[Senate Hearing 114-395]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 114-395
IMPROVING THE PENTAGON'S DEVELOPMENT OF POLICY, STRATEGY, AND PLANS
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HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
DECEMBER 8, 2015
__________
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COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona, Chairman
JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma JACK REED, Rhode Island
JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama BILL NELSON, Florida
ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire JOE MANCHIN III, West Virginia
DEB FISCHER, Nebraska JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
TOM COTTON, Arkansas KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York
MIKE ROUNDS, South Dakota RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut
JONI ERNST, Iowa JOE DONNELLY, Indiana
THOM TILLIS, North Carolina MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii
DAN SULLIVAN, Alaska TIM KAINE, Virginia
MIKE LEE, Utah ANGUS S. KING, JR., Maine
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina MARTIN HEINRICH, New Mexico
TED CRUZ, Texas
Christian D. Brose, Staff Director
Elizabeth L. King, Minority Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
__________
december 8, 2015
Page
Improving The Pentagon's Development of Policy, Strategy, and
Plans.......................................................... 1
Flournoy, Hon. Michele A., former Under Secretary of Defense for
Policy......................................................... 4
Vickers, Hon. Michael G., former Under Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence................................................... 17
Eggers, Commander Jeffrey W., USN (retired), former Special
Assistant to The President for National Security Affairs and
Former U.S. Navy Seal Officer.................................. 23
Questions for the Record......................................... 46
(iii)
IMPROVING THE PENTAGON'S DEVELOPMENT OF POLICY, STRATEGY, AND PLANS
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:31 a.m. in Room
SD-G50, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator John McCain,
(chairman) presiding.
Committee members present: Senators McCain [presiding],
Inhofe, Sessions., Ayotte, Fischer, Cotton, Rounds, Ernst,
Tillis, Reed, Nelson, Manchin, Gillibrand, Blumenthal,
Donnelly, Hirono, Kaine, King, and Heinrich.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHN McCAIN
Chairman McCain. The committee meets today to continue our
series of hearings on defense reform. We have reviewed the
effects of the Goldwater-Nichols reforms on our defense
acquisition, management, and personnel systems. In our most
recent hearings, we have considered what most view as the
essence of Goldwater-Nichols, the roles and responsibilities of
the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, the service secretaries, and service chiefs, and the
combatant commanders.
This morning we seek to understand how these civilian and
military leaders formulate policy, strategy, and plans, as well
as how to improve the quality of civilian control of the
military and military advice to civilian leaders.
We are fortunate to have with us a distinguished panel of
witnesses, who are not strangers to this committee, who will
offer their views based on many years of service to our Nation:
The Honorable Michele Flournoy, former Under Secretary of
Defense--and should have been Secretary of Defense--for Policy,
who is currently CEO [Chief Executive Officer] of the Center
for American Security; the Honorable Michael Vickers, former
Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who has also
previously served as a special forces officer and a CIA
[Central Intelligence Agency] operations officer; and Commander
Jeffrey W. Eggers, former Special Assistant to the President
for National Security Affairs, who served both President George
W. Bush and President Barack Obama and was previously a U.S.
Navy SEAL officer.
As we have heard in previous hearings, Goldwater-Nichols
emerged from concerns about the unity of command and the
ability of our military to operate jointly. However, another
primary concern was poor military advice, which former
Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger said at the time had
grown so bad that it was, quote, generally irrelevant, normally
unread, and almost always disregarded. Unquote.
That is why the Goldwater-Nichols Act elevated the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the Principal Military Advisor
to the President and Secretary of Defense and created the
position of Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The intent of these reforms is that the Secretary of
Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff would be
better able to promote a department-wide perspective that could
integrate activities and resources comprehensively across the
military services.
Goldwater-Nichols also sought to improve the process of
developing policy, strategy, and plans by requiring the
President to submit a national security strategy and provide
guidance to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the
combatant commanders for the preparation and review of
contingency plans.
These were all important reforms, but 30 years later, how
do we evaluate their effectiveness? If we base that on the
quality of so-called strategy documents such as the National
Security Strategy or Quadrennial Defense Review [QDR], I fear
we may have a serious problem. The QDR process has grown so bad
that Congress created an independent panel to review the
Pentagon's work. In 2010, that panel concluded, quote, instead
of unconstrained, long-term analysis by planners who were
encouraged to challenge preexisting thinking, the QDRs became
explanations and justifications often with marginal changes of
established decisions and plans. The poor quality of the DOD
[Department of Defense] strategic planning documents may
suggest a deeper, more troubling problem, that despite
Goldwater-Nichols reforms or in some cases perhaps
unintentionally because of them, the development of policy,
strategy, and plans in the DOD has become paralyzed by an
excessive pursuit of concurrence or consensus. Innovative ideas
that challenge the status quo rarely seem to survive the
staffing process as they make their long journey to senior
civilian and military leaders. Instead, what results too often
seems to be watered down, lowest common denominator thinking
that is acceptable to all relevant stakeholders precisely
because it is threatening to none of them.
I would cite again our recent experience in Iraq.
Regardless of what we think about the circumstances by which we
went to war in Iraq, the fact is that our Nation was losing
that war for 3 and a half years, with disastrous consequences
for our national security if we did fail. And yet, the
development of a new strategy to finally stabilize the
situation was not produced by the system, but rather by a group
of outside experts and insurgents within the system going
around the system. In many ways, this question of strategy is
the crux of our current review. The main problem that
Goldwater-Nichols sought to address 30 years ago was primarily
an operational one, the inability of the military services to
operate as one joint force. It is impossible to dispute that at
a tactical and operational level, the U.S. military today is
unrivaled in the world and far more capable than it was 3
decades ago, thanks in no small part to 14 consecutive years of
sustained combat.
The problem today, however, seems to rest far more at the
level of strategy. Our adversaries from ISIL [Islamic State of
Iraq and the Levant] to Iran and North Korea to China and
Russia are inside our decision cycle. They are capable of
responding to events deciding and acting faster than we are.
Instead, the Department of Defense and the U.S. Government more
broadly appears increasingly incapable of adapting and
innovating at speeds sufficient to maintain the initiative and
keep us a step ahead of our adversaries.
The DOD also appears increasingly challenged by strategic
integration, integrating thought and action across regions,
across domains of military activity, and across short-term and
long-term requirements. Perhaps this should not be surprising
when, as previous have testified, the Secretary and the Deputy
Secretary of Defense are the only two leaders in the Department
with directive authority to mandate this kind of strategic
integration. All of these problems are compounded by the fact
that civilian control and oversight of the military has
increasingly become confused with civilian micromanagement of
the military.
This is not an attempt to condemn an organization just
because some disagree at times with its conclusions. This is a
broader problem. Our defense organization has consistently been
too slow in adapting to the threats and challenges we face
today and will face tomorrow. And there are real questions as
to whether our current defense organization, which has long
assumed that wars it would fight would be short and largely
one-sided, is optimally set up to succeed in long-term
strategic and military competitions with great power rivals and
non-state actors like ISIL.
Part of this problem may lie, as previous witnesses have
testified, in how the Department educates and develops its
civilian and military leaders when it comes to strategy. I will
be eager to hear our witnesses' thoughts on how to improve the
Department's development and management of its people in this
regard, and yet we must always remember that bad organizations
all too often trump good people. Ultimately we must get this
right because we have never confronted a more complex,
uncertain, and numerous array of worldwide threats and our
margin for error as a Nation is not what it once was and,
indeed, is dramatically diminishing relative to our
competitors. We have largely weathered the consequences of our
previous failures, but without changes, we may not remain so
fortunate for long.
Senator Reed?
STATEMENT OF SENATOR JACK REED
Senator Reed. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Let
me join you in welcome the witnesses and thank them not only
for their testimony today but for their extraordinary service
to the Nation. And I know they will provide insights that will
better help us deal with these very complex problems that we
face.
As Secretary Bob Gates said before this committee in
October, Americans, including all too often our leaders, regard
international crises and military conflict as aberrations when,
in fact and sad to say, they are the norm.
He went on to further state, while we may not be interested
in aggressors, terrorists, revanchists, and expansionists half
way around the world, they ultimately are always interested in
us or our interests or our allies and friends.
And Secretary Gates' admonition has reverberated throughout
our hearings these past few months. The Department of Defense
is facing many complicated and rapidly evolving challenges. We
have seen how violent extremist organizations are able to
promote the destructive agendas and carry out attacks against
the United States, our allies, and our respective interests. In
Iraq and Syria, the breakdown of a nation-state system has
allowed the reemergence of centuries old divisions, creating a
vastly complex situation. At the same time, Russia continues
its provocative behavior in Europe while also deploying Russian
troops and military equipment to Syria to directly support the
failing Assad regime. Likewise, China's assertive behavior in
the South China Sea reflects both its desire to assert great
power status and a challenge to international norms, including
the freedom of navigation. Compound these issues, and the age
of nuclear proliferation and global instability becomes even
more dangerous.
It is in this context that previous witnesses before this
committee have testified that the Department's organization and
processes are not flexible enough to respond in a timely
manner. For example, Eliot Cohen outlined how the Department
currently produces strategy documents on a fixed schedule and
stated that a much better system would be something like the
white papers produced by the Australian and French systems, not
on a regular basis but in reaction to major international
developments and composed by small special commissions that
include outsiders, as well as bureaucrats.
In addition to how the Department develops defense policy
and military strategy to respond to evolving threats, I would
also welcome the witnesses' views on whether or not changes are
needed to the Department's force planning process, if the
current combatant command structure engenders effective
military operations, and whether the size and number of defense
agencies and field activities and other headquarters functions
should be consolidated or eliminated.
Lastly, while not fully within this committee's
jurisdiction, I would be interested in the views of our
witnesses on the current interagency structure for national
security and whether changes in that area should also be
considered.
These are complex, multifaceted issues that do not offer
easy or quick solutions. Again, I look forward to hearing from
each of our witnesses for their perspectives and thank them for
their service.
And thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Secretary Flournoy?
STATEMENT OF HON. MICHELE A. FLOURNOY, FORMER UNDER SECRETARY
OF DEFENSE FOR POLICY
Ms. Flournoy. Mr. Chairman, Senator Reed, distinguished
members of the committee, thank you so much for inviting us
here to testify before you. And I applaud this committee's
effort to take a hard look at the Goldwater-Nichols legislation
30 years after its passage and to consider a broad range of
defense reforms. I believe that defense reform is absolutely
critical to ensuring that we have a military that can
underwrite the U.S. indispensable leadership role in a very
complex and tumultuous environment.
The perspectives I offer today really come from serving two
different administrations in the Pentagon, five different
Secretaries of Defense from my perch at a defense-oriented
think tank, but also from the time I have spent in the private
sector looking at organizational best practices and so forth.
This is a very target-rich environment. It would be hard to
cover all of the range of defense reform issues that I hope
this committee will address in a single session, but I just
want to highlight five problems that I have seen particularly
in the area of strategy and planning and policy.
The first is what I call the tyranny of consensus and the
duplication of effort across staffs. I think the emphasis on
consensus, finding what we can all agree on, sort of watering
down solutions to the lowest common denominator has really
become quite pervasive in the Pentagon, sometimes in OSD
[Office of the Secretary of Defense] but particularly in the
Joint Staff process, as the different perspectives from the
services, the COCOMs [Combatant Commands], and others are
brought into discussion.
I think this overemphasis on jointness in policy actually
undermines the Department's ability to respond quickly and
effectively and strategically to some of the challenges we
face. That emphasis or overemphasis on consensus is further
complicated by what I see as a lack of role clarity between
OSD, Joint Staff, COCOM staffs, and sometimes the services. I
saw this in my perch as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
where frequently even though the OSD clearly had the policy
lead, there were more officers working a given policy issue in
the Joint Staff and on the COCOM staffs than there were on the
policy staff. And this is across many functional areas, whether
it is intelligence policy, logistics, a whole range of areas
where there is a lot of duplication and a lot of confusion
about who has what role and what responsibility.
When you look at the Joint Staff and the Office of the
Chairman, it has grown to nearly 4,000 people. That is 10 times
what it was when the Defense Reorganization Act was passed in
1958. I actually think the Chairman and the Secretary would be
better served by a smaller and more strategic joint staff that
was focused predominantly on the Chairman's core function,
which is providing best military advice to the Secretary and to
the President.
Similarly, the COCOM staffs collectively have now burgeoned
to over 38,000 people. I think they too are ripe for a real
scrub in terms of the breadth of their functions and the level
of duplication with the Joint Staff and with OSD.
The second key problem is what I would consider a broken
strategy development process. I am the veteran of many QDRs. I
have the bruises and scars to prove it. But I think as well
intentioned as the QDR was as a mandate from Congress, I think
it has in fact in practice become a very routinized, bottom-up
staff exercise. It includes hundreds of participants, thousands
of man-hours, and really does not produce the desired result.
What is really needed is a top-down, leader-driven exercise
that focuses on clarifying strategy. What are our priorities?
What are the hard choices? How do we allocate risk?
