"Adapting To Tomorrow's Strategic Challenges"

CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (CSIS)
CSIS GLOBAL SECURITY CONFERENCE OPENING ADDRESS: ADAPTING TO TOMORROW’S STRATEGIC CHALLENGES
WELCOME/MODERATOR: JOHN HAMRE, PRESIDENT, CSIS
INTRODUCTION: SIMONE BEMPORAD, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, FINMECCANICA NORTH AMERICA, INC.
SPEAKER: GEN. JAMES CARTWRIGHT, VICE CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
THURSDAY, MAY 13, 2010, 8:00 A.M.
WASHINGTON, D.C.

Transcript by Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.

JOHN HAMRE: Okay. Could I ask people to find their seats? The only hard problem I have today is to keep on schedule. And so we’re going to get started. Thank you all for coming. My name is John Hamre. I’m the president here at CSIS and delighted to have all of you here. Thank you for coming.

I am just – this is something we’ve been looking forward to for – I’ve been at CSIS now for almost 10 years and we’ve long wanted to be able to have a prominent security – national security conference in Washington on really cutting-edge issues. And this is the first year we’ve had a chance to do that. And it’s been made possible because of some very good friends from Finmeccanica that said they would like to partner with us and help us make that happen.

And so I want to say a hearty thank you to them, making it possible. Think tanks can’t do this on their own, but we are able to have friends that will help us do it. And so I’m very grateful for that. Where is Simone? I wanted to – Simone, why don’t you come up? I would like Simone Bemporad who is with Finmeccanica just like to say a few words of welcome and then we will get on with the program. Simone, please.

SIMONE BEMPORAD: Thank you, John, and thank you to all the CSIS team that did an incredible job to make this event happen. I’d just like to say a few words on behalf of Finmeccanica and our chairman and CEO, Pier Francesco Guarguaglini, that came from Italy. I would also like to acknowledge the presence of the members of the board of directors and the senior defense advisory committee of Finmeccanica that also came here from Italy.
As an international aerospace and defense group, Finmeccanica believes that it is very important to support forums like this that debate over the challenges that we have in front of us in the year to come. And because of its deep level of expertise, we think that CSIS is a perfect partner to do this.

Moreover, under the leadership of John, CSIS has grown in reputation a lot. And if you look at the list of speakers and panelists that we have today – and first of all, I would like to recognize Gen. Cartwright – we have an incredible distinguished group of individuals that will address a wide spectrum
of issues.

It is our hope that you leave today with a better understanding of how we can collectively tackle the policy, doctrinal and the technological issues presented in each of the focus areas. I believe that it is also through events like this that Finmeccanica and its operating companies are committed to supporting military and law enforcement efforts of America and its strategic partners. So again, welcome and enjoy and the discussion.

(Applause.)

MR. HAMRE: I was working up on the Senate Armed Services Committee back when we were debating Goldwater-Nichols and still can remember very vividly one of the big debates that the committee had. And the debate was in trying to strengthen the Joint Chiefs inside the defense complex, to create a vice chairman position.

And then the real debate was, is that the number-two position or is that the number-six position? And I will tell you this debate raged. It raged for almost a day-and-a-half. And it was not entirely clear how it was going to come out and finally it did – and I won’t go into the details. It was really fascinating. It ended up with a commitment that the vice chairman would be the number-two position on the Joint Chiefs.

Now, I happen to personally think that decision anticipated Hoss Cartwright being the vice chairman. (Laughter.) And I should be careful because Pete – I mean – (chuckles) – but Hoss is that person that was envisioned, I think, by the committee that was – blends kind of the sophistication of the policy world and yet the operational discipline to do real things and to get real things done.

And I don’t think anybody has done it better than Gen. Cartwright. He has served in so many different capacities and is trusted by everybody in Washington. He’s the one guy that I know that has just as strong credibility with Republicans as with Democrats. And it’s that sort of credibility that’s made him a lead thinker for all of us. And so ladies and gentlemen, it’s my great privilege and honor to welcome Gen. Jim Cartwright. Welcome. Would you please join me in greeting him?

(Applause.)

GEN. JAMES E. CARTWRIGHT: So am I number six or am I number two? (Laughter.) Some days you never, you know. I appreciate the opportunity. It is intimidating to look at this room full of people and the experience that’s represented here and it’s also – you know, it gives you a little bit of comic relief to think that you came in this early for a Marine. (Laughter.)

