Planning a Revolution: Mapping the Pentagon's Transformation

It is a great pleasure to be here at Heritage and to spend some time with you talking about one of my favorite subjects. But before I begin, three quick disclaimers. First of all, I do have a small staff, and they support me very, very well. So, much of what you see is the product of their work, principally my assistant for strategic futures, Dr. Tom Barnett. If you like that work, you might want to punch him up. He has a rather expansive website. www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets. Secondly, many people want to talk about Operation Iraqi Freedom, the consequences and lessons learned. We'll do quite a lot of that in the next few minutes. But you should also be aware that there is an official lessons learned effort, which is closed, as you might expect. That is generally not available yet. But what we can do is we can talk about what we have seen, through our own particular lens, and in my case, the lens of transformation. Thirdly, I suppose I should make clear that I work in advance of policy. So, among other things, what we'll see in the next few minutes is a peek down the path not taken yet. With that, let's get into the subject at hand.

The Secretary, and indeed, the President of the United States, elevated transformation to the level of strategy, national strategy, defense corporate strategy, and risk management strategy. We break it down into the three elements that are shown on the graphic here. Principal among those is the transformation of the role of defense in national security, which is most important, which really dominates all else. Second is the management of defense, which gets a lot of attention from people who want to decide what to buy, for example, and how it's bought, and what personnel policies are. Then third is the transformation of the force itself. I'll talk mostly about the first and the third elements here.

First, what did we see when we looked at Operation Iraqi Freedom through the lens of transformation? First, we saw grand strategies in tension. We saw nations who have alternative views of grand strategy. On the one hand, groups of people who were still motivated by great power politics and the concept of balance of power.

Others saw an opportunity created by a changed world, a changed strategic context, and the opportunity to make common cause to advance the global environment more broadly. We certainly saw the movement from the Industrial Age to the Information Age on the part of our forces, what we call the adoption of Network Centric Warfare. We certainly saw the power of transformation itself. When you have people who say "this didn't come out the way we thought" or "we thought the Americans would have a much harder time of it, it doesn't seem to be the American way of war that we thought was going to show up here" and that's exactly what we want to happen. I like to see a lot of generals who want to fight the last war. I just want them all to be on the other side.

Indeed, I think that's what we saw. That is the power of transformation. We want all of our enemies, current and future, to look at us and say, "Wow. How do they do that? We see it unfold before our very eyes, but we don't understand what's really happening, and we can't stop it." That's the power of transformation. So, let's get into what compels some of these things.

There are alternative views of the world, and some of them are flashing on the screen before you. Indeed, the world can be defined by the electronic activity that goes on around it, by the interrelationships, the networking that takes place around the world today. Really what we see is two movements. We see the movement from Globalization II to Globalization III, with Globalization I having occurred from sometime in the 1800s, ending with the Great Depression and the emergence of militant nationalism in the 1930s. Globalization II appearing after World War II, but running its course by the end of the 1990s.

Now we see the emergence of a new globalization, with new rule sets. There is chafing between the old rule sets and the new, which is bound to happen in any period of transition.

Of course, we also have the movement from the Industrial Age to the Information Age that all of us are witnessing. In the globalization area, you know, some of the indications of the new rules are shown on the graphic here. We used to talk, for example, about the haves and the have-nots, where the have-nots vastly outnumbered the haves.

But now we can talk about the functioning core of globalization, of which most of the people in the world are a part of, versus the non-functioning gap of globalization. We can see threats, then, in a completely different light. For example, disconnectedness now is one of the great danger signs around the world. It's an indicator of where the Department of Defense might be spending more and more of its time. Similarly, in the movement from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, we see changes in rules. Those of you in the corporate world are certainly very much aware of this, how the approach has moved, for example, from one of information hoarding to information sharing, and the recognition that a great deal of power comes from information, once it is shared.