I would encourage this committee to look at overhauling the
QDR legislation. I know there was some new language in the
NDAA, but the key pieces that I see are, first, moving to a
more leader-driven process rather than a staff exercise, and
two, having the primary product be a classified strategy
document that actually has the teeth to guide resource
allocation and prioritization within the Department. You may
also want to still publish the occasional white paper
unclassified explanation of our defense strategy for outside
audiences, but the key piece that is most important for the
Department and its management is the classified piece.
The third problem I would highlight is a flawed force
planning process. This is the process that translates strategy
into the forces we will need for the future. And here the
tyranny of the consensus is very much apparent. As we look at
how this process is done, every step of the way from scenario
design to analysis, to insight, all of that is governed far
more by reaching the consensus among parochial interests than
it is guided by pursuing the national interest. The current
process is antithetical to the kind of competing of ideas and
innovation that the Department really needs to grapple with the
key questions, which are how are new technologies and
capabilities going to change the nature of warfare in the
future. How will we develop those new concepts to prevail in a
more contested and difficult environment? How are we going to
make the necessary tradeoffs in programming and budgeting?
What we need and I think what is possible is the creation
of a safe space by the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary to
really have a process where all stakeholders can bring
solutions, ideas, concepts to the table to compete on how best
to solve a given problem, whether it is the COCOMs, the Joint
Staff, the services, and also industry who have great insights
about what is technologically feasible.
This may not necessarily require legislative change but it
does require leader focus and change within the Department if
we are going to get the kind of force development and
innovation that the Department needs to keep pace with the
threats that we are facing.
The fourth key problem I would highlight is bloated
headquarters that undermine both performance and agility. In
recent years, headquarters have continued to grow even as the
active duty force has shrunk. The Office of the Secretary of
Defense now has more than 5,000 people; Joint Staff, as I
mentioned, nearly 4,000; COCOMs, 38,000. In total, if you add
in the defense agencies, you have 240,000 people, excluding
contractors, at a cost of $113 billion. It is almost 20 percent
of the DOD budget.
And this is not just a matter of inefficiency. It is also a
matter of effectiveness. When you go out into the private
sector, there is case after case where you document that
bloated headquarters' slow decision-making push too many
decisions up the chain rather than resolving them at the lowest
possible level, incentivize risk-averse behaviors, undermine
organizational performance, and compromise agility. I think the
same is certainly true in government. And what is more is all
these resources that are duplicative take resources away from
investment in the warfighter, which is the DOD's primary
mission.
So I would really encourage this committee and the Congress
more broadly to take several steps in this regard.
First, strongly encourage the Secretary of Defense to
conduct a comprehensive and systematic effort to delayer
headquarters staffs across the defense agency. When I say
delayering, I am talking about a systematic design effort that
goes through, eliminates unnecessary layers of bureaucracy,
optimizes spans of control. There are proven methodologies for
doing this that have been used across both the private sector
and the public sector. I would start with OSD, the Joint Staff,
move to the COCOMs, the service secretariats, and then the
defense agencies.
Second, I think the Congress needs to give this Secretary
of Defense the kinds of authorities that past Secretaries of
Defense have been given to manage a reshaping of the
organization in the workforce, things like reduction force
authority, things like meaningful retirement and separation
incentive pays, including things like base realignment and
closure. And I know we can get to that in the Q and A if you
would like.
The third thing is I think that Congress should actually
direct the Secretary to commission a study by an outside firm
that has both deep private sector experience and familiarity
with the unique requirements of the defense enterprise to look
at these areas of overlapping functions, how do we better
integrate and streamline staffs within the Department. This
could look at the service secretariats versus service chiefs'
staffs. It could look at OSD and Joint Staff functional area
overlaps. It could even look at areas like transportation and
logistics where all of the leading private sector firms have
integrated those functions, yet in the Department of Defense,
we have two separate organizations managing those.
And lastly I would say I think we all need to take a hard
look at the combatant command staffs. I personally believe it
is time to actually reduce the number of COCOMs--there are
areas of consolidation that would make sense--streamline the
subcommand and service component structure and also look at the
size and composition based on a honing of the functions that we
want the staffs to perform.
I think the last piece I would just foot-stomp is the
importance of providing the Secretary with the authorities he
needs to actually make these changes. I have mentioned some of
them. One of the ones I want to highlight because it is in this
committee's direct control is a requirement that is placed on
all DOD nominees being considered that is different from what
is being placed on other agency nominees, and that is in most
agencies, to avoid conflict of interest problems, you are
allowed to put your assets and your holdings in a blind trust
and then, if necessary, recuse yourself from certain decisions.
The SASC [Senate Armed Services Committee] historically has
said, no, that is not enough. You actually have to divest of
your assets in any company that does business with the
Pentagon. The result of that is that you basically
disincentivize anyone from the private sector who has the kind
of management acumen and experience running large organizations
to come in and serve in the Department of Defense. And we
lament that lack of expertise and that lack of acumen in terms
of the people we are able to recruit to serve, and yet, some of
the rules in place have prevented that kind of service. So I
would just encourage you, before the next presidential
transition, to take a hard look at that rule.
I am out of time, but let me just conclude by saying a lot
of these problems can be addressed by means other than revising
the fundamental legislation of Goldwater-Nichols. I personally
believe a lot of the core elements of Goldwater-Nichols--they
got it right. The powers given to the Secretary of Defense, the
role of the Chairman not only as the military advisor to the
Secretary but also to the President, ensuring that the
President has the ability to hear military dissent if it exists
before he makes a national security decision.
The one thing that I will say I would not like to see that
some others who have testified before you have recommended is
reinserting the Chairman in the operational chain of command.
In my view, giving the Chairman decision-making authority over
the COCOMs and services would come at a high cost, essentially
commensurately reducing the authorities of the Secretary of
Defense. Decisions about where to deploy forces, when and how
to use force in conducting military operations are
fundamentally decisions about where, when, and how the United
States should use its power and expend its blood and treasure.
In a vibrant democracy like ours, those decisions should remain
in civilian hands, not the hands of military authorities.
So let me conclude there, and I am happy to entertain your
questions. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Flournoy follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman McCain. Thank you.
Secretary Vickers?
STATEMENT OF HON. MICHAEL G. VICKERS, FORMER UNDER SECRETARY OF
DEFENSE FOR INTELLIGENCE
Mr. Vickers. Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed,
distinguished members of the committee, it is a privilege and a
pleasure to be with the Senate Armed Services Committee this
morning to discuss how the Pentagon might improve its
development of policy, strategy, and plans.
It is an additional pleasure to be joined by my former
colleagues, Michele Flournoy and Jeff Eggers. Let me say
Michele and I are almost always of like minds, and I strongly
endorse everything she said.
It has been 7 months since I retired from my position as
USD(I) [Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence]. I miss
the great privilege of defending my country, and as astonishing
as this may sound to some, I miss all of you too.
[Laughter.]
30 years ago, a lack of joint interoperability and
interdependence and insufficient attention given to our special
operations forces provided the impetus for major defense
reform. Today, the need for defense reform is no less urgent.
In my view, defense reform today needs to address two
critical problems, one managerial, how to reverse the steady
decline in combat power that stems from rising personnel and
weapons costs and excessive overhead, and the other strategic,
how to get better strategy and therefore more effective
military operations at the higher levels of war.
As Dr. Kissinger and others have noted, we are engaged in
three long-term conflicts or competitions in the Middle East
with global jihadi groups and Iran, in Europe with Russia, and
in Asia with China. Mr. Chairman, as you noted in your opening
statement, these three strategic challenges are highly
asymmetric and two are wholly or predominantly unconventional.
Each of our adversaries and competitors are able to impose
significant costs on us, and each challenge will likely last
for decades.
We were as much as a decade and a half late in responding
to China's anti-access/area-denial challenge to our power
projection capabilities, but now I believe we are generally
heading in the right direction. We seem flummoxed by and self-
deterred in our response to Russian indirect and direct
aggression, and although it is certainly not from a lack of
trying, we are far from having a strategy that can bring
stability to the Middle East.
We have had considerable success at the tactical and
operational levels, particularly in the counterterrorism arena
and in turning around at least temporarily the situations in
Iraq and Afghanistan, but much less at the strategic level. It
is not enough to win battles or even campaigns. We must win our
wars and our strategic competitions, and victory must lead to
the establishment of the regional and international orders that
we seek. Our need for good strategy is more important than ever
and our organizational capability to produce it is uneven at
best and very much personality-dependent.
Let me say a few words about good and bad strategy. In my
written statement, I described what I think good strategy is
and I provided several examples from our history of the past 30
years that I think constitute it and so I will not belabor it
now.
Bad strategies result from a poor understanding of the
strategic and operational environment, unrealistic games, or
confusing goals with strategy, inappropriate ways, insufficient
means, and inadequate follow-through. But more than anything,
they stem from an inability to identify the decisive element
that confers enduring advantage and then to focus actions and
resources on it.
The reasons why we frequently produce bad strategy are
insufficient strategic education, lack of relevant operational
expertise and strategy-related experience among many of our
practitioners, as Michele noted, insufficient competition and
rigor in the marketplace of strategic ideas, and failure to
bring Congress along as a partner in the development and
implementation strategy. The most successful strategies that I
have been associated with in my career have been when we have
had Congress as a real core partner.
Bad strategy affects not just current operations but future
ones as well. As Secretary Gates has observed, the Department
all too frequently prepares for the wrong war and prioritizes
capabilities for imaginary wars over real ones.
Now, let me offer a couple of ideas that dovetail with what
Michele said that could improve the Department's making of
strategy.
Let me first emphasize my core point: good strategy
requires good strategists. It is just hard to get away from
that. Strategy is hard. It looks deceptively simple. It is
anything but, particularly as you move up from tactics to
strategy and grand strategy.
The first is to revamp the selection and promotion of our
general and flag officers to give greater weight to strategic
education and development in the course of their career. We are
packing too much in the careers of every officer, and today it
is hard for me to see how we will produce in the future four-
star commanders who have Ph.D.s like General Petraeus and Jim
Stavridis or have significant foreign expertise, as General
Abizaid and some others. The system just simply does not allow
that anymore.
With our one-size-fits-all line officer or personnel
management system, we have sacrificed the strategic education
of our officer for tactical and joint gains, which are very,
very necessary but not sufficient. It is far less likely going
forward, as I said, that we will produce officers who have
attained a Ph.D., are proficient in foreign languages and
knowledge about areas of strategic interest to the United
States.
We are paradoxically plagued by both too much and too
little joint experience in our officer corps. For some
promising officers, we should consider relaxing the joint duty
assignment until they reach the general officer or flag officer
rank, and within our services, we should seek to produce a mix
of highly tactically proficient and then somewhat less
tactically proficient but still tactically proficient but
strategically educated officers that are on the command track
and compete to our highest levels of military office.
The second idea, which again dovetails with something
Michele said, is to rigorously select and educate a joint corps
of operational strategists and transition the current joint
staff, which does all things for all people, into a real joint
general staff focused on the preparation and conduct of war.
Let me draw one difference. On the civilian realm and
civilian control, as Michele said, strategy is usually set by a
few people at the top or should be. In the military, it very
much depends on having a talented action officer that provides
impetus up to the top, and I do not really see that system
changing. It just can be reformed.
A joint general staff would differ from the current general
staff in several important ways: in the rigor of selection and
strategic education; in their longevity of position; in their
independence from their services once they go in this area,
although they would maintain their operational currency; and in
their exclusive focus on war and strategy.
Let me close with a few thoughts on improving strategy
across the broader national security establishment. The
National Security Council system works very well when it
focuses on big questions of strategy and crisis management. I
do not personally believe that a Goldwater-Nichols for the
interagency would be wise. In fact, I think it would perpetuate
some of the strategy pathologies we have in the Department
across the interagency.
Good strategy and effective operations are greatly enabled
by good intelligence and the operational integration of the
Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense in
recent years has significantly improved our operational
effectiveness in several areas. And I am sure I am going to
sound parochial in saying this, but at the margin, given the
challenges we face, their asymmetric and long-term character,
we will likely see a larger return at the margin, dollar for
dollar, in our strategic effectiveness by providing additional
resources to national intelligence than we will by providing
equivalent amount for defense. And of course, I am for both.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before
you today. I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Vickers follows:]
Prepared Statement by Michael G. Vickers
Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed, it is a privilege and
pleasure to be with the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning to
discuss how the Pentagon might improve its development of policy,
strategy and plans. It is an additional pleasure to be joined by my
former colleagues, Michele Flournoy and Jeff Eggers.
It has been seven months since I've left my position as USD(I). I
miss the great privilege of defending my country, and as astonishing as
this may sound, I miss you all as well.
I have followed with great interest the Committee's hearings on
U.S. National Security Strategy and Defense Organization. I commend you
for taking on the critical task of Defense Reform.
Thirty years ago, a lack of joint interoperability and
interdependence within the armed services and insufficient attention
given to our Special Operations Forces provided the impetus for major
defense reform. Today, the need for defense reform is no less urgent.
A major problem that must addressed today is that rising personnel
and weapons costs, and excessive bases and headquarters staffs are
generating decreasing strategic and operational returns on our defense
investment, resulting in less and less combat power available for the
defense of our national security interests. Second, and even more
urgent, we are not winning our nation's wars. We are winning battles
and campaigns, but not our wars.
