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tv   Future of the Army  CSPAN  August 17, 2017 9:04am-10:17am EDT

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the media has made enemies for you. >> and then the at 10 p.m. discusses his book breakthrough our guerilla war to expose fraud and save democracy. >> it's very hard to break through to the mainstream media. we did a story on cnn, hidden cameras and cnn didn't mention a word about it. the motion of getting on the new york times or anderson cooper talking to you, number one thing on twitter, these are what we call breaking through. >> for more on the schedule go to book tv.org. >> general david perkins is responsible for selecting, recruiting and training u.s. army forces. his job is to predict where future fighting will occur and
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prepare and train for it. he spokes in salt lake city to talk to leaders on the international stage. it was hosted by the utah council of kip -- diplomacy. it's an hour and 10 minutes. >> as a proud arm brat, it's my privilege to introduce general david d perk-- perkins. he's responsible for training and educating professionals and designing the future u.s. army to support national security. a graduate of the u.s. military academy at west point in 1980. general perkins held numerous leadership positions over his career. these include special assistant to the speaker of the house, 104th u.s. congress. battalion commander in
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macedonia. brigades commander, leading over 300,000 personnel during the invasion of iraq, executive assistant to the vice-chairman of the joints chief of staff and division commander. the u.s. forces from iraq in 2010 through 2011. most recently, some november 2011 to february of to 14, general perkins commanded the u.s. army's premier education and leader development institution at fort levin worth. developing the training and support and u.s. army doctrine and synchronizing leader development all of which provides elements. he holds a master degree in mechanical engineering from university of michigan and masters degree in national
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security and strategic studies from the naval war college. please join me in giving a round of applause and a warm welcome to general perkins. [applaus [applause] >> thank you. thanks, appreciate-- i was told don't get too far forward, you'll get feedback and don't need you to leave here with an eardrum injury tonight. my appreciation for folks who helped to pull this off. folks at westminster, mr. ambassador, thank you for being a big supporter of this and everyone involved with uccd. it's a great chance for me to get out and talk to you all, the american people, because as a senior leader of the united states army. we say you are our board of directors, we are your army so it's great to come out to the board of directors and the
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american people and give you an update of what we're doing and a q & a and i need to change direction or anything, don't hesitate to tell me. i'm looking forward to the q & a as much as anything else. i really do commend you all for, as the charter is given to sort of being proactive citizens in our democracy. our democracy is based on that as i've traveled around the world. some less than garden spots. when people use the term democracy, they don't realize what's on the average person to pull that off. i appreciate you all internalize that and engage and try to be informed citizens out there as well on this very complex world. i'm going to talk about what i was looking as i was coming out
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here the title of the lecture, developing strategic leaders for the future, et cetera. so i will talk about that, understanding that we in the army, we don't make policy, we execute policy. so, it's our job to understand what the policy is and more important for that. i have the army training and doctrine command. most folks don't know what that is. tra doc is what we refer to it as. i'll kind of highlight some of them so we get a vision of that and queue up questions and make sense of the topics i'm talking about. i'll hit some of the tips of the iceberg what we do for the erm an and try to pull it altogether on what that means for the future in what we're
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doing about that in the army to prepare for the future in this very challenging world that we find ourselves today in and become more so. one of the things we do for the army is we are called the architects of the army. we designed the army. we are looking out to the years 2025 to 2050, and you may think that's a long ways out, but i have to tell you when you're building an army like ours at 1.2 million people, that spans the entire world, that's not far around the corner. what our organization does, we look out 2025, to 2050 and we try to offer any environment, what are the geopolitical situations we'll face around the world and what are the democratics, what are economics and challenges we're going to face. what are the competitors we're going to face and what are the things that our adversaries, possible adversaries going to do to us. once we have that figured out
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in our crystal balls. as i said in our role as architect of the army, we layout concept what we want our battalions and brigades to do and write out for the next helicopter, tank and we basically put a blueprint together for the army for the next say 30 years. this is what we want it to look like, this is the capabilities that the army has to have and equipment and et cetera like that. that's one of our responsibilities. another thing we do, we recruit the army and i spent the day down at the recruiting station and downtown and so when you drive around the united states and you look in the strip malls, armed forces recruiting and training and that's tra-doc, i think we have some recruiters out there. the other thing we do, we run cadet command. a couple of cadets in the
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audience, i spoke to some not long ago, we generate the officer corps in the army. the basic training and our beloved drill sergeants and folks that leave a lasting impression on our soldiers and we run individual training and the army school system, armor, infantry men and helicopter pilots and we teach them in schools and do lessons learned and forms the doctrine. so that seems like kind of a wide range of topics. when you link them together, it sort of makes sense because what the army has done is taken one command and they say you're the person that designs the army. once you design the army you go out and acquire the army, ie, recruit the officers and soldiers. once you recruit, i want you to build, basic training and flight school, whatever like
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that and we may fight the army and then i want you to constantly improve the army, lessons learned, command, generals, staff college, et cetera and make the army better. we design the army and then go out and acquire the army we design and then we build the army we acquire and constantly improve the army we built and that keeps us busy at least until noon on most days. training and doctrine command is a very large and expansive organization, we're in 1,634 locations around the world and if we don't hit every one of them every year, but today we happened to be out here in the utah area doing a number of things with recruiting and training and command and i report back to the board of directors, senior leaders of the army. now that i outlined what
