>> thank you very much. it is very appropriate that we talked about this challenge to homeland's security. launched a successful presidential campaign in 1960. personally with the my favorite holiday. my favorite is patriot state. it always had been. in the moments after the boston bombings, my sixth road was with me. i was explaining what the day meant and why there were people that are trying to put a black mark on that day. patriot's day is still my favorite day. this makes us all very proud. i will see you in boston in april next year. please join me in a round of applause for our panel. [applause]

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] >> on the next "washington will talkeid wilson about the 2016 presidential field. then jim morris of the center for public integrity discusses the work of the occupational safety administration. "washington journal" live at 7:00 a.m. eastern here on c- span. >> next, add the feature of the u.s. military ground forces for the strategic of studies. they focus on the asia pacific region and budget constraints. this is 1.5 hours.

>> all right, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. those of you who were they chow line can stock up and head to your seats. we generally try to have enough food here to make it through until lunch, keep you alive for a short period of time here. good morning. on behalf of our c.e.o. and president, dr. john hammer, i want to welcome you to the center for strategic and international studies. i don't know in my mic is loud enough. are you picking me up ok? all right. i've got a couple of administrative details, and then i want to outline what we are here for and are doing today.

we have a wonderful terrific timely report and topic to discuss this morning. administratively, we are going to be here about 90 minutes. if you are on the web, he should be able to download a copy of the report and follow along at home. we probably won't refer you to page numbers as we go, so you will have to do a little work your own. i am not sure, but you also may be able to download the view graphs. you will be able to see them from the web as well. this is on the record. we are recording this. there will be an archive of the video and audio as we post it afterwards. if at the end of this you say what the heck did frank say, you can go back and pick up on that afterwards. what a time we are in. we are in the middle of, as all of you know, our fourth downturn in the last 65 or 70 years, and we have no idea how low it is going to go, how far it is going to go, et cetera.

you've got some very important questions about what do we need this military for, and how do we size and shape it properly? how do we align strategy, perhaps, policy and resources going forward? somead in the past week very lively exchange. i would urge you to watch the videos if you haven't, between the chief of staff of the army and members of the various armed services committees. it is quite a robust example of the difference between article i of the constitution, and article ii. you can look those up on your own time. \[laughter] we are really wrestling with questions like are we looking for the force we can afford, or are we trying to figure out the force that we need here? and are we preparing for a world that we are trying to make it come out a certain way, or are we preparing for a world that is what it is and dealing with

it. it is a complex set of questions. i am making it look like binary issues, but they are not binary at all. themilitary has assessed adequacy of its force structure against a set of threats and the war plans that are designed to met those threats. but that is probably not the approach that we are going to need in the future -- or really it is that and a lot more. we have a complex set of future scenarios, and we call them in this report ven yes, it is because we are not -- vignettes because we are not quite ready to distinguish them with the acronym or name scenario, because then you have to devise a plan to deal with it. but from the vignettes it allows you to look and a large scope of issues.

we haven't talked about the budget requirements to deal with these vignettes if you will. that is work yet to be done. this report is focused not on the whole world, but on the parts that have primacy in the strategic defense guidance issued january a year ago. a very strong cencom focus, asia, counterterrorism, et cetera. the theaters don't mirror one another the way they did when i was growing up in this system, where it was pretty fungible to have one set of plans for one theater be relevant to another. all of that adds to the complexity. then comes word from the wire services, one headline said army seeks to complement air-sea battle. the secretary said the army is moving forward. they talked about this office of strategic land policy in this

room in november of last year, to deal with ideas about forcible entry, power for direction, anti-access and aerial denial operations. to cover all that, we have both a nice thick document and a very robust conversation here this morning. leading this is our senior fellow, nate freier. he was a career army officer, spent time at the army war college, spent time at o.s.d., and in theater rations, especially in iraq. he has been a fellow here now for six or seven years. he is joined by a marvelous panel, and he will introduce the panel. i want to ask you all in joining me to welcome nate freier, csic. \[applause] >> we can move out here to the

