battle of tal afar. continuing on to serve in afghanist afghanistan. and now h.r., i'm going to butcher your title. so i'll let you give it to me directly. >> it's deputy commander general for training and doctrine command for futures. and then the clunky long title is the army capabilities integration center. >> i'm glad i didn't try to memorize that. >> arcic. >> but what h.r. is really that quite extraordinary combination of thinker and great military leader. there aren't that many in our history. there are a few people like general jack galvin, but it's very few. so we're really privileged i think to have somebody with us who has an extraordinarily distinguished record of command including command in combat. with an equally distinguished record as a thinker.

he was also i should have mentioned up front a senior fellow at the iiss and remains affiliated with iiss as well. it's wonderful to be here with him particularly since as i said we're old friends. the way we thought we'd do this is begin it as a conversation. i have a couple questions i'd like to ask general mcmaster, draw him out on a few subjects. and then i'll moderate a discussion from the floor. so h.r., the army has just produced something called the army operating concept, which i guess you had stewardship of. what is an operating concept, and why does the army need it? >> okay. well, it's a great question, eliot. what a privilege it is to be here with you and at the international institute for strategic studies, an organization which i think makes tremendous contributions to international security and an institution that really benefited me tremendously in my two years in london which turned out to be about four months

because i was mainly in iraq but had access to the scholars at the international center for strategic studies, toby dodge, others who really helped us tremendously in understanding how the conflict in iraq had evolved and to help refashion the strategy there in early 2007. so what a privilege it is to be here at the international institute for strategic studies and with you, eliot. though the army operating concept is important because it describes how army forces will have to operate in the future and i think one of the things we can do, even in times of diminished resources and budget constraints, is we can think clearly about future war and we need to maybe in particular based on some of the budget constraints and so forth. so in this army operating concept we really look at the problem of future armed conflict through the lens of both continuity and change. continuity in the nature of war, changes in the character of armed conflict. keeping in mind in particular there are certain things about armed conflict that really don't change a lot, and that's really

war's fundamental political nature, that war is waged to achieve sustainable political outcomes. we talk about the army's role in providing foundational capabilities to the joint force. but how in particular the army has to be prepared to defeat enemy organizations but then also to consolidate gains, to get the sustainable, usually political outcomes. we recognize in the army operating concept the human dimension of war and the fact that people fight in large measure for the same reasons people thought 2500 years ago where they identified fear, honor, and interest as what motivates people in armed concept. to understand that we say in the army operating concept soldiers and leaders have to be able to develop situational understanding in close contact with enemies but also civilian populations. what is really driving conflict. so we're not just treating the symptoms of conflicts, we're

actually dealing with the causes. the third thing we emphasize in the operating concept is that war is uncertain, that the future course of events in armed conflict has more to do than with what you decide to do. it depends on initiatives and reactions of your enemies that are often impossible to predict at the outset of a conflict. in the army operating concept we don't say we're going to dominate in the future. what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to be able to adapt continuously to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative while we're capable and oftentimes elusive and determined enemies. and then finally we recognize that war is a contest of wills. it's a contest of wills in terms of our own soldiers and teams, what john keegan said in the face of battle, really that battle, combat is the struggle of men and women trying to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation with the achievement of some aim over which other human beings are trying to kill them. so how do you develop in your soldiers really the ability to

operate in these uncertain and complex environments, these environments of persistent danger. how do you develop cohesive teams and soldiers that can operate in these environments. the human dimension of war. these continuities are very important. but then we also looked at changes in the character of armed conflict through four lenses as well. what are threats, enemies, and adversaries, how are they evolving. we talk more about that. what missions does the army do as part of the joint force, as part of what we now call another clunky term, interorganizational teams. bringing civilian capabilities, for example, and multinational teams. anticipating those missions and how they're changing based on geopolitics but also technology which is a third thing. what technologies can we integrate into our army to make us more effective while keeping in mind enemy countermeasures to our technological capabilities and enemy technologies. and then finally history and lessons learned, right? what are we learning from conflicts today and how does

that apply? this is a description in the army operating concept of how army forces have to operate in the future based on continuity and change and then based on that description of how the army forces have to operate we then determine what sort of capabilities we need in our army. then this is a starting point for learning, for thinking about future war, learning about future armed conflict, and applying what we're learning to future force capability development. not just things and material but how we change our doctrine, how we evolve our organizations, how we change leader development and education, how we modify our training. to make sure that we -- what we say in the army operating concept is we want to achieve overmatch of our enemies, right? if you don't have an overmatch over an enemy in combat, that means it's a fair fight, right? and a fair fight in war's an ugly proposition. so what we want to do is achieve overmatch as part of joint forces to accomplish future

