Transforming Military Force: The Legacy of Arthur Cebrowski and Network Centric Warfare

TRANSFORMING MILITARY FORCE

Praeger Security International Advisory Board Board Cochairs Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Public and International Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia (U.S.A.) Paul Wilkinson, Professor of International Relations and Chairman of the Advisory Board, Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St. Andrews (U.K.) Members Eliot A. Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies and Director, Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University (U.S.A.) Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies (U.S.A.) The´re`se Delpech, Director of Strategic Affairs, Atomic Energy Commission, and Senior Research Fellow, CERI (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques), Paris (France) Sir Michael Howard, former Chichele Professor of the History of War and Regis Professor of Modern History, Oxford University, and Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, Yale University (U.K.) Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Ret.), former Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Department of the Army (U.S.A.) Paul M. Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director, International Security Studies, Yale University (U.S.A.) Robert J. O’Neill, former Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls College, Oxford University (Australia) Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland (U.S.A.) Jusuf Wanandi, co-founder and member, Board of Trustees, Centre for Strategic and International Studies (Indonesia) Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International (U.S.A.)

TRANSFORMING MILITARY FORCE The Legacy of Arthur Cebrowski and Network Centric Warfare

JAMES R. BLAKER

Praeger Security International Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blaker, James R. Transforming military force: the legacy of Arthur Cebrowski and network centric warfare / James R. Blaker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99427–3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–275–99427–9 (alk. paper) 1. Cebrowski, Arthur. 2. United States—Armed Forces—Reorganization. 3. Military doctrine—United States—History—20th century. 4. Military doctrine—United States—History—21st century. 5. United States—Military policy. I. Title. II. Title: Legacy of Arthur Cebrowski and network centric warfare. UA23.B5422 2007 355.30973—dc22 2007000073 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2007 by James R. Blaker All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007000073 ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99427–3 ISBN-10: 0–275–99427–9 First published in 2007 Praeger Security International, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

Chapter 1

The Context

1

Chapter 2

Military Transformation

21

Chapter 3

Transforming the U.S. Military

63

Chapter 4

Future Forces

94

Chapter 5

Military Transformation and World Affairs

129

Chapter 6

Successes and Failures

146

Chapter 7

Institutionalizing Transformation

168

Chapter 8

An Appraisal

193

Notes

227

Bibliography

239

Index

245

PREFACE

I met Arthur Cebrowski in 1994. At the time I was the senior advisor to the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William A. Owens, trying to help him promote what was emerging as ‘‘the American revolution in military affairs.’’ We met as fellow conspirators in the revolution. Vice Admiral Cebrowski was the ‘‘J6,’’ formally, the Joint Staff Director of Command, Control, Communications, and Computers, or ‘‘C4’’ in the Pentagon’s acronymic addiction. We had little in common other than the conspiracy. C4 seemed to me then as the most esoteric of military functions, yet, by the mid-1990s it was clear that it was the center of the revolution. It was equally clear to me that Owens had the highest regard for Cebrowski and relied heavily on his insights. So, I tried to get to know him. We became friends and, particularly over the last five years, he became a window into what was occurring inside the Pentagon, into the international dynamics that drive the Department of Defense, and into the new age he convinced me we are entering. Cebrowski was a warrior. He flew through North Vietnamese surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft artillery as a young Navy pilot and later commanded aircraft carriers bigger and better than the ones on which he once called home. He designed weapons and planned combat operations. But he was also an intellectual who thought deeply about his profession. He read constantly, enjoyed mathematical challenges, and memorized poems. He had the phenomenal ability to tie the images, algorithms, statements, and descriptions together, for he was a synaptic thinker, drawing insight and correlations from the connections among what others thought were disparate phenomena. He was articulate and had a wonderful sense of humor. He laughed with a contagious enthusiasm, each time

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with a tone of discovery, as if he had found some nuance, implication, a small window to something new, and the discovery delighted him. So, of course, he was an explorer, a critic, an intent listener, a revolutionary, a transformer, and an agent of change. The last decade has been a period of great change, particularly for the U.S. military, and Cebrowski was in the center of it. The demise of the bipolar world changed the way we thought about military threats, the rationale we had constructed for our alliance structures, and the global distribution of our forces abroad. The emergence of Information Age warfare altered our assumptions about combat effectiveness, risks, and timing. The growing awareness and significance of global integration challenged our assumptions about military geography and missions. Together, they redefined ‘‘threats,’’ ‘‘national security,’’ and the military. Certainly, after 9/11 those in the Pentagon saw imminent threats to U.S. national security no longer as ‘‘lesser included cases’’ of great power war, or of any of the planning cases they had developed to compensate for the absence of a ‘‘global war against the Soviet Union.’’1 The United States was clearly vulnerable to direct attack by individuals willing to sacrifice themselves in the attempts. Those individuals no longer fought for nations so much as for religion and hatreds, and U.S. planners had to consider seriously the prospect of them using weapons of mass destruction. But even if that worst-case scenario never played out, the terrorists had demonstrated they could do things without weapons of mass destruction that could change the United States and the world. They changed the American Mind, to borrow the concept coined by a premier American historian, in the sense of reasserting what had been muted themes in the American experience.2 National security no longer began and ended at the nation’s borders, and it was no longer the sole purview of the military. It encompassed a crash requirement for better internal security and the creation and maintenance of a new world order.3 All you had to do was pick up some journal on national security to find the mantra. It permeated the talking head shows for years after the terrorist attacks, continually presented as if it were an insight, with the proper pontificational solemnity. Official Washington climbed aboard, making the sincerity of the expression an electoral discriminator and using it to rationalize how it allocated the trillions of dollars the nation devoted to national security in the first half of the first decade of the new century. Where Cebrowski differed in the tumult was in his search for the ‘‘whys’’ and ‘‘so whats.’’ He tried to put the swirl into perspective, to discern its underlying dynamics and moral directions, and to explain what it meant for the kind of military forces the United States would build. He was largely successful. He articulated the conceptual base for U.S. military force design and use. He was the prime architect of U.S. military transformation.

Preface

xi

What follows reflects Cebrowski’s personal views as related to me from October 2001 until shortly before his death in November 2005. In those four years, we usually met once a week for about two hours, sometimes more often, sometimes, particularly when his illness clawed, less frequently. He chose the subject, normally something he was preparing for a session with the secretary of defense or for a speech scheduled in the next couple of days. He did most of the talking, working out the points he wanted to make. I would ask questions; sometimes ask him to clarify his argument, and try to serve as a sounding board. But mostly I took notes or recorded the sessions, transcribed them, and sent copies back to him. At the time, the discussions seemed almost ad hoc, disjointed. It was only later, when I went back over the notes and transcriptions that I sensed an underlying pattern and an evolution of his thinking. It was a deductive evolution, moving from grand history laced with allusions of shifting ages and cultures to the details of current technologies and military organizations. I’ve tried to capture this sweep in the description that follows. Near the end, when we talked of a book, he made two requests. He wanted to acknowledge that many of the biases in the following pages reflect his experiences and insights from a military career that began over four decades ago. And he wanted them written ‘‘for the future and for those who will define and live it.’’ • Chapter 1, The Context, provides a brief overview of Cebrowski’s career, focusing on the events and insights that influenced what he called a new theory of war. It sketches the salient points of that theory. • Chapter 2, Military Transformation, lays out the broad framework and rationale for thinking about military transformation as an important current in a broader tide in human affairs. It sketches what the shift from the Industrial Age to the new Information Age means in terms of military rule sets (the assumptions and mores underlying the kind of militaries nations build and how they use them) and on the character of military competition. It discusses how the shift governs armed conflict, the rising importance of information superiority, the emerging concept of self-synchronization and other conceptual components of Cebrowski’s new theory of network centric warfare. • Chapter 3, Transforming the U.S. Military, puts the general concepts of Chapter 2 in a more specific American context. It lays out the arguments for and against accelerating U.S. military transformation and comes down on the side of acceleration. • Chapter 4, Future Forces, provides an example of what the United States could do if it accelerated transformation. It lays out some fairly radical changes, changes that Cebrowski thought were near the far edge of what is technically, economically, and politically feasible, but realistic enough to attempt. It includes detailed estimates of changes in the future size, structure, organization, and cost of transforming the U.S. military between the present and 2012, and illustrates the implications of the kinds of decisions that would be involved to get there. • Chapter 5, Military Transformation and World Affairs, puts U.S. military transformation into the broader issue of U.S. security and foreign policy in the years ahead. It describes

xii

Preface how transforming the U.S. military could help the United States weld together traditional and new alliances and a safer world. • Chapter 6, Successes and Failures, provides Cebrowski’s retrospective of where he did and did not succeed in his efforts to accelerate the transformation of the U.S. military. • Chapter 7, Institutionalizing Transformation, describes Cebrowski’s views on how to assure continuous military transformation and outlines some of the techniques he found effective —a kind of guide to Pentagon in-fighting. • Chapter 8, An Appraisal, offers some judgments on the extent to which Cebrowski’s ideas affected planning assumptions in the Pentagon and operational assumptions throughout the U.S. armed forces. It speculates on the extent to which his new theory of war will condition and influence the design, size, and character of U.S. military forces and how those forces will operate into the future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I acknowledge with deep gratitude the help a number of individuals provided in preparing this book. Admiral Cebrowski’s wife Kathy and his brother John both gave me insights to what made Art such a good, decent, honorable man, and I think their relationships with him had a lot to do with it. His colleagues and friends, Admiral Bill Owens, General John Shalikashvili, Admiral Chuck Saffell, Terry Pudas, Lloyd Feldman, John Garstka, Rob Holzer, Linda Lewandowski, Brenda Goers, Tom Hone, John Hanley, Tom Barnett, Scott Buchanan, Tom Ferguson, Roger Nicol, and Brigita Wood all helped me understand the man and his thoughts far beyond what I could have hoped to do on my own. Bob Silano and Winsor Whiton labored through early drafts, reviewing them with a skill I admire deeply. Erica St. James critiqued the drafts with the brilliance, perception, and literary flair I wish I had. A special note of thanks to Christine McGlumphy and to the editor at Praeger Security International, Adam Kane, and his colleagues.

Arthur Cebrowski (Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy, retired), Director, Office of Force Transformation, U.S. Department of Defense, October 2001–January 2005 (Scott Davis/ USAVIC).

CHAPTER

1

THE CONTEXT

Art Cebrowski put it this way: ‘‘We live between two great chapters of human history, in the messy interspaces between the Industrial Age we are leaving and the Information Age we are entering. In this historic wedge of a new age it is the United States that levers the future of military affairs. What the United States does and does not do, to and with its military, will define the character of military competition and the content of international relations for decades to come.’’ Everyone senses a deep shift in the context of today’s life, even if we cannot agree on what to call it. For over a decade, national security buffs have referred to it as the ‘‘post-Cold War’’ period, an attribution that says something about what it is not, but not very much about what it is. ‘‘Unipolar world,’’ ‘‘globalized,’’ ‘‘the end of history,’’ ‘‘clash of civilizations,’’ all these, and others, churn through scholarly literature and pop culture, attesting to the intellectual ferment in this exciting period of great change, but without arriving at the name everyone believes captures the essence of the changes.

U.S. Military Power in the Tide of Change There is one aspect that everyone recognizes, however: the prominence of U.S. military power. By all the measures, U.S. military forces in this new century are clearly superior to any other national military, and to just about any combination of them. Cebrowski’s testament to the salience of U.S. military power is not controversial inside the Pentagon. American pundits, politicians, defense contractors, and men and women in uniform accept it. So do millions of people in

2

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other nations who watch and think about the United States. Many in these audiences—particularly Americans—are happy with the disparity in American military strength. Much of the world’s population figures there is not much they can do about it one way or the other, simply accept it, and focus on other things. Some have spent years trying to come up with ways of offsetting it without investing the time and treasure needed to match it directly. But Cebrowski saw the new age and American military power as providing opportunity not just to obtaining and securing U.S. national interests, although he was all for this. He saw the global contextual changes that swept the U.S. military and everything else into the new age, and the edge in U.S. military power this tide had helped to create, as an opportunity to change the character of military power. He wanted to transform U.S. military power in order to bring all militaries more in line with moral purpose. Cebrowski believed military professionals are particularly interested in the nexus of military power and morality because they confront the issue in their profession more constantly and directly than anybody else. But, as a warrior himself, he also recognized that American military professionals take military efficiency very seriously; often concentrating on how to bring violence to bear in ways that produce the greatest possible harm to and destruction of opponents, sometimes forgetting, or consciously screening out, personal quandaries about and assessments of the justness of their actions. He thought military technology could affect how military personnel saw the connections between the use of military force and morality, and that the increasing ability to apply violence at greater distances, faster, and with more precision was making those connections more complex. He knew a lot about the technologies that were giving the U.S. military new prowess and capabilities. He had studied mathematics and during the more than three decades of his military career served in positions that gave him insight to the promises and limitations of military technology. During the last decade of his life he was deeply involved in the cutting edge of the information technologies propelling the U.S. military toward increasing potency and efficiency. He was the chief intellectual architecture of network centric warfare. He believed it was a new theory of war that, among other things, could provide that elusive bridge between the character of military force and morality—what mankind had sought for so long across so many cultures: Just War, jihad bis saif (jihad by the sword), Dharma Yuddha, and its many other names. Cebrowski was influential, not just in the sense of exercising the highest levels of military command, although he retired as a three-star admiral and had commanded naval battlegroups with the military power once possessed only by nations. He did not have the political and governmental authority of presidents, secretaries of defense, senators, congressmen, or governors. He was influential in the way Sun-tzu, Cicero, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz were; because powerful

The Context

3

men acted upon his ideas, because his ideas illuminated the times in which they grew, and because they will continue to provide insight to military affairs to later generations. Cebrowski advocated change in a period of great change. He saw the drivers of change in terms of deeper dynamics of cultural transition. But he believed the rate, direction, and results of the changes that cascade around us were not predestined. They were subject to human will, decisions, wisdom, and ignorance. He had the audacity to believe he could demonstrate this, the humility to see how difficult the attempt would be, and the conviction that it was important to try. ‘‘We would be wrong to let our current military dominance lull us into arrogance or lethargy,’’ he would say. ‘‘We should choose to transform what is today the world’s most powerful military. We should accelerate some of the changes that are emerging. We should push—more rapidly, strongly, and diligently than we have—the potential capabilities that technology opens into the way we organize, structure, train, and use the U.S. military. We should do this for the sake of our children, their children, and their children’s children. And we should do it because it is morally correct.’’ But the kind and rate of the changes he pushed are not easy for the U.S. military to accept. Militaries value continuity, conformity to rules, and maintaining tradition. In the din, chaos, and ambiguity of battle, the predictability of predetermined doctrine is very valuable because it increases the likelihood that comrades-in-arms will behave more or less as they all expect each other to. And in trying to decide what kind of military force to build for the future, the military’s conservatism—a strong bias toward maintaining what seems to have worked in the past—seems quite sensible. Penalties for the wrong kind of changes in military affairs can be very high, so changing very slowly is not necessarily a bad way to try to deal with the future. Besides, cautious change maintains force readiness. So, militaries institute change with extreme caution. When they are not at war. In war, change is easier and often faster, for in the clash of armed conflict it becomes clear, very quickly, what of the tried, traditional, doctrinal—the way ‘‘things are to be done’’—is no longer true. Conflicts, coupled with advances in military technology, are sharp goads for change. Particularly for the losers, if they are still around afterward, who often seek rapid, significant military transformation to wash away the ashes of defeat. But none of this means it will happen.1 Cebrowski understood this bipolar military approach to change, how militaries could remain suspicious and cautious about making changes for long periods, and then suddenly embrace and institutionalize different operational concepts, organizations, and structures remarkably quickly. He believed rapid military change was becoming increasingly possible and in the case of U.S. military forces, likely. But he also believed that it was going to occur even faster in the militaries of other nations because they recognized they could not compare or

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compete with U.S. military forces in traditional military power. And because they did not have to spend as much time, effort, and money to develop competitive military capabilities as the United States did to maintain its military lead. This, he argued, was the result of the macro shift from the Industrial to the Information Ages. There were, he would point out, military transformations in the Industrial Age, when military defeats and the fear of defeat drove nations to invest heavily in the technologies of the age—the capital intensive industries that allowed them to build new, larger, and different militaries. But to compete in the Industrial Age, you had to have the industrial base that could produce those militaries, and that narrowed the true competitors to nations with great wealth and organization—the ‘‘great powers’’ that dominated the last two centuries. Great powers, largely because of their militaries and the economies that supported them, defined international relations, the global economic system, and much of the world’s culture. For over two centuries, their military competition set the course and speed of human history. But he was convinced that the foundation of military power in the new age is not going to be the same. He argued the technological base for military power was becoming increasingly ubiquitous, inexpensive, and obtainable. It was a great leveler among national militaries, for to obtain significant military power, nations no longer need the wealth and organization to produce the numbers, the steel, the machinery, and the energy that distinguished the great, and subsequently, the super military powers. But it was more than a leveler among nation states. It is a leveler of nation states. Non-national actors—small groups of individuals, bound together by cultural beliefs as much as nationalism, by shared hatreds as much as national allegiances, have emerged as militarily powerful, with the influence to affect the course of economies, conflicts, and history. All this, he believed, meant the rate of change in the U.S. military had to increase. He did not prophesize that the United States was going to suddenly discover that its military lead had vanished; that pride in its military prowess was coming before a fall. On the contrary, he believed that not all military defeats plant the seeds of change and not all military transformations stem from defeats. Militaries could change also because national leaders—military and civilian—choose to transform them, not out of the bitterness of defeat, but to seize the vanguard tides that drive human affairs from an older age to a new one. This is a story about Arthur K. Cebrowski’s efforts to put the ideas he had developed over the previous four decades into effect. It is a story largely of success in his efforts to do so, so it is also a discussion of change in military affairs, what makes it possible, what works against it, and how to bring it about. It is also a glimpse into where the arguments for changing the U.S. military clash with the arguments against changes—what goes on among the higher levels of military and civilian authority in the Pentagon. Most of the story takes place after the

The Context

5

events of September 11, 2001, after the terrorists seized control of American Airlines flight 77 and flew the fuel-laden Boeing 757 airliner over the Army-Navy Country Club in Arlington, Virginia, into the Pentagon.

A Meeting with the Secretary of Defense In 2001, shortly before the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Arthur Cebrowski accepted Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s request to join him as director, Office of Force Transformation. In their initial face-to-face meeting Rumsfeld asked how Cebrowski could help him accelerate the transformation of the U.S. military. ‘‘But before I answered,’’ Cebrowski recalled, ‘‘Rumsfeld answered for me. I was to serve as a conceptual engine for the effort and help him sift from all the programs claiming to be ‘transformational’ the ones that best fit the path he wanted to blaze into the new century. He was not particularly clear in that discussion as to what he meant by his path. But he talked of a need for big changes, undertaken quickly, and of the controversy he expected to stir. He spoke of his need for a ‘think and do tank,’ and how I would work directly with him in formulating what should be done and then getting it started.’’ Cebrowski was not sure why Secretary Rumsfeld asked him to join him. ‘‘We had not worked together before, and while I vaguely remember his first tour as secretary of defense in the mid-1970s, it was from afar, geographically and in terms of rank. At the time, I knew he had been a congressman, a member of President Ford’s inner circle, and a Republican Party leader. But I was apolitical, my political activity and interest limited to voting. While I was generally aware he had taken on the secretary of defense earlier at a tough time when the nation was still trying to sort out what Watergate and the loss in Vietnam meant, I had been a lot more interested then in what much lower ranks in the chain of command at considerable distance from the senior leadership were telling me to do. He had no awareness of me prior to the late 1990s. So, I was surprised when he called and asked me to come and talk with him. When we met, he went straight to the point. He had heard what I had been doing for the last several years, he said, and wanted to know if I would join his team and help transform the U.S. military.’’

Preparations Cebrowski had retired from the Navy in 2001 as the Navy’s senior vice admiral, stepping down from the presidency of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He had served in the Navy for almost 37 years after receiving his commission through the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps, or NROTC, upon graduating from Villanova University. The general course of his Navy

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career was set just prior to graduating, for in 1963, Admiral Hyman Rickover, father and absolute ruler of the American nuclear submarine force, conducted his annual survey of NROTC members for those getting the highest marks in science and mathematics. Cebrowski’s name popped up. Rickover invited him to interview for the elite nuclear community he was putting together in the Navy. ‘‘Rickover was just a name I’d read in Time Magazine; I had no understanding of who he was at the time, and here he was asking me to come to Washington on a Saturday,’’ Cebrowski recalled. ‘‘So, I sent back a polite note, saying thanks, but I was busy. This was, of course, before my commissioning and before I had any real experience with the intricacies of military protocol. To me at that time, admirals were some exalted, mythical beings who had nothing at all to do with ensigns. As far as I was concerned the pinnacle of the Navy was the captain who headed the NROTC detachment at Villanova.’’ Rickover was not amused by Midshipman Cebrowski’s polite regrets and called the captain to inquire, in his inimitable way, what was amiss in the captain’s detachment. ‘‘I remember the captain’s face when he asked in a voice louder than normal if I knew who the Admiral was and just what did I want to do in the Navy now that there was no way I could ever have a successful Navy career. Noting that the captain was an aviator, I replied that with all due respect to Admiral Rickover, or whatever his name was, I had always wanted to fly Navy jets, thus setting my Navy career for many of the next thirty years.’’ He flew 154 combat missions during two tours in Vietnam in the 1960s, almost all of them over North Vietnam. ‘‘I focused on two things then: completing the missions and getting back alive,’’ he told his wife. It was an early introduction to the military challenge of striking the correct balance between central control and individual discretion and to the dangers of focusing on military problems too narrowly. Reminiscing in 2004, he related an example of the challenge: ‘‘I remember an apocryphal story circulating through the fleet in the 1960s that had particular meaning to those of us who dodged surface-to-air missiles over North Vietnam. Those were the early days of dodging SAMs, and some credited the missiles with extraordinary power, sometimes referring to them as a new kind of death ray. Navy intelligence had discovered a limitation to the missiles, however. They apparently had difficulty locking onto aircraft flying below about 800 feet altitude. The solution down the chain was clear: reduce the missile threat by flying low. For a while, the pilots did as directed and the losses to the SAMs went down. But our overall loss rate went up sharply, not because the missiles got better, but because the 800-foot operating altitude made it so much easier for the Vietnamese antiaircraft gunners. For us aviators, the short-lived quandary was how to balance the need to follow central direction with what we experienced at the tactical level. Ours was a pretty straightforward perspective. As long as the prospect of getting shot down was a function of both missiles and gun fire, we were going to do things that tried to reduce the probability of

‘‘The missions were all similar, but each one was different; a different target, different weather, different distance, and different twists, dives, turns of the aircraft. We knew it would be different every time we walked across the deck to climb into the cockpit. We knew the adrenaline surges would come at new times, the pull of gravity and centrifugal forces would hurt just a little differently. All the pilots knew each flight would be unique. But we thrived on routine. It was our mental anchor, the base and standard against which we could judge the significance of the variations. For it was the differences that warned you of the things that could kill you. ‘‘So, there was a ritual to each flight that went beyond military standardization and training. We all had a game face we donned on the elevator up to the deck. Nobody had the same one, each of us tried to duplicate our own particular way of setting our jaw and posture. Sticking to our own individual rituals helped tune our senses for the deviations. You’d search for that dirty, almost diesel smell of the engine exhaust as you walked to the aircraft. If it was there the fuel mix could be off just enough to flame the engine out if you pushed the nose up too soon after the bomb run. You’d file that in some synaptic crevice so it would be there if you needed it. You listened to the pitch of the engines and looked at the exhaust, scanning for anything that was different in the sound or in the way the heat waves liquified what you saw shimmering through them. And when you were in the cockpit, you took the gauge checks very seriously, running through them not just to see if each was on its proper mark, but whether they seemed right together.’’ Cebrowski liked the launches. ‘‘The rush was exhilarating, a blast of freedom. The push back into the seat and the sudden sense of going instantly from an horizontal to a vertical plane, all that was condensed to a sense of breaking out of constraints, shucking off bonds, breaking shackles. Physiologically, it should not have felt that way, for the acceleration drained blood away from the brain, shrunk peripheral vision, and shifted vision away from color to shades of gray. But those effects were brief, and as color and peripheral vision returned, the sense of freedom and joy of flying came back. ‘‘The flights had similar patterns, an almost calm luxury as we flew above the sea, a time to again see the amazing shades of blue in the water below, sparkled by green tinted white caps on clear days or submerged in the depths of blackness at night. Then, concentration replaced the serenity at ‘feet dry’ as we crossed the coast. That’s when we got serious about tuning in, tuning for the differences. Pushing peripheral vision out, scanning the horizon, the gauges, listening for warning signals of radar acquisition from below, and different tones or alert quotes in the radio chatter. And focus, focus on the land marks to confirm the directions. Watch for tracers, listen for radar warnings, missile warnings, hostile aircraft. Shift altitudes. Shift again. Don’t be predictable. Turn. Turn again. Check the position with your wingman. Line up the approach. Confirm the target. Focus. Don’t be predictable. Make it look like it’s random movement. The tracers float near the ground, then flash past. OK, no problem. Not close. OK. Now, approach turn. Slide it, slide it. Get the angle. A little lower. Focus. Good line. Good line. . .Now. Stick away. . .Keep focus. Left. Full throttle. Left. LEFT! Now, right. Right. RIGHT! Tighten your muscles to slow the blood slipping away from your brain. Keep tight. Keep focus. Make it look random. Don’t relax. Check wingman. Watch . . .Watch. . . Tune in. . .Listen.. . .’’

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both. We were after a higher level of truth, if you will, even if it seemed more complicated.’’ Cebrowski came out of his Vietnam experiences with some combat axioms. ‘‘One was to beware the narrow view; try always to look beyond the immediate issue and see it as part of a larger problem. Always start with the assumption that your opponent is not dumb. And always value the perspectives of the individual warriors. No one learns as quickly as someone being shot at, and usually no one in senior headquarters is being shot at.’’ He believed strongly that the Navy tends to apply these axioms pretty well. It tells its people what to do and not how to do it. It is the officers’ job to understand this and get those he or she leads to implement orders without denigrating or ignoring the insights of their subordinates who were carrying them out. At the same time, an officer’s obligation is to keep his seniors from issuing unfortunate or uninformed orders. ‘‘If he fails in that, his next job is to see to it that they are not carried out in unfortunate or uninformed ways. This is a moral dimension that distinguishes the American military from others,’’ he argued. ‘‘It places value on honesty and on maintaining the flow of information throughout the chain of command. It also encompasses consideration of how to implement violence and the targets against which the tremendous violence of modern armaments is used. Today that moral dimension is, as it should be, a driving factor in the new American way of war. And as I grew to understand during my career in the military, it applies to how we ought to think about and build military capabilities.’’ His career in the 1970s and 1980s moved upward through the levels of command associated with naval aviators. Not all of it involved flying. ‘‘In the early 1970s, I got very interested in large-scale integrated circuits—computer chips. I saw the chips as technical marvels because they seemed to lack a general failure mechanism. That had been a problem when communications and calculations had depended on the older vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes generated a lot of heat and that made them fail. But you could never be sure when the heat they produced, combined with differences in the materials they were made of and the complexity of their mechanisms, would make them do so. Computer chips, on the other hand, didn’t have a similar failure mechanism. That didn’t mean they would last forever, although they would usually last a lot longer than a vacuum tube. But it did mean you could predict more accurately when they would fail. And you could increase their use without a proportional increase in their potential failure rates. What that meant was a reduction of technical risk. Lower technical risk meant you didn’t have to have as many backups. At the individual aircraft level, for example, that meant more capability and improved reliability at less cost, risk, and weight.’’ Cebrowski came to believe large-scale integrated circuits had strategic importance because they could help deal with military complexity. ‘‘My experience at that stage of my career had come from flying combat aircraft. While I did it well

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enough to stay alive, I never thought of myself as one of those rare ‘naturals’ who seem to fly almost effortlessly. To me, it involved a lot of effort to fly an aircraft through air defenses, maneuvering quickly to present as unpredictable a target as possible, watching for the flack patterns and missiles, locating and tracking the target, getting the approach right, timing the bomb drop, and then getting out. It was a complex situation, and the success depended on manipulating that complexity—making it as complex as I could to the defenders without missing the target. Transistors and the large-scale integrated circuits they built promised to shift some of the complexity to the aircraft and the weapons it carried. The military that could do that, I came to believe, would have an edge against any opponent that couldn’t. It could lead to a strategic advantage, an ability to shift the terrible burden of warfare complexity and the risks it carried away from you onto your opponent.’’ Yet, it was clear that the transition from technical promise to strategic effect was anything but automatic in the military. From a technical standpoint, the military had been among the first institutions to recognize the potential utility of transistors and the electronics they enabled. This was in the heyday of the government and military laboratories when advances in military technology were largely a function of the focused research and development funded by the taxpayers in the name of national security. But what Cebrowski found truly intriguing was that it was not the military where uses for large-scale integrated circuit technology were emerging quickly. It was in the civilian sector. The promises he thought the technology carried were one thing. To convert those promises to reality was another. Could it be that technology was only an initial step, and that the military had within it structural, organizational, and cultural barriers to bringing technical promise to fruition? ‘‘Thirty-five years ago I began to think the answer was yes. But, then, it was an ill-formed answer, without much related thought about the question that answer framed: so what are you going to do about it? I started to develop some answers to this more interesting and difficult question over the next two decades.’’ One assignment in the mid-1970s involved research on how the F-14 could defend the fleet against waves of Soviet Backfire bombers, what the Navy then saw as the top-of-the-line threat. The analysis compared the theoretically best way of using the aircraft with what exercise data indicated would actually occur in a real Soviet naval aviation attack on a U.S. carrier battlegroup. The theory said a central air controller with perfect understanding of the defense scheme, excellent understanding of what was occurring in the airspace a hundred miles around the aircraft carrier, and perfect communications would always be able to mount the most effective defense. It had the equations that demonstrated this and supporting simulations. ‘‘But exercise data indicated that sometimes—not always, but often enough to suggest it wasn’t a quirk—a squadron of F-14s operating without a central air controller was more effective in intercepting and

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destroying attackers than what the algorithms said centralized control could provide. The exercise data said that several pilots, each with only part of the engagement picture, could do better than a single air controller could with a perfect, full picture. We wanted to see why this happened. It turned out to be my introduction to the potential power of self-synchronization.’’ He went on, explaining that ‘‘we found that the information the pilots got from communicating to each other and then making their own tactical decisions produced better results than following directions from a central control point. Even if none of them had as much information as a central controller, the pilots had the ability to rapidly collaborate in building a common understanding of the air situation. Together, they seemed to be able to build a rich, operational knowledge of what each had to do to reduce the risk to each other and maximize the overall defense. And they added nuances, depth, and correlations to the information they passed back and forth, in effect building a common appreciation of what was going on that was, literally, greater than the sum of the information each contributed.’’ What was involved here were different ways of dealing with complexity. Defending the fleet was an acute representative of the complexity of armed conflict generally. It involved many moving pieces on and beneath the surface of the sea and in the air, all traveling at different speeds—a deadly interaction among opponents concentrating on outmaneuvering, outthinking, confusing, and killing each other. One approach to dealing with this was the classic military solution: concentrate information in a central point so that greatest of all computers, an experienced human mind, could make sense of it all and direct the defenders accordingly. ‘‘The other was to do the processing, if you will, in parallel, using the minds of all the defenders with less comprehensive information and letting them self-synchronize to cut through the complexity. I think that was the beginning of my views on the value of pushing information and decision authority down in the military, something I knew went against the traditional view of how militaries are supposed to work.’’ In 1980, the Navy established the Strategic Studies Group at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and sent a handful of carefully selected captains and commanders to it for a year of strategic thinking, discussion, and research. It selected ‘‘war fighters,’’ individuals whose careers had for the most part been with the fleets, away from the Washington, DC, arena of budget fights, program management, and politics. These were officers who had done so well in the first decade and a half of their service as to emerge as prospective flag officers. Cebrowski was the youngest member of the first class. He joined another young commander, a submariner named Bill Owens, destined to lead the American revolution in military affairs as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the mid1990s. As the lowest ranking and youngest members of the select group, Cebrowski and Owens formed a friendship based on shared perspective of three components: (1) change in military affairs was essential; (2) it was not going to

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come easily, and; (3) because of the first two points, the logic for changing had to be solid and its articulation relentless. Following the year at Newport, Cebrowski returned to the fleet to command positions. He commanded a carrier air wing, then a helicopter carrier, then captained an aircraft carrier during Operation Desert Storm, the conflict with Iraq after it had invaded Kuwait. After promotion to rear admiral in 1992, he took over a carrier battlegroup. Those assignments let him observe and fly the F/A18, the Navy’s newest fighter in the 1980s that became U.S. naval aviation’s work horse into the twenty-first century. It was an epiphany of sorts. ‘‘It was the first aircraft I piloted that really flew itself, letting you focus on your mission rather than trying to control the airplane. And the information that was available to the pilot in the cockpit was so much better. To me, the F-18 represented a shift from the physical to the information and the cognitive realms. The limit on what the pilot could do was no longer a matter of physical strength or reflexes. The real limit was the level of awareness and knowledge the pilot had of both the mission and of the environment in which he operated. That awareness turned on the information flowing from parts of the aircraft, what the pilot could see from the aircraft, and—this was the big change—from what other pilots or sensors could see. That was the revelation. It was no longer the airplane or its pilot that counted the most; it was what the pilot could do once in a networked environment.’’ By the time he returned to the Pentagon in 1994, he had developed some general assumptions about military innovation. ‘‘I realized that military competition wasn’t about how fast one could align with reality, but how fast one could leap over it and create a new reality. I spent the next eight years trying to figure out how to do that. I was never fully successful because I couldn’t align my own intellectual compass fast enough. The world was changing too rapidly, and the changes were digging down into the foundations of society—into basic assumptions and what we had accepted as rules. Information technology was driving a lot of it. But I increasingly thought the kind of changes we all felt were diastrophic, that we were in the midst of a shift to a new age. How competitors would measure military power was going to be radically different from how they had a decade ago. Operational concepts had to change, as would the character of warfare because the competitive attributes would change. The U.S. military was on the cusp of radical changes. There was a moral imperative for it to make the leap. To accept the role of strategic follower was to me unthinkable.’’ It was his deep interest in the moral nexus with military power that distinguished Cebrowski and his thought. His focus on it stemmed from a set of personal beliefs in which his reading of Augustine and Aquinas, and the Jesuit John Courtney Murray were prominent. He was firmly in the American pragmatist tradition, had studied just war theory, and once explained his interest was because his profession had brought him in direct contact with the dilemma of

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how to use violence morally. ‘‘As a military professional, my career dealt directly with the most violent and destructive dimension of state power. My military colleagues and I confronted the issue of the moral exercise of destructive force probably more often and directly than others. How to draw the line between the moral and immoral use of military force is a constant companion to those in the military profession; we wrestle with it throughout our careers. Most of us are acutely attuned to the moral need to avoid bringing violence to bear on the innocent.’’ Cebrowski was convinced that the U.S. military stood on the threshold of an explosion of information, knowledge, and understanding of warfare and, most importantly, greater precision in waging it. ‘‘All that had great moral seductiveness,’’ he said. ‘‘It promised to make it easier to protect the innocent in using the great destructive power of the U.S. military. I took that as very important within the context of the insights of Father John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit theologian who greatly influenced my views.’’ Murray, writing in the 1950s and 1960s, had joined American concepts of democracy with just war theory. As an American, he stressed the dignity of individuals and the utility of freedom, respect, equality, and reason as the basis of a free society. As a Catholic theologian, he argued that the creation and maintenance of a free society was essential to morality and that moral governmental policy—including the use of military force—dealt with the juncture of power and morality. The goal of policy was the maintenance and creation of free societies. Efforts to achieve that goal that did not recognize the dignity and sacredness of the individual could not be moral. In other words, Murray had pointed to a guide for handling the thorny issue of how to use military force morally, in terms of both ends—the expansion of free societies—and means—with respect for the basic dignity of all individuals. ‘‘Now, in retrospect,’’ Cebrowski explained in 2005, ‘‘I find his insights as important to our military operations in Iraq as I found them when I first read his views in the Cold War.’’ For most of the 1990s, Cebrowski was at the center of the U.S. military’s growing interest in the digital information era, increasingly trying to push the edge of that interest beyond conventional wisdom. In the mid-1990s he had worked within the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contending that information technology was challenging many of the precepts of American military thinking and pushing toward radical force structure changes. Most of his military colleagues then agreed with the proposition that information technology was of growing significance, for they were certainly not ignorant of the potential of the internet and the digital information revolution on which it rested. Their sons and daughters were already immersed in what was being called the emerging Information Age. Many could also accept that information technology was changing military capabilities. Operation Desert Storm was still reverberating through the military in the mid-1990s, and while the U.S. victory

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there had come from overwhelming force, senior military professionals appreciated the potential of the emerging technology. But in 1994, that was about as far as most of the senior military would go. Information was certainly a good thing to have in a battle. Yet, some argued, as every military professional should know, there was always the fog of war to contend with—the confusion, disruption, and deception that accompanied armed conflict. And as military professionals, they understood that a deluge of irrelevant information, or worse, incorrect information—which the Information Age was quite capable of producing—was not going to make things easier. The notion that there was a trade-off between military mass and information faced strong skepticism, even though smart bombs, the dramatically better ground navigation afforded by the global positioning system, networked warships, and other emerging technology suggested it. ‘‘Never saw and don’t believe bytes of information kill enemy soldiers,’’ Marine Corps General Paul Van Riper was fond of noting, ‘‘Bytes of information can be very valuable in war, but it’s bullets that kill enemies.’’2 Indeed, many believed the wrong information, or just too many bytes, could make it easier for enemy bullets to kill us. A need for changes in the metrics of military power was hardest to accept. The military leadership had spent their careers learning and truly understanding the existing metrics, a commitment they knew in their heart of hearts distinguished themselves increasingly from the civilian officials they served. And these metrics also determined their personal performance. Metrics of military power did not change quickly, and they did not change simply because someone said they were different. If they changed, they changed only because of experience—a lot of experience and a lot of hard evidence. Yes, Desert Storm had shown some exciting glimpses of what was possible. But it did not make a case for a shift in metrics, for changing what counts in battle, or for shifting money away from the tried and true to what many thought was essentially wishful thinking. To many of his Pentagon colleagues, that was what made Cebrowski’s questions and arguments so controversial. ‘‘It was a slippery slope,’’ some said privately. ‘‘If you believed the metrics were changing, then it followed that operational concepts, the training that inculcated those concepts, and the equipment designed to execute them would change too. And that could plunge the U.S. military into chaos and reduce its readiness, just as the rest of the world was recognizing, respecting, and fearing the U.S. military as the best, most powerful in the world.’’ Change in the military was nothing new. But Cebrowski was arguing that rapid change was called for and that there was a moral imperative for making that leap. What if he was just wrong? What if the ‘‘Information Age’’ was not really different from other ‘‘ages’’ when information was a supplement to, but never a substitute for military mass? Why did things have to change any faster when experience said faster changes were much more dangerous than when military change was, rightfully, incremental, evolutionary, and very

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cautious? A precipitous leap could mean a fall into the military equivalent of perdition. The stakes of error in such things could be very high, for while the United States was the only military superpower in the world—a status the tried and true military approach to change had provided—military affairs would, by their nature, forever remain tied to violence, death, and destruction, not just for the men and women in uniform, but to the societies that provided those men and women. ‘‘So,’’ General Van Riper wrote for the majority view inside the military’s flag ranks, ‘‘the so-called revolutionaries misunderstand the nature of war, their prescription is dangerously wrong, and rooted in wish, not reality.’’3 If there was a moral imperative here, some of Cebrowski’s military colleagues told him, it was to oppose his views. This discussion took place largely outside the public purview, sometimes slipping into military trade journals, more rarely surfacing in publications like Foreign Affairs and in Public Broadcasting Service specials. The real debate was inside the Pentagon and among military professionals. Despite the passions that stirred it, the upper levels of the U.S. military conducted it genteelly, pushing its adjudication upward through memos and drafts of guidance documents, speeches, and statements destined for signature by the senior military and civilians in the department. One of the best indications of the debate, perhaps the high watermark of the revolutionary argument, emerged in the 1997 public release describing future military operations by General John Shalikashvili, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The document was entitled Joint Vision 2010. Billed as a ‘‘template for future U.S. military operations,’’ its gestation took 18 months and when finally published was neatly bifurcated between the competing views. The first half of the 30-page document read like an enlistment advertisement, underlining the importance of tradition, the need for highly trained, dedicated, and disciplined personnel, and the lessons of the past. The last half, the half that Bill Owens, then the vice chairman, and Cebrowski, then the Joint Staff ’s director of command, control, communications, and computers, the J-6, had pushed was very different. The operations envisioned for 2010 centered on one of the buzz terms that had become a rallying point of revolutionary sentiment: dominant battlefield awareness. With it, Owens and Cebrowski believed new operational concepts would come into play. U.S. military operations would emphasize agility, speed, and beating opponents to the punch at all levels of conflict. They would move from sequential to concurrent actions, an argument that not only contradicted current planning assumptions but also challenged the linear operational concepts that had conditioned training, doctrine, and equipment since the Civil War. Much of their argument wove through the final pages. Information superiority was the key to military success, not military mass or numbers of tanks, aircraft, and ships. Overwhelming force would be less useful and less effective than

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decisive force, applied quickly and precisely. Military structures, the design of military equipment, training, and organization would change to reflect and enable this. And those changes should be completed by 2010, in time to make the 1997 vision of the future a reality. ‘‘We actually believed it could be done by 2005,’’ Cebrowski later said, ‘‘But, we knew that would be too controversial to get people behind our efforts to accelerate change.’’ To many senior military officers, this was too bold a vision—far too disruptive to achieve. They were comfortable with the existing rate of change the military had grown to rely upon since the end of World War II. And compared to the rate of change Owens and Cebrowski were proposing, it was a snail’s pace, tied to weapons design and operational changes measured by decades and generations. On average, between 1948 and 1997 it took major naval surface combatants 17 years to move from drawing board to first cruise.4 Navy planners anticipated that once in the fleet, the ship and the logistics systems and shore infrastructure needed to support it would remain in place for at least 25 years. It took the Air Force’s F-16 almost two decades to move from drawing board to operational sortie. The F-15, the B-1 and B-2 bombers, and the F-117 stealth fighter had taken 16 years, 17 years, 14 years, and 15 years, respectively, to make the same journey. In 1997, the nuclear attack submarines then in service were expected to last another 14 years. The initial design of the U.S. Abrams tanks that had so dramatically outgunned and outmaneuvered Iraqi armored forces in 1991 was approved in 1968. In the 30 years between 1967 and 1997, the Army introduced a total of four new courses to its Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. It took between five and eight years to get each of them through the design, test, and implementation process. Over the course of the Cold War, the U.S. military establishment and its supporting industrial and service complex had become amazingly adept at longrange planning and at adapting and adjusting what was in service to meet new demands. The adaptive processes were fundamentally incremental, measured, and gradual; evolutionary rather than revolutionary. They fit the strategic context. They became the way things were—and, in the minds of most, should be —done. Now, here was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff picking up the argument of the revolutionaries in favor of radical and rapid change. Few generals or admirals believed it could be done. Many dismissed it as rhetoric. Some saw it as evidence that things were going in the wrong direction, convinced that Joint Vision 2010 was not a call to move more expeditiously into a new, more able and effective military, but a siren call of a disaster. The American revolution in military affairs led by Shalikashvili, Owens, and a handful of other flag officers ran into a counterrevolution in 1998. Shalikashvili and Owens retired. The old status quo returned as their successors reverted to the earlier molds in joint staff processes and the modifications made to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, which Owens had sought to mold into a

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revolutionary vanguard, were discarded. Joint Vision 2010 became Joint Vision 2020, still officially a guide to future operations, but pushed forward another decade beyond the concern of plans, programs, and budgets. The disturbing phrase ‘‘revolution in military affairs’’—with its connotations of radicalism, speed, and lack of control—slipped from the lexicon, replaced by the more indeterminate and benign ‘‘transformation.’’ Cebrowski returned to his former staff position with planning and programming responsibilities for Navy command and communications systems. He stayed there until he was appointed to be the president of the Naval War College, with new supervisory authority over the Navy’s new Warfare Development Command. The assignments gave him the authority and time to continue to work out the details of the theoretical construct he had chiseled out over the previous decade. He retired from active duty in the Navy in the summer of 2001. In September, the secretary of defense asked Cebrowski to become the director of the Office of Force Transformation. He agreed and arrived back at the Pentagon two weeks after the terrorist attack on the Pentagon. ‘‘As I walked through the military cordon around the Pentagon, past the destruction, and into the lingering odors of the fires and water damage,’’ he recalled in somber tones, ‘‘I knew —more than ever before—that the world had changed. And that the U.S. military had to transform. And that it had to do it much faster than it thought.’’ Cebrowski’s years as the director of force transformation allowed him to articulate and push the ideas he had been developing into a theory of warfare and recommendations on the kind of military forces needed to undertake what the theory demanded. The ideas that composed his theory were a product of a rare intellectual curiosity. That intellectual curiosity had led him to a religious faith based on deep understanding of the tenants of Roman Catholicism; into and past the techniques of mathematics to an appreciation of their underlying theory; into a life-long fascination with human interaction which, from adulthood on, focused on military institutions. Through it all, he developed a broad knowledge of technology. Broad knowledge is the best way to describe his relationship with technology. He knew about the most visible peaks of nuclear, nano-, and biomaterials, and information technologies—the prominent products of efforts to convert the insights of science to human utility (what Hannah Arendt, whom he had read carefully, described as the essence of homo faber). But he also dipped deeper, into the interactions of human organizations, dreams, and the applications of science that spawn technology. It took him a lifetime to work the products of his curiosity into what he believed was a new theory of war. He saw nothing remarkable in it, and believed everyone did the same thing, or at least should try. To him, it was a natural part of living the good life—a concept he saw as a moral obligation rather than a hedonistic goal. It was another component of that moral obligation that led him to the genesis of this book—the sense that one should share the products

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of intellectual journeys with others, not so much to convince them, but to help them to continue to further mankind’s understanding and appreciation of the cosmos. You see, he was at his core an American progressive, quite aware of the flaws of his fellow humans and of himself, but utterly convinced that humans and things could get better. The pages that follow try to explicate Cebrowski’s new theory of war. A couple of notes: first, he understood the weight the claim of a new theory of war carried in his profession. It was a very loaded term inside U.S. military institutions. That is why you will find all sorts of articles and not just a few books about ‘‘the American way of war’’ or ‘‘American warfare,’’ but very few works claiming to advance a new theory of war. The claim is disturbing to military professionals. Each of the military services tends to stick with the notion that while the circumstances in which they may have to operate vary, the theory underlying their operations remains stable. They may not agree on the specifics of that theoretical foundation—the U.S. Army honors Clausewitz, the U.S. Navy points to Mahan, and the U.S. Air Force acknowledges Douhet as their prime theorists—but they all approach the notion of a new comprehensive theory with great skepticism and a bit of trepidation. They recognize the potential tumult to training, operations, and culture it portends. Second, Cebrowski never explicated his new theory in detail, comprehensively, or systematically in writing. It peeks out through some of the articles he wrote, from published interviews, from his congressional testimony, and speeches. But he never sat down and wrote something comparable to Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege, Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1805, or Douhet’s The Command of the Air. The most comprehensive documentary record of his theory lies in the series of PowerPoint briefings he prepared in his last three military assignments and during the years he was the director of the Office of Force Transformation. But he seldom annotated these briefings, explaining the absence of explanatory notes as a conscious decision driven by his sense that he was still working out the nuances of his theory. Cebrowski saw the briefings as a means of stimulating a dialogue with his audiences, including the secretary of defense and other senior defense department officials. It was more his curiosity and personal quest for answers than his interest in convincing others that drove his presentations. As he put it, he always hoped to find some new insight or perspective when he used a briefing, and did not want to curtail the chance of doing so with some preordained text. In any case, all of his collection of briefings—in the custody of his colleague and friend Terry Pudas—deal with separate facets of Cebrowski’s work rather than try to lay it all out as a coherent theory. While this book draws from all these materials, its primary sources are the discussions between Cebrowski and me over the period shortly before he returned to Washington in 2001 to take up the responsibilities of his last appointment, until a few days before his death in November, 2005. We were trying to build

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the material for an autobiographical sketch of his intellectual journey to develop his theory. He died before he was able to complete either the sketch or the journey. But I was able to draft and Cebrowski was able to go over and modify enough of the draft to assure the portrayal of both was going as he had intended. Others who knew or worked with him helped, as well. His beloved wife Kathy and his brother John both reviewed various stages of the manuscript. Terry Pudas provided additional material and invaluable insights, as did other members of the Office of Force Transformation: John Garstka, Rob Holzer, and Tom Hone.