This is indeed an important distinction. We also see the importance of moving the demand function to the center of the problem. In the commercial world, we think of that in terms of the customer, moving the customer to the center of the problem. We have found, increasingly, in the Information Age, that the failure to put the demand function at the center of your problem results in dysfunction. But one of the exciting features about this phenomenon is that both of these movements are happening simultaneously. Each one of them alone would be very exciting. Books have been written about both, some of them quite popular, and worth reading. But both of these things are going on at the same time, and there is an interaction between the two; a dynamic, if you will. This is not new since September 11th. But a lot of things are. But September 11th was not the first time that the nation had to balance its global interests with its homeland security concerns.

During the Cold War, we balanced those concerns under the fulcrum of a stunningly perverse strategy called mutually assured destruction, but one that turned out to be quite effective, and that was the policy of containment. What this yielded for us in the Department of Defense was surrogate wars. We called them "lesser included cases." They really weren't. But it was a useful fiction. It worked well for us during that period.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet empire, it seemed as though the concern about balancing our homeland security needs with our global interests went away, and people instead talked about the peace dividend, which is a shorthand form of saying "I don't have to worry about this balance any longer."

But on September 11th, the holiday was over. We were all called rather abruptly back to work on this issue. It's not that there weren't opinion leaders and thinkers who were not working on this balance between the two, because there certainly were. But institutionally, we were on a holiday from dealing with this. That holiday is clearly over. Now, when we balance our frontier interests, or our global interests, with our homeland security needs, we don't really have a fulcrum yet -- the replacement for containment and mutually assured destruction.

So what I will propose to you today is something we call the Transaction Strategy. What will that yield? Certainly not surrogate wars, as in the Cold War. Instead, we believe it will yield something called systems perturbation and its consequences. We have seen some of those already, and we are likely to see more. Now what we have, then, is what looks like an equation with two unknowns. So we're going to work on defining those two unknowns.

Let's start with systems perturbations. A lot of words on the graphic here, but essentially, a system perturbation is like the rock thrown into the still pond. It makes a big splash. The splash gets a great deal of attention, but it is the horizontal waves that flow outward from that which really cause the danger.

We now see this as a security phenomenon. It's relatively new. It's a characteristic of the Information Age, because we finally have a structure of interdependencies and interrelationships that are so dense that it is capable of supporting propagation across sector boundaries, political boundaries, cultural boundaries, economic boundaries, and security boundaries. So that's what we're seeing.

To put it in graphic form, if you take a look at pain over time, and you get a vertical shock, it happens in a short period of time. But then all these horizontal tales ripple out from that. 9/11 of course is one of the great examples of that phenomenon. One of the tails, horizontal tails, included impact on the airline industry and the financial industry. Somewhere, you know, in a way that we don't fully understand yet, anthrax appeared. Then out of nowhere, Afghanistan -- the place that we swore we would never go to war in. We didn't want to repeat what the Russians or the Brits did. We didn't have a war plan for it, but suddenly we find ourselves there.

But the tails continue to propagate. Tourism, you know, continues to be affected. The airline industry is dramatically affected. The insurance industry is affected, the reinsurance industry gravely so. Then anthrax resulted in a very extraordinary path, resulted in somewhat lower-cost AIDS drugs in Africa, and produced the DOHA Round of the GATT. Afghanistan -- that shock wave led us to Pakistan. There were many leaders who thought that Pakistan was on its way to becoming a failed state.

Well, it's hardly the case now. We talk about a partnership there that perhaps we hadn't thought about before, at least not in the same way. Then that yielded India-Pakistan as a strange relationship seemed to spring up. But clearly, the animosities were both there, but now both of them were pointing to the same, you might say, you know, big brother on the block, as they pointed at each other in a new relationship. Then we have the Stans. Who would have ever thought that we'd position forces in there? Then of course, this yielded the war on terrorism. Then what are the other horizontal tails which should, which could, come out of this? We don't know.

Of course, we did have Operation Iraqi Freedom. But was that a horizontal tail, or was that really the next vertical shock? In accounting for violence in the world in 1954, I believe it was, Ken Waltz in Man, the State and War who produced the system, which is roughly shown here, where he breaks the world down into three categories of the larger system, the nation-state, and the individual. Militaries tend to be frozen at the nation-state level, because after all, that is our sponsor, and ever since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, militaries focus on that more than anything else.