missions. >> that's great. so let me press you a little bit on that. we've been hearing a lot in recent months and years about hybrid warfare and in particular the kinds of things the russians have been up to in the eastern ukraine. does that phrase, hybrid warfare, mean anything? and is it actually new? >> right. well, i think as historians historians typically say it's not really new. but i think it's reappeared and it's reappeared with maybe a higher degree of clarity and we can understand it better seeing what russia has done in ukraine and crimea before that and georgia and so forth. and i think to describe what hybrid means it really means that russia is competing on multiple battlegrounds, first of all. multiple contested spaces which war is contested not just in the physical domain but it's contested on the battleground of information and perception. it's contested on the batt

battleground of oftentimes political subversion and oftentimes these conflicts bleed over into sort of organized crime networks and other transnational sort of dimensions of the conflict. i think it's important to recognize that to win an armed conflict you have to be able to compete on multiple battlegrounds in contested spaces. in the army operating concept i think we recognize this and what we say is that army forces are critical to projecting not just military power but national power to deal with these kinds of threats. and you might say, okay, what do you mean the army is saying project national power. well, really to be able to operate effectively in contested environments and environments that are unsafe you'd better take some soldiers with you to be able to apply political influence, develop security forces and develop institutional capacity, to provide support to government, to rule of law, to law enforcement activities. intelligence activities and so forth.

i think this hybrid warfare term is useful because we can see russia using combinations of unconventional forces and conventional forces. we see that we have to be prepared for a broad range i think of threats on these multiple battlegrounds. i think also what russia's actions, to really i think in many ways changed the geopolitical landscape on the eurasian land mass and i think to place under duress the existing political order in europe and try to challenge it and collapse it is what we see is the value of military forces in deterring this kind of activity. and in particular land forces, right? so i think because i'm in the army and part of my job is to describe the army's contribution to the joint force, i think what you see with russia has been able to do is wage limited war

for limited objectives. to essentially in ukraine, to effect a land grab very quickly at very low cost because the ukrainians were unable to really contest it. and then to consolidate that gain and portray the reactions of the international community as escalatory. so how do you cope with that kind of a capability? i think one of the ways you can do that is through forward deterrence. and you have to do that with land forces. stand-up capabilities are important to national defenses we know that. but really it's land forces that ratchet up the cost at frontiers, for example, and to make it more palatable for russia to take that kind of action with unconventional forces under the cover of conventional forces. what we see with hybrid warfare is not just the deterrent value of land forces but i think what

you also see is the role of combined arms capabilities. a lot of people sometimes question the army, hey, why are you developing new combat vehicles, right? are you just trying to go back to the cold war? well, actually, paradoxically, those who say that are actually advocating for world war i capabilities really. if you want to go back to the era before combat vehicles. the western front is a good place to start in world war i. it's the combined arms capability. mobile protected firepower is important as a tool. along with special forces capabilities and conventional forces applied in combination. i think what russia has done is showed us what combined arms is again. you could actually say if you want to overstate it that russia is changing sort of the geostrategic landscape there with tanks right now. so there is a value in that kind of combined arms capability. and then i think what we have said in the army operating concept is our differential advantage in the army and in the

american joint force doesn't come with any one single capability, right? it comes with how we combine capabilities. our differential badge over the enemi enemies, the advanced technology is the element of our differtial advantage that is most easily transferrable our adversaries. as we know, china's been engaged in the largest theft of intellectual property in history. what is our advantage? our advantage combinations of capabilities employed to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative. combinations of technology with skilled soldiers and teams. so i think there's a lot you can draw from the recent experience in ukraine, and i think it highlights in large meshes the importance of land forces as part of the joint team and the importance of combined arms and joint capabilities. what we call in the army operating concept joint combined arms combinations. >> let me ask you a couple

personal questions which i think will help enrich the discussion. you've really had quite extraordinarily a range of combat experiences from being a troop commander to being on a very senior staff in afghanistan. it's really -- it is extraordinary. could you tell me let's say the top three lessons you've taken from your personal experience fighting this country's war in iraq and afghanistan. >> it's a great question. i think what those experiences have demonstrated to me again is really a point that i made earlier, is that there are really important continuities in the nature of war and whenever we try to do what carl van claus warned against, don't try to turn war into something that's alien to its nature, that's when we have problems. we have problems when we don't recognize the political, the human dimension of war, war is