Cebrowski’s New Theory of War The following pages discuss Cebrowski’s theory in some detail, and try to capture the contexts in which he developed it. It is a grand theory, rooted in assumptions about the nature of man and morality, community and conflict, war and peace, perdition and salvation. A condensation—unfortunately squeezing out the richness of his thought, at least some of which the following pages attempt to restore—goes like this: • Mankind is by nature competitive, but not naturally warlike.—Cebrowski believed Aristotle got it right. Humans were naturally social, inclined more to community than to conflict. The competition that was also natural was often physical, but not necessarily and not necessarily deadly. Combined with the instinct for community, competition could unleash the power of human society: leadership, organization, specialization, and the creation and continuity of culture. And, therefore, technology. He argued that mankind is not by nature warlike and war is not inevitable. It was a particular manifestation of competition; distinguished by its violence, complexity, and impact on society. Of all forms of human competition, war has the highest destructive potential to life and society. Organization, specialization, culture, and technology define its character, condition its conduct, and set the probabilities of its outcomes. As society, culture, and technology change, so, too, do the character, style, and outcome probabilities of war. • The United States must prepare for the possibility of armed conflict.—Because of the stakes involved and the historical evidence that man’s competitive nature expresses itself in warfare, Cebrowski took it as self-evident that the United States had to prepare for armed conflict. Because armed conflict was so lethal and disruptive to community, however, he believed preparation—the creation and maintenance of effective armed forces, military training, exercises, planning, and everything that went into proper preparation—had two dimensions. One was military effectiveness in the context of the challenges the United States was likely to face. The other was the imperative to develop and maintain the capability to fight in ways that were moral and, when using military force, to do so ethically. He believed that to be moral, the purpose of using military force had to be just, and in using military force, the ethical precept was to avoid harm to the innocent. • The key to meeting the military requirements of effectiveness and morality is to move away from indiscriminate attrition warfare to more discriminate use of force; away from the focus on physical destruction toward destroying the will to fight on the part of an opponent.—Cebrowski believed attrition warfare, which the Industrial Age had made efficient, was inherently

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indiscriminate, therefore conducive to harming the innocent, and therefore immoral. Information technology provided the means to move toward much greater discrimination in the use of violence and therefore promised more moral use of military force. It also promised the kind of military effects that could erode the will of an opponent. Sun-tzu had gotten it right, also. Making an opponent believe competing militarily was fruitless was much more cost-effective than killing him. Sun-tzu and later theorists who argued similarly had lacked the technical means of knowing enough about a military situation and an opponent to do it well or consistently. But, the technical barrier they faced was crumbling in the emerging Information Age and information technology is emerging as the primary source of military power. • Information technology provides the fulcrum for more effective and moral use of military force. But the lever—the design, structure, organization, operational doctrine, and culture of the U.S. military forces—had to change for the United States to use that fulcrum efficiently.—He believed that the military power in which the U.S. excelled flowed from mass. That had been the source of power in the Industrial Age and the foundation for the emergence of ‘‘great powers,’’ distinguished by their wealth, organizational acumen, industrial base, massive militaries, and capacity to set the rules of international relations and the global distribution of resources. But, military mass was no longer as powerful in the emerging age, and worked against the military agility, speed, and discrimination demanded by the transition to military effectiveness and morality. It was not enough to applique´ information technology to the existing design of the U.S. military; the United States had to change the design of its military. • The U.S. military should move toward a network centric design.—Cebrowski’s shorthand for the new character of the U.S. military was network centric—a military organized, structured, equipped, trained, and operating around four concepts: • faster, more inclusive and comprehensive bi-directional information flows among units, particularly laterally, to enable effective operational self-synchronization at the tactical level; • faster corporate learning; • an ability to develop more viable options for effective action faster than an opponent; and to implement viable options faster than an opponent could counter them; • confronting an opponent with overwhelming complexity. He envisioned a new force characterized by numerous small, fast, networked units; organized around extensive self-synchronization at the tactical level; and operating interdependently in a distributed manner across broad expanses. • Because the primary source of military power is shifting to a technology that is available globally, the United States must accelerate the rate at which it shifts to the new force design and accommodate to the need for constant rapid changes if it is to remain militarily dominant.— Cebrowski argued that unlike the history of the Industrial Age, military power in the Information Age was not restricted to nation states with the wealth, organization, scientific, and technological bases to generate it. The capacity to threaten and wreak terrifying damage on the United States will become widely available to both nation states and non-national groupings, and the United States has to better prepare to compete with them in the context of the emerging age.

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Anyone with only a casual interest in the discussions within the U.S. military over the last decade, or who loosely follows commentary on military affairs generally, is unlikely to find many new points in this list. Many of them have stoked the debate inside the military since the fall of the Soviet Union and have become political talking points in broader U.S. politics. But Cebrowski was the first to provide a comprehensive logical, coherent, and compelling conceptual framework for them. He succeeded in constructing a new theory of war. Does Cebrowski rank with the members of the military theorist pantheon, up there with Sun-tzu, Clausewitz, Jomini, Mao, and the others? It is too early to present a convincing case for or against his elevation. Like those whom military theorists now accord titan status, time must pass to see how far his thoughts actually conditioned events and outcomes, and the extent to which future generations use his views to guide their strategies, architectures, and guides. But Cebrowski’s contribution lies in his dedication and ability to weave the points into an integrated intellectual tapestry; to make the esoteric intelligible. The central purpose of the following pages is to try to help display his tapestry, beginning with the woof and warp of military transformation.

CHAPTER

2

MILITARY TRANSFORMATION

Cebrowski once told me that ‘‘ideas that matter come from the top. Only leaders create visions that count. That they may get that vision from subordinates doesn’t make this less so.’’ He thought Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, his boss when Cebrowski was the director of the Office of Force Transformation, supported his contention. Historians may eventually agree that Donald Rumsfeld was the most powerful secretary of defense. He is unique—the only individual to hold the office twice, the youngest and the oldest individual to hold it (he first held the position when President Ford appointed him in the early 1970s; the second time when George W. Bush brought him into the cabinet in 2001), and the longest to hold the position continuously (edging out Robert S. McNamara and Casper Weinberger in the 1960s and 1980s, respectively). He may have been the most Washingtonsavvy person to get the job. His credentials certainly suggest so, for while he had not focused much on military or foreign affairs, his experience in the politics and federal bureaucracies of Washington were impressive when he got the job the first time. He had been a congressman and a leader of the Republican House insurgency that dumped minority leader Charlie Halleck in favor of Gerald Ford after Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964. He was a White House operative under Richard Nixon, head of the Office of Equal Opportunity (where he hired Richard Cheney as his special assistant), and the U.S. ambassador to NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) (and out of the spotlight during Nixon’s Watergate decline and resignation). And he served as President Ford’s white house chief of staff prior to becoming the secretary of defense the first time.1 When the Carter administration took over, Rumsfeld made millions as the

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CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals and remained tied into the Washington policy community and the Republican Party. During the Reagan administration, he served on the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control. Reagan appointed him his Special Envoy on the Law of the Sea Treaty and Special Envoy to the Middle East, where he reportedly established the channels through which the United States provided Saddam Hussein military intelligence during the IranIraq Gulf War. He chaired both the Commission on the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States and the Commission to Assess National Security Space Management and Organization in the late 1990s, and he became an open critique of the Clinton administration. When he came back to the Pentagon he wanted to transform the U.S. military. Rumsfeld had a reputation of being very bright, self-confident, and brusque, and, upon becoming secretary of defense early in 2001, confirmed both the reputation and his practical understanding of Washington bureaucracies. The military leadership in the Pentagon had generally looked forward to the new Republican administration, in part because they had spent the last few years of the Clinton administration preparing drafts of the second Quadrennial Defense Review, scheduled for delivery to Congress early in 2001. Congress had imposed the first Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR, on the Department of Defense in 1997, with the statutory requirement to conduct a subsequent QDR every four years. It was supposed to look back at the successes and failures of the previous four years and then, more importantly, outline what the Defense Department would try to do over the next four years. Although Secretary of Defense William Cohen had dutifully conducted a review of defense policy and reported on it as required in 1997, the Clinton administration saw the review in political terms, as a vehicle for the Republicans, having gained control of both the House and the Senate for the first time since the early 1950s, to criticize the democratic administration. The administration was less than enthusiastic about preparing for the second QDR which, they recognized, would be their successor administration’s forecast. The legislation establishing the four-year review process had, however, demanded direct and deep military involvement in the reviews, and the military leadership took this as an opportunity to close ranks, work out among themselves a united front regarding the future, and present the new administration with a compelling position for submission to the Congress. Each of the military services maintained the special offices they had established for the first review, and, in many cases, the same military personnel who had worked on it. More importantly, the senior uniformed service members met regularly to pound out a unified position on their desired programs and budgets. The military presented Rumsfeld with a draft of the results shortly after his arrival back in the Pentagon, expecting his rapid and full endorsement in fulfillment of Bush and Cheney’s campaign pledge that ‘‘help was on the way.’’ But,

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Rumsfeld dissed the draft. He set up his own review panels, appointed several of the chairmen from outside the Pentagon, and made it quite clear that he was in charge and not inclined simply to rubber stamp anything coming up to him from the bureaucracy. His style, probably more than his actions, generated rumblings among the military leadership of ‘‘another McNamara’’ and, by midsummer 2001, had sparked media reports postulating he would be ‘‘the first of Bush’s cabinet to go.’’ The 9/11 terrorist attacks and Rumsfeld’s post-attack prominence had squelched both the rumblings and the media speculation of his imminent demise when Cebrowski arrived back in the Pentagon as the director of the Office of Force Transformation and began working with Rumsfeld on transforming the U.S. military. Donald Rumsfeld knew that as secretary of defense, the department’s senior leader, he and only he was the owner of transformation for the department. He also knew that the senior leaders of each of the military services and defense agencies had to take ownership of transformation for their services and agencies if it was to occur in time to maintain American world leadership and dominant influence. His primary vehicle for prompting this was the Senior Level Review Group, or SLRG2 (pronounced ‘‘slerg’’), an assembly of the Pentagon’s top civilian and military leaders. Rumsfeld launched this privy council with a series of meetings, usually on weekends, focused on defining transformation. He would ask one or more of the attendees what they understood by the term, they would respond, and then he would lead a collective parsing of whatever definition they offered. Cebrowski participated in these discussions. ‘‘Rumsfeld didn’t care what we came up with,’’ he recalled, ‘‘regardless of who offered a definition, he kept pulling the words apart, drawing out the implications of them, asking why this concept or that one lay behind them, what evidence was there that supported the definition, and so on. He was relentless about it. In meeting after meeting, he’d go back to the last discussion of what we’d said transformation meant and then challenge the definition with something he’d thought about afterward. And we argued over every single word. After several of these sessions, I realized Rumsfeld was making three points. First, that whatever its definition, the senior leadership had to believe they had come up with it. It was theirs. They owned it. They were not to delegate their ownership down into the various staffs. Second, transformation was a top priority, worthy of the personal time and energy of the leaders, and, third, that the secretary of defense was going to be relentless in its pursuit.’’ What they eventually came up with was complex, not easily converted to a bumper sticker. Transformation, the SLRG finally agreed, was to be ‘‘a process that shapes the changing nature of military competition and cooperation through new combinations of concepts, capabilities, people, and organizations that exploit our nation’s advantages and protect against our asymmetric vulnerabilities to sustain our strategic position, which helps underpin peace and stability in the world.’’ It sounded very much like the result of a bureaucratic process that assures

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everyone a sliver of turf. But the collective wording rested on some important conceptual pillars. There were some established notions in the definition. ‘‘Process’’ was not new. Since the 1960s, process was what the Pentagon did. The chiefs of the military services or their staffs do not command the military in a war. They help process the commands emanating from the president and secretary of defense to the commanders in the field. Of course, the Joint Chiefs of Staff spend a great deal of time helping their seniors prepare for the process of converting policies and strategies into kinetic expression. They provide military perspective to those who have the authority to order the use of military force. In performing that function, the military in the Pentagon focus a great deal on processes—on following existing procedures to assure the people who are supposed to know what the military advice, recommendations, and perspective is, do. They conduct rigorous processes carefully to assure that any differences among the military as to the substance of the advice get ironed out or highlighted, and to avoid mistakes. But most of the roughly 23,000 people in the Pentagon, military and civilian, focus not on how to use existing military forces, but on the design, structure, organization, size, armaments, and costs of future military forces. Here, process is very important, too. And it has been pretty stable; again, since the 1960s when then Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara established the Defense Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System that still prescribes the major steps and substance of how the Pentagon deals with the future. Process does not exist for the sake of routine, but routine was very important from the 1960s on. It emerged from the central security issue of the last half of the twentieth century; how to manage the security relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly in view of the nuclear assured destructive potential each had relative to the other. How to prevent the hostilities, fears, suspicions, and competition from spilling over into civilizationkilling armed conflict was the central national security goal. Process, procedures, and conformity to routine were an important component to that goal—an integral part of the competition and to the mobilization of cooperation across the abyss of superpower competition and with the allies and friends we sought in that competition. The most obvious expression of the cooperation with the Soviet Union was the formal arms control arrangements. These relied on procedures in reaching the various limits agreed to and in verifying the superpowers were maintaining them. But the two military superpowers managed their relationship with a set of informal rules, too. Both avoided destabilizing behavior; that is, they adopted procedures that signaled routine. Procedural stability was also a key to military cooperation within NATO. Maintaining the ‘‘proper procedures’’ helped allay European concerns that unilateral actions by the United States would drag them into a war with the Soviet Union, and helped assure the United States that its European allies would stand with it if the chips went down.

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So linking transformation with process was not a radical proposition. The way in which process was to fit with transformation, however, was. The rest of the definition made it clear that the process Rumsfeld sought was not to be responsive or reactive to a competitor, or an ally, or to focus on maintaining ritual. It was to shape a new competition and cooperation. And the shaping he had in mind went beyond adjusting existing processes, rules, and procedures. He said, and got the other members of the SLRG to agree, that the transformation the U.S. military was going to undertake would shape the changing nature of military competition and cooperation. The shaping would require new combinations of (not adjustments to) capabilities, people, and organizations. Its goal was to keep the United States on top; extend and expand U.S. military strengths, and reduce or eliminate its military vulnerabilities. Because that would be good for the world. Rumsfeld was living up to his reputation of someone who enjoyed shaking things up. The definition of transformation he and his privy council pounded out between the terrorist attacks and the U.S. military operations in Iraq picked up the revolutionary mantle the department had discarded with the departure of the ‘‘revolutionaries’’ in the late 1990s. Rumsfeld wanted radical changes. Except —and the exception eventually turned out to be a very important exception—he and the rest of his SLRG left out two of the needed components for a true critical mass so far as transformation was concerned. The definition said nothing about how fast the new combinations of capabilities and the shaping of military competition was to occur. And it said nothing about metrics; how the Department of Defense was supposed to measure how well transformation was going. Rumsfeld had turned to Cebrowski, his new director of force transformation, to set the stage for the SLRG discussions on the subject, and often to lead them. The definition of transformation that emerged was the result of a collective effort over the last months of 2001 and into the first half of 2002. But Cebrowski was the one who contributed many of the assumptions on which the SLRG built it. He was the best equipped to explain the military significance of the information technology that was entering the inventories. He was probably the most influential in establishing the notion that the nature of military competition was changing. And he brought intimate knowledge of the thinking and struggles that had taken place over the previous decade between the ‘‘military revolutionaries’’ who were pushing for dramatic changes by the mid-1990s and the ‘‘military counterrevolutionaries’’ who were pushing back through the last years of the previous century. Here is the gist of his explanations and arguments in the early part of the BushRumsfeld transformation efforts, many of which the secretary of defense adopted and began to implement. Cebrowski argued the technology that many took to be the essence of what the U.S. military meant by ‘‘transformation’’ was not producing silver bullets. What was emerging was a new technological synergy. The glide

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of a ‘‘smart’’ bomb to its target or the impressive ability of a U.S. tank to destroy an opposing tank rested on a variety of technologies in metallurgy, ceramics, electronics, and others. Yet, if there was a technical core to transformation, he said, it resided beneath the rubric of information technology, or IT—much the same technology that was fueling the change in business and American society at large. He knew most people in 2001 were not exactly exuberant, in the face of the dotcom bubble burst that had begun a couple of years earlier, about the potency of information technology. But he contended that the U.S. military had actually turned out to be good at focusing on the underlying power of IT. Its ability to understand and begin to integrate three kinds of information technologies accounted for its success. One set, he explained, gathers information. The Defense Department referred to it with the acronym of ISR for intelligence collection, surveillance, and reconnaissance. He acknowledged that everyone in the SLRG understood that ISR constituted the realm of sensors and embodied the ability to sift particular emissions by particular things of military interest from the world’s ubiquitous electromagnetic, acoustic, and chemical environment. But he questioned whether they appreciated how far the U.S. ability to do this really had come. He said the second set—known as C 4, for command, control, communications, and computers—included technologies that transfer information, correlate evidence, and help humans decide what to do with the results. He again opined that there had been tremendous advances here, so great, perhaps, that many in the defense department did not realize how fast things were changing. Finally, there is the set of technologies that was increasingly giving American forces the ability to respond with precise, accurate, and effective violence. This, he said, had become synonymous in the public mind with military transformation. The public had reduced the inherent complexity of this capability to ‘‘smart bombs,’’ an unfortunate phrase, he thought, that ignored the important fact that greater precision was occurring across all realms of military operations. A decade earlier, in the Desert Storm operation against Iraq, the synergy among intelligence collection systems, command and control, and communications was rudimentary and the numbers of precision weapons low. Smart munitions accounted for less than 7 percent of all the bombs, missiles, and shells U.S. forces used in the conflict. The design for most of those had originated in the 1970s, and although they made up a small percentage of the munitions the United States used in the Gulf War, their use nearly exhausted the inventories at the time. Similarly, the ‘‘C4’’ story in Operation Desert Storm was more about capabilities of the past than of the future. With bandwidth constraints slowing the receipt of electronic data, the Navy had resorted to a tried, usually true, and always slow solution: it sent messengers to pick up and deliver by hand the documents that spelled out the daily details of the air operation. Intelligence collection on the Iraqi forces was probably better than for any other enemy America

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had ever fought. Still, lags and gaps had stoked confusion over important strategic issues like whether the retreating Iraqi forces could or could not escape from Kuwait. American awareness of the location of friendly forces was far from perfect. ‘‘Friendly fire’’ had accounted for a quarter of the American combat deaths in the conflict. Cebrowski argued that the United States through the 1990s had converted those glimpses of what might be into real capabilities. Smart munitions inventories had grown. New guidance systems that relied on global positioning system satellites had flowed into the inventories, releasing precision guidance from the strictures of good weather, line-of-sight delivery. But the more significant changes had, he claimed, been less tangible, harder to demonstrate with video clips and pictures. It was the improving communications. New software, protocols, and links got information flowing horizontally inside the military, increasing the synergy among military components. More bandwidth, pushing huge amounts of information throughout the military, reduced decision and action times. Why did not the rush of information simply swamp decisions? Because the means to sift out what was important was developing alongside the deluge. Better visualization, integration, and evaluation software increasingly helped convert information to understanding. The acronyms flowing from all this, he said, defied appreciation of what was occurring (and full titles did not make it much clearer). ATR (for automatic target recognition), CEC (for cooperative engagement concept), GCCS (for global command and control system), GIG (for global information grid), COP/CSE (for common operating picture/combat support enabled), JTRS (for joint tactical radio system), and so on through the alphabet, cloaked the shift in capabilities. These technologies reduced the ‘‘time to plan’’ and ‘‘time to decide’’ by an order of magnitude. One reason was the growth in simultaneous horizontal and vertical communication, which meant that even as the vertical hierarchies in each of the military services could coordinate their planning, so could they collaborate simultaneously across military service lines. A second reason was high-speed information access at all levels. And, most important, Cebrowski claimed, U.S. military experience was growing rapidly, not just by training in the networked environment, but also by employing the new capabilities in the growing number of actual military operations. The ability to tie the disparities, factions, and different perspectives inside the U.S. military into a revolutionary ‘‘system of systems’’ was growing. This system of systems meant a leap in understanding of where military forces and facilities were and what they were doing. It meant dramatic improvement in speeding and spreading that understanding throughout U.S. combat forces. This enabled those forces, increasingly agile and armed with precision-guided weapons, to apply force with much greater speed, over longer distances, and with markedly improved accuracy and military effect. Information technology-based weapons—the bomb kits, laser designators, sensors, night

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vision devices, and many others— grew in the active inventories and into training and operations. U.S. military capabilities at the end of the 1990s, he argued, were fundamentally different than they had been in Desert Storm. But few, including many in the military who had spent the last decade bringing the technology into the forces, recognized this. Part of the reason this was not more widely understood, Cebrowski contended, was that precision weaponry had captivated the public and too many military professionals. Precision weaponry was, of course, an important contributor to the improved prowess of the U.S. military. But it was only a part of what was happening. Indeed, it was the growing ability to identify important targets and to attack them quickly that was the fulcrum on which precision guidance became important. But, he argued, the department was not applying the technological synergy evenly. He postulated that what the public could not see, and what many in the Pentagon chose not to see, was that the U.S. military was not using the leverage of greater awareness and precision as widely as it could. The design and size of the military’s ponderous support tail remained as if little had changed on the pointy end of the spear. For example, more than half of the mobilized Army was in logistics. Seventy percent of the tonnage moved by and for the Army is fuel, most of which was consumed by the support structure which includes the 60,000 troops required to move it. Yet, there was no program to transition the Army to hybrid or other fuel efficient vehicles. Another example: while speed is a driving competitive attribute, the Navy had yet to create a coherent program to bring high-speed transports into the fleet. Too many admirals still thought that 31 knots was fast when the Australians had already started to build transport ships that could move at twice that speed.

‘‘Take the implications of ‘smart bombs’,’’ said Air Force Lieutenant General Dave Deptula in 2002, who as a lieutenant colonel in Operation Desert Storm was a principal architect of the air campaign that had Iraq on the ropes in the first week of the conflict. ‘‘Almost always being able to destroy a single target with a single bomb changes everything. In World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, it took hundreds of bombs to destroy a factory because we had so much trouble getting a bomb on it. That meant we had to fly tens of bombers to get the hundreds of bombs dropped to get a bomb on it that could take it out. And that meant we had to have the crews, the support systems, the logistics infrastructure, the training facilities—all the backup that enabled us to get the tens of bombers and hundreds of bombs needed to get one bomb on one target. Do the math when the problem is not one target but a thousand. You get a sense of the size of the forces needed, the time campaigns took, the losses that planners had to anticipate, the bases that they had to establish and maintain. Now, when a single aircraft can take out ten targets in a single sortie, planning assumptions about time, losses, base requirements, logistics, strategy, and war are all different.’’

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Cebrowski pointed to a discrepancy that had grown over the preceding five years. While the technology that had so enthused the revolutionaries in the mid-1990s had been growing more effective, interest in adjusting military organizations and structures to take better advantage of the technology had waned. The technological implications echoed through all the military services in the 1990s. If the Army could operate at night as well as it could during the day, it had a huge advantage in killing power, at least for as long as opponents could not challenge the U.S. monopoly on nighttime operational effectiveness. If the Navy could navigate as precisely as the space-based global positioning system allowed, mine fields and other ‘‘keep-out’’ efforts by potential opponents might not be the problem they seemed. If bombing was going to be as precise and effective as Desert Storm and subsequent experience suggested, then perhaps wars could carry somewhat less risk to America’s sons and daughters in uniform. The U.S. military welcomed many of these implications, but, Cebrowski noted, not all of them. The promises of greater military efficiency, less risk, and more effectiveness were good to contemplate. But the technology that generated these potentials also carried some strong challenges to long-standing military traditions, assumptions, and procedures. For if U.S. military communications systems could operate individual drones from halfway around the world, then the hierarchy and structure that characterized the U.S. military could be history. If the intelligence capabilities turned out to be as good as promised, then maybe knowledge was a substitute for mass and a large U.S. military was no longer needed. If the generations of weapons designed in and for the Cold War were going to be irrelevant because of the new technologies of precision, information, and decision-making, then what, if anything, would replace the ships, airplanes, and tanks the military had now? Then, in the new century, halfway through the current ‘‘Desert Storm generation’’ in the military, Cebrowski argued, three things coincided. Some important technology matured. The earlier Cold War rationale for the existing size, structure, organization, and operational concepts of the U.S. military finally drained away. And it became obvious that the real threat facing the United States was nothing like that for which we had designed our military forces. ‘‘And you, Mr. Secretary,’’ Cebrowski said, ending one of his presentations to the SLRG, ‘‘have told us it is finally time to transform. The technology is here. The assumptions that held us back are gone. And you are correct. It truly is time to shift from the hesitant, suspicious, cautionary evolution that has marked the last five years and accelerate the rate of change.’’ He felt he was preaching to the choir. The members of the SLRG had no disagreement with what he had said so far, and Rumsfeld nodded, smiling. Then, in a subsequent SLRG discussion in the spring of 2002, Cebrowski turned to what he knew would be the hardest argument, convincing them that they were correct in their assumptions because, he proposed, ‘‘we are entering a

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new age and will need a new theory of war.’’ He looked first to archaeologists who, he told the members, ‘‘tell us the transition from the hunting-gathering age to the agricultural age took millennia to spread across human societies. Historians tell us the transition from the agrarian age to the industrial took centuries. Our transition—from the Industrial to the Information Age—will take mere decades, and radical change will mark each year in this sprint into the emerging epoch. Shifts in ages are marked by artifacts, the things humans make and build—the tools, habitats, and weapons we create with our hands and other sources of kinetic energy. But shifts are also marked by the things we make with our minds—our societies, mores, laws, and institutions. As in earlier shifts, this one will alter all of our artifacts. Including our militaries.’’ Indeed, ‘‘The world,’’ he emphasized, ‘‘is transitioning to a new age in which the rules, metrics, and understandings of military power will be different from the past and from those that currently set the character and design of the U.S. military. The transition may take years, but we can already identify some of the aspects, once so central to the way we thought about national security and military requirements that are now fading. Threat-based planning was slipping into history. We no longer narrow our thinking to what we could do to punish transgressions after the fact; we increasingly think of what we could do to remove the capacity to transgress before the fact. Nor were we as concerned as we once were with managing crises, with calibrating incremental steps and nuances so finely that our potential opponents and observers were unsure of our position and planning. We do not consciously seek as much to maintain ambiguity about our willingness to use military force, and we are less inclined to limit our military modernization and transformation out of concern with destabilizing a military balance.’’ Cebrowski postulated that a new rule set for Information Age military operations was emerging. Information Age rules start from the shift away from attrition warfare, he said. ‘‘That is, away from the operational goal of physically destroying enough of an opposition—and that opposition can be another military force, terrorists, insurgents or any combination of these—as to render it impotent, toward rendering an opposition impotent by disorganizing, disenfranchising, and dissuading it.’’ The new operational goal did not eschew violence, and, at least for the United States, military forces would remain the most legitimate repository of destructive power and the most expert in manipulating violence. The difference was, he argued, that we will increasingly use destructive power with precision and for the purpose of breaking down the organization of the opposition, separating it from its supporters, and persuading its members that continued opposition was fruitless. His prophecy was that the U.S. military would move away from the view that military operations are rooted in and oriented toward the physical realm, toward the view that they take place primarily in the information and cognitive realms. He argued the United States ‘‘was replacing the notion that in military operations the goal is to obtain

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overwhelming physical destruction with the notion that it is to impose overwhelming complexity on the opponent; a complexity that stems from us having far more options to use destructive force effectively than an opponent and far more than the opponent can counter.’’ Cebrowski said he believed this pointed to more specific operational goals. In order to impose overwhelming complexity on opponents, we would have to increase the speed of our command—to operate faster in deciding how, when, and where to use military force. To do so, we would have to move toward new decision processes that flatten our current pyramidal decision hierarchies. We would have to increase the speed at which we implement command decisions by moving toward greater shared awareness and self-synchronization throughout the force. So, he explained, the United States was compelled to make significant changes in the structure and organization of its military forces; leaving centralized command behind as the military moved toward organizations that are more networked laterally and more able to self-synchronize their operations. The United States should build a military of the fast, the many, the small, and the networked. Cebrowski argued that no one in the SLRG fully appreciated the magnitude of the transformation this will entail and the leadership had not reached agreement on how to implement the new rules and metrics. But the United States leads all other nations in the transition to the new rule sets that will increasingly define military power. Then he turned to the question of transformation rate and asked, rhetorically, why should the only military superpower on earth seek a rapid transformation, as the revolutionaries argue? ‘‘We ought to accelerate this transformation because the power it promised was open to all nations,’’ he said. ‘‘The price of admission to this competitive space is no longer vast wealth, large-scale investment in new production capabilities, particular scientific expertise, or the need to follow the path others have taken to obtain the prize. Globalization and the spirit of our times make this so. This is a competition in which the winners will be the quick, the smart, and the willing to change. And, in this competition, if you don’t play, you’ll pay.’’ The United States, he said, needed to transform its military because the stakes were very high. They include the United States losing the ability to influence in any significant way the course of world affairs or the U.S. role in them. But, there was a deeper reason. ‘‘It deals with the core issue facing all professional military people: how to reconcile what they do with their understanding of morality. The moral use of military force is not just a matter of its purpose. It involves how military force is used. Moral use of military force is parsimonious in its violence. It is driven by commitments to precision and discrimination. Precise, timely violence can harm the innocent just as attrition war and the use of overwhelming force can and has. But it narrows the probability of doing so. Past wars glorified phenomena that increase the probability of unjust and immoral

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acts, even if they are unintended. Attrition strategies are inherently indiscriminate. Overwhelming force is inherently sloppy. Industrial war will harm the innocent. It carries, therefore, an inherent immorality. The bottom line is that it’s the right thing to do.’’ That was his argument. He had laid it out over three SLRG discussions. He knew some of the argument would resonate with the group, but the other SLRG discussions had not dipped as deeply into issues of morality or as grandiosely into history as he had. When he ended his presentation, he was met by a silence he thought went for what seemed a very long time, but was probably only about thirty seconds. Then Rumsfeld spoke. ‘‘Well, Art, now I’m going to tell you something: You’re right.’’ Later, Rumsfeld iterated that he had thought Cebrowski’s views on transformation were correct and that they had captured his own thinking. He wanted Cebrowski to follow up on what he had said in the SLRG; to flesh out what he had meant about seeing transformation as part of a bigger part of global change and of historic significance. He asked him to push the concepts he had tabled down into metrics and specifics about what to do, where to put the money, and how to help him swing the department away from its commitment to the past. He said he agreed with Cebrowski’s arguments for faster transformation. Cebrowski challenged him, politely. ‘‘Do you really think we can accelerate change in the military when we’re going to be using it so much more in the months ahead?’’ Rumsfeld said, ‘‘Of course. That’s when militaries realize they have to change. Wars are when they change. I just want to make sure the changes go in the right direction. Give me the intellectual framework to make sure they do.’’

The Framework A lot had been written, and more said, about globalization by 2001. But the concept remained largely outside national security policy and strategy concerns. Cebrowski founded his framework on it. And on the notion of competition. He assumed that competition was a constant in human affairs, but the character of the competition, particularly military competition, reflected the technologies and rule sets of the time. His hypothesis was that the times had changed fundamentally; it was a new age. That kind of change brought a change in the rules governing military competition. The problem the United States faced was a delay in recognizing this was the case. The United States was not, he argued, the only nation to lag in recognizing the shift, and in terms of military technology it was probably ahead of its potential competitors. But the dynamics of the new age, driven by the rapidly increasing interconnectedness of the world —globalization—did not favor its ability to stay ahead. The key to successful competition was not just advanced military technology, it was also accepting

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and incorporating the new rule sets of the age. The new age was in effect imposing a new theory of war—he called it network centric warfare—and those who understood this and acted accordingly would dominate military competition. He did not believe he had discovered anything that others had not thought of. Indeed, he saw his reasoning firmly within the stream of western philosophy which, he contented, assumed the human experience was linear and moved successively from period to period. Each successive period maintained some of the characteristics of its predecessor, but was different. This view, he believed, ran through the mainstream of Western thought from St. Augustine’s City of God, the dialectical arguments of Hegel, and more recent expressions. Cebrowski’s religious beliefs and understanding of the philosophical foundations of Roman Catholicism tied him to natural law theory and to the view that there is an underlying human nature that continues through history. One of the elements of human nature, he believed, was its competitiveness. The development and use of military forces had been a significantly ‘‘powerful’’ expression of this dimension of human nature for at least several thousand years. But military wars were not ‘‘natural’’ or inevitable. They were only one way in which humans expressed their competitive nature. Indeed, religion, natural law, and a common sense of proportionality had created a strong antimilitary bias. But, in his view, military affairs had been and would often be a reflection of human competitiveness and, therefore, often a very important component of the human condition. The moral imperative in this, he argued, was not to ignore or deny the importance of military competition or the depth of its roots, but to understand it in order to better direct that competition toward moral ends and means. The other important aspect to recognize about military competition, he believed, is that it occurs in two dimensions: war and building the capabilities for war. He thought we tend to associate military competition with nation states and armies because for several hundred years it had been the nation state that built the greatest military capabilities and waged the most destructive wars, and because most of the competition in which they used military forces involved the control of land. Yet, military competition had not always been the sole purview of nation states. Wars had not always been fought over the control of land, and the distinction between military forces and other groups had never been entirely clear or precise. The commonsense definition of a military force was an institution specialized in the use of violence and characterized by cohesive structure, hierarchical organization, relatively strong discipline, special training, distinct traditions, and often a particular legal status, he said. The commonsense definition of armed conflict was a situation in which armed forces apply violence against each other. Those remained good ways to think about military competition. ‘‘But,’’ he would say, ‘‘we need to also recognize that the edges of such distinctions are fuzzy. Today what we mean by military competition is becoming less distinct.’’

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Cebrowski believed armed conflict was the most visible dimension of military competition. He acknowledged that the numbers and scope of armed conflicts had been declining over the last decade, and referred to publications by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that pointed to an annual average of 27 ‘‘major armed conflicts’’ between 1990 and 2001, down slightly from the average in the 1980s.3 He repeatedly pointed out that most of the participants in these armed conflicts were not the modern, powerful, and professional militaries we associate with large, wealthy nation states. Nor did the conflicts occur in Europe, North America, Korea, Japan, or China. And the deadliest ‘‘weapons system’’—the one that killed the most people—was not the sophisticated fighter bomber, warship, or tank in the inventories of ‘‘modern’’ nations. It was the teenage boy armed with an AK-47; mostly fighting in intrastate civil wars; mostly in the less-developed areas of the world. That the less-developed areas of the world had been the caldrons of armed conflict was not a blinding new insight. They had steamed for over a century, flashing into extremes that garner the attention and perhaps the direct intervention of the major powers from time to time. What was different, he contended, was the recognition by the wealthy nations that what once occurred largely beyond their concern, now affected them directly. ‘‘For the most part, over the last two centuries, the major powers could essentially wall off the turmoil, tensions, and armed competition that coursed through the less-developed areas of the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia and Latin America. However horrific the situation was to the populations there, nations with the wealth, acumen, and modern military forces worried most about the potential direct military competition among themselves.’’ He found that interesting and an important point for U.S. military planning. ‘‘An ability to wall off, insulate against, or ignore the caldrons no longer exists. Globalization welds the developed, underdeveloped, developing, and undeveloping segments of the world together ever more tightly. Direct military competition among the major powers can still grow from competing political and economic interests. But the dominant dimension of military concern lies in the challenges emanating from the caldrons where armed violence is constant, continuing, and laced with undertones of religious, cultural, social, and political confrontation; where disparities in per capita wealth are greatest and modernity, governance, health, education, and civil society lag.’’ That we can no longer ignore, isolate, or quarantine the violence, terror, and ugliness generated in these caldrons, he claimed, was one of the major implications of the terrorist attacks on the United States and the U.S. reaction to those attacks. The attacks and the reaction to them already changed the international system and would continue to affect how the United States and the rest of the world conducted their security, economic, and political interactions well into the future. ‘‘For the United States,’’ he would say, ‘‘the terrorism not only made

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it quite obvious that military superpower status was not a deterrent to direct attack, but could actually draw the attacks of individuals who sought martyrdom through them. It altered our perception of ‘rogue’ states. Once viewed as an inconvenience rather than a threat, they and their interests in developing weapons of mass destruction suddenly became a direct threat.’’ He argued this was not because they would risk attacking the United States directly—regardless of what they could do to us, we could utterly destroy them—but because they might give or sell those weapons to others against whom deterrence was the most gossamer of shields. We could no longer bet on the fear that our terrible response will prevent others from attacking us or our interests. This had implications throughout the world because the demonstration that the world’s strongest nation was not immune from disastrous attacks meant no one was. The U.S. decision to defend itself by actively seeking out, striking, and, if necessary preempting attacks carried international implications, as well. So, while counts of armed conflicts might suggest the world was becoming less conflict prone, they did not capture the increasing sense of insecurity worldwide, nor the increasing recognition that many of the conflicts were linked to organized terrorism. Certainly, the continued Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the India-Pakistan tensions, the smoldering hostilities in the Philippines, Indonesia, Algeria, Morocco, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Chechnya all affect the growth of terrorism and condition the efforts by the United States and others to deal with it. Even the continuing armed conflicts that had nothing to do with terrorism against the United States had an indirect effect, Cebrowski argued. They contributed to the pervasive sense of insecurity, generated both the demand for and supply of the human and financial assets of the terrorist organizations, and sped the fraying of the international fabric that had previously held the world together. The Americans, who once fired the ‘‘shot heard ‘round the world,’’ had now experienced a shock felt throughout the world. The assumptions of national defense had changed, the most likely participants were different, and the probability of greater frequency and higher intensity was increasing. Cebrowski would then turn to the other dimension of military competition, the development of military capabilities. If armed conflicts were the kinetic manifestation of military competition, the development of capabilities was its potential manifestation. The products of the competition here, he argued, were perceptions of relative military capability that led to deterrence, dissuasion, and assurance. And this was where the changes were huge, he argued, because competition in military capabilities was increasingly open. ‘‘Indeed, a relatively weak nation, drug cartel, or terrorist organization might well prefer to compete in this arena than in direct military conflict with a military superpower. Why did Saddam Hussein continue to maintain the appearance that he sought weapons of mass destruction? Probably not because he thought he could win a nuclear exchange with the United States. Perhaps because he believed that if he could

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get others to believe he had and could use weapons of mass destruction, he could keep the United States from attacking and have his way with his neighbors.’’ Competition in military capabilities was open to all, Cebrowski contended, because success in the contest could come in two ways. You could compete in terms of the prominent measures of military capability. In the past, industrial capacity, expressed in numbers of soldiers under arms, tanks, aircraft, and ships, was the prominent indicator of military capability. Many nations sought, or at least tried to make others think they were getting, these markers. Or, you could compete by establishing new standards, or achieving a relative advantage in a capability that is not yet fully accepted as a standard of relative military capabilities. Mao Tse-tung had argued this, Cebrowski believed, when, in the face of Japanese military superiority, he claimed that ‘‘people’s war’’ could offset and neutralize the industrial military power of Japan. Osama Bin-Laden and others had made similar points by arguing that they drew their strength from sources other than those traditionally used to gauge military power. And the point they were making was now compelling. They were perceived throughout the world as powerful. ‘‘Think about weapons development or procurement as a form of military competition,’’ he argued. ‘‘Successful competition means getting capabilities people find awesome. Every age has its own understanding of what those capabilities are. In Europe in the eleventh century they were great fortifications. In the last half of the twentieth century, they were large, heavily armored ground forces, aircraft carriers, large numbers of jet aircraft, and, of course, nuclear weapons. Historically, metrics of military power had changed slowly. Yet, history also demonstrates that from time to time, new competitive spaces open up and bring new metrics, often because of technology, or because someone figures out a different way of using weapons or military personnel. The capabilities developed in the new competitive spaces may trump the capabilities of the older competitive spaces.’’ This line of thinking drove the Pentagon’s discussion about asymmetric warfare. On the one hand, it was an expression of concern that an opponent could find an effective counter to American military power, not by matching it (that would be symmetric warfare) but with something we were not expecting or able to easily handle.4 On the other hand, it reflected a deeper concern; namely, that in the Information Age the sources of military power were more broadly available, not just to the relatively wealthy, industrialized, educated, or endowed, but to anyone who has the incentive to innovate. He believed the concern about asymmetric warfare had to focus on the easy access to information technology and the possibility that opponents could seize opportunities there before the United States. ‘‘The lead we have can be seductive, particularly if we assume information technology is similar to the industrial technologies in the sense that we have an essentially unassailable lead that only great wealth, broad technical skill, and large organizational structures could hope to

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close. Information technology is different. The United States blazed the trail into this new military competitive space, showed it could be done, and opened up a way for others to do it. But there’s no reason why competitors have to follow the same route the United States took, or spend the same kind of effort and money to get the benefit of this technology.’’ Cebrowski was convinced that in the Information Age shifts in capability and competitive advantage were likely to occur much more rapidly and the resulting changes in military capabilities would be steeper. This would occur because of the wider access to the information technology and from the technology itself —a technology that evolved much faster than the technologies that drove the Industrial Age. ‘‘The edge in the competition,’’ he argued, ‘‘will flow from the speed of innovation, the willingness to change, and the agility in integrating the technology with changes in military structure, organization, and operational concepts that can take advantage of what the technology offers. Our problem is that we so dominate the traditional competitive areas it’s hard for us to see why we should worry. Because our Industrial Age advantage is so great, we tend to think about how to apply information technology to our military forces as an applique´ or veneer, rather than move more quickly toward the true structural, organizational, and operational implications of the Information Age. We drag the anchor of our past success. It’s difficult for us to shift wholeheartedly into the new competitive area because it took us about a century to achieve the commanding position we have today in Industrial Age metrics. But those are not the rule sets and metrics that count the most anymore.’’ What did he mean by ‘‘rule sets’’? Something akin to the complex customs and mind-sets that guide behavior. Particular rule sets differentiated ages and defined behaviors that succeed in that age. It was, he believed, the different rule sets that drew the attention of so many to history, not really because they sought to revitalize those rules. ‘‘The reason archeologists value ancient artifacts, for example, is because they offer clues to the different rule sets that prevailed in the societies that produced the artifacts, and therefore to understanding both those societies and ours because we evolved from them. Beyond where and when they were made, artifacts hint at the complex set of assumptions, priorities, and myths that affected their creators’ thoughts and actions. They are interesting. But I don’t believe many really want to return to them, even if we could.’’ The notion of a shift in rule sets was how he thought he could get to the issue of what to give up of the old age so the U.S. military could move more expeditiously into the new age. He recognized that it was not just a matter of shifting financial investments. It was a matter of what the military had to give up in terms of existing operational assumptions, organizations, military structures, and cultures so that they could adopt the new ones that would succeed in the new age. That drew his interest to trying to discern what the rule sets were in the Industrial Age he was convinced the world was leaving with increasing speed.

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Industrial Age Rule Sets: What Should Be Left Behind To Cebrowski, tangible mass was the central measure of military power in the Industrial Age. Before the Industrial Age, large militaries were the exception. Sparta and Athens had large portions of their total populations in military organizations. Yet, the total number of military personnel either of those city-states was ever able to field was on the order of about 3,000, and then for only a few months a year. Rome’s military was large for its time, as was China’s in the Ming Dynasty. Yet, it was only in the nineteenth century that the size of militaries in Europe and the United States mushroomed. During the Napoleonic wars in the first two decades of the 1800s, armies grew to the hundreds of thousands. By the fourth decade of the twentieth century, the militarily powerful had armies with millions of men. The weight of armed forces also grew dramatically. In the mid-nineteenth century, European nations calculated their soldiers would fire about 75 rounds per rifle in a pitched battle. By the end of the century they put the average expenditure rate at about 300 rounds. In World War I, the actual daily expenditure rates in the Somme and Argonne battles rose to 700 per rifle and 4,000 per machine gun. The weights of other weapons and their supply similarly grew. The North German Federation in the Franco-Prussian war had about 1,600 artillery pieces. In World War I, the number of German artillery pieces, on average larger caliber than their predecessors, rose to over 8,000.5 In 1914, the weight carried per soldier, on his back and for him by trains, horses, and motor vehicles, was nine times what it was in 1870 (not counting the weight of the transport vehicles). The per capita weight of war materiel in World War I was nine times what it had been three decades previously. A similar gross comparison with World War II indicates a 12-fold increase over the World War I level. Just prior to World War I the average strength of a corps was 50 percent higher than four decades earlier and the war pushed it higher; combat troops of a corps on the march in World War I took up over twenty miles of road. The mass of forces in World War II was greater. In 1944, there were about 30 percent more soldiers fighting in central Europe than at the height of the first World War. But the greatest increase occurred in the ‘‘weight’’ of the ground forces. The same kind of growth occurred in the maritime realm. The numbers and size of naval combatants doubled between the mid-nineteenth century and World War I. The displacement tonnages of the fleets of the belligerents in World War II were generally five times what they were in the first World War. There was a trend toward greater concentration of military power in ‘‘platforms’’ as individual ships also took on a broader range of combat capabilities. The same pattern emerged in ground and, later, air forces. The armies of most industrialized nations increasingly shifted toward heavier armored forces, in which tanks and armored fighting vehicles became the locus of firepower, maneuver,

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command, and control. Aircraft shifted increasingly toward fighter-bomber configurations. Over the last two centuries, then, the dominant trend was toward massification in three dimensions. The overall numbers of men, ships, aircraft, and other elements increased. The overall weight, or bulk, of military forces grew. And the average weight associated with each person, unit, platform, or weapon rose. The rules of the Industrial Age stressed that military power was a function of more and larger, with a wider range of heavier weapons. Industrialization made getting military mass easy and cheap because it generated the wealth to arm, train, organize, and maintain much larger militaries. And by the late nineteenth century it was clear that the militaries produced by industrialized nations almost always turned out to be more effective than those of nonindustrialized nations. 6 By the middle of the nineteenth century, international affairs were essentially the affairs of the ‘‘great powers,’’ whose members got into the club largely through their industrial capacity and the mass of their militaries. Accordingly, military mass—usually measured in numbers of divisions and warships—increasingly became the metric of international power and the gauge of competition. World War I reinforced this notion, and World War II confirmed it. For what was a surprisingly brief interlude, the advent of nuclear weapons seemed to challenge the metrics of mass as the gauge of military prowess. Yet, nuclear weapons never really altered the commitment shared by most nations to invest in as massive a set of nonnuclear forces as their economies and polities allowed. The quest for military mass had a reinforcing logic. The greater lethality of Industrial Age military mass increased the stakes of armed conflict. That fact reinforced the perceived utility of military mass both to deter or, if deterrence failed, to prevail in the conflict. Mass was the best insurance against the growing risks inherent in armed conflict.