But by virtue of the rule changes, we can see some differences. Most of the power seems to have gone up to the systems level, while most of the violence seems to have gone down to the individual level, and so you have people, such as Tom Friedman talking about the Super Empowered Individual, which is a very useful construct for us. So this is an example of what happens when we have rule set changes.

Some of the rule set changes are shown here on the graphic. Technology, for example, certainly races ahead of the normal rules. If you don't think so, just look at the concerns and even litigations over such things as cloning, over electronic file transfers, and intellectual property. There's a lot of chafing as these rule sets change. But the result generally is what might be called the governance gap.

All this leads us to take an alternative view of the world, what we might say is the post-9/11 view of the world. It's a view that's based on the concept of globalization. There are a lot of nations functioning within globalization. These are nations that accept the rules. But more than that, they accept and enjoy the connectivity and the content. They prosper from that and many areas of the world are included. In fact, about two-thirds of the world's population is. We call this the functioning core of globalization. If that's the core, which includes North America, Europe, Putin's Russia, much of East Asia, Australia, some of the South African nations, then what's in the gap? How do you define that? Well, in an effort to come to grips with that, we used a surrogate. 

We just looked at where our nation has sent military forces over the last 12 years, to see if that was an indicator and indeed, it was. These are the places where the military has gone over these last many years. If you draw a line around 95 percent of those, you get something that looks like that. It's not a perfect map, by any means.

For example, you have North Korea -- an island of dysfunction in the midst of the functioning core of globalization. Then of course, you have Israel, which is a functioning member of the core, which is an island in the gap, so to speak. But this is mostly the non- integrating gap. If you are fighting globalization, if you reject the rules, if you reject connectivity, you are probably going to be of interest to the United States Department of Defense. On the other hand, if you are a participating member of globalization, we have the opportunity to make common cause against those nefarious activities, those unfortunate things that tend to flow from the gap. 

This is the chafing we saw in the run- up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, which is that we are a nation that is increasingly recognizing this view of the world. There are some major flows in this. The first of those is people migrating out of the nonintegrating gap and into the core. I think the United Nations uses a metric called the potential support ratio, which is the ratio of those of working age to the numbers of people over age 65. In the world at large, it's about 5 to 1 right now. The projection, however, is that over the next 40 to 50 years it will change to 2 to 1. Meanwhile, in the non- functioning gap, it's likely to remain 10 to 1. It is very natural therefore, that population will flow out of the gap, and into the core. Members of the core need that by virtue of the numbers I just gave you, with regard to the potential support ratio. It also constitutes a relief valve on the populations in the gap and is indeed a good thing. 

Another phenomenon is the movement of energy. That's the second flow. The projection by the Department of Energy is that by the time we reach 2020, the demand for energy in developing Asia will be roughly equivalent to bringing another Saudi Arabia online. There is no shortage of energy. But energy requires exploitation, of course, principally in the form of infrastructure. You have to be able to transport it and use it. Infrastructure requires foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment, however, requires rules. Rules require security and someone to enforce them. That yields the fourth flow, which is security. These are the four big flows. That results in transactions, hence the name the "Transaction Strategy." We will trade our openness and opportunities for their ambition. We will trade our security to stem their terror. We will provide security for the energy flows to support the trade that is very important to our prosperity. We will buy off the threat, if you will, or potential threat, and in the process, we will also buy off the threat of deflation. So then, what do we have to do?

We have to master systems perturbations, in order to enable the Transaction Strategy. This is a different view. There have been many articles in the papers over the last several weeks about how America is an empire, pros and cons, by all manner of learned people. It's generally good work. But I'd like to take an alternative view. That is that our role, and the role of members in the core, the functioning core of globalization, with whom we can make common cause, our role is that of Systems Administrator. Instead of stopping something, the role is to keep the system up and running, just like with your computer system. It's meant to be up and running. Keeping the system running generates maneuvering potential and that provides the opportunity to move forward. Yes, there is a certain amount of determinism in this. There is also an element of realism.