podium. thank you david. that is a very kind introduction to what has been a very what i think is has been an exceptionally challenging report and study in a time of great change inside the department of defense. before i begin talking about substance of the report, let me first take an opportunity for some thank-yous and also introduce my panelists before proceeding. first i think this report would not have been possible without the possible of the army g-8, and in particular, the army quadrennial review office, with major general john rossi and others. their assistance has been invaluable. we also received a great deal of support from u.s. pacific command, u.s. central command,

the service component commands underneath them, the joint staff, o.s.d., et cetera and their contributions to the substance of this report have been both invaluable and many times ground-breaking in the ideas we arrived at through their assistance. we had a great working group a great senior review group spent time with us going over our ideas, flushing things out and testing things. they, too, deserve some credit. you can can see who was involved in that when you leaf through the report. we are indebted to several c.s.i. senior scholars who helped us a great deal in guiding the report and arriving at the original insights we came to. let me publicly mention the research team who worked very hard at getting a report that i

think will be influential going forward in the defense review service. stephanie sanek, senior fellow and future director of the national security program, jacqueline guy, curtis, j.p., our military fellows, and sammy and megan loney, interns. they have been great teammates in this process, and i wanted to thank them publicly. as for the panel, i'm going to spend about 10 or 15 minutes talking about the report itself. i am joined on stage here by this panel that i think will bring a great deal of insight and experience to the discussion. on my far right is mr. barry pavel. he is director of the center on international security at the atlantic council. he spent 18 years inside the department of defense in various positions in the senior executive service and also was a special assistant to the president and a senior director

for defense policy and strategy in the white house from 2008 to july of 2010. to my right is lieutenant genre tired james duvik, he is a fellow at the institute for the study of war. he is a career infantry officer. i am sorry to hear about that. i am an artilleryman. he commanded the 25th infantry division at forth lewis, and the multi-national security transition command in iraq. then my old friend and colleague, mr. frank hoffman, he is a senior research fellow at the institute for national strategic studies. he is a former marine officer. i am sorry about that. >> who has walked and carried a pack as well.

>> he has left the naval office for capabilities and readiness. he is published on hive wid warfare. we have been mates and co- conspirators together for many things. we want to ask everybody to turn all cell phones, blackberries and other things off. after the presentations, we have time for our discussion. let us run through the discussion and then we will open it up to the floor. for questions, there will be microphones present. i will moderate the "q & a" and make sure you are called on in an orderly fashion. the intent today is to talk about a report that was co- chartered by army g-8 on the future potential and deployment of u.s. ground forces, that being u.s. army, marine and special operations forces in the cencom, pacom and other areas. in addition we were sort of charted to evaluate what the

department of defense calls future challenges risks associated with the deployment of those forces. with that we started the process in october of really -- right around the beginning of october of the previous year, of last year, going through this process, and what you see here today is really the culmination of that effort. so if i could, the next slide, please. here is our study purpose. it is all in the past tense now thankfully. this is what we did. our charter really was to identify core interests in the two regions and identify ground relevant hazards in the regions that are most likely to threaten those interests in the next two decades. as i said, before we developed a framework to assess future challenges and risk, and assess

it against a set of 20 regional vignettes that grew out of our assessment of the trends and insights in the two regions of concern to the report. finally we compared our risk assessment to the current direction of strategy and poolicy to arrive at certain judgments on general risk mitigation and policy risk mitigation measures going forward. let me make a few qualifications because i think they are important. number one, large-scale in the context of this report is not necessarily what was considered large scale in the past or would have been interpreted as large scale. our floor in this report is really an army division, the ground combat element of a marine expeditionary force or

some combination of marine and army forces that equal to that. that is the floor. the ceiling could obviously be much higher than that. that is large scale for us. the subjects are qualitative, not quantitative. we are charted to look at what the force might be asked to do, not the extent to which the force would be asked. that is a follow-on to this effort. following what we labeled and a question that i have been interested in for quite sometime, we tried to account for problems that emerge from disorder with the failure of competent authority to control territory, dangerous resources, et cetera, as well as unfavorable order, which would be what it sounds like, a rival regional pee r, another great power that rises up in traditional military fashion that threatens u.s. sps. >> i am going to cut to the chase. we came to four key findings. we came to a lot of findings. it is a very big report. but there are four themes, finding themselves that rolled out of our report. the first is that the u.s. does face future contingencies where