Industrial Age War During the Industrial Age, the dominant theory of war emphasized attrition as both the preeminent goal and most dangerous risk of military action. While increasing one’s own military mass was good in peacetime, decreasing the mass of the enemy was the key to successful warfare. Whether plotting how to use existing forces in a military campaign or trying to plan the size, structure, and equipment for a future military, military planners worked from the premise that the winner in a conflict will be the side that first inflicts sufficient losses on its opponent to force it to collapse, surrender, or otherwise cease to fight. Attrition was a logical strategy because of the growing mass of opposing militaries and the increasing lethality of weapons.

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Strategists, often for the smaller militaries, voiced alternatives to attrition warfare from time to time. None of them offset the dominance of attrition warfare. Following World War I, for example, military planners in France and Germany worked assiduously to devise an alternative to repeating the kind of carnage each had suffered in that conflict. Germany had lost nearly 1,200,000 of its citizens; French losses were similar. For both sides, the war had literally wiped out nearly 15 percent of the most productive component of their male populations (aged 18 to 30) in less than five years.7 The French solution of emphasizing the advantages of defensive positions—of which the Maginot Line fortifications were the most obvious example—failed early in World War II. The Germans shifted toward relying on speed, shock, and distances; what a newspaper reporter coined as ‘‘blitzkrieg.’’ A small portion of the Wehrmacht implemented this concept, but within a year of successfully employing blitzkrieg against the French and Polish militaries, the Germans shifted back (or had been forced to revert) to concepts based on military mass and attrition.8 The idea of a strategic air campaign, initially outlined by the Italian military theorist Giulio Douhet in the 1920s, seemed to some a viable alternative to attrition warfare.9 Yet, it is hard to describe air operations by both sides in World War II as something other than attrition warfare expanded to include the civilian infrastructures. Douglas MacArthur’s island hopping campaign in the Pacific, designed to avoid the carnage that would have taken place if he had sought to occupy every Japanese-controlled island, was really only one part of a wider attrition-oriented war. With enough military mass, achieving overwhelming force where you wanted it, while simultaneously protecting against the unexpected, was easier. Mass gave those who had it more discretion as to when and where to use force. And it was the best insurance against the possibility of unanticipated losses. Having more to begin with—more trained and equipped manpower, more weapons, more reserve—was no guarantee of winning an attrition contest. But military mass allowed those who had it to suffer more losses without collapsing, and more with which to inflict losses on the opponent. Military leadership, discipline, experience, and weaponry could compensate for numerical disparities. But in the purported words of Stalin, ‘‘military quantity has a quality all its own.’’ The rule set that prescribes that a ‘‘good big fighter will always beat a good little fighter,’’ incorrectly attributed to boxing buffs, echoes through the military thought of the Industrial Age.

Military Organization and Structure in the Industrial Age But mass carried what Carl von Clausewitz, the classic analyst of the nineteenth century way of war, called ‘‘friction’’—the bigger the military, the slower

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it reacted to the vicissitudes of armed conflict and to the commands of its leaders. 10 The basic organizational problem was twofold: how to make the pieces work together quickly, and how to make the institution achieve its goals effectively. Bureaucratization, as defined by Max Weber and succeeding generations of organizational theorists and sociologists, was the Industrial Age solution.11 It was in the Industrial Age when the control mechanisms we now associate with militaries became prominent: hierarchy of authority, impersonality, written rules of conduct, and specialized division of labor.12 In the nineteenth century, most of the militaries in the world adopted essentially the same organizational model (and, interestingly, the same organization and rank titles). The size of divisions, brigades, battalions, companies, squadrons, and platoons throughout the world became remarkably similar, and the hierarchical structure they embodied all more or less conformed to the same information flows. Information from subordinate units went up, directives went down. Impersonal rules explicitly stating duties, responsibilities, procedures, and conduct governed military life and operations. Training emphasized knowledge of and adherence to standardized procedures. Discipline, sometimes distinguished by a special legal basis, was rigorous. Unit specialization spread. In the Napoleonic era, European armies generally had less than seven kinds of units. In the Franco-Prussian wars of the midnineteenth century, Prussian and French ground forces had 12 and 10, respectively. The armies that fought in World War I had up to 15, and as many as 20 in World War II. The U.S. Army forces that fought in Desert Storm had 22 distinctly different unit types involved in the 100-hour campaign that swept what remained of the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. As the size and complexity of military organizations grew, a particular planning and operational style took hold. Planning was systematic, deductive, detailed, and comprehensive. Operations were sequential. Underlying all of this was the commitment to military mass, the commitment that made both the planning and operational style necessary, even though military professionals believed that no plan survives the first shot. That belief bolstered the commitment to sequential operations, for if no plan would work as intended, implementing it sequentially would allow for adjustments and corrections, while attempting concurrent operations would compound the errors. Why was this superstructure of logic and assumptions needed? Because military professionals were convinced Clausewitz was right. The fog of war would always reduce the accuracy, timeliness, and relevance of information. There would never be enough accurate information that would arrive in time to obviate the mass needed to insure against the effects of inaccurate information. That was why military hierarchy, discipline, and doctrine were so essential. Only the most experienced, wisest, or best pedigreed should be given information and decision authority because they were the most likely to make the best decisions. Providing

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information to the less experienced and of questionable or no pedigree was a recipe for military disaster. Hierarchy would assure a flow of information upward and a flow of orders downward. Discipline would reinforce the hierarchy and insure that the lower ranks would act as the upper ranks ordered. Doctrine would provide a surrogate for information, providing guidance until the orders arrived, and bolster discipline. Industrial Age rule sets recognized the need to bolster this logic with something more than fear of punishment if discipline, hierarchy, and doctrine were to overcome the stress of war. So, beneath the sometimes Draconian formal rules that governed military life in the Industrial Age, lay subtle, sophisticated, and successful appreciation of psychological needs and interpersonal loyalty. Military ritual was part of it, and it is interesting to note the extensive expression of it in societies throughout the industrialized world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the attention to distinguishing detail paid to military uniforms, flags, and other displays. Ritual was and still remains a key to developing the sense of community—of belonging and accepting the obligations of loyalty —to a social group, and, as such, part of the glue that holds military organizations together in the face of great stress and trauma. It was functional, revered, and assiduously cultivated. In the United States, in the twentieth century, the cultivation centered on the military services which provided the foundations of the loyalties military personnel develop for the smaller units in which they serve. Service identity permeated training, presence, display, and esprit de corps. And it was accompanied by efforts to distinguish the military services from each other.

Information Age Military Rule Sets Cebrowski recognized that it was a lot easier to present the Industrial Age rule sets, for which masses of literature and assessments were available, than to describe the Information Age rule sets. But, he believed if the military rule sets of the Industrial Age stemmed from the prominence of military mass, those emerging in the Information Age flowed from the assumption that knowledge can substitute for mass. Clausewitz had a profound mistrust of the information that flowed in battle and of ‘‘intelligence.’’13 But now information technology was undermining that distrust. So much so that while the ability to gather, understand, and communicate accurate, reliable, comprehensive, and timely information about modern battles remained imperfect, it was time to revise traditional beliefs on the utility and need for military mass. The Information Age transposes the relationship between mass and knowledge, a transposition that in several ways turns the Industrial Age military model upside down. The seeds for the transposition began to grow in the middle of the twentieth century. The Industrial Age that made military mass affordable and increasingly

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lethal also made military intelligence more comprehensive, accurate, and timely. Indeed, by the middle of the twentieth century, technologies like radar, acoustic signal processing, cryptology, and radio intercept and analysis, coupled with aerial, and, later, space-based observation were opening, literally, new vistas of battlefield awareness. In the last half of the century, advances in the ability to generate improved battlefield awareness implicitly began to challenge the utility of military mass. The advances in the technical ability to generate dramatically better battlefield awareness came late in the Industrial Age. Until very recently, military theorists have viewed the relationship between military mass and battlefield awareness through Clausewitz’s ‘‘fog of war.’’ To Clausewitz, the ‘‘fog’’ pointed to the uncertainty of information about what was occurring in armed conflict, something he argued degraded successful battle decisions and effective military action. This uncertainty stemmed from confusion—often generated by the complexity of armed combat and the trauma of battle and fear—delay in transferring information, and narrow observation. He believed it was an inevitable, unavoidable condition of war. He saw a relationship between the extent of the fog of war and the size and complexity of the contending forces. Larger forces produced more fog. And the greater and thicker the fog, the greater the need for military mass to insure against the higher chances for mistakes. But what really produced the fog of war? To Clausewitz that was clear. Human limitations generated it. The sources of information about what an opponent’s forces were doing, where they were, how powerful they were, and where they were going had always been human eyes, ears, an ability to correlate and synthesize information, memories, and an ability to accurately portray what they remembered to other humans. These could be made better with practice, training, and experience. But humans tired. They were myopic, sometimes confused and frightened, could not always remember what they saw or heard. They did not always portray what they thought they saw or heard well or accurately and often could not quickly get to whom they needed to pass information. Military mass, per se, did not generate the fog of war. But it challenged the breadth of human observation. More forces made it more difficult for human observers to know where all the forces were, what they were doing, what they could do. And military mass was awesome. It inspired fear and confusion in the hearts and minds of those who sought to oppose it. Or understand it. Clausewitz died in 1831, over 100 years before World War II. And while technology had changed the scope and breadth of war, and European historians following World War I reviled his views as responsible for the carnage of the Great War, American military theorists increasingly reread his classic On War.14 Through the last half of the twentieth century, however, technology increasingly undercut the phenomena that Clausewitz had identified as the source of the fog of war. Aerial platforms extended the distance and the breadth of human vision.

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Photography and other imagery eroded the effects of stress and confusion that war had on what humans thought they saw or remembered. Other sensors— radar, acoustic, infrared, magnetic, radio frequency—pushed the ability to gather information beyond what human senses could discern or record. As the ability to collect information stretched across the electromagnetic spectrum, as aerial and space-based perspectives drew information from ever greater geographical expanses, as communications allowed transferring the information instantly, and as computing power increasingly correlated the information in terms of space and time, pushing it all into an accurate, comprehensive, detailed, timely, and comprehensible portrayal of war, the fog of war grew thinner. Aided by technology, humans could ‘‘see’’ the enemy clearly. The new attitude was ‘‘If I can see it, I can kill it.’’ It was much more complex than this slogan implies and remains so. While technology has been able to generate greater transparency to armed conflict over the last several decades, it also has revealed better the underlying complexity of armed conflict and has contributed to that complexity. A new kind of fog has emerged. As the battlespace becomes more transparent, forces become more agile and adaptable. A more generalized doctrine emphasizing flexible pursuit of a commander’s intent replaces slavish adherence to military dogma. But this fluidity increases the complexity and speed of battle, which works against greater predictability and knowledge. As timeliness grows shorter, the costs of tardiness in decisions and implementation and of misreading the environment become greater. Cebrowski was convinced this changed the metrics of military power. Military mass no longer was clearly an advantage in military competition. It could be a liability. Mass, once applied, could be overwhelming. But changing directions quickly or adjusting to new situations in a conflict was more problematical. Numbers could add to the friction, particularly when some components lagged the tempo of others. More powerful platforms—whether tanks, ships, or aircraft—became increasingly more visible and harder to replace if lost. Mass had been an insurance against the vagaries introduced by the fog of war, a means of compensating for the inability to discern what was happening on the battlefield. If the fog of war could be made thinner, if technology could cut through that fog, was military mass still the measure of military might? That had been the essence of the question posed by the military revolutionaries, among whom Cebrowski aligned himself, at the end of the twentieth century. Their answer was that mass was no longer as important. But, some of them went farther. To some, military mass and all that went with the focus on military mass—the metrics to gauge relative military power, the organizations honed to manage and direct it, and the structures designed to focus it—were, if not wrong, surely suspect or becoming obsolete.

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Cebrowski knew that this possibility had emerged in nascent form within the fighter-pilot community in the 1970s. There, success in air-to-air engagements and survival had appeared to correlate with the speed of decision and reaction. Air Force colonel John Boyd had tried with some success to express this idea as a general aspect of combat. He came up with the ‘‘OODA loop’’: the process of observing an opponent and situation, orienting an aircraft (or force) to respond to what was observed, deciding on the best course of action, and then acting quickly and effectively.15 The concept implied a new hierarchy of metrics because it suggested that what really counted in military action was the ability to process through the cycle of observation, orientation, decision, and action faster and with more precision than the other side. In short, speed and accuracy in the process were as important as mass. If mass delayed or confused the process, it was not a contributor to military success. This was one of the conceptual bridges that began to transpose mass and knowledge. As an aviator, Cebrowski understood Boyd’s argument. That was the insight he had had when he flew the F/A-18 and experienced the heads-up display’s ability to transfer information from different perspectives—not just what he could see from the cockpit, but what radars and other sensors from a variety of platforms could perceive—into a comprehensible picture of the battlespace in which he was operating. It was clearly a tactical advantage, and in the mid-1990s he and others tried to push the concept into a more general strategy. To Cebrowski and other revolutionaries, having better knowledge of a military situation than an opponent gave the greatest leverage in an armed conflict. ‘‘Information superiority,’’ as he referred to it, ‘‘could not automatically guarantee victory. Information and knowledge did not automatically translate to military effectiveness. It was the action and behavior options it provided that offered the advantage. The side with information superiority could do things an opponent could not, while also doing the things an opponent could do, but do them faster and more precisely and efficiently. It changed the odds dramatically in favor of the side that had it.’’ He had had personal experience with the confusion, complexity, and unpredictability of armed conflict. He understood that the importance of information superiority had long been acknowledged by sages of military strategy and did not claim a new insight. ‘‘Where we differed from earlier observers and from many of our contemporaries,’’ he explained, ‘‘was our conviction that the current U.S. military organization, structure, and service-oriented cultures unnecessarily limited our capacity to obtain and use information superiority. Our views became highly controversial within the military establishment.’’ The first expression of concern came in the accusation that the revolutionaries were far too trusting of information technology’s ability to provide information superiority. It was, some argued, hubris to believe technology could lift ‘‘the fog

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of war.’’ Fascination with high technology would downgrade military skill and the training that produced it. It denigrated military experience. A resourceful enemy could counter any technology used against it. Information technology carried the Achilles heel of information overload. The litany went on and on through the last decade of the twentieth century.16 Much of the critique was ignorant of the real arguments the revolutionaries were making. Cebrowski’s rejoinder was, ‘‘none of us denigrated military experience, training, or reliance on ‘humint’—information from human sources—whether they were spies or soldiers on the battlefield. Nor did we think in the absolute terms the critics accused us of doing. On the contrary, as a group, the revolutionaries in the Pentagon during the 1990s focused on probabilities, not dogma.’’ Some of the critique, however, stemmed from a more accurate understanding of his views on information dominance; namely, that it could come in part from taking advantage of the different perspectives flowing through a military structure, from sharing those perspectives, and from pushing decision authority downward in order to take better advantage of the information, faster. To traditionalists, this sounded very much like an assault on hierarchy, class divisions, long-standing tradition, and hoary procedure, all of which would shake the foundations of the military. That was a valid critique. It captured much of what Cebrowski and others had in mind. Some of the controversy stemmed from the American military emphasis on the different military service cultures. Owens, Joint Chiefs Chairman John Shalikashvili, and Cebrowski had identified the traditional military service ‘‘requirements’’ process as one of the barriers to obtaining a common battlespace awareness that could cut across all the military components involved in an operation. Through the 1990s, there was a basic fact: the forces of one service could not communicate easily and rapidly with another. That was at the root of the fratricide that had occurred in Desert Storm, the F-15 shoot-down of Army Blackhawk helicopters during the Bosnia crisis, and the massacre of the Rangers in Somalia. That last event—which inspired the movie Blackhawk Down—was particularly immediate and hurtful to Cebrowski who had taken over command of the naval units supporting U.S. operations in Somalia shortly after the incident. His staff showed him a video taken of the event. During the ambush of the Ranger unit seeking to capture a Somalia warlord, a Navy EP-3 miles offshore equipped with special long-range optical surveillance equipment had watched and videotaped images as the ambush unfolded. The video was remarkably clear, displaying the locations and preparations of the ambushers as the Rangers approached. It was chilling; doubly so because, as the frames rolled toward the disaster, the Navy EP-3 could not alert the Army. The communications links simply did not allow it in time. In 1995, as the Joint Staff ’s director of communications, Cebrowski had kicked off an analysis of the communications routing required for a seaborne

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naval commander to communicate directly with forces on the ground. He had asked for a line diagram that would trace the routing the communication would need, the various nodes it would have to go through, and the human interventions needed to let the captain of a Navy ship talk to, say, an Army battalion commander. The study came back with a diagram that could have been a plate of spaghetti—a two-page list of the nodes and switches and an estimate of the time required to get through the maze that defied belief. Cross-service communications had been a mess year after year in part because each of the military services jealously guarded what it considered its exclusive right to design its own forces down to and including with whom they could communicate. When the revolutionaries began to point to the dangers inherent in this exclusivity, the services correctly saw it as an attack on their prerogatives. Yet, if a common battlespace awareness was ever to become a full reality to U.S. forces, cross-service communications just had to be easier, routine, and automatic. If that meant changing what the conventional wisdom defined as service prerogatives, doctrine, or culture, the revolutionaries’ response had been, ‘‘So be it. Do it faster.’’ Other points in the revolutionary argument raised cultural neuralgias. Traditionally, the ‘‘combat arms’’ were held in highest regard. Those ‘‘on the front lines’’—the infantrymen, combat pilots, attack submarine sailors—were celebrated as the warriors. To some military professionals there was something unseemly about the kind of military specialties the revolutionaries seemed to be lionizing. All military professionals recognize the absolute need for communications specialists, logisticians, intelligence analysts, and other skilled personnel. But Industrial Age military myth tended to lump such personnel into the broad class of ‘‘support,’’ edging career advancement and other rewards toward the ‘‘warriors.’’ So, to traditionalists, the revolutionaries implied a restructuring of the military pantheon, a glorification of Mercury at the expense of Mars. And that conjured interests in stopping the assault on virtue. The accusations got dramatic and personal. In their ‘‘confusion’’ about the nature of war, the traditionalists argued, the revolutionaries advocated things that would lead to both despair and defeat—despair by the public when it discovered ‘‘real’’ war was much uglier than the revolutionaries implied, and defeat on the battlefield when untested combatants discovered real war was very different from how the revolutionaries wanted them to fight. It was a bad rap. Like Cebrowski, most of the revolutionaries were warriors. They had built their careers on combat experience, and reckoned their appreciation of the nature of war was as good as any in their profession. But there was no doubt that the metrics they were trying to introduce challenged tradition. ‘‘If information superiority was as important as we claimed, then the means of obtaining it assumed a higher priority—as high or higher that the priority usually accorded the means of delivering devastating kinetic violence.’’

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Network Centric Warfare Cebrowski was singularly influential in merging the revolutionaries’ theses into a detailed and coherent concept.17 He called it ‘‘network centric warfare.’’ It was very controversial, in part because it directly contradicted the existing understandings of military organization (the arrangement of authority—who reports to whom) and military structure (the arrangement of responsibility—who is responsible for what). Cebrowski said, ‘‘Some of our arguments took on military organization. Like other Industrial Age militaries, the U.S. military leaned toward centralized decision-making that reflected flows of information upward and directives downward. The higher you were in the hierarchy, the more you should know about what’s going on. The more you knew—the broader your knowledge—the more command authority you should have. Industrial Age militaries organized around that notion. Each level of the hierarchical military structure collected and assessed information. It used that information to make decisions within its jurisdiction. It also pushed the information up to higher headquarters, which, in theory, combined it with information received from other subordinates to build a broader picture of what was happening so it could direct the actions of its subordinates.’’ In theory, this was fine, but Cebrowski argued that information superiority required more than simply knowing a lot. It required knowing more of the right things, accurately, and in time to act. Technology offered to make this possible, but there were two ways it could do it. It could give central decision-makers better, more timely information on which to make decisions and formulate orders and then get their orders transmitted to subordinates faster. Or it could provide more comprehensive information directly to all levels of the hierarchy. It could bolster the hierarchy and make vertical flows of information faster, richer, and more comprehensive. Or it could spread the information directly throughout the force at the same time it passed it upward. The first approach would reinforce the hierarchical structure of Industrial Age militaries. The second would undermine it. Particularly if decision authority went along with the information. ‘‘Think about it visually and you get a sense of the transformation,’’ Cebrowski argued (see Figure 2.1). ‘‘It is like going from the recognizable ‘chains of command hierarchy’ pyramid to, say, a sphere-shaped command structure In the former, decision power concentrates at the top of the pyramid. The lower, or tactical, tiers send information upward where the upper tiers collate the different narrower perspectives, decide what the tactical units should do, and order them to do it. The system works if the subordinates follow the orders.’’ Cebrowski, however, noted that ‘‘the network centric model is different. A command hierarchy exists, but it deals out ‘command intent’ allowing more discretion at the operating and tactical levels. In effect, decision power flows outward, ‘to the edge’ where combat units implement the command intent.

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Figure 2.1 Command and Control Models Information flows horizontally, not through hierarchical chains, but through networks, and it is this robust network flow that allows a common understanding to emerge throughout the force quickly. That common understanding,’’ he pointed out, ‘‘coupled with well-trained personnel, versed in knowing to think about how what they are directly aware of can be affected by what is occurring beyond their direct cognizance, is what allows them to self-synchronize their actions with those of their co-protagonists. Bottom line: it will pay off in a leap in military effectiveness.’’ That notion of pushing decision authority to lower levels was probably the most revolutionary concept he developed. What would happen if the U.S. military did it, if it used the rapidly improving information technology to transfer much more information not just to the top levels, but throughout the organization? Could a military organization function effectively if lower-ranking personnel on patrols, or flying aircraft, or manning ships at sea had the same kind of information, at the same time, as the senior commanders to whom they reported? Centuries of industrial warfare and military organizations said no. They said widely distributed information and decision authority would lead to disorganization and confusion. It would generate a cacophony of contradictory commands, inevitably paralyzing the organization. To suggest otherwise was not just going against the wisdom of history, it would endanger lives and reduce the ability of the U.S. armed forces to win the nation’s wars. Cebrowski disagreed. His work in the 1970s on fleet defense indicated when pilots worked off the same information and communicated with each other they were much more effective than when they responded to the direction of a central controller. Owens, as a submarine squadron commander, had come to a similar

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conclusion through experiments on the effectiveness of common information shared across submarines. ‘‘We both came to the same view,’’ Cebrowski said. ‘‘Effective synchronization no longer depended on hierarchy alone, for with the right kind of communications network, a common understanding of command intent—essentially, an appreciation of the goals of action and the parameters within which the goals were to be sought—and broader access to information, subordinate units could self-synchronize faster and effectively. Instead of the confusion and a cacophony of contradictory commands, a common awareness of the battlefield generated organized, effective, synchronized actions better than the traditional command structure could bring it about.’’ Why was that? Part of the reason involved how you could achieve information superiority relative to an opponent. The ability to blend perspectives was key. How could you distinguish, say, an enemy tank from a civilian truck? One way was to test whatever it was against a set of attributes associated with a tank. Did it look like a tank? Optical information could tell you. Did it have a heat signature similar to what tanks generally had? Infrared could provide evidence. Did it move like, sound like, radiate electromagnetic energy like a tank? The more different perspectives you could get on that object, the more you would be able to distinguish between military and nonmilitary objects. And among military objects. If you could ‘‘observe’’ a group of tanks from different perspectives and compare the observations, you had a better chance of identifying which of the tanks was more important. Which one contained the group’s commander? The actions of which tank were key to the enemy’s operational success? ‘‘Different perspectives could generate better discrimination, and better discrimination was a route to greater military efficiency and effectiveness,’’ Cebrowski said. Here, again, the structure of Industrial Age militaries did not seem to best take advantage of what information technologies were increasingly able to collect or of the growing capacity to correlate the data. Industrial Age military structures tended toward compartmentalization, not collaboration. They were vertically, not laterally, organized. They channeled information upward, taking longer for the correlation of different perspectives. Military organizations could and did take advantage of the emerging information technologies. Cebrowski had been part of a U.S. Navy effort to develop what it called the ‘‘cooperative engagement concept.’’ It was an impressive example of how different ships and aircraft could combine the radar and other data they collected separately into a common picture of the vast air space around and beyond the horizon of an operating fleet. The other military services were attempting similar feats. But the successes all seemed to flow from organizational changes, from avoiding or working around the traditional military organizations and structures. As such, they pointed toward a need for different organizations and structures and a different way of thinking about war, a new conceptual framework. That was why he called his new framework ‘‘network centric warfare.’’

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The term came from what he saw happening outside the military. ‘‘In 1995, some of us were asking the deep questions about military organization and were intrigued by the organizational changes in commercial businesses, things like flattened hierarchies, the ability of companies like Wal-Mart to keep their inventory so closely tied to what their consumers needed, how FedEx could track individual packages throughout the world. I remember listening to the CEO from Sun Microsystems explain Metcalfe’s Law about how the power of computers was more a function of the networks that linked them than the number of computers an enterprise had. There it was. Military power in the Information Age would come from the networks that linked military units, turning a military force into something that was more powerful than the sum of its parts. Network centric warfare was what we came up with to try to capture that notion in a broader military context.’’ Cebrowski claimed network centric warfare is a theory of war. That is, it identifies new sources of power, how those sources relate to each other, and how they link to political objectives. It explains how one side uses violence to compel an opponent to do what it would not otherwise do and to eliminate the opponent’s ability to do the same to them. It speaks to the character of war, not to its nature, accepting that war by nature is a form of intense human competition, involves violence, profound risk, and mutual danger. Network centric warfare recognizes that it is the nature of war to be nasty, brutish, and very complex, however short it may be. As in other and earlier theories of war, network centric warfare has its competitive space, rule sets, and metrics. Where the competitive space of industrial war was the capacity to produce heavy weapons and get them to where they could be most destructive, the competitive space in network centric warfare is the capability to obtain and integrate information into military operations. The metrics used to gauge the relative power of militaries in the Industrial Age were generally input measures. They measured and compared military mass, expressed in numbers of weapons, ton-miles per day, military manpower, and units. Planning focused on how to achieve an edge in such measures on a battlefield, during a campaign, or in a war. ‘‘In contrast,’’ Cebrowski argued, ‘‘the metrics of network centric warfare seek to describe the relative ability to create an information advantage and turn it into a military advantage. They are generally output measures of the competitive relationships among antagonists; things like speed and rates of change; operational and tactical innovation; how fast one side can act on information and couple events together; and political and moral outcomes. Where industrial war revolved around efforts to obtain overwhelming force and attrition, network centric warfare revolves around information superiority and precision violence to dismantle an opposing force.’’ It was not the greater precision in applying violence for destructive purposes that Cebrowski thought distinguished network centric warfare from Industrial

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Age warfare, however. ‘‘For at least the last several decades we Americans have sought to apply fire power with precision and to limit collateral damage. But we have done so largely for industrial war purposes—destroying targets with precision allowed us to destroy many more targets with less risk to our military personnel who were doing the destruction, in a shorter period of time and with fewer resources. In other words, we tended to see the value of precision violence in terms of attrition goals. Precision let us kill opposing weapons, men, and their facilities faster and easier, thus hastening the rate at which we could attrite an enemy to the point he would give up or be unable to resist.’’ To Cebrowski, the goal of network centric warfare was not attrition. The goal was to change the minds of the opponents more quickly—to impose a general belief that armed aggression or resistance was unwise or impossible throughout the opposing force and political structure from which it flowed. The central battlefield in network centric warfare was not in the physical domain. It was in the cognitive domain. ‘‘The aim of network centric operations’’ he said, ‘‘is to more closely couple military action to the mental processes and perceptions of war, reducing superfluous destruction and shortening conflict.’’ A closer look reveals what he saw as the differences between network centric and Industrial Age attrition warfare. He argued that the aim of an attrition strategy is to inflict however many casualties it takes to remove the ability of an opponent to function as a military organization. Historical assessments indicate a loss of half the strength of a military unit renders it militarily ineffective; some studies figure that killing or wounding one-third of the personnel in a unit can do it. Other studies conclude it takes a higher loss rate, on the order of 60 to 70 percent casualties, to render a military unit ‘‘ineffective.’’18 By ‘‘militarily ineffective,’’ they mean that the distinctive characteristics of a military organization—its relative discipline, trained predictability, structure, and systematic approach to tasks and mission—are gone. While there may be an attempt to kill only the formal combatants of an opposing force (and not civilians), attrition strategies make little effort to differentiate among military targets. To an attrition planner, one tank is essentially the same as any other tank, one ship the same as another ship. The goal is simply to destroy them until there are no more or until the enemy gives up, whichever comes first. Industrial Age militaries got very good at waging attrition warfare and most of the armed conflicts in the twentieth century, from WWI through the Vietnam conflict, were essentially attrition driven. Indeed, attrition warfare was the rule, rather than the exception, even when it did not involve powerful Industrial Age militaries. Most of the armed conflicts—many of them essentially civil wars— throughout Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South America reflected attrition strategies. While the historical record demonstrates a general growth in the proficiency of conducting attrition warfare, it does not show a similar

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improvement in the ability of attrition strategies to obtain the political goals of the protagonists, despite the fact that one may have prevailed over another. Attrition warfare tends to change the stakes in and character of conflict. For example, the death and destruction of relatively indiscriminate attrition strategies can reduce the value of victory in either internal or external war. The ‘‘winner’’ faces an aftermath of stabilization and reconstruction it did not contemplate or want when the conflict began. All the participants are likely to have accumulated a surfeit of blood debts from the almost inevitable deaths of the innocents in attrition war. Attrition wars do not end so much as they transfer the hatreds, blood debts, and proclivities toward armed conflict to succeeding generations. It can also lead to more protracted conflict. Attrition strategies argue that those employing them will kill their opponents until they quit or are gone. That is an argument that the recipients, particularly during the conflict, can easily interpret as a ‘‘no quarter’’ prospect. It may make them quit on the hope that their opponent, who from their standpoint has been wantonly killing as many of their comrades, wives, and children as he can, will become benign. Or it may make them decide they have no real option but to fight to the death. History provides abundant examples of both reactions. Since network centric warfare also involves force, violence, and destruction, it cannot guarantee to avoid the unintended consequences of Industrial Age attrition warfare. But, inherently, it makes them less probable. Part of the reason has to do with the focus of network centric warfare on the cognitive domain— on an enemy’s thinking. The difference this makes, put baldly, is that while network centric warfare seeks to change minds, attrition warfare simply tries to eliminate them. It is not that network centric warfare tries to make the enemy feel warm and fuzzy about surrendering. But since it sees the cognitive domain as the central battlefield, it is more likely to understand the phenomena of blood oath aftermaths and use force accordingly to reduce the chances of it occurring. Another difference shows up in the purpose of speed, precision, and discrimination in the two concepts of war. In attrition warfare, warriors seek them in order to increase the rate of attrition, in effect, to make the process that generates continued hatreds and blood debts work better and faster. In network centric warfare they see them as an alternative to attrition; to collapse an opponent’s force quickly without killing as many people in the process. ‘‘Any application of combat power can have two effects,’’ Cebrowski would say. ‘‘It can degrade an enemy’s ability to wage war or resist our will the way attrition does by physically reducing the numbers of personnel, their weapons, and other equipment until they are no longer able to function as a military entity. It can also have an effect on an enemy’s assumptions and decisions—to ‘‘lock out’’ what he may see as operational options. If we can achieve this—if we can impose a sense of hopelessness on an opponent by demonstrating we can operate within

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his decision-operation cycle, that we can avoid his actions, vitiate his planning, and always beat him to the punch—then the chances he will end his resistance earlier increase. That means less destruction, fewer deaths, less collateral damage, fewer blood debts, easier and faster establishment of civil society.’’ This last point is the logical link to the emphasis network centric warfare puts on information superiority and particular force characteristics. Information superiority is the key to collapsing an opponent’s forces. If one side can obtain the information it needs more quickly than its adversary and takes advantage of this disparity, it has a better chance of using destructive violence systemically and precisely. That is, if you understand what and where an opponent’s forces are and how he is attempting to use them, you have a greater chance of destroying those components that are critical to his command structure and operational scheme. Doing this has systemic effects—it reduces the overall capability of the enemy forces beyond the numerical loss of the element you have destroyed. If you have the kind of force that can take advantage of that knowledge edge you can, as the military says, ‘‘operate within the decision and reaction cycles of an opponent.’’ And if you do that, you can ‘‘lock in’’ a continuing advantage. Locking in that kind of advantage ‘‘locks out’’ the ability of the opponent to change the outcome of the conflict. It increases the probability that you will remove the capabilities that define his military: its organization, operational scheme, its discipline, and the morale of its members quickly. In effect, you put in place a likely victory on the cognitive battleground. In other words, if you have and can take advantage of information superiority you can reduce the opposing force to the same level of incompetence as can an attrition strategy. But you can do this with less carnage, fewer attacks, fewer losses to both sides, fewer resources, and in a shorter period of time. A lot of conditions must be met for all this to occur. An information advantage does not just happen. When and if you get it, you have to be able to turn it into a competitive advantage. To do that you must couple information with speed of command. You must decide what to do, where, and how much violence to use, and then implement those decisions before the situation changes enough to erode their effectiveness. Obtaining information superiority of the kind described by network centric warfare requires going beyond an awareness of what and where an opponent’s military assets are. The United States is already very good at generating that level of awareness. Successful network centric warfare requires understanding the interrelationships among the what and where. It is not as hard as it may sound. Access to the communications that tie a military force together can offer real insight into the command structure and where to apply force to collapse it. The ability to quickly review past actions, military training, and deployment history can reveal clues to what an opponent intends to do with its force as deployed. In the competitive space of network centric warfare, the efforts to cloak

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activity and confuse the interpretation of information will be as continuous as the efforts to pierce the cloaks and unravel the disinformation. The winners will be those who are most agile not only in the direct contest between seekers and hiders of information, but also those who are the most adept and agile in procuring and using rapidly evolving information technology. The capacity to use information superiority successfully in network centric war depends on command and control structures and procedures that differ profoundly from the ones devised and honed for two centuries for Industrial Age war. Industrial Age acquisition, planning, procurement, maintenance, and operations are incompatible with the demands of network centric warfare and must go. Military training and education will have to change radically. The weapons demanded by network centric warfare will have to be longer range, more precise, more accurate, easier to maintain, faster to use, and quicker to incorporate new technology. But their value will be only as good as the sensors that tell them what they should be used against, when and where. Only as good as the communications that link them to the sensors. Only as good as the decisions and decision processes that result in their use. ‘‘The central organizational concept of network centric warfare is selfsynchronization,’’ Cebrowski claimed. ‘‘That is, it’s based on the hypothesis that given a network that provides a shared understanding of a situation that is comprehensive—it extends beyond what is immediately observable by the individual units on the network—accurate, and timely, tactical units can coordinate their actions more efficiently and effectively than a traditional hierarchical military system can.’’

Self-Synchronization What is so good about ‘‘self-synchronization’’? To Cebrowski, it offered two advantages: greater efficiency in applying military power and a transition away from attrition warfare toward a more effective and moral use of military force. He believed that, ‘‘Traditionally, military operations almost always involve purposeful effort; they occur in pursuit of a mission or goal. And they follow a sequence of preparation and execution—increasing potential energy and then releasing it in kinetic form, if you will. It is usually a cycle: preparation and execution designed to obtain an intermediate goal, followed by additional preparation and execution either to obtain the first goal if the first effort was unsuccessful or, if it was successful, to obtain another goal the success of the earlier effort made possible. The same cycle appears in many human endeavors and in the behavior of many institutions, of course. But few dedicate so much effort to what is essentially planned synchronization as military institutions do. This is because, unlike building a road or getting a man on the moon, military endeavors assume someone will be fighting back using many of the same techniques, including planned

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synchronization.’’ Therefore, militaries have done two things to compensate for the inherent, high-stakes competition that underlies their endeavors. They have leaned toward mass and they have emphasized the utility of trying to envision the things that could go wrong as they plan the synchronization among the units composing the force. Military professionals recognize that the best plans usually do not survive the first battle. But that simply tends to emphasize the interest in having a lot of force (to provide options and insurance in the likely event that things will not go as planned) and in planned synchronization (to build in an ability to use the insurance effectively if it is needed). The recognition that they will probably have to change the plans and respond to the unplanned events, however, also embeds the utility of self-synchronization into military thought. Militaries want all their personnel to behave as effectively as possible when the planned synchronization does not work as hoped and when there is no one higher up the hierarchy to tell them what to do. The point here is that the notion of self-synchronization is not new to military affairs. The issue is how much you want and when. If you plot the underlying prepare-execute cycle over time, you get the stair step pattern illustrated in Figure 2.2. The vertical lines represent execution when the military force applies its power—that is when things happen to change the situation. The horizontal lines represent periods when the force is preparing for the next spurt of execution. It is a pattern that occurs in general form at all levels of military activity—from small unit actions, to campaigns, to wars.19 There are some subtleties in the diagram. It portrays an ideal, or fully successful execution of a perfect plan—something planned synchronization seeks to emulate but which it seldom, if ever, will obtain. It also describes a nonlinear curve from successful execution to successful execution until the force involved achieves its mission or goal. This progression captures the notion that in an armed conflict, successive successes by one protagonist accelerates the collapse of the other. Analyses of conflicts support the general pattern of the diagram.20 There is also an important relationship between the size and organization of the force and the time between the kinetic spurts. Generally, the larger the military organization and the greater the hierarchy involved in planning the synchronization, the greater the complexity and longer the preparation phase. The application of information technology can cut the time, but perhaps not as much as some believe. That is because the preparations involve more than large numbers of time-distance calculations. Even in the most disciplined and hierarchical organizations, planning and other preparations involve understanding and ‘‘buy in’’ by individuals throughout the organization. Large organizations take longer to do this than smaller organizations because they have more people. The longer the preparation takes, the longer between execution spurts; that is, the longer the time gaps between actions that make a direct difference in the military situation. In effect the time gaps between kinetic bursts of military power

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Figure 2.2 Traditional Prepare-Execute Patterns constitute losses of combat power. And some other things can occur that can make it more difficult to achieve the goals of the overall military effort. When the opponent is not responding to your actions, it increases the chances he may be able to make you respond to his. And when the initiative in actions shifts to him, it increases the likelihood that the synchronization you had planned will no longer work. So, from the standpoint of military efficiency, the more often you are able to apply military force kinetically in a military operation, the better. For Cebrowski, however, this maxim held true only so long as the application of military force is sensible, purposeful, and effective. These are very important caveats and the key to self-synchronized efficiency. The theory of selfsynchronization assumes that it is possible, by providing information and decision authority to the tactical level of organization to move from the horizontal steps characterizing planned synchronization to a smooth curve of executions defined by many smaller, semi-independent operations. The preparation gaps would shrink because the upper levels of the military hierarchy would not go through the synchronization planning process. An information network capable of providing near-real time information, coupled with decision authority at the lower levels that allows them to act on that information, would flatten the command structure, remove unneeded levels of control, and increase the speed of command. The overall effect would be a near continuous stream of kinetic action

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that would achieve the purpose of the operation earlier than the traditional planned synchronization approach could (see Figure 2.3). With a network that provides the information, communications, and interactions needed, selfsynchronization can provide more actions in a given time, better focused actions, and faster reaction times. This is efficiency in the sense of achieving the goals of a military operation faster. But ‘‘better, faster, and more actions’’ promise more than efficiency. They offer effectiveness in the form of breaking resistance with less harm to the innocent. It is worth noting again that the previous discussion of self-synchronization potential has been hypothetical. It scraped out a lot of the complexity and made some assumptive leaps regarding the training changes and experiments needed to reach the potential. It is also worth noting, however, that the U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated aspects of the argument. There was a lot of self-synchronization between the small special operations teams on the ground with indigenous forces and U.S. Air Force and Navy pilots in Afghanistan. It turned out to be highly effective in destroying larger Taliban forces. And analysts dissecting the race to Baghdad in the early phases of the conflict in Iraq are almost certain to conclude that it was more representative of the speed of command and strategic impact of the self-synchronization model than the traditional.21 We have seen the harbingers of what is coming.

Figure 2.3 Network Centric Prepare-Execute Patterns

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‘‘I ran into this argument often,’’ Cebrowski

As he developed these argureminisced, ‘‘but remember one incident in particular that took place in Roosevelt Hall ments, he ran into two counterat the National Defense University in Washarguments. The first focused on ington, DC. Roosevelt Hall is majestic. Its the primacy of information and, arched gilded ceiling gleams when the sun more specifically, on his view streams through the bank of windows along that all the members of the force the wall. You feel the continuity of generaought to have access to just about tions of military officers that passed through all the information that was availthat hall; the setting ties you to them. I was speaking to a new generation about the able at a given time. There was need for information and knowledge in milia great deal of skepticism that tary operations when one of the officers challenged his notion that selfchallenged the argument. He asked if there synchronization based on much was not such a thing as ‘too much informamore information and decision tion on the battlefield?’ Another jumped in, authority at the tactical level arguing that our problem was ‘too much would lead to greater military knowledge and not enough understanding.’ I thought about how to reply and then effectiveness. Instead, the argupointed to the implications of what they were ment went, reliance on informasaying. To the first, I asked if he believed tion technology and network that there was a right and proper level of centric operations increased the ignorance on the battlefield that we should chances of greater confusion, protect by restricting information. To the mounting error, and reinforcing second, I asked if he thought the path to betfantasy and inaccuracies because ter understanding required knowing less. of information overload. If every‘‘I didn’t want to embarrass them, because they were pointing to a deeper issue at the one on the network was, in effect, heart of transformation. Both were groping communicating with everyone, for reasons not to move forward into the each individual faced a deluge of Information Age. Both were saying they information. The whole system were uncomfortable with the prospect. And would bog down simply because most important, both were willing to live a everyone would be trying to sort contradiction or even an absurdity rather through and respond to the mesthan confront the inevitable transformation looming before them. They were reflectsage flow. Some of the specific ing the organic military characteristic of danger came from the constant skepticism regarding change.’’ effort by an opponent to flood the network with misleading information. Cyber warriors and hackers, after all, were sure to spend much time and energy trying to introduce misinformation and confusion to information systems, hoping that the greater the networking, the greater the chances to mislead everyone on the network by inserting false information and data.

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Cebrowski acknowledged these dangers. But he would not accept the underlying assumption that constraining information and knowledge was the solution. Yes, there would be a constant contest between technical efforts to secure communications networks from outside intrusion and the machinations of hackers to break in. Yes, the people on the network had to have the training and experience that would counteract ‘‘information overload.’’ No, there was no such thing as perfect, comprehensive, totally accurate information flowing through a communications network. People were not robots; they could be scared, tired, and not very smart. They could make mistakes, judge things incorrectly, hesitate to make decisions, and sometimes make the wrong decisions in the heat of battle, regardless of how much knowledge and battlespace awareness they could obtain from information networks. But, Cebrowski contended, the goal was not, as some of the critics claimed he championed, to eliminate all the fog and friction of war. It was to reduce it differentially; to reduce it more for U.S. forces than their opponents could do for themselves. Doing that demanded constant technical improvements to keep ahead of the hackers and cyber warriors with ever better virus blockers, encryption, and other mechanisms. But the real security of networks lay in what critics claimed was a weakness—more open flows of information to the network members and the notion that more transactions were better. When the technical shields worked in conjunction with dedicated, well-trained, disciplined people —who worked from rules that counteracted efforts to confuse or mislead—the defenses were formidable. The more robust the networks were and the more numerous the transactions that coursed through them, the more defensible they were. ‘‘Indeed, increasing transactions work as internal checks and barriers to efforts to confuse and misinform, as long as feedback occurs. When it does, the humans in the network—and the machines that support them—learn. They learn to use the networks more safely, how to correct error and misinformation more rapidly. Learning, after all, is not simply a matter of conforming to the orders of higher authority. It involves continual assessment of those orders to assure that they conform to the existing situation, and, again, with feedback, this improves the chances that those with the authority to alter their orders will do so when the situation demands it or when the transactions identify other opportunities.’’ The second counter-argument was that while Cebrowski’s views might be valid for large-scale conventional war, they would not apply to the nontraditional battlefield, against nontraditional enemies. There, it was very difficult to discern the true hierarchy of goals of a potential opponent, the extent to which that opponent is willing to go in seeking them, and how he intends to do so. Deterrence did not work the same against would-be martyrs bent on blowing themselves up. And, above all, it was particularly difficult to separate the enemy from the innocent. So, however effective networked sensors and self-

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synchronization might be against tank armies in a desert, network centric warfare would be hard pressed to be very good against insurgencies, or in stabilization, restoration, and democratization. The solution to these kind of challenges had more to do with large numbers of boots on the ground than it did with high tech, force agility, and self-synchronization. Cebrowski would respond by arguing that network centric concepts ‘‘can do better than anything we have now or see on the horizon. In large part, this is because of the emphasis network centric warfare places on knowledge, agility, precision, and morality.’’ He acknowledged the difficulty of dealing with insurgencies and with suicide bombers, agreeing that ‘‘it is hard to deter someone bent on becoming a martyr by threats of punishment after he sacrifices himself.’’ But the key to preventing attacks by would-be martyrs lay less in threats of certain punishment and more in the ability to get him before he gets us. And that was fundamentally a function of information, speed, and precision. ‘‘Knowledge of the sources and instigators of instability, speed, and precision in eliminating them, and doing so without collateral damage to their physical or social surroundings is not easy to do. But force designed to wage network centric warfare will be better at trying to do it.’’

The Framework and 9/11 Cebrowski developed much of this framework prior to his appointment by Secretary Rumsfeld and prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He had recognized in the early 1990s that the U.S. military was going to face a very different world from what generations of planners had assumed. And through the 1990s he had become increasingly convinced that the U.S. military was not responding fast enough to the changes that were swirling through the world. The first Bush administration left office in the early 1990s acknowledging the collapse of the Soviet Union, but cautioning that the Pentagon should still plan forces to deal with a ‘‘reconstituted threat’’ on the same order of the Cold War challenge. The Clinton administrations emphasized ‘‘greater flexibility’’ in military planning and introduced the notion that U.S. forces ought to be sufficient to deal with ‘‘two nearly simultaneous major regional contingencies’’ which it soon defined as a war with a recovered Iraq and with North Korea. But, the structure, organization, and operational scheme these ‘‘new’’ scenarios pointed to turned out to be very much like their Cold War predecessors. Cebrowski had followed the 2000 presidential campaign more closely than any previously, but he confided that really did not mean much because he had never been interested in national politics. He had always tried to vote in presidential elections because he considered it a civic duty, but did not consider himself a Republican or Democrat and did not remember ever voting a straight party

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ticket one way or the other. But he had been struck by Bush’s Citadel speech during the campaign promising significant military changes and had followed Secretary Rumsfeld’s allusions to military transformation during his Senate confirmation hearings with growing interest. And he was intrigued by Rumsfeld’s ideas about shifting away from threat-based to capability-based planning. 22 ‘‘But,’’ he said, ‘‘I’d been slogging through bureaucratic inertia and reluctance to make significant changes for so long, I didn’t get my hopes up that transformation would accelerate under the new administration.’’ The administration was forced out of its inertia, however, in 2001. ‘‘Then the attacks took place,’’ said Cebrowski. ‘‘They really did change everything, across the board, politically, economically, maybe culturally.’’ Most observers predicted military transformation was dead following President Bush’s declaration of war on terrorism. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s statements on military transformation shortly after the terrorist attacks usually pointed to the need to balance transformational changes against the demands of waging the war. Many in the Pentagon thought this signaled the administration was going to retreat from its formal commitment to transform the military. ‘‘But that’s not what he had said to me. And a year later, about the time I was talking to him about the framework he’d asked for, he made it public. His annual report to the president and Congress, delayed by several months, announced an important shift. The issue, he wrote, was no longer how to balance the demands of winning the war on terrorism with the need to transform the military. It was now how to transform the military quickly enough to win the war on terrorism.’’ As a result, by the summer of 2002, Cebrowski had put together the skeleton of the intellectual framework and had laid it out to the secretary. Rumsfeld liked it. ‘‘All you have to do now,’’ the secretary said, ‘‘is help me convince the rest of the building to accept your framework and start using it.’’