We indeed do have a protected, a privileged position. We in America constitute less than 5 percent of the world's population, and, depending on how you count it, we produce upwards of 25 percent of the world's wealth, most of which we consume ourselves. There is a requirement, therefore, to balance this equation. Merely adding it up in terms of balance of payments doesn't do that for us. There is a certain moral obligation to shrink the Gap over time. This results in a booming export market for us. But the export market that I'm concerned about in defense is the exporting of security. It is indeed a growth market.

Security is our nation's largest single public sector export, and it's booming. If you were a lawyer, counting billable days, and you applied that to the Department of Defense and looked at billable days, if you will, over the '70s, '80s, and '90s, you would see that, of course, we did something in the '70s. I do not count Vietnam in this work. In the '80s, it was quite a bit larger. In the '90s, it was indeed very, very much larger. The projection is that in this decade, it will go off the top of the chart. You could draw a line across the bottom, and we call that essentially the baseline, which we're going to do anyway, in any event. In the '80s, almost everything above the line was because of concerns or responses in the Mideast. In the '90s, it was Iraq in a big way, but also the former Yugoslav republics, and then of course, Somalia and Haiti. You can make your own projections about this decade.

In short fashion then, this is what the strategy might look like. Keep the system up and running. In order to do so, we have to encourage the system level bonds that encourage the four flows that I mentioned. Obviously, we want to nourish our security relationships, particularly our historic alliances. We want to behave in such a way that we forestall the opportunities for the destabilizing elements to move from the Gap to the Core. Then of course, as I had said, exercise the obligation and the capability to shrink the Gap, and expand the Core. So backing up, then, and looking at these trends again, Globalization II, from another perspective, had to do with developed rules. From a business point of view, you could say it's the mature market. We understand it well and we know what the margins are in that market.

But the other thing we've found is that the customer base is narrowing. We're finding that the way we used to define security is simply inadequate now. In Globalization III, however, we have emerging rules. We have new market opportunities. Perhaps the addition of some new customers as well. We see security as defense plus everything else. Indeed, a much bigger issue. In the movement vertically, from the Industrial Age, which had very long cycle times, we were comfortable with the long cycle times because of the stability of our security relationship with the Soviet Union.

But that's also reflected in our capability cycle time inside the Department of Defense, where programs will take 15 to 25 years, while for most of the markets, or most of the commodities you buy off the shelf, the cycle time is measured in months or perhaps a very few years if it's a complex piece of equipment. The tools we had were well understood, well used. Our concept of jointness was very immature, based principally on deconfliction. Yes, we were interoperable, but it was tortured. We became interoperable in the most painful way. But now, in the Information Age, we find that we want to have cycle times in the Department of Defense that mirror those in the commercial marketplace. That means a change.

Our concept of jointness is far more integrated. Instead of just talking about interoperability, we now talk about interdependencies, from which interoperability will flow, and this of course will require some new competencies. If you look at the vertical axis and the Emerging American Military, we are going to be far more expeditionary, which means foreign and temporary. That means a reduced reliance on existing overseas infrastructure, which means we carry more capability with us.

The force is far more networked now. That is another trend that we saw in Iraq. You saw the non-contiguous battlefield in Iraqi Freedom. You could not have the non-contiguous battlefield, which means there was no front, if the force was not networked. What you saw on the news reports were a few big blue arrows showing the direction of advance.

But what you didn't see were the hundreds of small unit actions that were spread out over the entire country. You cannot do that if you are not well networked, and are forces certainly are. We have the exterior position. We have as our operating domain the lion's share of the globe's space and cyberspace, which is a marvelous strategic advantage, and we leverage it well. But sensors have to move in, because while we could control our own weapons range, the enemy controls our sensor range. It's the total systems range that counts, which means that the real fight is a close in, sensor fight. 

Increasingly, commanders are talking about sensors, sensor platforms, intelligence, fused intelligence products and the like. Timelines become very important, and we talk about shortening the kill chain, or what we call the sensor-to-shooter timeline. There are some marvelous examples, which I suspect are going to come out of the lessons learned from this campaign.