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tra-doc does for the army, how we describe the future and what we're doing about it. and that might be of interest to you and maybe generate questions. if you could put up the first slide, please. i only have three slides and most of them are pictures, so, when i was growing up in the army, when i first came in the army and graduated from west point. it was the height of the cold war, okay? i was a young armor officer, tanks, mechanized infantry. i was sent to the german border all officers should be at the height of the cold war and pull duty along the west german-east german border. if there are some out here shaking their heads, i can remember that. our whole army was designed and focused primarily on being able to deter any, and the soviet
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union in the central plains of europe. so, this was sort of introduction, in the army in the early '80s, sort of the height of the cold war. and so we focused our army on being able to deter and/or defeat the soviet union in the central plains of europe. now, that was a challenge innen of itself, but we designed the army that way and this is a picture right out of the manual that i grew up with fm-100-5. and this is a picture. i was the one on my desk that i keep it there today since i'm in charge of writing the follow-on manual to that and i'm told that's the gold standard so i always refer back to it. a couple of things jump out at you, i tell folks if you were standing in the gap looking
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east it would look eerily similar to this. these are units in the army, a diagram how we would arrange the army. if you're looking to the future and building an army and military you have to describe the environment it's going to operate in. so this describes the environment that i was brought up in it, what it was, we have a known enemy, the soviet union, very well-known, knew a lot about it, our mission was to know more about something we know a lot about. we knew exactly where we would fight the soviet union on the central plains of europe, again, it would look like this. we knew what coalitions we would fight that enemy, it was nato. okay? in that coalition, it didn't change very often. it wasn't like, well, the country would say, you know, i'm going in nato and then be
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out, for weeks. we got in and didn't change who got in and out of nato. when you start thinking about it, what we had in the challenge in the army we built. we had an army focused on the voeft soviet union, a well-known enemy. we were a part of nato, a well-known coalition, so we built an army to deal with that. and so, what we did was build an army to deal with a known problem. when you build an organization to deal with a known problem, you build it a certain way, okay? you buy certain kinds of equipment, buy equipment a certain way, train people a certain way. and so, this, lieutenant perkins, a known enemy, a known problem. he said, okay, perkins, take your tanks and dig them in 1500 meters. this is your location, and then
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the first on the soviet would come on over and second echelon and deal with them as they come at you. the way we'll train you perkins, every 90 days you're going to go up to this same location we called this the gdp, general defense plan. you're going to go there and recon it again and again and again so you're going to learn more about something you already know a lot about. you're going to rehearse it over and over and over and have a little battle book that has maps and you're going to line on it where your routes are and where you would cache ammo and things like that. if the balloon goes up, world war iii, execute the script. open your battle book and the routes at certain times and execute the script that you've been rehearsing every 90 days. you see, that's how you build
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an army to deal with a known problem. you completely rehearse over and over and over again a kind of script and that's how you train lieutenant perkins when i came in the army. so, when i became the tra-doc commander, they said, dave, i think the world is changing look out to 2015 and build an army for that. now, what i've come to understand and experience throughout my career is that we are nt-- aren't particularly good at-- we have a perfect track record of being wrong we're actually going to fight. so, a lot of people, as we're looking out, we took that into account and when i speak to groups, they say you're the future guy for the army and i'm like, i guess so.
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they're like, well, they tell me about 2050 what they want me to do is give them a prediction. >> well, what are we going to do with the mideast, what are we going to do in the baltics, in the korean peninsula. really, when i look to the future, it's unknown, i don't know. they're saying, so that's it? you're giving up? >> i'm describing the future, unknown. you're not going to do anything about it? what are you, stupid and lazy? i won't argue that point, but the issue is, actually that's all i need to know because i don't need to predict the future. what i really need to do when you build an army is describe the difference. predict the future you get to a level of specificity which actually becomes dysfunctional. you become so official you've
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suboptimized the army for something that's not going to unfold. what we're doing is describe the future in a way with enough clarify to put pieces in place for an army pretty much you're sure you're going to need. so i said that's what we're going to do and that's what we did with our last operating concept. and so i grew up with the battle, which is this one. and when we published in last october, we did the same thing when we did this, i'm told that's the gold standard. we did exactly the same thing and we came up with exactly the same product only it's completely different. it's exactly the same only completely different. but it's exactly the same, but completely different. so when in a complex world, it's the army operating concept
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created known, 25-3-1, you all know that, it's written by tra-doc and the problem we're trying to solve is when in a complex world. this is the concept i grew up with, the one i wrote, it's completely the same only completely different. clarify, in case any of you are naval academy graduates, the first difference is, this is in color and this is black and white. now, that's more than just a silly marketing ploy, but so i describe this one here, i said, so the first thing operating concepts have to do is describe the environment that you're going to operate in the future. and we describe this here with this word complex. complex you define as unknown, unknowable and constantly changing. unknown, unknowable, constantly
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changing, you physics majors, something in and of itself changes it. in the future as well. if you nothing something about it, it's almost certainly not going to happen. if you know about it, you do something and it's not going to happen. do we ever fight the soviet union on the central plains of europe. no, i would argue we know a lot about it so it never happened. so when i tell folks the future, i say, i just-- just describe the future so it is this. leave it exactly the same thing and a completely different answer. we told you this was what, the soviet union, central plains of europe. nato. it's unknown, unknowable and constantly changing. both of these describe the future. in general terms. this was describing a known problem.
