This is a speech given by my old Regimental Commander from my days in 3rd
ACR to the Army War College in
Carslile Barracks, Pennsylvania. Currently, General Martin E Dempsey commands the Training and Doctrine Command (
TRADOC). I realize that this speech was given in association with slides (which I do not have) and is full of MILSPEAK, but if you wonder what issues keep the General in charge of training our Army awake at night, this is a great speech to peruse.
General Dempsey: Thank you very much. It's great to be here with
the Army War College. I couldn't get in. I was the Armor Branch Chief and
I got ranked into the National Defense University.I spend a lot of time traveling around to
pre-command courses.
Later this morning I'll be at the
JFLC Course. This is a time I think in
the history of our Army where we really need to enter into a
conversation about our profession, and that's the way I'd like to characterize
what we'll do here today. I'll spend a bit of time with my part of
the conversation telling you what I think is going on, where I think
we're headed, what I think is most important, how you can be part
of accomplishing that which our institution of the Army, but not just
the Army because of course we fit into a national defense strategy
that causes us to partner with our joint and international partners. But
the point is, you're in the War College at a great time. We've been at
war now for seven or eight years. We can certainly see that it will
be another seven or eight. We can also see that there's probably
something beyond that. We're not exactly sure what it is. So you're in the
right place at the right time, and you'll leave here and get the kind of
jobs that will cause you over time to be those responsible for following
us and figuring it out.I don't know that I came to exactly that realization at the War
College in 1996. Meaning I don't know that I really appreciated what I
was about to get into for the rest of my career, but here I am. I've
spent seven of the past eight years in the Central Command
AOR; about a year,almost, a little less, as an acting combatant commander; and
now Training and Doctrine Command. So I'll be happy to talk to you
about any or all of that because it all fits together somehow, or it should.By the way, that's the NCO of the Year at
TRADOC, Drill Sergeant of
the Year. It is the Year of the NCO, and every chance you get you ought
to thank them for what they do.We always say we're the Army we are because of our non-
commissioned officers, and we say it. We're not exactly sure what it means.
At least I've not been entirely sure. What I do know is when you get
into units and reset and in trained and ready that are short of
NCOs and
long on 10-level Soldiers, you can really see why the
NCOs are the
backbone of our Army.Okay, go ahead.That's my job. Literally there are three core competencies. We've
Got to provide the right Soldiers at the right time with the right
skills into the Army
ARFORGEN model to meet the demands of our customers,
the combatant commanders.How are we doing? We are meeting the demands of the
combatant commanders. Fundamentally, we're meeting those demands late
and extraordinarily inefficiently and we cannot continue to deliver
Soldiers after MRE or just before deployment, and we can't continue to spend
the kind of money we do with the thing called the TRAP process which
is Training Resource Arbitration Panel. I don't know who dreamed that up,but fundamentally it's when we miss the mark on what we need we react
in a fashion that gets us what we need but it's late and
it's extraordinarily expensive... probably about half a billion dollars
last year. It's kind of the Thelma and Louise model of personnel management.The thing's going off the cliff and at the last minute we toss them
in the back seat. So we've got to get a little better at that, or a
lot better.Now the Chief says to me and says to the other four-stars, you've got
to align the institution with
ARFORGEN. We all understand that. We
all understand, however, that that's going to be very difficult to do.
For example, here, to fully line up behind
ARFORGEN I might come to
General Williams and say we really need three War College starts a year.
We need three graduations a year to keep up with the demands of
ARFORGEN.And then the second order effects of that have to do with families
indwell time and all the things that you know are other factors in
your life.So what we're trying to do among the four-stars of the Army and
those that are helping us is align ourselves with
ARFORGEN, but maintain
that balance of mission and people. We can talk about that more if you like.The middle one is my most important job, bar none. We can get
the organizations wrong, we can get the equipment wrong, we can give you
bad guidance and we probably do from time to time, but if we've
got adaptive, creative thinking leaders, they'll figure it out. Do we
have any evidence of that? Absolutely.What we went to do in 2003 in Iraq is not what we were doing in 2004.Every division over there made significant adaptations to the
mission set in which they found themselves. We know how to adapt. The
question is, in developing our leaders today, how we create that as a
core competency throughout the course of a professional military education.And we are taking some risk in leader development, and here's why I
say that. Somebody said to me, you're in charge of leader development.What you really ought to do is hire somebody to do a study and
they'll come back and tell you what you really need to do. So before I
launched off on a $5 million study, I did a little personal reading and
I discovered there have been studies done throughout our history.Probably the best ones were done in the late '80s or so. There are
also recent books like a book called Outliers by a guy named
Malcolm Gladwell, that if you haven't read I encourage you to do so,
an entertaining look at leader development. He also wrote Blink and
also wrote Tipping Point. But they all say the same thing. The studies
and the books all say the same thing, that there are three pillars of
leader development -- training for skills, education for thinking,
and experience. And in fact of the three the one that actually
produces leaders is the experience factor, but you can't ignore the first two.So why do I say we're taking risk? Well, for example, battalion
and brigade command tours are beginning to creep on us. For good reason
if you're on the tactical side of it. Continuity matters if
you're deploying. So we have the average brigade command tour length
is creeping up toward 40 months. When Bob Williams and I went through
that phase of our career the average command tour was about 24 months.