CHAPTER

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TRANSFORMING THE U.S. MILITARY

As the Pentagon’s director of the Office of Force Transformation, Cebrowski had two basic assignments. One was to understand the impediments to getting the U.S. military into the Information Age. The other was to help the secretary of defense overcome them and accelerate military transformation. The first assignment was not that hard. He had already had a pretty good education in bureaucratic inertia from the three decades he had served in the military, and had a considerable number of personal ‘‘experiments’’ under his belt on how to overcome it. But, in a looking backward discussion in 2003, he said that upon taking the second assignment, ‘‘I was destined for a graduate course in advanced impedimentation. In the process, I gained a much deeper appreciation of how much easier it is in large institutions to retard change than to accelerate it.’’ Success in meeting the challenges, of course, depended on a good grasp of the potential pitfalls and pratfalls that are out there waiting to ambush innovators. But identifying the impediments to accelerating transformational change was one thing. Figuring out how to overcome them was another. And the real difficulty comes from the fact that the hurdles interlock. This chapter looks at the impedimenta to transformation and the counters to it. It addresses, if you will, the tactical level in the debate over transformation; that is, the immediate, most often voiced objections to transformation and the most immediate responses to them. Later, in Chapter 7, we will look at some of the underlying reasons for and deeper counters in the debate.

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The Impediments Cebrowski said he had found there are three impediments to faster, more significant changes in the U.S. military. They were the contentions that (1) ‘‘there’s no need to change the way we’re transforming now’’; (2) ‘‘the military is too big and busy to do it faster’’; and (3) ‘‘the Pentagon’s decision processes won’t let us do it differently even if we wanted to.’’ He was to find they were formidable, rooted in long-standing assumptions about military affairs generally, and in particular, with the military understanding of risk. But wrestling with them also reinforced his conviction that they are not as tough as most people claim, we can overcome them, and we can do so a lot faster than many think. It Ain’t Broke, So Don’t Try to Fix It One of the most important hurdles is the belief that anything more than the incremental change the U.S. military normally undergoes is unnecessary and dangerous. ‘‘Look,’’ the skeptics say, ‘‘it’s been nearly two generations since the U.S. military was beaten in Vietnam. That defeat triggered a great deal of introspection within the military in the 1970s and brought about some important changes. The U.S. military has been riding the crest of victories ever since. In other words, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.’ Besides, continuing changes are underway. The military is always changing, recognizes it has to, and has instituted ways of insuring it continues to do so.’’ Cebrowski believed the caution and ‘‘I’m alright, Jack’’ attitude that seep out of this view reflect traditional understandings of innovation in military affairs. They stem in part from the fact that mistakes in transforming militaries are life and death matters. Many historians and analysts are rightfully concerned that the Department of Defense, enamored with the promise of technology, will march with all military discipline and dispatch into failure, defeat, and catastrophic consequences. In some cases, they rest their cautions on carefully selected historical examples—the Maginot Line often pops up in their critique. But they generally reflect a widespread skepticism toward rapid change, a posture that, given the stakes involved, is not entirely unhealthy. The current United States superiority in traditional measures of military prowess, the absence of a peer competitor in such measures, and the string of military victories the U.S. military has put together over the last decade and a half all bolster a conservative view of the proper rate of transformation. Likewise, the skeptics can point to a number of changes over the last decade to support their contention that things are going just fine. For example, the improved precision and accuracy of U.S. weapons and better battlespace knowledge meant reduced U.S. casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. Better communications have diminished the difficulties of talking with each other and coordinating

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actions among the different military services. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq clearly demonstrated some of the problems the Navy once faced in operating with U.S. ground and ground-based air forces in Desert Storm are gone. A decade of working on cross-service operational techniques has paid off in much smoother and effective joint operations. Organizational change is also a fact. The Air Force’s Air Expeditionary Forces, adopted to rotate units through cycles of deployment and training, is a very different organizational approach to earlier Air Force operations. The Navy now routinely combines its air, surface, and submarine components in far more flexible organizations than it did a decade ago. The Army is shifting toward a unit rather than an individual replacement and rotation system. It is also moving away from the division and toward the smaller brigade as its central organization for operations on the way to becoming more mobile strategically and more agile operationally. These changes did not just happen. They stem from conscious and continuing efforts to transform the military. In short, the majority view in the Pentagon argues that since the glass is already half full, we should simply let nature take its course in the incremental, cautious manner that has paid off so handsomely in the last 10 years. We are militarily superior. By some important measures, our superiority is increasing. ‘‘So,’’ traditionalists ask, ‘‘what’s the problem?’’ The U.S. Military Is Too Big and Too Busy to Transform Faster Some of the reluctance to accelerate transformation comes from the sheer mass of what has to be changed and from the fact that the U.S. military is operating at a high tempo. This argument recognizes that some military transformations in the past have taken place relatively rapidly, and, indeed, those making the argument often point to the late 1920s and early 1930s as a time of rapid military transformation.1 Yet, in this view, those developments occurred when the militaries experimenting with them were much smaller than today’s American military and occurred against a different economic backdrop.2 The fact that the United States is waging a global war on terrorism compounds the difficulty of changing something as large as the U.S. military quickly. At least that is a corollary that often accompanies the ‘‘too big to change faster’’ argument. Here, the point is less that it cannot be done, and more that it should not be tried. In war, the argument goes, the key to success is to fight the way the force has trained—to do things the way doctrine and experience and training and discipline say they should be done. Experimentation with different ways of fighting is particularly dangerous in wartime. You do not want to reduce effectiveness by having some of the force trying to fight the way they trained and the rest of the force trying to figure out a different way of fighting.

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Pentagon Processes Will Not Let Us Transfer Faster, Even If We Wanted To The third argument against changing the way the U.S. military changes is that the processes the Defense Department uses to define, size, and structure U.S. military forces simply do not facilitate rapid, significant change. Those processes—identifying future military requirements, planning and programming, acquisition, experimenting, and training—all stem from an era when the imperative was to manage a military superpower relationship. Managed poorly, that relationship could have slipped into a civilization-ending, worldwide destructive conflict far more terminal than mankind had ever faced. The incrementalism, caution, reserve, and reliance on what we, rightfully, call ‘‘legacy’’ forces and capabilities were rational and functional then. Stability was the strategic watchword because we did not want the U.S.-Soviet tension to spin out of control. In a way, we wanted it to take a couple of decades to move a new weapon or operational concept from drawing board to the hands of an American on a warship, in an aircraft, or a tank. And for 40 years we honed the process to make sure it did. Those who argue that this makes it hard to accelerate transformation point to the fact that the system has been around so long, vested interests have grown in Congress, U.S. industry, and in the public in keeping the processes pretty much as they are. So, even if the Defense Department wanted to change them, it could not.

Some Counter Points You can challenge each of these arguments on its own merits. For example, the ‘‘ain’t broke’’ argument comes from a history of past successes. It is really a statement that says ‘‘the way we transformed in the past generated a good result, as evidenced by our military successes between Vietnam and Iraq.’’ That is a strong argument if future challenges are essentially the same as the ones we handled so well in the past. If future challenges, threats, and problems differ from those of the past, however, there is no guarantee that the transformation rates of the past will lead to success against them. And if they are significantly different, sticking to past transformation rates could be a recipe for disaster rather than one that will give us the military force we will need. Yes, Cebrowski agreed, the skeptics are right about the possibility and risk of making the wrong transformation choices. But for every example history generates of the dangers of accelerating the rate of transformation, it is equally able to provide counter examples of disasters tied to not accelerating. Likewise, he cautioned, you cannot take the ‘‘too big and too busy’’ argument too far. All the conflicts in which American forces participated share three characteristics. The first two are pretty obvious. During the conflict the military was

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bigger than it was before and after the conflict, and the operational tempo inside the military was markedly higher. Somewhat less obvious, the changes in organization, equipment, structure, and operational concepts were always greater over the course of the conflict than over the same period before or after the conflict. In other words, in the American experience the rate of transformation goes up when the military is the biggest and busiest. Yes, larger numbers of people build in some inhibitions to rapid transformation that are not there with smaller numbers. Implementing big changes across the entire military, its service contractors, and the companies that make their living from building and selling the equipment, facilities, and other materiel to the U.S. military takes time, good planning, and good reasons. But size and operational tempo do not mean you cannot or should not accelerate the rate of transformation. History, at least, points to the opposite conclusion: if you want to see periods when transformation is easiest and fastest, look for when the military is big and busy. ‘‘And,’’ he continued ‘‘you shouldn’t bet on the idea that the Pentagon’s decision process will keep transformation slow. Or, more to the point, you shouldn’t assume that the current process that, arguably, does reinforce an incremental rate of change will be around much longer.’’ Yes, there are a lot of vested interests inside and beyond the Pentagon that benefit from the current process. But there were many vested interests that opposed the current system when McNamara put it in place in the early 1960s. Despite the opposition and the tensions it generated, what was then a revolutionary new decision process was up and running within a year. Now, when the world that spawned the Pentagon decision system has changed so dramatically, why would anyone assume the old process will remain? Neither Congress nor the defense contractor community is monolithically against a faster rate of military transformation. Indeed, Republican Senator Dan Coates and Democratic Senator Joe Liberman were instrumental in getting the joint experimentation effort started in the mid-1990s. The ‘‘Defense Reform’’ movement that pushed for faster changes in the 1980s sprang from Capital Hill with the support of Congressman Newt Gingrich and Senator Gary Hart, and today politically oriented think tanks like the Progressive Policy Institute argue consistently for accelerating the rate of transformation. Still, these counter-arguments tend to be pedantic. By themselves, they are not going to lead to faster transformation, nor should they. What will, and should, is a compelling argument for accelerating U.S. military transformation.

The Case for Acceleration Cebrowski believed the case for acceleration rests on three arguments: (a) that the United States has much to gain from it, (b) that it has much to lose if it does not accelerate the pace of its military transformation, and (c) that it is possible to accelerate the transformational process and push to the other side of the

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American revolution in military affairs with fairly modest efforts. He considered himself the point man for giving that argument an intellectual foundation and compelling depth. What America gains from accelerating its military transformation and loses by not accelerating, he argued, are different sides of the same military superiority coin. Obviously, it is good to have military superiority and not as good not to have it. Yet, of itself, military superiority has no inherent value. Its value comes from how it provides or protects other things that are of direct value—things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and in how not having military superiority can diminish or threaten those more valuable conditions. Military superiority is not sufficient to secure things of intrinsic value. But, it is very useful and maybe necessary in preventing others from removing or destroying them—particularly when those who may seek to do so are amenable to military power or military power can neutralize, remove, or protect against the means through which they may try to do it. The right kind of military superiority, then, can increase the probability of obtaining things of intrinsic value and hanging on to them. Cebrowski was convinced that having the ‘‘right’’ kind of military superiority was the central goal of U.S. military transformation. He always contended that those who pushed for faster transformation believed the character of today’s superiority was ‘‘not right’’ because it had been designed and maintained for a political and military context that no longer exists. ‘‘Unless the military transforms faster,’’ he continually iterated, ‘‘it will be increasingly less able to secure intrinsic values for Americans or for people everywhere.’’ Let us look at this contention closely because it is at the core of the debate over how fast we should transform the U.S. military. Why did he and the others who argue for faster transformation say the current force does not ‘‘fit’’? It is because the world no longer justifies its design. When the central task was to deter a heavy ground force attack from the east into central Europe, or from the Soviet Union southward to the Persian Gulf, or from North Korea toward Seoul, having a heavy forward military presence made sense. It gave credibility to those we wanted to deter and utility to those we wanted to protect. So, it effectively achieved its design purpose. That force became the cornerstone of artful and carefully crafted alliances and bilateral structures and it secured intrinsic values for our allies and for us. Cebrowski believed that in today’s geopolitical context, that military design lacks the credibility and effectiveness it once had. The forward-basing dependent, heavy ground and relatively short-range tactical air forces that typify American forces lack relevance to what we and our friends and allies see as threats. Today there is one important exception, and one additional potential exception, to this generalization. The important exception is Korea, where geography and demography combine to still require a protective structure built on forward stationed

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heavy ground power. The potential exception is Taiwan, where politics and passions could combine to require a protective structure built on forward stationed heavy ground power. But it is hard to rationalize the continued stationing of forward deployed heavy U.S. ground power and short-ranged tactical air power in Europe or in the Middle East because of a threat that makes it credible. Because it lacks credibility, it stirs suspicions. It is important to note what this argument does not say. It does not say that there is a geographic line somewhere beyond which the United States will not use military force. It does not say that the United States should immediately withdraw its forces from abroad. And it does not say that there never will be a need for the current design of our forces. But it highlights the differences recent force planning and programming have been incorporating into the future design of U.S. forces. Those plans and programs make it clear that the United States intends to move toward forces that are more expeditionary, strategically mobile, and agile in design. They make explicit that we will build forces that are less dependent on forward basing and more able to maneuver directly from sea basing or over greater distances to where they will fight. The United States is doing this because the Defense Department increasingly recognizes today’s forces do not fit the world as it anticipates it to be over the next 10 years and beyond. Are we doing this because we seek greater ‘‘unilateralism’’—because we wish to be more independent in our use of military force and less ‘‘fettered’’ by the interests and desires of other nations? Cebrowski was convinced the answer was no. ‘‘It is not because we have rejected the need for security collaboration or the benefit of military interdependency with other nations. It is quite the opposite. We recognize the globalizing world makes security collaboration more important. We are moving toward a military that facilitates collaboration because it is more in line with the future than with the past.’’ He argued that the U.S. need for security collaboration comes from the kind of threats that were emerging from and are likely to continue to spin out of globalization. Those threats to intrinsic values were no longer as unambiguous as they once were, nor do they stem as directly from the military power of specific nation states. This is the reason for the Pentagon’s shift from ‘‘threat-based’’ to ‘‘capability-based’’ force planning. As long as the potential opponent was identifiable—as was assumed for most of the last half century—U.S. force planning could focus on designing a military to deal with the particular strengths and weaknesses of that opponent. But that kind of template was no longer available; the United States faced a much greater ambiguity regarding from whom the threats would come. ‘‘We know where some dangers come from and who will generate them,’’ he would say. ‘‘Nations differ in terms of their capabilities to inflict damage and the extent to which they are, and are likely to remain, friendly. We will have to maintain the military capability to deal with those that we believe are unfriendly

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with the capability to do significant harm to what we value and want to secure. But the most likely threats will come from less distinguishable sources, from groupings that cut across national boundaries and loyalties. They will spin out of the complex dynamics we call the third stage of globalization.’’

Globalization Cebrowski related that through the 1990s he had a growing appreciation of how the global transition into the Information Age changes the notion of national security and how those changes altered the role the U.S. military plays in national security. ‘‘While history and experience leave indelible blueprints on how we design our forces,’’ he would say, ‘‘they do not provide a sufficient or even a very good blueprint for what we need to build.’’ Yet, it was the future the Pentagon had to design against, and he was convinced that despite all the ambiguity surrounding the future, one grand challenge was already clear. It was the need for a military that could recognize and better cope with the interdependencies of what he called Globalization III. He defined ‘‘Globalization III’’ as the third stage of the worldwide integrative process that began with the surge of European exploration and mercantilism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The growth of a truly global economy in the Industrial Age, particularly in the twentieth century, marked the second stage of globalization. Globalization III, he explained, was a product of the Information Age, in which information technology was knitting interactions throughout the world into ever denser networks. Information networks were not the only drivers. Travel, trade, the growth of multinational business organizations—all those phenomena that got people to believe that the world really was getting smaller—were behind it, too. But the density of information networks, which largely enabled the global economic, social, political, and military interactions, was what distinguished the new phase of the complex, fuzzy force we know as globalization. Cebrowski’s interest in it focused on what it meant for the emerging American understanding of national security. To him, the growing global density of information networks were of most importance to national security because this could communicate and amplify the effects of a local shock throughout the world’s economy, international structure, and social milieu. Globalization III was cutting through the social, political, secular, and cultural compartments that had once conditioned the human condition. This certainly was not all bad. It was opening barriers that had once confined an individual’s knowledge, understanding, and freedom. But the process was changing political, social, economic, and cultural systems, offering individuals sights, and sounds, and ideas that were new, disrobing them and exposing them to the unfamiliar, largely whether they wanted it or not. Freud had argued once that the price of civilization was discontent. It was not clear that

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Globalization III offered proof of his thesis. But it was certainly stirring new anxieties throughout the world. Tom Barnett, a professor at the Naval War College, had worked on a way of articulating this conceptual stew. He came up with a metaphor that envisions a world divided into two broad globalization competitors, locked together in a great struggle over the direction of the emerging world system. Barnett called some of the competitors members of an ‘‘integrating core’’ and argued that much of the technology that drives globalization emanated from them. Those who were part of the ‘‘core’’ were globalization’s primary economic beneficiaries. Those who were not part of the ‘‘core’’ were members of what he termed the ‘‘nonintegrating gap.’’ Gap members were slipping farther behind in terms of wealth and power and, therefore, they experienced globalization in terms of frustration, anxiety, and growing hatred. And the technology that accounted for the success of the ‘‘core’’ was making their hatred more lethal.3 Cebrowski found Barnett’s description compelling, and in the course of many discussions with him grafted it into his own views.4 There were, Cebrowski and Barnett believed, geographical dimensions to the core and gap (see Figure 3.1). The core, they argued, aligns roughly with what we once referred to as the relatively rich, ‘‘advanced,’’ and powerful nations with strong and growing civil societies; the gap lines up with the relatively poor, ‘‘underdeveloped,’’ and decivilizing societies. The world is not bifurcating into two economic and political systems, as we had thought about and explained as the international bipolar system of the Cold War. The core and gap were too interconnected to do so. Shocks in one could surge through the world; they would affect the populations in both the core and the gap. Wall Street brokers affect Hutu gardening in Rwanda; the SARs virus from Kuangchou creates an epidemic in Ontario. The core cannot isolate the gap and the gap cannot withdraw from the core. Together they will direct the course of globalization toward either expanding the core or pulling the core into the gap. Together they would ultimately define the Information Age as one of global enlightenment or global chaos. Cebrowski came to believe and ultimately push another of Barnett’s corollary arguments, namely, that the role of the United States in this was to help integrate the gap into the core in ways that add to the core’s functioning and which extend the benefits of globalization enjoyed by the core into the gap. The U.S. international role now includes the imperatives to mitigate the gap’s suffering, enable its economic growth, deter its anger, contain its aggression, and excise those groups rooted in the gap who would strike out against the core. We do not have to and perhaps could not do this by ourselves. We will have to construct a new cooperative, collaborative framework with other members of the core to do it. It cannot be done through military conquest alone because the existing interaction between the core and the gap is such that military conquest can hurt the

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Figure 3.1 Globalization III: The Functioning Core and Dysfunctional Gap (Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map) conquerors as much as it would the conquered and could push the world toward chaos. But military power, used correctly, will be an essential component of beneficial integration. Still in the early stages of Globalization III, the rate of change is high, the tensions change creates are increasing, and one of the dangerous complexities of globalization is particularly acute. ‘‘As modern globalization integrates the connections, loyalties, actions, and passions of the groups and individuals,’’ Cebrowski argued, ‘‘it pushes the power to affect and disrupt higher levels of human interaction to smaller social entities.’’ The terrorists who flew the aircraft into the New York World Trade Center demonstrated the phenomenon. In that incident, the suicide of a few individuals reverberated through the international system. The harm that terrorist act did to the United States transcended the tragic deaths of the immediate victims because it demonstrated we were vulnerable to the hatreds globalization generates and because it put in train new challenges to the intrinsic values of life, liberty, and our pursuit of happiness. Cebrowski did not just mean the inconvenience of airport security checks, new governmental

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subsidies to keep U.S. airlines in business, or the other economic repercussions. He included the erosion of civil liberties, individual privacy, and constitutional rights that he believed the new awareness of vulnerability could generate. The fundamental national security problem Cebrowski saw was that the design, training, and character of the U.S. military were not well suited to meeting these challenges. It was not as effective as it had to be in identifying them, removing them, and in building the international collaboration the world and we needed to prevent them. The national security challenge posed by Globalization III was the increasing rate at which the challenges to U.S. national security were changing and the inability of the U.S. military to change fast enough to keep up. ‘‘Because,’’ he surmised, ‘‘that’s how we had designed it. Here’s why I say this. The last century of the Industrial Age played out under the fundamental assumption that the final arbiter of differences among nations was industrially based and distinguished military force. For the last half of that century a sense of irreconcilable bifurcation colored that assumption. We believed the world was engaged in a great zero-sum game between two economic and political systems in which there were only two potential outcomes; either a win for one and a loss for the other, or, because of the weapons that could be involved, a terminal loss for both. Managing the game—preventing it from ultimately moving to an outcome—was paramount.’’ That set the character of our military forces. They would remain the final arbiter of differences, but they also took on the implications of the practical and immediate requirement to prevent either potential outcome in a military conflict with the Soviet Union from occurring. We built them to stabilize the situation. That meant, he argued, we wanted them to avoid rapid change. The fact that our forces changed incrementally and relatively slowly was an essential component of strategic stability. The central challenges that would require military force, he continued, have changed. ‘‘It’s not just that they are changing faster. It’s that they have already changed so fast that it is clear that the character of our military forces are out of step with what we need. We face people who see us as their implacable enemy and act accordingly. They are not concerned with strategic stability and, in some cases, actively seek and are willing to sacrifice themselves to bring about an Armageddon. Now, the strategic reason for incremental change is gone, but we are left with a military force inherently inclined to incremental, slow change.’’

Military Competence and Relevance Cebrowski believed that the underlying problem facing the U.S. military was a discrepancy between its vastly superior competence in traditional warfare and the declining relevance of that kind of competency. The United States had perfected a military for an age that was rapidly receding into history. By the time he

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resigned in the spring of 2005 to fight his last battle with cancer, he believed a different view was taking hold and that the U.S. military leadership was beginning to institutionalize new assumptions into the design and character of the forces. It was beginning to recognize that the U.S. military role extended from winning military battles into winning the political victory for which it fights battles. The leadership was starting to see U.S. military overseas presence differently, no longer viewing it primarily as a means of deterring undesired operations by another nation’s traditional military forces, but more as a platform to move preemptively against non-national groups for whom traditional deterrence has little meaning. U.S. military leaders were, he argued, starting to accept nation building as a legitimate U.S. military role. But, to Cebrowski, the operative word was ‘‘beginning.’’ The recognition had come late and it had come slowly. The shift in underlying assumptions was all to the good, but it remained fragmented and lacked a conceptual coherency. Most disturbing of all, the rate of the shift and the changes it entailed continued to lag behind the rate at which the underlying dynamics were driving the world. He used the graphic in Figure 3.2 to help him explain the disjuncture he saw between U.S. military competency and its relevance to the challenges the United States faced. The figure illustrates what is happening to the U.S. military during the transition from the Industrial to the Information Age. It simplifies greatly the actual complexities but highlights the interaction between military technology— a key component of military competency—and the social/political context in which military technology is emerging. By social/political context, he meant the processes by which individuals, groups, and nations interact with each other, and the character of the interactions. Technology and the social/political context were, he argued, dynamically interactive. They were both changing,

Figure 3.2 Military Transition of Our Time

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driven in large part by their interaction. But their rates of change are not always consistent. He used the transition from what he called Globalization II to Globalization III to summarize social changes and portrayed the transition with the horizontal arrow. Globalization II was his shorthand for the course of industrialization from roughly the eighteenth through most of the twentieth century. The last half of the twentieth century had been the most influential on the character of the U.S. military, but many of the assumptions on which it rested were rooted in the Industrial Age. The 200-plus years of Globalization II had been a period of tremendous change. World population increased by a factor of 6, from about 760 million in 1750 to over 6 billion in the last decade of the twentieth century.5 By the end of the twentieth century there were more people alive than had ever lived. Political change, revolutions, and horrific wars marked the Industrial Age, and while not all nations became industrial powers, industrialization increasingly influenced all nations and touched everybody. By the end of the twentieth century, most of the world’s 6.1 billion people were members of a global economy. Military power, largely a function of an industrial productive base, had the capacity, literally, to destroy the world, and industrialized nations ran things in the international system. Near the end of the twentieth century, Cebrowski argued, the third stage of globalization began as electronic communications began to condition the interactions among nations, groups, and individuals throughout the world.6 The global economy tightened as financial transactions began to travel at the speed of light. Mass media expanded dramatically, and information technology emerged as a new source of power and wealth. The United States, Europe, Japan, and much of the rest of the world found itself deeply into Globalization III. The vertical black arrow indicates the transition toward information technology as the primary source of military prowess and competency. It is currently underway in many militaries and as they combine information technology with structure, organization, and operational behavior, their ability to use force efficiently increases. They become faster, more precise, and more accurate in applying violence. The correlation of increased information technology and military competency is not direct since military competency stems from much more than just technology. But most of the militaries that have consciously sought to incorporate information technology into their structure, organization, and operations rank high on just about anyone’s list of competent military forces. The militaries that have not generally end up near the bottom. Today the United States, arguably, occupies the highest position on the vertical arrow and has, again arguably, the most competent military in the world. We hold that position because decades ago we decided, largely in a series of separate decisions across the military services, to make the investments and adjustments needed to incorporate information technology on a relatively large scale into U.S. military forces.

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Despite its position at the top, there are still improvements that the United States can make. ‘‘What we did not do,’’ Cebrowski argued, ‘‘was undertake our rise on the vertical vector within the context of what was happening on the horizontal vector. We—and we were not alone in this—continued to build and hone our military on the assumption that globalization was not changing the social/political context as rapidly as it was. Our force planning template remained lodged in Industrial Age assumptions and tied to images of a confrontation with another military superpower. The result was that as our military competency rose in the last decades of the twentieth century, the relevance of our military capability did not keep up with the changes in the world. We were not entirely ignorant nor as myopic as this sounds, but it took the shock of 9/11 and the subsequent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq for us to get serious about bringing our military forces more closely aligned to the changes in the social/ political context, that is, to the changes that define military relevance. Instead of following the ‘ideal’ developmental path indicated by the diagonal arrow, our actual course has been along the curve, and we now find ourselves with a highly efficient military with gaps in its effectiveness because it has not remained entirely relevant to the rapidly changing world in which it must operate.’’ He continued, arguing that the arc of the thick arrow portrayed a rough trace of the Defense Department’s transformation decisions. ‘‘When I stood up the Office of Force Transformation, ‘traditional’ warfare against nation states transfixed the Pentagon,’’ he remarked. ‘‘Many of us who had worked with transformational concepts did not believe the United States should design its military to fight traditional warfare in the traditional way, for we believed military competency was deeply dependent on adopting and implementing network centric concepts of warfare. But we focused on the vertical arrow and concentrated on how to enhance our battle awareness relative to a traditional military opposition, how best to engage opposing military forces, how to counter their strengths and take advantage of their weaknesses. As we understood the full import of the 9/11 event, however, our emphasis on relevancy rose.’’ Cebrowski thought that most of the Pentagon by 2005 accepted the central implication of his overview; that the United States needed a new basis for national security planning, and that it had to transform the military into an instrument better able to deal with the new world. What was not yet agreed was how fast to do it. He was convinced the real debate over U.S. military transformation had shifted to whether the rate of changes had to accelerate. He saw himself as a strong advocate for faster transformation. His case for acceleration stemmed from his view of globalization. The world, he believed, was not benign. The globalization that generated the new threats also altered how long the world and we have to cope with them. It translates and amplifies the effects of attacks, disruptions, challenges, and tragedies globally that once might have been localized, ignored, and insignificant. It does so not

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only because it alters the effects of distance, but also because it alters the effects of time. It closely couples events, globally. And as globalization proceeds all that it does is most likely to accelerate. It cannot, of course, keep generating more rapid change forever. But from today’s perspective it is hard to come up with explanations of why the rate of change is going to slow and when the slowdowns will begin. The things that various studies suggest could knock the legs out of accelerating change revolve around true cataclysms: asteroid strikes, global nuclear war, superpandemics, global warming, and events of that kind of magnitude. You cannot dismiss any of these; some of them have happened in the past. But it seems pretty clear that U.S. planners ought not to base their plans on the assumption that something will reverse globalization and the increasing rate of changes it generates, but on the bet that it will continue and continue to accelerate the rate at which its effects expand through the world. That includes the rates at which the potential power of the Information Age expands to those who actively seek to attack us and to those who simply wish to hedge against our military superiority. Cebrowski, was convinced that unless we accelerate military transformation, the utility of U.S. military will become increasingly less effective in securing our values and achieving our national goals.

The Risks of Not Accelerating The United States leads in understanding the military implications of the Information Age. It has been the first to systematically begin to introduce Information Age capabilities to its military forces and can leverage the leads it has. So, what is the risk, if any, in not accelerating—in not trying to extend and expand the significant lead we already have? The risk is being left behind by the rest of the world. To argue the ‘‘rest of the world’’ could leave the United States behind in military capabilities had a ring of incredulity that usually rolled eyeballs when Cebrowski would say it in his presentations. He had trouble himself really believing it, but he was trying to make a point of what it meant to shift from one age to another. The notion of being left behind was not exactly new because it had been part of the Cold War context for half a century. But a decade after that context vanished the notions of arms races, military competition, and relative military capabilities had pretty much become wisps of intellectual smoke. While official discourse respected the diplomatic utility of not too blatantly proclaiming U.S. military untouchable ascendancy, it had become the working proposition inside the Pentagon. The assumption behind ‘‘capabilities-based planning’’ was essentially that if you thought about the kinds of capabilities opponents might try to develop vis-a`-vis the U.S. military, and considered what those opponents would see as U.S. vulnerabilities, you would assure American military superiority. A

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prudent approach, to be sure, but founded on the assumption that the United States could always deal with anything if it saw it coming because it was so far ahead of everybody else. Cebrowski saw that view as hubris based on Industrial Age presumptions that it took a lot of time to overcome military leads by the United States and the only potential opponents that might try would be other nation states (because only that level of institution could amass and manage the ability to do so). What he believed distinguished the new age is its global nature, the new sources of military power it was establishing, and the rate at which the sources could be obtained and developed. In the past, transitions from one age to another had been highly diverse and local. Europe entered the Industrial Age at least a century before Asia or Africa, and only parts of Europe reaped the benefits of industrialization for nearly as long. The uneven transition into what was then the nascent new age allowed only some national militaries dramatically greater military power and political influence for centuries. In contrast, he believed, the transition to the Information Age was truly global, nearly simultaneous, and open virtually to any nation or group that decides to make the transition. This was a paradigm shift. It undermined the pretension that the U.S. current military ascendancy was, if not eternal, certainly very long lasting. ‘‘We need to recognize that those who wish to compete,’’ Cebrowski argued, ‘‘no longer face the same obstacles that once separated the major military powers from the lesser ones. Nor do they have to follow the same course as that pioneered by the United States. Falling barriers to competitive entry facilitate new technological threats to U.S. supremacy. Potential competitors can get highly capable, low cost information technology.

Cebrowski believed the insurgency in Iraq was a prime example of how the Information Age empowered individuals and groups that lacked the wealth, numbers, training, and organization that once were prerequisites for military power to gain it. He was fascinated by how quickly insurgents adapted information technology, from garage-door openers, to global positioning, to mass media, to their operations. And he found the speed of insurgent organizational mutation toward network centric operations as very impressive. To him, the real test of the U.S. military in the conflict with Iraq was not in the major combat operations during the U.S. invasion and rapid seizure of Baghdad, but in the aftermath. He believed strongly that the general policy to destroy the Saddam regime was correct, but became increasingly critical in private of the administration’s conduct of the post-major combat activities. In his view, they demonstrated the need to move more rapidly toward the more agile, network operational force he promoted. But the big lesson, he thought, was the danger of assuming the U.S. military lead was going to exist for a long period. He had no doubt that U.S. military strength was going to long remain superior so far as Industrial Age metrics were concerned. The problem was those strengths were rapidly becoming irrelevant.

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With such technology, key operational domains such as space, the seas, and cyperspace are open to them as competitors.’’ Universal access to the new sources of military power does not mean everyone will seek to enter the competition. Just because military competition has been around for millennia does not mean it will necessarily continue. But just because we may wish military competition would end, does not mean it will. And if the transition into the Information Age was going to be as tumultuous as the last several years suggested, Cebrowski forecast, interest in entering Information Age military competition with the United States was bound to increase. Cebrowski believed stakes of the competition were not as high as they had been when, during the Cold War, the numbers of thermonuclear weapons available for use had at least an even chance of exterminating most life on earth. He was sure most of those weapons, the number of which had gone down, had even less probability of being used than they had during the Cold War. But the stakes of military competition remained vital to American life. And the likelihood that someone would seek to challenge those vital stakes was higher than it had been for decades. The major powers who sought to never have to use them no longer monopolized weapons of mass destruction. So, Cebrowski said, ‘‘We can no longer rest on the concepts of deterrence that made it unlikely that an opponent would use them against us. While it is hard now to envision how this would trigger the civilization-ending nuclear exchange—the specter that girded deterrence in the past—it is also clear that as globalization expands, their use against us— or, for that matter, against anyone—would trigger economic and political repercussions throughout the world, none of which would be beneficial to the United States.’’ Cebrowski concluded that the case against acceleration could rest on only two arguments: that accelerating transformation would cost more than it was worth and that going faster would increase the chances that, in accelerating, we would stumble down the wrong path. ‘‘But,’’ he would point out, ‘‘both those possibilities depended on how we go about accelerating the rate of U.S. military transformation.’’

How to Accelerate the U.S. Military Transformation Physics and politics set the parameters of transformation. Of the two, he believed that politics was likely to be the most limiting as to how much change the U.S. military can undergo between now and 2010, for example. It was not that the U.S. political structure will prevent force transformation so much as it will shape its direction in accordance with a national consensus. That, to him, was the genius of the American system—it works against the rapid, radical changes any single group seeks to impose upon the body politic. So, one key to

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transformation, he proposed, is to align the desired changes with an existing consensus about change. ‘‘Those of us who push for change need to understand what most people already see as tidal surges in human and military affairs and fit what we seek with those perceptions. In many cases the perceptions are probably accurate projections of what will occur. Much of what will occur in the future flows from what people think will occur and the actions they take on those assumptions. A sense of what is inevitable carries a self-fulfilling dynamic that increases the chances of the assumption actually occurring.’’ But a sense of the inevitable was not the same thing as a commitment, blueprint, or timetable to bring it about. That required two additional steps: sifting from widely held assumptions about what was ‘‘inevitable’’ those that would most accelerate U.S. military transformation and then figuring out how to bring them about faster, smoother, and with lower costs. That, according to Cebrowski, was the real challenge facing those who want to shape the future—‘‘how to make a virtue out of what people saw as inevitable.’’ There are two connotations of that phrase. One has the flavor of opportunism: attach whatever you want to what people see as inevitable and ride to success. That was part of what Cebrowski had in mind. Get people to believe transformation was inevitable and the Department of Defense would increase dramatically the chances of actually bringing it about. But there was another dimension to his understanding that flowed from a deeper source, his view of the moral purpose of transformation. Here the connotation of making a virtue out of the inevitable was to shape and direct what was inevitable to a moral goal. This understanding had precedent in his mind and surfaced in his discussions of what he saw as inevitable developments.

What Is Inevitable? He believed, for example, that everyone in the national security community saw it as inevitable that the U.S. disposition of its forces overseas was going to change; that the U.S. overseas basing system was going to shift away from what had been in place since World War II ended toward something else, with different base locations, capabilities, and purposes. He also listed the assumptions that the speed at which forces could and would move, that the technology they would employ, and that their general structure and organization were subject to inevitable change. He believed these common assumptions set the parameters within which the actual character of future U.S. military forces was going to emerge. He recognized that there was less agreement now on how the president should use the U.S. military, but here, too, he thought a consensus was emerging and that consensus marked a tremendous change from twentieth century assumptions. So, the future of U.S. military transformation had to fit within these ‘‘inevitabilities.’’ It had to adjust to the notion that these things were inevitable. But, it

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also had to affect the inevitable developments in ways that would lead to moral outcomes. He had some ideas on how to do that. He believed one of these inevitabilities was a global consensus on the high value and utility of precision in the use of force and for the weapons systems that provide it. He believed the United States led the rest of the world and pointed to U.S. procurement and operational patterns as evidence. Over the last three years, service inventories of precision-guided weapons have risen sharply. Their use on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq in both absolute numbers and their percentages of all the munitions used rose dramatically, also. The Desert Storm standard of ‘‘smart bombs’’ accounting for about 7 percent of all air-dropped munitions was gone. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, a decade later, that portion had grown to over 60 percent. As in other improvements, the drive for greater military effectiveness accounts for the pattern. Precision in the use of military violence generates faster, less risky combat results for the force employing it. And it has political payoffs. Lower collateral damage is one; a new kind of awe of American military prowess is another. To Cebrowski, the increasing value of precision force had moral value because it promised to move away from a willingness to use violence indiscriminately. He recognized his belief that there was a growing global valuation of precision force flew in the face of the belief that terrorists were bent on obtaining weapons of mass destruction. But he suggested that the war on terrorism in which the United States was involved was at root an epic battle over ideas, that it would be won or lost on moral issues, and that, as such, indiscriminate use of violence was a losing strategy. Shifts in the Global Presence of U.S. Military Forces Another one of the inevitabilities, he said, was that the U.S. overseas basing structure was going to change. The locations of U.S. military forces were going to be significantly different. The numbers of U.S. military personnel stationed overseas had dropped dramatically in the 1990s, from about half a million in 1990 to about 230,000 by 2002. The return of forces stationed in Europe to the United States and the overall reduction of the numbers of active duty personnel during that decade accounted for most of the reductions. The portion of the total number of U.S. military personnel stationed overseas, however, remained fairly steady at about 22 percent. The locations of U.S. overseas bases were also remarkably stable. Much of the U.S. overseas basing structure as it exists today was born in World War II and matured during the Cold War. At the end of WWII the United States had established the most extensive global basing structure in history, for the most part tracing the routes U.S. forces and their supply lines had taken during the war. After the war, the basing structure congealed around the demands of

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containment, shrinking as new transportation technology allowed longer flights and less reliance on intermediary basing. The Vietnam conflict modified the pattern somewhat, developing a robust, new U.S. presence in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and early 1970s. Outside that period, however, the location of the greatest U.S. military presence overseas has been essentially where U.S. forces ended up at the end of WWII. Cebrowski felt it was important to recognize the basing structure was going to change. He believed the United States would dismantle many of the main operating bases that had been there for decades and construct a new basing structure from among four general options. One was to maintain forward garrisons in proximity to the areas where armed conflict was relatively likely. The second was to keep a significantly larger portion of forces in the United States, which would deploy to areas of concern when needed. The third was to shift to what the Defense Department talks more openly about today and calls ‘‘sea basing.’’ The fourth was to establish more contingency basing arrangements. The Growth of Contingency Basing This latter option gained prominence after 9/11 as the United States went after the Al Qaeda presence and training centers in Afghanistan. More contingency basing was discussed in the Clinton administration. But planning for Afghanistan and Iraq in the George W. Bush administration moved it to the front burner and to the decision to much more actively seek additional contingency basing arrangements—called ‘‘forward operating sites’’ and ‘‘cooperative security locations’’—throughout the world. The effort to establish them was particularly salient in eastern Europe, and in the arc of new states that emerged south of Russia as the old Soviet Union fragmented. The new basing arrangements did not involve permanently stationed forces or family support structures. A limited number of military personnel maintain the forward operating sites; contractors, either from the United States or from the nations in which they were established, take care of many of the ‘‘cooperative security locations.’’ The main purpose of both kinds of contingency bases is to facilitate the rapid deployment of U.S. forces throughout the world.7 Overseas Garrisons Despite the reduction of U.S. basing in Germany and Japan, Cebrowski believed the United States should continue to garrison some U.S. forces forward; that is, station them outside the United States in areas built or modified to support them indefinitely. The United States has reduced the number of forces it garrisoned in Europe significantly over the last decade. At the beginning of the 1990s it had about 300,000 military personnel there. As of 2006 that number

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was roughly 75,000 and more reductions are coming. The numbers of military personnel stationed in Japan and Korea have declined also and there, too, additional reductions are likely. There are two relatively new factors that alter the traditional understanding of why the United States stationed forces abroad. The first, and most obvious, was the collapse of the Cold War understanding of deterrence that had been the bedrock reason for the garrison of U.S. forces abroad. That rationale vanished when the Soviet Union vanished, so far as Europe is concerned. Deterrence remains the key reason to station U.S. forces in Korea because of the proximity and unpredictability of North Korea, and to some extent regarding the U.S. forces in Japan because of the ambiguity of Chinese military strength and intentions. There were some subsidiary reasons the United States and its allies saw value in having U.S. forces stationed in Europe, Korea, and Japan. All the parties derived different economic benefits from the arrangements and the web of formal and informal obligations that accompanied the U.S. bases had strategic benefits. Put baldly, it gave the United States some voice and influence in the foreign policies of its allies, and its allies some voice and influence on U.S. foreign policy and, in particular, in U.S. decisions on how it might want to use and move the forces it had garrisoned on their territory. Cerbrowski believed that the traditional reasons for stationing U.S. forces abroad were eroding quickly. He argued privately that it was more the ambiguity and confusion that accompanied the global shift to a new age, rather than any clear strategic agreement between the United States and its allies that accounted for the continued presence of the U.S. military garrisons abroad. The other factor affecting the future of overseas garrisons is the future of the Persian Gulf area and greater Middle East. Through the George W. Bush administrations, discussion of forward garrisons focused on whether the United States should try to establish them in or near Iraq. The potential need for this emerged largely from the U.S. occupation of Iraq, for by 2005 it was clear that the stabilization and democratization of Iraq was not going to occur quickly and the demand to reduce U.S. presence in Iraq was growing. But there was also a general recognition that U.S. forces would probably have to remain able to intervene in Iraq for an indefinite period. Robust basing facilities had been built in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain before and during the conflict, and much of the discussion over the future of basing in the Persian Gulf area revolved around the extent to which the facilities there could become a new locus of more-or-less permanent U.S. basing. The prospect of continued tensions with Iran over its involvement in Iraq and its nuclear developments were an increasingly important aspect of the question of U.S. garrisons in the area. So, too, was the increasing realization that U.S. force presence had ambivalent affects in the conflict with radical Islamic movements and on the political stability in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

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Regardless of how the question of garrisoning U.S. forces in the Middle East came out, Cebrowski believed it was important to see overseas garrisons not as only a component of a regional strategy for where they were located, but also as a node in a global basing system. ‘‘They should be seen as nodes or hubs in a worldwide system of moving U.S. military forces anywhere we need them to go,’’ he argued. ‘‘It’s not a new idea. In Desert Storm, many of the U.S. forces did not come directly from the United States but from those garrisoned in Europe. We used facilities in Europe essentially as transit depots for points east. Likewise, both Japan and the United States see U.S. forces garrisoned there not for the direct defense of Japan, but for operations elsewhere in Asia. So the idea of deployment from strategic distances is not new.’’ The problem was the superstructure of assumptions. Overseas bases were seen as tied to specific areas, not as hubs in a wider transformation system. The U.S. command structure was built around and emphasized the roles of regional commanders who were inclined to think exclusively in terms of their geographic areas of responsibility and to hang on to the forces assigned to them. And the forces normally stationed at the garrisons or ‘‘global forts, castles, and bastions,’’ as Cebrowski referred to them, were oriented toward and designed for ‘‘local forays,’’ not deployments across strategic distances. Basing in the United States U.S. forces returning from the garrisons abroad were returning to bases in the United States, and, in effect, increasing the need for expeditionary military capabilities. In all the wars it has fought since the nineteenth century, the United States demonstrated a facility at expeditionary warfare—moving military forces from the United States and sustaining their operations at great distances from U.S. territory. It has done it so long that it is easy to miss how extraordinary this capability is. No other nation—or combination of nations—comes close to matching it. And the United States is getting better at doing it. Operation Desert Shield, the buildup that preceded Operation Desert Storm, the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, involved moving about as much military mass over about the same strategic distances in six months as the U.S. buildup for the Normandy Invasion in Great Britain moved over a three-year period. A decade later we halved that rate on a ton-mile basis prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. The expeditionary capabilities of U.S. forces played a key role in the George W. Bush administration’s decisions early upon assuming office to bring forces back to the United States from the garrisons in Europe and Asia. Doing so forces changes in the basing in the United States, because the basing structure here has shrunk significantly from the vast structure built for World War II and largely maintained for the next four decades. Since the 1990s, however, the Department of Defense has been reducing and consolidating military

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facilities under the terms of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act. The pattern points toward fewer separate military bases overall, with ‘‘macro’’ base complexes growing in places such as the Norfolk, Virginia, area, and, perhaps, in Anchorage, Alaska. [The latter is roughly the same distance from the Persian Gulf (via Russia) as it is to Germany and Japan.] The point is that a shift to greater reliance on a concept of strategic deployments from home will carry additional basing changes. Sea Basing By the end of the 1990s, the U.S. Navy was advancing the notion of sea basing. It was a blend of old and new ideas. The Navy had long argued that the seas, covering over three quarters of the earth’s surface, offered the greatest flexibility and options from which to project power onto the land, and claimed as a military service it was the best equipped, experienced, and versed in how to do it. Over the last decade, however, it began to cast the function of sea-based power projection increasingly in a joint military context, initially in terms of the traditional (since World War II) form of naval forces—Marine Corps amphibious operations, but later in terms of naval forces enabling the use of Army forces as well. The U.S. Sixth Fleet began exercises using Army helicopters from the decks of Navy aircraft carriers in the early 1990s. Carriers provided bases for the U.S. Army and Special Forces troops used in Haiti in the mid-1990s. And in the 2001 operations in Afghanistan, U.S. Navy carriers and ships served as bases not just for the projection and support of Marine Corps units, but also for Army, Special Forces, and Air Force units, as well. The Navy argues it can now bring capabilities that are critical to joint operations, including offensive and defensive firepower, command and control (no longer limited by the bandwidth constraints that turned out to be so embarrassing in Desert Storm), and logistics, all from mobile platforms, some perhaps prepositioned, at sea. In other words, new technology (precision weaponry and broadband communications) is overcoming some of the limitations of sea basing, like restricted operational reach, constrained magazine capacity, and narrow band communications connectivity. And operational adjustments, like rotating crews to forward deployed ships, are overcoming some of the limited time-on-station problems. These tend to magnify some the traditional naval strength of mobility. For Cebrowski then, it was inevitable that the disposition of U.S. forces around the world was going to change; the basing system was going to be different. One could, within reason, forecast how it was going to change. It would evolve to a combination of fewer traditional, more or less permanent garrisons in Europe and Asia; a new web of small, contingency base sites, many in nontraditional U.S. basing areas; consolidated bases in the United States; and sea bases. The question he raised was ‘‘what was the most virtuous mix of these options?’’