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this is describing an unknown problem. so i tell folks, the guy that designs the army, i only have to know one thing about the future. is it a known future or unknown future. that's describing, not predicting what can happen in the middle east. all i have to do is know if it's known or unknown. if the future is known you design a kind of army, you write a kind of dock doctorate. you train people differently. >> i get asked this question a lot. we went to a venue once and i was sort of token land sky. way i was an army there. and we had a navy add rat and air force officer talking about the future and kind of going down the panel, as it works out
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i was the last guy so they aukd talked to the air force general. they said tell us about the future of the air force and he explained we'll have stealth fighters and technical stuff we'll have. i'm reassured because i want to be in a country that has that air force. it sounded, you know, very good, well thought out and then to the navy admiral. we're going to have undersea this and south seas kind of things and very specific what they're going to do. wow, that's good i want a country with that kind of navy. i like what the air force guy and navy guy says. okay, perkins, you're the future guy with the army. tell us about the future. >> and what they really wanted me to do is what? predict the future and they said, you know, sometimes you army guys are kind of shortsighted we want you to look out 50 years.
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look out 50 years and basically predict the future of what's going to happen. so i pause for a while and i-- one of my previous assignments in the army did some stuff with media and things and they teach you with the interviewer, somebody asks you a question or it's a tough question, you know, just respond with another question. as we asked the question, okay, perkins, i want you to predict the future 50 years from now. and a pause for dramatic event i say, look, is that really the question to be asked here tonight? buy me a little bit of time. let's think about that. i don't think that's really possible. i don't think that's very useful. let's assume i was here 50 years ago when you asked me that question. you're asking me to predict 50 years out with a level of specificity that i don't think is useful, but you keep pushing
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me on it so let's assume this was 50 years ago and you were asking me this question. i said, my answer might go something like this. and i said, remember, 50 years ago, the world trade center wasn't even built. so i said, what if-- went something like this, well, 50 years from now. what's going to happen? i don't know, and like ten years from now, but we're going to build two tall buildings to the tip of manhattan and they will become the financial center of the world and i'm sure why is this army guy talking about this, whatever, let them go. and say, yeah, so we're going to-- as i'm predicting the future. very specific. ten years from now build two tall buildings, they don't exist now, but we're going to build two tall buildings and then what's going to happen, a very large attack on the continental united states and the result of that attack will
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be such that it causes more deaths than pearl harbor, more casualties than pearl harbor. they will be thinking what is this guy talking about? and one of the other results of that attack is that two tall buildings that don't exist now, and we're going to build ten years from now, 30 years from now they're going to tumble down. and looking long-term, we don't have buildings yet. we are requesting to build buildings. 30 years after they're built, the united states will be under attack, more deaths than pearl harbor and one of those the two buildings that don't exist now will be crumbling down. i'm sure that they think where is he going? general, you're saying the united states will undergo an attack more deaths than pearl harbor. right. what is the enemy going to be
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armed with that's going to cause thousands of people to die on continental united states? death rays, neutron bombs, laser guns? what is it? what kind of futuristic weapon are assailants going to be armed with to cause more deaths than pearl harbor. box cutters. really? some folks with box cutters are going to cause more deaths than pearl harbor. yeah, pretty sure. that's my prediction. and by now i'm thinking, holy cow, this guy is really kind of out in left field. well, okay, general, so what-- i am sure there's going to be some worldwide command and control mechanism that somehow is going to go together and focus and must be hundreds of thousands of box cutter wielding assailant that descended on new york to cause more death than pearl harbor. what's the apparatus to
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synchronize untold number of box cutter wielding assailants. i'll go well, it will be a radicalized guy in a cave-in afghanistan. you're telling me, general, some dude in a cave-in afghanistan is going to coordinate somebody with box cutters to create more casualties than pearl harbor? yeah, that's what i'm predicting. ... the problem is i would been pretty close with that prediction. who wouldn't believe me 50 years ago that would happen.
