>> john milewski: this week on dialogue the future of us forces in europe. ♪ [music] ♪ [music] >> john milewski: welcome to the woodrow wilson international center for scholars in washington, d.c. i'm john milewski. each week dialogue explores the world of ideas and issues in international affairs, history and culture. now let's meet our guests. lieutenant general mark hertling is commanding general of us army europe. he assumed that post in march of 2011. robert litwak is vice president for programs

at the wilson center where he also serves as director national security studies. gentlemen, welcome to dialogue. thanks for joining us. >> thanks, john. >> thank you. >> john milewski: i want to begin with a little scene setting. let's not assume that the history is widely known. as i was preparing for the discussion, one thing i realized is that troops in europe are not the way americans think of troops in other places. we accept troops in europe as part of the [inaudible], part of the national security picture. we don't talk about whether or not they should be there or how long they've been there. it's something that we almost accept, but there is a history to it. when did we first have troops on the ground permanently? >> lieutenant general mark hertling: obviously it was during world war ii. after the war we had several million troops on the ground and as developments occurred and the onset of the cold war we were able to keep various sized forces throughout europe. as recently, john, as 1989, we had about a quarter million troops. they were kiddingly referred to as the imperial army of the rhine. >> john milewski: [laughter] >> lieutenant general mark hertling: but we worked

with our central army group partners and nato defending against the warsaw pact. over the last 15-20 years we have steadily reduced that force and have taken on new missions and frankly it's a fascinating experience to be assigned to europe today. i'm interested whenever i read the uninformed say something like, hey, why are we still over there? why are we still fighting the cold war? bring those soldiers home. i think those are individuals who really don't understand what we do with the 51 other counties in europe that we partner with and conduct theatre security cooperation. >> john milewski: well, i hope after this discussion they'll know a little more about that. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: i hope so. >> john milewski: we'll delve into some of those details, but back to the numbers. so non-combat post-world war ii, what was the high point? >> lieutenant general mark hertling: the high point during the cold war was about a quarter of a million; about 250,000 soldiers and along with that came a thousand of their family or i'm sorry a million of their family members; wives, children,

and in fact, there was several sequences of how to get people out in case the soviet union and the warsaw pact crossed the border. we would practice that religiously when i was a young lieutenant in my assignment over there, but then, again, in the early 90s after the wall came down and the borders opened we gradually started reducing the forces over there. >> john milewski: and about 80% reduction since the 1980s. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: about that, right. we currently have about 42,000 soldiers and close to 100,000 family members over there. rob, could i get you to comment generally on the national security picture and how americans think about forces in europe? is it as i suggested in my opening question to general hertling? something that is just part of the scene that we don't really question in any significant way? >> robert litwak: well, for the latter half of the last century, international relations were defined by the cold war divide between east and west and the us military presence in europe was essential to the maintenance of peace.

with the end of the cold war that role has morphed into a new role. i don't think anyone takes stability in europe where two world wars were fought for granted and they shouldn't, but the us military presence has also been linked to the integration of new countries into nato and the european union. so there's an important sort of socialization function for european counterparts to interact with individuals such as general hertling whether there's a tradition in this country of civil military relations and having those types of norms inculcated in a new europe i think has served an important function and it's a hedge against uncertainty in the future and not to take the stability of europe for granted, but i think there's another question and it's where we're at right now and it's there's this phrase, you know, out of the area or out of business. europe has been used as a critical kind of staging area for operations outside of europe. now politically that's been contentious with some

of the european allies and i think that's really kind of the role that in terms of us strategy that the civilian, the national command authority or the civilian leadership with the military sort of working through right now particularly given the last decade in which we fought two wars in the gulf and central asia. >> john milewski: that post-cold war era or the cold war itself certainly the three of us are old enough to have lived through that era. how do you think about the new environment for yourself as someone who grew up in the cold war? how do you frame it for yourself? >> lieutenant general mark hertling: it literally is fascinating. what rob said a minute ago about the assurance piece because with the 51 countries that are in the theatre, we work with about 45 of them but each one of them approaches things very differently. there are some countries who see the american presence there as, well, it's always been that way and we accept them and they do provide a stabilizing force.