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His answer was to convert the overseas garrisons to ‘‘hubs’’ within a larger net of contingency bases; continue consolidating bases in the United States into larger, co-located consolidations that could facilitate more rapid deployments abroad; and more robust sea basing. His rationale was that this would allow more rapid employment of military force and better support a strategy of preemptive prevention rather than reactive punishment. To Cebrowski, too much reliance on basing in the United States and a continued assumption that forward garrisons were there exclusively to deal with regional issues had some important strategic and moral implications. ‘‘It tends,’’ he contended, ‘‘to commit us to a strategy of punishment rather than prevention. That is, it is hard to get somewhere in sufficient numbers in time to prevent, rather than punish, aggression. That doesn’t mean the United States can’t reach out from the homeland and quickly hurt someone. Ballistic missiles can get pretty much anywhere in the world from the United States in less than an hour, and aircraft carrying bombs or troops, usually with airborne tanker support, can get there in less than a day. But, as the 2003 conflict with Iraq demonstrated, it still takes months to get a significant level of U.S. military ground- and land-based air forces from the United States to a fight abroad, given the present character of our forces.’’

The Growing Importance of Speed Regardless of how the nation decides to deploy its forces in peacetime, the movement toward a force that has greater speed seems certain. Following the 2003 conflict with Iraq, the then commander of Joint Forces Command Admiral Edmund Giambastiani (whom Secretary Rumsfeld promoted to vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff in 2005), summed up the lessons of the campaign: ‘‘speed kills—not just physical speed, but speed of awareness, command, and execution. It reduces decision and execution cycles, creates opportunities, denies an enemy options, and speeds his collapse.’’8 Cebrowski agreed. But here, also, he was more interested in making a virtue out of the inevitable increase in speed, than in simply lauding that it was coming. Like any military capability, he argued, all the manifestations of force speed—the physical, awareness, command, and execution dimensions of speed that Giambastiani had noted—carried good and bad possibilities. Cebrowski did not participate directly in the department’s discussions and decisions leading to the invasion of Iraq. But he was an inside observer of their outcomes, and events in the conflict with Iraq greatly affected his thinking. He thought the decision to go in was right, but privately was critical of the way the administration managed the situation in Iraq after the seizure of Baghdad and other cities. From an analytic perspective, however, he thought Operation Iraqi Freedom by far provided the best insights to the benefits and dangers of the increasing speed of U.S. military operations. He believed the decision to invade,

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the conduct of the U.S. military race to and seizure of Baghdad, and the demanding subsequent efforts to secure and stabilize the country afterward, demonstrated the ambivalent outcomes speed could generate. The answer to what those outcomes were and how to get good ones, he believed, lay in taking a broader view of the necessity for speed than in simply seeing it as a means of destroying an enemy. So, he searched for broader implications in the shift toward greater speed in the application of military force. He argued warfare was increasingly path dependent in the Information Age; that is, small changes in the initial conditions of armed conflict could result in enormous changes in outcomes. Nothing new about that observation as far as traditional armed conflict was concerned. Military theorists had long believed that the side taking the first initiative established a competitive edge, and that the longer an opponent took in responding, the greater the initiator’s edge would grow. What fascinated Cebrowski, however, was how globalization compounded the effects by diminishing the time it took for awareness of the action to spread and the breadth of the effects it generated. Earlier military theory had emerged when awareness lagged action. But the 9/11 terrorist attacks had demonstrated that an initiative could now generate almost instantaneous awareness throughout the world. In part because of the rapid global awareness, the effects were global, magnifying the impact of those that had been intended. The 9/11 attacks had not only killed thousands and destroyed property; they triggered business crises, changed politics, and challenged fundamental assumptions. The speed and breadth of the effects of attacks also generated the need for fast responses. Cebrowski argued that speed was becoming a more valuable capability of the entire force because the United States would want to be able to more quickly define or alter the initial conditions on terms favorable to its interests. Speed was important, not only in responding quickly enough to undercut the aggressor’s momentum, but simply to keep the original issue contained as narrowly as possible. In the modern context, where aggression against the United States may be initiated less to inflict damage and more to mobilize support against the United States among foreign communities that are not yet committed, a delayed response by the United States could give the perpetrator time to explain the U.S. response to the uncommitted in terms favorable to the aggressor. That could easily lead to two outcomes: either the United States would have to eventually apply more force to reverse an undesirable situation, and accept the risks of greater collateral damage to the innocent, or to acquiesce to the less desirable, higher-risk situation created by its perpetrator. If what the opponent was attempting to do was wrong, the moral course was to prevent it as soon as possible. This did not mean he endorsed the use of military force to right all transgressions or injustices. He did not; and given what he had worked out for himself as the moral use of military force, he understood the risks of immorality came along with its use and leaned toward the notion of a resort to military force

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as the last resort. But when the proper authorities chose to use military force, its use, he was convinced, should be faster rather than slower. Cebrowski also pointed to what he saw as the paradox of the U.S. response, and in particular, to the decision to invade Iraq. Speed in response depended on speed in decision. Indeed, while in office the issue to him was speed within the response—speed of deployment, speed of organization, speed of employment, and speed of logistics support. ‘‘In other words,’’ he would point out, ‘‘we may want to delay a decision to use military force, but having made the decision, to implement it quickly. That is, to choose with great care how and when to punch—have a well-thought out strategy—and then to unleash the punches with blinding speed—emphasize great speed in our military operations and tactics.’’ An emphasis on speed at the operational and tactical levels also increased the need to identify and think through the follow-on implications as much as possible. The failures Cebrowski saw in managing the stabilization of Iraq following its seizure did not undercut the need to make U.S. military forces faster and more agile, he argued, because only forces oriented around speed were going to be able to develop high rates of change that an adversary could not outpace, while sharply narrowing that adversary’s strategic options. The Information Age generated two issues regarding military use. One was how to improve the decisions that would have to be made regarding the use of military forces—how to increase the understanding that actions would generate follow-on needs and additional actions, and how to assure the expected outcomes were logical and stemmed from as firm a set of assumptions as possible. The other was how to execute decisions with speed and agility. Near the end of his life he increasingly focused on how the United States could better do the former. What he perceived as a failure to maintain objectivity in the decision to invade Iraq and terrible mismanagement afterward by the policy levels in the Department of Defense weighted heavily on him after he retired in the spring of 2005.

How to Use the Future Force: From Punitive to Preventive Force Use Cebrowski recognized there was a close link between increases in the precision and speed with which the United States was endowing its military forces and the strategy of preemption. He thought the initial discussion of preemption in the president’s National Security Strategy of the United States of America in 20029 was an unfortunate choice of terms, preferring ‘‘prevention’’ (which the administration shifted toward in subsequent releases). But he believed it was an accurate description of a needed policy articulation. Cebrowski was a proponent of a preemptive strategy, certainly to deal with terrorism and more generally as an alternative to the use of military force for punishment. He believed that during the last half century, the United States built,

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maintained, and, for the most part, used successfully the most powerful punitive military force the world had ever seen. ‘‘Punitive’’ was not the term most military experts used to describe it. ‘‘We did not want others to see us as an aggressive military power,’’ he argued. ‘‘As the major architect of the United Nations collective security concept after World War II, we wanted to claim the semantic authority to be the punisher of aggression and never its practitioner.’’ His concern was that the focus on responding to aggression had generated a way of thinking about the use of military force that embedded planning assumptions that were no longer appropriate for the military challenges the United States now faced. ‘‘Fifty years—almost a lifetime—was long enough to turn that general desire into a robust, detailed theory. As early as the 1960s we had developed just such a theory. We called it deterrence, and a lot of very bright people spent their careers working out the terms, measurements, and explanations that went with it. But, at heart, it was a responsive, punitive concept, in effect saying that if you do something we do not want you to do, we will see to it that it costs you more than you gain. It was a reactive concept, leaving it up to the perpetrator to trigger our punitive action. And it was a demanding concept because we had to be able to absorb the first blow and still have enough left to punish the aggressor.’’ So, he contended, ‘‘it was not surprising that the key force planning question through the Cold War was ‘how much is enough?’—enough to retaliate, respond, or punish the transgression sufficiently regardless of how much damage we suffered by letting the opponent take the first punch. Nor is it strange that we spent so much time, money, and effort on specifying what potential military opponents could do to us and how much they would have left if they did. We had to know the answer to that question to know ‘how much is enough’ to be able to counterpunch decisively.’’ He was, therefore, convinced that the nation had begun a new debate over its basic security strategy. It boiled down to whether the United States should update its responsive, punitive strategy to the conditions of the twenty-first century or shift increasingly to a preventive or, as the current National Security Strategy of the United States phrases it, a preemptive strategy. ‘‘This is a serious debate, one that is overdue,’’ Cebrowski argued. ‘‘It is also a tendentious one, pitting concerns that preventive armed conflict smacks of arrogance and will coalesce global opposition to the United States against views that threatening to punish attacks on the United States no longer has a deterrent effect on the groups and networks that are most likely to attack.’’ He thought these options were not as mutually exclusive as some thought. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. security strategy never accepted that the United States would simply wait for aggression before it would undertake a military response, or always refrain from taking preemptive military actions. In designing the UN collective security system in the late 1940s, U.S. representatives addressed the need for preventive military actions. Indeed, the original vision for the UN Security Council included means by which the great powers could

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prevent aggression as well as punish it if it occurred. However, as the bipolar security system solidified and mutual assured destruction became its central feature, the context and perceived results of preemptive military action changed. ‘‘We increasingly viewed preventive military action as inherently destabilizing and likely to trigger the nuclear holocaust that haunted the Cold War era,’’ he recalled. ‘‘Yet, the United States never officially renounced the option of preventive military action. Our current debate, therefore, is not revolving around an either-or proposition. It is a debate over degree and about where on the response-to-prevention spectrum the design of U.S. military forces should rest.’’ This was a very important debate in Cebrowski’s opinion because a shift toward prevention not only marked a break with our past, it continues to challenge the established security relationship with our allies. ‘‘We founded that relationship on deterring and defending against a common enemy,’’ he said. ‘‘But we also assumed mutual restraints to obtain mutual benefits. That is, our allies agreed to restrain their unilateral proclivities in nuclear weaponry and military options in exchange for U.S. guarantees to provide the deterrent value of the American nuclear arsenal to them. We agreed to restrain our unilateral proclivities by maintaining a significant military presence in Europe, Korea, and Japan, in effect providing a de facto link between the Europeans, South Koreans, and Japanese to the deterrent value of our arsenal. We and our allies established elaborate processes and procedures—in multilateral (e.g.: NATO) and bilateral agreements—that reinforced this idea of mutual restraint. In short, there was always an understanding on the part of all the alliance members, including the United States, that their agreement committed them to restrain their unilateral actions, or at least consult with each other before taking them (which was a form of restraint).’’ This was, he thought, a key point to our allies because it was the fulcrum on which they could balance and offset the disparity in power between themselves and each of the superpowers. Their alliance with the United States offset the power and imminent military threat to them of the Soviet Union and also provided some means of controlling the actions of the United States. In the views of influential Europeans, the formal commitment by the United States to a preemptive strategy reduces the utility of the NATO alliance to Europe and increases the utility of a European Union effort to build a more robust military capability to, among other things, offset the disparity in military power between Europe and the United States. ‘‘The point here,’’ he would argue, ‘‘is not whether this stream of effects is good or bad. It is that the policy of preemption cascades into the bigger questions of where the world is going and what role the United States should play in affecting the direction and rate.’’ Cebrowski believed the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon demonstrated the need to build preemptive capabilities. ‘‘As we all know,’’ he pointed out, ‘‘the attacks put in train a number of new

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behavioral patterns in travel, banking, the legal system, the political system, and the social system. But that event also generated an outflow of cascading effects that did not stop at the U.S. border, or for that matter, at any national border. As these waves spread through the global financial, economic, and social systems, the networks through which they flowed did not dampen their effects. They amplified them. They changed at least the mores, if not the rules, of international relations. Suddenly, the seventeenth century Westphalian concepts that defined legitimate use of military force along what nations did outside the geographic line of their sovereignty as opposed to what they did inside did not make as much sense. Wars—global wars—the world began to realize, could now involve nonnational groups that operated across national boundaries and could stem from what went on inside a nation, as well as from what that nation did beyond its borders. And they could be as deadly and destructive as the wars once thought to be the sole purview of nations.’’ He believed that changed the calculus regarding the risks and benefits of preemptive military action. ‘‘In a world in which the likelihood of preemptive precision and speed could prevent a catastrophe increases and the possibility that such action would trigger a catastrophic response decreases,’’ he would ask, ‘‘doesn’t the moral balance tip in favor of preemption?’’ He thought it did. Moreover, he believed that the policy shift in that direction was irreversible and acknowledged it would continue to stir controversy. But the real issue, he was convinced, was how to shift the design and culture of U.S. military forces away from the punitive character previous decades had embedded to the design and culture the future demanded. ‘‘If we are serious about being able to do this,’’ he would conclude, ‘‘we will have to make a number of structural and operational adjustments. We need to think much more seriously about how to get to a fight more quickly. Today, our expeditionary deployment is sequential. We get an ‘advanced party’ into an area that can secure ‘a foothold’ or ‘bastion’; then build up forces and supplies in that bastion; and then launch an offensive outward from it. We are the best in the world at implementing this sequence. But if we want the kind of strategic leverage we seek from speed, we have to design a force that is able to undertake these steps concurrently. That means a different approach to logistics and intelligence as well as the combat elements.’’ All this boiled down to two conclusions, one dealing with the structure and organization of a military that was more compatible with the kind of challenges and demands the Information Age would pose, the other with the operational character that force would undertake. The Information Age force, Cebrowski contended, required two things: changes in the size, structure, and character of the forces the United States had, and an increase in the information portion of all force components. Network centric operations would emerge as the core of twenty-first century military activity throughout the world. His mission, he would say, was to help the United States be the first to get there and to stay ahead.

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Structure and Organization: Network Centric Characteristics When asked to be more specific, he turned for examples to the Navy’s cooperative engagement concept, or CEC, and the Army’s Future Combat System, or FCS. The CEC grew from the tactical need in the 1980s to better integrate the defense of naval forces at sea, which could involve ships and aircraft in areas of 2,500 square miles or more. It sought to do this by combining the sensor information provided by all the various ships and aircraft into a common battlespace understanding from which the fleet could coordinate its widely distributed defenses in the most effective manner. The FCS stemmed from the Army’s interest in developing more agile and strategically mobile ground forces while maintaining the combat protection needed to overcome increasingly deadly defenses. It, too, had roots in the 1980s, but gained momentum following the difficulty the Army had in getting its Apache helicopters into the fight with Serbia over Kosovo in the late 1990s. As with the Navy’s CEC, a central driver of the Army’s decision to move toward this goal flowed from the growing appreciation of the ability to create a common relevant operating picture and an agile, adaptive command structure. The Air Force and Marine Corps are both developing similar approaches, and, over the last several years, the Joint Forces Command and other major combat commands have pushed the approach into joint commands. To Cebrowski, these developments were more than communications modernization. The tactical purpose of both the CEC and FCS was not new. Improved communications coupled with the different organizations associated with the Navy’s CEC and the Army’s FCS both seek to exert military control by relatively few forces over greater geographic areas and to enhance the ability of the forces to conduct dispersed operations. That goal has been a feature of traditional warfare for centuries, and notable successes include those achieved by Alexander, Genghis Khan, and the British in the fifth BC, thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively. What is new, he contended, was two shifts in military assumptions: one was the growing awareness that the new information technology enables much greater military effectiveness from self-synchronization by tactical units rather than from traditional hierarchical command structures. The other was that military mass—larger weapons systems and units—should be abandoned in favor of smaller, more numerous, and agile ones. These assumptions, he suggested, are the conceptual foundation of network centric operations, and since the United States was embracing them, it would only be a matter of time until it sought to incorporate the network centric approach across the board. But why did that make it inevitable that others would move in the same direction? ‘‘They were already doing so,’’ Cebrowski would respond, ‘‘because there is no incentive for them to try to match the world’s only superpower in Industrial

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Age war, and, because they could; they didn’t have to have the capital base to tap into the power of network centric warfare that was once required by Industrial Age military power.’’ To him the United States had been the trailblazer to network centric warfare, but the race was open to anyone, and the U.S. lead was neither as extended as a lot of people thought nor guaranteed.

CHAPTER

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FUTURE FORCES

Cebrowski’s view of the proper size, structure, organization, and mode of operation for U.S. military forces grew from his assumptions about the world and the role of military force. So, at the most general level he believed the United States had to bring its military forces more in line with the demands of Globalization III. ‘‘We need to introduce change accelerators to their organization and structure; to move away from the design features that inhibit change toward features that enhance it. And because that kind of redesign will not come easily, we have to incorporate the new features within the areas of agreement. That is, we need to come up with a blueprint that is within and consistent with the consensus that U.S. military forces should become more agile and precise in applying power, more able to move faster strategically, operationally, and tactically, and more effective across a range of different challenges.’’ That was almost always his opening proposition when people asked him for more specific suggestions on what the Department of Defense was supposed to do to transform. To understand what Cebrowski was trying to do, start with what he saw as today’s military. He acknowledged that the U.S. military was the most powerful and best in the world. He believed, however, its active-reserve component structure was out of date, synchronized for an age that the world was leaving, and unable to provide the capabilities the new age demanded. It was bloated, not from a surplus of men and women in uniform, but from excess redundancy in functions, and from what might once have been called camp followers, but now marched alongside under the rubric of defense contractors. It was far too slow in changing. It valued continuity too much, acquired new technology hesitantly and slowly, and hung on to what it had much too tenaciously.

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On the active-reserve component relationships in the military, his critique began by dissecting ‘‘the total force.’’ This was the phrase coined in the early 1970s when the United States went to an all volunteer military. It portrayed the interaction between the active components—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps personnel dedicated full time to military training and operations—and the reserve components. There are two kinds of reserve components. One is made up of units and personnel that are part-time members of the military services who, when called up or assigned, fill in or back up similar units and personnel in the active components. Each of the military services has this kind of reserves. The other is composed of National Guard or Air Guard personnel and units. During peacetime guard units serve as the state militias, reporting to the governor, usually through a state adjutant general. The National Guard affiliates with the U.S. Army, the Air Guard with the U.S. Air Force. When nationalized and called up, they become part of the active forces, entering the federal military chain of command that runs from the president, through the secretary of defense, to the operational joint combatant commands. The active and reserve components are integral parts of how the United States has dealt with the prospect of war since World War II and, in particular, with the American concept of mobilization. This concept rests on the WWII notion of total mobilization of the U.S. population and economy. The active military components are the first line of defense; big enough, strong enough, and trained, tough, and ready enough to handle most military challenges by themselves, or, at least, to provide the time needed to call up and prepare the reserve components. The reserve components are the intermediary line of defense. They bolster the strength of the active component, multiply its strength fairly quickly, and provide more time to tap more deeply into the reservoir of American manpower and economic strength. A military draft is the primary means of tapping into manpower beyond that provided by the reserve components; de facto nationalization of industries, rationing, and other mechanisms channel the economic productivity of the nation to building military capabilities. The idea behind the current U.S. military reserve structure is to make the size of the military expandable in time of need. Mobilizing the reserves is not an all or nothing proposition because there are degrees of mobilization.1 But the concept assumes that the reserve components have to be clones of the active forces, organized, structured, trained, and equipped as similarly as possible to their active duty counterparts as their part-time premobilization status and the budget allows. And the reason for this remains the same today as half a century ago; it is to provide military resources for a massive conventional war. The U.S. military remains designed primarily for sustained major combat, in both its active and reserve components. Cebrowski thought that made a lot less sense today than it had 50 years ago. A need for the capability to fight a massive conventional war, and to tap the entire

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manpower and industrial strength of the United States to do so, was not entirely passe´. Having the mechanisms to do this had deterrent utility, and, besides, moving quickly away from a concept that now had so many layers of vested interests tied up in it would not be easy. But there were things on the other side of the ledger. He attributed the U.S. difficulty in preventing and squelching the insurgency in Iraq not only to mismanagement and poor planning, but to the absence of military capabilities to stabilize the situation after the seizure of Iraq. It was not the fighting skills of the world’s best military that had been needed after Baghdad fell to U.S. military prowess, yet, the skills that were needed simply were not in the U.S. military. The same lack of capability had appeared after hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The aftermaths of major combat in Iraq and the flooding of New Orleans had both cried out for the discipline, organizational effectiveness, and professionalism of military forces. But they also demanded a military force that had the training, equipment, organization, and skills to cope with stabilization and reconstruction. Such a force had not been available, and its absence fostered dark premonitions of other gaps following natural disasters or terrorist attacks. The design of the U.S. military, with its assumption that the reserves had to be clones of the active forces, had probably ruled those capabilities out so far as the U.S. military was concerned. Cebrowski was not suggesting the U.S. military ought to forsake the traditional military skills in which it excelled. But expanding its capability to clean up after using those skills seemed to him an obvious need. He was also concerned about the functional structure of today’s military; that is, what units are supposed to provide particular functions. Not so much about what others had claimed was a scary tooth-to-tail ratio—too much support for the number of frontline warriors. He worried about the excess redundancy that existed in the support. The excess redundancy was there because each of the military services insisted on controlling their own logistics, communications, transportation, intelligence, administrative, and medical support and devoted so much time, money, and manpower to maintaining their institutional distinctiveness—the infrastructure and activities designed exclusively to enhance understanding of and loyalty to the institution. He accepted the need for institutional identities among the military services, but not the extent to which they sought them or the way they reinforced the reluctance to integrate support activities with another military service. He believed, and studies supported his belief, that judicious integration of the support and institutional functions could reduce the personnel devoted to support and institutional functions by half and bring the overall military tooth-to-tail ratio close to 1:1. And the Department of Defense could do that without risk to support effectiveness to any service or to its legitimate institutional cultures. The redundancy was a major contributor to what he saw as bloat. He would ask, rhetorically, how many people were included in the U.S. military. Most

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would respond with ‘‘about a million.’’ ‘‘That’s about right for the active force,’’ Cebrowski would say, ‘‘but what about the 900,000 reserves, the 700,000 civilian employees, the 2 million retirees and their dependents, and the 1.3 million defense contractors who provide services to the military?’’ He could have added the defense contractors who build the weapons and other equipment and other segments of the population that considered themselves part of the defense community. His point was that the military was considerably larger than most realized. Not all of these people had the same influence on what the military was and did, of course. But they all had some influence on what the nation could do with and to the military because they were all part of the larger political system. And most of them were comfortable with what the military was, was becoming, and the rate at which it was changing, which was much slower and incremental than Cebrowski thought it should be transforming. To him, the size and conservatism of this greater military family was a major factor in the slow rate at which the military embraced change. There were other factors. The military understood that it dealt with high stakes, and that rushing too quickly into changes could haunt them when the chips were down. And that those kind of mistakes had very serious consequences, for militaries deal literally in life and death matters, not just for those immediately involved in conflicts, but the nations and societies that provide the men and women in uniform. That is why linear, incremental change is natural to militaries. It is the most cautious approach, relatively easy to stop, and subject to careful review at each step. Cebrowski understood this. But he knew that the cautious approach to changes carried strategic risks. In competitions, the slow, steady, cautious approach to change is no guarantee of success. It can just as easily guarantee not winning. So, he thought long and hard about what characteristics he could incorporate into a U.S. force design that would move away from those aspects of today’s force. He sought a design that would provide greater flexibility, force agility, and faster rates of transformation.

Cebrowski’s Force He argued the U.S. military needed to expand the breadth of its capabilities in two general directions. One was in its ability to actively prevent aggression or other actions inimical to the United States.2 The other was in its ability to assist the transition from combat situations to peaceful conditions that secure and enhance the political purposes for which the United States committed military force. That is, the military had to be better able to preempt threats and to stabilize, reconstruct, and reorient a population and infrastructure following military conflicts. Yes, the mission to fight the nation’s wars remained. But, increasingly, the U.S. military must also act in concert with the other instruments of U.S. power to channel the global transition into the Information Age along beneficial

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paths. That would require expanding U.S. military capabilities to preempt attacks, on the one hand, and, on the other, to restore or establish a stable peace after military operations and help in removing the sources and causes that lead to the desires by others to attack the United States. And he was convinced new stabilization capabilities were also needed for disasters—natural or man made—in the United States. His solution was to trifurcate the existing force into three force components, each focused on a particular function. One would be a ‘‘prevent forward’’ force component that could actively prevent potential opponents from executing attacks. The second was a ‘‘sustained combat’’ force component that could sustain relatively intense conventional military combat indefinitely. The third was a ‘‘stabilization’’ force component that could deal with situations following intense combat or assist in meliorating the political, social, and economic toxins that stir frustration, anger, and hopelessness in the gap. This component, he argued, ought to also be able to help deal with catastrophes inside the United States. The trifurcation he called for meant the U.S. military could no longer prepare solely to fight the nation’s wars. That phrase had been a mantra since the mid1970s when the military had tried to rebuild itself, adapt to the end of the draft, get out of ‘‘nation building,’’ and focus on its professionalism. Cebrowski had been there. He had been immersed in the effort. But, it was clear to him that the military would also have to prepare to work with other institutions to help keep Globalization III moving in the right channel toward beneficial global outcomes. The U.S. military had to become part of a U.S. effort to administer the emerging global system and Information Age. It had to be both the nation’s war fighter and part of the world’s system administrator.3 Armed conflicts, he believed, could begin in familiar ways. Efforts to expand territorial control by military force would continue because nation states still focused on borders and sovereignty. He did not believe the future would necessarily disclose a conventional military somewhere out there prepared to take on the U.S. military with a good chance of winning if it does. But, he was not prepared to bet that no nation would try. That was why he wanted to retain major war fighting capabilities. ‘‘The ambiguity of the future is the basic reason we want to continue to enhance our capacity to wage sustained, effective, combat operations against well-trained, equipped, organized, and armed military forces. Enhancing our lead reduces the incentive of other nations to try to catch up, enhances our ability to deter such conflicts, and therefore lowers the chances we will have to engage in those kinds of deadly operations. So, because we will never reduce those chances to zero however much more powerful in conventional military operations we become, we need to continue to enhance our ability to sustain major combat operations.’’

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But, to Cebrowski, that did not mean the United States should keep the current force design or continue to invest in military mass on the assumption that mass was the best insurance against having to face a significant conventional war in the future. He was convinced that the United States had been moving toward substituting information for mass and toward network centric military operations for over a decade. And that doing this had already begun to alter the character and design of the U.S. military toward a more agile military, better able to apply force with greater speed at greater distances, and better able to conduct network centric operations. Yet, he was equally certain that the U.S. military had not changed fast enough and the changes had not fully addressed the challenges the new age was generating. ‘‘Until recently we have focused too much on the possibility of having to face a ‘peer competitor’—a national military power with conventional military prowess that poses a real threat to our military. In this myopic concern we have been largely blind to the other challengers emerging from the globalization driving the new Information Age, and have been laggard in shaping the force to deal with them.’’ His prevent forward force component would prevent by preemption; that is, it would have the capability to remove an opponent’s capability to harm the United States and its allies before the potential enemy tries. It could, of course, participate in both sustained combat or in post-combat stability operations. But it would have some distinguishing characteristics. It would be capable of providing its units with very high-quality shared awareness and of responding rapidly and effectively to that awareness. It would have components from all of the military services and the command, communications, and collaboration systems linking them would be very robust and more cutting edge than those generally in the other two force components. None of this is categorically new. The obvious analogy today is the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).4 But while the prevent forward component might be similar to what JSOC provides today, there would be some important differences. For one thing, while JSOC might contribute units to the prevent forward component, so would each of the military services. For another, its missions would expand beyond those normally associated with JSOC. It would be a considerably larger force with a wider mission purview. Altogether, the prevent forward component would involve up to about 25 percent of U.S. active military forces. It would be largely sea-based or rapidly deployable across strategic distances to areas of concern to the United States. So, while this force component would not be radically different from some force aspects the United States has today, it would still differ enough to accelerate changes throughout the rest of the U.S. military. This is because its purpose would be twofold: to serve as the nation’s primary preemptive military capability and as a vanguard for accelerating transformation throughout the entire armed forces.

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Cebrowski’s sustained combat force component would maintain much of what characterizes and distinguishes the U.S. military today. Of the three foreseeable military challenges—preventive actions, sustained large-scale combat campaigns, or post-combat restoration—the sustained combat portion would, like today’s military, be best suited for the second of these potential challenges. Like today, it would reflect the idea of a ‘‘total force’’ composed of both active and reserve personnel, with the reserve units organized, structured, and trained similarly to their active counterparts to be able to fill in or supplement the active forces in major combat campaigns. The sustained combat component would be the central repository for most of the relatively heavy ground forces and relatively limited range tactical aircraft. His stabilization force component would become the primary agent through which the U.S. military would aid in post-major combat transitions from war to peace, provide military muscle in ‘‘nation building,’’ and, if needed, bolster U.S. civil authority in the event of catastrophic events, natural or terroristgenerated, in the United States. Personnel from the National Guard and Air Guard would form the core of the component; roughly 20 percent of the total strength of the National and Air Guard would be assigned to it. The heavy Guard presence would stem from several considerations. One is the kind of missions likely to face these personnel. Establishing security would certainly be high on the list of probabilities, and in the transition from combat situations toward something less than armed combat against heavily armed, organized militaries. But ‘‘stabilization’’ or ‘‘restoration’’ involve more than military expertise, and the military role in them demands knowledge of the differences between establishing security in the context of a military combat campaign and in the context of a transition to or restoration of civil society. This includes a premium on understanding how to work effectively with the nonmilitary institutions and agencies that work to create or restore civil society. Reserve personnel, whether from the Guard or from the reserves of each of the military services, are more closely embedded in the civilian society and economy of the United States—from where the greatest pool of skills associated with a transition from combat to peace abroad or with working with civil authorities in the U.S. missions reside. This makes the reserve components the logical choice for the central core of the stabilization force component. Cost-effectiveness considerations also point to heavy reliance on Guard personnel for the stabilization force. One could argue that the stabilization and restoration mission will always be present in any armed conflict the United States enters, and therefore we ought to charge the active forces with the mission and build the capability accordingly. But the ability to meet the demand, particularly if the demand occurs within the United States, is inherently better in the reserves because of their closer integration with civil society. The fact that it is less expensive to meet it with reserves during peacetime is an added benefit.

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In any case, training and expertise would distinguish the stability component, for while it would possess combat power, it would also have civil affairs capabilities —police, administrative, construction and restoration, medical, and educational. It would not be an inferior force—far from it, for it would be essential to the political victory for which we commit military force and wage combat in the first place and, if required in the context of a catastrophe inside the United States, the component of the force best able to work effectively with civil authority.

Force Allocations The deficits in today’s force lie in the prevent forward and stabilization legs of Cebrowski’s triad. He argued that ‘‘the United States lacks a prevent forward capability that is able to move quickly in significant size to vitiate an opponent’s strategies before he can execute them. And we lack a stabilization force that is able to shepherd the transition from general armed conflict to stable peacetime conditions smoothly and quickly. Today’s force is not without preventive or stabilization capabilities. But the predominance of the sustained combat force overshadows them.’’ Analysis backed him up. The portion of today’s military that is specialized for prevention and stabilization is relatively small. While this portion includes units and individuals with skills that are particularly important in such missions—civil affairs and military police units for stabilization; Joint Special Operations Command, Delta Force and other units for preemption—only about 5 percent of the force clearly falls within the stabilization and 10 percent falls within the preventive.5 Figure 4.1 illustrates the gross differences between today’s force and Cebrowski’s triad—which he thought the United States could have by 2010—in terms of military personnel in both the active and reserve components. The current force illustration reflects the primary functions of military personnel—active and reserve—among the three general force components outlined above. That is, if you separate U.S. military personnel in terms of whether they spend most of their time doing or preparing for preemptive actions, sustained combat actions, or stabilization actions, respectively, the illustration shows how they would break out today and in 2010. As the figure indicates, moving to Cebrowski’s triad would involve a significant shift of personnel away from the sustained combat component of the force into the prevent forward and stabilization components. In his model the personnel shifts would parallel significant structural and organizational change, particularly on the part of the prevent forward and stabilization components.

The Prevent Forward Force Component The triad calls for an increase of the prevent forward component of the force from about 10 percent of the total manpower of the active and reserve

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Figure 4.1 Force Composition components to about 25 percent by 2010. This might produce more preemptive force capabilities than the United States needs. But the increase comes partly from the role this component would play in transformation. For, in addition to providing the joint preemptive military resources, this component would become the joint experimentation/spiral development base for the U.S. armed forces and the primary crucible within which the military works out new joint force interdependencies.6 Because of its dual functions, this component would need enough ‘‘mass’’ to meet them both, or at least always to maintain the ‘‘preemptive’’ capability while meeting some of the joint experimental requirements. To meet its preventive operations requirements, the prevent forward force component would include a high proportion of force units with agile expeditionary capabilities designed for short duration operations. These units would provide highly precise strike capabilities, and high speed at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of operations. They would be able to maneuver from sea or from strategic distances directly to combat and would, as a force component, have robust, highly networked C 4ISR (the military acronym for the amalgam of command, control, communications, computers and intelligence collection, surveillance, and reconnaissance) at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. What emerges from this description is, of course, a force component

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composed of relatively light ground forces—Marine Corps units and Army airborne and Stryker Brigades, for example—backed by naval air and long-range ground-based bombers. Speed, high battlespace awareness, network centric command and control, agility, precision, and flexibility would be the common characteristics of the forces assigned to the prevent forward component. The connection of the prevent forward force component with transformation stems from its desired force characteristics. That is, its emphasis on speed, high awareness, network centric command and control, precision, and flexibility are the signature capabilities and goals of force transformation. This is not to argue that the only goal of force transformation is to develop a preemptive force. Force transformation has to do with making the U.S. military more effective across the spectrum of potential missions, from preemption, through major sustained military conflict, to peacemaking and peacekeeping. But the coincidence of interest in speed, agility, high information quotient, and the other transformation characteristics is what makes the prevent forward force component the potential vanguard of the wider effort to transform the entire force. How could the United States pursue this vanguard notion? By rotating units from the largest portion of the total force—that comprising the sustained combat force component—into the prevent forward component and then back into the sustained combat force component. While assigned to the prevent forward component, the units would transition through four operational phases over a period of roughly two years. The process would focus the initial phase on joint training and exercises designed to hone all of the different service units participating in the same cycle into a joint force dedicated to a preemptive mission. The second phase would involve launching the operation for which the units trained and exercised, or continuing to hone their joint operating capabilities while in an alert status for the particular operation or for previously unanticipated operations. Phase three would be a period of recovery from the intensity of the operation or stress of the tempo of operations in the first two phases. So far this pattern is roughly consistent with current trends. Each of the military services has moved the operating pattern of its units into a similar rotational scheme and plans to refine this basic three-phase sequence in the years ahead. The pattern Cebrowski sketched, however, would add a fourth step for those units assigned to the prevent forward force component: a joint experimentation phase. The units that had trained and fought together jointly, in accordance with the doctrinal approach to joint operations, would then transition together into experiments focused on developing different ways of fighting together jointly. At the completion of this joint experimentation phase, the units would rotate back to the pool of forces assigned to the sustained combat force component. They would carry two important things with them as they returned. Because they had in effect ‘‘lived jointly’’ for the period they were part of the prevent forward force component they would carry a deeper sense not only of joint operations

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and the utility of interoperability, but, arguably, of interdependency as well. And because they had experimented together jointly, they would return with a finer appreciation of the utility of not only joint operations, but of the effectiveness and promise of transformation. They would have provided the mass necessary to do true joint experimentation long enough to be imbued with a new perspective, a deeper understanding, a more profound commitment to transformation. They would return as agents of change, enhancing the receptivity toward and accelerating the progress of transformation throughout the U.S. military. Figure 4.2 illustrates this pattern. Cebrowski believed his approach would involve some new command relationships. But here, too, the changes would not be out of line with what was already occurring. Past practice envisioned a command partnership in which the organization, structure, equipment, and training of military units was largely the prerogative of the military services, while the use of those units for military operations was the responsibility of commanders in the field or fleets. For most of the last five decades this relationship was sanctified by the Unified Command structure, in which the use of military forces for combat operations was organized within geographical regions or particular functions, such as transportation, special operations, or strategic strike. Ostensibly, once assigned to a regional or functional unified command, a unit coming from the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps became operationally responsible to that unified commander,

Figure 4.2 Rotational Pattern of Units Assigned to Prevent Forward Force Component

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who took overall operational command, to include exercises and training. The reality was more complex, for until recently the military service component commands assigned to a unified command had substantial de facto operational authority over the units supplied by their military service. Over the last several years, however, things have changed. While their commanders have lost the somewhat exuberant title of ‘‘commander in chief ’’ or CINC, their operational command authority has increased. More significantly, four unified commands—Joint Forces Command, or USJFCOM, Transportation Command, or USTRANSCOM, Strategic Command, or USSTRATCOM, and Special Operations Command, or USSOCOM—have emerged as particularly important, with new authority. Previously, these commands had usually acted in support of regional operations under the respective regional unified commander. But over the last several years, each of them has gained broader operational authority. USJFCOM, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, has become one of the institutional leaders of U.S. military force transformation with authority over joint experimentation. USTRANSCOM has become in effect a logistics coordinator and distribution manager for all military logistics. USSTRATCOM, headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, has risen to authority over strike planning involving all U.S. military forces (not just air and missile forces and not just strike operations involving nuclear weapons) and over the planning and allocation of intelligence collection, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to support the other unified commands. The command and control arrangements for the prevent forward force component in the model Cebrowski laid out would take advantage of these developments. USSTRATCOM would be responsible for the planning, implementation, evaluation, and adjustment of the first two phases of the rotation cycle. USJFCOM would design, control, and evaluate the joint experiment phase. Cebrowski recognized that the prevent forward component he sketched would not suddenly burst upon the scene, and the transition to 2010 would involve some significant alterations to the way things are done today. For one thing, it would require the services to synchronize their acquisition and deployments of new technology to the prevent forward force component and to alter their approach to and authorities of their regional service component commanders.7 For another, the changes begun over the last three years regarding the unified command structure would have to continue to evolve in their current orientation regarding the rise of importance by USJFCOM and USSTRATCOM.

Sustained Combat Force Component Cebrowski predicted a sustained combat capability would remain immensely important to the U.S. ability to influence world affairs, protect national interests,

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and maintain national security. While U.S. military prowess stimulates others to seek asymmetrical military capabilities, it also increases the cost and difficulty of their efforts and remains the bed rock of the U.S. ability to deter actions we do not want opponents to attempt. He was convinced that organized, conventional military forces would remain the primary final arbiters of competition, disagreement, and contest throughout the world. Nearly all the world’s nations have invested heavily in building and maintaining them and would look to their organized militaries for their national security needs. This was not, however, an argument for stasis. Cebrowski was also convinced the Information Age had altered the relative significance of the traditional sources of military power and opened access to the technologies that are increasingly becoming the foundation of modern military power. He felt that in the new age, the industrial capabilities that had helped give the United States its current military primacy could become a dangerous legacy, generating an unfounded arrogance and delay in exploiting the potency of the new technologies and theories of warfare they make feasible. Therefore, to him the fundamental issue associated with the sustained combat force component was how to transform it fast enough to maintain the U.S. military dominance in the Information Age without dangerously diminishing its military dominance during the transition or its ability to meet its presence, combat, peacekeeping, and other missions. He postulated that the transition in structure and organization between now and 2010 for the sustained combat force would generally conform to present service and defense agency plans and programs. But his model favored a slightly faster transformation process with earlier introduction of particular units, technologies, and operational concepts where feasible and desirable, linked with the rotational pattern associated with units returning from the prevent forward force component. Operationally, the sustained combat force would continue to perform many current missions, modified on occasion by overlap with elements of the prevent forward component in some overseas missions and on other occasions by overlap with elements of the stabilization force component. As its name implies, it would be charged with the central role in large-scale, extended periods of combat. The sustained combat force component would be the core around which the nation would mobilize, either partially or fully, for large-scale war. It would represent about 60 percent of the manpower strength of the total force (active and reserve components). The reserve component units allocated to this force would maintain the current policy of adhering, as much as possible, to the structure, organization, and modernization of the active components. Structurally, this force component would be the primary repository of the military’s heavier land force power and of the bulk of its tactical air fighterbomber assets. It would maintain most of the nation’s naval power and a significant portion of the nation’s long-range bombers. Compared to today’s force, it

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would have a significantly smaller portion of the lighter, more agile land power units, fewer long-range bombers, and fewer naval assets. These would primarily be assigned to the prevent forward component. Likewise, the sustained combat force would have fewer reserve component forces as the stabilization force component takes hold and the National Guard reoriented toward the homeland security mission. The command and control of the sustained combat force component would largely parallel what exists today. That is, deployed elements of this component would operate under the command of the major commander with overall operational responsibility for the region in which the elements deploy. The military services would exercise primary control over the training, equipping, and administration of their personnel when they were not deployed abroad. The transition from the present to 2010 by the sustained combat component would generally conform to the current service transformation road maps and service programs. Modernization would continue at the currently programmed rates. Experimentation would remain largely individually service oriented, and the relatively cautious innovation in structure, organization, and operating doctrine, typical of the last five years, would continue at about the same rate. In short, the sustained combat force component—the largest, most familiar of the three components, would be the nation’s hedge against the risks associated with the less familiar, more innovative prevent forward and stabilization force components. Cebrowski postulated several other things that would have to occur for the sustained combat force component to emerge by 2010. But some of these have already begun to take root. One is expanding the idea of synchronized unit rotation across the military services. The Army has put in train a unit rotation scheme similar to those the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force established earlier. It would not be very difficult to synchronize the rotations in all the services to provide the flow from the sustained combat force component to the prevent forward component and the return to the former component on the two-year cycle. Likewise, there are a number of technological developments that Cebrowski expected would facilitate meeting the 2010 target for a viable sustained combat force component. Many of these are the same as those associated with the prevent forward component: better intelligence collection, surveillance, and reconnaissance, more integrated support functions, and others. All three components would benefit greatly from secure broadband communications at the tactical level. For the prevent forward force, the greatest direct benefit of this technology might be the boost it could give to force agility. For the sustained combat component, the most direct benefit might be the ability of secure broadband communications to substitute for the mass the force might need to compensate for its overall reduction in size as the other two force components grow from it.

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Stabilization Force Component Cebrowski’s concept of a stabilization force component is probably the most novel of the three components in the triad he proposed. It is not an alien concept, of course, for the U.S. military has long maintained units that fit into the seams between combat operations and nonmilitary activities associated at least normatively with civil authorities. And it has garnered experience and doctrine in bridging the military and civil domains, most recently in the conflicts in Panama, the first conflict with Iraq in the early 1990s, and the later intervention in Haiti. Clearly, the military occupation of Iraq following Operation Iraqi Freedom has had an important impact on how the United States thinks about post-major combat situations. The recent experience in Iraq has also posed a significant challenge to the previous dominant assumptions regarding the role of U.S. military forces in postmajor conflict situations. The earlier assumptions were that stabilization, restoration, and doing all the things involved in transitioning from war to peace, combat to civility, and destruction to reconstruction would be relatively quick, fairly smooth, and, if not easy for the liberators, at least limited in its danger and violence. When the casualties suffered by U.S. military personnel during the postmajor combat period in Iraq surpassed those of the major combat stage, U.S. assumptions about the military capability needed to deal with stabilization and restoration began to shift. For instance, the military now realizes that it is in the post-major combat phase of military operations where we will achieve or fail to achieve the political goals for using military force in the first place. And where we may have once viewed the post-major combat problem as a kind of ritualistic curtain call, we now see the transition from war to peace as a complicated, overlapping, and perhaps extended process. That is different from the earlier view that assumed a fairly straightforward sequence in which civil authorities would replace military units fairly quickly once the military had eliminated or neutralized organized military resistance. The Iraq experience showed that while there are sequential aspects of post conflict situations (security really does make restoration easier), there is much more overlap than the conventional view suggested. Delays in restoring civil services led to higher criminality which bolstered armed resistance and further delayed restoration. A transition to peace seldom follows a clear sequence of stages. It is actually a complex process in which all of the activities and phases often occur simultaneously, overlap, and feed on each other. One lesson is clear: The U.S. military ideally should have the capacity to help in all the dimensions involved in the transition—eliminating the organized military resistance, reducing criminality, restoring public services, undertaking civil reconstruction, and establishing a new form of government. Likewise, while many believe the U.S. military involvement in the transition should be for as short a period as possible,

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that does not mean that the U.S. military should lack the capability of meeting the demands of a protracted transition. On the contrary, the U.S. political leadership ought to have the option of using the military in such a role effectively and efficiently for as long as it takes. Today’s military is not designed nor well structured for stabilization operations. The success it had in Iraq had more to do with the ability of the military personnel and their leaders to innovate in unanticipated situations than it did with being prepared to cope with the situations in which they found themselves. In retrospect, the biggest military risks U.S. forces faced in Iraq came from the post-major combat situations for which they were not equipped, organized, structured, and trained. More nonlethal weapons would have helped tremendously, as would have closer integration with local Iraqi police and constabulary forces, more flexible military structures and organization, and better training in crowd control, criminal investigation, and peacekeeping. The military played the essential role in establishing and maintaining the security needed for other U.S. government agencies, nongovernmental agencies, United Nations agencies, and private contractors to provide the reconstruction, reconstitution, reform, and restoration of the civil infrastructure that was essential for achieving the political purposes for which we went to war. But we did not sufficiently equip nor prepare the men and women in uniform to provide the keystone function of security, nor to facilitate the work of the groups, agencies, and institutions who focus on creating, restoring, and maintaining civil society. Our forces in Iraq were and remain magnificent warriors who fought and can fight the nation’s wars with the highest professionalism and effectiveness. They are not equipped, trained, organized, nor structured for what happens after the war, and we must correct this. One could argue that the stabilization challenge we faced in Iraq was unique, and not the situation for which we should design our military forces. Certainly Iraq was unique, in the same way any war the United States fought was different from those that preceded and followed. But, while the United States is highly unlikely to duplicate its experience in Iraq, we live in and will continue to face challenges that are not dissimilar to those Iraq posed. The U.S. military has no military peer in the form of an organized, well-equipped, trained, and capable modern military force, and the most challenging tests for our military is likely to come not on the battlefield against such a threat, but in the period after the U.S. military destroys the conventional military power of an opponent. And, Cebrowski argued, we know now that we can no longer rest confidently on the assumption that the oceans that surround us will defend us from direct, possibly catastrophic attack from outside, leaving us with stabilizing and restorative challenges here in the United States. So, the question is less whether the United States needs a stabilization force component, and more what should that force component look like and how should it operate. The issue is whether we can create that

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capability without increasing the size of the total force, driving its costs dramatically upward, or otherwise jeopardizing American economic, social, and political security. Cebrowski believed the answer was to build the stabilization force component largely of reserve and Guard personnel who would increasingly focus on the dual missions of homeland security/defense and stabilization and reconstruction abroad. In his triad, the stabilization force component would include many of the current specialized units that perform some of the transition functions (civil affairs, ordnance disposal, medical) and other units with relevant skills (military police, construction engineers, chemical decontamination, and so on). Overall, it would constitute about 15 percent of the total force manpower at any given time and involve mostly reserve component personnel from the ground forces. The component would perform two general roles: It would provide the core of the military capabilities required for the post-major combat transition to peace in overseas operations. And it would constitute the national pool of specialized military capabilities from which the federal government could pull personnel and equipment needed to supplement the actions of state and local governments in response to acts of terror or natural disasters in the U.S. homeland. When mobilized for national service abroad, the stabilization force component would report to the command responsible for the area of the contingency. In the early post-combat phases of a major armed conflict, it would likely operate under the operational command of the joint task force which had undertaken the major combat. In the subsequent phases, it could operate under the direction of an interim U.S. authority. The United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), formed in 2003 to provide homeland defense, would coordinate the interaction, training, and exercises of reserve and active components allocated to the stabilization force component during normal peacetime periods. It also would be the senior military command authority for the individuals and units assigned to the component in response to attacks against the U.S. homeland or natural disasters. Training would focus on interactions between the stabilization force component and the other participants in the transition process from war to peace for operations abroad, and in homeland security under the direction of state or federal authorities.