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that's the problem when you try to predict the future. you can't get it right. there are so many nuances and so many twists, it's impossible to do. what happens is when you think k you predicted the future, you start making decisions based on a bad prediction based on a false sense of assurance that you know is going to go on. that's why when we wrote our new operating concept we said were not going down that road anymore. when the going to build an army for no problem. you know what i'm betting? 50 years from now will face the problems that none of us could even in our wildest dreams makeup. i am convinced of it. what's going to happen to us 50 years from now none of us even if we all worked out on a piece of paper what we think will happen we may not even be close. once you come to that conclusion that you do not know the future and you cannot know the future, you go down a different path. you could add a completely path. if you think you know the future
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you start to sub optimize and start making some optimization decisions. if you think you're not going to know the future, what you do is expand the options available to you. you keep as many options open to you and you try to find an asymmetric capability that can withstand the test of times. it's generally not mitchell solution. -- material solution. that's the road we have gone down and we are saying you know what, if you take a look, this was a very linear kind of approach with very specific kind of formations that o have a specific tasks, do specific things, against a very specific enemy. you can see this is any part of the world and/or no part of the world. it has taken all of our domains, cyber, air, space, maritime, the land and said what we have to do
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special operations forces, nongovernment organizations, indigenous people, and what we have to do is hold us together in a way that we can do it better than anybody else. what we have to do is be much more innovative and adaptive than the enemy. because the world is going to change so much and so quickly it's not necessarily keep it was most prepared at the beginning. it is he who adapts the quickest and can innovate the quickest which means you have to have agile organizations. you have to buy equipment that is multipurpose. but most important, you have to develop leaders i can think this way. that gets to the topic of today's presentation which was sort of leadership for the future. the first thing is you have to describe the future before you know what kind of leaders to make. if you have a different definition of future, you will develop a different kind of leader. so if you go to the next slide,
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please. this is what we call our mission command flossie and i won't go into too much detail but it gets to the kind of leader we want to develop for our army. it is based on our description of the future. as i said, this lieutenant perkins was developing in an army which we thought we knew was the problem. without he was going to fight the soviet union in the single points of europe with the nato. what we did with this lieutenant perkins is he rehearsed the snare over and over so in the dead of night he could get with his eyes closed. the problem is in future in even today's army we can't do that with the lieutenant perkins of today, and there is a lieutenant perkins today. because we can't tell lieutenant perkins today we don't know is going to go to the balkans, the baltics, we have no idea what is going to go, number one. we have no idea who the enemy
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is. we have no idea what the role of engagement is. where no idea what the caveats are bit with no idea what the coalition is. when i grew up the coalition was nato. that was it. there was no coalition of willing. an attack against one, an attack against all, article v. now we're all over the world. we don't know any of those things. the only thing i do know with the lieutenant perkins of today, he's not going to recon his place every 90 days. he ain't going out there for people like every 90 days. in fact, the first time use their will is when is an comeback. how do you develop that lieutenant perkins? you have to have a different philosophy of leadership pick you up to have a of leadership. the army has completed changes flossie of leadership. we are the problem for the leader of development in the army. when i grew up we had what was called command-and-control.
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command-and-control was command, i issue an order, control, compliance. so when the army i grew up it was ensuring compliance with the commands. it's no longer our command, no longer our command philosophy no longer our war winding function. mission command is it. what we want to have happen is we want our soldiers to seize, retain and exploit the initiative to get to a position of relative advantage. i want everybody whether he's a private or a general to look out, figure out where they need to be at any given point in time to be in a position of relative advantage and exploit the initiative to get there. that might be a position of advantage fighting the taliban. it might be position of advantage dealing with hurricane sandy. it might be a provision of advantage and yet humanitarian supplies.
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maybe position advantage dealing with negotiations whatever. whatever your mission is, there's both racia they show pld time is ultimately geographical place, as maybe as well as a position of coalition building that puts you at an advantage. but it's what we call qualitative advantage. the future is unknown, constantly changing. whatever is a position advantage today may not be a position of advantage tomorrow. it's going to change. that's why you don't all receipts and retain the initiative. you must exploit the initiatives. you got to always be one step ahead of whatever your problem set is. you can't be content with thinking you know what's going to happen. you don't know what's going to happen. you always have to be positioning yourself to be able to be in the right stance to do
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with what could happen down the road, or you could be shaping it. when i grew up our philosophy was command-and-control. command can issue an order. that won't work for the future we're talking about because that assumes you know what to command somebody to do. what we are no longer focusing on is controlling compliance, but empowering the initiative. you don't control the initiative. you empower the initiative. how do you empower initiative versus controlling and complying? we come right down here. understand, visualize, describe and assess. understand the problem if we just talked about about how you bring in folks from across the world and have discussions to understand their world and culture. we are seeing all of our soldiers need to understand the world they are in understand the situation you are in, understand
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your caveats, understand your resources, understand the culture, understand all the relationship with the various. once you understand that you need to visualize how you going to take the resources you have available and in time and space based on your understanding of the problem such as that your visualization results in a position of advantage with regards to the resources you have available. then once you visualize how you're going to get a position of advantage, you describe your visualization to your subordinates, to the people left the right of you, the members of the coalition, to your subordinates, your superiors. you describe your visualization so that you come to a common understanding of the problem. once you have this common understanding you visualize how you'll solve it, you've described the vision relation to everybody involved the results in a common understanding, you then direct, late, says.