But what I’d like to do is take you through a few thoughts that I think to some extent were addressed in the quadrennial reviews that we have just gone through in the department and are still trying to wrap up and put a bow on. As always, like the debate that John just talked about, there’s some fascinating discussions that go on.

There are some things that get left on the cutting room floor that are either just too hard or we can’t find the way to get to consensus in some things. And that doesn’t mean that they’re not important. And so forums like this and teeing some of these issues up I think are very important. And these issues are not just isolated to the military.

And if I were to look at all of the activity that has gone on in these recent reviews in comparison to the years and years of reviews that we have gone through in the department, this one is probably marked – this set of reviews is probably marked in two ways that are unique: The first is somewhat of a head slapper, but we’re at war. And so we’re going through these reviews in stride of conflict. Sometimes in stride of conflict and sometimes almost in denial of conflict – and I’ll talk a little bit more about that.

The second and probably the most leveraging is that we had Bob Gates go across that divide with us, across that transition. And if you don’t think that that’s not powerful, then let me just walk you very quickly through the process in Washington and the way it works. You get elected, on January 20th you get sworn in, on February 2nd you sign the first budget and you might have changed one or two things in it. You spend a year going through reviews about what you think is important in your administration and by the time you finish them, it’s almost – it is too late to affect next year’s budget.

And so the first one you get is the third year’s budget; it takes two years to deliver and you never see it if you have a four-year term. Having a guy go across, being able to stand up with him in ’10 and say this is what we are going to do and these are the big program changes that are going to occur and having that – having four years to put that in place has hugely leveraged the department. That is a significant activity for us.
Let me hit just kind of three things: The first is we are a nation at war and you can sometimes ignore that. The blessing that we have is that we’re pretty much able to carry on in the country as if we weren’t, but, you know, if you look at Clausewitz and you look at their – the trinity there of the army, the people and politics, we spent the first part of this past year trying to understand how we were going to wage the current wars and fights that we’re in. That question is going to come up again.

There is nothing in demographics, there is nothing in the competition for resources, whether it be water or climate – whatever it is out there – that tells us that we’re not going to be in conflict for as far as we can see out into the future. It’s just – everything is stacked up that way for a persistent conflict environment. And the question is, when you look at your military, when you look at the politics of the nation and when you look at our people, how are those three going to come together to that reality? How are we going to handle that? What’s the strategy going to look like to move to the future?

The second piece that I think is somewhat more subtle but is equally leveraging is that everything about this nation for the most part is an industrial society. We do it better than most and have for a long time. Our vertical approach to industry has been very successful. But we’re living in the information age. And the leverage is in the information age.

And all of the incentive structures in our law, in our policies, in the way we do business, in our governance are set up for industrial constructs and leverage and competitive advantage is in the information side of this equation. And we’re trying to reconcile those and be competitive in the world, whether it’s in the military or whether it is in commerce is a tension that has not been resolved in this country yet in law and policy, et cetera.
Our first reaction in the military to a problem is go build something. Okay? The problem is competitive advantages out there in the battlefield is in a 30-day cycle, not a 30-year cycle. Took us 15 years to design the Joint Strike Fighter. It will take us another 10 to field it and then we expect 30 years of life out of it.

To think that that’s going to maintain competitive advantage for the nation, to think that that far back – 40, 50 years – that we understood what the battlefield was going to look like when this vehicle’s out there misses the essence of where competitive advantage is going to be in the future – and today. And so we’ve got to come to grips with that.
The third area that I think is absolutely essential is the economy. You know, in my role as the lead for requirements in the department, we have a saying that, you know, there are a thousand good ideas out there. The ones that don’t have resource behind them are called hallucinations – (laughter) – because they’re interesting to talk about, but they’re not going to get to the foxhole with you. And there are any number of – I won’t name recovering comptrollers out there, Hamre – (laughter) – that will tell you that trying to do business in a world where resource constraints are going to be significant is difficult.

Go back to a gent by the name of Fuller that basically focused on the idea and construct that if you’re going to do grand strategy, your first objective is to appreciate the commerce and financial position of your nation. And this nation along with the world is going through a global economic crisis, okay?

There is no precedent for sustaining the deficits that we are in right now and are projected in our future. And the ability to recover from them has no real precedent. We’ve got a significant problem in front of us and waging war in that construct is something that we’re going to have to understand and think our way through.