A Path to 2010 Cebrowski predicted that the greatest challenge to achieving the triad structure he described would be largely perceptual (which does not diminish the difficulty of overcoming it). He thought we had lived so long with the notion that the central threat was a worldwide war with a military superpower and with a force design to cope with that contingency that we had presumed that everything else

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the military might face would necessarily be a lesser included problem for a force designed to deal with World War III. This made it difficult to recognize that because the world had changed we needed a different force design. ‘‘But to get it,’’ he would say, ‘‘we have to leave the old vocabulary behind, for until we break with the terms of the past we will continue to believe in the concepts underlying those terms. We have started to do this by replacing ‘threat-based’ planning with ‘capabilities-based’ planning, but we must continue to replace the older vocabulary and concepts with new ones. And that certainly goes for how we think about the structure of the U.S. military.’’ That said, the force design he sketched generates some legitimate issues. As he informally floated his model he got a better sense of how controversial it would be. Some claimed his triad would simply reduce the military capability of the force by diverting too much of it to joint experimentation and stabilization. They pointed to claims that the force is ‘‘stretched’’ to a breaking point by operations throughout the world and suggested that this is not the time to add the confusion of new rotation patterns or the burden of additional missions. Cebrowski never accepted the notion that the U.S. military was as ‘‘stressed’’ as some commentators claimed. ‘‘Let’s be clear on what is ‘stretching’ the force,’’ he would say. ‘‘At the height of the U.S. military deployment to Iraq, the United States had roughly 200,000 personnel outside their normal, preplanned schedules involved in operations associated with the war on terrorism and meeting peacekeeping missions. That was a little less than 10 percent of the personnel in the total force.’’ About two-thirds of the active force component personnel and about a quarter of the reserve component personnel were directly involved in the military operations and stabilization efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2005. The range of the involvement, however, was broad—from up to several days to over a year. That means that while many in uniform served in these areas during the height of U.S. military activities there, most did not. This is not to argue that there is considerable slack in military life today. There is not, and the men and women in uniform work hard. ‘‘But,’’ he argued, ‘‘the question is what they should work hard at doing when they are not fighting. And when it boils down to a question of either preparing for the past by sticking to the schedules of training and preparation for Industrial Age war, or preparing for Information Age war through mechanisms like joint experimentation, the future ought to win.’’ The idea of taking about a fifth of the National Guard and focusing it on stabilization or disaster response inside the United States drew the most fire. The neuralgia came from two aspects. The first was the prospect of moving away from the active army in terms of training, equipment, and warrior culture. Many in the Guard resented any attribution that they were second-class warriors and worried that such a shift would aggravate the angst, and, eventually, dam up the flow of federal funds for those so designated. The second was anxiety over a loss of state control and concern that once designated, trained, and equipped for dealing

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with domestic disasters, the president would too often call up the stabilization force component and send it out of the state, because its capabilities would be so useful. That is, in fact, what his model envisioned. In it, by 2010, roughly 15 percent of the reserve component would diverge in terms of structure, organization, and operational focus from today’s current goal of making reserve forces clones of active components of the nation’s armed forces. But, again, this would represent a shift away from a force design that was conceived over half a century ago to meet a need that no longer exists. Cebrowski believed the reserve components possess capabilities that are essential to national security. Many of those capabilities, however, increasingly flow from the fact that the men and women in the Guard and reserve forces are mostly oriented toward work, experience, and knowledge of the civil sector where their primary career paths lie. This made them inherently better equipped to deal with the transition from war to civil society and to respond to the local, domestic dimensions of disasters inside the United States than the military professionals that compose the active components. ‘‘Would shifting a portion of the reserve component toward stabilization capabilities represent a ‘down grading’ of the military importance and significance of the reserve components?’’ he asked. ‘‘Hardly. Today, and probably for the future, it is the post-major combat stabilization mission that will emerge as increasingly vital to the United States and our role in world affairs. And that means higher importance, status, and significance to the reserve components who would move to key positions in this mission.’’ What about the complexity of the shared direction, control, and command of the prevent forward force component as the units assigned to it rotate through joint training, operations, and experimentation? To some this may threaten the quality of the force because, in their view, individuals assigned to the prevent forward force component could not train in service-specific skills because of the emphasis on joint training and experimentation. It is true that, on average, the service-specific training of individuals and units assigned to the prevent forward force would decline. But there are some mitigating considerations. First, although the units of this component would spend more of their time during their normative two-year assignment to the prevent forward on joint training and experimentation than is the case today, that would not necessarily be at the direct loss of service-specific training or skills. The fact is that joint and servicespecific training is not a zero-sum game. Pilots flying their military service’s aircraft in joint training missions do not lose their flying skills or familiarity with the aircraft they fly as airmen, naval aviators, or Army pilots. Infantrymen working with Air Force aircraft in close air support training or experiments do not lose their basic infantry skills. Second, it is not that individuals assigned to the prevent forward force component would lack service-specific skills, nor that individuals returning from the component would be ‘‘behind’’ their peers because of their focus on joint operations. Any personnel assigned to the component would have

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had the benefit of service-specific training and experience. Likewise, those returning from assignments in the prevent forward are unlikely to return ‘‘behind.’’ On the contrary, since the United States will fight jointly, they may return from their period of joint emphasis ‘‘ahead.’’ To be sure, creating a prevent forward force component along the lines Cebrowski outlined would alter the current authority the military services have in training, equipping, and defining the future structural, organizational, and materiel requirements. The increased role of functional commands (USSTRATCOM and USJFCOM) would make this so. The prevent forward component would be, in fact, a direct challenge to the current service insularity in the requirements process. To the extent it emerges, the traditional roles of the military services in defining military requirements would almost certainly change because it would accelerate the trend toward a more pervasive and tangible joint perspective which would come at the expense of traditionally perceived service prerogatives.8 Indeed, that is part of the purpose of the idea of a transformation vanguard and the dual role of the prevent forward component. To the extent that joint military interdependencies were a component of transformation, which they most assuredly are, Cebrowski thought this effect was just fine.

The Size of a Future U.S. Military Cebrowski contended that because transformation is a process, not an end point, there is no logical way of describing a ‘‘transformed U.S. military.’’ You can, however, note what the changes along the way are likely to be, take some snapshots that freeze the process of change, and highlight the significance of some of the changes. That is what the following discussion tries to do—provide some snapshots of salient characteristics that would be consistent with his model, starting with the size of the U.S. military over the next several years. Cebrowski assumed that it would be increasingly possible to obtain more military and capability with fewer numbers of people as information technology and some of the effects of his reorganization took hold. Suppose his basic argument that knowledge could substitute for mass was correct. How much knowledge could reasonably substitute for mass by 2010? What would be the overall manpower level of the U.S. military then if that substitution occurred, assuming the United States wanted to reduce the manpower levels in its military without reducing military capability? This does not mean, of course, that the United States would necessarily want to do this. If there is as much of a trade-off between mass and information as Cebrowski thought, information might enable the individual soldier to do much more than his predecessors could. Network centric warfare assumes, for example, that backed by the right information technology and organization, each node (soldier) on a network increases the potential productivity of the whole network nonlinearly. So, one way of using the

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trade-off would be to increase the numbers of military personnel to get a nonlinear leap in overall capability. But what follows describes what might happen if the United States used the trade-off to maintain, and, in fact, increase, military capability and potency with fewer people. The increase could occur along two paths: automating activities and functions now performed manually, and consolidating functions in which excess redundancy exists. Many in the private sector have touted the first path as the highway toward higher productivity, but historical review suggests it does not necessarily occur quickly.9 In any case, you have to be careful about attributing military personnel reductions to higher productivity and then assuming that as information technology increases productivity additional personnel reductions will follow. The fact is that the military does not measure its productivity and effectiveness in the same manner as the private sector and does not reduce personnel in the name of profit. It tends to reallocate personnel technology replaces rather than cut them. Personnel reductions also could come from consolidating some functions currently undertaken by each military service. Information technology could reduce some of the redundancy across the military services and defense agencies in command and control, logistics, and institutional maintenance.10 Here, too, there are some caveats. Some historians point to the consolidation efforts in the 1960s and the creation of separate defense agencies as evidence that few, if any, personnel reductions would or should emerge from consolidating functions and the personnel that provide them. From a historical point of view, they had have a good case. The ratio of logistics and institutional personnel to the personnel whose activity falls in the fire and maneuver functions—the toothier part of the military—is actually higher now than it was before the McNamara reforms of the 1960s and the birth of the defense agencies. But that was then, this is now. Joint operations, service interdependencies, and the fact that the military services are much more aware of and appreciate the power of information technology to reduce the need for redundancy all make the experience of the 1960s and 1970s less a barrier to divesting some redundancy and more a lesson in how not to do it. Rather than erect additional institutions and agencies to undertake the functions of logistics, communications, medical services, and transportation for the military services, it makes more sense to expand the capabilities of particular services so that they can assume responsibilities for the other services in these areas. The Army, for example, could serve as the executive logistics agent for many of the logistics functions the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force conduct separately for themselves; the Navy could do the same for communications, and so on. The result could be, unlike the earlier experience, largely a true reduction in redundancy and the manpower reductions that would allow.

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Figure 4.3 Personnel Functions Figure 4.3 illustrates this in terms of the changes in active military strength between 2004 and 2010 in seven major military functional categories.11 As the figure indicates, trade-offs between mass and information could reduce the manpower of the active forces by about 15 percent over the next six years. But there is another phenomenon at work here, too. That is the reallocation of manpower within the forces. That shows up in Figure 4.4, which portrays changes in the percentage distribution of manpower brought about by the information-mass substitutions and the structural implications of what Cebrowski outlined as the force trifurcation. The reallocation of manpower portrayed in the illustration is probably more significant than any reduction, for it manifests the shift toward a more potent and agile force overall. The structure for 2010 represents significant percentage growth in information superiority, fires, and maneuver, more than matched by decreases in the manpower shares allocated to logistics, fires, and force protection. Cebrowski believed the future of warfare belongs to forces that are smaller, faster, and more numerous. This is not the formula that set the standards of

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Figure 4.4 Personnel Functions in Percentages of the Force

military excellence during the Industrial Age, for although numbers and speed were valued then, too, so was mass and size. This was in part contradictory, for mass and size tended to work against speed. But mass was valued highly because of the lack of timely, accurate, and comprehensive information. In its absence, mass provided the insurance against the effects of making mistakes about where forces were, how strong they were, and what they were doing. With the advent of the Information Age, accurate, timely, and comprehensive information became more available. Mass became less important. Speed became more feasible and the productivity of smaller units became more interesting. This was because the communications improvements allowed numerous, fast, small units to work collaboratively. Cebrowski was convinced that if they could do this, a lot of smaller, faster military systems would almost always beat fewer, larger, and slower ones. ‘‘It is not smallness, or speed, per se, that has value,’’ he said. ‘‘It is smallness and speed accompanied by increases in the information fraction of individual units and of the force components they compose that makes the difference.’’ In other words, the inherent advantage of numerous, fast units was that they could

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be in more places faster than less numerous slower units could. They could therefore always both have knowledge of what was occurring in a larger space and influence more of what was occurring throughout the greater space, faster. That required them to operate in a dispersed manner, of course, for their ability to influence what occurred in a larger space vanished if they huddled together and did not seek to use the inherent advantages their numbers and speed offered. So far, Cebrowski’s argument was nothing really new. Military strategists had recognized for centuries the utility of fast, numerous units and had sought them for as long, usually in the form of scouts for larger, heavier, less mobile force elements. But Cebrowski’s ideas began to push beyond the traditional frontiers of military thought because of his insights regarding communications networks and the military power of shared knowledge. The ability of numerous fast units to know about and influence events and phenomena in the broader area depended on increasing the information fraction of the units and sharing each unit’s perspective. Increasing a unit’s information fraction was in part a function of its ability to sense what was occurring around it. It depended on technologies that collect, process, correlate, and communicate information. Large units could generally do all of that better than smaller units because, being larger, they could carry more. That was at the heart of the trend in all modern militaries to move to larger platforms and organizations throughout the Industrial Age. But the price for that trend could be high. All you had to do was compare the prices incurred for the sophisticated super carriers that replaced the earlier aircraft carriers, or the up-gunned, night-visioned, turbine-powered, 60-ton Abrams tanks that replaced the 30-ton tanks of the 1960s to get a sense not only of the leap in financial costs per unit, but also of the increases in the logistics, maintenance, and training tails that accompanied the steady trend toward larger, more complex and multicapable military systems and units through the last two centuries. It was true that nations could sometimes get greater movement speed from going to the brute force of larger propulsion plants. But there was generally a decrease in the rate at which significant changes and modifications could be made to the larger systems. The evidence was not only in the longer time it took to go from drawing board to operational status, but in the extending time it took for new models to replace the old. The larger and more complex the platform, the longer you were stuck with it. Smaller could be faster at less unit costs and shorter modernization times. But it was the power of networking that gave them their operational value. Robert Metcalfe’s ‘‘law’’ explained why: the value of a network scales as twice the number of nodes. Roughly stated, a network with twice as many people provides four times as much value to each person on the network. So, the larger the number of units on a network, the more each could obtain valuable information from the network. How valuable was a function of the technologies that collected, processed, correlated, and communicated information. It was also a function of

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networking—of combining individual perspectives and understandings into commonly held knowledge. ‘‘So,’’ Cebrowski argued, ‘‘the priority goes to systems, weapons, and operational concepts that increase the overall capacity to gather, communicate, and use information effectively. That can create the information edge that gives the smaller, faster, networked units the advantage. The competitor that can gather more information, draw more relevant knowledge out of that information, and get that information to all its force components has an advantage. If training, experience, and skill allow the force components to use the information faster and better than an adversary, that competitor will almost always win.’’ The more numerous the sensors—including individual humans, some of the very best sensors—the more dispersed they could be. The more dispersed, the more comprehensive their information take could be. The wider the acoustic and electromagnetic spectra from which they could draw information, the more detailed the knowledge they could generate—if they were networked together. ‘‘Push these assumptions about how one competitor can gain an advantage,’’ he argued, ‘‘and you get to a force design principle. Namely, that systems, units, or warriors not on the net are not contributing to, not benefiting from, and not worth having in an Information Age force. Defense advocates for programs that fail to contribute to joint force interoperability ought to be seen as simply nominating their programs for cancellation.’’ In Cebrowski’s view, then, smaller, faster, networked force components could more quickly build a shared, more comprehensive understanding of the competitive situation in which they competed. They could convert that information edge into a military edge if they could rapidly decide how to use the destructive power each unit possessed in a collaborative way. That had been the classical challenge of command and control systems, and military organizations had classically dealt with the challenge with hierarchy and discipline. In the classic military organization, information ideally flowed upward where the wise, experienced, well trained—distinguished by their higher rank—could sort it out into an understanding of what was occurring and how best to push the competition to victory over the antagonist. Based on their understanding, their orders would flow down to the units and individuals who would act accordingly. In the nineteenth century, Clausewitz had explained how the violence and fear of conflict produced a fog of war that tore and warped the information flowing upward, and how confusion delayed the orders flowing downward and errors as to command intent and misunderstandings produced a friction in implementing the orders. His solution was discipline: subordinates had to follow orders as well as was humanly possible; their superiors had to devote themselves entirely to understanding the art of war. Cebrowski’s answer to the challenge supplemented that of the classic approach. Lateral as well as vertical information flows could reduce the fog of war; self-synchronization among the elements directly using military violence could reduce the friction of war.

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Operations Cebrowski’s views of structure and organization conditioned his descriptions of how to conduct military operations in transforming militaries. Numerous, small, networked units and platforms made sense if the networks that tied them together carried the right kind of information. Making this the case meant protecting the networks from unauthorized intrusion and incorrect information. Neither was a trivial problem, something he had faced in spades while serving as the director of command, control, communications, and computers on the Joint Staff in the mid-1990s. One of his biggest concerns then had been the exponentially growing number of attempts from throughout the world to hack into the command and control computers in the Pentagon. The problem had not gone away. If anything, efforts to intrude into the networks had continued to increase and the sophistication of the cyber attacks had grown. But so too had the sophistication and effectiveness of the defenses and Cebrowski was convinced that the expansion of the networks and the self-synchronization at the tactical levels he advocated raised the immunization and expanded the ability to correct misinformation. That by no means meant the problem had been solved. But to him, it underlined the need for vigilance and continual defensive improvements, rather than going ahead into network centric organizations. Network centric operations did mean some significant changes, however. One of these was his concept of ‘‘fighting first for sensor reach.’’ Traditionally, U.S. military operations tended to accept the notion that it was first necessary to establish a strongly defended presence in enemy territory in order to build the information collection capability needed to continue military operations to their planned goals. But in his view, it had become both possible and desirable to now establish a sensor presence prior to intervening with significant combat power. Some of the new technologies of space operations, miniaturization, stealth, and information collection were dramatically increasing the ability to establish a sensor presence anywhere in the world. U.S. military operations in Afghanistan had disclosed some of what was now possible. But the important point was that operations focused on establishing and expanding sensor coverage were the key to the power of the organizations and structures he associated with transformation. The most significant operational shift associated with transformation was, however, the rebalancing of operational purpose. Network centric operations moved away from the concept of attrition. The emphasis on sensor coverage and the rich information and robust battlespace knowledge to which it was devoted made the shift possible. This was because with enough of the right kind of timely, accurate knowledge of the battlespace and the opponent, it would be possible to discern the most important nodes in an opposing force. Attacking them with speed and precision could have systemic effects, collapsing the opposition without having to destroy it entirely. The grand shift away from

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attrition warfare was, to Cebrowski, the ultimate reason for moving to network centric operations. It was a more effective form of warfare and, because it had a lower probability of collateral damage, it was a morally superior form of warfare.

Weapons Structure and organization were two of the three legs of the force Cebrowski had in mind. The third was directly tied to the aspect that distinguished the military from other human institutions: its ability to use violence. This is the realm of weaponry, truly, the point of the spear, edge of the blade, barrel of the gun, and the other metaphors that swirl around this most important aspect of military forces. Cebrowski spoke and wrote more about the structure, organization, and operations of military forces than he did of weaponry. This was not because he thought weapons were unimportant in transforming the U.S. military, or to standout from the many observers and commentators for whom weaponry held such fascination. Because he had wielded weapons he appreciated both the fact that they were part of the essence of militaries and their destructive power. Warriors understand weapons in a way those who only build them or talk and write about them cannot. He believed transformation was tied to particular weapons characteristics and saw weaponry in the context of how he thought about structure and organization. The best weapons were those that could help justify his belief in small, numerous, fast, and networked fighting units. So, to the extent they could bolster the quickness of units they had much more value than those that could not. To the extent they could expand the area in which the fighting units could influence military competition they had higher value than those that could not. To the extent they could provide capabilities the United States did not yet have, they were preferable. ‘‘In choosing among demands for resources,’’ he would argue, ‘‘the nod ought almost always to go to the candidate that extends the breadth of our capabilities rather than the one that improves an existing capability.’’ And he believed the key to successful military competition was always to acquire, modify, or invent weapons that would perform at an increasing rate of military return to U.S. forces in the midst of accelerating change and adaptive opponents. ‘‘The Army’s Crusader artillery system is an example of what I mean here,’’ he explained.12 ‘‘It was clearly going to be a better cannon in the context envisioned by its designers a decade ago. But the altered strategic environment devalued that consideration. In the Information Age there are better ways of providing what the Crusader promised: low cost, high volume of fire and short response times. In Afghanistan, aircraft, precision munitions, and long-range dispersed joint capabilities empowered by high-speed network centric warfare concepts were more effective than the Crusader could have been. A mix of small, fast, networked systems that extend the overall breadth of our military capabilities will

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perform at increasing rates of return on an investment. The Crusader would have performed at decreasing rates.’’ He used these propositions to formulate a test for distinguishing the things the Defense Department should invest in from those that it should not; more specific guidelines that he believed could provide transformation decision logic. ‘‘They begin by asking if a candidate—it can be a weapons, support, intelligence, or transportation system, or something less tangible, like a force structure or operational concept—is transformational. That is, does it enable a new concept of operation and represent a difference in kind, not degree? If so, is it robust in the face of a wide range of threats? Does it broaden the capabilities of the force? And does investing in it promise an increasing rate of return on that investment? ‘Yes’ to each of these questions signals a transformational winner. ‘No’ indicates a loser.’’ This was a reflection of his focus on the competitive dimension of military affairs. All of the tests in his formulation of transformational decision logic assumed a potential competitor. Why did he value the idea of enabling a new concept of operation? Because he believed that in military competition the contenders were constantly seeking ways of neutralizing each other’s advantages. If, as one of the contenders, you constantly sought new concepts of operation in parallel with the natural efforts to counter what an opponent could do, you would not suddenly find yourself at an irreparable disadvantage when your opponent found, as they were bound to do, a means of countering your current way of operating or other relative strength. Why did he favor things that promised an increasing rate of return on the investment? Not so much because he had some trick in hand that could accurately forecast the future—he often said there were no such tricks and it was stupid and dangerous to think otherwise—but more because trying to think about future returns on investments helped emphasize mental agility and challenge conventional wisdom. Altogether, his criteria iterated the need to think of potential outputs in terms of how they would affect the competitive situation inherent to military affairs. He cautioned against being too narrowly focused on technical characteristics or becoming mesmerized by speed, range, stealth, or other weapons systems characteristics. ‘‘It’s too easy to start seeing them as things that are inherently good regardless of the context in which you may have to use them. When that happens, you introduce a rigidity to thought. They become ends in themselves, pursued mindlessly. It happens in aircraft design. You know, the faster, higher, farther mantra that can produce aircraft that achieve one or two of these characteristics at the expense of what turns out to be a much more valuable set of capabilities in a competitive context.’’ Within those general parameters of approaching the tough decisions on what weapons to buy, Cebrowski favored precision as the paramount standard, for two reasons. The first was because of its connection with military efficiency. Precision meant, among other things, that the platforms that carried and launched

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precision weapons could achieve higher probabilities of hitting what you wanted without hitting what you did not want to destroy. That higher probability meant you could reduce the numbers of weapons a platform carried to try again when the first missed. That meant you could reduce the risk to the platform because it could reduce the number of times or the length of time it might have to make attacks, and so on through a cascading set of factors that resulted in greater efficiency and overall effectiveness. The second reason was a corollary of the greater probability of not hitting something you did not wish to destroy promised by greater precision. It reduced the likelihood that in using military violence you would harm the innocent. It reduced the chances of collateral damage. Some challenged him on what they saw as a contradiction in his line of argument. On the one hand, he cautioned against assuming that a particular set of weapons characteristics were always valuable, and then highlighted precision as something that sounded like he believed it had enduring value. ‘‘Well,’’ he would respond, ‘‘I never said precision, or speed, range, or any of the other characteristics people praise are without value. What I said is that the value attached to them had to be reasonable and always subjected to critical assessment in the competitive context in which you think you may employ the weapons. For me, precision appears to be something the United States is likely to value because it fits the American sense of morality. But my point is I could be wrong. Can you think of a competitive military situation when precision would not be valued highly?’’ No one seemed to be able to do so.

Modularity and Mass Customization Cebrowski’s penchant for continual critique was consistent with the value he attributed to changes. He never argued that change was inherently good and never accepted the cliche´ about changing for change’s sake. But he did believe that changes in the right direction were worth a great deal, and that the correct changes were worth trying to accelerate. He recognized that doing this depended on changing the production processes outside the military that produced its weaponry, hardware, software, vehicles, and everything else that contributed to what the U.S. military was and could do. He never worked out to his satisfaction what those changes should be, but he did develop some insights on what was necessary to move to the modularity he advocated for the military. He called it ‘‘mass customization.’’ Mass Customization Defense procurement has traditionally sought duplicates of the same thing, long production runs, and evolutionary improvements. The pattern provides steady, marginally larger profits for the producers and standardization, steady

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training and learning curves, and predictability for the military consumers. But in the Information Age, when military power increasingly flows from adapting rapidly evolving information technology, Cebrowski argued, mass customization eclipsed the utility of mass production. He stressed that mass customization referred to producing goods and services that fit a wide range of different requirements in order to meet rapidly changing demands. It was a way of tailoring capabilities for rapidly changing conditions and experimentation. He believed the commercial world offers examples of the approach and pointed to Dell, a leading computer producer. ‘‘Dell,’’ he said, ‘‘allows customers to identify a significant range of particular capabilities they want added to the basic model they buy at about the cost of the basic model. Depending on the memory, hard drive, and other components you designate, you can get very different computers. That’s mass customization.’’ The U.S. military was, he argued, already taking advantage of the idea of mass customization. ‘‘The best example of the approach so far is the littoral combat ship the Navy is starting to build. The range of capabilities it will provide will be impressive because each hull will have configuration, mission, and battle network modularity. That is, the configuration of a given littoral combat ship will be a function of the weapons, electronics, and the ship’s technical equipment modules that the operators ‘‘plug’’ into the hull. Its mission capabilities will reflect the containerized weapons and other equipment packages they add, and its battle network modularity will flow from both the sensor and communications modules it carries.’’ He believed mass customization was not limited to naval forces because what makes it possible—advances in technology, particularly in programmable, computer-based machines, modules that conform to standard interfaces, and networked systems—apply not only to the various platforms on which Army and Air Force components depend, but also to the organizations they employ. ‘‘The Army is beginning to implement the notion in its Future Combat System and the Air Force would argue—without too much exaggeration—that its interest in multi-role fighters (like the F-16) pioneered mass customization for the military services.’’ So, the shift to mass customization was underway. He argued, however, that it was not going fast enough. It was going much slower than it should because none of the military services thought much about the strategic competitive advantage of wider and deeper use of mass customization. That is, they did yet recognize that mass customization generated a variety of experiences that were, in effect, a form of accelerated experimentation, that in turn opened up a wider range of options and flexibility in the design of future forces. Mass customization, coupled with modular design, enabled the military to rapidly configure new and different joint units with many capabilities. ‘‘To the extent it suffuses the force structures, it multiplies the base with which to continually experiment with ever more effective means of merging advanced technology with

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the military structures, organizations, and operational schemes. That makes it easier and faster to take full advantage of the technology and accelerate organizational and structural transformation.’’ The combination of mass customization and modular design helped the military reduce the cycle time for introducing new capabilities. ‘‘This is,’’ he claimed ‘‘easiest to demonstrate for platforms—ships, aircraft, and large ground combat vehicles—where the cycle time for innovation can run up to decades for primary structural materials or propulsion systems, but the cycle times for significantly new capabilities in communications and other information technology components runs in terms of years or less. As long as we design ships, aircraft, and tanks largely as single integrated entities, the rate at which they can take advantage of the rapidly changing technology is shackled to the cycle times of the components that change much more slowly. Modular design alters that. It multiplies the future force options open to the United States. And that degrades the ability of potential opponents to forecast the kind of capabilities the U.S. military will have in the future. This is the force planning equivalent of the operational desirability of confronting an opponent with overwhelming complexity.’’

A Fight with the Navy Cebrowski had started to develop many of his views prior to his appointment as director of the Force Transformation Office. In the late 1990s, then president of the Naval War College, he had emerged as the foremost advocate of what he termed the ‘‘streetfighter’’ concept. The idea revolved around using smaller, fast ships that could provide presence and compete successfully with the enemy for control of coasts and littoral waters. The ships were supposed to cost less than 10 percent as much as current battle force ships. He argued the Navy could achieve this by, among other things, adapting the catamaran design hull the Australian Navy had pioneered in fast cargo ships and using modular designs that would allow them to quickly shift what they carried among different combinations of weapons, aircraft, sensors, and troops. He advanced the concept initially as a means of overcoming the Navy’s concern with using its larger, much more expensive, main battleforce combatants in high-risk littoral areas. But it became a basis for his views of the power inherent in numerous small, fast, networked fighting units. The Navy opposed the idea, largely because it was convinced the concept could not generate the naval power of larger combatants, and, committed to a 50-year shipbuilding plan to maintain a Navy built on highly capable individual ships, feared Cebrowski’s streetfighter would jeopardize its shipbuilding goals. But, Cebrowski’s arguments made sense to Congress, particularly those members who were worried that the Navy’s preferred course would necessarily lead to fewer ships overall and perhaps to the final collapse of the shipbuilding industry

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in the United States. They kept the idea alive, ultimately pressuring the Navy to build something it insisted on calling a ‘‘LCS’’ for littoral combat ship. It was not the full expression of what Cebrowski had in mind, but moved toward his concepts sufficiently to assure that the mossbacks in the Navy would not forever refer to the new class of LCS as ‘‘those little crappy ships.’’ By November 2004, the Navy had contracted for two LCS, but institutionally remained unconvinced that the concept had more than experimental value. Congress again intervened and in the FY2004 National Defense Authorization Act mandated two independent studies of naval fleet platform architectures, circa 2020. The Navy turned to a federally financed research and development center, the Center for Naval Analyses for one; Congress asked for the other from Cebrowski’s office. The Center for Defense Analyses study, perhaps not surprisingly, produced a fleet architecture that closely paralleled what the Navy planned for the future, heavy on large, multipurpose, highly complex and capable ships and manned aircraft. Cebrowski, however, seized the chance to expand his force design concepts to encompass the entire Navy and did so with gusto. His design focused on how to complicate an adversary’s action in combat and a potential adversary’s force planning and had the following characteristics: • large numbers of platforms (to complicate an enemy’s effort to track and target U.S. Navy forces, and to offer us the maximum number of force employment options) • great variety of U.S. Naval forces • fast, agile, low-signature platforms • constant experimentation • modularity (That is, ship designs that allow sensor or weapons suites to be ‘‘plugged’’ in or out of the ships in order to quickly adapt the platforms to changing strategic or operational challenges. Among other things, modularity facilitates readiness and experimentation. Separating the sensor and weapon suites from the hull permits the Navy to incorporate new technology into the module without taking the ship out of service.) • larger numbers of unmanned vehicles

With these as planning parameters, he pulled together a new fleet architecture made up of current ships, successful prototypes, and ships within the bounds of demonstrated technology. It differed significantly from the fleet the Navy envisioned in several ways. Cebrowski’s architecture had a smaller number of larger ships capable of providing high-volume firepower, aviation, troop spaces, module support at sea, and logistical transport. But it had a significantly larger number of smaller ships, designed to accept different weapons, sensor, and transport modules, and while his alternative used the same number of manned aircraft the Navy had programed for the future, it included a much larger number of unmanned aerial vehicles. Cebrowski substituted air independent propulsion submarines for the Virginia class attack submarines on a cost-saving basis of roughly four

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to one and added larger numbers of unmanned undersea vehicles. Overall, he kept the alternative at an equal cost to the Navy’s programmed fleet in terms of procurement and 30 years of operating and support costs. The ships in his alternative architecture were generally less potent and less technically complicated than those of the programmed fleet; smaller ships simply cannot carry as much. But, the increase in numbers was impressive. The Navy’s design called for a total of 224 combatants; Cebrowski’s architecture came up with 774 plus over 1,300 unmanned vehicles, mostly unmanned aerial vehicles but with many unmanned underwater and surface vehicles, all for the same costs as those projected for the Navy’s preferred fleet architecture. The key question in all of this was, of course, how effective would such a force be, compared to the force that will emerge if the United States sticks to the path the Navy currently says it wants to pursue? Pretty good. At least from an analytic standpoint, the alternative fleet provided some impressive advantages, particularly in the context of efforts to help project power ashore and support U.S. ground forces there.13 This was the arena where analysis indicated Cebrowski’s alternative fleet provided superior capabilities because its numbers, agility, modularity, profusion of multiple sensing assets, and networking give it markedly more offensive and defensive edges. Similarly, the alternative fleet also offered important advantages at the other end of the sea environment—the open sea—where its greater numbers, modularity, speed, and agility provided relative edges in controlling the operational domain. The Navy worried that Cebrowski’s alternative would line Congress up against the Navy’s long-standing commitment to bigger, self-contained, ever more sophisticated ships. The Navy’s leadership believed a general shift toward a fleet design relying on greater numbers of highly networked, faster, and smaller ships posed a profound institutional disruption. It turned to its stable of in-house and contractor analysts, charging them to come up with the technical reasons why such a shift was dangerous. They churned away with robust enthusiasm, mostly pulling old assessments from the files (they had heard some of the challenges before). But, for every argument they came up with, Cebrowski had an answer (he had heard most of their counters before). The Navy claimed that to get the speed Cebrowski advocated would require power plants that demanded so much fuel the smaller ships could only carry enough for a few days on station! Cebrowski said change the hull shape and you can get speed and time on station without the gluttonous power plant the Navy assumed. The Navy argued new designs would take too long to come up with and test! Cebrowski said the Australians and others already had them. The Navy said U.S. shipyards could not build the new designs! Cebrowski said build them elsewhere. The Navy said the costeffectiveness of the ships would decline! Cebrowski said not if they were networked. The Navy used its hold card: ‘‘It’s not the way we do things!’’ Cebrowski said it is a new age—change the way you do things.

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Cebrowski had no sense that he had won some kind of contest—he had seen the study as an intellectual challenge and an opportunity to test some of his ideas on a broader canvas with a wider palette of analytic colors . He was pleased that they appeared to hold up, but found the most pleasure in the suggestion that his concepts could apply generally to all U.S. military forces. For if they could survive against the onslaught of Navy tradition and conventional wisdom, they had to be able to prevail against the dogma the other services would throw at them. So, he looked forward to pushing the argument analytically with the other military services, and believed his contention that the kind of technological changes that enabled modularity and networking for the Navy would hold up for U.S. ground and air forces as well. Just as precision guidance for munitions allowed smaller naval platforms to carry the destructive potential once associated only with larger ones, thereby decoupling power and survivability from size, it could do the same for the other military services. The capacity of information to substitute for mass could apply to all the military services. The sensor proximity and persistence that he argued would make naval aircraft and other weapons more effective would do the same for the Army and Air Force because the advances in all their guidance systems made knowing where the enemy is the key. Why did he think this was a big deal? ‘‘Look,’’ he said, ‘‘when the core military institutions really all accept the new design principles, that’s when the parochialism that keeps them apart operationally finally melts away. Each of the military services guards its separateness jealously, cloaking it in claims that the environments in which they operate—land, sea, and air—are so unique they can never adopt the same design philosophy. And with that assumption, the differences in design philosophy become the manifestation and rationale for their parochialism. And for the excess redundancy that characterizes their common functions of logistics, communications, intelligence, transportation, and administration. And for the limits on their ability to operate together effectively. When they all see the operational value in moving toward smaller, faster, more numerous, networked units—that’s when U.S. military transformation will accelerate.’’

Looking Backward from 2010 Cebrowski was cautious about predicting the future, and when he did always added the caveat that making predictions about what would occur was easy, but making accurate predictions was pretty close to impossible. So, when asked how sure he was that the U.S. military would move toward what he had described as coming, he was hesitant in claiming any prescient knowledge. But he did argue that what he had portrayed was ‘‘feasible, and much of it is already planned, underway, or consistent with the secretary’s guidance and direction. So, while we can be sure that the projection is not a precisely accurate description of what the U.S. military will look like in 2010, it may not be too far off, either.’’

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He believed what actually emerges is going to be close enough to his vision of what the U.S. military could be by the end of the decade to allow some generalizations about what is coming. So, he laid out what he thought the U.S. military would look like: • Its lead in information superiority will be greater. The U.S. military will be much better in generating and exploiting high-quality shared awareness through more timely, accurate, and relevant information than it is now. More importantly, its ability to do this will extend the lead it has in this capability relative to any other military. • Its ability to extend sensors deeper—in terms both of greater distances and in terms of more comprehensive take—will be dramatically better. The transition to deployable, distributed, and networked sensors will be well underway. These sensor networks will be able to detect, identify, and track items of military interest at operationally relevant ranges with much greater accuracy and continuity. • It will routinely translate information and knowledge into the requisite level of common understanding and situational awareness across all U.S. force components. • In part because of these capabilities, it will be a very different military. Rapid speed of command, dynamic self-coordination, de-massed structure, and operationally dispersed forces will distinguish the U.S. military from all other militaries by 2010. • These will have dramatic operational effects. U.S. military forces will be able to move strategically with much greater force much faster. They will be able to alter the initial conditions of a conflict much more rapidly and to dominate the rate of change on the battlefield. They will operate with greater decisiveness over greater distances and ever greater speeds. And they will operate within a very different organizational construct. Today’s boundaries between services and within processes will be gone; joint operations will increasingly occur at the tactical level.

He recognized these all represented dramatic changes in a short period. But he thought that he was making a ‘‘surprise-free’’ forecast; that is, that military professionals and knowledgeable observers would be surprised if the elements of his forecast were not present. And that was what he saw as the key strategic issue regarding the transformation of the U.S. military. How would the United States manage the accelerating relative growth in U.S. military power, prowess, capabilities? How could the United States help the world live amicably with the world’s only military superpower as it becomes the world’s only ‘‘hyperpower’’?

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MILITARY TRANSFORMATION AND WORLD AFFAIRS

If U.S. military transformation evolves along the lines Cebrowski sketched, how will the rest of the world react? More particularly, what effects would it have on allies and the alliance structures the United States has and is trying to build? The issue was particularly salient during the first George W. Bush administration after its public release of the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States. That and a series of statements by the president and other administration officials framed the so-called Bush doctrine, arguing the United States should act preemptively to prevent strikes on U.S. targets and be willing to act unilaterally when the United Nations or allies balked. It became part of the explanation for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Many other nations, including several traditional allies in Europe, did not receive the new formulation of American security strategy well at all. French commentary was probably the most caustic, but the thrust of the critique echoed in German, Italian, and other media amid cartoon images of the remaining military superpower unconstrained in its exercise of military power. Cebrowski had not been involved in the formulation of the doctrine. But as Rumsfeld’s director of force transformation, requests for discussions with him poured into his office from various foreign representatives seeking to better understand the military implications of what many took as a dramatic new American military doctrine. In these discussions, most of his visitors saw growing tensions between the United States and its traditional allies. While they did not argue that the U.S. military transformation was the root cause of them, they worried about the doctrine and whether the U.S. military efforts in transformation

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would increase the disparity of and make the United States more eager to act unilaterally.

Disparity Dangers That there has been a marked disparity in military power between the United States and its allies is no revelation. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, that disparity grew. Both the United States and its allies began to reduce their forces and military expenditures in the late 1980s. But over the last decade U.S. military expenditures surged, increasing at a much higher rate than any of its traditional allies. U.S. military strength leveled out and then began to grow slowly in the mid-1990s as allied strength continued to slip downward. More recently, the disparity in defense expenditures has grown faster, largely because of the cost of U.S. military operations in Iraq.

Figure 5.1 Military Expenditures

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The relative U.S. growth in force size and military expenditures paralleled a more important divergence, however. Over the last decade the U.S. military increasingly added Information Age capabilities to the Industrial Age power it had accumulated during the Cold War. By the end of the twentieth century, the disparity of military power between the United States and its allies was twofold: The United States had increased its edge in Industrial Age measures of military prowess largely because of the greater post-Cold War force and budget reductions by our allies. But, it had also opened up a new and more potent edge by being the first to enter the Information Age of military power. Comparing the expenditures of different nations with those of the United States highlights the disparity. The United States leads nearly all of its principal allies in research and development spending. According to one European commentator, ‘‘The gap in military research and development is unacceptable and growing, with Europe spending $10 billion vs. $50 billion for the United States in fiscal year 2003.’’1 The United States accounts for the bulk of military research and development spending worldwide—$26,800 per soldier, compared to $4,000 in the European Union.2 In 2005 U.S. defense spending on research and development alone was greater than Germany’s entire defense budget. The United States is also far ahead in spending on procurement. It buys large numbers of weapons systems that capitalize on technological innovation, allocating $60 billion for procurement in the fiscal year 2007 budget request, compared to roughly $30 billion all other NATO nations will probably spend together. Does ‘‘disparity breed discontent’’ within alliances? Since the collapse of the bipolar international system over a decade ago, a number of people have said so.3 The potential problem they point to is that in the absence of a common military superpower threat the increasing disparity of U.S. military power will drive political wedges between the United States and its allies. It is not the disparity, per se. The political cleavage will come, they argue, because the United States will be less inclined to go along with procedural constraints on using its military power, and the Europeans and other allies will increasingly believe this to be the situation, even if it is not.4 The concern with the unilateral use of force by the United States stems from two factors: the erosion of an institutional framework that emphasizes collaborative force use and the growing disparity of military power between the United States and other nations. And, in the view of many in Europe and elsewhere, the United States’ efforts to transform its military add to their concern. Speculation about what U.S. military transformation means for world affairs peeks out from the deluge of mass media throughout the world. If you skim journals, newspapers, and television programs in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and just about everywhere else you will find it. The propositions that tie it together include the following:

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Cebrowski argued that this is not necessarily bad. The world had changed; the threat as we once knew it and for which we built our alliance structure was gone. So, why lament the past or try to hang on to arrangements, institutions, agreements, and assumptions designed in and for an era that has passed? Particularly if, in the absence of the compelling threat that spawned them, they act primarily to limit and restrain the United States from pursuing its national interests or deal effectively with the problems of the twenty-first century? ‘‘The answer is,’’ he replied, ‘‘that we need cooperative and collaborative arrangements, institutions, agreements, and assumptions in order to deal with the twenty-first century problems. The common threat that generated the alliance structure through the last half of the twentieth century is gone and the prospect of civilization-killing strategic nuclear exchanges, massive clashes of modern armies, and traditional nation-state aggression that glued it together has pretty much vanished. But the chances of actually experiencing the horrors of weapons of mass destruction and deadly cultural conflict are higher now. And who would want to deal with them alone?’’ Cebrowski argued that the old conceptual divisions that once framed U.S. alliances—‘‘East/West,’’ ‘‘aggressor/defender,’’ ‘‘capitalism/communism’’—no longer carry actionable meaning. However, it still made security sense to him to speak of a world divided between the relative rich and the relative poor, those who were embracing the Information Age and benefiting from it and those who sought to reject it, or, as Barnett had suggested and Cebrowski had helped popularize, a world bifurcated into the ‘‘core’’ and the ‘‘gap.’’ The division had similarities to the old Cold War division. For one, the divide was not easy to eliminate. ‘‘As powerful as the United States is,’’ he said, ‘‘raw, physical control of the gap is beyond our capacity, even if we wanted to obtain it—which we don’t. Nor is it desirable, and probably not possible, to encapsulate the gap. We and the other members of the core depend on it too much, not just for the natural resources, but also for a range of trade, materials, and human skills. And while

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we might be able to become a bastion of internal security to protect ourselves from the anger, poverty, and disease emanating from the gap, we would change ourselves to our detriment in the process. In short, the notion of containing the problem until its internal dynamics implode or simply wind down can’t work anymore. We have to shift from the defense to the offense, from reaction and response, to pro-action and prevention. We have to expand the good transactions between the ‘core’ and the ‘gap’ while limiting the dangerous, degrading, and ugly ones.’’ He was convinced that it is better to try to do this with others instead of alone. It was not a new insight. The mainstream of U.S. policy for over a century had always placed the higher value on cooperative and collaborative action in the use of military force. This is not to say that the United States has subordinated unilateral to multilateral use of force. It has not. ‘‘But,’’ Cebrowski pointed out, ‘‘while we have always reserved the option to act unilaterally—as have all other nations—we have consistently sought to enlist the cooperation of other nations in using our military and to institutionalize cooperative arrangements for doing so before a particular situation calls for it.’’ He thought maintaining this policy reflected two commonsense values. First, the cooperation of other nations made U.S. use of military force much easier and more effective. Second, it allowed each of the participants to influence the decisions of other participants regarding the character of their military forces and how they use them. But, how was the United States supposed to counteract the erosion of its old alliances and reorient them to the twenty-first century, and how is it to establish the new alliances it will need to do this? How does the United States do this in the face of growing concern and suspicions on the part of its allies that U.S. military transformation may be leaving them behind? When European criticism sparks American allusions to ‘‘old Europe’’5 and fuels desire on U.S. leaders’ part to ignore their concerns, interests, and views? When U.S. military transformation to some allies imbues the United States with an increasing capacity to pull them into a chasm of unintended consequences? Cebrowski approached such questions analytically. ‘‘One approach is, of course, to slow or abandon our force transformation. If there is a connection between our military transformation and the solidarity of our alliances, we can affect the latter by what we do with the former. If the current trajectory of U.S. military transformation is going to increase the U.S. disparity in military power at the expense of our alliances, should the United States simply slow its rate of military transformation?’’ His answer was no. U.S. military prowess stems from both Industrial and Information Age sources, and even if the United States slowed its military transformation plans, the United States would probably maintain its military superpower status well into the current century. That might alleviate concerns that the United States is trying to increase the military edge it has, but it really would not alter the superpower status of the United States or change

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the disparity in power the Americans had over its allies. Nor would it prevent the United States from reserving the right to act unilaterally or stop it from doing so. But, it would, he argued, keep the U.S. military a blunt instrument that, when used, could make things very messy. To Cebrowski, the United States was transforming to make any use of its military force more precise, more moral, and more effective, not to make the United States more arrogant or less sensitive to the utility of collaborating and working together with others to deal with common problems. ‘‘Why,’’ he asked, ‘‘would any friend and colleague want to delay that?’’ Cebrowski thought the concern on the part of allies was overblown in part because groups inside the United States who themselves saw transformation as threatening exaggerated foreign concerns. ‘‘Transformation is not cost free,’’ he noted, ‘‘particularly regarding what we have to give up in order to get it. We have to relinquish old, often very comfortable, assumptions, procedures, systems, and hierarchies. Giving up such things is never without controversy. So, beneath the nearly unanimous rhetorical commitment within the U.S. national security community to transformation, there is sometimes the view that in effect says, ‘look, slowing our transformation and hanging on to the military we know and love can keep our alliances together, alleviate the criticism we’re getting, and pay off in terms of our diplomacy.’ Angst about a collapse of our alliances may have a lot to do with internal bureaucratic politics.’’ Regardless of whether the concerns of allies were overblown, Cebrowski cautioned against ignoring them. Why he warned against it had to do with his view of the utility to U.S. transformation of having other nations also embrace military transformation. This went beyond questions of interoperability and being able to share network centric operations. He wanted allied nations to seek to transform their militaries because it could better provide a broader, more effective experimental base than the United States could provide alone. He did not want to dismiss their concerns over U.S. transformation because doing so could undermine his vision of broadly based, collaborative research and development that could accelerate U.S. military transformation. This was a fundamentally different way of looking at alliances. Throughout the Cold War, there had been collaborative research and development among the members of NATO, ANZUS (the security alliance among Australia, New Zealand, and the United States), and among other alliances in which the United States participated. But, that had been essentially a side show, a kind of diplomatic nicety that had marginal benefit to the ability of the militaries of the members to work together. The core of Cold War alliances rested on the U.S. monopoly of nuclear weapons technology and weapons—which, with some important exceptions for Great Britain, France, Canada, and Australia, the United States was not inclined to share with other allies. So, most of the alliances revolved around agreements and understandings between the United States and