uncertainty and war is a contest of wills. so i think an overall lesson, and it's a great question because i think the lessons that we learn from the wars in afghanistan and iraq will be as important as maybe the outcomes of those wars. i think we're at real risk of learning the wrong lessons. so i think the number one lesson is that we neglect the continuities and the nature of war in our peril. so for example, if you think about the very successful campaign in afghanistan in 2001 and our ability to empower in mujahadin era militias with our precision strike capabilities, our intelligence capabilities-w our intelligence capabilities, what we're able to do is achieve a military victory very quickly. but the military operations we conducted, the way we conducted military operations were not conducive maybe to consolidating those gains and getting to that sustainable political outcome. those mujahadin militias we empowered were able to essentially effect state capture

over nascent state institutions and functions that had to be rebuilt from the ground up because of the civil war from '92 to '96 because of the soviet occupation, because of the dismantlement of those institutions under the taliban. and so those militias then morphed into organized crime networks. you might call them criminalized patronage networks who pursued political agendas but also criminal agendas to consolidate power in a post-u.s. afghanistan. the activities they engaged in essentially were hollowing out the institutions we were trying to build. institutions critical to afghanistan being able to cope with the regenerative capacity of the taliban as they began to regenerate across the border in pakistan. so i think a lesson from afghanistan is that war is an extension of politics. you have to conduct military operations in a way that allows you to accomplish military objectives and consolidate the gains. in iraq a well-known story is not doing enough to allay the

concerns of the minority population, especially the sunni arab populations and doing things that in retrospect exacerbated the fears of those communities and set conditions really for the evolution of that conflict from a decentralized localized hybrid insurgency into a large-scale communal conflict and a humanitarian disaster and so forth. i think the number one lesson is that neglect the continuities of the nature of war at your peril. and whenever a new concept comes along, you know, like revolution in military affairs or defense transformation that promises fast, cheap, and efficient war in the future, we have to be very skeptical about that. the second thing, and this is a lesson i think that goes back to the gulf war and any combat experience that i've had in really all my colleagues in our army and marine corps in particular have had, is the human dimension of war and the psychological dimension of war

and the importance of training and leader development and the development of cohesive, confidence teams. right? this is important because again, to quote john keegan, who found all this tremendous continuity in battle-e said that war, battle is aimed at the disintegration of human groups. and so how do you build soldiers and units that can operate in environments of persistent danger and deal with all the difficulties you have to cope with, especially seeing fellow soldiers killed for example and being able to continue your mission. i think it's important for the american public to understand what it takes to build those capable cohesive confident teams. we undervalue that. i think one of the mysteries in recent months and years is don't worry about cutting the army because you know, you can just regrow it when you need it. right? i think what it does is it undervalues obviously the human dimension of war.

and war on land in particular and the importance of developing leaders over time. right? you have to develop these competencies across a career. you have to train under tough realistic conditions. you have to build into training all those things that happen in combat, right? you have bad information. you rush things in combat. you have to deal with casualties. so building that friction, that uncertainty into your training so that as we say in the army operating concept our forces are ready to win in a complex world, in environments of uncertainty, in environments of complexity, i think that's the second lesson that we have to really make sure we stay focused on really the moral, ethical, and psychological preparation of soldiers in units for combat. and we have to obviously inculcate into our units our army values, our ethos. when you're in these environments of persistent danger and ambiguity you have to make sure that you steel your soldiers against really what can

be an erosion of their moral character. and so that's the second big thing, i think, that i've learned and i think is relevant to future armed conflict. and then the third thing i think that we've all learned is the need for us to be able to operate effectively with multiple partners. right? so that these problems we're facing, isil, daesh, these are the enemies of all civilized people, right? these are people who want to impose medieval order. these are people who commit mass murder as their principal tactic in a war against all civilized peoples. it is the interest of civilization in these modern-day frontiers between barbarism and civilization that we be able to work together. and the think the conference in washington to counter violent extremism is extremely important. we have to be able to develop relationships with partners, other members of the civilized world, and to do that through

preparing our leaders, our army leaders to really -- to develop empathy for others. and then also to be able to engage in what we've called in the army, we've made this a competency for our leaders, cross-cultural negotiation and mediation. understanding people's interests. being able to map those interests to see the degree to which they're congruent with each other. to recognize that winning and prevailing in these sort of contests doesn't come from just capacity building, right? it's really understanding who you're working with, what their interests are, the degree to which their interests are congruent with yours, and then to be able to exert influence as well, to either alter behavior or to be able to convince people it's in our interest to take actions that are compatible with yours. we've made mistakes i think in sort of assuming that we're dealing with neutral state institutions and leaders, for example.

when we developed capacity for iraq during the time when the ministry was captured by shia militias and sulemani and the rgc were in sxharnlg this ministry and its forces had become party to a sectarian civil war and it helped create a humanitarian crisis of colossal scale. but not putting the politics in that human understanding at the center i think we inadvertently exacerbated the situation we talked about through 2006, for example. we have to operate with multiple partners but do it with our eyes open. we have to put interests and politics at the center of those engagements. i think those are three big lessons. >> okay. last question before we throw it open. again, a little bit unorthodox. could you tell us the three figures who have most influenced your understanding of war and to some extent the nature of military leadership?