there are others, the more recent emerging democracies who have transformed their governmental systems and in many cases their militaries who see our presence there as an assurance, as a helper, as an assistance in building their militaries, as helping them transform as rob said into the proper democratic civilian military relationships. we not only do exercises in training events and teaching sergeants and privates how to fall into the right kinds of systems so alliances can wk together, something that historically in any war has been difficult to do, but i also have the responsibility of key leader engagements with many of my partner land force commanders and frankly it's fascinating for them asking me questions of so how do we drive a national security policy? how do we get our government officials to do this? how do we help our military buy this, you know, the same kind of things we do on a daily basis. >> john milewski: democracy coaching.

>> lieutenant general mark hertling: it is. it's exactly democracy coaching. it's the kind of things our young soldiers are doing in iraq and afghanistan with key leader engagements we're doing at a higher level. >> john milewski: talk about how the mission has changed over time. i mean you've just started to do that but in many ways where initially you were there to fight a war. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: right. >> john milewski: or to defend against a potential for war, but now the mission is expanding in significant ways. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: it has and i will tell you my mission consists of several things. first of all i have to train our forces that are there, the 42,000, to conduct not only the current operations counter insurgency in iraq and afghanistan but also full spectrum operations against hybrid threats. on any given day, we have about 20, pick the day, between 20 and 40% of our forces in europe deployed forward to either iraq, afghanistan or other places. so, there are out of theatre operations that we're conducting with our allies. my second primary mission though is to help build partner capacity, theatre security cooperation,

taking some of our nations and saying here's how we can work better together on the battlefield, taking others of our nations and saying here's how you build a professional military. >> john milewski: talk about the threats, characterize the threats and is there some hierarchy in the way that you look at them? i know that i read a quote from you characterizing europe as i believe a hallway or a gateway for terrorists to more friendly nations. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: right. recently we did an analysis with many of our agencies from here in the united states, the three letter agencies as well call them, and they came over and presented us with their analysis of the european footprint. one young lady from one of the agencies suggested that if you consider al-qaeda and extremists terrorism as the base, al-qaeda the base, they actually are looking for places to locate as the ebb and flow of their operations go. what she suggested and she had some pretty good rationale for it, which i bought into, is if you look at places

like afghanistan, pakistan, yemen, saudi arabia, egypt as being various rooms of a house then europe provides the hallway to get to different places; that's one of our threats. another emerging threat and is becoming significant is the transfer of illegal narcotics. the transnational narco-terrorism if you will. what we're seeing is not only transfers of drugs, human trafficking, weapons, criminal activities from east to west we're also seeing in some cases and the dea will point this out the transfer of drugs from south america into portugal, spain and into the iberian peninsula and then up through europe. so, there are several threats across the continent that i think many other our partners, our alliances are dealing with there's also the case of increased population that consists of potential extremists islamists. so, all of those things add to somewhat of a churning

and a transforming of the european footprint. >> john milewski: and how do you actually respond to those threats? in other words, some of this sounds like it's police activity not the job for the armed forces. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: it is, but what i would suggest is we have the capability to pass information to other armies and other governments. we certainly don't conduct kinetic operations within the european footprint our self, but we have military intelligence assets, targeting assets, signals assets that will contribute to other nations catching the kind of maligned actors that transit the regions. >> john milewski: does this change the type of soldier that you need? >> lieutenant general mark hertling: it does. it makes our youngest of soldiers , we require them to be much more educated, much more professionally savvy, much more tactically alert than they've ever been before; that's a training issue. when you're talking about reacting to hybrid threats

or asymmetric warfare and especially war among the people where other soldiers aren't wearing uniforms like we've seen in recent conflicts, it takes a very quality young man or woman to conduct those kind over operations. a lot of training involved there. >> john milewski: rob, i don't want to dominate all the questions. >> robert litwak: no, no. >> john milewski: i have many more. >> robert litwak: general hertling's comments about the character of the threat resonates with, you know, work we've done at the wilson center, which is try to elucidate the nature of the emerging international system where you see changes taking place at all levels transnationally, interstate and intrastate and yet we live in an international system where states remain the principle units and you're operating in european context with allies working with national militaries and their interaction with their ruling governments.