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you will still give direction but you don't give direction until you've done this part, and this is generally the most difficult part. especially in a complexity of the world that we live in today and probably the increased complexity we are going to have in the future. what we have to do today with our young leaders, our privates, sergeant, lieutenants is we have to train them to understand, not just comply. just comply within active control is the longer adequate. when i was lieutenant they pretty much wanted me to comply with the command given, and then succumb to the method of control. we are saying now that is no longer possible because we really don't know what the command to do any level of specificity. we describe our visualization and then we empower them to exploit the initiative. that's a very difficult way to
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run an army. that's a very difficult way to run an army, because it requires a huge investment in people. you have to spend a lot of time developing people. sufferers of all they even know how to understand the complexity of the world they are in. and into other things we want to do, develop teams within your organization and outside of your organization, and then inform and influence people in your organization and outside your organization. and so you may well as a young noncommissioned officer or lieutenant having to be both building teams and influencing people, they are not even in your organization, not even in the army, they are not even american. they could be not governmental organization. if you're the one at first airborne division, the brigade that essay to western africa to
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do with ebola come you're working with doctors without borders, world health organization. how do you describe what you doing to then, if you're an army infantry both to you can a military mission to second squad. you know how to do that in a way that resonates. can you describe your mission to the world health organization in a way that resonates with somebody who has no idea what they do? you need to understand. you know what those organizations do that you understand what role they play in the air you in. do you understand what their objectives are? that means you have to build teams within your organization and outside your organization and had to figure out how you and for them as to what you're doing and how you're going to influence people. this is a very tough way to run organizations especially united states army, 1.2 million people in 160 country over the world. you can only attempt this if you
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have a very well-trained well disciplined and well led organization. if you don't have a well-train well-trained, well that and well disciplined organization, you don't empower that. what do you do with an ill trained, for led l disciplined organization? you control it. i spent a lot of time traveling the world seeing a lot of other armies. what you'll find is the less professional the army, the more the focus on control. the more professional the organization, the more they focus on empowerment. i could even tell within the united states army as a go from unit to unit to unit, units whose primary method of getting something done is extreme amount of control is generally a less well led unit. units that are very much about empowering subordinates generally is better trained, better disciplined and better lead. so i great leaders .nl much
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control to have but how much of empower people. i can fear that out in about five minutes just talking to them and see how they interact with people. because you can't fake it. you can't fake that because it takes a huge amount of effort, time and investment to make that happen. don't want to be rude but of what to work he on time. what we have? we are good. so what i'd like to do so i can kind of finish up with one thing. if i go to questions us i have a little bit of time to wrap up with one thing? are we kind of setup to do that before i go to the last slide? okay. while we are setting up for questions, because i don't want to run over but i do want to -- so to recap, talking about the leadership aspect of it. this is been a deliberative process the army has gone
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through but it's pretty revolutionary for the army even though those in the army don't realize it. one of the reasons is our first field manual, our first doctoral manual is written in 1904. from 1994 until last october, just but every piece of army doctrine was written to do with unknown problem. this manual was specifically written to do with an unknown world. that's again we are making ther way putting all our bet on the fact the world is a note and will constantly change. if the world 20 years and that is exactly as ned predicted today, doesn't change, this, this is the wrong book. this doesn't optimize an army to deal with no problems. we are banking on that the world will become a lot more unknown in chamber quickly. as i go around to organizations and you are a lot of later development stuff in the army
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and try to get ideas, a lot of people in organizations and never come to that conclusion yet. they are developing their leaders but they don't know what for. there, taking the latest book. there are some organizations where you may develop your leaders different than others because it depends on what the organization is for. people never figure out, they just take the latest management book or leadership book and thinks it's one size fits all and i would argue it's not. are we ready for official questions? that we consider asking questions and i think then i will save a little time at the end to wrap up a couple of things. right here. >> so this command unit that you're in charge of, did it exist before the second invasion of iraq? if so, did it have influence?
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and then what was the input? you probably were not there then. >> i was the brigade commander during the invasion. talk about what we call -- 2003? so yes, tradoc existed and tradoc was formed in 1973, interesting, story about tradoc came to be. it was pulled together, it stood up in 1973. where was the united states army in 1973? coming out of vietnam. and so the army as is coming out of vietnam at that point was sort of pivoting back to center your. the army leaders took a look at the army and said the army we have is probably not the army that we want to do with the soviet union because as were coming out of vietnam, although we had some unbelievable baroque activity and great courage on the battlefield, we had consumed a noncommissioned officer corps, in vietnam.
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we did not have a culture of training peer we did not have a modernization program. we had drug problems, race problems. our leadership said i need to change in the army. need to change it from what we have in vietnam to something to do with the soviet union. they change the army. that's what we are for, to drive change. as we went back into iraq in 2003, i was a brigade commander at the time. i tend to reserve criticism for myself and/or the organization unassociated with. i was an armored brigade commander at that time, with elite force that invaded. i would tell you probably one of the problems we had as a look back on it now is we thought we knew what we were dealing with. i was pretty sure i had good intelligence.
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i had satellite photographs. i it varies things like that. i had a false sense of understanding of what it was, and i will leave it at that level where i was as a colonel. what that does is, if you start developing a battle plan based on your sort of false understanding and your sort of level of assurance, one of the reasons you get to that is you take previous experience and you artificially set it on top of your current experience. that's a common problem. you should look back in history, not be captive to a i would say that my level at least i believe at that level we were probably captive to the experience of desert storm. which was a very different situation. interesting enough, i am not a desert storm veteran, but i saw
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it on scene in like everybody else. i was an instructor at west point at the time. in fact, i've never been in combat before before i was brigade commander so that was my first time crossing the line of departure. my battalion commanders had been. in desert storm is like this can only lasted for 100 hours am thinking this is only 100 hours. it we did this and this. there was the human nature you going to template to last experience on this one because everything seemed kind of the same. it's in the desert, the same part of the world, the same guy, et cetera. what a lot of us feel to do is understand but a lot of things have changed. this is a little bit different commie if you're pushing someone out of the country versus going in. so certain assumptions were made, and i will tell alyssa my level, probably not adequately question the sort of red team.
