sitting next to me, lieutenant j.r. mcmaster, he has a ph.d. in history and is at the same time incredibly distinguished practitioner. he came to public attention during the gulf war in 1991, when he commanded an armored cal vary copy at the battle of '73 easting, where he routed a much larger iraqi tank force and this became textbook study in new forms of armored warfare. 1997 he pushed a book that was based on his ph.d. dissertation called "der reliks of duty." 2004 he was the commander of u.s. forces in iraq where he was able to achieve success against

insurgents at a time where very few americans were actually succeeded in that regard. he spent time in afghanistan, 2010, took charge of the international coalition, anti-corruption task force and he's now at the army capabilities integration center where he is in charge of planning army capabilities for future conflict as we go forward. he's done a lot of other great things, in the interest of time i'll leave it at that summary. i would like to introduce, turn it over to lieutenant general mcmaster. >> what a privilege it is to be with all of you. how many history majors are here? i want to know -- there is still some people to convert maybe. i thought maybe it was just going to be an audience of fellow historians, all of whom are talking about how underappreciated we are, you know. but i think this is such a great idea. i mean, the idea of a center for military and diplomatic history, for all the reasons that mark

identified, so what i thought i might do is talk about how i think the center can really help us, make us better, better at defending our nation in particular, better at anticipating, the demands of national security and then crafting a national security strategy to address really threats that we see or that are growing. threats that are growing to our nation, and i think all civilized people's today. so i will try to be super brief here. what i would really like to do is see where you want to take the discussion and hear your ideas and thoughts as well. but this is important, right. this is an important center, and from our perspective in the army, in the joint force in our military, because thinking clearly about diplomacy and security is fundamental, not only to protecting our vital interests and conflict, but also ensuring that our military is prepared, prepared to respond to threats to national and international security.

and to be able to, as mark alluded to already, to resolve crises at the lowest possible cost. in lives and blood and treasure. thinking about future war is often neglected. or it's just done superficially. remember the orthodoxy of the revolution in military affairs in the 1990s, a lot of you are probably too young for that. in the 1990s, it became conventional wisdom, future war was going to be great, cheap, efficient. wage war like the george -- leave on a high note after doing really cool military stuff. so it didn't acknowledge wars enduring political nature. the fact that people fight for the same reasons, 2500 years ago, fear, hon are and interest. it didn't acknowledge wars interactive nature, zlfr the interrent uncertainty of war. remember the language dominant

battle space knowledge, you could find it on the internet, it has its own wikipedia page. shock and awe, read the four conditions we were going to be able to achieve in future war. one was total control of everything. and so it didn't even acknowledge any kind of agency or control over the future course of events by one's enemies or adversaries. our ability to prevail, strategically and at peace in war in particular depends on as you heard from the senator, knowing who we are, right. and knowing our values. so some particularly in ack dame i can't don't want to study war, in part because they confuse the study of war with advocacy of it. what we ought to do is think about, i was thinking about war and conflict the way that

raymond bradbury thought about it. when he finished writing this novel, he was interviewed and the interviewer said to him, are you trying to predict the future? he said, no, i'm trying to prevent it. so unless we can think clearly about future war, we'll be unable to deter conflict. but others neglect, as i mentioned, continuity in the nature of war and focus almost exclusively on social or tech any logical -- it's the neglect of diplomatic and military history that per petiates deficiencies and understanding which in turn then can make war more likely. so what is lacking sorely today i believe, is depth of understanding. we achieve new heights of superficial, in our discussion of what is going on in the world and what we might do about it. in recent years many of the difficulties encountered in

strategy i can -- have stemmed from shallow or thawed thinking, enabled by the abject neglect of history. i hope this center will help policymakers and civilian and military leaders overcome the tyranny of the daily crisis, when you are thinking about and reading history you are freeing your mind from the day to day chores and engaging a subject more deeply. but i also think it will help serve as a corrective to wishful thinking that makes the future appear much easier, and fundamentally different from the past. so what the center will help us do is to go beyond what we should think about particular issues, but i think with a huge contribution is going to be helping us understand better how