Just the mathematics of it would suggest that we're giving about 35
percent of our officer corps fewer opportunities to experience that level.So where's the balance? I don't know yet, but we are taking risk.We're taking risk because we're not releasing our young men and
women into the professional military education pipeline. We're building
up huge bubbles at
ILE (Intermediate Leadership Education) or what you probably knew as
CGSC (Command and General Staff College). So we've got to figure out how to align with
ARFORGEN, deliver
leader development training and education differently -- I'm not sure what
that means yet. How much (class time) in the brick and mortar schoolhouse,how much in distance learning, how much by
MTT (Mobile Training Team)? And we've got do
so consciously including the experiential factor. How do we get
people experience in the joint community and the
interagency community,
in academia, so that we build these adaptive leaders for 2025.By the way, the battalion commanders of 2025 are probably entering
the ranks of our officer corps this summer, so that's what we've got
to watch. Again, because we are going to be at this pattern of
cyclic deployment, persistent conflict, for a while.My other world is future capabilities. The Chief does, part of
the responsibility for the future resides on the Army Staff, but that's
more requirements. Capabilities concepts and how those concepts
are expressed materially belong to me in an organization called
ARCIC at TRADOC. So that's the life of the
TRADOC Commander.I'll be happy to tell you about any one of those when we get to
the question and answer period, but I want to move on.Next slide.You probably have had this in spades, but I retain just so you see
how important this is, I retain the
proponency, if you will, for
definingthe operating environment at Training and Doctrine Command Headquarters.What does that mean? That means that I, through my G2 (Intelligence Section) and a variety
of organizations that work for me in
TRADOC, I define the threat
against which scenarios are driven at the training centers and in
the classrooms. This is what allows me to provide a consistent product,
if you will, coming out of the
TRADOC school system. And we've got
some work to do in this regard.You've seen all of the data that backs these things up, but I
would suggest to you that, well in fact, let's go to the next slide.I would suggest to you that that previous slide, the
operating environment, feeds this one and begins to cause us to question
our institutional aim point. And let me explain that.The Army, in my entire career, to include today, has had
an institutional aim point against which we optimized the
DOTLMPF domains. Doctrine, organizations, training, leadership, materiel, personnel
and facilities. We optimize against a single aim point which is oriented
on the major combat operations and the spectrum, and we do that
because that's the most dangerous scenario. We've always done that.If you look back in history, however, we tend to organize and
orient ourselves -- now I said we optimize against
MCO (Major Combat Operations, Like WWII), but we tend to
organize ourselves from time to time against other threats. And typically
we organize ourselves at the extremes. So
MCO for a period of time --let's go back to Vietnam. Irregular warfare. Following that it was
the Soviet threat, we're all the way over here on the
MCO side. We sort
of ignored the peace operations. We saw that as an aberration. We
didn't really change anything. We conducted missions in the Balkans but
didn't change anything. Now we're making incredible tactical adaptation to
the irregular warfare side of the threat. Big organizations are
comfortable at the extremes. Where we're trying to move as an Army is
somewhere between MCO and irregular.Now the Chief, I don't know if he's going to talk to you all.
He's going to be here for the
JFLC course. But he's got us trying
to understand where on that spectrum of conflict he should be organized.Should it be a single aim point, and again to optimize ourselves
such that we could gain a few, if you use a boxer's analogy. So if you're
a middleweight fighter you gain a few pounds then you can
fight heavyweight, or you lose a few and you can fight lightweight. Is
that the right answer for our institution? Or do we end up with two
aimpoints? One that is somewhere approaching
MCO and the other which
is clearly irregular?The answer to that question has profound implications because if you --We've also started down the path of answering the question by
our doctrine, which I hope, you're paying some attention to. Along
thebottom there you see offense, defense, and stability ops. That's out of FM 3-0. The companion piece, FM 7-0, talks about
DMETL and
CMETL. I
know you've probably had conversations about what does that mean.The real question that we're posing and asking ourselves is the
DMETL tasks are pretty clear to us. That's the mission in which we
currentlyfind ourselves engaged. But what is
CMETL? Today as we stand here
it's still oriented on the major combat operations side. Is that right?