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what we found out early in that invasion is, in fact, it wasn't going to be like last time. something for dramatically different. the good thing is, and i always operate at the toxic level, our soldiers were very good at adapting and innovating and dealing with them pretty quickly. they are making the best of a bad situation. but if you make a couple of fatal assumptions, you then really having to quickly make up for that and get ahead of the power curve. one of the reasons that we have written our new concept now is informed on what we were seeing in iraq and afghanistan. we had not written really a new concept like this before 2003. and, in fact, quite also i went into iraq with basically
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doctrine very similar to airland battle information and everything we had, which were basically to do more or less with sort of a known situation. this is an outcome of that but we tried not to come as we write this to concept of jus jesse wio the 2003 invasion better or this invasion better. there are first order prints will succumb out of it and if you start looking at the future as it you cannot predict it, you focus on different things. you focus on indications of change versus confirming something that you think is a certain activity out there. when we do our intelligence preparation of battlefield, we did the layout in templates and say xyz, this is where everything is okay and we cross intelligence to confirm what we think is the no answer. i offer to you that sort of the world i grew up in. you try to put all the pieces
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there. you think you got it right and then what you're doing is crosscutting intelligence, prosecuting intelligence to confirm or deny your set piece is right. that's what i tell people some of the common mistakes is it's just on a military mistake, you are trying to confirm the value of a variable, x equal something, why equal something, see equal something. we like known things. the human brain doesn't like to do with unknowns. we like to put things in ben's and a templates that i know this and know that. we come up with a template that we try to confirm it. in the kind of world we would then better certain 2003 to say you know what, instead of confirming a template of what i know, what i focus on is the relationship with the variables. when x goes up, y ghostwriter i don't care with the value of the variable is per i care about the relationship. if this is happening with the regime, what is happening here?
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and so that kind of thinking did not perceive that 2003 activity, but we are trying to sort of take those first order lessons learned from that. [inaudible] >> no. any, in fact, we are working this concept very much with the air force and navy and marine corps. our next version of this is multi-domain battle. we now have the army, marine corps, multi-domain battle task force working with this and we just briefed my chief of staff to the army, secretary of the army archie step of the army, the combat of the marine corps two weeks ago t together there where working this in a joint venture because one of the things i point out is, if you
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take a look at this, the world sort of that i grew up in, this is really pretty much army stuff. there's only armistice on it. if you take a look at this with semper fi activity going on here, maybe here, air force here, special operations, et cetera. in fact, the thing that is missing on your is a bunch of army stuff. in fact, it's mainly other stuff, ngos, unhcr, none of the stuff is on the other one. we are very much approaching this as kind of a joint what we call combined aspect. i was over in europe last week talking about this as we worked with alice as are trying to look towards the future and say we need to have a different vision of how the world is going to unfold than the one we grew up with.
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>> i will the mic folks decide. i think we have one right down here. >> given those more jointly operating situations you were describing, can you speak to working with the nato and such as the efforts in poland right now, that kind of thing? >> poland is my older you do. i saw on the super bowl, and so that's very much in conjunction with this, is as we rotating units, poland one of our great nato allies, we're trying to provide options both for nato as well as the deterrent to peer competitors in that area. when i was coming in the army as
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lieutenant and captain, we had forces probably stationed in europe. so they were fixed in your fix location and night a fixed location that i went to. the unit that's in poland right now, they are from fort carson, colorado. i will be there tomorrow. we rotate the units over there and we move them around so they have been up in the baltics, down the poland, romania, other places like that. what it's doing is providing lots of different options, depending upon the ever we think the main threat, the threat would be. what that requires for the army is we have done it much more agile army. when i was growing up your station here and you would fight in one location. you are kind of a set piece. our army is smaller now than when i was a lieutenant. but quite honestly our requirements are even larger than when i was lieutenant. we have to be able to be much more agile with our army.