And so the secretary and I have spent the last two weeks at forums like this saying, wake up, you’re not going to have 300, 500 ships. You are not going to have thousands of new aircraft unless we change the way we’re doing business because just saying I need it and therefore it’s important and therefore you’re going to provide it is not going to go much further. And you cannot build strategy in the absence of resource. It’s just a fact. And to do so is perilous for the country.

Let me just step down through the reviews that we’ve gone through, kind of hit the highlights of them, hit the themes here. And then I’ll turn it around and you can come at me. The Quadrennial Defense Review mandated we do this at the beginning of each of the administrations, the broad brush and review of strategy, how we’re doing.

I think for me the headlines in the Quadrennial Defense Review are first, focus on the war and the fight that you’re in. Keep an eye on the most dangerous, but you’ve got to focus your resource and your capability and your intellectual capital on the fight that you’re in. You can wish for another future, but you cannot get there unless you can take care of the present. Okay?

And there’s nobody that I know of out there that thinks that we’re going to be done with the conflicts we’re in in less than five to 10 years. We may be at them in different places and at different levels, but we’re going to be in what we’re doing for the next five to 10 years. And so ideas of trying to wish that away and thinking about a different world and, you know, there are sorts of postulations out there – you cannot, as a nation, forget the war that you’re in. Okay? You must win that to get to the next one.

The second piece here is the realization that, at least from the department’s perspective, we have focused inward for most of our strategy planning over the years. Inward – by that I mean, what is it we are going to do as a nation? How are we going to deter, deny, dissuade, assure – whatever it is that this week’s buzzwords are – how are we going to do that as a nation?

And the reality is we don’t fight alone; we don’t deter alone; we don’t assure alone. Everything is done in partnership. Everything is done in coalitions. And if we don’t do our strategy thinking about up and out instead of down and inward, we will miss the point of the way we do business, okay? Seems like an obvious thing, but I tell you, it is not. We tend to go inward. What are we going to do? We have to have the only capability. We have to fill every ladder on the – every rung on the ladder with the best capability in the world.

We can’t afford it, nor can we do it. Okay? There are other very capable nations out there, very willing to partner up. And we’ve got to make sure that our strategy is inclusive, not just acknowledges but brings in and incorporates the capabilities of those we’re likely to be partnered with, okay?
And people will immediately say, oh, you can’t rely on that. Well, I’ll tell you one thing you can rely on is you cannot afford to do everything yourself. We are not an island. The QDR really hit hard on those points: building the partnership capacities, starting to understand how we’re going to leverage the combined capabilities, not only of our allies but of our industry and of our academic resources. These are two areas that we have not tapped well, particularly commerce.

We tend to want to build and buy and field everything ourselves. We want it to be the best that could possibly be out there and now, quite frankly, pick your service – we’ve got a ship on each coast, we got an airplane on each coast. That’s the direction we’re headed. They’re the best in the world but there’s only a couple of them and yet the world we face is a hugely dispersed and diffused threat.

We need to be in a lot of places. We need quantity more than we need that high-end exquisite capability and if we can’t figure out how to get to that, then again, we’re living in denial of the world we’re in, hoping for the world we want to have in front of us.

The Nuclear Posture Review tied very nicely into the Quadrennial Defense Review. In the previous Nuclear Posture Review, we came up with what was called the new triad. Instead of going bombers, submarines and ICBMs, we said offense, defense, infrastructure, command-and-control – things like that. It was the acknowledgement that an offense-only strategy would no longer work in a world that had a range of military operations against which the destructive and lethal power was evenly distributed so you could get weapons of mass destruction with 300 ICBMs coming over the Pole.
In the world we’re living in, you can also get weapons of mass destruction from the single terrorist. You’ve got to acknowledge that fact and you’ve got to acknowledge that one size does not fit all. An offensive-only strategy will not work, nor will a defensive-only strategy work. You have to be able to tailor it for the world that you’re actually in, not the one you wish you were in.

So the acknowledgement in the Nuclear Posture Review this time around was that things like missile defense, things like conventional capabilities, things like command-and-control and infrastructure were going to be equally important in our deterrence construct, both at the strategic and tactical levels. This is the “how” in this NPR of what was postulated in the last NPR. I have the opportunity, the privilege, the burden – whatever you want to call it – of going across administrations but this has been coherent. Now we’re starting to have capability.