So we're trying to get at that.The reason you see that, the Chief calls this the Tennessee Chart,
by the way, because of the shape of the thing I guess, but if you see therein the middle, what really perplexes us in general, me in particular,
is that the original Tennessee Chart, if you look in 3-0, it's Figure 2-2.The original Tennessee Chart has gaps there between major
combat operations, irregular warfare, peace and limited intervention. I
have of late begun to blur those because my personal experience and
yours too, I'm sure, in places like Iraq, is that any of these conflicts
tends to migrate into those various kinds of threats.So we go to Iraq looking for an
MCO environment, we find it, we
defeat it, it migrates into irregular warfare. There was a period of
time there in the '04, '05
pre-Samara Mosque bombing where we really
thought we had it almost to the point where we were ready to transition, if
you recall, then it migrated back into irregular warfare. If you were
the battalion commander sent down to
Karbala or
Najaf, the
distinction between irregular and regular was probably lost on you.So the point is that the threat doesn't stay in one place if you're in
a protracted conflict. And therefore, what really matters is how
you identify those transition points. Do you anticipate them? Do you
even recognize them?I can tell you Bob Williams and I struggled with that in '03, '04
in Iraq, and you recall there were people in government that said
thou shalt not use the word counterinsurgency. Seriously. You probably
have heard that they said don't use it. We're here to confirm for you
that they said don't use it.So the question was, did we even acknowledge the transition in which
we found ourselves? And if you buy that, then you probably need to buy
the argument that -- back to my senior leader hat -- what a senior
leader probably brings to the fight as his or her most important competency
is anticipating, recognizing and adapting to transitions. And how do
you introduce that into a leader development program? Where do
you introduce it? At what level?So that's why I use this chart in my discussions about
leader development. What are the competencies? Where do we deliver it?
And what's the impact on the way we fight? But this discussion about
aimpoints is one that will go on here for the next few months as we run
upto the
QDR.I've got two slides that talk about my reflections of being at
the operational level. You're going to leave here and many, probably a
few of you are going to go back to the tactical level; many of you will
go to the strategic level. You'll get sucked into that five-
sided building (The Pentagon), I suspect. And then a handful of you will go into
the operational level, either in this country or somewhere downrange. So
I think it's probably worth going through a couple of these things
in detail and then I'll open it up for questions.The first one is fairly obvious. But again, we're in a
QDR year and
in QDR years these kinds of discussions begin to have greater
importance and resonate through the ranks. I don't know whether you've
been introduced, for example, to the capstone concept for joint operations.I'm going to talk about that when I go down the street and talk to
the JFLC course. But sometimes we listen, but we don't hear what our
senior leaders are saying to us. So the capstone concept talks about
the requirement for a balanced force. The Secretary of Defense says
he wants us to be a balanced force. The Under Secretary of Defense
for Policy, Michelle
Flournoy, comes to visit us at
TRADOC and says
we're really looking for you to be a balanced force. And by the way,
you can't any longer optimize yourself against "the
MCOs of the past."
So we are being troop led into determining how we will fight and
organize ourselves against something other than
MCO.And that gets at that first bullet. We have always said that
we're interoperable and we've always aspired to be interdependent. I
believe this next
QDR will actually force us in a direction to have to live
up to that phrase interdependency. You'll be in the right place to
watch that occur, but it will fundamentally, I think, change the way that
we organize ourselves.The second bullet. One could take a look at how Iraq is today
and determine that in February of '07 decisions were made that turned
that conflict around and that nothing before that mattered. If you read
the books, you'll see that there's this tendency to believe that
everything that happened before February of '07 didn't make much difference.
But let me tell you what really happened before February of '07, from
about May of '03 and on.That second bullet was the biggest problem we had. I say that
because your Commandant and I live the experience of watching an Army
General and a US envoy try, unsuccessfully in my view, to come together with
a common campaign plan. There was painfully little negotiation
between the tactical/operational commander,
CJTF7 and his political partner Mr.
Bremer. It just didn't happen.As a result of that we had essentially three or four different
division commanders making, we think, I was one of them, making what we
thought were very good and very effective campaigns for our own piece of
the battlespace but nothing to knit them together. We did that for about
a year.What happened after that was then came George Casey and
Ambassador Khalilzad. Better relationship, to be sure. Much better relationship.But still there was this feeling among us senior leaders -- by that
time I was back as the
MNSTC-I (Multi-National Security and Transition Command-Iraq) commander now. There was a feeling that
there were two campaigns. Try as they might to merge them. And frankly,
we fought off the notion; we continued to criticize each other for
one thing or another. The civilian side would criticize the military
for failing to provide adequate security so that the government and
economic workers could get out and about; and we criticized them for not
sending enough people. You probably lived it, you've heard it.