>> gosh. well, there are so many. there are so many great historians. there are so many great, i mean, leaders. i would say that from combat leadership in terms of leading soldiers to close with and destroy an enemy in close combat, general ernest harmon is one of my heroes, who commanded the second armored division in world war ii. >> tell us more about him. >> he was a cavalry man, maybe not surprising based on my background, but he made the transition from horse cavalry to preautomotive revolution in a very fassel way because he was imaginative, he understood continuities and changes, changing the character of conflict. and he was an extremely effective combat commander because he was very much attuned to the human dimension of war. so in fact he said the most important thing in combat is leadership. he said the most important thing you can do as a leader is put leaders in positions of

leadership. he wrote a great document, and i think it ought to be more widely available. i know you can probably get it on the internet. i've got a copy if you're interested. notes on combat actions in tunisia and north africa. so another great thing about harmon is he learned and learned from combat in north africa and he wrote this paper and sent it out to his colleagues and other infantry divisions and armored divisions so they could benefit from what he learned in north africa prior to the d-day invasions. and if you go through that document i used that document to prepare our cavalry troop for operations in desert storm. some fundamental things, right? he said army units are like a good football team or you could say rugby team since we're at iss. he says a good team knows about eight plays and they use these plays in combination. so battle drills, right? rehearsed responses to a predictable set of circumstances in combat is what battle drills are. these are fundamental things,

right? fire and maneuver. he said combat in the desert is sort of like naval -- these are things that informed our preparation in 1991, written in 1942, 1943. so ernest harmon is i think one those guys. i'm trying to pick people that may not be as obvious. i think in terms of political military leadership obviously george marshall. and i think that he set the example in terms of civil military relations and civil control of the military. scholar of civil military relations knows this much better than i do. but i think he set a tremendous example for military officers to understand what your duty is and also what your duty is not. it's your job to give your best military advice but it's not your job to advocate for policy, right? because nobody likes generals to make policy. and this is the key lesson to

not cross that line between advice and advocacy. it's a blurry line. it's hard to distinguish. but i think in terms of professional responsibility and adhering to civil control of the military george marshall. >> how about intrepidity, imaginative leadership, bold action? you know, it's presidents day weekend. george washington. right? george washington i think is underappreciated as a leader. i think if you just read david hackett fisher's book you get an appreciation for how he saw possibilities and opportunities which i think is a very important quality for a military leader when others only saw difficulties. right? and i think that's because he had also been a student of war and warfare. he obviously had an experience during the french and indian wars. but he really developed his

ability to lead by reading and thinking. so i think across all three of these leaders is a commitment to learning the profession and studying war as sir michael howard said to study it, in width, depth, and context. so one of the things we're emphasizing in our army obviously is inculcating in our leaders a desire for lifelong learning and for reading and thinking about -- think about how arrogant it would be if you don't do that. essentially you're saying all i need is my personal experience and i'll be able to figure out any wartime situation. of course not. you have to read and think and learn continuously to be a true professional in our military and in our army. >> wonderful answer. okay. why don't we move to questions? we'd ask you to be concise. if you could identify yourself and institutional affiliation, and i believe we'll be passing microphones around. the gentleman over there. >> thank you. i'm leon weintraub.

i'm retired from the u.s. foreign service. sir, you mentioned not only achieving a military win over the enemy but also consolidating gains. along the lines of consolidation i wonder if you could discuss the issue which i believe is somewhat controversial about expanding the iraqi army and the debaathification under ambassador bremer that's been written about a lot. i'm sure you've heard about it a lot more than i have. i wonder if you could make a comment on that action. >> well, these are mistakes that are very clear in retrospect. and i would call them mistakes. there are no easy solutions in iraq. obviously if you were to recall too much of the army, for example, you could have exacerbated the fears of certain elements of the shia community and especially the expatriates who were coming back into the country after the collapse of the regime and maybe that could have led to other problems and so forth. so there were no easy solutions. but i do think if you look at sort of policy decisions in the