The Ballistic Missile Defense Review, which followed on the Nuclear Posture Review, started to bring the instantiation of how we were going to do that, both at the strategic and the regional view and how we were going to bring our allies into that construct. If I go back just three or four years, I can remember how many times I went to the Hill and to public forums and built up my scar tissue over “the missile defense system will never work, we can’t afford it, it’s not credible” – on and on and on – to the last six months going to the Hill and the only issue is how fast can you build it? Do you need more money?

It’s the only system that I know that I have ever experienced where the moment something goes on contract, I got a deployment order against it. That’s how big the demand is out there, particularly in the regional construct.

So what is the right balance and how do we tailor our offenses and our defenses? How do we start to think about what’s the strategy, what’s the grand strategy under that construct? How do you tailor it and how do you keep it adaptable? What we don’t want to do is write any of this stuff in stone and then walk away for 10 years. That’s just not the world we’re going to live in. It’s got to be adaptable; it’s got to be able to move through phases of transition for individual countries, individual regions and for the global economy and the global world as it exists today.

If we don’t do that, if we can't adapt, then it’ll be irrelevant pretty quickly and we’ll go out and take pictures of it and whatnot, but it won’t be relevant to the fights, to the world that we live in. We’ve got to be able to balance that. We’ve got to be able to move it around and put it in the right places and put the right balance of offense and defense together and we’ve got to have a construct and a strategy under which we’re going to do that.

After those two reviews, we went into a lot of work that was associated with the space posture. That work is not completed. It has been the most difficult of all of the reviews that we have gone through. When there were tens in space, we kept it a secret. Now that there are tens of thousands, we’re still trying to keep it a secret. Nobody knows we’re out there. It is kind of like taking your fighter jet and saying, the rules shouldn’t apply to me, I’m just going to fly through the traffic pattern in New York City because I’m in the military. We’re going to have to get to some level of regulation. Nobody wants to do that.

And so where I live in my last job and where I live in my current job, to get up in the morning and go, okay, how many people are going to run into each other in space today if we don’t cajole, plead with somebody to move out of the way in the next orbit cycle? How many people are going to step on each other’s signals? Just simple things: Are we going to pass right to right? Left to left? I don’t care but we’re going to have to get some sort of a management construct for how we do business out there.

Of course, everybody immediately goes to the extreme on it: “You want to take it over, you want to run it.” What I need is a construct in which we can do business in a safe way out there and we don’t have that today. Each of the countries that have systems that understand space situation awareness keep it a secret: “I don’t want you to know how many are out there.”

When I sat down with my counterpart from Russia, between the two of us in a room, we got down to the point of – on this many fingers, which is Marine math, we could count the number of vehicles that we didn’t want to tell each other about. We can work at that level but we’ve got to find a way to move to a shared understanding of what’s out there, what the traffic is, how we can advantage industry, how we can advantage commerce in that environment because it’s hugely leveraging and we’re not the only ones out there anymore and we’re not the only ones that want to compete in that environment.

Quite frankly, by keeping it a secret, what we have done is so disadvantage our own industry that we’re becoming noncompetitive in this environment because we can’t do what we need to do in technical and intellectual capital to go out there and compete in the global market. Our ability to build the components, et cetera, is lagging. We got a few and we can be exquisite but our ability to compete on the international market for commerce in space has really taken a hit.

The last one that I’ll touch on is cyber. We just went through the confirmation process for what was Lt. Gen. Alexander, soon to become Gen. Alexander, and the stand-up of Cyber Command. This goes back to the earlier conversations about offense and defense. There are generally three types of activities that go on in cyber that are considered threat.
There’s the hacker, out there on his own or with a couple of buddies, breaks in, changes his grades, whatever it is. There is the industrial espionage side of this equation, trying to find competitive advantage, wrestle it away from your competitor, whatever you’re trying to do there. And then there’s the nation state level.

Inside the United States, probably more in the United States, the acknowledgement at the national level that we are losing intellectual capital, competitive advantage, our ability to do business out there, is recognized, and how significant those losses are.
In industry, it’s recognized. No longer can you afford to be attacked and then wait 30 days for someone to come up with a patch and write it off to the customer the cost of those 30 days. You can’t do it. So industry and the government understand the threat and are ready to do things to make sure that the greater good addresses that threat.