it will want to consider large scale deployment of grand forces. that may appear to be a mom and apple pie conclusion, but our view was in the contemporary debate where you really do have this perfect storm of resource challenges inside the department of defense and long experience with the wars in iraq and afghanistan, the trend and strategy and policy right now is to really discount a large number of potential contingency events in the future as not necessarily breaching a threshold that would have us employ ground forces, but we think it is future is somewhat different than that. when looking at the roles for army, ma arenas, general purpose forces and special operations forces in both regions, one thing we found is the more conflict and crisis involve challenges between peoples, the

likelier that ground forces provide a qualitative advantage in the u.s. military response. second, after looking at the vignettes that we developed, which i will talk about in a bit, we found that large scale ground force responses in the future really fall into what we think are five basic archetypes. about talk much more those as i go forward. we found it more plausible that ground forces are more likely to respond to border disorder, some type of conflict than they are to respond to over cross-border aggression by an adversary of the united states. in this construct of the five, there are two real war fighting missions, which are the limited security and the limited conventional campaign. we found the distributed security to be the largest

cluster of demands over the next 20 years and therefore identified as the best or likeliest war fighting force for the forces going forward. perhaps the most controversial finding we came to is classic combat operations of the kind we have experienced over the last 12 years are likely the lesser included case in the next two decades. regional shaping we found to be a dominant demand for all the ground forces across the board going forward. some would argue that it should be a force driver, but we see it as a dominant mission going forward. but important as we found in

consultation with regional strategists, the most important efforts are those with partners that appear to be most capable and willing to actually participate in future contingency operations with the united states going forward, number one. and second, they should focus on preventing the most dangerous outcomes and preparing to respond to the most disruptive outcomes in the regions. >> finally we found the current defense priorities and service priorities may not align well with what we see are the future demands for ground forces. awill get more into that in few moments, but satisfies it to say that we have six basic categories. they were either increasing or static in all categories. strategy and policy are too focused on the traditional state-based challenge and not focused enough on consequential disorder. distributed security itself is

inconsistent with the current direction of policy, and we found this idea of enabling support actions to be somewhat countercultural to service culture. finally i think one of the biggest contributors to this problem is the fact that the force itself has become conditioned to respond to one contingency type in particular, which is counterinsurgency from a fixed and very sophisticated support architecture, which we don't feel will hold true in the future. here is a pictorial of the five archetypes, which is what we get. the large circle talks about the fact that the army in particular has a very large theater setting bill. the army provides the foundation for all major operations in the areas of communications, i.s.r., logistics, et cetera, and that

on top of that, all of these operations would occur. we placed the distributed security vignette or archetype in the center of this chart it's success draws on the capabilities necessary to conduct the other operations, and therefore, we think it is kind of the centerpiece of future capability. next slide. what we wanted to depict in this chart is the way d.o.d. assesses risk, they assess it four cat gorse, institutional risk, force management operation, operational risk and challenges risk. borrowing from frank hoffman, this is the chart. the bottom line is institutional and force management risks provide the foundation upon which the other two can be assessed and rest. in the current sort of structure, the way d.o.d. assesses risk going forward is

operational risk being sort of over the next 24 months can we perform our war plans? it is heavily favored and more formalized than is this view of future challenges risk. what we have try to do is actually take a crack at rewriting the balance of that chart. one thing that is important that we see is really today's operational risk is tomorrow's future challenges risk. they really are a continuum. one assesses the ability of the force to respond to problems it sees now. the other assesses the force's ability to respond to problems we see in the future. they have similar characteristics and are joined somewhat. as a con text, we identified five core interests. i am not going into detail in the interests, but it was a charter in the study. we think these core interests we derived from assessment of 25 years of national security