We value more than ever information superiority. When you look at the operation of the force itself, the movement was really vertical from the Industrial Age up to the Information Age. When you look at what the nation did strategically, and the position of the administration, it was also a horizontal movement from Globalization II to Globalization III.

The reason why we do the vertical movement is because that's where the power is. Our name for that is Network Centric Warfare. How does one develop an information advantage and turn it into a competitive advantage? We do shared awareness, and this enables us to have distributive forces, which again gives us the non-contiguous battle space. They're very, very powerful. Again, why do we do it? Because we have ample evidence that networked forces simply outperform forces, which are not networked. As a matter of fact, if you want to know what good candidates are for forces to be removed from the rolls, look at those that are incapable of being networked. Another way to look at the phenomenon is through this model here.

There are three domains of warfare. The physical domain, which is what we all see. Second is the emerging information domain, which has always been important, but now more so than ever. The third is the cognitive domain. Any War College student will tell you that battles are won and lost in the minds of the commanders. You want to access the minds of senior leaders. This is another way of talking about effects-based warfare.

What we saw in Desert Storm was a great deal of emphasis on the physical domain. So people talked about such things as the fraction of armored fighting vehicles destroyed in a particular unit, and using that as a measure of the combat effectiveness of units. But now we have advances in the information domain, particularly in sensing and networking. One of the things that we saw in Iraqi Freedom is a direct movement into the cognitive domain. Many reporters, in fact, said that they could see many examples of essentially psychological operations, which is the drive to get into the cognitive domain, and to use the other domains as a vehicle to do that.

Over on the globalization axis, on the other hand, because of changes in the environment, I believe you should expect to see forces that are somewhat less reactive. If you have a reactive force, the temptation is to be punitive. Rather, because of the global situation, and because of emerging threats, we want to be much more preventive.

We want to be able to achieve unambiguous warnings sooner. It's not a matter of preempting faster, but a matter of knowing sooner. This puts a special burden on sensory systems and intelligence. We want forces to be more SOF-like. Not necessarily that we want more special operations forces, but certain characteristics of our Special Operations Forces are enormously valuable, and we'd like to see them spread more into the other forces overall. Ease of insertion, a depth of local knowledge, small unit agility are all very, very powerful attributes that the entire force should possess.

We want what we call a Deter Forward force. A force, which is capable, as the QDR said, of either determining or defeating a threat with minimal reinforcements from home. This requires the ability to act very early on. We want a surveillance- and intelligence-based capability to deal with weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction problem are principally a problem of surveillance and intelligence. Consequently, we need a focus on that. We should set a very high bar for our capabilities in this area. If it means that we have to spend a great deal more on that, we should do so, because it is so important to us. To give an indication of that, look at some of the potential trends in threats. 

Obviously, at the systems level, we continue to talk about great power war, but now we try to talk about that strictly in the virtual sense. Whereas, at the next level down, we had been fighting over political ideology, but we recently completed, or nearly completed, a major campaign against a hated dictator. But think of what happens when you have the hated dictator with nuclear weapons, or worse still, if you have nuclear nationalism, which is also a real possibility, and some say is emerging now. Down at the individual level, regional terrorists, international terrorists, we've talked a lot about that. But think about the Super Empowered Individual with genetically altered bio-toxins.

If you don't think that's an issue, think about the first SARS patient who got on an airliner. This is a real issue for us. So in any case, there are several questions that one could ask about Iraqi Freedom, and our strategic posture as we move forward. Was Iraqi Freedom not a horizontal tail, but really a vertical shock strategy, because the horizontal tails emanating from 9/11 were so unacceptable to us? So the nation had to move, seize the initiative, forestall those, and essentially create a new vertical shock. Does it change the arms controls rules for us? What happens when some people feel compelled to seek weapons of mass destruction? What happens when potential bad actors choose to use nuclear weapons as a way to take their nation offline, and their people offline, and essentially isolate them? Some point to North Korea as a potential example for that. To what extent does this really create a new customer base for the Department of Defense? If you're dealing with these questions, then feeling comfortable with what we did in Iraqi Freedom is not the right emotion for you to have. You might be very proud of that work, very satisfied that it was done, learn its lessons, but consign it to the past, because the global strategic reality continues to change.