As I will discuss momentarily, we are engaged in three long-term
conflicts or competitions for which we have yet to devise effective
strategies. I have focused my statement this morning on our
difficulties with developing good strategy, since policy and plans,
and, indeed, effective military operations flow from good strategy.
As Dr. Kissinger and other witnesses have testified, we face major
challenges to our national security interests in the Middle East, in
Europe and in Asia.
In the Middle East, the old order is collapsing. There is
an assault on the international system by the Islamic State of Iraq and
the Levant, al-Qaeda, and associated global jihadi groups; expanding
sectarian conflict; and a widening proxy war between Saudi Arabia,
Turkey and its allies, and Iran and its allies.
In Europe, a revanchist Russia has successfully waged
hybrid warfare against Georgia and Ukraine, and seeks to reorient the
continent away from the United States.
In Asia, a rising China is asserting its growing power
across the region, and anticipates that within a few decades that it
will surpass the United States as the leading power in the
international system.
These three strategic challenges are highly asymmetric, and two are
largely unconventional. Each of our adversaries and competitors are
able to impose significant costs on us. Each challenge will likely last
for decades. We are not postured as a Department, intellectually or
organizationally, for these highly asymmetric and largely
unconventional long-term challenges. We are also in the midst of an
ongoing revolution in technology that will have profound consequences
for strategic balances. We must account for this ongoing revolution in
our defense strategy and investment.
We will need to develop an array of strategies to deal with these
challenges. Much as some might prefer, we cannot simply opt out. As my
former boss and mentor, Bob Gates, told this Committee seven weeks ago,
``while we may not be interested in aggressors, terrorists, revanchists
and expansionists half a world away, they ultimately are always
interested in us--or in our interests, allies and friends.'' And,
unfortunately, our strategic effectiveness across administrations from
both parties has not been at the level that will be needed going
forward.
We were as much as a decade and a half late in responding to
China's anti-access/area-denial challenge to our power projection
capabilities, though, now, I believe, we are generally heading in the
right direction. We seem flummoxed by and self-deterred in our response
to Russian indirect and direct aggression. And, although it's certainly
not from a lack of trying, we are far from having a strategy that can
bring stability to the Middle East.
We have had considerable success at the tactical and operational
levels, particularly in the counterterrorism arena and in turning
around the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but much less at the
strategic level. It is not enough to win battles or even campaigns. We
must win our wars, and victory in war must lead to the establishment of
the regional and international orders that we seek. We must develop and
field capabilities and demonstrate the will to use them, moreover, to
restore the deterrence component of our strategy.
good strategy/bad strategy
As Richard Rumelt observes in his excellent book, Good Strategy/Bad
Strategy, good strategy is unfortunately the exception and not the
rule. Good strategy almost always looks simple and obvious, but it is
not.
Good strategy is made by good strategists. A talented leader
identifies the critical issues in the situation, pivot points that can
multiply the effectiveness of his effort, and then concentrates action
and resources on them. Good strategy doesn't just apply one's strengths
against an opponent's weaknesses or against the most promising
opportunity; it creates strength, both short and long-term, often from
unexpected or non-obvious sources. Good strategy aims to force an
opponent to play our game, sometimes by changing the rules of the game,
or to beat him at his own game when he overreaches and makes himself
vulnerable. And, important aspects of strategy, particularly in the
national security realm, must be developed in secret to be effective.
I was privileged during my career to be part of two efforts that
represent what I believe good strategy is.
During President Reagan's second term, the administration leveraged
American economic and technological superiority to force a competition
the Soviets knew they could not win without major reform, and we beat
the Soviets at the own unconventional warfare and covert action game by
driving the Red Army out of Afghanistan and supporting Solidarity in
Poland. Importantly, the Regan administration and its George H.W. Bush
successor sustained both efforts until they were victorious, despite a
warming in U.S.-Soviet relations.
Late during President George W. Bush's second term and through
President Obama's first term, the administrations adopted and sustained
an effective strategy against core al-Qaeda in the Pakistan border
region that has brought core al-Qaeda, though not its franchises,
closer to operational defeat than the group has ever been.
There are of course numerous other examples, large and small, of
good strategy since the end of the Second World War: the strategies of
containment, rollback, and economic and technological superiority that
we pursued in varying ways through the Cold War; the opening to China,
which we leveraged to great effect in our covert war with the Soviets
in Afghanistan; the shift to a deep/follow-on forces attack strategy
against Soviet forces in Europe during the late 1970s; the strategy to
drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait; the air strategy that led to the
Dayton Peace Accords; and the air-irregular ground campaign that
toppled the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks.
There are others, and an even greater number of examples of bad
strategies that, in the interest of time, I won't go into. Bad
strategies result from a poor understanding of the strategic and
operational environment, unrealistic aims, inappropriate ways,
insufficient means, and inadequate follow through. But more than
anything, they stem from an inability to identify a decisive element
that confers enduring advantage, and then to focus actions and
resources on it. As Clausewitz noted, strategy gets more difficult the
farther one moves from tactics to operations to strategy and to grand
strategy. With respect to the Department of Defense, examples of good
and bad strategy are evident in both the conduct of war and in the
preparation for war, in operational plans and in force development. The
latter results in a Department that all too frequently prepares for the
wrong war and prioritizes capabilities for imaginary wars over real
ones.
improving strategy within the department of defense
I have spent my career developing and implementing strategy and
conducting and overseeing operations. I've spent far less time thinking
about how to make the making of strategy better. With that in mind,
I'll offer a few thoughts on reforms you might consider that could
improve the making of strategy (and policy and plans along with it)
within the Department of Defense and the U.S. National Security
Establishment more broadly.
Let me return briefly to my core themes: good strategy is made by
good strategists; you can mandate strategy, as we have done with a
series of national security strategies and quadrennial defense reviews,
but you can't mandate good strategy; good strategy is the exception
rather than the rule; the problem is getting worse and more
consequential as challenges to our national security significantly
increase; the problem affects not only strategic and operational
planning but also force development; and Goldwater-Nichols has done
very little to address our growing strategy deficit; it has, in fact,
contributed to it.
I have described the sources of bad strategy. The structural and
systemic causes that often result in bad strategy in the Department are
insufficient strategic education, lack of relevant operational
expertise and strategy-related experience among practitioners,
insufficient competition and rigor in the marketplace of strategic
ideas, and failure to bring the Congress along as a partner in the
development and implementation of strategy.
There are a number of ideas, several of which I had a hand in
developing in an earlier stage of my career, that have been proposed by
previous witnesses that could address some of the structural and
systemic causes that frequently result in bad strategy. As such, they
are at least worth exploring as you continue your review of potential
defense reforms.
These include: remaking our system for selecting and promoting
general officers to increase the odds that strategic leaders will rise
to the top; making a much larger investment in the strategic education
of select members of the officer corps; transforming the Joint Staff
into a Joint General Staff with an exclusive focus on the conduct of
war and the preparation for war; transferring responsibility for
certain warfare areas (counterterrorism, special operations and cyber)
to functional combatant commands--CIA, for example, has a functional
organization in charge of its global CT operations; elevating Cyber
Command to a Unified Command; establishing additional standing
warfighting joint task forces and reorienting regional CoComs on
military diplomacy; strengthening the role of the Services in
operational planning and encouraging a greater degree of inter-service
and intra-service competition in the development of operational
concepts; establishing much closer linkages among strategic and
operational planning, intelligence assessments and force planning;
establishing additional Services (Special Operations, cyber and space);
and consolidating staffs (OSD and the JS and those within the Military
Departments). Most of these ideas have as their animating principle the
development of deeper strategic expertise within the Department--
through rigorous strategic education and career development, through
specialization, and through healthy competition.
Several of these proposed reforms may have merit, and there may be
important synergies that can be realized by adopting several of them as
part of a coherent strategy. Some may be alternative courses of action,
e.g., establishing additional Services versus transferring operational
responsibility to Service-like organizations (SOCOM and CYBERCOM) to
gain greater operational expertise in certain areas of military
strategy. (In this vein, Space Command could also be reestablished.)
But each of these ideas has drawbacks that must be carefully assessed.
While I'm admittedly generally skeptical of organizational change
as a driver for strategy improvement, something must be done.
Accordingly, I think the biggest direct strategic bang for the buck
could come from revamping selection and promotion of general and flag
officers, and from rigorously selecting and educating a corps of joint
operational strategists and transforming the Joint Staff into a real
Joint General Staff. Good strategy requires good strategists.
During the past three and a half decades, our armed forces have
become far more proficient at the tactical level of war. They have also
become more jointly interoperable and interdependent. These are good
things. That increased tactical proficiency and joint effectiveness has
come at a strategic cost, however. With our ``one size fits all'' line
officer personnel management system, we have sacrificed the strategic
education of our senior officer corps for these tactical and joint
gains. It is far less likely going forward that we will produce four-
star combat arms officers who have attained a Ph.D. or who are
proficient in foreign languages and knowledgeable about foreign areas
of strategic interest to the United States. That means no more Dave
Petraeus's, no more Jim Stavridis's and no more John Abizaid's. If
continued, this practice over time will reduce our strategic
effectiveness. We are paradoxically plagued by both too much and too
little joint experience and tactical expertise in our officer corps.
Good military strategists can be military or civilian, and on the
military side, they can be produced in several ways. Indeed, to
increase our overall strategic effectiveness, we should pursue several
diverse paths. For some promising officers, we should consider relaxing
the joint duty requirement until they reach general officer/flag
officer rank. This would allow them to pursue strategic education, gain
important foreign experience or become masters in their domain of
warfare. Within our Services, we should seek to produce a mix of highly
tactically proficient and somewhat less tactically proficient but
strategically educated officers on the command track. To keep pace with
the ongoing technological revolution, we will also need command track
general and flag officers with doctorates in the STEM disciplines.
A Joint General Staff would differ from the current Joint Staff in
several important ways. First, its members, after demonstrating
operational proficiency, would have to pass a rigorous selection
process that would seek to identify those with potential to serve as
strategists, and then would have to complete several years of graduate
level strategic education. Second, as opposed to a single two-to-three
year tour in a joint assignment, Joint General Staff officers would
spend the remaining two-thirds to three-quarters of their careers in
the Joint General Staff, rotating back to their Services of origin
periodically to maintain operational currency. Third, to ensure their
strategic independence, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, dual-hatted
as the Chief of the Joint General Staff, and not their parent Services,
would control the promotions of JGS officers. Fourth, a Joint General
Staff would be focused exclusively on the conduct and preparation for
war at the strategic and operational levels as opposed to the wide and
duplicative range of broad policy and staff functions the current Joint
Staff engages in.
improving strategy across the u.s. national security establishment
Although it is beyond the remit of this hearing, I would like to
close with a few thoughts about improving strategy across the broader
U.S. National Security Establishment.
The National Security Council system works well when it focuses on
big questions of strategy and crisis management. Problems in strategy
at the national level usually stem from not presenting clear strategic
alternatives with their likely consequences to the President, and/or
from not having deep and relevant operational expertise directly
available to the President when needed. Accordingly, I do not think a
``Goldwater-Nichols for the Interagency'' would be wise. In fact, I
believe it would likely make our strategy problem worse, as it would
replicate the sources of bad strategy within DoD across the
interagency. To repeat for a final time what has by now become my
mantra, good strategy comes from having good strategists in the right
positions.
I'd like to close by noting that good strategy and effective
operations are greatly enabled by good intelligence, and that the
operational integration of CIA and DoD capabilities has significantly
improved our strategic effectiveness in several areas in recent years.
I'm sure I will sound parochial in saying this, but at the margin, we
will see a larger return in strategic effectiveness by providing
additional resources to national intelligence than we will by providing
equivalent amounts to defense.
Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before you today. I
look forward to your questions.
Michael Vickers, a former Special Forces Officer and CIA Operations
Officer, was Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, 2011-2015,
and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low-
Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities, 2007-2011.
Chairman McCain. Thank you.
Commander Eggers?
STATEMENT OF COMMANDER JEFFREY W. EGGERS, USN (RETIRED), FORMER
SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY
AFFAIRS AND FORMER U.S. NAVY SEAL OFFICER
Mr. Eggers. Thank you, Chairman McCain, Ranking Member
Reed, and members of the committee. It is an honor and a
privilege to testify on this important topic. And I am honored
to be joined by my former colleagues, Michele Flournoy and
Michael Vickers.
My testimony today is, of course, informed by my own
experiences as a naval officer, policy advisor to several
senior defense officials, a National Security staff member
across two administrations, and as well my recent public policy
research on the intersection of organizational performance and
behavioral science.
Goldwater-Nichols was, of course, informed and catalyzed by
the failures of that generation. And my sense is that our
modern shortcomings are equally deserving of reform. So I
appreciate the significance of this topic and this opportunity.
My experience across both ends of the policy spectrum is
that the defense policy and strategy apparatus that employs our
world-class military is by comparison relatively weak. So my
testimony today is focused on what I consider to be the
greatest challenge to the future of our defense policy, and it
is not any particular threat, nor is it how we are organized.