i think as one tries to get a handle on threats that aren't of a transnational quality one keeps coming back to the importance of developing effective state-based strategies. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: absolutely. >> robert litwak: that if you can get it right on the state level and it's hard particularly in areas where there's, you know, zones without authority like a yemen or somalia or we have weak governments or governments that are turning a blind eye to bad activities going on in their territory, it's tough, but i think in terms of us strategy getting it right on the state level doesn't eliminate the non-state problem but really takes you quite a ways there to doing so and i think we're seeing that in the area of terrorism and getting a form of deterrence by denial as they've referred to it and strategy. just making the operating environment that much tougher and the importance of states in doing that. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: yeah, and one of the things and rob brings up a very good point because one of the threats i failed to mention that were partnering

with a specific state is the emerging role of cyber activities as a i'm the present threat and recently we've started to conduct some information exchanges where we're learning as much as we're teaching with the nation of astonia or as they like to call themselves estonia because they're going into the electronic capabilities of state defenses. so, we're learning things from our european partners as much as they're learning from theirs in those kind of activities. >> robert litwak: there was one other thread of your comment that i wanted to pick up, general hertling, and that is that as we're moving forward as a country, we're really kind of taking that last decade into account; the two wars, what's going on with our national economy. we're at a point now where us grand strategy is being debated in new ways. what is the american role in the world? and will we continue to do it, you know, in the same way. american grand strategy has been

and official ones characterize it as integration, we want to integrate new, you know, zones into like the former communist block into an international system, but the united states is going to be constrained, this is sort of at the most macro level, and i wanted to get your take in terms of how it affects the army because there are kind of two versions of what's going on, you know, as a lay person looking at the debate. one version is, and one saw this a couple of years ago, that the army is moving into sort of counter insurgency and that's going to become the new thing and the other is, you know, what secretary gates said at west point, you know, like quoting i guess mcarthur that anyone with have to have their head examined to want to do another one of these given the experience we had. so i think that sort of, where does that leave the army in terms of being caught at the switches? and just one other element to it the person or the individual who in the public mind is most associated with sort of the counter insurgency strand has now gone to take over authority at the cia leading kind of the drone wars

and sort of what's been more publicly prominent in the last couple of years. i mean those are the outlines of a dilemma, but i just wanted to get your take. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: yeah, i think they're all very good questions that are being debated in several places, but i think when you look at it from a soldier's perspective, many of us realize that counter insurgency while a critical mission over the last 10 years, is just a subset of something we might be asked to do. even as we see some of the conflicts drawing down certainly in iraq soon to be in afghanistan, we're going to be faced with other challenges, with other conflicts. we don't know what they're going to look like. certainly there is some talk about directing our attention to asia-pacific and the middle east and those are all well and good but what we've seen in the past in our history we've seen every time we've directed in one place we've always gotten it wrong. so, to go back to your question i think the demands on the military and especially the demands on soldiers

because that's who i train is to become as adaptable and as versatile as we can be. adaptable being able to see what kind of threats are out there and then quickly being able to address them and versatile being able to go from one to another if we're asked to do that by the american people. >> john milewski: looming over our discussion, sort of over our world, budget cuts and the financial circumstances, the military is going to pony up with its share of the cutting. what does that mean for troops in europe? is there an optimal number that you can get to that involves some cutting but doesn't get us into dangerous territory? >> lieutenant general mark hertling: well, there's certainly, there are some things i've already offered as part of this. >> john milewski: ahead of the game. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: ahead of the game and those are being considered, but as many have already said to include admiral mullin before he left the chairman's job, everything is on the table. so for me to comment on that would be premature