The result is that we're going to have to have a different force lay down, and we're going to have to operate in a different way, because there's a world of difference between a hated dictator, and a hated dictator with nukes. We look at this on three different levels. At the strategic level, a nation has only three ways to secure its overseas interests. Either you're going to position forces forward, or you're going to do strategic deployment from home, or you're going to have a trusted ally look out for that interest for you. Our preference, ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, has been towards strategic deployment from home, because that was highly efficient. But work in the world is meant to be effective, first and foremost.

To maintain the kind of effectiveness that we need, we're going to have to rebalance with an increased reliance on forces forward, and more and stronger alliances, even at a time when some people are saying that alliances are less permanent and reliable. That means we're going to have to work that very hard. Operational maneuver is going to change for us. There are really three forms of operational maneuver.

We're going to do operational maneuver from garrison forward, such as what we did in Iraqi Freedom. We had a garrison in Kuwait, we fell in on that garrison and its stockpiled equipment, and then we stepped off against objective from that garrison. It is not likely that form of operational maneuver will be tenable very much longer, if at all. Consequently, we'll see increasing emphasis on operational maneuver from strategic distances, which is not just from the United States, but also from strategic hubs, perhaps in other places around the world. Not places that we garrison, but places that we hub and train with, perhaps. We call this operational maneuver from strategic distance and operational maneuver from the sea. Then we'll have to have a force that we call the Deter Forward Force, a second derivative capability. A force that is capable of developing very high rates of change, altering initial conditions, and indeed deterring with minimal reinforcement. Right now, our preference is on sustaining forces. So that's likely to change.

Stepping to operational maneuver, when one looks at operational maneuver from the sea, and operational maneuver from strategic distances, you see there are several things in common. Both the Army and the Marine Corps should be viable land forces whether you're working operational maneuver from the sea, or from strategic distances. We can be looking at very common lift for that, or at least some elements for it. Certainly the sustainment systems and the networking is the same, and the focus is on avoiding obstacles and defeating anti-axis strategies. It's a key enabler for Deterring Forward.

But there are some key differences. The defense from the sea is based on mobility. The defense from strategic distances is of course based on distance itself. Mobility from sovereign positions at sea gives you the capability to do surveillance long before you have a crisis. This is indeed very, very powerful. There is of course great political ease in deploying such a force. But on the other hand, when you move from strategic distances because you have a more permanent structure, you could be talking about much, much higher volume. Put these two things together, and you now have the nation's new one-two punch at the operational level. Looking again at that Deter Forward Force phenomenon, here on the graphic you can see the great peak that we frequently focus on as we try to answer the question, for whatever crisis it is, of how much is enough. But that is perhaps not a particularly suitable question any longer.

In the Information Age, more than at any other time, we are aware that warfare is a highly pathdependent activity. That is, small changes in initial conditions can result in profound changes in outcome. The ability to seize the initiative, alter those initial conditions, has enormous power. We want a force that is capable of doing that. Not all forces can do that. We want to shift the focus to that front portion. In order to do so, you're going to value some different things.

First among those things is the ability to network, particularly network sensors, manage the engagement envelope of an enemy, be able to respond with quite high speed, be able to generate the numbers in the place you need to generate them, and indeed, be very tolerant of risk. This then results in a New American Way of War. Principal among these is the capability to develop high rates of change, leverage the phenomenon of closely coupled events, lock out alternative strategies, exercise speed of command to create an information advantage, and have forces which are capable of self-synchronization.

You had good glimpses of that in the nightly news reports from Iraqi Freedom. What did we see in that campaign? We certainly saw Network Centric Warfare being implemented. We saw the power of shared awareness, particularly in intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, very high-speed networking. We also saw the phenomenon of changing tactics, and indeed capabilities on the fly. We saw speed. The principal thing that gives you speed, again, is the sensing and networking which does that. It's the same vehicles. Their engines don't run any faster than they were before. That was not the limiting factor. So we see some changes here. We saw a new sweet spot emerge in air-land power relationships. We had some cases where we had land forces which seemed to be running at such a pace that they were actually taxing air power to keep up. We saw some changes in fires, certainly, like all-weather munitions with extraordinary accuracy. This is new. It is new when you can provide close air support under all weather conditions and at night. Now, the volume and sources of fires that are available to forces on the ground is dramatically increased, which therefore increases the options.