to think. and so what can the center do in particular in terms of how to think about problems. and i think that first of all, to -- it will help us understand better how to do what was suggested we do. take what seems fused, big problems and then break them down into their constituent elements, to engage problems we're dealing with now, right. dice for isis or terrorists and engage it on its own terms and recognize the complexity of these problem sets. also just how to ask the right questions. asking first order questions, sometimes we got to skip that stage, you know. let's do bombing, this or that, right we confuse activity with progress, because we don't properly frame the problem. what is the nature or character of this conflict. what is driving the conflict.

who are our enemies and add very rares, what is their strategy. i mean, sometimes we skip right in, what is the enemy organization, how are they disposed and how do we go after them, for example. how to understand events and circumstances on their own terms, how to trace events. how to apply inner disciplinary approach that includes an throw apology, literature, fillis fee and science. and then as mark mentioned how to think in time, consistent with the historian carl becker's observation, that the memory of the past and anticipation of the future should go hand in hand in a friendly way. without disputing over priority and leadership. so whenever somebody taubz to you about the deep future or leap ahead capabilities run for

the exits. something crazy is coming right after that. you know. and i think what we really need is a grounded projections into the near future, a focus on solving real problems, addressing real threats. real add ser varryes in real geo graphic areas. we learn the military countries that are prepared to either prevent or respond to crisis are those who think clearly about the problem in future war in that grounded war. who think about it as the ancient greeks said, think about ourself as walking backward into it, paying attention to what is going on today and what has gone on in the past as a way to think about the future. so without the depth of understanding that history provides, the center will help provide, we'll remain vulnerable to what we have to always quote whenever we can, the 19th century philosopher of war warned against, the tendency to regard war as something autonomous rather than an instrument of policy.

misunderstanding the kind of war in which we're embarking and turn it into something that is alien to war's very nature. in short, this center, and the history that the center promotes is important because i think it can provide a strong anecdote to future folly. so this is why historians have to make a special effort. i think be unabashed about connecting historical knowledge and understanding to contemporary strategy i can and operational problems. we have to be humble about that. historians should be particularly humble about that and qualify analogies, we must help think about concrete contemporary or emerging problems. so applying history to understanding the problems of today and tomorrow is just as important for citizens, though, as it is for diplomats and

offense officials x i'm glad this is a public forum, i think that the center reaching out to our citizens is going to be particularly important because citizens have to possess a fundamental understanding of war, and of warriors if they're to remain connected to those who fight in their name and if they're to hold our governments, our governments accountable for decisions involving killing and the prospect of death. and if society is disconnected from an understanding of war or is disconnected from that society's warriors, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain just the fundamental requirements of military effectiveness. or to recruit young men and women into military service. so the connection between our military and our society is something that we might focus on as well. as necessary to preserve the -- that permits service men and woman that see themselves as part of a community, and a

covenant that biends them to one another and binds them to the society that they serve. absent a fundamental understanding of war and what it takes to fight it, popular culture cheapens. it further separates warriors, often portrayed as flawed, fragile or traumatized human beings from their fellow citizens. the historian and the sensitivity to the limits of reasoning by historical analogy are important to preserve. historians must engage on contemporary issues. so this conference, the work of this center is important because unless we access history in a purposeful way, it's lessons will, as the great historian becker warned, lay inert in unread books. i'm looking forward to see where you would like to take the conversation, what a privilege it is to be with you.