because i know there's a lot of people in this city who were talking about how do we balance between the budget deficits, the constraints we have in terms of what we can and cannot spend versus diplomatic power and military power. to make a great nation you need a balance between the three as best you can. what concerns me right now is it seems a lot of people are shifting their attention on only the economic power and we have to have the bright mind saying, hey, there's a diplomatic and military piece of this as well. >> john milewski: why do you think that is? is that just complacency that's built up over time? or is it some sense that the threats we'll be facing don't lend themselves to ground troops? >> lieutenant general mark hertling: i think both. i think there are certainly an element of our key thinkers who believe that, you know, we can do things with high-powered machinery, precision weapons, and we don't really need ground troops anymore; we've already found our ground battle, but i would remind folks as i think secretary panetta did the other day we said the same

thing about september 10th of 2001. so we have the same kind of arguments coming back to the fray and one of the lessons i believe we've learned from the last ten years of conflict is the integration of the various services, the army, the air force, the navy, the marines, the coast guard, the agencies and conflict resolution and attempting to address the challenges our nation faces. >> john milewski: we've mentioned training a couple of times, but specifically i want to ask you about the advantages of training with the allies side-by-side. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: it's great. it's great i think not only for them and they will admit that, but it's great for us because it literally is a professional expansion of our cultural awareness number one. secondly, any time you can train with an element before you get on the battlefield it's a good thing and we've never done that well in past conflicts. i remember in the early stages of this war the first time i deployed we had coalition forces

on the battlefield that frankly could not fight. they were part of some of our alliances, they were certainly part of the coalition of the willing, but there were national caveats and just plain training deficiencies that were not addressed before they deployed to the right. today i would suggest you talk to the commanders on the ground in afghanistan and there are very few of our allied partners who are not willing to take up their load. in fact, what i see in europe in the nations i deal with, the land force commanders i deal with, they take a great deal of pride in fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with us. there are some specific ones that i would address the pols for one, the italians, the germans, the french, some that would say, wow, they're fighting alongside of us in afghanistan? they are. they make up a third of the force. in fact, the statistic i like to cite is 85% of icef in afghanistan come from the european footprint. so 85% of the fighters as part of the isa force

in afghanistan are from my battlefield and we've trained with them and exercised with them and helped prepare them for the fight and their armies are happy about that. >> john milewski: when you talk about this kid of coordination, describe the command structure. how does that work? >> lieutenant general mark hertling: well, in the exercises and the training or in the conflict? >> john milewski: in both. in both the preparation and the actual mission. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: yeah, in exercises and the training, it is a coordinated event. right now today we have one of our brigades, the 173 airborne brigade, training at our training center in [inaudible] hohenfels. with them, underneath them, they have a polish airborne company. they jumped in, they started their fight, it's an asymmetric fight, not a coined environment trying to view toward the future in the post-icef realm. we have slovakians and slovians providing the opposing force to them. so they literally see another force in another uniform plus civilians who don't speak their language that they have

to fight and train against. there are 13 other allied nations providing observer controllers to that battlefield. so that was a coordinated event that we planned and executed and those are the kind of things we do daily. in fact, last year we did a total of 8,000 security events with partners, anything from the individual sergeant training with a sergeant from another country all the way up to a three star headquarters training with someone else. >> john milewski: and i'm sorry, rob, go ahead. >> robert litwak: i wanted to switch to a different topic. one of your previous commands was in iraq and i was reading the excellent new book by tom shanker and eric schmitt, you know, counter strike, that relates an episode involving you in northern iraq and how you basically argued that sort of the term hearts and minds was not a good way for us to be thinking about how to relate to the people there. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: right. >> robert litwak: and you used trust and confidence. could you talk a little bit about your experience in iraq and what that says about how americans can interact