Rather, I see our most significant challenge to defense policy
as simply how we think and the most significant future threat
we face as a failure to adapt in the future.
Amidst budgetary pressures and a very rapidly dynamically
changing future environment, it is imperative that we invest in
the concept of intellectual adaptability. This is particularly
important because we have demonstrated an inability to actually
predict the course of future threats. Secretary Gates perhaps
said it best. Quote: When it comes to predicting the nature and
location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam our
record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right.
So making the case for intellectual adaptability is quite
easy. I think the hard part is designing change that actually
results in intellectual adaptability. The good news is the
Pentagon has gone a great way to internalize this concept and
institutionalize it within their current strategic planning
lexicon.
So I would first make a few points about how adaptability
relates to people and technology.
First is that adaptability relates to an organization's
culture and therefore and ultimately its people. As General
Dempsey once said, if we do not get the people right, the rest
of it will not matter. We are going to put the country at risk.
It is in this light that I believe Secretary Carter's Force
of the Future initiative should be aggressively implemented,
but the proposals are likely to meet some dilution as they go
through the cultural resistance to change.
Second, the strategic potential in this initiative of Force
of the Future is not simply in controlling costs. Rather, it is
enhancing the adaptability of the force. We must shift our way
of thinking from retention of talent to the development of
talent.
Third, adaptability must not be misconstrued as how we
acquire or buy technology. Even for DARPA [Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency], which I see as one of the world's
greatest intellectual innovation firms, their great history of
innovation rests instead on their personnel system with their
special hiring authority in a very rigorous intellectual
process.
Fourth, intellectual adaptability will require rebalancing
the military's emphasis on operational employment with academic
development. Generally speaking, the more time spent in
operational units, the more promising one's military career,
which is a disincentive to pursue experiences that broaden and
build new ways of thinking such as civilian schools.
And fifth and finally, the command-centric military
promotion system results in a lack of skill differentiation
that dulls intellectual adaptability. Command track officers
who come to staff jobs to check the box so to speak for their
joint requirement have little incentive to challenge the
mainstream analysis of that institution lest they jeopardize
their operational career.
In exploring an adaptable force that is more open to new
ways of thinking, my statement highlights cultural factors that
generate a wider array of new ideas, improve upon a risk-averse
culture, and can do things to inoculate against cognitive bias.
We must do better at seeing the world as it is vice how we wish
it were or thought it was going to be.
Along these lines, my statement offers two broad sets of
recommendations to promote intellectual adaptability in policy
and strategy, which I will summarize. The first set speaks to
military personnel management and the prioritization of people
and their cognitive development.
One, move beyond the joint concept by building senior
military leaders in the future that have an abundance of
national security experience outside of Defense.
Two, prioritize academic growth by making such broadening
tours more common by the time people reach the 06 milestone
with a significant expansion of civilian school opportunities.
Three, promote differentiation among our office community
by balancing opportunity between a dominant command track
career track and the non-command tracks.
Four, promote a meritocracy in military promotion by making
more flexible both the early promote system and the up or out
tradition.
The second set of reforms is applicable to the civilian
side of the defense policy community with three
recommendations.
First, institutionalize an independent red team of experts
and outsiders that are empowered to rigorously test the policy
assumptions and to present alternative perspectives into the
process.
Two, separate the policy development and implementation
functions so that the policy development personnel can be
protected from the burden and distraction of day-to-day
operational crises.
And third and finally, enhance the development of the
civilian policy professional community with specialized
training to enhance critical and divergent thinking in the
policy development and assessment process.
I greatly appreciate the opportunity to testify and offer
these thoughts today. The uncertain nature of our future puts
the need for humility into our planning and puts a clear
premium on the concept of adaptive thinking and being more open
to how we employ the resources we will have in the future. As
always, such reform will be disruptive and costly and entail
some acceptance of risk. However, in my view such risk will be
more manageable and more acceptable than the increasing costs
of a future failure to adapt.
I hope my testimony serves useful to the purposes of this
committee, and I look forward to assisting the committee and I
definitely look forward to your questions. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Eggers follows:]
Prepared Statement by CDR Jeff Eggers
introduction
Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed, and committee members, I
appreciate the opportunity to testify in this series of hearings on how
the American defense establishment might be improved. And I'm honored
to join my former colleagues Michele Flournoy and Michael Vickers.
After the painful and instructive failures of Vietnam, Grenada, and
Operation EAGLE CLAW, Senators Nichols and Goldwater had the courage to
overhaul our defense establishment with the landmark legislation that
bears their names. It is difficult to see with clarity today how our
more recent struggles with the business of defense and our operations
in South Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa will compare as
potential catalysts for change. While our contemporary policy
shortcomings may not have garnered as many protests on the Mall or have
been marked by highly publicized operational failure, my sense is that
our modern shortcomings may be equally deserving of thoughtful reform.
America both deserves and needs a defense establishment that
considers policy and strategy in a way that lives up to the complex
array of threats it faces and the extraordinary military it employs.
The operation of a modern day nuclear submarine or Army brigade combat
team are small miracles in themselves. Yet my experience--across both
ends of the defense policy spectrum, first as a field operator and
later as a policy advisor--is that the strategic policy planning
apparatus that employs our operational assets is, by comparison,
relatively weak. The greatest military in the world deserves a world-
class policy and strategy apparatus.
Designing such a system, both for our defense and the government
more broadly, is the basis of my current research at New America, where
I am working to improve public policy through a better understanding of
the intersection of organizational performance and behavioral science.
the strategic challenge to future defense policy
Many prior witnesses in this series have outlined how the rapidly
shifting 21st century environment is making our 20th century models and
tools obsolete. I couldn't agree more, and so I won't belabor those
points.
Moreover, I recognize fully that our defense policy challenges are
rooted in the overarching national security process led by the national
security staff. Defense reform needs to be nested within broader
national security reform, but my statement today is constrained to
issues within the purview of this committee.
In this statement, I am focused on what I see as the most important
challenge to the future of our defense policy. It is not how the
Islamic State radicalizes our enemies, or how future adversaries tunnel
through our cyber walls, whether Iran spins more centrifuges or whether
Russia or China take their assertiveness to the next level. Nor is it
fixing our broken acquisition system or rewiring command relationships
within the Pentagon. These are all immensely important, but I believe
that our greatest challenge is not what threat we may face, or even how
we're organized.
Instead, I see our greatest challenge as how we think, and our
greatest potential threat as a future failure to adapt and be more open
to new ways of thinking. Amidst a rapidly shifting and uncertain
landscape, we can ill afford to be locked into old patterns of
thinking. A failure to adapt could cause us to fail militarily and,
more broadly, as a society.
This does not reflect insufficient faith in American ingenuity and
determination. Rather, that spirit of optimism is tempered by the
humility of my experience in public service and an awareness of
history. For nearly a century, the strategic privilege enjoyed by the
United States was rooted in geographic advantage and an abundance of
power, particularly in our resources and our technology. In such an
era, the U.S. could more easily afford to be slower to adapt. During
his military career, the future National Security Advisor Robert
McFarlane wrote that ``having superior strategic military might has
provided an enormous hedge for flabby thinking. We could afford less
than optimal strategic planning because push was never going to come to
shove. We have had the luxury of being able to be foolish.''
We no longer have such luxury. With budgetary pressures, a shifting
global landscape and a relative decline in global influence, we must
improve our cognitive adaptability or suffer the consequence of failing
to do so. As General Dempsey once testified, ``Our competitive
advantage is our people and their adaptability . . . . Overmatch in
size and technology matters, but the rate in which we can innovate and
adapt relative to these non-state actors matters more. This is a
generational challenge.''
the case for adaptability
A 2010-2011 Defense Science Board defined adaptability as the
``ability and willingness to anticipate the need for change, to prepare
for that change, and to implement changes in a timely and effective
manner in response to the surrounding environment.'' The concept of
adaptability in defense planning is en vogue now, largely because it is
seen as mitigating the risk posed by an uncertain and increasingly
complex operating environment. In my experience, successful defense
policy hinges on adaptability not just because we face an increasingly
complex environment, but because we are consistently and profoundly
unable, despite our best efforts, to accurately predict the future and
the threats it will bring.
General Mattis, the former commander of Central Command, once told
this committee that ``as we look toward the future, I have been a
horrible prophet. I have never fought anywhere I expected to in all my
years.'' And Secretary Gates has perhaps said it best: ``when it comes
to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements,
since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten
it right . . . '' We will always be tempted with predictions, but we
should also learn to embrace uncertainty.
Greater intellectual adaptability will not only better posture the
U.S. against an uncertain future, it will also improve the rigor and
fidelity with which we make decisions in defense policy amid a dynamic
landscape. We will do better at seeing the world as it is, vice how we
wish it were or thought it would be. And we'll be less prone to the
logical fallacies that are often woven into human thinking.
In my view, adaptability should be concerned with being more
rigorous in our thinking, more open to new ideas and better prepared
for change, whatever it may be. Because there is sometimes confusion
between adaptability and the also-important versatility, I see
intellectual adaptability as deriving from three critical aspects of
how we think: intellectual innovation, or our ability to think
creatively; intellectual integrity, or having the courage to challenge
assumptions; and intellectual humility, or our empathy to listen and
learn.
Intellectual innovation, integrity and humility derive from an
organization's culture, and ultimately, its people. People drive
culture, culture drives how we think, and how we think drives our
policies and strategies. So any reformation to the future of policy-
making should start with how we invest in people. As the former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marty Dempsey said, ``If we don't
get the people right, the rest of it won't matter. We're going to put
the country at risk.'' The good news is that many of the services and
the Pentagon staff are already prioritizing the concept of adaptability
in their planning.
making adaptability real
Indeed, and to a large degree, such a shift is already under
consideration. The ``brain-drain'' of the U.S. military has been well
documented and the Pentagon has clearly taken note. Secretary Carter's
Force of the Future initiative should be aggressively implemented as a
serious effort at reform. Secretary Carter's vision has a tremendous
champion in Undersecretary Brad Carson, but he will face a broader
cultural resistance to change, which is likely to diminish the pace and
breadth of reform.
Force of the Future is only the latest study that validates the
urgency of instilling greater adaptability into the defense enterprise
and the thinking of its personnel. The Defense Science Board published
a report in 2011 on ``Enhancing Adaptability of U.S. Military Forces.''
The Army's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point has
done considerable research on this problem to include a 2014 Task Force
report on ``Fostering Institutional Adaptability.'' And Army Chief
General Odierno's ``Force 2025'' vision is an Army that is ``adaptive,
innovative, exploits the initiative and can solve problems in many
different ways.'' As other witnesses have told this committee, we seem
to know we have a problem with the personnel system and acknowledge the
need for adaptability, but struggle with agreeing on what that means in
terms of reform.
In my view, the potential in personnel reform is more strategic
than retention, healthcare, retirement and compensation, as important
as those issues are. Rather, the focus of personnel reform should be
the broader spectrum of development to include recruiting, assessments,
promotions, and education. The real potential in Force of the Future is
not simply in controlling costs--it is in how it enhances the future
cognitive performance and intellectual adaptability of the force.
Indeed, Force of the Future might shift its lexicon from a focus on
retaining talent to one of developing talent. Carrots and other
retention tools are not necessarily the same as force development
tools, and the more the two are confused, the more risk we incur.
Moreover, adaptability in this context should not be misconstrued
as how we buy or acquire technology, but is instead directed at how we
think about defense policy and strategy itself. Of course, technology
is important, but we tend to over-emphasize and misperceive technology
as the crux of innovation. For instance, the establishment of a new
Defense Innovation unit in California will bring entrepreneurial spirit
and technical expertise to Washington. But what we need most from those
outside of Washington is a spirit of intellectual integrity and
humility, not just technical know-how. Many of our nation's best and
brightest are found in Silicon Valley, and we need to tap into that
resource. However, we should aspire to a future military force that is
itself regarded as the best and brightest, and where Silicon Valley
comes to find and borrow talent.
people are the crux of adaptability
One subtle irony with the Pentagon's outreach to Silicon Valley is
that the defense establishment owns DARPA, one of the world's greatest
innovation firms. DARPA has special hiring authority and robust funding
because it has the sacred mission of maintaining a cutting-edge
advantage in defense innovation. In a similar way, we should view the
mission of defense policy and strategy as equally high-stakes and
sacred. Defense policy deserves and requires the same attention to
intellectual innovation that we currently invest in driving defense
technology.
DARPA's gift to the military is its innovative technology, and the
real magic behind that technology is DARPA's personnel system, which is
built on a rigorous tradition of cognitive performance and an
intellectually grueling process that insiders liken to defending a PhD
thesis. This culture, coupled with special hiring authority that
laterally acquires outside experts on a term-limited basis, drives an
engine of innovation fueled by exceptional people who want to change
the world.