immediate military victory over the hussein regime or collapse of that regime, that in retrospect it seems we were trying to make it as hard on ourselves as we could. and that's involving the decision not to recall portions of the army. of course and not recognizing that the vast -- 60% of the army was shia to begin with. that this was a symbol of national identity. to recognize war is fear, honor, and interest. i would say fear, sense of honor. so not recall portions of the army was a violation of sort of the sense of honor of iraqi and arab nationalists to a certain extent. and then helped this localized decentralized hybrid insurgency coalesce over time. other decisions involving severe debaathification not only within the army but outside the army exacerbated that problem. as did i think other decisions such as the makeup of the

interim governing council and so forth. so i think whenever we don't put politics in the center of a conflict and understand what is the political objective we want to achieve and have a political strategy to get there, i think that was what we were able to achieve in the rewrite of the iraqi campaign plan, to catch up to the evaluation of this conflict in 2007. we were able to do it because we had david pierce, a colleague of yours, who's now an ambassador to greece. he had done the iraq study group project which was, as we know, largely -- it was given the attention maybe it should have been given, right? in 2003. and then he and ambassador robert ford and toby dodge of iss wrote the political strategy. and then wrote a diplomatic strategy to deal with because these conflicts, there are internal political dynamics and

external political dynamics and you have to address both, right? to be able to move them to the sustainable outcome consistent with your interests. the key is asking the right questions up front. what is the nature of the conflict, what are our vital interests at stake, what are the political objectives, what is the political strategy, which by 2007 became then to move toward political accommodation and to do that by establishing some mediating mechanisms that will allow us to influence that from the bottom up and from the top down. and then to develop indigenous mediating mechanisms over time to get to that political accommodation between iraq's communities that will remove support for both the shia islamic militias and al qaeda in iraq and its associates. then everything was subordinated to that. the military strategy was then to go after the so-called irreconcilables. and those if you take the negotiation mediation theory, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, you know, was we're going to kick your ass

militarily. so it would help move communities toward that political accommodation, and then of course the other element of the military strategy was to get people to stop shooting each other because it's tough to come to an accommodation when you're shooting at each other. so it was to break the cycle of violence, to work on local cease-fires, and so then it also drove our security force assistant efforts, how we're going to do development, our information and communications efforts were all subordinated to a political strategy. so i think that was one of the key lessons, to get back to eliot's question earlier, and i would say that we did make mistakes early in the iraq war that in many ways made it as hard on us as we could make it. >> the gentleman over there. i think you're about to get the microphone. >> steven donahue from mclarty associates. would you talk a little more about how the army is preparing

its soldiers in the transition from combat operations to the peace-time army if there is such a thing so that they don't lose their morale, they maintain their proficiency, and just -- and also how we're helping our allies think about that in their own forces. >> great points. and of course you know, we were anticipating obviously a post-war period, right? even just a year ago, a little bit over a year ago. and if you look at what has occurred since that time, we mentioned russia and its actions earlier, i think we see that i think everybody recognizes that it's narcissistic to think if you leave a war it stops, that in fact wars continue even after you leave. if you leave a movie in the middle the movie's still playing. so i think we've seen that dynamic in iraq and we're

anticipating a continued contested environment in afghanistan although i think there have been some very promising developments there regionally and with the change in national leadership there. so i think -- what i think our army recognizes, and i think it's important to recognize this outside the army, is that demands on land forces in a post-war period tend to go up historically. so we're in a period now where we see our army getting smaller, i think dramatically smaller, but the demand for land forces is going up. so we have about 150,000 soldiers deployed overseas now in a broad range of roles in iraq as you know and in afghanistan. but also deployed -- we've been successful as a joint force in preventing great power conflict for over 70 years that's been due in large measure to our forces positioned overseas. so we're engaged in a broad role of activities with special

operations forces and conventional forces in 120 countries right now for our army. so i think this anticipation of a period of peace and lack of engagement by land forces may be premature to say the least. so in terms of keeping our leaders challenged and engaged in that i think we see a number of challenges with which our soldiers and leaders are engaged across the globe. the other thing i will tell you, though, is we are endeferring to institutionalize the lessons of the last 13 years of war. and i think our army's done a pretty good job of this in terms of our doctrine, in terms of what we've learned about combat leadership, our philosophy of mission command, right? which is your decentralized operations based on mission orders, and we recognize that to deal with complexity, these kind of complex environments we need

trust up and down our chain of command. so if anybody's looking for a challenge, if anybody's looking to serve something bigger than yourselves, sign up for the u.s. army. and i think what you see is you see soldiers and leaders who are continuing to extend their service because they are aware of not just the demands on them that service place but also the less tangible rewards of service. and what are those? i think these are underappreciated by society sometimes and this is something we have to communicate more effectively. i think they come with being part of something bigger than yourself. to feel you can make a contribution to efforts that are important so i think the future of all community. and i think we can see that dramatically today and across the greater middle east, for example. and i think you also are then part of a team.