with nationals in kind of remote theatre particularly one where the culture is so different and as we're preparing to leave iraq i mean, you know, what's your assessment? their ability to make it without the -- >> john milewski: -- i'd also be interested in the construct that rob brought up why you think the trust and confidence is superior to hearts and minds? >> lieutenant general mark hertling: well, i think it's a great question. i'm glad you gave me the opportunity to talk about it because it's been sort of a mantra of mine that trust and confidence is much more important when you're dealing with another culture. we shouldn't be asking them to be like us. we shouldn't be asking them to come over to our way of thinking or have our sorts of emotions. we should understand the other cultures we're dealing with and tell them, hey, we're fighting for the same thing that you are, the dignity of mankind and woman kind in your environment so join us and we had some significant success i think with that, but it is a different approach.

you're not trying to make them be like mike as the commercial said. what you're trying to do is say, hey, we're brothers in this, we're sisters in this and we're trying to defeat this threat to your security together and then we'll get out of here. >> robert litwak: because i think nation building has had this connotation of trying to almost westernize or americanize other countries and it's sort of such a problematic rubric -- >> john milewski: -- building in whose image. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: yeah, and that's exactly right and i think that's the mistake we made in the first several years in iraq and afghanistan because we were trying to judge them according to western standards and they're not a western nation. so, both in our fighting and in our interaction with the people, we were asking them to understand us on their land when, in fact, we needed to understand them and work together toward advancement. i think when we got to that point when we understood as military leaders after several years of the fight and this was normally borne on the back of the youngest of our warriors in the captains, lieutenants, the sergeants,

the privates, things started turning around. it took a while to learn that though. >> john milewski: the disconnect that some speak of between the small amount of americans who are active military and a volunteer force versus the rest who continue to shop or things like that at least when the economy was better during wartime, is this something you think about? is this a concern of yours this potential disconnect? and you hear it manifested in we support the troops in the military but we don't support the mission. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: yeah. it is an increasing divide i think whenever you have a national with a professional military. when there isn't a feeling that you have to have some type of universal service whether it's in the military or in teaching, or any kind of public contribution to the society i think you'll have that kind of act. i'm a firm believer in public contribution to society in many ways, the military just being one of them, which i happen to enjoy because i enjoy the camaraderie

of the profession, but i think it is a divide that we have to be very careful of. >> john milewski: i know you're not in the policy business, but it sounds like you're about to endorse national service of some kind. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: i would do that. i mean as a private citizen i would publicly say that i'm for national service in many forms. >> john milewski: final thought on the vision statement. we know that budget cuts are coming; we know that the situation in afghanistan is winding down or at least we all hope it is. what does that say? what's your vision for the future of us troops in europe with all of these changes that are emerging? >> lieutenant general mark hertling: that's a great question because we just recently had something we call the conference of european armies where 38 of our partners came together, our land force commanders came together. some of them couldn't make it and we talked for three days about the post-icef environment. we have gained so much over the last 10 years of combat where we have been training towards something.

it's like training for a race. you're motivated if you have to, if you know at the end of this month you're going to do a 10k you know you have to get up every day to run. when you have that kind of motivation in your future in knowing you're going to combat with each other you train. what we decided as a conference was we've got that same kind of requirement in the future in the post-icef world for different threats so we have to use the same kind of momentum to continue to train together and we're looking to do that more as a regional approach with regional actors, with groups of countries working multi-lateral training and exercises versus the individual unilateral things that we've been doing for the last ten years. >> john milewski: general hertling, thank you for joining us today. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: thank you very much. thanks for having me. >> john milewski: i wish you continued success. >> lieutenant general mark hertling: thank you. >> john milewski: rob, thank you as well. we'll return next week with another edition of dialogue. until then for all of us at the wilson center, i'm john milewski. thanks for joining us. [announcer]: we'd like to hear from you. please send you questions or comments to dialogue@wilsoncenter.org. you can also follow us on facebook us on facebook.

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