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it has to have many more capabilities than when i was lieutenant. i tell folks no more one trick ponies. these are called icons. a unit icon. i can't have units or icons that can only do one thing. they have to be able to do multiple things because i'm not sure what i'm going to do with them here if it's a no. they have to be accountable under lots of different things. i can't be over specialized and have to operate in many parts of the world and move back and forth very quickly. because our requirements in some ways are greater than they were as i was growing up. if you take a look at this, you can see this is a much more static linear formation, much more easy to command-and-contr command-and-control. this for one thing is very spread out, very spread out. you've got all the domains, cyber, space, et cetera. one of the challenges we have is how to connect that all together? what is the network that brings
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up together, both a tactical network with regards to cyber and all that as well as the physical connectivity. so are the soldiers that are here, do they know how to work with the united nations high commissioner for refugees? do they even know what to do? are the countable talkie with them? do the work with ngos, special operation forces wax there's a human networking that's much greater requirement than what i was lieutenant and there's a tactical networking much greater than this. we thought this was hard. this was complicated. this is complex. big difference. complicated systems have a lot of moving pieces. it gets back to the thing i talk about knowing either the value of a variable or the relationship of a variable. in a complicated system, there's a lot of moving pieces. it's kind of like if he took the
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back off a swiss watch, even to the back of a swiss watch and you look at it you would say this is very complicated. complicated piece of machinery. so you're looking at it, yet little dials, springs and gears. but in a complicated system, relationship with the variables never changes. you can figure it out. if you're looking at a swiss watch you like okay, this is really complicated, but i can figure out. why? because it's actions replicate themselves over and over again. use after a while i see every time that secondhand turns one revolution amended and clicks one. i see when this spring tides, this gear moves and every time i wind it saying it happens. that's a complicated watch. if you had a complex watch, the problem with a complex watch is you open it up and you can't figure it out. the reason you can't figure it
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out is because the relationship with the variables always changes. on the complicated watch every time the second had had one revolution, the minute hand moved once. on a complex watch one time the hand goes around, the second, the minute hand moves once. the next time it makes one revolution it was 20 minutes. you are like what's going on? the relationship with the variables, because it never replicates itself twice. that's why you have to decide if the world unity with a complicated problem by complex problems? if it's a couple get a problem you can take previous activity and template it on there so they could steer question, that if you think is a get a problem you look at the last time we did it and you put the template on it and use i know how to solve this problem. when a second hand goes around it will go once. on a complex problem you can't template it. i see ten. i either have ten minutes left
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or that's my grade. >> can you talk about how the army is planning for, preparing for climate change? >> so on any number of things, whether it's climate change, what we do is we kind of look long-term like at 50 years and try to see what changes are occurring, climate, demographic or like that. there's a number things, climate change, i know there is a huge discussion on it but we take a look at the same would we do other in front middle factors. another happening is increased rate of urbanization. more and more population of the world are living in larger and larger urban areas, megacities. what we do as an army essay, we can't change that. we are not going to change the demographic trend of the world
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to become urbanized. we are not going to change what happens with the climate. what we do is say how do i build a capability to deal with that operate in a vibrant. again we don't set policy. we execute policy. we have to try to describe what are the things happening in the future and how can operate in that world that has now changed. when you take a look at climate change, we always have what we call sort of most dangerous, most likely courses of action. you say what are going to be some of the challenges that could precipitate it? water shortages, food shortages. look at that precipitate? that could precipitate conflict. what other parts of the world i could participate conflict in? what are parts of the world where using salmon and trout like that? those of parts of the world where you could have conflict. what are the requirements of the army to operate in those parts of the world? what it were asked to go in and
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do a humanitarian kind of thing, ebola or something like that. we had the capability, the language capability? can we sustain ourselves medically and all that kind of stuff. so again this world was we were only operate in one part of the world. the way that any other part of the worker we were only operate in one part of what with one mission. this again been shipped to be able to operate everywhere. one of the things is what kind of networks do you establish if you're going to operate in those parts of the world where you may have conflict due to famine and trout for something to what other networks that are already there? what level of infrastructure is there. do the rail lines, and you get income is isolated, landlocked? again the army's challenge is not to solve those problems it's to make sure we anticipate the possibility of that and that we can operate in that environment if it came to.
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>> sergeant inc. with the army reserve. my question is what examples is tradoc doing to help leaders shift from this inward might set of command and control to of unify leadership to influence others and recruit partners in this world that we are not defending people but unifying with them? >> it's almost easier for me to answer what we are not doing. we have rewritten all our doctrine, so all the schools that tradoc runs, every school in the army now teaches this, and we own all the echelon above brigade training in the army. we set up the scenarios and we run people through it and we make them become critical thinkers. we had to have multiple path to success, not one path to success. from the very beginning we incorporate them to the worker we guess i'm going to wait and
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take you to the army war college and give the elective uncritical thinking. we start from very early on we come into the army, that's when things you contradict as if it acculturates young high school graduate into the world of the army. when examples i used is how that is changing and how we try to get people to think broadly about stuff they could happens early on. when i was a young person come into the army i went up to the reference the first time. in my recollection of marksmanship at the rifle range is there were two trucks parked in the parking lot. one truck is a truck you got auvi q qualified your rifle. the other truck you got on if you didn't qualify. all i really need to know was i'm getting on that truck. i think that truck is going to go to dinner. i don't know what that truck is going but i'm thinking it's not pleasant. that's about all i remember about rifle marksmanship. make sure i get on the truck
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that's going to go to dinner. don't get on the truck with the people that did not qualify their weapon. recently i was done at a basic trade location at fort jackson we do a lot of basic thing for the army. i sat down with these new recruits, myself and my command sergeant major they had been in army for three weeks so in their minds they are not new anymore. think isaac came in last night were new. they had all the answers. they are still young privates i said that in the vessel at a table and a sit down, and the first you're staring at me, sergeant major. i go and get the same thing, similar to the christmas commercial with the immanence the comrade and santa claus comes out of the chimney and their staring like he's real. we've heard of these mythical figures called generals, i've just never seen one before. okay, any questions? one breaks the ice and we start talking and then there were not afraid of me, they were afraid of the drill sergeant. they thought he would get in trouble. i talked to one soldier and said
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what do you like best so far about the army? we went out to the rifle range and shot rifles. i've never shot a rifle before and i was exciting. i said, and which is qualified a couple days ago. how did it go? he goes not as good as a wanted it. the practice stuff whispery good but when we actually went out to the rifle range i fired, shot at the target, a couple hundred meters down the way into my drill sergeant took me out and went down the target and did some bullets here, some here i that's my drill sergeant said what you think is wrong? drill sergeant, i know how the trajectory of a round goes like this, since it sprout u i probay did have good breathing. i have to fix my breathing and this, i'll change of this. he had all been taught this is the blizzards of a rifle, is a solid bullet travels. if this is what the effect is this is what you did wrong, this is how you corrected.