But fundamentally we had two campaign plans that just never merged.Then came along Ryan
Crocker and Dave
Petraeus, and if there's a
single thing that made the biggest difference -- forget being out with
the population. We were with the population in '03. Forget about
the surge. That was going to happen anyway, by the way. There was always
a plan on the books for 2+1+1+1. The question was how fast do you
pull them over there. What really changed was the relationship between
the MNFI (Multi-National Forces Iraq) Commander and the Ambassador which caused the synergy that we
just hadn't had before. This is my view. Unwritten, probably likely
to remain that way. But nevertheless important to remember, because
that second bullet is one that I think we should take away as one of
the enduring lessons of this or any conflict. That negotiation between
the military commander and his political partner must occur and they
must find a way to harmonize their activities or the mission will not succeed-- no matter how many resources you throw at it.The third one there, defining the problem. How many of you have
heard of this design construct called systemic operational design?
That's probably okay, because you'll see where I'm heading with this.When we got to Baghdad -- let me back up. Military leaders, given
a well defined problem, take that hill, and understanding the mission,
the enemy, the terrain, the troops available and the time available -
METT-T, can go straight to the military decision making process and
find a solution. That's obvious.The question we confronted in Baghdad, for example, in 2003 was
it didn't lend itself to an
MDMP (Military Decision Making Process) process because we really didn't know
what the problem was. Now we kind of got there. We got there through trialand error, frankly, watching brigade commanders adapt theirorganizations and start to perform lines of operation in governance andeconomics and all of that. But we didn't have at the front end acampaign based on the design of the problem. In other words, we didn't first understand the problem. What we're trying to do now inside of TRADOC is provide an instrument through which a leader can confront an ill structured problem in a structured way to essentially feed into the MDMP problem. Simply stated, understand the problem first before you start trying to figure out how to solve it. The reason I mention it in this context is you're going to go back outinto an Army that is struggling with that issue of design. Because design precedes MDMP. And there's, like we always find, there are schools and advocates that are coming up out of the ground to advocate one position or another. The one called systemic operational design really comes out of an Israeli construct and is very complex. It's no kidding based on post modern French philosophy and the art of thinking,and I frankly find it extraordinarily rich for what we're trying to do. But there's a real camp out there advocating. I'm blogging, if you can believe this, a 56 year-old Irishman from Bayonne, New Jersey, bloggingto try to convince people we don't need to go that route. And so far, so good. By the time you get out there we will have something that precedes MDMP and you ought to pay attention to it. The problems we confront in thefuture are not going to lend themselves to us launching straight into MDMP. We've got to have some way of defining the problem. The third one there, I say designate the main effort and then actually resource it. That's a tactical principal. You go to the NTC or the JRTCor any of the combat training centers, and the first thing they'll do toyou during the AR is they'll say what your main effort was? How did youweight it? Did you give it extra resources? Did you give it less terrain? How did you in some way make sure that you were going to succeed in your main effort? We didn't do that in Iraq in the early days? I'm not even sure, frankly, having been the acting combatant commander, that we were doing it in 2008 at the CENTCOM level. It is an issue of moral courage. Somebody's got to vote and say this ismore important than that. And when you do, once you do that, and by theway you'll do it with great resistance on the part of the person you'redesignated as the supporting effort, but it allows you then to weight the main effort. So for example in Iraq, 2003, we had all four divisions -- north, Baghdad -- Actually way north, Diyala Province, Baghdad and west, all of which had about the same resources. Any time resources were called intoquestion it was fundamentally a distribution based on fair share. We didn't weight the main effort. Now I was probably the biggest nuisance about that because I figured Baghdad ought to be the main effort, but I would have been okay ifsomebody just voted. But we didn't do it. CENTCOM, 2008. We can see Afghanistan beginning to falter and we can see Iraq beginning to succeed, but we wouldn't bring ourselves to use the phrase main effort, supporting effort, shift resources. Would not do it. We're beginning to do it now, but I think we're a little late to need and we're going to pay the price this summer if I had to predict,because we're not going to get it there quick enough.It's an issue of moral courage, in my view. Distinguishing between measures of performance and measures of effectiveness, and I say there a source of interagency friction. How many of you have served in Afghanistan? All right. You probably know that when we report levels of violence or incidents, particularly in Afghanistan, we get a dog's breakfast of answers. The reason it's so hard to figure out what is really going on in Afghanistan is we have about three different reporting metrics. We have NATO which has its own reporting criteria and its own reporting processes. We have US Army Afghanistan, and then we have the intelligence agencies. Now you would think that as the CENTCOM Commander I could have successfully found a single standard, a single definition to establish a single