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the other allies on when and how the United States would use the nuclear weapons technologies it kept close to its vest. Cebrowski believed that unlike nuclear weapons information technology is essentially available to any nation that decides to make the modest financial commitment to integrate it into their armed forces. The fact that the United States leads in doing this was largely a function of two factors: we started earlier than most other nations, and, more importantly, we had been more willing to integrate the technology with changes in the structure, organization, and operational schemes of our military. But Cebrowski argued things were changing, and while the momentum of U.S. transformation was likely to increase the disparity it enjoyed in military power for the next several years, other nations did not have to traverse the same trajectory the United States had pioneered in order for them to transform their militaries. ‘‘Some, such as Sweden, Australia, and Singapore, are pushing ahead on their own transformations. Indeed, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan have begun to do so, as well. And just as they learn from the U.S. experience, we can learn and benefit from how they transform their military forces.’’ The best way of alleviating concerns on the part of our allies with U.S. military transformation was, Cebrowski believed, to share, collaborate, and work with them on their military transformation. His question was what is the right vehicle for it—traditional alliance arrangements or the newly coined coalitions of the willing? He recognized there were some important differences between the two. ‘‘As someone I talked with at a conference on transformation in Europe had put it, alliances are like marriages. A long courtship precedes it, a lot of ritual surrounds the joining, whatever issues from the joining is legitimate, and a good one lasts a long time. Coalitions of the willing are like one-night stands: Not much courtship, little ritual, their issue is illegitimate, and they don’t last very long.’’ The continuity and relative longevity of alliances provide some things coalitions cannot. Continuity helps foster and maintain interaction, training, and coordination processes. These turn out to be important when events trigger the purposes for which the alliance exists. If, for example, an alliance exists to cooperate in armed conflict, the fact that the forces of the members have trained together can make a big difference. Alliances tend to acquaint members with a common set of procedures, identify the channels and points of contact that become key to effective coordination in time of need, and help build the personal networks of trust and knowledge that turn out to make the difference between productive interaction and counterproductive confusion when the chips are down. Longevity increases the value of maintaining the relationship. ‘‘The longer alliances last,’’ he argued, ‘‘the more they build at least the perception of the value of maintaining them. Longevity also spreads cooperation and collaboration beyond the boundaries initially ascribed to the alliance. For most of its history the NATO alliance formally had nothing to say about economic competition

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among its members or the individual actions of members outside the geographical area defined in the treaty. But it certainly influenced both. While economic competition for export market shares among NATO members was a fact of economic life, that competition never got out of hand, in part because of a common interest in maintaining the alliance. Likewise, NATO members who objected to actions by other members outside the formal confines of the treaty, dampened for the sake of the alliance what otherwise would probably have been much more scathing criticism. This was, for example, the case during the Suez crisis of 1956 when France and Great Britain lined up on one side and the United States on the other with regard to who was going to directly control the Suez Canal. It happened again during the 1970s when many NATO members informally opposed U.S. military actions in Vietnam and U.S. support to Israel in the 1973 ArabIsraeli conflict.’’ Coalitions usually do not offer these benefits. They are limited in focus and time, and, as such, lack arrangements that facilitate common training, procedures, and approaches to collaboration. The coalitions that formed during Operation Desert Storm and over a decade later for Operation Iraqi Freedom focused their ‘‘collaboration’’ on trying to stay out of the U.S. military’s way and avoiding fratricide. They may have had high political utility for a relatively short period of time. But that utility never spread into a common perspective or interest beyond the specific purposes for which the participants formed the coalition. On the other hand, Cebrowski acknowledged, national leaders often prefer coalitions precisely because of this feature. They are less entangling. ‘‘So, it’s really not an either-or issue. Basically, we ought to focus on reorienting our existing alliances toward more capacity to deal with the new common threat. This probably includes continuing to support expanding NATO membership eastward. It could also involve serious thought about and efforts to build a new alliance structure in the Pacific that includes China. But we will probably need short-term coalitions as we go about it.’’ Cebrowski believed the key to effective cooperative engagement was mutual benefit. But it was important to recognize that the disparity of military power between the United States and other nations can inherently cause suspicion. It was also important to recognize that the purpose of U.S. military power had expanded beyond the traditional understanding of national security. ‘‘The purpose is no longer simply to protect the core values and institutions of the United States and its interests abroad, narrowly defined. It now includes the export of security abroad, a security that, yes, involves protecting the United States against the threats that emanate from the gap. But it also involves exporting security to the people who live in the gap in order to prevent the emergence of threats to the United States and its interests.’’ He knew this was controversial. ‘‘Some will recoil from this formulation. It may sound like advocating that the U.S. military should become a policeman in the slums of the world, or that the military ought

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to move away from war fighting toward nation building.’’ But he thought those interpretations carry the residue of the past myths, when the gap was a sideshow to the central concern of massive Soviet military aggression in Europe, and nation building was a dangerous diversion of the military away from the primary military threat. And it is not an either-or proposition, for the United States would continue to need a military capability sufficient to sustain major military campaigns. The fact is, he argued, that the U.S. military must expand its capabilities to deal with both the possibilities that it may have to fight modern, significant military threats and also export security in the face of the nonconventional military problems. What are these nonconventional problems? They include destroying global terrorist networks (similar, perhaps, to taking down the al Queda network in Afghanistan), stabilizing chaotic civil situations (similar, perhaps, to the postmajor combat operations in Iraq), establishing governments (similar to the intervention in Haiti), and removing them (again, similar to the intervention in Haiti). In other words, they deal with that complicated political arena between using military force in response to clear-cut aggression among nation states and using military force for humanitarian purposes. The first has been the longstanding rationale for the use of military force since the Treaty of Westphalia and the birth of the nation state in the seventeenth century. The second is more recent, rooted in the late eighteenth century in such things as Jeffersonian democracy but given a considerable boost after World War II and now also a legitimate rationale for the use of military force.6 The tension between these two—the former a foundation of the concept of sovereignty, the latter a foundation for limiting the concept of state sovereignty—is what makes the argument that the U.S. military role is to export security into the gap so controversial. That controversy, in turn, complicates doing it effectively and underlines the question of whether we can or should try to do it unilaterally. To Cebrowski, the answer was that the United States could not do it easily or effectively unilaterally. We should do it collaboratively. ‘‘Today,’’ Cebrowski argued, ‘‘we need a framework that is similar to the ‘nuclear umbrella’ arrangements that offer the military benefits of American power to our allies with some assurances that they can influence how and when we use our power. This is not a matter of ceding our decisions on the use of our strength to others. It is a matter of recognizing both the short-term political utility and the longer-term necessity to work together with nations and groups that not only share with us the benefits of globalization but also the deeper commitment to democratic values.’’ He was convinced that the military technology around which the United States might reorient NATO and build new alliances would not be nuclear weapons. This was not because nuclear weapons were no longer important. They remain the most destructive instruments yet conceived. But the concern now was less with the numbers and character of the weapons that set the strategic

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nuclear relationship between nuclear powers, and much more with the few numbers of nuclear weapons that nations or subnational groups in the gap may obtain, and, more importantly, use. Here, he argued, our common interest was to prevent nuclear proliferation, and, more controversially, to be able to reverse it by actions that included the removal of weapons of mass destruction and the means of obtaining them from the gap. As such, the technology around which we should build new alliances, he argued, was that which allowed us to do this. More specifically, he claimed that ‘‘the foundation for revitalizing old and building new alliances will come from those technologies that enable the core to protect itself from the anger, frustrations, hatreds, and harmful actions emanating from the gap and to export security into the gap. The shorthand for these technologies is information technology. And the goal is use this and related technologies to build a global ‘‘transformation umbrella.’’ Cebrowski’s transformation umbrella was significantly different from the Cold War nuclear umbrella. It would be global in scope and its purpose would include helping to integrate the gap into the core. That is, it would seek not only to protect the nations that were benefiting from globalization from the hatreds and attacks by people not benefiting from globalization, but it also would seek to extend the benefits of globalization into the areas and nations in which the hatreds were fermented and the attacks generated. And it would often be an umbrella that would invert to collect and merge technology insights from others. ‘‘If we are to use our technology as a basis for the new cooperative engagement, we must do so differently from what we did with nuclear weapons technology. Despite symbolic control over the nuclear weapons we stationed overseas, we never allowed our allies much real access to the technology, control of the weapons, or the decision processes associated with their use. The nuclear umbrella with which we extended deterrence over our allies remained under our ownership and control. Our allies and we all understood this; just as we understood the alliance partnerships we all collectively celebrated were composed of two ranks in which we, in sole control of the central military technology of the time, were the senior and they the junior partners. It was this underlying distinction which generated the tensions that led to the break by the French in the late 1960s and which smolders within Europe today.’’ Information technology, the technical engine of military transformation today, provided the basis for much closer political-military integration with traditional alliance nations. To achieve it, the United States would have to see its military information technology as essentially something to share, as opposed to something that distinguishes and elevates us. ‘‘That’s a difficult proposition to swallow,’’ he acknowledged, ‘‘not only because it sounds like we would voluntarily step down from the military position that gives us much leverage in world affairs, but also because it would open access to our inner sanctums of intelligence,

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communications, and databases. So, what’s the case for what may initially seem to be a radical proposal?’’ Part of it was self-interest. We could use both the technical inputs and the competitive stimulation. The technological driver of military transformation is generally available, and while the United States is a leader in integrating it into its military forces, it is not the only nation that is doing so. Sweden, Singapore, and Australia, for example, have made impressive strides, as well. None of these nations match the United States in shear military power, even disregarding nuclear weapons. But each matches or exceeds the United States technically in some key military areas. Sweden has developed what may be the world’s best coastal surveillance system. The local air and sea surveillance and tracking systems developed by Singapore and Australia match and probably exceed those of the United States in reliability and sophistication. ‘‘So,’’ Cebrowski maintained, ‘‘it’s a two-way street. Our allies would, no doubt, gain technical insights and expertise were we to share access to our intelligence collection, surveillance, reconnaissance, and processing capabilities. But we would gain also.’’ While the United States had pioneered in military transformation, the technology that drove it changed so fast, the key to maintaining a lead or simply to keep up was continued technological innovation and agility in adapting military forces to use the innovations effectively. As pioneers, it was easy for the United States to miss this, settle too early, and wake up after others had gained the lead. ‘‘Building collaboration while we have a lead is not unilaterally relinquishing the lead,’’ Cebrowski said. ‘‘It is increasing the chances we can keep up by assuring that all the collaborating members share promising pathways. Helping to transform and integrate the military information systems of all members of our alliances while we hold a commanding lead could turn out to be the best investment we could make in the twenty-first century.’’ The strongest argument for such an approach is that it could help shift the alliances to a firmer political foundation. As long as the United States in effect monopolized nuclear weapons technology, it was destined to dominate its alliances in the context of nuclear deterrence. Other members accepted U.S. superiority because they could derive the benefit of the American military power without paying the price of developing an analogous power—which they could not afford even if they wanted to. They had a protector with whom they shared many interests, a common cultural heritage, and purpose. But beneath the formal partnership, the consultative procedures, and iteration of camaraderie, it was an unequal relationship. Only one member, the United States, controlled the technology on which the structure of deterrence rested. As such, the alliances were always prone to the suspicions and resentments generated by a chaffing sense of powerlessness on the part of the non-U.S. members and a sense that they were responding with ingratitude on the part of the United States.

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This underlying tension surfaced in the context of the conflict with Iraq in 2003 when Germany and France, among others, refused to join the military coalition that kicked Saddam out. There were complex pressures involved in the diplomatic and political maneuvering prior to and after the major combat operations, but, arguably the most significant and dangerous factor that emerged in the spring of 2004 were the rising questions regarding the credibility of the United States. These appeared most specifically regarding the state of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and intentions. But the challenges to U.S. credibility were broader, extending into suspicion of the overall intentions of the military campaign and U.S. foreign policy more generally. Retrospective views are a great luxury, of course, but Cebrowski wondered if the United States would have been so quick to declare the presence of WMD in Iraq if we had developed a much more integrated intelligence approach with our allies prior to the decision to overthrow Saddam’s regime with military force? Or if in the aftermath of failing to find the WMD, the credibility of the United States government would have eroded as much. Cebrowski did not think this was just a rhetorical question. ‘‘The issue here is not that we must assuage the schadenfreuden of the Europeans, or that the challenges and critiques of the United States that emerged after the military campaign in Iraq marked a real split within the alliance. It is that it provides evidence that our erstwhile allies would welcome a U.S. shift toward bolstering the alliance by greater information technology integration—with particular regard to intelligence.’’ He recognized that integrating U.S. military information technology with that of its allies was not something the United States should entertain without careful consideration. ‘‘But neither should we be constrained by the fears of the past regarding sharing the emerging key military technology of the twenty-first century. Not only because that technology is very different from that around which military power in the previous century formed, but because the world is.’’ The new basis for alliances, and for the specifics of cooperative engagement, he explained, is a set of agreements and procedures that would provide similar assurances to our friends and to ourselves as those once provided by the nuclear umbrella. There would be some important differences. The main product of such an arrangement would not be to ‘‘deter’’ the spread of danger, anger, hatred, and instability from the gap. It would be to assist and support a collaborative effort by the nations of the core to export security into the gap. And the character of what we would share with our friends and allies in this endeavor would be different, too. ‘‘We did not base the notion of extended deterrence on sharing our nuclear technology or the details on how we weaponized it or intended to use it if we had to with our allies. And we certainly did not actively promote the development of the technology by them. But we would be likely to do so with the information technologies and force designs associated with transformation.’’

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Sharing Technology Innovation Why would we do this? Part of the reason had to do with the technologies. The technologies at the heart of military transformation evolve quickly. The key to avoiding long-term commitment to obsolescent technology is therefore to have access to a research and development effort that emphasizes breadth and allows investigation of new technology as it emerges. A large number of participants can better do that collectively than any single member can do it. ‘‘Proliferating development efforts is simply the best way to test a technology’s capabilities. To the extent the Pentagon promotes and partners in external research and development,’’ Cebrowski said, ‘‘the chances of expanding potential uses for the technology go up. That allows it to diversify its technology bets and feed more quickly off advances in the technology base.’’ Cebrowski cautioned that we should not kid ourselves about how easy it would be to promote transparency and openness. ‘‘Technology sharing carries tremendous historical baggage of concern, sensitivity, and caution.’’ Mutual security constraints and suspicions paralleled the great successes in the past and today there are continuing political and economic inhibitions to openness, even among alliance partners. Military security concerns may be eroding in the face of the commercialization of military research and development. But intellectual property concerns and market competition limit the rate at which the transparency expands. Expanding it will not come automatically. For this to work effectively, of course, all participants in the collective effort have to know about the research and development, experimentation, and planning efforts of each participant. At first glance this may appear to be not worth worrying about, for it seems an inherent condition of any alliance, and, there is evidence that military research and development is becoming more transparent. Researchers at the University of California and elsewhere track the pattern of military research and development within two categories they refer to as ‘‘shielded’’ and ‘‘shared’’ and point to a long-term shift toward the latter.7 Part of the shift reflects the growing importance of commercially available information technology and the spread of common protocols and other standards. To Cebrowski, the key to greater collaboration in research and development exists where the technology transected military organizations, structures, and operational concepts. That was in the realm of experimentation, and it was in combined experimentation with how to adjust existing military structure, organization, and operations to take advantage of the new technologies that Cebrowski argued should be the core of collaboration. A multiplicity of experiments, he argued, allows faster development of new capabilities with lower individual risk. He distinguished collaborative experimentation from the usual exercises the U.S. military had with allied forces. Cebrowski saw a lot of difference. ‘‘Virtually all of the current exercise interaction between U.S. and other forces focuses on

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demonstrating the way our forces do things now. Exercises normally are not a search for better ways of doing them in the future. We try to demonstrate that what we do now, we do very well. The forces with which we exercise try to demonstrate that what they do now, they do very well. Mistakes, unexpected developments, and surprises are frowned upon. So, current exercises are generally antiexperimental. Experimentation is very different. There, the bias is on finding different solutions to problems and new approaches. Discovering the unexpected has high value.’’ He had some specific recommendations regarding NATO. NATO had already begun steps to increase transformational collaboration, and while the results so far were less than impressive, the structure through which it could occur was emerging. The 2002 Prague NATO summit meeting established the Allied Command Transformation (ACT) with the formal mission to transform NATO’s military capabilities; prepare, support and sustain alliance operations; implement the NATO Response Force and other deployable capabilities; and assist the transformation of partner capabilities. NATO does not always back up its press releases about marching together forthrightly into the future. But Cebrowski thought the new command could be more than just an information clearing house. He found the connection with the NATO Response Force particularly interesting. NATO communiques called for a 25,000-strong multinational rapid reaction force, the majority provided by the European members of NATO. It will include air assets and command and control capabilities to support up to 200 combat sorties per day; a brigade-sized ground force; and maritime forces, all trained and equipped for expeditionary operations. In October 2003 NATO declared a prototype element of the force operational and as of early 2005, over 9,000 of the Response Force’s 20,000 troops had been trained and certified as prepared for combat, ready to deploy within 5 to 30 days, and sustainable for 30 days. The personnel will rotate through periods of training and certification as a joint force, followed by an operational ‘‘stand by’’ phase of six months, roughly similar to what Cebrowski defined as a U.S. defend forward force. That is the point, of course. The NATO Response Force is a potential vehicle through which Cebrowski thought the United States could share its transformational efforts. ‘‘We could do this by contributing units equipped with the cutting edge of our military technologies to it. Better yet, should we move toward the force trifurcation I suggest, why not synchronize the unit rotation scheme for the U.S. defend forward force with that of the NATO Response Force? If NATO’s Allied Command Transformation were to adjust the rotational pattern of the Response Force to include an experimentation phase similar to that I associated with the U.S. defend forward force, it could establish a direct link with where U.S. military force transformation would most dramatically occur. There would be no better way of ‘sharing’ U.S. force transformation with our NATO alliance partners.’’ Figure 5.2 illustrates how it might work.

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Figure 5.2 Synchronizing U.S. Experimentation with NATO Response Force Experimentation

The figure portrays the rotation pattern of the units assigned to a U.S. ‘‘prevent forward’’ force component at the bottom of the illustration and the rotation pattern for units in the NATO Response Force at the top. The units in the NATO Response Force will undertake a period of joint and combined training, followed by a 6-month period in which they would be on call for operations. At the conclusion of the on-call period, the units assigned to the NATO Response Force leave their NATO Response Force assignment. If NATO’s Allied Command Transformation were to add an experimentation phase to the rotation pattern (the striped rectangle) and synchronize it with the experimentation phase of the U.S. defend forward force component, both could gain valuable combined force experience while jointly working out the best organizational and structural

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ways of using cutting edge technology. The flow of transformation knowledge would be direct and two-way. Cebrowski recognized the political complexities that lay beneath the formal arrangements and displays of NATO solidarity regarding the NATO rapid response force and, in particular, the diplomatic scramble that goes on in trying to explain its relationship to the European Rapid Response Force.8 As far as he was concerned, it did not really matter functionally whether the organization supplying European forces for the experiments came from NATO or the European Union. The point was to take advantage of the new organizations that were emerging as the United States and Europe tried to work out the new international order.

Expansion to New Alliances Cebrowski’s observations applied mostly to NATO and other long-standing formal alliances. What about new alliances that could include Russia, China, and other nations with whom the United States has not had the same kind of alliance relationship? Should it attempt to build similar alliances with them, and, if so, how difficult would it be to do so? He responded that the basic rationale for exploring new formal alliances with Russia and China was that these two nations were part of the ‘‘integrating core.’’ He believed that they had decided to ride the modernization tide of globalization, rather than to seek to oppose it. At the most general level, then, they shared some important goals with the United States and faced the common threat to obtaining those goals. ‘‘Collaboration and cooperation with them,’’ he argued, ‘‘would make it easier for us and others to obtain the goals we share than working separately or at cross purposes. The other reason has to do with the future. Alliances have as much to do with limiting antagonism among their members as mutually defending against the antagonism of outsiders. So, for as long as the possibility exists that we will end up competing with Russia or China, the more incentive we have to reduce that possibility further by building an alliance structure that emphasizes our agreements rather than our rivalries.’’ This, he believed, had been the primary motivation of the NATO expansion eastward. While NATO extended full membership to only a few of the former members of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, others, including Russia, had become partners. ‘‘What distinguishes the NATO partnership for Russia from full NATO membership,’’ Cebrowski observed, ‘‘is the degree of mutual trust we have and our willingness to open what earlier we tried so diligently to cloak in secrecy. But the earlier concern with secrecy, however valid it was in the past, is now much less compelling. And despite continuing concern that U.S. and Russian national interests may not be fully compatible, the pattern of interactions

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over the last decade indicate they are moving toward greater compatibility. A significant shift occurred after 9/11, and since then, U.S.-Russian relations have moved toward much greater cooperation, as they should.’’9 Russian experts differ in their opinions when explaining the trend. To Zbigniev Brezinski, it reflects tactical decisions by a Russian leadership that remains committed to reestablishing an empire to offset U.S. power.10 To Leon Aron, it represents a growing and long-term effort to ‘‘join the west.’’11 So, the jury is still out. It seemed to Cebrowski, however, that it was in the short- and long-term interests of both Russia and the United States to maintain the trend, whatever its original motivation. ‘‘If we can incorporate Russia into joint research and development efforts and experiments on how to use it in military structure, organization, and operations, we increase the chances of longer, deeper, and mutually beneficial collaboration in military affairs and in dealing with the security issues that will dominate the future, not those that dominated the past.’’ His view of the future of alliances, then, rejected the idea that they should exist to balance the military power relationships among great powers, as had been the case in the Industrial Age. He believed the purpose was to help manage the tension between what he saw emerging from the disparities between the core and the gap. To ignore this, to remain focused on the notion of trying to deal with a return to a balance of power system among great national powers, was both wrong and dangerous. To the extent the United States sought to maintain or create alliances to guard against the rise of competing military powers, whether they were Russia, China, India, or Europe, would not only make it more difficult to deal successfully with the clear, present, and increasing danger, but complicate and darken the future. Whatever the overhang from the past that conditioned not just U.S. foreign policy, but also the foreign policies of the so-called potential future peer competitors—China, Russia, Europe, Japan, India—all of these were committed to globalization. They all sought to benefit from it. They all could do so by dealing with the challenges and the conditions that created those challenges that were emerging from the gap. They could do so better in collaboration than by competing militarily with each other. ‘‘We should’’ Cebrowski said, ‘‘welcome the participation of nations such as Japan, Australia, Singapore, Sweden, Israel, China, India, and Russia into collaborative research and development efforts, more personnel exchanges, and joint experimentation efforts. These efforts would lack the procedural framework and tested framework of the NATO alliance. That would not necessarily be a disadvantage. The biggest difficulty would be, of course, overcoming the knee-jerk reactions that this kind of interaction would constitute a threat to our national security. But, the threat to national security stems more from stasis than it does from the kind of accelerated innovation collaboration offers.’’

CHAPTER

6

SUCCESSES AND FAILURES

Cebrowski was at the center of many of the debates that swirled through the defense department between 2001 and 2005 and for him it was, as he said, the perfect culmination of a professional career that had begun over four decades earlier. In 2005, as his cancer sucked out his vitality and he neared death, he looked back. ‘‘It was wonderfully exciting to have been where I was over the last four years. I know the tides that now sweep us into the future had begun well before I returned to the Pentagon in 2001. But to have been there when they really began to change things, well, I can’t think of any place else that could have been as fulfilling.’’

A Report Card In Cebrowski’s retrospective, Rumsfeld had tried to transform the U.S. military by simultaneously breaking old molds in U.S. defense thinking and articulating new assumptions. His emphasis was on breaking things. As Cebrowski described it, ‘‘Rumsfeld knew things had to be changed in the Pentagon. He was not sure about what changes to make, but he had an instinct for how to go about making them. He brought in people he believed would advocate change. He understood the really hard part of changing things is getting rid of what you find comfortable. So, he sought to stimulate innovation and change by destroying what he saw as the shibboleths and icons of planning that worked against change.’’ But Rumsfeld was astute enough to understand that as important as it was to challenge conventional wisdom, the key to driving stakes into

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the hearts of the concepts you want to kill was to have something ready to replace them. He turned to Cebrowski for two things: help in explaining why some old assumptions had to go and help in articulating what would replace them. Those two charges set the parameters within which Cebrowski judged how well he thought he had done as director of force transformation. He thought his report card showed successes in helping the secretary replace some assumptions that tended to retard and inhibit change with others that enhanced and accelerated it. The report card also listed some absences—things that should have been done but had been missed—and some surprises along the way. Changing Assumptions Rumsfeld had some specific targets he wanted to attack and some more general ideas about what he wanted to build. He wanted to get rid of Cold War residue. This included the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, because he believed it was a prime example of how old assumptions founded in the Cold War now prevented the United States from doing something the new era demanded: building a national missile defense system that could defend against missile attacks by rogue nations. But he also went after planning assumptions and processes he believed inhibited the innovation and more rapid change the post-Cold War era demanded. Here, his targets were threat-based planning, aspects of the planning, programming, and budgeting system that retarded faster changes and generated excessive costs, and military service parochialism. Cebrowski’s assistance came via the concept of challenges as a replacement for threats, by showing how network centric concepts could help reform planning, programming, and budgeting, and in developing the notion of interdependency to deal with service parochialism. From Threat-based to Capabilities-based One of the first ideas Rumsfeld went after was threat-based planning. He wanted to replace it with what he called capabilities-based planning. His argument was that threat-based planning, which had dominated defense planning through and after the Cold War and had focused on countering specific threats that a few nation states could pose, had narrowed thinking too much. The terrorist attacks proved the defense department was thinking too myopically and made it quite clear that planning had to consider a much wider range of potential problems. So he directed the Pentagon to start thinking more about what any nation or non-national opponent could do to hurt the United States, that is, more about the range of capabilities to do harm that were out there, possessed or available to non-national actors as well as potentially hostile nations, not just currently, but in the future as well.

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Rumsfeld understood that military planners had a penchant for worst-case planning. And despite the negative connotations of the phrase, he recognized that worst-case planning included serious contemplation about what any opponent could (and would try to) do to surprise the United States. In short, there had been a long tradition inside the Pentagon of ‘‘capability-based’’ thinking, and the original architects of the long-lived focus on Soviet military capabilities had in part hoped that focus would stimulate thinking about the range of capabilities the U.S. military might have to deal with. That is, by assuming the big threat would emanate from a devious, highly competitive, military superpower with the broadest of capabilities (military, political, and economic), defense planners in the 1960s had consciously hoped to generate a considerable breadth of potential defense requirements. The problem was that the Soviet military and industrial planners did not usually seek leaps in capabilities. They had done so early in the Cold War with crash efforts to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, but that turned out to be the exception to the otherwise incremental modernization that characterized their approach to their military. After the 1960s, the gradualist approach the Soviets had adopted tended to erode U.S. planning interests in leaps to new capabilities. Strategic nuclear parity and mutual assured destruction bolstered caution about upsetting the relationship, and given the Soviet approach to military modernization, planning future U.S. forces revolved around straight-line projections of a future threat. By the time the USSR collapse removed the logic that anything other than the Soviet threat was a lesser included case, the incremental approach to U.S. military force planning that seemed fine for the Cold War had become too comfortable, too engrained, and, in Rumsfeld’s view, completely divorced from reality and entirely too risky. He announced, in the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, that capabilities-based planning had replaced threat-based planning. The Review did not spell out the specifics of what the new planning base was, but it was clear that the emphasis was on broadening military capabilities to deal more effectively with a wider range of contingencies and on stimulating thought about how any opponent might attack the United States rather than on who might attack from where.1 The defense department collectively saluted smartly and quickly adopted the term in virtually all documents that had anything to do with planning. But the nagging little query about what in the world was capability-based planning really all about kept growing. If threat-based planning had been too narrow, was its replacement just a bit too, well, fuzzy and limitless? ‘‘As a result,’’ Cebrowski said, ‘‘the secretary asked some of us to go beyond the admonition to abolish ‘threat-based planning’ and provide a more robust conceptual framework that would help the Pentagon better understand the thinking behind capabilitybased planning and continue to stimulate greater innovation, imagination, and change in the planning process. That was what led to the argument that the department ought to focus its planning on how to deal with four challenges.’’

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Figure 6.1 QDR Planning Cebrowski did most of the intellectual heavy lifting, the results of which ultimately emerged in the National Defense Strategy published in 2005 and in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review. The challenges were, respectively, traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive. The idea was to break the grip traditional challenges—nation states employing recognized military capabilities and forces in well-understood forms of military competition and conflict—had on U.S. military thought. The rising concerns were ‘‘irregular challenges’’: terror, for example, in which the target was less the U.S. military or infrastructure than the will and cohesion of the United States society and citizens. Terrorists were unlikely to be able to amass the raw military power a nation state could, but they might also be much less responsive to U.S. deterrence efforts—more willing to use a weapon of mass destruction against the United States if they could get one. So, defeating terrorist networks had to rise in planning priority, as did preventing them from getting dangerous capabilities. The way of looking at catastrophic and disruptive warfare had to change, also. ‘‘What we need to understand,’’ Cebrowski argued, ‘‘is that modern catastrophic warfare involves devastating vertical shocks in a particular location or nation that

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radiate rapidly throughout the world. Globalization—the growing interdependencies and connectivity driven by the Information Age—is responsible for the emergence of this modern form of catastrophic warfare. Scenarios involving nuclear, radiological, biological, or chemical weapons are its mantra. But, as the 9/11 shock demonstrated, catastrophic warfare need not involve only esoteric nuclear, biological, chemical, or cyber technology and does not necessarily require the resources of a modern nation state to wage it.’’ Finally, there was modern disruptive warfare. In Cebrowski’s view, ‘‘Disruptive warfare can come on two vectors. One is a classic military technical-cultural surprise—something you’ve never dreamed of, or, more likely, simply dismissed— that just blows you off the battlefield. The other is a military competitive edge that emerges, typically from the bottom up, that renders your current military model and assumptions obsolete. You may see such things coming, but you discount them because they don’t look real, or important, or because you assume your military capabilities are so overwhelming and comprehensive that they can handle just about anything. Kind of like Shakespeare’s description of the French dismissing the British archers before the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V. Such things can be dramatically disruptive of an existing set of assumptions and world view.’’ The growing awareness that these three challenges were no longer ‘‘lesser included cases’’ of traditional military threats provided intellectual structure to the notion of capabilities-based planning, narrowing it to the kind of specificity that facilitated focused analysis without losing the emphasis on innovation. It sharpened awareness of the facts that the U.S. military has to be able to deal with issues it once simply assumed other parts of the government would take care of, and, conversely, that other parts of the government have to be much better at working with the military in the fuzzy transition from armed conflict to peace. Today there is a general recognition throughout the national security planning community that the military can no longer view its role as narrowly as it once did. A different view—that the U.S. military role extends from winning battles into winning the political victory for which it fights battles and that the role of other governmental and nongovernmental agencies begins before peace is obtained—is now a basic assumption. ‘‘The credit for this does not go just to what we were doing in the Office of Force Transformation,’’ Cebrowski underlined, ‘‘but we helped and it’s one of the things I count as a success.’’ Reforming the PPBS Rumfeld also went after the central planning process in the Pentagon, the PPBS (the acronym for the planning, programming, and budgeting system). Born in the 1960s, the PPBS was, and remains to this day, driven by Secretary McNamara’s famous question upon arriving in the Pentagon, ‘‘how much is

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enough’’ for the nation’s defense? It was not a new question. But McNamara came into office convinced that a particular analytic and budgeting process could generate the best answer. Today, with all the modifications succeeding administrations incorporated to it, McNamara’s process remains the core of how the Pentagon decides to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars the nation commits to national security. And at the center of that core is ‘‘cost-effectiveness.’’ Rumsfeld was concerned about the PPBS on several levels. At the most general level, he believed the process retarded the changes and the rate of change that was necessary. It sought to avoid radical or rapid change, something its architects had built into it specifically to help manage the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union. At another level, he was concerned that the PPBS was responsible for the growth in the costs of defense—a concern that he expressed privately to Cebrowski as the defense budget rose steadily toward half a trillion dollars a year. But mostly he saw the PPBS as the primary dynamic of the Cold War mind-set he was determined to shatter. He enlisted Cebrowski’s help in explaining why the process was out of touch with reality and what could be done to correct it. Cost-effectiveness assumed the connection between military effectiveness and costs was not direct; that is, you did not necessarily get a proportional increase in military effectiveness by spending more and more money for a weapons system, military unit, or any other thing that provided military value. You had to spend something—sometimes a lot—to get something worth spending anything on. You could not get, say, 10 percent of the military effectiveness of a tank by spending only 10 percent of what a tank cost. But you would not necessarily get twice an effective tank by spending twice as much, either. The relationship between costs and effectiveness was a curve and the best way to buy military effectiveness was to shoot for the knee of the curve: the point at which you could get at least the level of effectiveness and capability you needed, but where the relationship between what you paid and what you got flattened out. So the way to buy an airplane, ship, tank, division, or any other military capability was to identify the range of costs between what would get the nation what it had to have and where paying more did not get much more increase in capability. Then, you could decide what specific cost-effectiveness relationship you wanted based on all sorts of other considerations, from political (‘‘this widget comes from Congressman X’s district, so maybe we ought to spend a bit more for a bit more capability’’) to budgetary trade-offs (‘‘maybe we can get the same or better capability from this mix of ships than this mix’’). The cost-effectiveness standard could have led to investigating how more numerous lower-cost and less individually capable weapon systems could match the military effectiveness of fewer, more capable ones. The Army had tried to incorporate the notion of smaller, faster, more numerous units, based on lighter, more agile tanks and other systems in what it called the pentomic division in the late 1950s. It flirted with the approach again in the late 1970s in the form of the

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‘‘high technology, light division.’’2 But both military and civilian analysts had largely ignored that line of inquiry. It was a more complex analytic problem, and while the counter-argument would surface from time to time, 3 defense analyses at the individual weapons system level focused on getting the most capability within a cost derived from ‘‘knee-of-the-curve’’ analysis. The overall result was a constant effort to pack more capability into individual aircraft, ships, tanks, and other vehicles. That invariably led to bigger, more expensive aircraft, ships, and other platforms. And when the Defense Department tallied up what everything would cost, the sum would more often than not exceed what the president or Congress would agree to pay. So, the Pentagon would cut the number of systems it wanted or stretch the proposed buy over a longer number of years. That usually increased the costs, maintained the momentum of the individual programs, and squeezed out consideration of going for larger numbers of smaller versions. Cebrowski thought that was crazy. He argued that the current budget strategy was a form of suboptimization. It divorced the process of allocating resources from broader policy and strategy considerations because it concentrated on getting the greatest margin and return on a system-by-system basis, without really addressing the interactions among the systems or what the overall goal was. ‘‘That’s one of the reasons every effort to adjust the Defense Department’s planning, programming, and budgeting process—before and after the GoldwaterNichols Act4—has complained that there is a disconnect between the plans and policies an administration sets at the beginning of the Defense Department’s planning, programming, and budgeting process and the budgets that emerge at the end.’’ Cebrowski pointed to historical trends to make his point. The numbers of major weapons systems have fallen as have the variants of those systems. Some argue that the fewer number of newer systems individually carry so much more capability that the capability of the entire force is much greater than larger numbers of smaller, less capable, and less expensive systems could generate. But various critics have pointed to the pernicious effects of this argument. Norm Augustine, not entirely tongue in cheek, argued that unless the Pentagon overhauled its procurement policies to halt the cost escalation of military equipment, the U.S. defense budget would eventually allow the purchase of just one very capable and very expensive aircraft.5 Cebrowski believed that for nearly half a century the Pentagon had had more of a budget strategy than a cost strategy. The budget strategy, he argued, focused on reducing total defense expenditures rather than reducing individual entity costs. It had attempted to maintain and expand U.S. military capability by getting the highest capability out of everything it buys. It sought the greatest margin of capability for each buy. But then it forced the sum of those transactions beneath a budget top line (set by a host of political, economic, and other factors).

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Figure 6.2 Consolidation of Aircraft That almost always reduced the numbers that would otherwise enter the military. All this, he believed, ran counter to the mainstream of the Information Age, in which the value of smaller, faster, and more numerous units was going up. The Pentagon’s budget strategy in effect meant the return on what the Pentagon invested in the nation’s security each year was going down, not up. He thought the solution would require more than admonitions to make the planning part of the PPBS more influential (that had been a common refrain of secretaries of defense since Melvin Laird). And while he thought Rumsfeld’s effort to move toward submitting a budget every two years instead of annually made a great deal of sense, he did not think it would get at the deeper problem. To Cebrowski, the solution was to get broader recognition inside the Defense Department of the pernicious effects of the existing budgeting process and attack its underlying assumption that bigger, more complex, more capable weapons systems were cost-effective. That meant, he proposed to Secretary Rumsfeld, getting the department to understand and accept network centric concepts. ‘‘I told the secretary the only real way to break what the PPBS was producing was to go after the platform centric focus that was driving it. You couldn’t just direct the building to be less platform centric, but if the department recognized and understood how network

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centric concepts gave war-fighting value to smaller, faster, networked forces it would come around. He thought about it for what seemed a long time. And then made a twofold response. First, he agreed with the notion [that] pushing network centric concepts could be the alternative to the lockstep toward fewer but bigger and more capable platforms that was fueling much of the escalation of the costs. But he said the shift would take a lot of work. He wanted me to help spread the understanding of network centric concepts and to think about how to articulate a set of transformation metrics that incorporated them. Give him the right metrics for transformation, he said, and he’d use them—how to measure transformation progress was the key.’’ But he also wanted more than a new set of metrics; he wanted Cebrowski to come up with a way of infusing defense planning with a general bias that change was not just acceptable—it was absolutely necessary. Cebrowski’s views on how to measure transformation changed while he was director of the Office of Force Transformation and as he developed his theory of network centric warfare. ‘‘Five years ago,’’ he said in the fall of 2005, ‘‘we believed the best metrics by which to gauge the transformation process, or to mark where different nations were in that process, were networking, speed, numbers, and distributed or dispersed operational capabilities. We based our view on nearly a decade of thought, data, and experience. The metrics we postulated were not all new. Speed and numbers had been long-standing military interests and design standards, certainly regarding individual systems.’’ In this he was representative of how most military professionals and analysts had measured military potential for decades and still do. ‘‘Faster, higher, farther’’ has been the informal mantra of the U.S. Air Force for its aircraft goals since its creation half a century ago. Nearly a century of expeditionary force doctrine embedded the value of strategic and operational speed in the minds of generations of U.S. military planners. Likewise, numbers have been important in the American way of war at least since the Civil War. And connectivity—being able to communicate among military units—has been a central goal within U.S. military forces, certainly since World War II. Networking was a relatively new concept. It meant much more than just the important capacity to communicate and to pass information and orders within a military force. The power of networking gained prominence in the 1970s in the form of ‘‘Metcalfe’s Law’’: the contention that if you connect any number, ‘‘n,’’ of machines—computers, telephones, radar systems—you get ‘‘n squared’’ the value of what those machines can do (compute, communicate information, or distinguish and track the location of forces). By the mid-1990s the U.S. military was adopting networking as a design template, driven largely by operational and test data that indicated Metcalfe’s Law applied to military operations.6 The more networked military units were, the more efficient they became. Why? There were at least two reasons. First, networks provide a much better basis for rapid and effective collaboration than single-line, point-to-point

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communications. The difference Some network theorists argue that the is similar to the difference in tryvalue of networking in developing optional ing to coordinate a schedule solutions to a problem, solving problems among several individuals with faster and more effectively, and stimulating separate phone calls, compared to innovation grows faster (exponentially) to doing it through a conference call. the extent that it ties the networks of differNetworks not only help get some ent groups, or communities, together. The growth of a network-of-networks, or what things done faster, they also get these theorists call ‘‘group-forming netthem done better, in effect helping works,’’ allows each group, within its own subgroups form, the individuals of network, to focus on a particular aspect which can work directly with each of the problem. The integration of these other. Indeed, it is this phenomesmaller networks into a larger network non that has captured the interest allows the larger network to test different of economists, psychologists, and ways of integrating the various solutions. Analyses of U.S. military operations in Iraq military professionals and has led support the argument. Effectively coordinatsome to suggest that Metcalfe’s ing close air support, for example, involved ‘‘law’’ understates the power of integrating the solutions to a number of 7 networking. This was the attribinherent problems. These included reconcilute of networking that Cebrowski ing the different perspectives of the ground based his views of and arguments and air units, assessing options for maintainfor self-synchronization. ing aircraft and ordnance to deal with other Cebrowski saw the second reaair support contingencies, defining where the backup capabilities would come from son as equally important. Net(U.S. Air Force, U.S. Naval Air, or ground works facilitate developing a artillery), what logistics actions would genercommon and increasingly accuate backup capabilities, where the next conrate understanding of the military tingencies were likely to emerge, and so on situation among the components across the consequences of the immediate of a force. That potential came action. There were a number of different from the inherent ability of netmilitary components that worked on these components, each working within their own works to increase the rate of communications and collaborative nethuman transactions and, because works. While the U.S. forces had not yet of that, to learn faster. integrated these component networks into a Okay, there are some leaps here smoothly operating macro-network, they that we need to fill in. Cebrowski had come closer than any military force had chose the term ‘‘transactions’’ careever done so. fully to capture the notion of interactions and feedback among humans that occurs in two-way flows of information. Because human beings differ in their perceptions, interactions among them alter the perceptions and understandings of each of the participants. The changes may be small, subtle, and perhaps not even conscious. But exchanges of information among humans always change the thinking of those who engage in them. Their perceptions

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and understandings expand because the interaction with different perceptions and understandings adds to what existed before the interaction. The interactions do more than increase the knowledge of the individuals involved; they confirm, revise, adjust, and refine it. That is, because the interactions carry with them the interactions of different perspectives, the synthesis that results can be a more accurate, timely understanding of reality. That is what learning is all about: an increasingly accurate understanding of reality. Such a synthesis does not always result, of course, because interactions between different perspectives can also turn into contests of individual ego and will. But the societies (using the technical meaning of the term as a group of people united by a shared interest and culture) within which the interactions occur set the rules and goals of the interactions, and militaries are particularly good at enforcing rules that constrain individual actions that work to the detriment of the group’s shared goals. Accordingly, militaries can be highly adept at cultivating the interactions that result in increasingly better knowledge of a military situation that all the individuals in a military force share—and in paralleling the individual learning that results in such interactions with similar learning on the part of force as a whole. In other words, Cebrowski, argued, the development of an increasingly comprehensive and accurate, shared understanding of a military situation is a function of an increasing transaction rate among all the individuals of the military force that faces and hopes to shape that situation. The significance of the learning process went beyond defense of the networks through which it occurred. In military competition, Cebrowski theorized, the key to winning was the relative rate at which the antagonists could understand the environment and dynamics of their conflict. The side that could learn the fastest would win. It would win because higher learning rates could create viable military options faster and with greater probabilities of success. Collective learning was how more networked forces that maintain higher transaction rates could adjust faster to the exigencies of battle. And that was the foundation of the ability to operate within the decision and action cycles of an opponent. With hightransaction-rate networks, units could collaborate and self-synchronize their actions. That meant they could adapt to the complexities and changes of conflict faster. They could achieve a better understanding of the competition faster than an opponent. They would therefore be better able to forecast their success. They could gain and maintain the initiative in the conflict. The force that had and used these advantages would have a much higher probability of winning armed conflicts with opponents that did not have them. It would be analogous to a chess master taking on a blindfolded chess amateur— the master’s experience and understanding of where the pieces were on the board against the amateur’s luck and little, if any, understanding of what was occurring, or worse, what could occur in the game. The master could remove the opponent’s pieces almost at will; checkmating the opponent’s king would be almost

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inevitable. The amateur would ‘‘Their understanding’’ Cebrowski argued, increasingly believe the competi‘‘can be more accurate, timely, and prescition was hopeless, his ability to ent than an opponent’s. It is, to be sure, compete as overwhelmingly comnever perfect, and probably more complex. plex. In the real-world military But conflict is a function of relative relationanalogy, the relationship would ships in which the side with an imperfect allow the force with the advanbut more accurate, timely, coherent, and comprehensive understanding of what is tages to destroy the opposing force occurring has an immense edge. And in detail, with little risk to its own greater complexity reflects a competitive adforces. An attrition strategy would vantage, too. It offers the force that has it almost certainly succeed in more options with good chances of success. destroying so much of the oppoIn Information Age operating environments nent’s force that it would lose the —where accelerating change and ambiguity capability of fighting. The cognidominate—competitive advantage depends on the options the antagonists perceive they tive impact on the opponent have and the accuracy of their perception. would be analogous, also. The An option is the right, but not the obligation, hopelessness of the situation to take or preserve an action in the future. would sap the opponent’s will to The side that perceives the greater range of continue. The complexity of sucoptions is always at an advantage because cessfully competing militarily it can better influence the future.’’ would become overwhelming. That all boiled down into four standards against which to judge claims on resources and promises of operational success. The Department of Defense should rank the 7,000-plus program elements that it annually tried to decide whether and how it should fund in terms of their relative ability to • increase the transaction rates among all components of the force; • increase the learning rate within the force; • increase the speed at which the force can generate and implement viable options to gain a competitive advantage; and, • impose overwhelming complexity on an opponent.

These were his metrics of transformation. How did these metrics meet Rumsfeld’s interest in purging the PPBS of its Cold War overhang and reversing the pernicious effects of its underlying assumption that bigger, more complex, more capable weapons systems were cost-effective? Cebrowski had constructed a new set of output-focused metrics. It refocused the understanding of military value from the inputs that would provide more of what was traditionally seen as militarily significant—mass, speed, self-protection, and the other traditional goals of force planning—toward valuing the small, fast, distributed, and networked.