policy, public pronouncement of interests by policy makers, we think these provide a foundation and are translatable across combatant commands. individual their implementation or manifestation in these commands. aese core interests provided foundation upon which or through which we could look at the challenges in the particular regions and arrive at conclusions on what the likeliest demands would be in those regions. next chart. in the process also as we came up with the interest, we also developed a set of insights. we have 10 basic insights that we worked off of, and these insights, like the interests, became a bit of a lens for us look at the regions and determine what the nature of the challenge in those regions

will be. let me go over these a little bit. these insights by the way sort of are both a combination of assumptions and preliminary conclusions as we went into the beginning of the study, and they held as insights largely because they were confirmed in the course of the study. we do think that the united states will maintain its military advantages, but those advantages will erode. that is very consistent -- erode over time. that is consistent with current policy and thought in this area. however, having said that, inspite -- in spite of the erosion, given the commitment to deterrence of major conflict between the united states and other great powers is largely preventable. the area that we have the least capability to prevent is the area of civil conflict inside states, especially states of

importance to the united states as well as proxy resistance to the united states by another great power. we think two areas of the report are particularly troublesome with respect to the consequential threats to the core conclusions. wars between nations and peoples, and the conflicts that they actually generate will be important to u.s. strategy and policy going forward and will be the subject of contingency planning for time to come. we do think the threats are really and that state and non- state actors will continue to generate threats to access and threats to our ability to maneuver in specific operational areas. that threat is becoming more prolific and the capabilities are migrating down and democratizing. c.b.n. will be a problem in the future.

their control, proliferation and development will be a problem for the united states and a primary concern in u.s. strategy for the next two decades. >> one key finding that i think is important is this idea that everyone calls the information revolution, this is almost having a viral effect on the ability of conflicts to sort of spread. to only is it a challenge operational security, but it allows a greater, more diverse universe of actors to interact with one another, organize at distance and at range and conduct some somewhat coordinated actions that complicate u.s. interests. a host of accelerants will be a problem going forward. they include challenge governance, catastrophe, climate change, environmental degradation, and the increased competition for strategic resources. continued states will

to have a number of strong bilateral multi-lateral partnerships going forward. but frankly in the same way american defense resources are declining, the resources of many of our partners are declining as well, which will leave us in a position where we will remain sort of the most capable and able to respond to many instances of common concern between our alleys and us -- allies and us. finally i would like to say we think that strategic warning for the most traditional military challenges will remain whereasnd significant, strategic warning from those instances that spring from some kind of disorder will be much more in question and in doubt and will actually impress the decision-making space. >> next slide please. the trays that we identify in u.s. centcom. we talk about these trends in

particular the takeaways. the trends are the most important to this report. the bottom-line is we think there are two basic trends that will be the focus of defense strategy and planning going forward. the prolific challenge, and the impact on the stability of the region. i can talk about any one of those in great detail. you can see some of the reasoning behind our thoughts in that regard on the right. in the interest of time, i want to move on and talk about the next region and then we will punt to qa for the discussion. pacom has four or five basic trends. the most common is an increase in competition for regional territory sources and freedom of action within the region and into the region. there are alternative features

that we think are probably under considered. currently, when you look at pacom, the most common thought is the dominant rise in china that stays on a linear path of boards. we also think that there is some discussion of the different paths for china, in a failing china or a weaker china. a strong china, in addition to that, there is this idea that if you see china as a principal focus of u.s. strategy in the pacific region, the chinese get a competitive strategy that basically occurs largely outside of the military domain, and therefore undercuts any military buildup that is associated with conjuring them. we do feel the uncertain trajectory will remain a dominant concern particularly

for u.s. ground forces for some time to come. north korea is a three paths. it can unify with south korea. in collapse. it can actually continue to engage in provocative or aggressive behavior that somehow leads to war between the north and south. we do think north korea remains important. the most dominant daily trade is natural catastrophe and climate change. withs a dominant theme pacom. it is probably their most frequently required contingency response. it is want to consider. there is ethnic and ideological problems.