you're part of the team where the man or woman next to you is willing to give everything including their life next to you. there are tremendous rewards of service that obviously you don't really become aware of until you're part of that kind of military organization that really takes on the qualities of a family. i think as leaders we have to maintain those bonds of trust with our subordinates and leaders. we have to challenge them. soldiers typically join the army because they. it to be hard. typically they're disappointed when it's not. army does a great job challenging and bringing out the best in our young men and women. i think the reports of a period of peace during which people are going to become bored, disinterested, going back to sort of peace time like rock painting or whatever it is, it's not going to happen. i don't think it's going to happen. and i can't see it happening in the foreseeable future anyway.

>> all the way in the back. >> bud mcfarland. general, thanks very much for your service. in all of our conflicts in the last 40 years. and for your vision and originality of thought. i wonder if i could ask you to comment on stability in asia and how to preserve it. deterrence, resolution of disputes peacefully, and how you see the role of the army in that. >> yes, sir. well, thank you for that question, sir. as you know, that we have 55,000 soldiers committed to the pacific theater, which is the largest of any theaters, bigger than central command. so there's this idea that with the shift in emphasis to the pacific suddenly the army's interested. the army's always been in the pacific, as we know, at least

since the post -- really preworld war 1 era. i guess post-philippines war. we've been involved in the pacific. and i think we'll continue to play a vitally important role. what does the army do in the theater security architecture of the pacific and maintaining really the security order that has led to the global economy that we've all benefited from and the security of countries in asia have benefited in free trade and stability in asia. well, i think it's going to be analogous to what we've done in the past. the army provides foundational capabilities. in the army operating concept we say we're the foundation of the joint force. and what that means is the army provides multiple options to the president and secretary of defense across all theaters. what does that mean? that means theater logistics capabilities, ballistic missiles defense, intelligence capabilities, communications capabilities. but also what we provide is

really a tangible and credible commitment of the united states of america, as you know better than anybody, the role of land forces in establishing and maintaining security. i mentioned the key role in northeast asia for army forces. but i think what you see is that applies broadly throughout the region. i think in particular working through partners in asia and the dominant military service in our partner countries is the army. and so i think that that is a vitally important role. army forces conduct what we call regional engagement and regional aligned forces to develop the capability of our problems, to work on interoperability. and also to send a clear message to powers in asia who would want to establish a hedgemonic order

that would restrict freedom of trade and commerce or coerce our partners in the region that it's not worth it. that there's an alternative path which is a path of not confrontation, and continuing to benefit from the economic order for which american security has provided a foundation. we also think in terms of military capabilities for a theater like the pacific where you really rely on freedom of movement and action in the air, space, maritime, and increasingly cyberspace domains, that army forces play an important role for the fundamental reason that we live on land obviously and any problems that manifest themselves in the maritime, air, space domains originate on land to begin with. as technology is transferred to other countries or other countries who steal the technological capabilities, who can then challenge what has been now sort of multidecade

dominance in those fluid domains, i think it's going to be increasingly important for army forces to have the capability to conduct what we call expeditionary maneuver. expeditionary maneuver is the deployment of forces into unexpected locations with the appropriate combinations of mobility, protection, and lethality. to defeat an enemy organization and establish control of territory, to deny its use to the enemy, to secure populations and to consolidate gains. but increasingly to project power outward from land into the maritime, air, and space domains tone sure movement and action of our joint forces. and so restrict use of those domains by our enemies. we spend a lot worrying about this obviously and the office of net assessment and other think tanks in the region -- in d.c. have worked on this, how we develop and answer that. i think the army plays a very

important role as part of the joint force in that. from a military operations perspective i think the term i would use is expeditionary maneuver and i think maneuver's important. i think when we look at theaters oftentimes we tend to look at potential military operations as a big targeting exercise. and we reduce war to a bunch of targets that we then engage with standout capabilities. and what we fail to recognize is what is important in coercing an enemy or -- thomas schilling identified this decades ago. is you need to have available a brute force option. standout capabilities without land power capabilities leave decisions in the hands of an adversary. land force capabilities play a complementary roll to the joint force standout capabilities because you demonstrate commitment and you're also able