thanks. >> well, thank you, h.r. for those terrific remarks, a few more points to my mind. you talked about taking a time to free your mind. that is kind of one of the things we're trying to do is just get in with a senior person, actually sort of a role model for our project is one of our board members, i met him in 2007, he was working on iraq and they had an idea that they were thinking of and it was in relation to what was going on in vietnam, they brought me into the pentagon to talk to him and other senior officials and i think it had some value to them and obviously i count give them all the answers, that was of value and it's easy to get caught up in the crisis of the day that it's valuable that way. you talked about complexity, i think that is one of the

advantages of history and historians, i think the social sciences in many respects and not all of them, but many of them, oversimplify things, especially when they try to quantify things or come up with grand theories and history makes you understand how complex things are that things are non linear, that you actually need to spend a lot of time studying something before you can really understand it. you also raise the point about inner disciplinary work and we do actually support things that are beyond pure history. i have actually written a couple books that are sort of in the political science realms. you are taking a subject, how -- you maybe take five different administration, look at their history for trends in certain areas. speaking of disciplinary, another thing came to mind, recently read a book "super forecasting."

it's a pretty interesting book. the book looks at forecasting

and -- it grew out of an earlier work that found that experts you see on tv don't really predict anythings any better than anyone else, they just say things better. you talked a little about future, maybe if you could talk a little more how your historical sense or historical knowledge makes you think about future, because you obviously in your position can't say we don't know anything. how do you think through that? >> thank you. so i think the first way that we think through it is we acknowledge the continuity in the nature of war, these are the continuities that make war that howard observed. wars resemble each other more than they resemble any other human activity. so if you acknowledge what makes war different, which is its for political outcomes, political nature, the human drivers of conflict, the interactive nature of war, it's a contest of wills for example, it helps you resist simplistic analogies like some of those in the 1990s. some had to do with law and computing power equals fundamental change in war, for example.

so it helps you understand continuities. of course the character of war is always evolving and changing. so what we do is we really look at four key elements. we look through this four considerations as we look to future armed conflict. the first is threats, enemies and adversaries in the operating environment. to make a ground pd -- to see threats to national security. we don't have to be super imaginative these days, unfortunately, so we're concerned obviously with the two powers on the land mass, russia and china, who are engaged in, you might say a form midtive war for collapsing the post world war ii order and replace it with one more sympathetic to their interests.

they are pursuing a very sophisticated strategy that combines the use of unconventional force under the cover of conventional sources and involves a -- economic actions and political subversion and so forth. so this is one threat set to look at. both of those militaries are modernizing their militaries and russia has been -- so we're watching that very carefully, we're looking at russian capabilities and emerging capabilities to see what our gaps are and understand better what our strengths are relative to them so we can preserve and accentuate those strengths. the threats -- i think we obviously look closely at north korea. it's difficult to overstate the threat from north korea. iran, whob waging a proxy war against us since 1979 and then terrorist protostate in the

middle east is representative of terrorist organizations striving to take control of resources, as we look at these, but also recognize that these problems are completely disconnected from each other. they'll continuously calculate their actions and pay attention to where they might see opportunities associated with the effect that others are having on us and our interests. but what is common across all of these conflicts that we see and potential conflicts is their about population and resources. we see common across these are potential enemies take four kind of, they do four things, that are common. first thing is they try to evade what they see as our strengths. we have to understand our enemies are not going to be the passive recipients of our

military pro wes, they'll engage in counteractions traditional simple ones, they'll disrupt our capabilities, come after what they see as our network capability with sophisticated cyber and warfare kale built, concerned about our air power, russia's established air supremacy over ukraine from the ground. so these are the kind of things common across different adversaries and enemies. the third is they will especially euiate. china engaged in intellectual threat in history. the most transfer able to our enemies, and finally expand on the other battlegrounds, propaganda, district information, political subversion, criminality and so forth. what we have to do to sure our interest. the third is technology, changes

in technology, also understanding from a historical measure there is countermeasures, sub marine, radar, machine gun tank, tank missile, understanding that interaction within technology, enemy technology, our technology to gain advantage. and finally the fourth lens we look at. we can learn so much obviously from what is going on today in conflicts we are still involved in. i was -- you hear this, what is it like to be in this post war period, man, what post war period you talking about. so we're learning a lot from -- french operations in -- or israeli combat operations in gaz i can't or lebanon in 2006, so learning from what is going on that we see around the world today is important. ukraine obviously is -- and russian operations in syria, things we're paying particular attention to.