General Pete Schoomaker institutionalized this belief more than 20
years ago with the enduring principle that ``humans are more important
than hardware.'' Schoomaker's passion for reforming the Army stemmed
from his personal experience in the tragedy at Desert One in the failed
Iranian hostage rescue. In his farewell message to the Army, he
cautioned that ``we must never forget that war is fought in the human
dimension. Therefore, technology will always play an important but
distinctly secondary role . . . ''
Pixar president Ed Catmull has a similar philosophy about people
that has enabled Pixar to remain an innovative and creative leader in
the world of animation. In the creative industries, the priority is on
novel ideas, much as the military puts its premium on technology. But
according to Catmull, prioritizing ideas over people puts the cart
before the horse: even great ideas can be spoiled within a culture
where people are not the priority.
The lesson of DARPA, Schoomaker and Pixar is that we must think of
adaptability as a way of thinking rather than as something that is
acquired or purchased. The pursuit of intellectual adaptation in policy
will require balancing our investments in technology with our
investments in people.
balancing operations with development
I've participated in two studies that assessed the future of U.S.
Special Operations Forces. I've come to believe, despite all their
successes and accomplishments, that the intensive utilization of
special operations forces in permissive environments over the last
decade has been akin to taking a very sharp knife and rubbing it across
concrete. Sustained operational employment of our best forces is an
inevitable temptation in a time of war, and it builds an incredible
well of combat experience, but it does not provide the time to study
and grow, and to experiment and fail, which are necessarily to hone
cutting-edge cognitive performance and adapt ahead of the enemy.
It is my sense that our military's operationally-focused, command-
centric culture is working against the development of intellectual
adaptability. The model of promotion and personnel management is built
around the operational command experience. The more our forces run to
the sound of guns and serve in operational units, the more promising
their career. By contrast, experiences that expose people to new ways
of thinking, such as civilian schools, are still seen as rewards or
``good deals.''
Moreover, these ``broadening'' opportunities, where they do occur,
are seen as ``rests'' from the grueling operational pace. Thus the
military officer student is incentivized to ``take a knee'' at school
rather than actively invest in their learning and growth. How they do
or what they write as students is generally irrelevant to their career
promotion. Military colleges have a 100% pass rate, which does not
reflect a rigorous process of independent learning. Overall, the
operational culture still views broadening as a cost to be minimized
vice a long-term investment to be expanded.
The one-size-fits-all system and its lack of differentiation also
results in a stratification of officers whereby some become ``fast-
track'' and ``groomed'' for flag rank and the rest are among the
``pack.'' The competition for the ``fast-track'' is a powerful
disincentive to investing in personal growth and development. Thus
military members consider outside ``broadening'' opportunities with
hesitation as they weigh the downside risk to their career. Moreover,
the model tends to promote based on historic tactical and operational
proficiency, not forward looking strategic thinking potential. The Army
War College recently published the results of a Harvard thesis that
concluded that Army officers with higher cognitive ability are
statistically less likely to be promoted below zone or to achieve
battalion command. The fact that we've had thoughtful and intelligent
senior leaders in uniform should not be taken as evidence that the
status quo generates an entire force with such traits. The question is
not whether we can find a few critical thinkers every few years for the
top positions, but whether we have an institution that collectively
thinks critically from top to bottom.
The operational culture also dulls intellectual adaptability by
incentivizing convergent thinking. Fast-track officers who come to
strategy and policy jobs to ``check the box'' for their staff job
requirement have little incentive to deviate from the mainstream
analysis, lest they jeopardize their operational career. The cultural
command-track expectation is not that these officers ``move the policy
needle''--it is instead that they merely ``punch the clock'' and move
on to the next command-track job. They are ill served by rocking the
boat they sit in.
It is in this spirit that prior witnesses have raised the issue of
a general staff as being preferable to the current joint staff model.
Notwithstanding the drawbacks of a general staff, there is a very real
problem with the joint staff increasingly serving as a pass-through
rubber-stamp for combatant command or field recommendations. This
deference likely stems from the above effect, whereby command-track
officers are unlikely to challenge other operational officers in
command. There is little penalty for silence.
The anti-intellectual cultural prioritization of operations over
education should be inverted. This has been done before. During the
inter-war period, the War Department explicitly prioritized Army staff
and war college faculty manning above operational units. This
prioritization of education was based on the assumption that future
warfare would be different than the first World War--our planning
assumptions today should be at least as humble.
We can't rely solely on a generation of combat experience and new
technology. The development of our people, and their ideas, is how
we'll adapt and outsmart future enemies.
invest in drivers of adaptability
Research points to several factors that could improve intellectual
adaptability in defense policy and strategy decision-making: 1)
autonomy and ownership; 2) experimentation and failure, and; 3)
critical review and dissent.
1. Autonomy and Ownership. The private sector is increasingly
investing in the related concepts of autonomy and ownership as means of
optimizing not only the intrinsic motivation of employees, but also as
an important engine of intellectual innovation. Autonomy gives people
the freedom to plan their work and to own that plan, and researchers
have demonstrated that such factors generally result in a more creative
process. Google, 3M, and other companies with a track record in
innovation have institutionalized autonomy and ownership by accepting
the inefficiency and cost of giving their people time to develop their
own ideas. DARPA's model also leverages this effect, whereby program
managers and their teams generate and own the ideas at the center of
their projects.
In defense policy and strategy, autonomy would suggest moving away
from the one-size-fits-all model to allow for differentiation among
officer tracks to account for different strengths and interests.
Autonomy might also involve rebalancing career paths to allow for
``broadening opportunities'' with increased flexibility for independent
research and academic assignments. Force of the Future is proposing
reforms to expand in-service civilian school opportunities, but
internal compromise will likely result in a partial and modest
prototype. A partial prototype could have the unintended consequence of
continuing the stratification effect whereby officers perceive some
handicap to their career path by experimenting with the traditional
norm. As experienced with the Pentagon's ``Afghan Hands'' program,
career path reforms may not have the desired effect unless they are
implemented broadly.
2. Experimentation and Failure. The track record of innovation
highlights a willingness to experiment with creative ideas and to
accept the accompanying risk of failure so that iterative improvement
can occur. However, we typically treat defense policy and strategy as a
high-stakes venture, thus we become risk averse and have a very low
tolerance for experimentation with bold ideas. And yet, the practical
experience of defense policy is that we're constantly undergoing
experimentation and failing along the way, except that we don't
recognize it as such--we're more likely to rationalize failure as the
strategy being under-resourced or not yet working.
Intellectual integrity and humility avoid this trap, and would make
it more likely in the future to salvage success from an initially
flawed plan.
Take, for instance, our recent experience with security cooperation
as a strategic pillar of our defense strategy. I've concluded that the
logic of our modern reliance on security cooperation as a means of
``building partner capacity'' is flawed. The logic is straightforward:
the rise of non-state threats among failing or failed states presents
an imperative to counter these threats with military means, and we can
generate those military means by building capacity within other
governments through traditional security cooperation. The flaw in the
logic is also straightforward: experience has shown that other foreign
governments, particularly those relevant to this issue, rarely share
our interests or values, and how well they absorb, utilize and sustain
the military capacity we provide often falls well short of our
expectations.
The flaw in the logic is reasonably apparent and well-documented,
but it is easily overlooked because of a compelling perceived need to
act in the face of these growing threats, and security cooperation
provides an existing channel by which to act, particularly when
political pressure makes it preferable and cheaper than the alternative
of deploying U.S. forces. And despite the fact that the track record of
the experiment has been so poor in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan,
Yemen, Syria, and others, we have yet to step back and revisit the
logic of this strategic pillar of national defense. The lesson might be
to be more modest in setting realistic objectives. Again, it is
intellectual integrity that allows for adaptation to the strategy when
the strategy isn't working. And intellectual humility can help
compensate for a `decisive win' culture that frequently tries to hedge
against all possible risk.
As an aside, and in this regard, I applaud the new mandate, via the
recently passed NDAA, to develop a ``strategic framework'' for security
cooperation.
3. Dissent and Critical Review. Related to the importance of failure
is the necessity of dissent. We recently marked the 100th anniversary
of the articulation of the theory of general relativity by Einstein,
the most iconic of intellectual innovators. Among Einstein's more
famous quotes is the simple idea that ``we cannot solve our problems
with the same thinking we used when we created them.'' While Einstein
is often popularized and celebrated as a lone genius, he leveraged
collaboration, peer review, critique and iteration to conclude his
radically adaptive theory of general relativity.
Defense policy decision-making is a relatively closed, consensus-
based process, and is exposed to a limited infusion of external ideas.
Moreover, research suggests that groupthink is more common in
hierarchies with a high degree of cohesion, risk, and sense of mission.
Thus defense policy is vulnerable to cognitive bias and shouldn't be
grading its own homework, yet that is often how our current system
functions. Within the Pentagon, the offices that develop and implement
policy are often the same ones that assess its effectiveness, and those
assessments can suffer from a lack of objectivity. Thus assessments of
defense policy typically fall to the intelligence services, which
becomes understandably frustrating to the Pentagon and
counterproductive to the national security process.
The exigency of combat long ago brought about the practice of ``red
teaming'' military planning to think like the enemy and probe one's
vulnerabilities, and the U.S. military has done much to advance the
concept. After the failures in planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
Schoomaker and Keith Alexander established a ``Red Team University'' at
TRADOC at Ft Leavenworth to improve the Army's decision-making process
by teaching officers to be introspective and reflective of their own
biases, to be more empathetic in listening to others, and to mitigate
the effects of group-think. The current leader of that program, Steve
Rotkoff, became dedicated to this challenge after personally
experiencing the failures to account for the known risks of the 2003
Iraq invasion, which retired Marine General Zinni has called a
``dereliction in lack of planning.''
The recent book ``Red Team'' by CFR Fellow Micah Zenko scrutinizes
the challenge of an institution evaluating its own plans and the
utility of dedicating expertise that is empowered and expected to
rigorously pressure-test those plans. Dr. Zenko outlines how the
``tyranny'' of expertise within groups can cloud objectivity and
creativity and how the best insights within an organization often come
from its least senior people. This sheds light on a critical challenge
of our defense policy system whereby decisions get made top-down while
understanding flows from the bottom up. The tools of ``red teams'' can
help mitigate the risks of decision-making being separated-in this case
by many layers-from the best source of insight.
recommendations
Along these lines, I offer two sets of recommendations on how this
committee might promote the strengthening of intellectual adaptability
in defense policy and strategy. The first set of recommendations would
rebalance priorities at the individual level, i.e. within the context
of talent development and career planning, mostly in the military
context. The second set of recommendations would make changes at the
organizational level, mostly in the context of defense civilians.
1. Prioritize People and their Cognitive Development. The conventional
military officer career path is based on the outdated idea that command
at every level requires command experience at the prior level.
Enhancing adaptability and cognitive performance will require
broadening and diversifying this career path and allowing for
differentiation of officer skill sets. Force of the Future proposals
call for mandatory academic and interagency tours for promotion, but
dilution and partial implementation of such proposals are likely.
Specifically, the services appear to be pushing back against more
aggressive reforms due to concerns with finding room in the
``conventional'' career path for such mandates. To be fair, there is
valid concern over the opportunity cost of having less operational
experience when our forces are next called to fight. However, recent
experience suggests that accepting the risk of this trade-off would be
acceptable based on the lesson that intellectual adaptability in combat
is increasingly valuable relative to conventional operational efficacy.
This was the lesson of JSOC in Iraq in the hunt for al-Qaeda in Iraq,
as outlined by Stan McChrystal in his recent book ``Team of Teams.'' To
defeat the enemy, they needed to re-tool how they had learned to
operate.
These recommendations would put cognitive development on a par with
tactical proficiency, based on the premise that rebalancing combat
warfare proficiency with broadening education and training in divergent
thinking will improve our future intellectual adaptability.
Move Beyond ``Jointness.'' Goldwater Nichols succeeded
in building a joint force that thinks as a military rather than as a
service, but the universal requirement for ``joint'' service has likely
outlived its usefulness. Today's military serves in a different
landscape where the solutions to defense problems intertwine military
capabilities with diplomatic, intelligence and competencies from other
agencies. And yet, military leaders have little incentive to serve with
other national security agencies because it would jeopardize their
career path. This also bifurcates defense and foreign policy, with one
community trained to think in military and intelligence terms, and
another in diplomatic and political terms. This parsing may be
traditional, but it is not conducive to effective policy solutions to
the 21st century problems that increasingly blur these old divisions.
Tomorrow's national security apparatus needs ``wholeness'' among
its agencies in the same way that Goldwater Nichols sought
``jointness'' among the services. The committee's writ is limited in
this regard, but Defense could lead the way by building a next
generation of senior military leaders with an abundance of ``national
security'' experience with other agencies or interagency task forces.
Prioritize Academic Growth. Academic or research
``broadening'' tours where military leaders are exposed to new ways of
thinking should be as important to promotion as combat experience. In
their 2008 Joint Operation Environment publication, the Joint Forces
Command cautioned that ``in the year 2000, the PLA had more students in
America's graduate schools than the U.S. military.'' Status quo career
incentives should be rebalanced to make academic ``broadening'' tour
experiences more common by the O-6 milestone, with a significant
expansion of civilian school opportunities.