standard, and then to find a way with knowledge management to have the databases feed each other so that I could tell the Secretary of Defense and the President, this is really what's going on in Afghanistan. However, if you believe that you're wrong. We never got to it. And we're not there today. So it is vitally important to pick measures of performance and measures of effectiveness that really matter, and then drive them to conclusion and then actually let them inform your planning process. We're not there in Afghanistan today, believe it or not. Set the theater. The Chief says to me, okay General, what is it that you're worried about in terms of rekindling or restoring lost competencies? And if you go out into the field, I'm talking about the Army now, but I suspect it would be applicable for other services, the artilleryman will tell you we're not massing fires. The armor officer will tell you we're not conducting mounted mass maneuver. The communications community will tell you we're not echeloning command and control on the move. You'll get answer after answer after answer. The one that worries me the most, frankly, is the lost art of the RSOI (Reception, Staging, Onward movement and Integration of forces). We have really lost some skills in how to set a theater. Right now, in fact since about 2004, there is no real RSOI for the Army.Those conditions are set in Kuwait and are down to a drill. It's a battle drill. But when we -- when, not if -- we're faced with some other access issue, I think we're going to have a real challenge unless we rekindle those skills. The other thing you need to know is that the Theater Army Command, that's the Army sub-component command, ARCENT for CENTCOM. The role of the AFCC is evolving. One of the other lessons of this conflict that the Chief has taken to heart in particular, is we rarely go to war with the organization we have. We build these organizations, and then as soon as you say you're going to war with it, here comes the JMD, or here comes the RFF, and it doubles in size almost overnight. So what the Chief said to me was look, I can't afford to have an AFCC, ARCENT happens to be the one I'm most familiar with, with capabilities sitting there that are not being used elsewhere. And what got him onto this was when we started looking in Afghanistan to how we would provide extra support to General McKiernan. We tried to use the OCP, the Operational Command Post for ARCENT, but we couldn't unplug it. We couldn't unplug it because it had started doing other things, plus we hadn't resourced it. It was resourced at about 65 percent. So the Chief said to me, look, if we're not going to use the damn thing, redesign it. So we have redesigned it. The new design for the TheaterArmy Command will have a main command post capable of Title 10 and a contingency command post capable of literally contingency operations --NEOs, humanitarian, disaster relief, small intervention, one or two BCTs-- but will not have the capability to be a JTF. That's a big moment. What that says is we're balancing ourselves. Again. The threat or thepotential to need a JTF for an MCO scenario is diminished and thereforewe're taking those resources and rebalancing them elsewhere. This isthe kind of thing that's coming to us at every echelon and eventually will migrate into a relook of the BCT structure as well. Next slide. This is the last of the slides. Lead up and laterally. I say there it comes down to relationships. Policy and guidance always come late. Always. It's just the nature of the beast. So there are some examples I could use in CENTCOM but they'd still remain compartmented. But if I thought that we might face something, some violation of Iraqi airspace, for example, and I asked for guidance about what to do in the event that would occur, the answer back would almost always be who, that's a tough one, what do you think we should do. But that's okay, actually. I just came to the realization late. So what I got in the habit of doing as I matured as the Acting Combatant Commander is I would introduce, first of all you build relationships. That's what the combatant commander does. Relationships with the interagency, in particular with the CIA given the current fight, FBI so you can share their authorities and complement them with yours. We have Title 10, they have Title 50. FBI's got whatever it is, 32, I forget. But whatever it is, they've got authorities that you need as the combatant commander and the ability to have them give you access to their authorities and them gain access to yours is by the relationship. So I spent an enormous amount of time building those relationships. The same thing with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman. You have to have a relationship with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman in order to help them understand -- they will always appreciate your advice. Seriously. I came to that recognition a little late. If I had it to do over I think I'd probably be more effective. The issue with the Secretary of Defense is he's got the world. You've got a combatant command's AOR and there's only a handful of things in that AOR that really could go badly, and if you can focus on them and provide him your best advice, I have to say that I've never seen, especially this Secretary of Defense, he'll question it, he's a very good listener, he asks extraordinarily good questions, but he takes the advice of his military leaders. But what comes first is the relationship. That's true -- I already mentioned to you about the relationship with Ryan Crocker and Dave Petraeus which was fundamentally the biggest change that I saw in my three years in and out of Iraq. Balancing effectiveness and efficiency. This is going to surprise the hell out of you. The components compete for resources.Let's use ISR as an example. Why don't we? That's coming up in the QDR (Quadrennial Defense Review) too. So there's a finite amount of ISR. My Air Force component commander, Gary North, comes