that is how we -- that's the framework we think through. what we try to do is lay a strong conceptual foundation based on that thinking for mod rnization. based on that understanding, then we describe how army forces in the future will have to be prepared to fight or fight how they would fight to secure our nation and our vital interest as part of the joint force with multinational partners, with civilian agencies and others. so that is the description of how we have to fight in the future. that is in highly readable army concept. in time to take to the ski slopes with you. there is a whole family of consents soc waited with that foundation and the latest is something called multidomain battle. based on that conceptual foundation we have to identify what are the required capabilities and then we learn through seminars, experimentation, war gaming and we learn through a framework

called the war fighting challenges, these are 21st order questions, the answers to which will inform future force development. so it is an effort to learn in a focused, sustained and collaborative manner, not to learn, you know, repetitively or eped soically. in the army we get enthusiastic about things, what about robots man, if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing in the army. so the problem is then we'll forget about that and go on to something else. like kids soccer, right. so counterusa. the key is we have to learn under this framework on a -- in a sustained manner and then we have to analyze what we're learning effectively and bridge an implementation. i think there's a role for history in each of these phases, right, so what do we read, well, we're reading history to understand better contemporary

conflicts and the threats. you know, we're reading the history of technology and interactions between technology and organizations and doctrine and so forth. so we have some work that is seminal in this area, the book that dealt with mcgrog other nox and -- lot of great literature on technology. a lot of literature on militaries that did innovate and learn effectively and those that didn't. there is work on comparing the french and ger mans. i could go on and on. the history of how we got weapon systems, the king of the killing fields. so we -- everything we do, we have wane lee from the university of north carolina coming to our organization tomorrow, to talk about history and history of the waging war

and how to think about changes in the character of warfare, so just a quick, it's not a quick synopsis. >> i will ask one more question then we'll open up to the audience. one of the first historians we had two months ago was brian lynn, he has a new book out "elvis army," in the book he looks at the army in the '50s and makes the point that a lot of the transformation that we hear now in the -- are actually similar to what was being said in the 1950s and they ran into a problem ultimately that tech nomgy they wanted to introduce surpassed the capabilities of the military because you did not have sufficiently educated work force within the military. there is certainly lots of talk these days about personnel

especially trying to find innovative personnel. where would you say the army is right now in terms of human resources and what further steps would you advice the army to make? >> so this is a big area of focus for us. and we say in the army operating concept, in appendix c, it's awesome, wait until you get to that. you will be like what is going to happen next, right. so we say our differential advantage comes from combinations of resilient well trained sold dwrerz and cohesive teams and adoptive leaders with technology. that's our differential advantages, we're at pages every day to say we don't man equipment, we equip the man or woman. so the key thing for us is from the beginning to be sure we're cognizant of how that technology actually applies to the problem

of war and warfare, i think the warfare challenges help us do that and we also understand how to integrate that into an organization that will apply it. we have a rigorous experimentation program, where we get that in the hands of soldiers very early. where there is one called the maneuver and fires experiment at fort sill there is a cyber equivalent we do in new jersey, so i think that getting that equipment in then allows soldiers to see how they would apply it and then it gets feedback to industry and it informs our requirements. for example, we're about to buy and field a unmanned system that is about this big, it fits in a pocket, and has a significant amount of rang so that before you cross the street in an urban area or where a machine gun

might be covering, you can send this soldier borne sensor out and you have a real time downlink from the sensor. now, the tactics for employing there where it could be distributed and then also some of the design changes came from early experimentation. so for example, it wasn't very good in the wind, so i got to fly to fort benefitting a few years ago, it went up and blew back against the wall, that is fixed now. so i think that getting the technology in and seeing how it applies helps. the second thing is to try to simplify things. and you know, there is a great book called "men, machine and modern time." in the book he said that man has succeeded in creating these machines to help tame his natural environment but in doing so has created an artificial environment that is far more complex than the natural

