The particular concepts themselves don’t matter as much as the process. This process was so important to me that I extended it from war fighting to other areas — leadership, life, other people, team building. I kept asking myself: “What makes people tick? What do they want in life? What makes teams tick? How can I bring them together more strongly and effectively?”
I’d write down my thoughts on these things, but they were always open to challenge and to change. I wanted always to be able to keep examining my core. I learned long ago that when you stop examining your core, you can really be shaken when you take a hard hit.
AMERICA AND THE WORLD
Our country is great. It has become great because it strives to be good. That is, our country is values based… values we hold dear in good times and bad. Our country is admired, respected, envied, and hated for its greatness. To some it is the beacon that Jefferson said we should strive to be. It offers hope and promise. As a first-generation American, I know what that means. Everything is possible here.
We have to stay with all that. We might not always succeed, but we must always try. It’s important
We are now an empire. Not an empire of conquest in the traditional sense. We are an empire of influence. Our power, our values, our promise affect the world. We are more than Jefferson’s beacon. We are an expectation of better things. The world demands of us the delivery of the promise we project. We are seen to have an obligation to share our light. Other peoples want help, leadership, and guidance in getting to where we are. They want our help in reaching their potential. But they don’t want or expect us to put them on the dole. Go back to what I said about teaching. They want us to show them how to move up to what we are. They don’t want handouts.
We are, however, reluctant to deliver. We have never comfortably settled on our role in the world or on our obligations to the other citizens of this planet. The Wilsonian dream of using our blessings to better the world has always clashed with the opposing isolationist heritage to “avoid foreign entanglements.” In my view, this will be the true issue with which we will have to come to grips in this century. The world at our gates demands it of us.
And it’s not a clean, well-ordered world. It’s messy. A lot of folks don’t like us. Or they envy us. Or they don’t like the way we throw our weight around.
In a sense, it’s going to be back to the future: Today’s international landscape has strong similarities to the Caribbean region of the 1920s and ’30s — unstable countries being driven by uncaring dictators to the point of collapse and total failure. We are going to see more crippled states and failed states that look like Somalia and Afghanistan — and are just as dangerous. And more and more U.S. military men and women are going to be involved in vague, confusing military actions — heavily overlaid with political, humanitarian, and economic considerations. And those representing the United States — the Big Guy with the most formidable presence — will have to deal with each messy situation and pull everything together. We’re going to see more and more of that.
Certain of these collapsed states will continue to provide sanctuary to extremist groups who will continue to use these bases to plan, train, and organize for strikes against U.S. forces and other targets. Natural and man-made humanitarian catastrophes will continue to be on the rise; along with civil strife that seems out of control in many parts of the world. Regional hegemons and rogue states will learn the lessons of our wars with Iraq and develop what we call “asymmetric” capabilities — threats designed to exploit our evident military vulnerabilities and gaps. These threats range the spectrum from weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles to low-tech sea mines and terrorist tactics. All are designed to challenge a perceived weakness in our military, political, or psychological ability to use force.
Victory no longer happens when you capture the enemy capital. And we can’t just declare victory in a photo op on an aircraft carrier. These events signal that the home team is ahead in the third inning. The game goes nine innings — or longer if necessary; and victory happens when you put in place a lasting, stable environment.
Globalization and the explosion of information technology have meanwhile made the world ever more interdependent and interconnected. Geographic obstacles such as oceans and mountain ranges no longer provide impenetrable boundaries. Economic, political, or social-related instability in remote parts of the world will likewise continue to affect our security interests and well-being on our ever-shrinking planet. Added to that will be the continued rise of non-state entities, such as nongovernmental organizations, transnational criminal groups, extremist organizations, global corporations, and warlord groups, all bringing a confusing new dimension to a world previously dominated by the interactions of nation-states.
In recent years, an arc covering a large part of the earth’s surface — from North Africa to the Philippines, and from Central Asia to Central Africa — is chaotic and in turmoil. We are going to be dealing with this turmoil for decades. Remote places such as Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Rwanda, East Timor, Aceh, Colombia, and others have become flash points that required our intervention at some level. At the same time, the need to contain regional threats such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea still remained a major military requirement. These became more threatening as they developed greater military capabilities aimed at denying us access to their regions and to our allies within those regions. More and more, our security interests have drawn us into remote, unstable parts of the world.
As a result of these commitments, our shrinking and adjusting armed forces were hit by an onslaught of strange, nontraditional missions that pressured their dwindling ranks and resources with an operational and personnel tempo that was not sustainable. With some exceptions, the U.S. military resisted these missions and the adjustments it should have made in doctrine, organization, training, and equipment needed to meet this growing new mix of commitments. Traditionalists in the military leadership insisted on holding the line; they wanted to fight only our nation’s wars, and hoped to go back to “real soldiering” as they were mending a transitioning force suffering from all the pressures on it. One of our most senior military leaders was quoted as saying, “Real men don’t do OOTW”—a term that became the title for all of those messy little low-end commitments (we now call these missions “Stability Operations”).
THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MILITARY
Several serious questions and challenges face our military. The first has to do with the growing number of these nontraditional threats. Will these continue to increase, with new types added to the confusing mix, and will we rely on the military as our principal instrument to deal with them? Second, can we afford the kind of military that can meet all the potential challenges ahead? The third question relates to the much-needed military reform. Can the military change, reform, or transform to meet the challenges of the new century and adapt to the rapid development of new technologies that could radically alter the military as we know it today? The fourth issue deals with the interagency reform necessary for other agencies to move in parallel with military reforms. Can we meet the demand for better decision making and the integration of all the instruments of power (political, economic, informational, etc.) to solve the multidimensional challenges ahead?
No one can predict the future, but we can make judgments on the growing number of threats that now face us. Some of these will not be what we have grown used to preparing for.
Our security interests will require that we have a military capable and prepared to respond to:
• A global power with significant military capabilities.
• Regional hegemons with asymmetric capabilities, such as weapons of mass destruction and missiles, designed to deny us access to vital areas and regional allies.
• Transnational threats that include terrorist groups, international criminal and drug organizations, warlords, environmental security issues, issues of health and disease, and illegal migrations.
• Problems of failed or incapable states that require peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance and disaster