But down here is the average civilian who maybe lost their ID, one in 10 of them, maybe had their computer compromised. But they have no sense right now that the threat is sufficient that they’re going to compromise personal privacy or any of the other things that they hold dear yet. They’re not threatened sufficiently. So we have this gulf in the country between those who understand and are worried about it and those who understand but do not put that worry at a level that they’re willing to address.

We have an entire architecture globally that is based on defense only – point defense only. So our defense is our virus protection software and our firewall. If you’re in uniform, what you’ve basically said is, I want to have this fight at my boundaries, inside my country and I’m willing to wait for that and when it gets catastrophic, then we’ll address it.

The question is, is that the kind of declaratory policy we want to have? Is that the kind of strategy that we want to have in this environment? Is it sufficiently leveraging that we are worried about it? Do you believe that this network environment we live in is going to persist for years to come?
If you believe those things, then we’ve got to start to think about the validity of a Maginot Line approach to cyber. I’m not advocating that the DOD needs to take over Homeland – that’s not the issue here. The issue is strategy. The issue is the construct in which we believe that this environment, which has become so leveraging, so intensive in our capital growth and work that we’re going to leave it to a home game: “It’s free, you can attack at any time you want and there’s no penalty.”

Is that the construct that we want to have? We’re going to have to think our way through that. We do not have a declaratory policy right now for cyber. We’ve got it for space, we’ve got it for missile defense, we’ve got it for nuclear, strategic. There’s work to be done. There are a lot of sides to this argument; there’s a lot of sides to this and any place where there is this much money, there’s going to be controversy. So please solve that before you go home. (Chuckles.)

Thank you for this opportunity. I’m happy to go in any direction you want to go in the question-and-answer. But I think this is important. (Applause.)

MR. HAMRE: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got two microphones positioned here and because of the size of the audience, we really can’t move them. So I’d ask you to come up to one of the microphones if you have a question that you’d like to put to Gen. Cartwright. We’ve got about 10 minutes that we’re going to be able to do that. So just go ahead and grab a mike and I’m going to let the general field the questions.

Q: Gen. Cartwright, in lieu of what you want to do in terms of combined capabilities, are the current ITAR restrictions, in allowing us to cross-flow this information to keep the capabilities realistic – do they need to be amended as well to allow us to have that capability in a combined manner?
GEN. CARTWRIGHT: I think both the secretary and I have been out the last two weeks saying that we’ve got to go at that. State Department agrees. We’re putting people together. The difficulty will be when you start to get beyond inside the administration, of working our way through the congressional side, the legal implications, working our way through constituencies that – where competition somehow is envisioned to be advantaged by those activities.

We’ve got to break these walls down. We’ve got to open up the ability to compete and to go out into other markets and find best value benchmark, et cetera, in a way that we’re not allowed to do today. It’s just essential.
Q: Hi, I’m Jennifer Brinkerhoff from George Washington University and I wanted to press you a little bit more if you could say something about the civil affairs capacity of the military and what your review is saying for that.

GEN. CARTWRIGHT: Civil affairs has been an area that has been under-resourced for as long as I can remember. The bulk of it, for the past 10 or 15 years, I think, has been in the garden reserve which – the good on that is that we tend to get people who actually work in that area and bring real skill to the job but the demand seems to – has exceeded the capacity to go out and recruit to those areas.
If we leave the demand in place, we incentivize it better. We’ll get the quality. What we have to do now, my sense is, is not bring it into the active force because then you’ll get somebody who gets, you know, six months worth of school and now is an expert versus somebody who’s actually been a practitioner out there.

I think what we need to do is start to understand how to recruit and set the rules and the laws in the Guard and Reserve so that the type of work – the type of incentive brings those people in, finds a way for them to come on a regular basis that is acceptable to their employment scheme inside the United States, but sets us a quality of work, as we would call it, and an expectation of employment that is different than what is set by the standard Guard and Reserve, which is break glass and I’ll come and get you.

It’s not an emergency. We need these people out there day-in and day-out and we need a capacity that is far greater than what we have today. We’re trying to grow it; we’re still growing it, the onesies and twosies and we really need to grow at a much larger scale.
Mitzi?