Promote Differentiation. Outlying officers who do not
achieve the ``fast-track'' operational career because they have greater
inclination to non-command academic or policy tours should not be
handicapped in their career. Force of the Future is proposing the
expansion of ``technical tracks'' for such officers, but this risks
perpetuating the stratified, two-tier system of the ``command track''
and everyone else, which is not healthy. Until there is better equity
and balance between the command tracks and other tracks, the non-
command tracks will not attract and promote the best people. The
concept of a ``technical'' track should be made commensurate with the
``command'' track and include near-equal opportunities for the policy-
minded strategists.
Promote a Meritocracy. Carrot-based incentives to retain
the ``best and brightest'' are unlikely to succeed. What drives many
such officers out is not the pay or benefits, but frustration with a
time-in-grade system of promotion. If the rate of advancement could
vary based on demonstrated aptitude for responsibility and leadership,
with a less rigid system of tickets that needed to be punched, the
``best and brightest'' would be more amenable to being retained. Such a
shift could be phased in, as a first step, by expanding and making more
flexible the ``early promote'' quota system and removing the year-group
management controls in the mid-grade years.
2. Enhance Intellectual Adaptability within Defense Policy
Conduct internal, independent policy and strategy
assessments. Policy developers and implementers should not be grading
their own homework. While the intelligence agencies will continue to
play a role in evaluating the implementation of policy, it is
unproductive for the Pentagon to rely on another agency to assess its
defense policies. Rather, the Defense Department should have an
institutionalized, independent ``red team'' of experts and outsiders
dedicated to and empowered with the task of rigorously testing policy
and strategy assumptions and opening eyes to alternate perspectives.
This office should be led by an independent, direct report to the
Secretary, comparable to the existing offices for budgetary and
programmatic oversight (CAPE) and over-the-horizon analysis (ONA).
Objective policy assessment is at least as important as long-term
forecasting and budgetary evaluation.
Dedicate and separate policy developers and
implementers. The urgency of policy implementation generally dominates
policy resources, leaving little bandwidth for dedicated policy
development. The two functions should be related, as implementation
should inform development, but they should not be one in the same.
Separation could be akin to the Ops-Plans model of military staffs,
which is lacking in the current OSD model. OSD should consider such a
policy model, whereby policy development personnel are dedicated and
protected from the distractions of policy implementation issues and
day-to-day operational crises.
Enhance the development of civilian policy
professionals. OSD should augment the professional development of
policy civilians with specialized training to enhance critical thinking
in policy development and assessment. The Army's University of Foreign
Military and Cultural Studies at Ft. Leavenworth gives an in-depth
course of instruction to those who serve on ``red teams'' and provides
a shorter curriculum to all Army officers, which includes important
lessons on group think mitigation and fostering cultural empathy.
Something similar could also be useful to civilian policy personnel.
conclusion
Mr. Chairman, Senator Reed, Members of the Committee, I appreciate
the opportunity to offer this testimony.
I believe that humility is required in predicting how many or what
types of battalions, fighters or languages the force of the future will
need. Those who proclaim that the future of conflict definitively lies
in one region over another, or in one form of conflict over another,
are likely to be proven wrong. The uncertain nature of future threats
puts a clear premium on intellectual adaptability and being more open
to new ways of thinking about how we employ the resources we have.
This is difficult, because it requires an embrace of uncertainty
and tinkering with some of the most revered, time-honored personnel
models in our history. As always, such reform would be disruptive and
costly in the short-term and require some acceptance of risk.
Nonetheless, my view is that such risk would be smaller and more
manageable than the increasing costs of a future failure to adapt.
I hope this statement serves useful in your consideration of
reform, and I'd look forward to assisting the committee in any way
possible in the future.
Chairman McCain. Thank you very much.
Secretary Flournoy, I have been concerned about the
centralization of decision-making on a tactical level. I have
been told, for example, the reason why we waited for a year to
launch strikes against the fuel trucks, which were a great
source of ISIS's [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] revenue,
that the decision rested in the White House and had never been
given. It seems to me that those decisions should be made at a
tactical level, and I wonder about your concern about that.
But, second of all, when I tell people and my constituents
about the numbers that you just cited in your testimony, tens
of thousands of staff members at all levels, they ask me a
simple question: How did this happen?
And finally, what is your solution? Do we have to act
legislatively to put caps on the size of these staffs? Do we
have to restructure the entire organizations? I think everybody
agrees they are much, much, much too large. And so what is your
suggestion as to how we get this situation back under control
and get our service men and women back into the operational
force?
Ms. Flournoy. So first on your point about tactical
decisions being sort of pulled up the chain of command into
either the senior reaches of the Pentagon or the White House, I
think too often that happens because of two reasons: one, a
lack of role clarity of who has what job; and two, a risk
aversion. The more people are worried about risk, the more they
tend to pull decisions up the chain of command.
The irony of that is that I think if you were to keep the
NSC [National Security Council] process focused on strategy
development, policy setting, setting the right and left limits
for execution, and then you were to empower the secretaries of
the various agencies to actually execute on that policy and
then hold them accountable if they screw up, but allow them to
really be empowered executors of the policy, I think actually
in fact that would reduce risk to the President and to the
policy.
So I do think it is a matter of role clarity, but it is
also a matter of management style that empowers leaders down
the chain and holds them accountable.
You know, in terms of how this tremendous growth in
headquarters staffs have happened, I think there is certainly
instances where in a very complex world, the Department gets
assigned new tasks and every time there is a new task and
somebody new responsible for that task at a senior level, they
grow a staff.
Chairman McCain. And there is a new command.
Ms. Flournoy. And there is a new command. Right.
So there is some of that.
But I also think it happens--it is more about the natural
tendency of bureaucracies to grow. The fact that without role
clarity you have a lot of people competing to do the same work,
we now have a situation where COCOMs are routinely pulled into
the policy process. And if you are a four-star COCOM commander
and you are going to have to appear in the situation room, of
course, you are going to build your own policy staff so you are
prepared to do that. But is that really what we want the
functions of the COCOMs to be?
So I think role clarity, really scrubbing the functions and
then I think applying some of the best practices that many
Fortune 500 companies have gone through, which is systematic
organizational design where you start with some design
principles and then you go layer by layer and you optimize
spans of control and you eliminate unnecessary layers. And not
only do you get cost savings, but more importantly, you get the
kind of organizational agility and adaptability that my
colleagues here have been talking about.
Chairman McCain. Secretary Vickers?
Mr. Vickers. I would just underscore what Michele said
about the dangers of centralization. I also think there is a
case--and it does stem from risk aversion, and I think when you
confuse a regional war for a counterterrorism campaign and
apply processes you apply outside of areas of armed
hostilities, then you get the results. If you compare our
campaign against the Taliban in 2001 versus our campaign
against ISIL in Iraq and Syria, you see a really marked
difference, and you see a marked difference in results as well
in terms of toppling the hostile regime. ISIL, of course, is
far more like a state--or it is a combination of a state and a
global jihadist organization. Even within the counterterrorism
realm, when we have applied the principles that Michele
described in terms of delegated authority, we have been far
more effective.
Chairman McCain. Commander Eggers, briefly.
Mr. Eggers. Thank you, Chairman McCain.
The only point I would add is the role of information flow
and technology which has changed radically and made it far
easier for the effect that Secretary Flournoy mentioned where
we pull in the field. We feel an obligation to understand the
operational level of detail and the policy decision-making
process. And I think that has two drawbacks. One is it does
bloat the size of the subordinate staffs, but two, it
introduces a certain cultural deference to the field and a
certain amount of bias towards the preferences of the field,
which I alluded to in my statement for the record, which I
think has to be acknowledged.
History suggests that there is benefit by senior leadership
understanding these tactical details and the effects of the
policy and the strategy. Yet, I think that that has grown due
to the proliferation of technology change and the way we see
information and have awareness of the battlefield.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Senator Reed?
Senator Reed. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you witnesses for very, very thoughtful
testimony.
Starting with Secretary Flournoy, you indicated that in the
realm of planning documents, the process would be improved if
it was a classified document essentially and then periodical
releases of generic information, et cetera. If you want to
elaborate, please do so, Madam Secretary, and then I will ask
Secretary Vickers and the Commander for their comments too.
Ms. Flournoy. In my view, when we have unclassified
documents, we tend to get a lovely coffee table book that is a
list of everything that is important. But what the Department
really needs is strategy and strategy is about making choices.
So clear priorities where not everything is a priority.
Probably the hardest part of strategy is deciding where you are
going to accept and manage risks. There are problems talking
about that in too detailed a manner in a public context because
your adversaries are listening, opportunists are listening,
allies are listening. So it is very important I think for a
real strategy document to be classified and shared with the
appropriate overseers in Congress to really guide
prioritization and resource allocation.
I also think that that process should be leader-driven but
be very inclusive at the leadership level. The best example of
that I saw was in the development of the 2012 defense strategy
where we did it because of profound changes in the resourcing
and security environment, but it included everybody from the
President to the Secretary of Defense to the Chairman to all of
the COCOMs, all of the service chiefs and secretaries, and so
forth. I would have liked to have actually seen it include a
couple of key Members of Congress as partners. But it was an
iterative process of really getting the leadership team as a
leadership team to buy into a real strategy that did prioritize
some things and accept risk and manage it in other areas. So I
think that is a good model to build on.
Senator Reed. I will just insert a point and then ask the
Secretary, and then you might come back at the end, Madam
Secretary.
This is all nice, but ultimately we have got a budget,
which is pretty open and people argue that that is the
strategic guidance right there. You might think about this,
Secretary Vickers. How do we sort of have this very classified
sort of strategy and then have a budget that does not reveal
it?
Ms. Flournoy. I think there are parts of the budget that
are rightly classified, and I think we can have a broad
discussion of strategy and we should in a democratic context. I
just think that what I hear from this committee and from others
in the Department, frankly, is a frustration that we stop short
of the hard choices sometimes. And I think some of those need
to have a classified environment to have an honest discussion
about what we are actually doing.
Senator Reed. Secretary Vickers, please, and then
Commander.
Mr. Vickers. Sure. I think that important aspects of our
strategy have to be developed in secret to be effective, and
that really is the case. You know, it is a question of
emphasis. The reason for this is that good strategy really has
to be unexpected in some ways if you are going to exploit your
strengths against your opponent's weaknesses and create new
strengths. Either to change the rules of the game or to beat
him at his own game has to be consistent with your overt
strategy, but there are important elements that have to be
secret.
I would add to your question, Senator Reed, classified
strategy can use unclassified capabilities in unexpected ways,
and that is what confounds your enemy, as well as our
classified capabilities that we necessarily keep classified.
Senator Reed. Commander, can you comment, please?
Mr. Eggers. I would take a slightly different and mixed
view on this which is that the problem with the strategic
documents and the framing we have now is not necessarily that
they are unclassified, it is that they avoid the hard decisions
and that they become a laundry list of every conceivable
approach to solve a problem because of the process. And that is
not because of the unclassified nature so much as the process
that develops those documents. And some strategic documents
will need to be classified by virtue of the content, but that
in general an open document that is open to the scrutiny and
the debate of outside experts who will not have access to a
classified document could be a valuable effect to increase the
diversity of thinking that goes into that strategy that we
would lose by classifying the document.
Senator Reed. Well, thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
Chairman McCain. Senator Rounds?
Senator Rounds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Just down the line, does a classified document or series of
classified documents exist today that actually are the
operational directive that would be a replacement to a QDR? Is
there a series of them out there right now that we simply do
not talk about?
Ms. Flournoy. Yes. There is a planning guidance that is
issued both for force planning but also for contingency
planning. And so there are key elements of a strategy in those
documents that do exist today.
And I would agree with Commander Eggers. I am not
suggesting that all our defense strategy should be classified
and that solves the problem. I just think that the real issue
is being able to make those hard choices, being able to debate
where we are going to accept and manage risk, how we are going
to prioritize among the many things we need to do.
Senator Rounds. Agreed, gentlemen?
Mr. Vickers. Yes. I mean, there is certainly no shortage of
classified documents and guidance. The question is whether they
are strategically meaningful in a sense of concentrating
actions and resources. That is where I think we fall short.
That is the difference between good strategy and bad strategy.
It is not things that we should do in the classified realm we
sometimes do in the unclassified realm, but it is also whether
what we are doing in the classified realm is really significant
enough. It still has to meet the same test for good strategy.
You are just more exposed, and that is why you keep it
classified because you are trying to really--you are
acknowledging how you assess the world, which may be different
than the way you say things in public in some important
aspects, and then actually how you are going to leverage your
advantages is obviously sensitive.
Senator Rounds. Mr. Eggers?
Mr. Eggers. And I would agree. I think people in the
military decision-making and policy decision-making processes,
when they set out to try and drive the process, will assemble
all of these reference documents, unclassified or classified,
QDR, national defense strategy, strategic planning guidance,
and so on. And even then, it is very difficult to look at the
mosaic of that guidance and the strategic framework and discern
what that means for the implementation on that particular
policy issue. In other words, it has become so big and so
diverse in some ways that it often can lack coherence to the
policy decision-making process that it is trying to inform, and
even worse, it can become somewhat disconnected from resource
allocation, which is a different problem in and of itself.
Senator Rounds. Bottom line, if the QDR were to be
eliminated, there would be a savings, I believe, in terms of
staff time just creating it, and at the same time, there are
other documents which could be expanded upon in a classified
setting that would take the place of what we are doing right
now in an unclassified setting.