to me and says if you give it all to me I can make sure it's being used efficiently and we can lift and shift. We'll still base it on the ground commander's desires. How many of you have been in the CAOC (Combined Air Operations Center)? Make sure you all get there someday. It's really a remarkable place. In any case, the ground commander says we can't do that. I can't have the unpredictability that comes with not owning it. A parochial answer? Absolutely. Absolutely parochial, but one you can understand if you're on the other end of it. So fundamentally, this is where I go back to the point about weighting the main effort. The combatant commander then takes, and by the way,the naval component commander who was always getting almost no ISR support, who at the same time in CENTCOM was tasked with tracking Iranian activity in the Straits of Hormuz, so he was banging on my door as well. So that's the job of the combatant commander, to make adetermination of where the greatest need is, weight the main effort and then give it out. Along comes the MQ9 (Unmanned Aircraft). By the way, the way ISR is managed is in a system called PRISM. Does anybody know what PRISM is? It doesn't matter thatyou know it, it's just that PRISM is where ISR is managed; JTARS iswhere the air tasking order comes out, my blue brethren here will confirm, which is close air support, fundamentally. They're on separate databases. Here comes MQ9. MQ9 is the Reaper; MQ9 is armed ISR. It's an ISR platform. Full motion video is what everybody wants in the G Box to do signals intelligence. But the point is, MQ9 comes along and it's also got ordnance. Where does it go? Air Force puts it into the JTARS, the ground commander wants it in PRISM, the combatant commander comes inand finds an artful solution to all that. But the point is, you do have to -- that's just internal to my components.Then you've got, MNFI has never given up, I think until about three months ago, we were never able to shift an ISR platform from MNFI to Afghanistan. The commanders develop a sense of ownership about it. That doesn't mean they're bad people. In fact the reason I'm telling you about this is that when you work in staffs for them and for the next commander up, you have to understand what each other are doing. The ground commander is always going to ask for whatever he thinks he needs. The tactical commander. The combatant commander has the responsibilityfor organizing the theater, the AOR. Then of course the Chiefs through the Chairman, have the responsibility for managing global risk. I talked a little bit about managing transitions. I had no idea how hard that would be. When I became a general officer, General Shinseki, I raised my hand in the general officer charm school and said what the most important job is for a general officer? I thought he was going to say something about leader development, which is a passion of mine, and it is. But he said managing transitions. I didn't really understand what he meant then, to tell you the truth, but I understand it in spades now. Look at the tactical transitions that occur in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's always somebody on the move there. Changing battlespace. Then if you think about the transition we've been trying to manage withthe host nation called Iraq, and some day Afghanistan, how do you transition responsibility for their own security to them? And by theway, we've been at fits and starts. You would think that transition in Iraq would sort of, in terms of assessing the Iraqi security forces; you'd expect that it would be kind of on a gentle incline, but it's not. When you look at the way we've measured success, it goes up and then it goes straight down, then it goes up and it goes straight down, it's likea saw tooth. Why is that? Because the brigade commander who's partnered with the 5th Iraqi Army Division in Diyala Province, when he takes the unit as part of his partnership responsibility, he assesses that it's not good, or less good than he wants it to be. When he leaves, what do you suspect he will declare? They're a lot better now. The new guy comes in, I don't know what that guy was looking at, but they're not s good. By the time he leaves they're good again. Am I making that up? So as the MNSTCI Commander it occurred to me that we'd be there a longt ime if we kept on that path. I've actually come to the idea, by the way, and have introduced it to the Chief, as we try to put into doctrine this thing called Foreign Security Assistance, that we need an external assessment tool, external assessment organization, to actually look atthe host nation units. When you own it, you can't be objective about it. Whether we should be or not, we can't. Anyway, that's another transition. And by the way, the enemy has a vote and he'll transition on you too. That's back to the other slide, the Tennessee Chart. We have to managethe transitions the enemy makes. Even today, small example, the RKG hand grenade, you know the hand grenade that actually has the ability to penetrate armor, the TTP for the last six months has been to attack the last vehicle in a convoy. We came onto that, we've adapted our TTP. They're no longer attacking the trail vehicle, now they're attacking the next to the last vehicle. Now that's a small tactical example of an enemy making a transition. Or how they hang their EFP arrays. But those are small tactical examples.In the aggregate, though, the enemy in both Iraq and Afghanistan today,while we're sitting here, are adapting their plans based on the waywe're flowing forces. And it's almost as though sometimes we areoblivious to the fact that the enemy gets a vote. Okay, communications. I recall as the 1st Armored Division Commander publishing what I thought was my ultimate campaign plan for Baghdad, and I think it was probably by that time August of '03. And then believing that that would take me through my tour, which I thought at the time was going to end in April. It didn't end until