Q: General, it’s wonderful to hear you speak again. I’m Mitzi Wertheim. I’m with the Naval Postgraduate School. Thinking in to the future, which I tend to do – (chuckles) – I’ve been listening to a lot of people say the biggest national security challenge we face is our educational system.
And we’ve had Defense play a big role in getting us to look into the future about education, but the point that keeps getting made over and over, recently, is that we have to start at age three. And that’s sort of a hard game for you to get in, but we have to somehow get the
country to understand how important it is in building the human capacity to basically face the future and gives us the people we need for national security as well.

GEN. CARTWRIGHT: I’m not sure there was a question in there, but I’ll answer it anyway. (Chuckles.) I’ll focus more on the uniform-side of the equation here, but you know, in a 30-year career, we send an officer to school three times. And 30 to 50 percent of that school is making sure they still know how to put the uniform on properly, can stand in an inspection and things like that.
Rather than sending them out to industry, rather than sending them out to benchmark against a much broader range of understanding, et cetera, the Department of Education, right now, is saying that in a four-year college education, after the third year, 30 percent of the first year is irrelevant by technology.

That’s a three-year PCS assignment for a commander. So the agenda that you bring in to your squadron, battalion, whatever, in the third year of your command, most of your agenda has become irrelevant because technology’s ecliptic. Tactics, techniques and procedures, competitive advantage have all eclipsed it in the world that we live in.
The education process in the military is not keeping up with the realities of the world that we encounter when we go out there, at the transaction point. And so we’ve got to figure a different way to do this and we’ve got to understand the expectation that we have, both on our officers and our enlisted and be able to give them educational and intellectual advantage on the battlefield as well as the physical prowess.

Q: Hi, thanks for fielding questions. My name’s Jeff Abramson. I’m with the Arms Control Association. I’ve been trying to figure out how to frame this question about military capabilities and what – how you think about what we need to hang on to, what we need to protect moving into the future and how you make those decisions given our desire and need to work with allies and they may have different approaches.

So in particular, in terms of things, you know, our organization says maybe we don’t need any more cluster munitions and landmines. There’s a big humanitarian and international – and a lot of our allies have sort of moved away from those items. Is there desire to sort of go along that path and then I also think the United States wants to maintain capabilities in, let’s say, UAVs and other technologies.

And they want to stay ahead of the game and maybe not want to share those things moving forward. So how you decide in this environment where we recognize we need to cooperate, what to hang on to, what to try to hang onto exclusively and what to maybe jettison that maybe we don’t need anymore.

GEN. CARTWRIGHT: Yeah. Let me just take those two examples; the idea of munitions that are not – in growing quarters of the world, are becoming activities that we don’t want to participate in. They may be effective as lethal agents but they are – they have a social and cultural bias against them for good reasons.

The reality is, and we tended to live for several years in a mindset of this is war. You know, put that stuff aside; this is war. The reality is, we’re back to Clausewitz, it is about the politics, it is about the people. And so if you ignore that, then your ability to actually wage and succeed in conflict is lost because you’re trying to influence somebody’s mind at the end of the day.

On the other end of the equation about what you keep and what you don’t keep and the value of UAVs as an example and whether or not we want to allow that technology to get out to others. I may be in the minority in this opinion, but where my head is on this, is that, the platform is not where the leverage is, okay?

And so denying allies the ability to have the best of your platforms, whether they be UAVs or something else, really is kind of – it doesn’t work to your advantage all that well. It really isn’t protecting anything. Our competitive advantage in the UAVs is really in the sensors. It’s really – in most of our platforms today, it’s the sensor, it’s the weapons.

It is not the platform anymore. The platforms just eclipsed in their value in the first or six years and they become obsolete. It’s the intellectual capital, our ability to upgrade and our ability to turn them fast enough to be inside of the adversary’s decision moves.

That’s where our competitive advantage is. And not selling them out there, not proliferating them to our friends really doesn’t help us. It disadvantages us because then they can’t really be true partners in some cases. So we’ve got to think about that problem differently and that’s my opinion.

Q: General, hi. Thanks for your remarks. I’m Bruce McDonald at the United States Institute of Peace, had served as supporting the Strategic Posture Review Commission. One of the recommendations that the Perry-Schlesinger commission made, besides all the things it talked about with nuclear, was in the area of space and it talked about the importance of maintaining stability in space.

A number of people have written and commented on it, that deterrence is one mechanism to do it. And I wanted to ask you how you would see deterrence theory, which is – which in the space dimension, has not been developed very much – how you might see that work. And especially given what China has been up to in the last few years, what the implications are of that for the United States and particularly in the offensive capability area?

