Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

The 33rd IFPA-Fletcher Conference
on
National Security Strategy and Policy

October 16-17, 2002
The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Transcript Session 4: Transformation for a Changing World

Address by General John M. Keane, USA, Vice Chief of Staff, U.S. Army

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: We now turn to the Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General John Keane. General Keane became the 29th Vice Chief of Staff on June 22, 1999. His previous commands include the 18th Airborne Corps; the 101st Airborne Division, Air Assault; the Joint Readiness Center; the First Brigade, 10th Mountain Division; and Deputy Commander in Chief, United States Atlantic Command.

I might add before General Keane speaks that he will meet briefly with the press in the Horizon Room promptly after this session ends. So, Jack, please proceed.

General John M. Keane: I hope you don’t mind me coming up here. I went on a long run this morning, and one of my two bad knees is killing me. The month of October is usually a great month for me. I’m a New York City kid, and the New York Yankees are always doing something special this month. I am in absolute withdrawal. I don’t know what to do in the month of October. And these two teams out in California, I mean nobody cares. Nobody cares. And either you like the Yankees or you hate them, but people care, at least. So, we’ll get there.

I spent the weekend in Afghanistan to bring some balance to my life and get out of the doldrums that I felt. My third visit there and seeing our soldiers and also our airmen and sailors and marines who are over there. It’s just absolutely remarkable. I wish all of you could see them and see the dogged determination that they have to get this thing right for the American people.

You know, in my 36 years of wearing this uniform, this is the only time we have done anything directly for the American people. It’s always been for some other beleaguered nation where some thug has imposed their will on them. But all of our people get this. They really understand what this is about. It is all about the American people. And, as John mentioned, to see their courage and their determination, to give up everything that they care about in life, everything, for our people is just so inspirational. It brings you to tears being around them.

Bob, thanks for the introduction and Jim, thanks for the invite. Just delighted to be here and be on a panel with our distinguished colleagues. These are all teammates and we’ve been hanging out together for a number of years. We know one another and, most importantly, we trust one another, and that’s very special.

When General Shinseki and I took over our offices three years ago, we were faced with a national military strategy that did not meet the resources that we had and also a national military strategy that did not meet what we believed was the appropriate force design and capabilities of the United States Army. I’m not going to talk about the resource mismatch, but I am going to talk about what drove us to begin to change the United States Army.

We knew our enemies and our adversaries were certainly changing and evolving and that none of them really wanted to take on the United States military toe to toe, certainly, but they would exploit our vulnerabilities and advantage themselves in doing so. We knew as part of a joint force that we were moving away from a deconflicting of operations, as we fundamentally did in Desert Storm, to truly beginning to integrate our operations, and there was already some evidence of that in the ‘90s.

We knew that the integration of our joint forces is transforming from the integration at the strategic and operational level, which I think we’ve done to some degree, to an exciting possibility of integration at the tactical level. And by that I mean where you have – from an Army perspective – you have a battalion or brigade commander and, as we saw in Afghanistan, even a special operations sergeant having at his disposal all of the means the United States military can bring to bear in terms of joint fires and truly begin some genuine joint integration at the tactical level. And that is an exciting possibility.

We knew that technology would help us network our forces in a way that we would achieve unparalleled situational awareness and also the capacity to network our fires. And we knew that there would be a premium for rapidly deploying our forces so that we could have the capacity to fight our way into an adversary sovereign state, if necessary, if they were attempting to deny us that access.

So, we put all that together and knew that the Army had to change because it wasn’t possible for us to meet all of what we were talking about if we stayed in the current organization. We settled on the word transformation because we intended to change the doctrine of the Army, which defines how we fight. We intended to change our organization in support of that. We intended to change the material acquisition strategy that we had. We intended to change our leader-development program, and we also intended to change how we train. Put all that together, and it wasn’t a simple change, it was a profound one. And that’s when Rick settled on the word transformation; as Jim so appropriately pointed out.

And we’ve been here before, and we were comforted by the fact that we’ve been here before. When World War I broke out, we had-- Listen to this, we had 19 officers assigned at the Department of the Army Headquarters. What a staggering thought that is. How could they possibly have done it? I can’t have a meeting without 19 generals being present. But that’s the truth of it. We had 250-odd thousand soldiers in the United States Army when that war broke out. We were a frontier army. We did not have a construct called a division. One year and nine months later, we formed 62 divisions, organized and trained and equipped them, and deployed 43 of them to France. A remarkable transformation, in every sense of the word, of a frontier army to a modern force of the 20th century.