environment ever was. so i think can we get to the point -- we stress getting to the point where we're integrating technology to simply things for soldiers. the iphone, in to wative, easy to use. then of course it's training and education and bringing in you know, the best soldiers we can, the best men and women in our society. i think that there is an untapped desire to serve in our country. and so what i would like to see is more young men and women volunteering to serve increasing the pool of candidates so we can become even more selective and we are pretty selective already who comes into our army and armed forced and i think we have to do a better job of attracting them by communicating the rewards of service which are less tangible and visible than

the sacrifices and the difficulties of service. you know, long separations, hardships, obviously the physical risk, the loss of comrades, and so forth. so -- but those rewards are being part of something bigger than yourself, being part of a team in which the man or woman next to you is willing to give everything, including their own life to you, where else do you have that rewarding experience in an organization that takes on the quality of a family. and then i think that we ought to stress more that our soldiers are warriors but they're also humanitarians, they're humanitarians because we are confronting the enemies of all civilized people with these groups. but the -- they're humanitarians because they're taking action to protect innocence from this kind of brutality. so i think that we can do a

better job in attracting more in. there is -- there is a 1958 "look" magazine article, i think it's 1958, and jonathan shy is featured in the article, he is a captain who is leaving, you could have changed the names and the dates and think you are writing about the day, the equipment being more complex. it's not a new challenge, it's certainly a challenge and i think we are emphasizing this across really all of our activities. >> we've got about 15 minutes for questions, so we'll start with the gentleman right here. >> thank you. henry -- to what -- well, the first offset seemed to be a reaction to stalemate in veto

ma'am, in korea, the second to defeat in vet vietnam and the third seems to be whether reaction or not they come in the wake of these conflicts and the third to purgatory in iraq and afghanistan. to what extent are these bureaucratic responses that provide a refuge, a technological refuge that isn't relevant to the sources of our recent failures? >> it's a great question. that's a real danger. so i think that many of us are cognizant of that danger, this could be like some kind of cathartic, that war was really hard, let's go on to a cool war that would be more fun, right, or something that -- a problem that could be solved quickly and so forth. i think we're cognizant of that. we're doing a study on warfare, that is what you expect the army to do pay attention to what you are learning.

we're not saying that is what all warfare will be. we're looking at other hard threat capabilities and ongoing efforts in afghanistan and iraq. crane said it really well, the historian, he said two ways to fight the military, assume metally and stupid. you hope the enemy picks stupid but they're unlikely to do so. we have to be prepared to fight across a range of contingency operations, we've never been able to predict with any degree of certainty what the next conflict is going to be. and we have to do what sir michael howard said, not be so far off the mark we can't adjust once the real demands of the conflict reveal themselves to you. we're trying to adopt quickly to circumstances, learn quickly, develop situations to understanding with these problem sets and i think one of the

things we have to really do is recognize that there are no short term solutions to long term problems. and if we try to take a short term approach to a long term problem we're just guaranteeing that we're going to extend the duration of our effort and probably just increase the scale of it. so we're really emphasizing in the army the consolidation of military gains is an integral part of war and warfare, it's not an option nal part. and so i don't think we're trying to simplify things, it is some sort of effort to get beyond iraq or afghanistan into a much better kind of war. but that is definitely a danger and i think across the force and some of the defense intellectual community there was a tendency toward that. if you go back to the early work, it's multidomain battle, i

think we're on the right path now, there was really a tendency to say those wars in afghanistan and iraq were -- let's get back to what we do best. the response to theoff shore balancing argument in this issue of foreign affairs, it's really good and it's something we all have to probably try to get out there, get that argument out there. to in okay late us against that simplistic thinking. >> sure. in the black leather jacket here. >> thank you. keith hill, i'm here as a private citizen. i would like to approach your answer to not the last question but the question before that from a different direction. i heard the army chief of staff mention the fact that the army is the only branch of the service where more than 50% of its man power comes from the guard and reserves. in addition to the -- well,