GEN. CARTWRIGHT: In theory, when you look at an expanse and you decide how you want to either employ an offensive-biased or a defensive-biased strategy, the larger the contested area, generally, the more friendly it is to an offensive-type of construct because you’re not trying to do point defenses every place. It doesn’t take as many assets.

That, because of the – back to some of the questions that came earlier – has socially, culturally, everything else, no weapons in space, no capability in space is really what people have talked about. The more we populate space, the more contested it becomes. You can say
the contesting may be just over competitive advantage in a commercial environment or otherwise, but the more resource that goes out there, the more likely we’re going to have it.

The more we build competitive advantage to be able to be global and to be able to have eyes, ears and communications on a global basis, the more important it is to our nation to have an assured capability in space. The question is, what’s the right balance between defense and offense in space? That is what the debate has been about, internal, where do we want to be in this discussion?

My sense is there is not going to be a great tolerance for a significant offensive capability in space. But quite frankly, you don’t necessarily have to be offensive in space to have an offensive capability about space. Much of space resides on the ground. As silly as that sounds, that’s the reality.
And so what we’re trying to understand here is what would a declaratory policy look like for space? And that debate is out there and it’s rich. There are many countries that are building counter-space capabilities. Most of them reside on the ground. That makes it a little easier. But their effect is in space.

And so how are we going to do that? How are we going to have sufficient space situation awareness to be able to understand what’s happening to us? And quite frankly, to make sure that we understand when it is just an anomaly on the spacecraft versus some other manmade activity? So that requires at least a sensor system out there, an awareness system that we don’t have today and that we’re quite likely going to need to move to.
The question is, do we want to move to it unilaterally? Or would we like a more holistic approach with our allies, with others, to get us all into the same – okay, let’s understand what’s going on out there. Let’s understand when somebody does something bad, who it is, so we have attribution and what our remedy opportunities are. And I think that’s where the debate is starting to center. But it’s front and center right now.

MR. HAMRE: I’m mindful of the need to get the general out of here. If you can give me a 30-second question and a 45-second answer, we can get one more in. Please.

Q: Doug Brooks. I’m with IPOA, which is the Association for the Stability Operations Industry. My question’s really on stability operations. What is the future of that? We have an amazing capability within the military today. I mean look at the photo here in terms of working in small wars and everything, the Marines have their small wars handbook. But what about the whole military? Are they going to continue to maintain this capability for the future? What are the plans on that?

GEN. CARTWRIGHT: I don’t think there’s anything in our future that says this is going away anytime soon. And so this is the classic, how many, you know, bomber squadrons do you want versus how many people do you want associated with stability operations and that end of the range of military operations?

And it’s a question of balances. It’s not a question of either/or. And so the balance, right now, is moving more towards what used to be called the lower end of the spectrum, but stability operations, influence operations. You know, those types of things that help our partners help themselves.
And I don’t see us moving away from that anytime soon. The difficulty here is in the competition for resource; people want to build the high end. What we need is the low end. It’s the war we’re in and the bias towards it that we’re trying to drive. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I appreciate it.

MR. HAMRE: (Inaudible, applause.)

RICK “OZZIE” NELSON: Okay. My name is Rick “Ozzie” Nelson. I’m the director of the homeland security and counterterrorism program at CSIS. While the general and his party depart, I just want to cover some logistics with you. Thanks again for attending this event. As you can see, we have an incredible number of people here and we’re thankful for your participation, but we’re going to have to manage the movement of people to make
sure that we can get through the itinerary.

We have three rooms and the rooms are going to be posted up here on the screen throughout the day, so you can see where your panels are. We have to create the third room. So on the break here before the first panel starts, they’re going to enclose a barrier here. This will be the main room. There will be a room in the back here and then a room across the hall.

For the first panels in the main room will be Middle East. The back room will be “nuke” and then across the hall will be the “cyber” and the “satellite.” And then for the “future” presentations, you’ll see what rooms they are based on this calendar. And there’s also placards out in front of each room as well directing you to there.

We have staff – each room has a captain. We have staff positioned throughout the event. So if you have any questions – if you need any assistance, please reach out to one of the CSIS staff members and we’d be more than happy to help you get what you need. So with that, we’re going to go ahead and take a 25-minute break. The next panel starts at 9:10. They must start on time and they must end on time. Again, thank you all for attending.

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