Operational, Personnel Issues Vex a Changing Force

Signal, May 2005 by Ackerman, Robert K, Mowery, Beverly P

Much remains on the plate for post-Iraq military transformation.

The U.S. military must ramp up force transformation without missing a beat in its campaign to win the war on terror, and succeeding in those two endeavors will require close coordination across many disciplines. A variety of issues ranging from advanced system acquisition to personnel training and education must be addressed in the midst of operational activities at home and abroad.

Many of these points were discussed at West 2005, the annual conference and exposition sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute. Held February 1-3 in San Diego, the three days of speakers, panels and courses focused on the conference theme, "Beyond Iraq: How Do We Get Transformation Right?"

That theme proved to be something of a metaphor for the ideas that were exchanged on the first day. The event's first speaker was Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, USN (Ret.), the outgoing director of the Office of Force Transformation. One day after resigning his position, Adm. Cebrowski launched into an assessment of the ongoing force transformation and threw down the gauntlet, declaring that it is time for radical changes in the way the U.S. Defense Department shapes the military.

"There is no going back-transformation is here to stay," he said. "Who wants to be less networked? Who wants to know less? Who wants to be slow and lethargic? Who wants to be ponderous and clumsy?"

However, to address the challenges of transformation, Adm. Cebrowski called for attendees to look at transformation through the lens of economics. Defense planners are still using old business models for planning, and the admiral called for "a whole new intellectualization" for transformation and force structure.

This new approach would scrap longtime-and even recently implemented-methodologies for designing and procuring systems. Using the U.S. Navy as a model, the admiral called for changes that would permit the development of a scalable fleet. This would not take long, he offered, and a key would be the ability to create and preserve options. Instead of building one new lead ship and then conducting an analysis of it, the force would be better served if three different contracting teams build three different ships that would be compared. This would avoid the trap of "data-free research" and would give the military the ability to create and preserve options, which is key to this new methodology.

The enemy is not waiting. It has moved off the traditional battlefield, he noted, and has decided not to bear the cost of confronting the U.S. military. Instead, it is moving into political and social domains to pass the cost to the United States. These social and political domains represent a new business model to which the United States must adjust. "The force must focus on winning the war and the peace, not just on waging combat," Adm. Cebrowski declared.

Following Adm. Cebrowski's address was the day's first panel discussion, which focused on lessons learned in the Iraq War. Some of the panelists wasted no time in citing Adm. Cebrowski's points-and in disagreeing with most of them.

Ralph Peters, author of Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace, charged that Adm. Cebrowski's transformation approach largely is irrelevant in the war on terrorism. The terrorists' network-centric warfare works because they employ it smartly, he said. Technology does not win wars by itself, and linear models of force strength do not work. Peters called for greater focus on the human aspects of defeating an enemy, including understanding cultural issues and having better human intelligence.

Panel moderator Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, USA (Ret.), co-author of The Iraq War, said that the transformation is more than 10 years old, and it is time to hold it up and look at it. An observer can see the threads of continuity running from the present to the future, and the challenge is "to reach into the chaff and pull out the wheat," he stated. Today's transformation is based on network-centric warfare, but that works better over the larger scale. In this war, the success of networks is on the local level in settings such as back-alley payoffs.

The day's most noted comments came from Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, USMC, commanding general, U.S. Marine Corps Combat Development Command. Gen. Mattis began by agreeing with Gen. Scales that the United States' very dominance of modern forms of warfighting has driven the enemy into primitive forms of fighting for which this country has not prepared. "Don't patronize this enemy-they mean business," he warned. "They mean everything they say."

Citing the need to diminish the conditions that provide recruits for the enemy, the general also was warfighter-blunt about the need to kill all of its forces. "You go into Afghanistan where guys slapped women around for five years simply for not wearing a veil-they have no manhood left. It's fun to kill them." Some of those remarks by Gen. Mattis were picked up by major media outlets and transmitted worldwide.