Again, you get the resulting increase in speed. We also saw other new things. This is a picture taken of two high-speed transports (two High Speed Vessels) alongside the pier in Kuwait. The exciting thing about these two ships is something that you can't see. That is that while one of them supported the Special Operations Forces, principally the SEALs, and the other supported the Army -- and the work they did was indeed very, very good -- what you can't see is the fact that these were bought without a decision by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council or the Defense Acquisition Board. There were no milestones for any of this. There was no OT&E. I mean, there weren't great reviews in the Pentagon. This was done at very high speed, very short cycle times, and without the bureaucratic hindrances. There are some things we didn't see. We didn't see very much operational maneuver from strategic distances. Of course, we did see it from Air Force assets, which one would expect. We got a glimpse of it with the employment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade staging from their hub in Italy and maneuvering directly against objective. We didn't see very much operational maneuver from the sea. But there was an exception there as well, with the employment of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit from the Mediterranean against their objectives. We didn't see new concepts of lift or vertical maneuver. Remember the pictures of all the soldiers with all kinds of equipment hanging off of them, and looking indeed very, very cumbersome. Not your image of the 21st century land warrior, but it could be. But it was not there yet.

While we did see a logistics miracle, we really didn't see a new, single integrated logistics system based on new methodologies. Another thing we didn't see was, we didn't see soldiers and Marines complaining that they had too much network and not enough ordnance. Instead, we saw them very happy to have boom mikes sticking out from underneath their helmets, because it would enable tactics that they couldn't do before, and there was the realization that if you want more fires, that means you've got to have more network. So that's where they're going. Other things you didn't see, was you didn't see much of a change in this, which is the intelligence analysis problem, where we have all of these intelligence sources, and they all produced their products and reports and fed databases, all of which are stove-piped. The analysis functions are similarly stovepiped.

Essentially, we have an intelligence community that is organized by wavelength. But it needn't be that way. It could be more like this, where your intelligence is organized around the demand functions of warning, force protection, and warfighting intelligence, where you have data mediation layers that are able to pull together all source information, plot it geo-spatially, and generate the kinds of displays in which a senior leader's question can in fact be answered at very, very high speed. In fact, this exists. This exists in a protocol at the Army Intelligence and Security Command in Fort Belvoir. But it's only a prototype. But it is a glimpse of the future.

There are other paths not taken yet, but ones that could be. At the upper left, the UCAV. We did see the coming of age of unmanned aerial vehicles, particularly in the form of Global Hawk, for example, which is responsible for an extraordinarily large fraction of sensory events against time-critical targets. We can see new forms of transport, merging intra- and inter-theater transport, being able to have the lift capability of a C-17 married up with something that could work in an environment which isn't much more improved than what we think about for helicopters. We need to change our space access architecture. Not changing it so much, but expanding it so that we have tactically responsive space capabilities. I'm not just talking about having the satellite being able to talk to the tactical user. I'm talking about being able to put on orbit capabilities that a warfighter needs within the nation's planning timelines for a crisis, which you all know is going from years to months to weeks. We would like to do that. On the left- hand side, the large airship up there is meant to be supporting something which is capable of taking energy weapons over the horizon, which is a harbinger, really, of fundamental changes in the character of warfare as we see the increased occurrence of energy-based weapons on the battlefield. Airships also for transport, perhaps being able to lift 500 to 1,000 tons. Very high-speed transport ships, able to unload across an unprepared littoral, ships capable of carrying forward 5,000 tons, but at speeds in excess of 80 knots. Then perhaps new air-capable ships, so that we could have not only tactical aviation at sea, but widely distributed tactical aviation. So it doesn't matter, really, whether we're talking about a future military force or a future global environment. In both cases, this is a future, or these are futures that are worth creating and worth pursuing. That's what we try to do.