July. But the point is, I thought I pretty much had locked in my campaign plan and I quickly came to the realization that in that environment at that time we needed to review, revise, and in particular I needed to republish my commander's intent about every 90 days. I don't know what it is today. My suspicion is it might not be every 90 days today because there is, in Iraq anyway. But my point in all this is, you absolutely have to understand what your commander's intent is telling your subordinates to do. And in this kind of warfare in particular, you're empowering and you're resourcing, and that fight is being fought at the lowest levels. So your commander's intent becomes far more important than it is in the central corridor of the NTC (National Training Center, Fort Irwin, CA) and youhave to revise it and refresh it frequently. Information is a weapon. I got to go to one DSLC as the acting commander. They were actually good to me. I was the three-star who could be the pain in the ass at the table, but the group -- the Secretary, the Chiefs, the other combatant commanders -- they were really very good to allow me equal voice as an acting commander. One of the things I introduced at the only DSLC I went to was my belief that information is a weapon. If you look at our doctrine, we say there are six war fighting functions and two enabling functions. One enabling function is leadership and one enabling function is information. I think that grossly understates the importance. I think information is a war fighting function. I could give you countless examples of my personal experience both in Iraq and Afghanistan and why I firmly believe that. We can do it in question and answer if you like. But I'll give you one example of, and when I say weapon, I mean it does have elements of you wield it or you defend against it. I would like to see us adopt it as a war fighting function as a nation, or as a military, because it will cause us to resource it and to clarify its use in a way that we're still blurring, we're setting up firewalls, and we're just not as agile as we need to be. And generally those that use it well are probably violating some particular form of policy. So we've got to get after that. Health of the force, not just a service problem. Remember I said earlier that a combatant commander, a tactical commander should, and will you can count on it, ask for whatever they think they need. In fact like the old supply sergeant, if they think they need three they're going to ask you for five. What it does, though, is it puts an enormous-- Up until now the Army is not a supply based Army, we're a demand based Army. If the demand is out there, we work to meet it. I don't know whether we can continue to be a demand based Army. One of the things we're talking about when we look at our aim point and we look at the force mix and the available pool is are we, should we, can we be more like the model that the Navy operates on or the Marines, where for example it's always absolutely predictable how many carrier battle groups are in the available pool and how many are in the, they don't call them the same things we call them, but how many are resetting, how many are training to deploy, and how many are indeployment. I don't know. But what I do know is that as long as we remain a demand based Army the operating side of the force still has to have an appreciation for what the conflict is doing to the health of theforce. That's not whining because I'm on the TRADOC side now, the generating force. But I've been stunned, actually, to go to pre-command courses and tell them about what the Army is doing; drill sergeants are kind of my touchstone for what I mean by this. We take a kid that just came back from the fight, and in his dwell time we make him a drill --and by the way, drill sergeants, it's a two year tour. They work seven days a week, 18 hours a day. That's a fact. That's their dwell time. And by the way, they don't complain about it. Sometimes their wives do,f rankly, if you have a town hall meeting with the families, and rightly so. It's not uncommon to hear a wife say why don't you just deploy him? At least he'll be getting combat pay and I won't expect him to come home. But there's a lot of pressure on both sides of the Army. I've had an ongoing conversation with the deployed four stars is, I got it. We'll meet your needs. But you've got to understand that we've been at this for seven years, we're going to probably be at it for seven more, and we better figure out what that means to the health of the force. I think we're going to be okay. But as you leave here and you get out there and you're now in the J5 shop of a combatant command or you're down range in a C5 shop, I'm just suggesting to you that when you look at that RFF (Request For Forces) you're preparing to drop on me just understand whatwe're doing to the force over time. And if you need it we'll get it, but don't do the supply sergeant thing to me. If you need three, tell me you need three. I'd actually rather if you only told me you need two because we're really stretched. The next to last bullet is just some personal advice to you. In March of '04 we were halfway redeployed out of Iraq. The 1st Cav Division had literally taken over responsibility for Baghdad. I had half of the unit back to Germany. I also had the 2nd Cav with me and about half of them were back in Fort Polk, Louisiana. And the first Sadr uprising occurred. I walked out of my TOC and I could see plumes of oil fires where I knew Route Tampa was. And they had dropped many of the bridges south of Baghdad on Route Tampa. So I walked back into the TOC and I said Houston, we've got a problem. I don't think we're going home. I didn't say it to the entire TOC or they would have scampered out on me, I'm afraid, but I did say it to the key leaders. I said we've got a problem. What I mean by we've got a problem, we, MNFI or CJTF7's got a problem, and I don't know of any other uncommitted force so I think we