Ms. Flournoy. Yes. I would encourage you to just
fundamentally reset the process and ask the Secretary to
produce a top-down, leader-driven strategy document that has a
classified form and an unclassified form and get rid of the
bottom-up, ``everybody comes to the table'' kind of process
because in practice the QDR has become the ultimate tyranny of
consensus. The object is what can we get everybody to agree on
and sign off on as opposed to how do we frame and present to
the Secretary and the Chairman the real choices before the
Department and how to make those choices. It focuses it on
consensus as much as framing and assessing the alternatives and
offering those for decision, which is a different process than
what the QDR has come to be.
Mr. Vickers. And it is much bigger than the QDR in terms of
strategy. You know, as Jeff said and the chairman said about
strategic integration, we do strategy every day in lots of
ways. So our COCOMs every day are doing something called phase
0 operations directed by classified guidance that is shaping
the environment. Well, you know, we are not doing all that well
that is shaping the international environment the last 15
years, and that is why a coherent strategy that is
strategically integrated--this is something that spans
administrations, but that is what is really missing from our
overall practice of strategy.
Senator Rounds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Senator King?
Senator King. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I find this a fascinating and important discussion.
Napoleon said war is history. Freud said anatomy is destiny. It
has been my observation that structure is policy, that if you
have a large, cumbersome, slow structure, you will have
cumbersome, slow, consensus-driven, and ultimately
unsatisfactory policy or strategy, as we are talking about
today.
It is very interesting. Mr. Vickers, you kept talking about
adaptability as the key term, and you used the phrase about
consensus is the enemy. You cannot adapt if you have a
consensus-based process, it seems to me. What we are really
talking about is agility and agility in decision-making
particularly in an era of such rapidly developing and changing
challenges, the challenges we are facing today from ISIS are
different from the challenges we faced from terrorism 2 years
ago. The whole homegrown extremist idea is a new challenge. And
yet, we have 38,000 people trying to evolve policy.
Ms. Flournoy, I think one of your important insights is
that policy should be top-down, that the people who are
assigned to think big picture are to be the ones where the
strategy should begin.
Mr. Vickers, do you agree with that proposition?
Mr. Vickers. I do. That does not mean only senior leaders
have to do it. They can be aided by a small staff or key
individuals, but I think small groups, top-down, senior
accountability is critical in strategy.
Senator King. If we are talking about strategic thinking in
the military, give me some thinking, Mr. Eggers, on whether the
promotion process stifles creativity, risk-taking, and the kind
of adaptability that we are looking for. To put it more
bluntly, could Rickover become an admiral today?
Mr. Eggers. In my statement for the record, I go into some
detail about a lot of the research that suggests that the
promotion system with its emphasis on the command track model,
which puts the premium on operational experience, is in fact
degrading our ability to be more creative and innovative in how
we think. That, coupled with the refinements of Goldwater-
Nichols and the Joint Staff requirement for promotion, for
instance, means that you today have a Joint Staff that is built
with some of the best officers we have largely from the
operational community on a very promising career track who come
to that job and have very little incentive to think differently
and offer opinions that are outside the mainstream analysis,
which hinders the process. In effect, the Joint Staff can
become something of a pass-through for field or COCOM
recommendations in the process.
Senator King. I could not find the quote, but there is a
wonderful quote from Churchill about the sum of any committee
decision is always no, that the committee, by definition, sort
of filters out a different thinking and adaptability and
agility, which again is what we need.
Let me change the subject for a minute. Is all this window
dressing? Is real policy not made in the White House these
days? We have thousands and thousands of people in the Pentagon
thinking about strategy, but the decisions are made in the
White House and perhaps that is where they have to be made.
When I was Governor--or let me just make another example.
It was not some mechanic--the headline was not ``mechanic
failure caused helicopters to crash in the desert.'' It was
``Carter mission to rescue hostages failed.'' Do you see what I
mean? If the President is going to be held responsible for
these decisions, it seems to me in large measure they have to
be made there. I do not have an answer here, but I am
interested in your thoughts, Ms. Flournoy.
Ms. Flournoy. I think strategy and policy decisions should
be made at the Commander in Chief level--many of them,
particularly when you are putting Americans in harm's way. But
I think once a general policy direction is set, empowering your
line organizations to actually implement it within certain
right and left limits and then holding people accountable for
the results--you know, it is the only way you are going to be
able to deal responsively and effectively with the full range
of challenges that we are facing.
I think from a White House perspective and from a senior
leader perspective, one of the challenges is when you ask for
options, when you ask for ideas, what do you get? And this gets
back to the tyranny of the consensus. What we really need right
now on the capabilities front is real competition of how are we
going to solve some of the key problems in a much more
contested Asia-Pacific environment or with a Russia who may
actually realize real anti-access/area-denial capabilities in
the European theater even sooner, or with this persistent
problem with ISIS and violent extremism. We need real options
development, and that means a competition of ideas.
Senator King. I am out of time, but I think it was Mr.
Eggers who talked about a red team. I love the idea of a red
team in the Pentagon or perhaps in the National Security
Council whose job it is to contest the conventional wisdom, to
contest the consensus, to be obnoxious. I could volunteer for
that. I am well qualified.
[Laughter.]
Senator King. But seriously, I think literally a structure
that builds competition and contrarianism into the system might
be salutary.
Thank you very much for your testimony.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. I think it was the former head of IBM that
had a sign on his desk that said ``The Lord so loved the world
he did not send a committee.''
[Laughter.]
Chairman McCain. Senator Sessions.?
Senator Sessions. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator King, thank you for beginning to think at a higher
level. That is what is on my mind right now. We are talking
about a very important thing, how to develop strategy within
the Department of Defense. But if it does not coordinate with
the executive branch's ultimate decisions about how to conduct
operations, then we have got a problem. We have got a
breakdown.
So I am thinking about the role of the National Security
Council. I understand that to be the place where the President
makes his final strategic decisions, and therefore, how does
the Defense Department, which has the technical expertise
presumably to execute whatever strategy they are given to
execute--how do they influence that? Are they properly being
respected and their expertise accepted? Or how does that
relationship--and is there anything that we can do--I will ask
the three of you--to enhance the ability of real practical
knowledge on the ground?
I may be wrong. I have a couple of problems. I think that
we were way to slow in responding to ISIS's move in Iraq. It
was like, well, once they take over and they stop, then we will
worry about taking back territory, which is normally harder
than stopping it to begin with. And then we have the problems,
as has been mentioned, in Syria.
Secretary Flournoy, what do you think?
Ms. Flournoy. A couple of observations. One is that I think
when one of my former mentors, John Hamre, used to say, if you
want to make a staff more strategic, cut it in half. I think as
you grow staffs--and this includes the National Security
staff--they tend to get more into operational details and
tactical kind of oversight. I think historically when you have
had smaller National Security Council staffs--I am thinking of,
for example, the Scowcroft era with a very clear understanding
of what their role is, which is strategy, policy, honest
broker, and options development for the President and not
getting into a lot of micromanaging of agencies' actual
execution, except when there is a problem and providing
necessary oversight there--so I think that is very important.
In terms of the Goldwater-Nichols structure, I actually
think the structure is right in that you have the Secretary of
Defense at the table in the National Security Council and you
also have the Chairman as an independent voice, not only an
advisor to the Secretary but also an advisor to the President.
And what that ensures is that even when the President is--
whether it is his own view, he is representing a COCOM view,
what have you--when there is military dissent, that that direct
line to the President by the Chairman ensures that he has an
opportunity to make that dissent heard before the President
makes a decision about using the military instrument. And I
think that is absolutely critical. I have seen it work. It
sometimes upsets people, but it is a very, very critical part
of the system.
Senator Sessions. Then you have the problem where if the
President says it is my strategy, my policy not to have boots
on the ground again in the Middle East, how does the Defense
Department handle that? Do you structure a QDR that reflects
that view?
Ms. Flournoy. Well, once the President makes a decision
with regard to a particular operation, then folks have a choice
of they implement that, salute smartly and implement, or if
they feel that ethically or morally they cannot do that, then
they have their own personal choices.
Senator Sessions. Well, I think that is a good answer.
I think the Nixon-Kissinger, the China deal, was decisive,
small people with the depth of knowledge themselves, knew who
to ask, made the move, and it worked. It is hard to do that the
larger you get I think.
Secretary Vickers?
Mr. Vickers. Yes. I would agree with what Michele said.
When you have too much centralization in the White House rather
than on strategy, a big, broad strategy that is set, and when
it is not working, it needs to change, you get a number of
results.
One, as you move up into our higher level committees of the
National Security Council system, you tend to strip away real
operational expertise for the problem at hand, and that can
isolate a President. And that is why, as you said, making big
decisions, of course, is the President's--that is what they are
elected to do, but they cannot tactically manage operations.
And so you tend to be slower as you assess the situation, or
you tend to be very protracted in decision-making for some
decisions that take 3 years rather than 3 months in some cases.
You know, as I said, if I look at different models--Michele
talked about the growth in the staff. It is also a question of
process and what you focus on. By very, very different
experiences, for instance, in the 1980s when we were at war
with the Soviets in Afghanistan, we reviewed that about every 6
months where we do not really do that today. We review them
every week or every month.
Senator Sessions. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Commander Eggers, do you want to respond? My time is about
up.
Mr. Eggers. I would only offer an encouraging note, that
the size of the National Security staff is an acknowledged
issue and there is an ongoing effort I think to try and
streamline and reduce that because of the effect that Secretary
Flournoy spoke to, that smaller in this case could be better.
Senator Sessions. A yes or no answer. Do you think that it
is important for us to work harder to develop a long-term
strategic policy for the United States on the major threats
that is bipartisan in nature?
Ms. Flournoy. Yes. And I actually think that that will be
job one for a new administration going forward, and elections
both in Congress and presidential elections will hopefully
allow us to come together more on such a strategy and hopefully
on a comprehensive budget deal that would actually underwrite
the necessary investments for that.
Chairman McCain. Senator Ernst.
Senator Ernst. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses today for being here.
I enjoyed the discussion about our force structure, about
being more agile, more flexible, mobile. There are so many
things that we really do need to consider.
But as it comes to force structure, I am really concerned
about our military intelligence force structure and our support
to our warfighters both now and to meet the needs in the
future. And I really feel that we need more robust assets to
meet the intelligence requirements in both Europe and Africa.
And I believe that we should be able to enhance support to our
warfighters by reforming the Cold War era institutions and
really focus on streamlining some of these headquarters and
command relationships. And I want to focus a little bit on
INSCOM [U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command].
As you know, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security
Command is located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and it is
currently the Army's senior intelligence integrator. It equips,
trains, mans all of our intelligence units around the globe.
And when I asked about INSCOM and its impact on
intelligence and warfighter last week, General Michael Flynn
said before this committee we have Army component commanders
underneath every geographic combatant commander and yet the
Army intelligence forces are aligned back to INSCOM. Talk about
more headquarters that you do not need.
So I think there is a fundamental need to take a real laser
focus at what you are addressing and decide whether or not
INSCOM can be dissolved. There is a fundamental need to decide
if INSCOM can be dissolved. You take resources and you push
them out to those theater intelligence brigades which are
necessary. End quote. That was from General Flynn.
And, Secretary Vickers, do you agree with General Flynn's
comments on INSCOM, and how can the Army better align its
intelligence forces?
Mr. Vickers. I actually do not. In fact, I strongly
disagree with them.
So the theater intelligence brigades that--and I have great
respect for General Flynn. The theater intelligence brigades
that General Flynn talked about support our combatant
commanders. One of the functions that INSCOM serves is that--
and I am against excessive headquarters. So let me say that
upfront. But one of the functions that it serves is to provide
the highest level command for the Chief of Staff of the Army
for intelligence across the Army. But it also serves as
managerial development for our senior intel leaders. If I
compare our intel leaders, who are going to rise to positions
of commanding great organizations, they need the same
leadership development that our combat arms leaders do.
So if you are a staff officer, if you are a J-2, if the
last thing you commanded is a battalion or something like that
and then suddenly you find yourself as director of a major
national intelligence agency with 20,000 people, just like our
combat arms officers, you hope you have had a division command
or something else before you rise to a corps command. And that
is one of the functions that I think INSCOM serves. It is
20,000-some people or something like that. It provides that
opportunity for a two-star to not only set intel priorities for
the Army but also to gain the important managerial experience
that is required before you take on a national agency.
Senator Ernst. I am not sure whether I agree or disagree
with that. I would hope that developmental opportunity is
important. Whether you have a command at that level or not is
maybe another issue. But I would like to look more into that.
Secretary Flournoy, do you have any thoughts on that?
Ms. Flournoy. I must confess this is not an issue that I
have looked at in detail, so I do not have a view on it at this
point.
Senator Ernst. Okay.
Commander Eggers?
Mr. Eggers. Similarly. With all the respect for both
Michaels, Flynn and Vickers, I would not add anything.
Senator Ernst. Very good. I appreciate the input.