to do positive things on land. those positive things can be bolstering the capabilities of allies as i mentioned developing their capability and so forth. i see the army as today having a very important role in asia in terms of theater security architecture. and as i mentioned, it's the largest commitment of soldiers abroad, of any theater. and i see it maybe growing in importance depending on the behavior of other powers in the region and the threats that they pose to international security and to our partners and allies. >> thank you very much. and thanks for a fantastic brief. as always, just fascinating to hear you speak. and very humbling to hear your perspectives and experience. my name's david uco, i'm an associate professor at cisa, the

national defense university. my question relates to the institutionalization of capabilities. it strikes me that the army has learned many hard-won lessons in the last 10, 15 years of operations and in so doing have had to rely on various ad hoc mechanisms to fill enduring capabilities gaps. we can think of the human terrain teams or even the provisional reconstruction teams. and also the capabilities required to advise and assist and really mentor security forces and host nations. i was wondering, we're not going back from an era of warfare, as you rightfully have pointed out, but in the aftermath of what we call the iraq and operations, what efforts have been made to institutionalize some of the capabilities needed within the army? how do you see those efforts progressing? at the sam time the army's being shrunk. >> i'm going to dow give a fairly brief answer because we're running up on 11:30.

is that a hard stop? it's a somewhat flexible stop. i'm going to throw one more question at you after you answer this one. >> it's a great question. the army's done quite a bit. adaptation in conflict will always outpace the institution's ability to sort of absorb and make permanent some of those adaptations. the institutional army is catching up. to those hardwoman lessons. but our doctrine has changed. what's the implications of that across all our manuals. in the army our brigade manual which is an important manual has new chapters. the first is on understanding the environment. understanding the conflict. understanding the local dynamics within a particular area. we used to think if you go back to the old days, you see yourself, the enemy in context of the terrain, i've got it. no, it's also in context of the human dynamics and the political dynamics and the cultural and ideological and religious and so

forth, and tribal dynamics. so we've institutionalized that in our doctrine. we've also institutionalized it in our training. and in the tasks and competencies we develop in our leaders. so our army has come one an army leader development strategy that emphasizes language and religion and culture and that kind of understanding from the very beginning, from precommissioning all the way through to kernel, once you become part of the problem and you're hard wired. so we get that going early in leaders' careers, and for non-commissioned officers as well. so leader development is a huge aspect of all of this. a lot of those include resiliency training and training for advanced cognition and to be able to identify the presence or absence of advanced wires training. that's all institutionalized now in programs and instruction. sought first manifestation of

all of this is these are sort of add-ons. now they're integrated into all of our training, into our scenarios and our educational opportunities. our training environments. we have an organization called the training brain operation center. how cool is that, right? the tboc. basically what this operation does, the tboc is it takes big data from conflicts and klattifies it and genericizes it and unclassifies it. applies it to different terrain and simulations. and now we have the rich texture of a complex environment and all that data that feeds into our exercises as well. we see this in our combat training centers. we're not going to go back on this. some people say we need to go back to the basics. we need to go back to fighting wars as we would like to fight them. rather than as they are. no. we're not going to do that. so i think we've made great strides in ensuring that we institutionalize a lot of our lessons in leader competencies and leader development, in

training and doctrine and organization as well. i think with the changes to our brigade and other organizations. so it's a work in progress. i think we're getting better all the time. the one thing i would highlight in the army operating concept and ask you to read it is, just one of the perks of coming to iss, there are some free copies in the back. but the -- in here we've also established a framework for learning. the army learns enthusiastically but oftentimes not with a lot of finesse. and so an ability maybe to organize what we've learned, right? we have all these lessons, right? how do we combine these lessons into a body of knowledge that we can use to improve our capabilities? so what we've said is we know we're going to be wrong about future war. sir michael howard said no matter how hard you try you're going to be off the mark. the key is not to be so far off the mark you can't adjust as the demands of real conflict are revealed to you. ask the right questions. so in the army operating concept we've asked 20 first order questions, the answers to which will improve current and future

force combat effectiveness. the first of those is one you alluded to in your question, which is how to develop and sustain a high degree of situational understanding against adaptive enemies in complex environments. now, we're never going to solve with our multinational partners, with our civilian partners in state and aid. i mean, then we can -- we can really advance our -- our capability in that area. that's what we have done to institutionalize. we have a framework for learning. we have venues for learning which we are calling force 2025 maneuvers, that is all of our war gaming, but also practical experience, it is exercises, multinational exercises, interoperability work ber doing and a police to put all this, right, and work together athe relevant communities to develop training, personnel, facilities,