better do some parallel planning here. Within hours General Abizaid came and said I don't think we can let you go home. I said yes, sir, I had a feeling that was coming. But I said can you give me a little clarity on -- Remember I told you about leading up? Here it is. He said, I don't know. What do you think? I said, well sir, it depends on what the mission is. If you need me to reopen Route Tampa, that's one thing. If you need me to reopen Tampa and regain control of Karbala, Najaf, Diwaniya and Al Kut, that's a different mission set. He said, can you do both? I said yeah, I think so; if I can get the unit pulled back together I think we can. He said, how long would it take you? I said, I think about four months. By the way, I had no frigging idea what I was talking about. Seriously. But I knew, honestly I didn't. But I knew that if I missed this opportunity to shape the discussion, I knew he was flying right back to talk to Secretary Rumsfeld and that there would be some deliberation about an extension and there would be some deliberation about how longthe extension would be. And I knew if I missed that opportunity, I missed it. About 30 minutes after he left, in came General Sanchez. He said, I think you've got to stay. I said yeah, I had a feeling that was going to happen. I didn't want to let him know that his boss had already let me know. I said, when can I tell my families? No, I said two things. I said, can I stop my convoy movements and my air movement out of Balad? He said no, you can't do that. I said why, sir? He said, because thatwill be a trigger, everybody will know you're staying. Sir, look outthe door. I can't move the convoys. They cut the frigging locks (Logistic Corridors)anyway. So all I'm telling you is I'm going to have to stop. He said you can't tell anybody to stop. I said, can I bring some people back from Germany? No. Not yet. Wait until it's announced. So we all had seen what happened when uncertainty had hit the 3rd ID in the early days. They had been told several things along the way and we saw what happened. So I'm not advocating selective disobedience here, but what I am advocating is that you lead up and laterally. So Pete Chiarelli and I started to parallel plan about equipment. I did in fact schedule a VTC with my senior leaders in Germany. I did send Mark Hertling, my ADC, back to Germany and that's where the families come in and I'll tell you about that in a second. And I did stop all movement. And I did so though, under the rubric, if you will that they couldn't go any place anyway because the locks were cut. Then I sent Mark Hertling back to engage the families. I told him, I said go ahead and tell them. Even if the CNN announcement isn't made yet, go ahead and tell them. Keep the media out of the town hall meetings; we had nine separate casernes (facilites) in Germany. I said keep the media out, but empower them. Empower them to be part of this. So Mark Hertling, who by the way some of you know him, is just a terrific guy but is a very emotional leader. We used to kid him that he would cry at an opening of a WalMart. You know what I'm saying? So he went back to these town hall meetings with my wife, the rear detachment commander, and to his enormous credit, General B.B. Bell, the USAREURCommander, who by the way threw the entire weight of United States Army Europe behind this thing, and they went to nine separate town hallmeetings. They let the people kind of express their frustration, they told them what was going on, and told them they would solve whatever personal problems that would accrue because of this, and we told them this was a four month mission. Took some risk, empowered the families. And what happened was, seriously, not a single news article or media engagement on the extension of 1st Armored Division. And it was so powerful that some of the NCOs told me later they -- and by the way, theother reason you always have your families with you, is they're connected all the time. So they're emailing each other back and forth.And one staff sergeant said to me, just so you know, sir, I was emailing my wife and I was sort of bitching about the fact that we had to stay,and she told me to suck it up because --. Really. She told him, I gotit, I'll take care of the soccer games, and you stay safe, complete the mission and get home. So it is a different kind of environment for you and your families and especially your Soldiers and their families, and just don't ever forget that. The last thing, and it's not last because it's not important, it's last because as I was flying here making notes it occurred to me that I am going to have a chance to say how much we appreciate our coalition partners. And I'm an internationalist by nature. I've spent 12 years in Germany over the years, and seven years in CENTCOM AOR too, in Saudi Arabia, 3 in Iraq, and then as CENTCOM Commander all over the rest of it. So I get it. The issues that confront us are not issues that we will solve alone. I value our partnership deeply. And the comment there, by the way, is we tend to focus on what the allies say they can't do. Now our military partners are not doing things like that because they don't want to do them. They have some pretty stringent political advice that comes to them. What I found in CENTCOM was it was always better to focus on what they could bring to the fight, what they were able to do, and let somebody else -- whether it's SACEUR or the Chairman or for that matter somebody out of the State Department -- to negotiate away the caveats. But you as a combatant commander with your military partners just have to remain focused andfixed on the opportunities that a coalition brings. And shame on us if we can't find coalitions to help us with the challenges that we face in common in this world. So I just want to tell you how much I appreciateyour partnership. I'm glad you're all here working side by side with this class. Thanks very much. Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: NONE