actually that was done because general a brams when he was army chief of staff he wanted a situation where, when the army went to war it was going to be america going to war rather than just the army going to war. now, in addition to a lack of knowledge about history, wouldn't you say or would you say that more fundamental problem is this disconnect between the average american and the military? >> well, i think that is a big problem. i think the problem is getting worse because of the size of the army, the army getting smaller and so those touch points being fewer and fewer and fewer families having a direct stake in it because they've got sons or daughters, brothers and sisters in the service. the guard and reserve is a critical bridge between i think our military and our citizens. and i think that the more we can identify -- we can create opportunities, identify

opportunities to a broader population to serve, the better. and i think there are a number of initiatives we could undertake to do that. i think one is you know, an idea. is that we could have multicomponent contracts for recruiters, for example, i think we should do more of those. if you are coming out of high school and you don't want to defer college or a job for a civilian job you want more more than two years, come in for two year active duty enlistment and have a three year or four year national guard commitment on the back end. then you serve back in your home state, there are great incentives associated with the national guard service in sort of tuition relief. there is a lot more we can do. the other thing i think is engaging more broadly in our community. i think that military leaders, our sergeants and our officers in particular, ought to get out

in their communities as much as they can and make the post as accessible as possible. i had the privilege of commanding fort benning, georgia, there is not a better event than a basic training graduation. it's unbelievable. you will laugh, cry, way better than "cats" almost as good as "hamilton." it's amazing. so i think make it more accessible. any ideas you have sir, i'm easy to track down through these guys. any suggestions anybody has on how to connect better, you know, we're all for it. >> in the front. >> kind of a two-part question for you. you've spoken in some of the other army senior leaders have spoken about the fact this is the first time perhaps since world war i the army hasn't had

a new combat vehicle under development and you have spoken about the personnel issues. can you frame for us the broader situation the army finds itself in in a historical context. and then also, how does recent army history sort of the inspector of fcs and other things impact your efforts to develop other future capabilities for the army. is there a concern that budget drives kale abilities development as opposed to strategy. >> okay. great questions. you know, the army -- remember the old book called "massive command" it's about different cultures and services. it's dated now, it was before the all volunteer force. it got the army really right. the army's -- we tend to have a streak in us, i think the marine corps might be the same way. we can make do with what we've got.

sometimes that prevents us from making a clear argument of the capabilities we need for the future. that is an example of really a waive of deferred army modern i sags. there are a number of good reports on this, i think the csis report from a couple months ago is particularly good in which the author talks about the triple whammy of modern i sags and capacity. the triple whammy is that the army, size of the army has been severely reduced from 570,000 active -- 1.1 million total force. this is a huge reduction, way below the 482,000 that we had in the active army prior to the wars in afghanistan and iraq. if you remember, the wars in afghanistan and iraq were breaking an army, active arm of 482,000, so we grew the army to 570,000. at the peak of the wars in iraq

and afghanistan, we had 170,000 soldiers deployed, 53,000 of whom were reserve component. so 123,000 active, deployed. so now when you go down to 450, think about what forces you have to surge forward. guess what, the historical pattern is that after wars your commitment goes up to consolidate the gains. the wars are going on first of all, in pakistan area, in the middle east where you have a brigade in kuwait. and armed forces, kurdish armed forces, turkish, you know, in iraq and then you have rotation nal to korea, one to europe now because of russian aggression.