Secretary Flournoy, while we have you here, last week
Secretary Carter announced that all military occupational
specialties will be open to women. And I would love your
thoughts on that. I support providing women the opportunity to
serve in any capacity as long as standards are not lowered for
women to join those types of occupational specialties and it
does not hurt our combat effectiveness.
However, I am disturbed at how it appears the Secretary has
muzzled the services to a point where they cannot provide
results and data from their combat integration studies before
or even after that decision was made this past week. And what
are your thoughts on the process of how this decision was made
and can you provide any further input? And my time is running
short as well.
Ms. Flournoy. I was not involved or aware of many of the
internal details of the process. Like you, I support an
approach that sets a clear set of standards based on types of
military specialties and then holds all people, men and women,
to those standards. If women are able to pass the standards,
they should be able to serve.
The one thing I will say is that there has been a lot of
discussion about impact on unit cohesion. I think much of that
is disproven by actual operational experience that has occurred
in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I would also say we have not taken
account some of the positives. I mean, all of the business
leadership--I am sorry--literature and experience emphasizes
that the more diverse you make a team, the better decision-
making you get, the better performance you get, and so forth.
So I am generally supportive of this decision. I am not
aware of the particulars of the internal process. I would
certainly hope that this committee in particular would be
provided with all of the data that you request to understand
how the decision was made and is being implemented.
Senator Ernst. Thank you, and I do hope that we are
provided with that information.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chairman McCain. Secretary Flournoy, I would not like to
end this hearing without making you uncomfortable.
Ms. Flournoy. Sir, I would expect nothing less of you.
[Laughter.]
Chairman McCain. Are we winning the war against--the
conflict with ISIS?
Ms. Flournoy. I do not think we are where we need to be,
sir. I think that this threat has shown itself to be much more
serious than I think we first realized. As Mr. Vickers said, it
is going to be a generational issue. It is something that is a
long-term challenge that we need to deal with, and I do not
think we are fully resourcing a multidimensional strategy.
I do think a lot of the strategy the President has
articulated is correct, and I personally support an approach
that is primarily focused on enabling local partners to be more
effective against this threat. I do not think invading Syria is
the answer. But I do think we, as the United States, need to
play more of a leadership role diplomatically, more of a
leadership role in terms of enabling others militarily and with
intelligence and be in a more forward-leaning posture because
this threat is getting worse not better.
Chairman McCain. Secretary Vickers? And by the way, I read
a very excellent piece you wrote recently. I think it was in
Politico. I am not sure which one, but I thought it was very
thoughtful.
Mr. Vickers. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I do not believe we are winning or we are certainly not
winning fast enough. As Michele mentioned, this will be a long
struggle, but if you look at our fight with al-Qaeda, if you
look at it in terms of a campaign, we need a more rapid and
decisive campaign that will at least deny sanctuary, much as we
did with the Taliban in 2001. The war was not over, but it
certainly knocked them back on their heals, knocked al-Qaeda
back on its heals for some period of time. And that is what I
think we need to do to ISIL in the short run and then many,
many things to follow.
Chairman McCain. Commander Eggers?
Mr. Eggers. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I would only add that while I agree with you that the
situation is quite concerning not just because of the degree of
the threat but also because how complex the problem is, that
sometimes I am concerned that the debate becomes overly focused
on the one thing we do control, which is U.S. troops and,
quote, boots on the ground, which seems to me to somewhat
disrespect the essence of our previous discussion, which is
kind of thinking in broader and more diverse strategic terms.
And in this particular context, I think the debate needs to
consider not only the application of United States military
means, to include soldiers and troops on the ground, but as
well the broader political landscape both within Iraq, but as
well within Syria and within the region, and that too often
that gets lost in that debate and in that discussion.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. I thank you. I am sure you understand the
concern of the American people in light of the San Bernardino
attack and Paris and others. The opinion polls have lifted this
issue understandably to one of the highest priorities. And we
need to have a national conversation about it. I obviously have
my views and Senator Reed has his, which we are largely in
agreement, but more importantly, we have to, I think, develop a
strategy that is credible to the American people, and I do not
think that is the case today.
Jack?
Senator Reed. My only comment would be I think as the
commander pointed out, it has to be a multifaceted strategy
with political as well as military dimensions, information
warfare dimensions. And I think interestingly enough, I think
Secretary Vickers made a good point about we had not the last
15 set the conditions properly, and I think we have to go back
and look back and say what were we doing. In fact, in some
cases, we were victims of our success. The ability to take out
terrorists with drone strikes and Predators was very effective
short-run, but it created this dynamic in the world that many
people found a justification to focus their animosity against
us as a reaction. So I think, again, what we have to do--and
the chairman is right. We have to come up with a coherent,
multifaceted strategy, and I think we can agree upon it and
move forward.
Chairman McCain. I think Senator King wants to weigh in on
this.
Senator Reed. He has a quote from Mark Twain.
[Laughter.]
Senator King. No, I do not. Sorry about that.
Chairman McCain. Yes. The one about suppose you are a
Congressman, suppose you are an idiot, but then I repeat
myself?
[Laughter.]
Senator King. Do not get me started.
We are talking mostly about military strategy, and that is
absolutely appropriate because we are fighting a military
opposition. But we are also fighting an idea. And I think if
there is any gap in the--well, there are several gaps, but one
of the serious gaps is the clash of ideas gap. We wiped out
USIA [United States Information Agency] 15 years ago. It now
appears that was a mistake. For the country that invented
social media to be losing the battle of social media is
shocking to me, and I think that we need a much more strong and
vigorous ideas thrust ultimately because it is very difficult
to kill ideas and we are not going to do it with drones. We
have got to do it with information. And I think that has got to
be part of the strategy in connection with all the military
options, the air strikes, the troops, all of those things. But
I fear that that is one of the places. These people in
California were radicalized online, and I think that should be
a real serious warning to us that that is where this battle is
also taking place.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Also, by the way, a great Russian success
is their propaganda in eastern Europe as well.
Would any of the witnesses like to respond to those words
of wisdom by the Senator from Maine?
Ms. Flournoy. I do not have a ready Mark Twain quote, but I
do agree with the notion that this has to be a sustained
multidimensional effort. I think some of the areas where we are
lacking is in countering the narrative online. ISIS is posting
90,000 posts a day online, and one of the most effective things
I saw in counter was the tweeting of a remark that was made
after the stabbings in the UK metro, which was someone saying
to the attacker, you ain't a Muslim, bro. I mean, this behavior
of stabbing civilians in the London Tube is not representative
of the religion of all of Islam. And that got tweeted virally.
And that was probably one of the most effective counter-
narrative things that has happened recently.
But we do not have a sustained and systematic effort online
to counter ISIS presence and attempt at recruiting. But more
fundamentally I think what we really lack at the community
level, here, overseas, is community-level counter-
radicalization programs. And it cannot be something the U.S.
Government comes in and does. We can help facilitate, but
really funding, assisting, help enabling those community-level
engagement to try arrest radicalization inside communities
here, in Europe, elsewhere. That is a critical part of the
strategy that I think needs more attention as well.
Chairman McCain. Secretary Vickers, did you want to add
anything?
Mr. Vickers. No. I agree. You cannot win in the long run
without really countering and discrediting the idea. I would
add in the short run, one of the ways to discredit the idea is
to really set them back. I mean, part of their success right
now is they are perceived as having the success.
Chairman McCain. Absolutely. I think that is a very key
item here.
Mr. Vickers. And we saw that, for instance, with the
Taliban and al-Qaeda right after 9/11. You know, their stock
went way up after 9/11, and then 3 months later, when they were
kicked out, it was, you know, who are those bums for a while.
Now, it did not last. It does not win the long-term war, but it
does matter.
Chairman McCain. Commander Eggers, did you want to --
Mr. Eggers. I would just balance out the conversation by
offering the flip side of that idea, which is that one way to
destroy an organization's ideology is to dismantle the
organization, of course. But what we need to be careful about
is the unintended consequences of how we do that because in
this case that is precisely what could play into their
narrative, particularly with the introduction of U.S. or
Western ground forces and the escalation of that type of war
within their region. And I think that is the issue that really
comes into play where it gets very complex between the military
application of means and the ideological fight.
Chairman McCain. Well, we can continue this discussion, but
I think it is incredible to say if you accept the view that
some U.S. military presence is needed, which clearly events
indicate to me, which we have been talking about for a long
time, and predicting the events that have taken place, that
then you are conceding that ISIS can continue to succeed. There
is no strategy now. There is no strategy to take Raqqa, their
base, where they are, among other things, developing chemical
weapons. So this idea that somehow the United States of
America, by inserting some ground troops in order to succeed,
is going to be counterproductive--what is the option? That they
continue to succeed? Is it not to your satisfaction that we
cannot defeat ISIS without American involvement and simply not
from the air. Air power does not win.
So I respectfully disagree with this insane idea that
somehow if we intervened to stop people that have just
orchestrated an attack that killed people in San Bernardino,
that somehow it will be counterproductive. The worst
counterproductive thing would be to allow them to succeed.
But I look forward to continuing this discussion with you,
Commander, and I respect your view.
And I thank all of you for being here today, and we look
forward to continuing working with you on this restructuring,
which was the reason for this hearing to start with. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 10:59 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
[Questions for the record with answers supplied follow:]
Questions Submitted by Senator Kelly Ayotte
isis strategy
1. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Flournoy and Secretary Vickers, what
is lacking in the President's strategy against ISIS, and what should
the administration be doing that it is not?
Secretary Flournoy and Secretary Vickers did not respond in time
for printing.
nato force posture
2. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Flournoy and Secretary Vickers, the
National Defense Panel review of the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review
(QDR) concluded last year that Russia's aggression in Ukraine calls
into question the longstanding view that Europe is a `net producer' of
security. As a result, the panel concluded that ``NATO must bolster the
security of its own frontline states, especially in the Baltics and
across southern Europe but also in Poland, lest they be subject to
intimidation and subversion. America must lead the alliance in this
regard.'' This belief that we must bolster U.S. and NATO force posture
in Eastern Europe has been reiterated in a bipartisan manner by others
who have appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee this year,
including former Secretaries of State Dr. Brzezinski and Dr. Albright.
General Jones, Former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said earlier
this year that a failure to respond to Russia's aggression in Europe
appropriately could represent the ``beginning of the end of NATO.''
What is your assessment of the administration's action so far in
bolstering security in NATO's frontline states, and what more needs to
be done?
Secretary Flournoy and Secretary Vickers did not respond in time
for printing.
ukraine
3. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Flournoy, along with others, you
authored a report published this past February by the Atlantic Council,
Brookings, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs entitled
``Preserving Ukraine's Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression: What
the United States and NATO Must Do.'' The report said that the U.S.
should provide ``direct military assistance--in far larger amounts than
provided to date and including lethal defensive arms--so that Ukraine
is better able to defend itself.'' The report concluded, ``Only if the
Kremlin knows that the risks and costs of further military action are
high will it seek to fins an acceptable political solution. Russia's
actions in and against Ukraine pose the gravest threat to European
security in more than 30 years.'' Do you still believe that the United
States should provide lethal arms to Ukraine? Why?
Secretary Flournoy did not respond in time for printing.
4. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Flournoy, what specific capabilities
would you recommend the administration provide to Ukraine?
Secretary Flournoy did not respond in time for printing.
detention policy
5. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Vickers and Commander Eggers, the
spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, Colonel Steve Warren,
recently said that ``certainly it's our preference to capture in all
cases. It allow[s] us to collect intelligence.'' As of today, Ayman al
Zawahiri and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the heads of al-Qaeda and ISIS
respectively, have yet to be killed or captured. From an intelligence
perspective, would you rather kill or capture Zawahiri and Baghdadi?
Why?
Secretary Vickers and Commander Eggers did not respond in time for
printing.
6. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Vickers, would it take more than a few
weeks to gather all of the valuable intelligence that Zawahiri and
Baghdadi could provide?
Secretary Vickers did not respond in time for printing.
7. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Vickers, would there be value in
potentially returning months or years later to interrogate Zawahiri and
Baghdadi to confirm or clarify information gathered elsewhere?
Secretary Vickers did not respond in time for printing.
8. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Vickers, could intelligence from
Zawahiri and Baghdadi prevent future attacks and enable the United
States to go after al-Qaeda or ISIS more effectively?
Secretary Vickers did not respond in time for printing.
9. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Vickers, would it help or hurt our
intelligence collection efforts if, after a few weeks of questioning
Zawahiri or Baghdadi on a ship, we sent them to the Southern District
of New York and told them that they ``have the right to remain
silent''?
Secretary Vickers did not respond in time for printing.
10. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Vickers, if Zawahiri or Baghdadi were
captured tonight, where would we detain them for long-term law of war
detention and interrogation?
Secretary Vickers did not respond in time for printing.
11. Senator Ayotte. Secretary Vickers, on February 15, 2011, when
you came before this committee as the nominee to be Under Secretary of
Defense for Intelligence, I asked you about the administration's
detention policy. You responded that ``the administration is in the
final stages of revising its--or establishing its detention policy.''
Almost five years later, has the administration completed its detention
policy? If yes, what is it? If no, why not?
Secretary Vickers did not respond in time for printing.
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