Much the same took place in World War II. Fortunately, many of our leaders, who were, at that time, not the household names that they became, reasoned there could be a challenge as they heard the drumbeats in Europe beating again. What happens if we don’t have a base from which to launch operations into Europe and we have to fight our way into the continent? How would we handle that? Well, those men took a foot infantry force, horse-drawn artillery force, and transformed it into a world class, combined arms mechanized force that had a capacity to conduct amphibious operations and participated in the largest amphibious operation that has ever taken place. One hundred eighty-six thousand people crossed those shores at Normandy – an enormously successful operation that was precarious, as we all know, in the conduct of it.

But it was truly transformation for our Army. And I think what we did in Vietnam was also transformation. We took a European-based Army focused on the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, intellectually imbedded in that, and transformed this Army into a force that was capable of conducting a successful counterinsurgency. And we did it literally on the run, retrained our officers, reorganized ourselves to do that.

And when we look back on those three events, they give us comfort because our predecessors have been there before and why can’t we be there. So, that moved us in the direction of making some fundamental change.

To help you understand what we’re doing, John is absolutely right, we completely agree with his premise that it must begin with an operational concept. And that’s intellectually how the Army looks at problems. We start with our doctrine first and then we organize ourselves in support of it, we equip ourselves in support of it, and then we train our leaders in support of it. That’s kind of the thought process that we go through. I’m going to draw this concept of how we used to fight throughout the 20th century on this little machine here. I have no mechanical skills, which you’re going to recognize immediately.

This is the way we fought throughout the 20th century. We’d build up our forces outside a country – the box represents a country. We would move into that country on axes of advance, like so. These lines here would represent our division formation. There are about four or five of them that we would assign to a corps commander. The purpose of those divisions is to seize terrain, overmatch adversary, and control population. We did it rather deliberately throughout the 20th century, and it was based on the principle of mass. The mass is those formations themselves and their connectivity with each other. Up here is a capital city. Eventually we would want to move to that capital city because that’s where most of the elements of national power are resident, and, obviously, we have to take those elements of national power away from an adversary leader. It took us weeks and months to build up outside this country with our formations, and then we prosecuted the war as I described.

For half of the 20th century, we could literally not see over the next hill, so we sent soldiers over the hill to go take a look and see what was there. Inherent in the formation that we had, inherent in the style of this formation, was the fact that we couldn’t see over the hill so we hedged against that uncertainty. In the latter half of the 20th century, with the development of satellite technology and the way we started to use rotary platforms and our aerial platforms, we obviously could see at greater depth. So, our formations became more fluid and we separated ourselves in distance and time a little bit more than what we had done in the earlier part of the 20th century. The manifestation of that was Desert Storm where we had absolutely the most perfect ground to fight our mechanized forces – open mobile terrain in the desert, we separated our formations considerably. But, basically, the way of war from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of it was as I just described it. We would move into that country and control terrain and dominate an adversary. That was the Army’s way of war throughout that century.

We felt that we could make a change because of the explosion of technology that’s taken place. We now have unparalleled situational awareness to understand what an enemy is doing. We have almost an unblinking eye over this enemy formation. And we can see and understand what an adversary is doing in unprecedented ways from the past. If you accept that premise, then you can begin to change these formations and how we would fight this Army of ours.

Here’s the same country again,. What we want to do is fight the enemy at a time and a place of our choosing. And for illustration purposes, I’m going to draw some circles around those things that we’re very interested in. For example, airfields, enemy formations, maybe a line of communication. In Afghanistan, there’s a Route 1 and a Route 4 that we were very interested in. Not so much that we intended to use it, but we didn’t want anybody else to use it. And the same thing here. To help this military implode on itself, we want to take away its capacity to take care of itself. So, we might want to seize and control a line of communication that is of strategic or operational value to us. And then we have the capital city itself.

What’s different about this model is that we want to go to these circles as I’ve described to you as near simultaneously as we can, with a premium on the vertical envelopment. What’s also fundamentally different about this is that we’re not as interested in all this terrain in between – which is hundreds and hundreds of square miles and maybe thousands of square miles. Why?

Because we can see what’s there. We understand what’s there, and we think we have enough time to react to whatever an adversary is doing who may be occupying some of that terrain and is going to react to what we’re doing. And we would do it completely in a joint context.