dad -- we came up with 10 -- 20 vignettes. here the 20 vignettes listed side-by-side. aey range in likelihood from a syrian century problem that we are staying on folds as we speak all the way to a future syria-turkey conflict. you can see we have eight other vignettes between those that we considered. in u.s. pacom, the likely stay man's all the way up to the speculative demands. all away down to fighting physically in taiwan. the major implications for ground forces that we came to that i want to highlight.

first want to highlight the fact that future operating environments will be disordered. there are a number of constraints that are emerging coming out of the wars in iraq and afghanistan that will be a natural aversion and self deterrence. the objectives pursued will be limited and new will be less decisive. we think u.s. centcom is defined by security and peace operations and u.s. pacom by the support actions and humanitarian response. rubbing up this idea on warning. there will be limited warning in this sister beachhead security category per that -- security category.

finally, let me just again if the size the point of risk in all six categories that we identified. if you think of forward two slides per eliminate a couple of points and then i will turn it over to my colleagues. the overarching challenge in the risk assessment problem is twofold. first, there is the general prioritization away from consideration of large-scale ground operations now going on inside the pentagon for a variety of reasons. there is war weariness.

there is resource challenges, etc. that is competing with this idea that we have become a custom to war a contingency focused. that we have dispensed with a number of capabilities and competencies that are more relatives going forward and that we will have to capture those. the issue projecting forward is a key area. there are fewer deployed forces which will require the united states to have an deployed mentality with all of its ground forces that will be challenging with all of the forces based in the united states, and in logistics. with the across the board forces

from a wider variety of actions. protecting those forces will be increasingly important in giving persons across the spectrum of response more ability to protect themselves and conduct operations. finally, one interesting point we came to is that we think given this idea that operations will be left decisive, the forces will have to become more attuned to the idea of actually disengaging from environments that are necessarily a factor. where the conflict or crisis is still very much in train at the time that we disengage, but we have pushed it to a level where it is manageable to the view of u.s. policymakers and therefore time to disengage. as we go forward, we think it is

one that likely is to require more attention on their -- on the part of the forces. we have more charts, i do want to bore you anymore. we will punt everything to question and answer after that rethink you very much. we are right over you being here. we to the q&a portion. >> thanks, nate. they key for inviting me for this session. i will be very provocative and brief, because there is a lot of rich knowledge among a panelist. this is a rich study. it avoids the most common error that i see in force planning, and that is emphasizing the contingencies that dominated our thinking over the last decade or so. i think it has the imagination and an ovation. i applaud it. havets on issues that i

been concerned about, including when i was helping the white house oversee the last cbr. i will get into the and a little bit. i'm going to make four basic points. i will be brief. hopefully i will stimulate conversation. i think i will. number one, we are terrible at predicting future contingencies. there is no other way to say it. the only thing that is certain is that we will be tried again by major contingencies. i am doing a lot of work in the atlantic household with the national council and with other

governments on global trends and instructive technologies bring it is clear to me that the world in five-10 years is going to have different dimensions than it has today. it really the iphone and the democratization of the medications technology has changed things, which is easy the rest of the technology revolution come to play in terms of biotech and the democratization of 3-d printing, and a rate of technologies that are coming on top of each other. we do not know how it is going to play out. it will be disruptive in some ways. it will be beneficial to the united states, but there is always a dark side to each of these technologies that can be applied. the key trend is that of individual empowerment. this is enabled by a large of resources to asia that is currently ongoing that will bring about a very significant rise in the global middle class. there is also this technology element in play as well. thes start sort of with

baseline of the strategy that the united states currently has an play. i think we need a strategy in a portfolio of capabilities that hedges against this very uncertain environment in an appropriate way. it is really important to keep in mind that i was part of the bureaucracy before. the bureaucracy's inclination to resist change and to focus on the comfortable. in this case, the comfort zone is one where we love to deal with militaries that look like us. in this case, at av department's inclination is to focus 80% of its efforts a strategy on dealing with the chinese contingency is understandable. it makes some sense. it is overplayed to a degree. i worry very much that the

uncomfortable but extremely plausible scenario, some of which nate covered well, are going to come back to bite us. unfortunately very damaging. the summary of my first point is that the current culture of automaticity, of autonomy and departmental components, as part of the strategic challenge that we face.