so one is capacity in the army. the second thing is that in previous periods of draw downs, the army had been modernized. we did a lot of important things to strengthen our forces but those were really niche capabilities for those particular fights that are not really the modernization we need to respond to crises in the future, especially against capable nation states. so there is that wave of deferred modernization and compelled by a very significant reduction in the modernization budget. what do you do. in a democracy you get the army the american people are willing to pay for. so we are working very hard to not do what you said is a danger which is to have the means, the money you have, to determine what you do instead of having the objectives drive it. so the tendency has been okay as the budget gets cut, cut, you

spread less and less money over more and more programs and you get less and less for the dollar as a result. we're trying to make the case for investment in army capabilities, can you imagine if you went to the navy and you said are you working on any new ships, no we're good, we like the ships we got. so to not be working on a combat vehicle when we see our friends and our potential enemies fielding more advanced capabilities, we're upgrading as you know the bradley and the tank, they're not the same by any means from the 1980s, but you know, they're from the 1980s, you know what i mean. there is only so much you can do. when you look at putting active protection, other network related demands into those vehicles, layering in other protective capabilities, additional armor, new infrared radar, you overburden the

vehicle. so i think we've got to again, a significant waive of deferred army modernization. >> sir? thank you for your time. my name is drake long i'm a student at miami university of ohio. you -- i want to ask a question about military history. to the average person, it might seem to have their strong points in terms of subject matter. for military history civil war, diplomatic world war i. what is a conflict, diplomatic moment or a war that you think not enough is written on and definitely needs to be paid attention to especially with regard to conflicts right now. thank you. >> i would say that the -- just going -- in recent history i would say the iraq war. and joel ray burn is here, he is

just drafted a seminal operation al history of the iraq war. i think what that will be is a tremendous jumping off point for historians to really dig into aspects of that operation al history in greater depth. i think in large measure we've been distracted by iraq by not the wrong question but a question that we've asked and probably answered, which is should we have done it. right i think the right question to ask is who thought it would be easy and why, right. so -- then how did the war -- how did the war progress from that point on.

i think the iraq war and then obviously connecting it to what is going on today. i think michael ward even is working on another volume, he's been very good. that is the contemporary -- that will stand the test of time, his cobra and end game books and this next volume. what other conflicts need to be written more about? gosh, you know, i think there is always you know, as my adviser at university of north carolina said, he said, don't think that there is too much written on a particular topic, right. so because there is always another good book or different approach you can take or access to new materials. i mean, heck, look at what rick atkinson did in world war ii, so what he did is he took historian's approach of doing multiresearch but also uncovering through his journalism background, of papers in attics and got all kinds of new materials. look at rick murray's book on the civil war. that book is brilliant in terms

of not new materials but a different an lat tick framework to understand the course of the war and the war's outcome. so i would say, just do what you are drawn to, what you are interested in and you will find, more than enough material for a good book. >> time for one last question. sir in the back. >> rick atkinson has written a trilogy on the war which is going to be interesting. >> venture capital things as they relate to this kind of stuff we're talking about here. this kind of piggy backs on the reporter's question up front around the army platforms. i remember the big five. blackhawk, apache, bradley and mlrs. i don't think it's coincidence that we haven't had a big five

and candidly, one of the army's biggest acquisitions is buying a truck. congrats. >> come on now. >> but having been a part of army transformation, and i remember watching how those war games went down. i'm sure you are at least familiar with those. >> i wrote a very, you know, entertaining monograph on that. not really entertaining. pretty dry but called "crack in the foundation." defense transformation. >> the challenge i've noticed, though, is whether we have 450 or 570 or pick your number, we don't really have a unifying threat like we did when we had the -- when we came up with the big five. we knew who we were fighting and that made it easy to say we need

a main battle tank with 120 millimeter gun and so on and so forth. going forward, you know, whether you want to talk about how many folks you need or how many platforms you need, the big challenge i've seen is what we used to call future operating environment. maybe a new term of art for it. but who the hell are we fighting? and given your role at army capabilities, how do you orient around that when fighting in blob or fighting a vapor, in this case? >> well i think we have really concrete problem sets now. it's not a problem at all. i think we have an opportunity to really mature our defense planning scenarios based on concrete problems in asia broadly with the revisionist power there. in northeast asia with an unpredictable and armed to the teeth with some old conventional

equipment. what russia has demonstrated already with its capabilities, and i can go through those if you want if we had more time, i could. you know, other scenarios as well. so we have very, i think, well developed scenarios as a basis for our war gaming and experimentation. and what those war games and experimentation is allowing us to do is establish a very clean logic trail between the future operating environment, the problem of armed conflict. scenarios associated with it, how the army has to fight as part of the joint multinational team to protect the nation against those threats, enemies and adversaries in that operating environment. the capabilities required of that force. then through our learning, identification of the capability gaps and opportunities to maintain overmatch, integrated solutions which are doctrine, organization, material, solutions, all integrated and specific requirements.