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he had all the background behind it so the drill sergeant is asking what you going to do? how are you going to fix it? not like listen to what i tell you. i do, there's a problem, how are you going to solve it? that's not how i remember. it was get on this truck or that truck. i had no idea but the ballistics of a rifle. it's not we explain everything in detail to privates when they come in but we are getting fit into the meld you need to understand how stuff works, understand what the relationship of the variables are. you have to understand what you can change to make things happen and then within the scope of your responsibility we look you authority to change it. we start early on. not your grandfathers basic training. the first official last questi question. >> general milley talked about and described the battlefield i was counseling changing, very dynamic, very lethal.
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he talked about units having to move possibly every two hours to survive. my question involves equipment piece which is said we don't always wrap everything around, but to allow us to have that mobility what's the thought process in putting a lot of the separate have together so they are easily deployed quickly? >> so there's two big challenges as we are looking at what i will call a multi-domain battle of moving quickly. the first thing is keeping it all connected, network wise. what we want is we want this first unit yet mutually supportive. we don't want 15 separate things going on at the same time. it's not just about dispersion, it's about being mutually supportive. it's very easy, i can disperse anybody. it's making sure their mutually supported and cannot be isolated. that's the difficulty.
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the big pole and that it is how connect them all network wise? then how do you develop weapon system that have ranges to meet your support very dispersed locations? the second thing is sustaining them. how to provide logistics, provide medical evacuation if someone is wounded? if you do not secure lines of communications, how do you get casualty ahlquist maybe you'll have to treat casualties closer different with more extreme measures. maybe you have certain robots that can do surgery on folks so you don't have to bring them back. the two big challenges we have operating in this dispersed environment is maintain mutual support, it's not getting there. there's this misunderstanding about deploying that's a big challenge. big challenges quite honestly how to maintain mutual support while dispersed and how do i provide sustainment? i think that was the official
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last question. one thing i want to wrap up on, for the cloud, you can take down the slide. as i said and come at you as the board of directors of our army, united states army and i was just talking to some young recruiters and rotc cadets. one of the things i always remind him of and reminding you of as well, again, we are your army. but to put it in perspective as to the service and sacrifice that these young men and women that were the uniform and those that have made it, and the legacy that they are upholding in sort of the responsibility we put in their rucksack and on the back i wish my people this june were coming up to the 242nd birthday of the united states army. the birthday of the united states army is 14 june 1775 is when the united states army was established. the birthday of the united
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states is fourth july 1776. that means united states army is older than the united states of america. in other words, this country was founded on the back of the united states army and its soldiers, whether minutemen at bunker hill, valley forge, like that. his army of these men and women serving, so the army our soldiers serve in is older than the republic they defend. and so i think it's important to understand is our board of directors, there are special institution you have that is older than the country you are a citizen of, and quite honestly is responsible for even the existence of the country you're a citizen of at all the great many benefits we have. and so again putting a perspective what i do appreciate the chance to come out and speak to our board of directors is one of the leaders of the oldest institution of the united states.
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in fact, older than the nation itself, so thanks a lot for your support and god bless you all. thanks. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, i just want to be able to share a small token of our appreciation to general perkins, and honestly thank him for the service. as many of you in the audience had given as well. thank you for your time and dedication to the united states of america. [applause] >> thanks everyone for putting this together. [inaudible conversations] >> president trump's chief strategist steve bannon says there is no military solution to the threat posed i north korea. his remarks come as president trump recently pledged to meet north korea with fire and fury for its threats. meanwhile vice president pence is in -- flying back to washington, d.c., to attend the
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meeting tomorrow morning at camp david. that is expected to focus on north korea. >> tonight on c-span at 8 p.m. eastern an in-depth look at the opioid epidemic including ohio attorney general who is suing several drug companies for the marketing of opioid painkillers. >> what is different about this a drug problem that we have is how pervasive it is. it is absolutely everywhere. it is in our smallest communities, in our cities. it's in our most affluent suburbs. >> and friday at 8 p.m. and profile interview with secretary of health and human services tom price. >> i think my passion for trying to help people and my passion for a healthy society, this just feels like the culmination of a lice work. the 20 plus years in clinical practice that i had caring for patients which was incredibly rewarding overlap with th the 20
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plus years that i had in the representative life, both in the states in and in congress, and have the opportunity now at this time, this pivotal time in our nation's history in the system we have to lead this remarkable department is supposed as anything. >> followed at 8:30 p.m. by the conversation with supreme court justice elena kagan. >> you said at the very beginning of our conversation we are not a pure democracy. we are a constitutional democracy. that means that the judiciary has an important role to play in policing the boundaries of all the other branches. that can make the judiciary and unpopular set of people when they say to a governor or president or congress know, you can't do that because it's just not within your constitutional powers. >> watch on c-span a c-span.org and listen using the free c-span

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