integrated solutions, interim solutions to those problems. and so, i'm really excited this. something our chief of staff has driven. so you talk about innovation, the buzz word these days. it ought to be, right? we want to innovate. what we have said is innovation, a tenet in our army operating concept. innovation is turning ideas or experiences, as you're alluding to, into valued outcomes, right? not just having an idea, turning into a valued outcome, a qualitative aspect to it but a temporal dimension. we say in the army, we have to innovate vast enough to stay ahead of determined and adaptive enemies. we are endef attorney general try to adapt faster and innovate bet we are a high degree of clarity. and i'm excited about -- to be a part of that effort in our army. >> let me ask you the last question. understanding the politics is uncertain and warfare even more so. still, if you had to guess, what

are the way -- the ways in which you think the next war will actually be very different from iraq and afghanistan? >> okay. well, all right, here's some of the things i'm concerned about in terms of keeping pace with changes in the character of warfare, i would say. so, what would be different? i think what we are seeing is we are seeing our enemies emulate what we have seen as our differential advantages. so, our enemies really do four things, i think, four things we have to consider that are changes in the character of warfare. the first thing they are going to do as i mentioned, avoid our cape pits, right? so on land, you know, you have tens of thousands of so-called targets, not targets on land, they are people and all of them are trying to avoid being classified as such, right? so, we have to consider the counter measures that we have seen adopted now and i think we have seen harbingers of future conflict in what we see today and that is business persian, could be sealment, intermingle with civilian population and evade our cape pits, we have to

be prepared for. this our network strike capabilities, our communications capabilities, our depend dense on certain sort of technological advantages i think are going to be at risk. we think our enemies are going to emulate our cape pits, this is one of the things i'm concerned about, right? access to commercial satellite imagery, unmanned aerial systems, right, and swarm capabilities associated with autonomous and autonomous systems, long-range missile cape pits.

i think this is a tremendous offensive capability by potential enemies an nag douse to the v 1 and v 2 threat to world war one and two, scud missile threat to 1991, israel and rocket threat lebanon, israel or the rocket threat out of gas florida. and i think what we are going to see increasingly is enemies using these long-range missile capabilities in urban areas, restrictive terrain, going to demand joint force answer to this, right? what was the answer to v 1, v 2 threat, the answer to the scud misle? >> wasn't just standoff capabilities. enemies got to be prepared to contribute to through expedit n expeditionary maneuver capabilities. and i think our enemies are going to expand to other battle grounds as they have already. this is the patel ground of political subversion, the connection of our ennoise transnational organized crime networks. again, we see harbingers of this

already. we need better integration of civilian interorganizational capabilities, right, threat if is going to be more important than ever. i think -- i think the ability to intergreat law enforcement with military operations, we need to ramp that up, right? along the lines of what treasury does, treasury's limited in their capacity, i think an example what we can do from an interdepartmental perspective. i think what we have to do, we have to be able to get better at defeating enemy organizations through the road range of cape pits that come with all of the elements of national power and organized to do that. so, we have to look at these organizations and analyze them based on who they are, what they are trying to achieve, what is their strategy to achieve it? then we have to map these networks, right, in terms of nodes and the net abortion and the roles, but see flows through these networks internationally of people, money, weapons, often narcotics and other -- other commodities.

if we have a name and address and they are a threat, we can deal with that. but how about other authorities we can bring to bear? law enforcement authorities, you know, extra territorial jurisdiction, you know, and authorities that we can be brought to bear, travel bans, visa denials, you know, targeted economic sanctions, and so i recommend the book "treasury's war" is extremely good.

sheema keen done great bork. transparency national does great work on it. how do we go after these networks? ultimate question we ask, what are the sources of strength for the networks and what are their vulnerabilities? these groups so-called supposed to be religious groups, i think they are criminal, not only pause they commit mass murder of innocent people, but pause they relied on criminality for their source of strength and for their funding and ability to mobilize resources. so i see greater threats. i see greater threats to international security that emerge from these sort of high pride organizations and i see great demands on our forces because what we have seen in the past is our asymmetrical advantages may not be our advances, so we have to work more effectively as a joint team to counter enemies who take -- who evade our capabilities, who disrupt our capabilities, who expand on to those other battle grounds and emulate our

capabilities. >> you described a pretty daunting world. i will just say, speaking for myself, but i think for a lot of other people as well, i'm glad you are one of the people who is going to be living the army through it. so, thank you very much. >> thanks.