so what is like an equivalent of the big five today? well, these are really capability areas that we think are immensely important for the future fight. i mentioned combat vehicles. all the trends we see in future war are making close combat more, not less likely. in fact, long-range capabilities are those that are in jeopardy. satellite-based communications. precision navigation and timing. the whole network strike capability is -- we're going to work out countermeasures but the enemy has ways to counter that now. potential enemies do. they've focused on it. so what are the trends that we see that are -- that we have to cope with? all domains will be contested. in the '90s, everything was dominance this and that. full spectrum dominance. and it was never going to happen anyway but i think now everybody is convinced all domains will be contested.

we will not have air or maritime or cyber electromagnetic supremacy. that will probably be temporary windows of superiority across those domains. the battlefield is increasingly lethal in terms of range of weapons systems and energetics and democratization of destruction with even networks, smaller forces having greater destructive capability and powers. the third is complex battlefields. the need to fight in and among populations, likely in urban areas as well. and the fourth is that all operations will be degraded. so we can't develop exquisite systems that fail catastrophically. redundancy and systems that degrade gracefully. so what does that mean for us in terms of capabilities? i mentioned combat vehicles. combat vehicles is tied to a larger problem set of advanced

protection. that means area protection and also protection on specific combat vehicles and aircraft. the so-called russian snow dome capability. russia has established air supremacy over ukraine from the grand. we need tiered defense capabilities, electronic warfare capabilities that allow us to protect our forces and so forth. the third area of emphasis for us is robotic autonomy enabled systems which can do really five big things for us. if you google the robotic and autonomous system strategy, we have a strategy out on that, and i think a pretty good way ahead on that. and the fourth area is cross-domain fires. this is the ability for army forces to be able to project power outward from land into the maritime, aerospace and cyberelectromagnetic domains. we're already developing capabilities now that have tremendous promise using even existing systems that will give us the ability to sink ships. if you have a fires unit, it can

do surface to surface, surface to air or shore to ship. other critical capabilities involve future vertical left which i think a very good program going now that will give us a lot more speed, payload and legs so we can self-deploy. and you can bypass so-call a2a2 bubbles and deploy forces into areas they can maneuver from offset objective areas. and all of this is underpinned by shoulder performance and overmatch. close combat is getting more and more effective. a traumatic op ed by joe scales who i loved yesterday in "the wall street journal" said we need to invest more. i agree with him in close combat capabilities. but we're doing quite a bit there. soldier-borne sensor. also a flying munition. it's extremely effective.

also developing shoulder-fired capability. we've developed the first shoulder fired weapon that has a ballistic solution. integrated thermal site, laser range finder and ends firefights. if anyone has read "the outpost" by jake tapper, if you haven't read it i recommend it. we don't want to put our soldiers in that kind of situation where a taliban platoon with a sack of rpgs can pin down u.s. infantry units. we're developing those units and getting them into the field pretty quickly. so i don't think there's a lack of clarity at all. and we are drafting now future force development strategy that would help us communicate this outside the army better. but if you go to the army capabilities website, our website, you see this is what we put out as the big six plus one capabilities that are tied in that logic trail all the way back to how we have to fight in the future and the future operating environment.

>> h.r., it's been a tremendous pleasure listening to you. thanks so much for coming and spending some of your very busy day with us. if everyone could join me in a round of applause. thank you. [ applause ] and on that happy note, i again thank you mark, thank you general mcmaster and all of you for joining us today and wish you all the best for the rest of the year and a happy 2017. thanks for coming to the forum. ♪