This is what the Army is attempting to do. I apologize for the simplicity of it, but I want you to understand the basic premise of this concept and how it is so dramatically different from what we have done throughout the 20th century. So, we intend to change how we fight.

The other thing we intend to do is change how we deploy this Army. We want to deploy it more rapidly than what we’ve done in the past. We know that time is a premium. We know that we want to deploy some of it by air. Most of it will still go by sea. We recognize that and we applaud the efforts that are being made in fast sealift. The reality is what we decided to do to change the culture of the Army so that we could deploy it more rapidly, either by air or by sea.

We’re going to deploy most everything by sea or strategic air, obviously in C-17s or C-5s as long as they’re around. We would then transport some of our equipment and battle formations in C-130s or C-17s once we get into the theater.

But we wanted to force everything through the crucible of a C-130. We said that if it doesn’t fit in a C-130, then we don’t want it. And that has profound implications to this Army, because we have a lot of things that are very large and very heavy and very cumbersome. So, that gave us great utility to use it as a crucible and force all of our branch components to change and make things fit in the C-130, knowing full well that we’d probably move most of it by ship anyway. But that would require less ships, the Army would be considerably more deployable, and, in our mind, we were going to reduce the footprint rather significantly.

We are attempting to reduce the logistical footprint of the Army by 50%. It is a stretch goal. We recognize that. But unless we get real tough with ourselves, we will not do that. There are some other profound things that we’re doing to help in that. General Shinseki, as you know, is an armor officer, and three years ago he went to the Armor Center at Fort Knox, Kentucky. This is where they have Patton this and Creighton Abrams that all over the place. He walked in there and said that we have built our last main battle tank. We are not going to build any more main battle tanks. And we’re dead serious about that. The 03 budget is the last budget that has a main battle tank in it. That’s it. The 03 budget.

We believe we can move away from the paradigm upon which the M1 tank is built. Which is, survive first-round hit and continue to overmatch an adversary. To, avoid being hit. That doesn’t mean that we would not protect the soldiers the way we protect them today, but we changed the paradigm. Because we’re going to fight at a time and place of our choosing, our situational awareness is going to be considerably better. And, with advanced stealth technology and increased lethality, we’re confident that we can change that paradigm and go to a vehicle that weighs considerably less. Increase the range, lethality of its munitions, go to smaller calibers but greater range in lethality. That’s all possible. We intend to go to a hybrid electric engine. We would like to move away from fossil fuel. Technology will not yet permit this, but with a hybrid electric engine, we can reduce our fuel consumption 40%. That is transformation in and of itself. If we did nothing else, that would change the logistical footprint of this Army considerably.
So, we’re excited about those prospects. We have to change our information management system in the United States Army so that we’re using web-based technology so we all see the same thing – from what the soldier needs in the foxhole to what’s available the system. We don’t have it yet, but we’re moving in that direction and we’re going to get there.

We’re also interested in personnel transformation. It’s not transformational to the United States Marine Corps and the Navy, but it is to the Army. Because we are looking very seriously at moving to a unit-manning system that will permit us to rotate our units in a way that we have not done in the past. And that’s very different for us, because we have been completely dependent on an individual replacement system. What we’re saying is that we would keep our people in our organizations together for considerably longer periods of time, then rotate them as a unit. Once they’re trained, they would be available to deploy wherever the needs of the nation are; to a Kosovo, a Bosnia, an Afghanistan, possibly even a Korea and possibly even a Germany. We’re looking at that very seriously. We’ve studied it before, and our personnel guys have always said no, no, no, it’s too hard. So, we told them don’t study it, look at the studies that have been done, bring us some options and some solutions. And I’m expecting something like that in about a month.

So, we’re pretty excited. The United States Army has to change, it is changing, and it does so in the complete context of being a part of a joint team. We have Stryker Brigades on the ground as we speak, and we intend to bring in our objective force – the beginnings of it – in 08. It’s ambitious, but if you don’t push the acquisition system around, as John and Jim so accurately pointed out, it’s not going to happen. If we said we wanted transformation beginning in FY12, we’d probably get it in 18. So, we have put a lot of pressure on that system to change. And we told them we want the beginning of it in 08, and we’re doing everything we possibly can to bring it in less than a decade, which would be a remarkable achievment.

We’re proud to be a part of this team, and we’re excited about what’s in front of us, in terms of Army transformation. Thank you.