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Why? Because when larger numbers of units network together and operate under network centric warfare concepts, the force is able to generate the higher transaction and learning rates for which the metrics call. The new metrics, therefore, undermine the current budget strategy. They replace getting the greatest margin out of each individual transaction with building a force that can generate the greatest number of military transactions with a positive margin. The former leads directly to consolidating military capability into fewer, larger, and more expensive entities. The latter moves toward getting military capability from the interaction of more numerous, smaller, and less expensive entities. That changes the goals of the decision process inside the Pentagon. It obligates defense analysts, comptrollers, and secretaries to focus less on how to delay the costs of big, expensive entities (to get them under a budget top line) by reducing their numbers, or stretching the time to develop and procure them, or by leasing rather than buying them outright. Instead, it directs their attention toward better integrating the entities that exist or could exist. Transaction rates were a function of both technology and organization; both the number of nodes on a network and the substance of the information that flowed among them and the rules as to who could interact with whom. More nodes were better than fewer; flatter organizations with robust flows of information horizontally were better than vertical information flows through hierarchical organizations. Distributed assets among many platforms were better than concentrated assets on fewer platforms, not only because networking allowed the assets to be used collaboratively, but because the ability to develop a more comprehensive, increasingly accurate common understanding of the situation depended on maximizing the interactions among different perspectives. Forces composed of many small, distributed components that were highly networked could learn faster and better than forces that had concentrated their assets on fewer platforms. This latter approach raised the systemic risk of losing a platform, thereby increasing the need and costs for the self-protection assets that had to go to each of the fewer platforms. Option generation and execution was better and faster with many smaller force components, distributed more widely, working from the same common, increasingly accurate understanding, and networked sufficiently to collaborate in their actions. Such a force was better able to impose overwhelming complexity on an opponent. These were the inherent biases of the transformation metrics Cebrowski proposed. They were diametrically opposed to the biases Rumsfeld sought to purge from the PPBS. Breaking the Service Stovepipes Interoperability has been a military operational goal for decades. It refers to the capability of the weapons and other systems of one military force or service to

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operate with those of another. That is a pretty straightforward, commonsense notion. Until you get into the details. There, you run into all sorts of excuses why, for example, U.S. Air Force aircraft have had difficulty operating with U.S. Navy aircraft, why ground and air components have problems operating with each other, and why communications among units of different services are often ragged. Everyone laments the lack of interoperability and agrees that problems in communicating and other gaps among the military services are the central reason for fratricide: the mistaken attack by one unit on another on the same side. The reasons for not being able to interoperate are technical, procedural, and cultural. Air Force fixed-wing aircraft normally cannot land on Navy aircraft carriers because they lack the arresting gear and strengthening that Navy aircraft have. Their wings do not fold, so they take up more space. Sometimes the procedures each military service has differ enough to complicate interoperability. And sometimes competition between the services for control of a given function gets in the way. Interoperability has gotten better, driven by a decade and more of command focus, the expansion of common standards and protocols, and the lessons relearned from operations and combat. But no one argues seriously that it is good enough. Cebrowski’s transformation metrics help push through the last barriers to better cross-service communications. It is obvious that the goal of increased transaction rates demands that the units of different service components ought to have a better technical ability to communicate with each other. But the metrics also push beyond interoperability toward interdependency. That is more potent and a lot more controversial. Interdependency does interoperability one better in terms of difficulty. Interoperability does not imply that force components that lack it have no capability to do things on their own. It does often mean that without interoperability, different components usually have more difficulty in doing something as well, as efficiently, or as effectively as they would together. But interdependency is different. It implies that a given military entity is unable to accomplish a task without the help or participation of another. Some important interdependencies have been around for a long time. At the strategic level, large Army units generally depend on the Air Force and Navy to get from one continent to the other quickly. At the operational level, as in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Marine Corps and Air Force units often depend on Army logistics units. Close air support involving ground and air units often have a lot of interdependency. Interdependency is not a new concept, and, like interoperability, it has gotten better. Arguably, there is more interdependency now than as recently as five years ago. But, largely for cultural reasons, none of the military services automatically welcome depending on another in order for them to carry out tasks, particularly in high stress situations. Their natural predilection is to be

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cautious about interdependency and continue to seek resources and authorities that point toward independence and autonomy. Interdependency offers effectiveness and efficiency payoffs similar to those promised by interoperability. But it also offers some outcomes that are in line with the new metrics, and, in particular, the view that higher transaction rates are increasingly important. One of the examples involves interdependent logistics. Some hints that interdependency pays off in better combat operations appeared in the early combat phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Those phases were particularly challenging to intra-theater logistics because the combat forces moved so rapidly toward Baghdad that they outran the communications links to their logistics centers. That forced an unplanned interdependency among the different service logistics chains. In the effort to keep up with the combat forces, the normal ‘‘logistics’’ lanes between the services (in this case, the Army and Marine Corps ground force units racing toward Baghdad) broke down. Logisticians of both services responded by combining the logistics systems of each to create a common pool of support. Modern communications and information systems facilitated their ability to come up with logistics solutions that created de facto interdependencies. After-action assessments of the logistics operations in Iraq pointed to some significant implications.8 Both the Army and the Marine Corps had deployed more than enough logistics material and transportation assets to support their operations, creating an ‘‘excess’’ surplus in the theater. ‘‘Excess’’ surplus is the interesting term, here, because it refers to more materiel than prudent planning indicated was more than enough (most U.S. operational planning always builds in a surplus to calculations of logistics requirements). There was a penalty for the excess surplus. The extra mass meant a slower buildup, more space requirements for storage, more transportation assets—all factors that worked against having a full force that was as small, fast moving, with as many combat and maneuver units as the new metrics postulates. In short, enough came out of the assessments of the military operations in Iraq to suggest that logistics interdependency could pay off in military effectiveness. Among other things, the experience facilitated the development of the ‘‘sense and respond logistics concept’’ an effort to flesh out and implement an interdependent logistics system designed specifically against the new metrics.9 At a higher conceptual level, interdependency is likely to lead to higher transaction rates, more widespread and denser feedback, and a higher, force-wide learning rate. It gets back to the differences between interoperability and interdependency. Interoperability is essentially an option—units of different military services do not have to interoperate and sometimes try not to. So, interoperability really only carries a potential increase in transaction rates among different units. Interdependency, in contrast, does not really offer the units involved an option. They have to interact with each other not only to carry out the mission or task,

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but also to survive in the effort. Where interdependency exists, an increase in transaction rates is essentially inevitable. Because interdependency really has no fallback to independent or unilateral action, the entities involved have stronger incentives in increasing their transactions and in expanding feedback throughout the networks that tie them together. All of this argument is, of course, conceptual, theoretical, and does not acknowledge the inevitable efforts of military units to ‘‘hedge’’ against their dependencies on other units. But the point here is that as the value of increased transaction rates and feedback grows within the American military, the perceived value of greater interdependence will also. And as that happens, many of the concepts based on higher transaction rates and feedback across service components will move to prime time. This probably includes things like the ‘‘sense and respond logistics concept,’’ which essentially argues that all the materiel and transportation assets that each service component brings to a fight ought to be understood, organized, and structured as a common pool of assets for all. It may accelerate both interest in and experimentation with new joint tactical units. It almost certainly will affix the term ‘‘joint’’ to the Navy’s effort to develop sea basing. It may even raise that most threatening specter to service parochialism of all—a common, joint military academy.

Transformation as a Process, Not an End State Rumsfeld was for faster change and continuing critique. In response, Cebrowski proposed referring to transformation as a process that should continue indefinitely. Rumsfeld soon adopted the phrase, iterating the notion of unending transformation in his speeches and discussions. Cebrowski considered the idea one of the most important to come out of the evolving concept of transformation. It was. But accepting transformation as a continuous process was subtle and its effects were indirect. It made it much easier to step away from the earlier planning assumption that you should set fairly long-range goals defining the size, structure, organization, and character of the future U.S. military, and then work unswervingly toward those goals. That particular long-term view had settled in during the 1960s and was one of the underlying Cold War assumptions Rumsfeld most wanted to challenge. As with nearly all the Cold War assumptions, the assumption that you could predict the future well enough to define where you wanted to be decades or more into it reflected the assumption that the threat posed by the Soviet Union would evolve in an incremental, straight-line manner. That had led to the conclusion that it was possible to plot out a limited range of future Soviet military capabilities five, ten, and even twenty years into the future. It also justified the core PPBS approach: project what Soviet military capabilities would be in the future; estimate what the United States would need to counter them; establish the required programs, and, by working backward from the future goal, plan the

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schedule required to get them. The key to U.S. security in the future was therefore to meet the schedule, and generations of Pentagon planners, program managers, and policy leaders dedicated themselves to doing just that. It followed that changes in plans and programs were viewed as unfortunate disruptions that increased the chances of triggering a series of disastrous potentials: falling behind the Soviet Union, shifting the Soviet’s view of the ‘‘correlation of forces’’ to the extent they would be more willing to raise the confrontation directly, thereby triggering the conflict that could escalate into the civilization-ending nuclear exchange. It had been the logic behind what Cebrowski termed ‘‘the tyranny of the program of record’’; that is, the disciplined, often mindless dedication to programs initiated in the past regardless of their relevance to a rapidly changing world. Once people started accepting the notion that transformation was a beneficial and continuing process, however, the idea of changes along the way became more acceptable. In effect, it cracked the intellectual dam built before the Information Age. Together with the reverberations of the 9/11 terrorist shock, Cebrowski’s arguments favoring continuing and accelerating transformation triggered a cascade of other changes. The attacks spawned spiral development, a notion that substituted the value of ‘‘getting something in the hands of the troops faster’’ for the value of ‘‘adhering to the program schedule’’; justified broader and faster innovation; and began to erode deeply conservative traditions. Take, for example, the shift that appears underway with regard to the U.S. military’s approach to ‘‘lessons learned’’ efforts over the last several years. 10 The vast bulk of the ‘‘lessons learned’’ undertakings until 2001 shared a common perspective and effort. They focused on ‘‘mistakes’’ defined as deviations from standard operating procedures and doctrine, and concentrated on how to correct those deviations and bring practice back into line with accepted procedures and doctrine. But if you peruse the lessons that emerged from Operations Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Iraqi Freedom in Iraq, you will note a very different focus and tone. There, the lessons expand into a search for ‘‘deviations’’ that resulted in higher effectiveness and the ‘‘lessons learned’’ emphasize finding better, and different, ways of operating. The shift is important, for it represents a general recognition that it is now more important to change the ‘‘way things are done’’ in order to become more effective than to enforce the accepted ways of doing them.11 Additional evidence that change was taking place comes from the cancellations of older systems, and, more precisely, the reactions to the cancellations. Two of the most notable were Army systems: the $11 billion Crusader artillery system, cancelled in May 2002, and the $39 billion Comanche reconnaissance/attack helicopter, cancelled in February 2004.12 The Crusader system fell as a result of Secretary Rumsfeld’s decision while the Army cancelled the Comanche on its own.

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In the case of the Crusader’s demise, the Army’s response was essentially to recognize and begin to take advantage of the dramatic effectiveness of enhanced airground operations that emerged in Afghanistan and Iraq. The response was less one of going back to the drawing board to design a less robust, heavy artillery system. Instead, the response was to reach out to another military service to fill the role earlier intended for the Crusader. It disbanded some artillery units and transferred their personnel to military police and other units that were in much higher demand in the aftermath of major combat operations in Iraq. But it also initiated a series of exercises and experiments with the Air Force to refine and expand on the successes of collaborative ground-air operations. In other words, the Army began to put resources and effort into its proclaimed goal of developing inherently joint military capabilities. It moved toward the concept of interdependency. When the Army canceled the Comanche helicopter, it spun the technology developed in the program out to all of Army aviation. In other words, the Army used the Comanche program as a form of spiral development and in effect shifted away from jeopardizing a number of smaller programs to ensure the viability of a large, expensive program, toward just the opposite. The cancellation of Comanche allowed the Army to maintain the viability of a number of smaller programs. Cebrowski said, ‘‘There are two general ways of interpreting the Army’s actions. One is that they simply responded narrowly and tried to make the best they could out of the demise of systems for which they had committed considerable resources and had planned as key components of the Army’s evolution. The other, which I prefer to believe, is that the two decisions represent a reorientation of the Army’s leadership toward some of the premises of transformation; namely, the payoffs from integrating service capabilities and from larger numbers of networked smaller units. But I think it goes deeper. It marks a more general acceptance that transformation is inherently good, ought to occur faster, and should never end.’’

What Has Not Worked and What Has Not Changed Enough. . .Yet Cebrowski was not Pollyannaish about how well his efforts had gone, nor about the extent to which his ideas would change things. ‘‘Judgments on the effects and rates of transformation depend a lot on the question you raise,’’ he pointed out. ‘‘So, when you turn the issue around and ask what hasn’t gone as well as hoped, you can get a different tone to a retrospective look. A lot remains to do, for while I think we’ve actually gone beyond that tipping point when the issues shift from ‘why should we’ to ‘why shouldn’t we,’ there’s still a lot to change.’’

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He believed there was a growing recognition within the professional military that the United States had entered a new age with new rule sets. But he also thought that the defense department had not yet agreed on what the new rules were or on what of the past era it should jettison. ‘‘For example,’’ he lamented in the late summer of 2005, ‘‘our organizing principles remain tied to traditional battlefield challenges. Unfortunately, we still plan and buy our forces for great power war. I say unfortunately because the emerging persistent challenges before us are increasingly not traditional, but irregular, disruptive, and catastrophic. We are not entirely ignorant of these three challenges because we have already had to deal with their harbingers. But we still tend to treat them as aberrations to our assumptions about the future, as lesser included cases of what we need to build for a conflict with a peer or near-peer competitor. The world is changing the mix and what we should be doing is planning against those lesser included cases as if they, and not traditional warfare, were the central problem.’’ He might have seen it differently six months later if he had lived to read the Quadrennial Defense Review released in February 2006. That document followed through on the framework Cebrowski had outlined in 2003, not only using the fourfold challenge classification—traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive—he had proposed, but specifically admonishing the department against focusing on the traditional challenges. But he was experienced enough to understand that policy pronouncements are not necessarily followed immediately by consistent behavior. And his regret remains justified today. So does his explanation. He argued there would be a the lag in accepting the shift because the reluctance to relinquish long-standing ways of planning, and, more importantly, an underlying system that had built so many vested interests in maintaining them. Shifting wholeheartedly to new planning assumptions was hard, not because the U.S. military was unable to figure out how to deal with the new challenges it would face. It was more the prospects of what it would have to give up that gave it pause. ‘‘Making the shift carries the prospect of great change,’’ he argued. ‘‘many of the largest and most expensive programs in the department will be at risk. We have been living the contradiction of buying a force for great power war, only to discover that it has to fit a different operational world. We can no longer ignore the need to transform the role of defense in national security and the organizations and processes that control, support, and sustain it. To do so is an act of denial unjustified by the profound change occurring in our world every day. We have passed the tipping point in transformation, but the new race has only begun and we should not smugly assume we will win.’’ Cebrowski’s insight was that the predominant pattern of human behavior in the Information Age would be network behavior, and as network behavior permeated military organizations, doctrine, strategy, and processes, it would alter greatly the character of warfare. New metrics are emerging—metrics that define the characteristics for future forces. At one level they are broadened sensing,

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widely distributed access to information, speed in decision-making, high mobility, and networking. He believed these to be scale free, as valid at the tactical as at the operational and the strategic levels of war. He also believed they are as applicable in establishing post-combat or post-disaster stability, reconstruction, and peacekeeping as they are in high-intensity combat. U.S. military planning and forces were transforming, but, to him, not fast enough. ‘‘That’s because of two factors,’’ he explained. One was cultural, the other was the seductive effect of having the world’s most powerful Industrial Age military. ‘‘It’s hard to give up some of the cultural factors of the past; force mass, hierarchical control, cautious, incremental change are deeply embedded in our military mores. And it’s hard to make the case for accelerated, significant changes when you have the world’s most powerful military. But until we finally sever the cultural umbilical cord that ties us to the past and recognize how profoundly the world is changing, we will continue to end the competition of ideas far too early in many of our planning and programming processes. This diminishes institutional learning and decreases the generation of options. Providing the tools necessary to create value and ensure competitive advantage should not be, as it is now, based on deterministic methods. We tend to try to predict the future, and then, worse, believe in our predictions. Instead, we should be hedging against potentially harmful contingencies by considering and making uncertainty a positive trait rather than a negative one. The result would provide the nation and its defense establishment more opportunity to create security value by establishing future competitive positions early.’’ Change was and is slow to come. Indeed, Cebrowski worried about the United States being too complacent about its military strength and becoming arrogant in dismissing the possibility that others could come up with counters. It had become simply too easy to remain complacent and not recognize arrogance and therefore miss the fact that the competition for military power was wide open. He put it this way: ‘‘Routine is the enemy of increased transaction rates and learning. It is also the dominant characteristic of the Pentagon’s planning and management processes. One of its manifestations is the ‘tyranny of the program of record,’ but it permeates the way the Pentagon goes about nearly everything.’’ He recognized that ‘‘as the pace of change in the Information Age accelerates, so must the institutional transactions that create capabilities from learning. Stagnation of institutional learning means reductions in future advantage. The more we tend to perfect the comfortable and familiar ‘known’ in our forces, the less learning we achieve. New knowledge enters our force glacially, and we become a strategically fixed target to enemies.’’ Recognizing the New Strategic Commons Cebrowski believed the U.S. military was slow also in recognizing the importance of what he referred to as a new strategic commons, namely, global

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communications and what some call cyberspace. He picked up the metaphor of a strategic commons from Alfred Thayer Mahan who described the sea as a wide ‘‘commons’’ domain of trade and intercontinental communication. Mahan had argued that nations sought access to and command of this commons to establish, expand, and protect their competitive advantages globally or regionally. The entry fee to the common was an economic and later, an industrial, capacity sufficient to sustain a strong and capable ocean-going navy. To the degree this was possible, participation in the great commons of the sea sustained and expanded a nation’s power. As a naval officer, Cebrowski had read and believed Mahan’s assessment. As the director of force transformation, he had tried, with less success than he had hoped, to carry Mahan’s notion of a strategic commons into the twenty-first century. Cebrowski contended that the new strategic commons of the twenty-first century is cyberspace. Cyberspace is not simply ‘‘the internet.’’ It is the broader domain of information and cognition that includes the channels of mass media and finance, where trade and intercontinental communication take place. Access to and participation in this commons sustains and increases a nation’s economic, diplomatic, and military power. But, he argued, the commons of cyberspace differed from the sea, air, and space in four ways. First, the entry fee is very low, so low that access and participation is not the exclusive purview of nations. Individuals, organizations, and institutions in addition to states could compete within the cyberspace commons. Second, unlike the other commons of sea, air, and space that are defined by their physical aspects, cyberspace is essentially nondimensional. It is increasingly a creative and cultural commons defined by information, perception, cognition, and belief. Third, it is an expanding domain. The cyberspace commons is expanding nonlinearly by the month, affecting more activity and encompassing more individuals, institutions, and organizations by the second. Finally, Cebrowski believed it is becoming the preeminent domain of political victory or defeat. Cebrowski thought the United States had been slow to recognize this. ‘‘We profess a desire for access to the political domains of victory and increasingly recognize that military victories in traditional battles do not necessarily equate to political victories or secure the goals of warfare. But the weight of our operational approach to cyberspace is largely measured only in physical terms. Accordingly, we continue to plan and operate our military forces on the myth that victory on the battlefield is the key to victory in the political realm. It is unlikely that our forces will lose traditional battles. But we may be denied political victory because we do not yet understand as well as we should that political victory can be achieved only in the cognitive dimension of the cyperspace domain.’’ So, to Cebrowski, the first five years of the twenty-first century had been filled with amazing successes and disappointing delays. ‘‘We recognize much more than we could have imagined four years ago that the strategic landscape is changing,

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and we have begun to adapt our military to the emerging world and age. We are well along in important shifts. But the battle for our future has only begun, and we have much to do. The weight of our intellectual effort and investment strategy must continue to shift from a concern with traditional battlefield challenges to the challenges of irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive warfare. We will need to transform at a rate that can meet these challenges.’’ Then, Cebrowski returned to his memory of an early mentor. ‘‘I’m reminded of George Haering. Haering was one of the few people that I keep learning from, even though he’s now deceased. I often find myself wrestling with some problem and asking myself, ‘in this situation, what would Haering think?’ And, I often mull over what he told me the first day I reported to the Pentagon, what he called the three rules of understanding the Pentagon. Rule one was that you cannot overestimate the body of ignorance that resides in the building. Rule two was that over time, that body of ignorance will appear to get smaller. And rule three was that the reason for rule two is that you will have become an integral part of the body of ignorance.’’

CHAPTER

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INSTITUTIONALIZING TRANSFORMATION

Haering’s three rules for understanding the Pentagon were caustic. But Cebrowski believed their underlying theme captured the biggest challenge to transformation. To him, Haering highlighted an inherent inertia inside the Pentagon that can ensnare innovators, reformists, and revolutionaries. What can happen, Haering believed, is that these dedicated people, seeking to improve, innovate, and reform, must deal with a decision system that is so highly compartmented, competitive, and myopic that their views and thinking take on the ethos of this system. They become competitive and myopic. The system grinds them down until they eventually become part of a bureaucratic bias that emphasizes caution, prudence, and suspicion regarding shifts in policies, programs, assumptions, and planning directions. Yet, Haering was not a pessimist or a cynic. He phrased his insights dramatically to get people to pay attention. And he wanted people to pay attention because he believed there would always be a flow of smart, dedicated people into the bureaucracy. As long as they kept coming, there would always be some diamonds the system could not grind down, who would shape the system, make it better, and make sure it did what it had to do to keep up with the changing demands of national security. ‘‘So, in his way,’’ Cebrowski reminisced, ‘‘he was a transformer who helped me understand transformation is a process that needs institutions that prompt continual review, critique, and change.’’ Cebrowski recognized the danger of transformation becoming simply a slogan, or, worse, something that boiled down to a verbal shield used to hang on to the past. ‘‘By definition,’’ he argued, ‘‘transformation means change. So, if you want to transform, you have to think about how to best institutionalize continuing change. That doesn’t mean you accept as a corollary that any changes are

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transformational or necessarily good. But, defense transformation ought to accept as an axiom that change is not dangerous, wrong, or unnecessary, per se. It should also carry the bias that the purpose of transformational change is threefold: increased military effectiveness, improved military efficiency, and reinforced moral principle in the use of military force.’’ By military effectiveness he meant much the same thing that most of the prominent military theorists—from Sun-tzu to Clausewitz—had contended: militaries are effective to the extent they help achieve the political goals for which legitimate leaders employ military force. U.S. military transformation, then, ought to be guided and judged by whether it generates more capability to achieve U.S. political goals. ‘‘The specifics of what that means, what we need to change, and how much we need to spend in developing the capabilities demanded by our foreign policy and national security goals are unlikely to ever be completely unambiguous and agreed upon by all. That means one of the keys to institutionalizing transformation is to devise and refine decision processes that will continually assess the priority of our goals and whether the military capabilities we seek, maintain, and develop are consistent with that priority.’’ To Cebrowski, that meant constant assessment of whether the U.S. military was relevant in the context of the time. He believed the conflict in Iraq had underlined this need, and he was concerned that the polarization that was occurring in American politics was eating into the nation’s ability to make reasoned assessments. ‘‘As our experience in Iraq illustrates,’’ he said in July 2005, ‘‘it’s not too hard to discern when gaps between our military’s capabilities and the goals to which we commit the military exist or are likely to exist in the future. The hard part comes in being able to keep our notion of future military effectiveness attuned to the changes in the world, and focusing on how those changes alter the means and ways in which military force can achieve our national security goals.’’ He also worried about the U.S. military becoming less efficient in a rapidly changing world. Military efficiency, in his view, dealt with the ease and costs of performing military functions and tasks. He thought the hard part was appreciating that what we take today as keys to military efficiency would change. This was because opponents would adapt to and seek counters for what made the U.S. military efficient, and it was particularly the case because our current military power is so overwhelming. Our military edge logically compelled those who contemplate armed conflict against the United States to try to exploit the way we do not conduct our military functions and tasks rather than confronting us head on, on our terms, and trying—with low probability of success—to beat us in what we literally do best. Here, too, Cebrowski pointed to the need for continual, reasoned assessment of whether the way the U.S. military did things remained efficient in the Information Age context of global political and technological changes. The danger of slipping into inefficiency was, again, increased by a tendency to refuse to

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question earlier concepts and assumptions. ‘‘Thanks to adopting many of Clausewitz’s nineteenth century views of warfare,’’ he said, ‘‘the U.S. military has an almost codified understanding of military efficiency and some long-standing ways of measuring it. That is, we have generally accepted the argument that the ease and cost of performing military tasks is a function of dealing with what Clausewitz discussed as ‘‘the friction’’ of war, and, working from his explication of friction, we have sought to incorporate counters to what he pointed to as its causes.1 Traditionally, we and most other nations sought to ‘lubricate’ Clausewitzian friction with discipline, training, mass, and the centralization and hierarchization of information. 2 Having well-trained, disciplined military personnel remains key to achieving and maintaining a military that is efficient in its use of military force. But, I believe military mass and the centralization of information at the upper levels of a military organization now lead to much military inefficiency.’’ To him military efficiency connoted focused, speedy, and decisive resolution in armed conflict. ‘‘One of the goals to which the use of military force is almost always committed,’’ he would say, ‘‘is to achieve a decisive solution to an issue as fast and completely as possible. Militaries that do this are efficient. Those that do not are inefficient.’’ So far, there was nothing new in the observation. But, he went beyond what many military professionals would see as a truism, to link quick resolution with preventing what he believed was an inherent tendency of armed conflict to degenerate to perdition. It was a function of war’s nature—its violence and ugliness. To Cebrowski, the longer it lasted, the uglier it would become, the easier it was for warriors to lose sight of the moral prohibition against harming the innocent. ‘‘Extended conflict,’’ he argued, ‘‘tends toward inefficiency. That is, long wars are inefficient in the sense that if in applying force they actually prolong, expand, and elevate the violence; if they change the political stakes in and the original purpose of using military force in the first place. This is where efficiency can overlap with effectiveness and morality, for if the issues driving a resort to armed conflict are not resolved quickly and because of this the political context of the conflict changes, then that is likely to decrease the ability of using military force effectively and morally. This is one of the reasons why an attrition strategy—destroying lives and property until you eliminate the enemy or he gives up—can turn out to be an inefficient use of military force. It’s inherently sloppy and tends to kill the innocent along with everyone else. That often creates blood debts that essentially rule out the notion of surrendering. Yes, the United States has the capability of ending a conflict decisively and quickly by using nuclear weapons. But resorting to that form of force transgresses the moral prohibition of avoiding harm to the innocent. Attrition warfare tends to be long warfare, and that tends toward degradation because it is also likely to erase the lines between the enemy and the innocent.’’

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He thought military effectiveness, efficiency, and morality reinforced each other and together pointed to the need for a force with the flexibility to adapt to changes in the world, to the resulting changes in the political goals the United States adopts relative to the shifts in the political environment, and to the opponents’ adjustments to what the United States does. The net effect was a general standard for transformational change during the transition from one age to another: constant change that continually makes U.S. military operations more effective, efficient, and moral. His argument for ‘‘constant’’ change begs a bit more explanation. There are few human affairs that are not constantly changing, however incrementally the rate may be. Cebrowski’s notion of ‘‘constant’’ referred to the result of conscious choice and a commitment to maintain a rate of change that exceeded that which would otherwise occur. Why the faster rate of change? Simply because of the character of military competition in the Information Age. He was convinced the competition is constant, the means of the competition are increasingly available throughout the world, and the winners in this contest are not preordained by past strength or present power. ‘‘The competition will therefore be broader. There will be a larger number of serious competitors than perhaps at any time in human history. Military technology will proliferate faster, and knowledge about where one stands in the competition will be more widely distributed. The issue is therefore how to best institutionalize rapid, constant change that makes U.S. military operations more effective, efficient, and moral.’’

Institutionalizing Transformation Institutionalizing rapid, constant change sounds like a potential contradiction in terms. Institutionalizing, after all, connotes routine, repetition, and conformity, hardly an environment associated with innovation, experimentation, and change. Cebrowski, however, preferred the sociological definition of institution, which refers generically to patterns of behavior. In this sense, he saw no inherent contradiction and turned to what he believed was the central issue of transformation. ‘‘The question is how to design and reinforce behavior that inculcates constant beneficial change at a high rate.’’ He thought Americans had some inherent advantages in doing this. The United States, he liked to point out, maintains the longest-standing government in large part because of its capacity to change. The balance of power implanted by the Constitution has often prevented sweeping, radical changes by the body politic. But those inhibitions to revolutionary changes also maintain the kind of policy tensions that stimulate critique and challenge to the conventional wisdom. The Bill of Rights protects the capacity to challenge current policy and bolsters a democratic tradition and philosophy that recognize the need to

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constantly scrutinize and question existing views. That said, he recognized the Department of Defense is not the most democratic of institutions. Much of what the department does, he was convinced, worked against the extent and rate of change he believed the United States needed. But he also believed there were ways of overcoming the barriers.

Barriers and Fulcrums Institutionalizing transformation was to Cebrowski a matter of identifying both the major barriers to maintaining a high rate of change and the means of overcoming them—what he referred to as the fulcrums of transformation. He saw four barriers to overcome, referring to them as ‘‘failure fear,’’ ‘‘size and uniformity,’’ ‘‘the military-Congressional-contractor triangle of stasis,’’ and ‘‘the seduction of stasis authentication.’’ They were formidable. But, he also identified six fulcrums for moving the barriers out of the way. Barriers: Failure Fear To explain what he meant by failure fear, he began with an example of the Special Air Service of the British military. The Special Air Service (SAS) is renowned among military professionals. Highly trained, skilled, and accomplished, members of the SAS claim the motto of ‘‘Who Dares Wins,’’ implicitly calling for brash, unexpected, and bold approaches to military affairs. Cebrowski used it as a talking point, noting that ‘‘the SAS is a magnificent military unit. It is also atypical of military units generally. This is not because members of other units lack equivalent courage, skill, or tenacity. It is because the mainstream of military thought and decisions place high value on prudence and caution. These constitute a legitimate approach to military affairs generally and to war and armed conflict in particular, because the risks of failure carry repercussions that almost always extend beyond the individuals involved. With stakes that high, cautious approaches to change become quite rational. This is the fundamental reason professional militaries hold a bias against precipitous, rapid, and/or radical change. Military institutions are cautious by nature because they recognize the stakes of failure can be very, very high.’’ ‘‘But,’’ he argued, ‘‘it’s easy to go from this justified caution to a less beneficial conservatism that cautions against all change.’’ The fear of going down the wrong path could, he thought, become irrational. It could shift from a prudent understanding that it is important to challenge those who seek rapid change to explain why, to a condemnation of their motives or their character without listening or thinking about their views. It could become the flip side of the view that all change is inherently good and is just as incorrect and dangerous, particularly during a transition from one age to another. Yet, he believed it was the most

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fundamental barrier to needed change within the Department of Defense, in part because the other barriers tend to reinforce it. Barriers: Size and Uniformity He believed one of these reinforcing barriers, particularly for the U.S. military, was its size and commitment to uniformity. In his view, the size and desire for uniformity of the military tends to become a rationale against change, especially relatively rapid change. Stemming in part from the high stakes of military affairs, the basic concern goes like this: the size of the military makes it costly to change, particularly in view of the need to maintain a high degree of uniformity in order to keep overall capability and readiness high. But that is not the only reason. The other one is that size and the commitment to maintain uniformity also introduce a momentum to change, in that once change begins, there is logic to completing it as rapidly as feasible to avoid a divided military. If, however, you initiate the wrong change, the potential mistake can compound as the military leadership tries to reestablish uniformity, coherence, and readiness within the force as quickly as possible. ‘‘So,’’ he said, ‘‘the desire to maintain uniformity and readiness and to avoid going down the wrong path introduces a kind of schizophrenia in the military’s approach to change. On the one hand, military professionals normally seek to limit the scope of change—to narrow and restrict accelerated change to a particular component or aspect of the force. They worry about simultaneous, wholesale changes throughout the force. On the other hand, they want to make the changes in the narrow, permitted aspect as rapidly as possible. Once they accept the need for faster change, they want to keep it narrowly defined and get it over quickly. And that can create real problems.’’ He offered two examples. The first, he thought, spun out of the Army’s experience in the late 1950s, when, driven by the perceived need to be able to fight successfully on an atomic battlefield, it sought a major change to its structure and operational concept. They were willing to make some rapid, radical changes. But not to the traditional hierarchical organization or to the communications technology the changes they did accept demanded. The result was the Pentomic Division, a design shortly abandoned by the Army as a major and costly mistake.3 His second example was the conscious attempt to narrow the scope of change following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then, many in the military, including then JCS Chairman General Colin Powell, recognized the size of the U.S. military was going down. But, Powell argued strongly against changes in structure and organization.4 Yet, to Cebrowski, the caution and awareness of the dangers of introducing changes too quickly could go too far. It was easy, he believed, for this laudatory recognition of how the size and need for uniformity and readiness conditioned change inside the military to become a justification for limiting and slowing all

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change, including changes that were truly needed. ‘‘It’s the difference between speed bumps and brick walls. You don’t want to go so fast that you can’t stop in time to avoid hitting a child that runs out in the street. Speed bumps reduce that risk. But you don’t want to run into a brick wall that keeps you from getting to a worthwhile destination, either. The problem is the tendency of some to turn speed bumps into brick walls.’’ Barriers: The Military-Congressional-Contractor Triangle of Stasis The U.S. form of government requires agreement between the executive and legislative branches on what of significance can change inside the U.S. military and how fast. This is rooted deeply in the concept of the Constitutional separation and balance of powers and reflected in the Constitution’s articulation of the duties and powers of the president in his role as the commander in chief of the military and the Congressional power to declare war and appropriate funds. Since World War II, a third participant—the private contractor base that produces the military’s arms and other materiel and provides a wide range of support and services to the military—has augmented the Constitutionally created balance and tension between the branches of government. This product and service provider base receives about half the money appropriated for national defense each year. In exchange, it produces all the new weapons and other systems the military buys and provides roughly 1.2 million personnel to help maintain that equipment, train military personnel in its use, and undertake many other service and support functions that otherwise might require uniformed personnel. Although by no means unified, the contractor base has undergone considerable consolidation into fewer de facto mega-corporations since President Eisenhower in 1961 characterized its predecessor as part of the military-industrial complex. Cebrowski called this the triangle of stasis. ‘‘You know,’’ he quipped, ‘‘the triangle is the strongest geometry. Try[ing] to break it or move it by pushing one of its points won’t do it. It just sits there. Solid. Dug in.’’ These three legs of the ‘‘triangle’’—the military, Congress, and defense contactors—all have different reasons for caution regarding transformational change. Defense contractors, focused largely on military clients, tend to accept and echo their clients’ views. It is good for business. But there are some other business reasons why contractors are generally not inclined toward change. To those who produce tangible goods for the military, change usually means retooling, new production learning curves, and at least temporary sags in profit. It is generally more profitable to maintain or increase the production level of weapons and other equipment for which the producers have already paid the up-front costs than to produce new kinds or designs of equipment. But longevity of production runs is not solely a desire of equipment producers. Service providers also welcome continued business as usual, for which they have already hired and trained their existing employees who sell

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their labor to the various parts of ‘‘Until the latest of our world conflicts, the the defense department. True, United States had no armaments industry. defense contractors sometimes American makers of plowshares could, with offer insight, innovation, and time and as required, make swords as well. challenges to the traditional ways But now we can no longer risk emergency of doing things and the Departimprovisation of national defense; we have ment of Defense sometimes rebeen compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. wards them handsomely for doing Added to this, three and a half million men so. But these are the exceptions, and women are directly engaged in the not the rule to defense condefense establishment. We annually spend tracting. The Congressional interon military security more than the net est in continuity is less clear. But income of all United States corporations. the geographical distribution of This conjunction of an immense military both the military and defense establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total industry tend to bolster it. Coninfluence—economic, political, even spirigressmen and senators almost tual—is felt in every city, every State house, always welcome defense employevery office of the federal government. We ment growth in their states and recognize the imperative need for this develcongressional districts. They tend opment. Yet we must not fail to comprehend not to welcome changes that have its grave implications. Our toil, resources, the potential of reducing it. In and livelihood are all involved; so is the the former case, they may be able very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against to reap the political benefit for the acquisition of unwarranted influence, the growth. In the latter case, they whether sought or unsought, by the military are almost certain to get the blame industrial complex. The potential for the disfor its decrease. Every program astrous rise of misplaced power exists and manager inside the defense departwill persist.’’ (Dwight D. Eisenhower, in Pubment understands this. Most conlic Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. sciously seek to distribute the Eisenhower, 1961 [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960], 1035–40.) development and procurement of their programs with it in mind to ensure program continuity. ‘‘So,’’ Cebrowski argued, ‘‘you’ve got two legs of the triangle generally inclined against rapid change. The record of the third leg—the executive branch—is mixed. The Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations were change agents for the military. The Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush (George H.W. Bush), and Clinton administrations were not, at least not in the sense that they pushed hard for significant internal changes. McNamara (secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) was certainly an innovator, but the innovations he put in place occurred largely under Kennedy. And when you get an executive branch that is not particularly interested in changing the military the triangle of stasis becomes a real iron triangle.’’

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Barriers: The Seduction of Stasis Authentication Cebrowski was convinced that, despite what he saw as a mixed historical record, it was the executive branch that held the power to bring about military transformation. The question was, why was it so often uninterested in exercising that power? Part of the reason, he thought, comes from the fact that, in the context of a separation and balance of power system, those authorized to change things decide not to do so. ‘‘They do this because they calculate that attempting to buck the other two sides of the triangle will jeopardize their authority or ability to carry out other mandates in policy areas other than national security. Those who have the political authority to bring about change and transformation often find it easier not to exercise it,’’ he opined. ‘‘The deference the military pays to senior civilian defense officials can be seductive—particularly to those growing numbers of officials who have never served in the military nor had much direct involvement with it. It is sometimes more convenient, usually less difficult, and almost always more enjoyable to see oneself as an important spokesperson for those in the military or Congress or defense industry who have more experience, understanding, and appreciation of the intricacies of national defense. This is not to say that civilian defense officials always lean toward going along with them. Yet, civilian defense officials really do have an obligation to champion the views of the military professionals they speak for. When they don’t, they not only perturb the traditional base of civil-military relations and style, they introduce a dissonance into the military–defense-contractor–Congressional triangle that the nation now relies on for security policy, effectiveness, and continuity. The fact is that it takes courage, conviction, and a strong ego to push against these institutional aspects of the U.S. defense establishment. The stakes involved in military affairs are complex and very high. The relationships between transformational change and the readiness of the military to meet vital challenges are intricate and important. Going against the triangle can endanger one’s career hopes. Not everyone is up to the challenge, and it is often fairly easy to cover what is a reticence of deed with an abundance of rhetoric.’’ These, then, were what Cebrowski saw as the four greatest barriers to transformational change inside the Pentagon. He thought they were not going to vanish, perhaps not even in the context of a catastrophic attack on the United States. ‘‘They are formidable because their strength flows from both our system of government and because they are not necessarily wrong, misguided, or dysfunctional.’’

The Fulcrums of Change But while he thought the four barriers were permanent fixtures in the tension between change and stasis, he also believed the Department of Defense could

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surmount them. ‘‘Although formidable, we can overcome the barriers to transformational change. Not to be too dialectic about it, but each of the barriers carries the seeds of its own erosion. More importantly, the changes in the world today are and will be so dramatic and dynamic that they will force modifications in what currently limits the rate and depth of transformation. For all of the barriers, there exist fulcrums to assist in moving them out of the way.’’ Take the barrier of failure fear. While the stakes in military affairs that increase the fear of failure are not going to shrink, the definition of failure is already changing from one that emphasizes adherence to rules of the past to one that sees increasing danger in not changing those rules. In part this shift reflects the erosion of Cold War assumptions, when managing the deadly interaction between nuclear superpowers was so central to national, indeed, to world security. The basis for that approach ended with the demise of the Soviet Union. However, the assumptions about the rates of change and the concern with disrupting the stability of the old system continued for years. Today Pentagon planning scenarios built around the rise of a military peer competitor remain on the books, but the writing has faded and the books are on the back shelves. So, Cebrowski told the secretary of defense and everyone else that the mind-set of military planning in the United States had been shifting, with increasing speed, toward a new definition of failure. The new definition emphasizes the danger of not changing faster and more profoundly. And they began to acknowledge his point. The shift is evident in the vocabulary of planning, training, and guidance, and it shows up in conscious efforts to introduce more rapid change, such as the notion of spiral development. It permeates the journals and classrooms of the military services. There was, he would argue, too much circumstantial evidence to deny that the shift was occurring and accelerating. The world—and particularly the global war on terrorism—drives the shift. It is the immediate exigency that emphasizes information technology in military affairs and directly challenges the military structure, organization, and operational modes designed for the past era. And Cebrowski believed the U.S. military—the central player in the war—is remarkably strong in marking, assessing, and incorporating the changes our world demands. ‘‘Perhaps stemming from an underlying American pragmatism, the lessons-learned efforts of the U.S. military are shifting towards devising better rules and away from reasserting the old ones. The swirl of world affairs has engendered an almost unconscious shift—a new spirit of change—that has launched a profound and general search by the military for new rules. The search is not limited to military operations. It extends into the design and character of U.S. military forces.’’ He believed it was showing up in the way the defense department was beginning to deal with the changeinhibiting effects of size and uniformity. Yes, size still counted in the rate of transformation and maintaining uniformity and containing disruption remained important. ‘‘So, the concern remains that changing too fast will diminish force

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readiness and divert military resources from the war at hand. But the conflict has driven innovation in testing and experimenting with changes, rather than retarding change, and, some of the innovations are taking hold and increasing the rate of change.’’ ‘‘Take joint experimentation,’’ he argued in the summer of 2005. ‘‘Three years ago, joint military experimentation inside the U.S. military focused on a massive, expensive, and largely unsuccessful ‘super experiment’ called Millennium Challenge. It turned out to be more of a series of demonstrations designed to show off existing capabilities rather than an experiment designed to find new ones. As an approach to joint experimentation, it is unlikely we will ever see another Millennium Challenge, not just because the huge expenditures produced very little of real value, but because Joint Forces Command replaced it with a different approach which actually is producing changes. Today and into the future, joint experimentation is much more likely to focus on new ways of doing things at least as much as demonstrating what it can already do. Such experimentation will be conducted more often, by different components of the armed forces, and with much greater discussion and sharing of the results throughout the military. The shift here is not driven by concern with costs. It is driven by an interest in results that point toward faster and deeper change.’’ Cebrowski also believed the military-Congressional-contractor triangle of stasis was changing. Or rather, that the advocates of more rapid change had gotten better at understanding how its iron hold on innovation, alteration, and faster transformation could be loosened. He argued that the components of this triangle are much less tightly joined than many claim. It is a loose alliance in which any two of the members can usually sway the third in terms of policy emphases and rates of change. And the members are not of equal strength or orientation. As the primary source of contractor funding, the military exercised extraordinary influence over the contractor leg of the triangle. Accordingly, the shift in the military’s view of transformation will almost certainly shift that of the contractor community. As this occurs, the third leg of the triangle would shift accordingly. When and the extent to which this occurs is a function of what happens with the fourth barrier to transformation: the seduction of stasis authentication. ‘‘Look,’’ he said, ‘‘not all secretaries of defense and their senior assistants are innovators. They react differently to the seduction of authenticating the decisions made by the military and civilian bureaucracies they head. They don’t always try to drive those bureaucracies toward changes. The strong secretaries—McNamara and Rumsfeld, to name two—force change. Their strength flows from their character and personalities. But it also reflects the needs of the time and the levers the innovators, revolutionaries, and transformers prepare and offer them. The course, rate, and direction of change and transformation all depend on the levers they offer to those with the authority to make a difference.’’

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Cebrowski, the optimist, remained so in the twilight of his life regarding the transformation he had advocated. He remained modest, saying that he had only helped chronicle the tectonic shifts that were driving the world from one age to another; that others had had explanatory insights that he had borrowed; that he had helped synthesize the explanations of what was happening, rather than generating the ideas that were driving it. But he did not become passive or completely content about the direction or rate of transformation and continued to point to ways of making it go faster and of keeping it going in the correct direction. He believed the levers he had described were still appropriate—and that new ones were needed.

Planting Seeds of Change and Transformation So, he proposed some. ‘‘Let me call them the six stimulants to accelerated change. They are related and implementing some of them makes it easier to get the Department of Defense, or any large institution, to accept others. And there is a synergy among all six. Get all of them instituted and you enhance and multiply their combined effects.’’ Here they are in the proscriptive form in which he described them: • shift the vocabulary and imagery • teach change • keep spiraling • keep sowing dragons’ teeth • expand change agent networks • let the sun shine in

Shift the Vocabulary and Imagery Cebrowski believed language was the royal road to cognition, understanding, and effective collaboration. Many studies of human cognition and linguistics support his belief, postulating that cognition flows from the images language generates in the brain and that the more image-prone the language, the more effective it is in transferring knowledge and building collaborative efforts. ‘‘Poets, good writers, successful politicians, and those adept at getting others to do things by the power of their language,’’ he said, ‘‘we all know this and act accordingly. For our purposes, the rate of U.S. military transformation is and will continue to be a function of the language used to describe it. As such, it is important to choose the words carefully. Precision is important, but so too is imagery. Those seeking to stimulate change need to explain things as precisely as they can, but to do so in ways that generate the images conducive to innovation, change, experimentation, and transformation.’’

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He offered an example. ‘‘Many of my ideas had their genesis in the mid-1990s under the unfortunate rubric of the ‘American Revolution in Military Affairs.’ I say unfortunate because our image of and call for revolution provoked counterproductive reactions to the accelerated change we sought. Revolution connoted rapid, uncontrolled change. To be sure, rapid, unpredictable change is something military professionals tend to understand; it has been a condition of what they experience in war and for which they train. But their profession and training emphasize the need to buffer and constrain the rapidly changing conditions that are inevitable in armed conflict—to impose order on the inherently disorderly. So, when we a bit too exuberantly called for ‘revolutionizing’ the way the Pentagon planned forces, we know now we were conjuring up something that in many minds triggered a need to moderate and slow down. And slow it they did, ultimately substituting the term ‘transformation’ to connote a more reasoned, more controlled, and slower change in the character of the U.S. military. My point here is the power language has in framing how the defense establishment reacts to the terminology we use in advocating change and in trying to accelerate it.’’ To Cebrowski, then, it was important to be willing to change the vocabulary when the images it generated were no longer conducive to the goal you seek. The shift from ‘‘revolution’’ to ‘‘transformation’’ is instructive. The shift to ‘‘transformation’’ helped round off the sharp edges of change ‘‘revolution’’ had generated. And that made it easier to get support for some of the specific changes the revolutionaries sought. ‘‘Transformation’’ means simply ‘‘to change’’—and change is a normal condition of life. ‘‘So,’’ Cebrowski said, ‘‘transformation became the banner under which those opposing rapid change could get away with it. They were able to stretch the term to justify everything they were doing. ‘Transformation’ had become much less useful as a means of bringing about the rate of changes we believed were necessary,’’ he noted. ‘‘That was why,’’ he said ‘‘we in the Force Transformation Office began to push the concept of network centric operations. We needed to supplement ‘transformation’ with a more narrowly focused concept that would maintain the pressure for more rapid change. That meant it had to be more than just a new slogan. Network centric operations offered the best way of doing this. We had refined the concept over the previous three years and come to realize that the essence of modern transformation involved—as network centric operations posited—pushing information and decision authority into the tactical level of conflict. Championing network centric operational concepts offered a new standard the department could use to reestablish a more focused and faster transformation.’’ Cebrowski thought shifting the vocabulary of change was a means of overcoming the tendency large bureaucracies have to slow and restrict change. It was a natural tendency because bureaucracies were human institutions designed to break problems and challenges into their component parts so that it was easier to deal with the parts in accordance with existing rules. They were naturally

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conservative, and, in enforcing ‘‘I was truly surprised by how important the what amounted to past experipress and other media were to establishing ence, provided needed stability in the vocabulary of transformation, and how the face of ambiguity. Bureaucmuch they became allies in our efforts. racies, he believed, were a necesNewspaper and journal articles have a lot sary component of rational of impact. Senior defense officials—civilian transformation. They never really or in uniform—are always interested in what the press is saying. So, if you’re trying to imposed full stasis to problem establish a concept inside the defense solving, policy, strategy, or force department and define what it involves, getbuilding because selecting what ting the press to talk about the concept and rule to apply and the act of applyexplain it in terms of how you define it turns ing it to the new problem, affected out to have immense leverage inside the the rules. Bureaucracies evolved, Pentagon. There are some important ‘rules’ changing both the way they in the game, of course. The press is usually interested in internal controversy, but dediapplied the rules and the rules cated and savvy officials shouldn’t try to take themselves, in much the same advantage of that interest and try to get the way common law evolved. But press to attack anyone they’re debating with the essence of bureaucracy was to inside or to go after a policy that’s already maintain continuity. And, he been set. That’s wrong and it turns out to believed, in times when so much be stupid and counterproductive so far as was changing, changes in vocabuthe internal debates and discussions are laries could interject a healthy concerned. Luckily, I worked for the most part ahead of policy, pointing out possibilcounterpoise to the inherent conities. That appealed to the press because servatism of bureaucracies. ‘‘Howthey all want to write about coming issues ever, it is important,’’ he argued, and potential controversies. So, in effect I ‘‘not to make the shifts in vocabuhad a story to tell, and the press wanted a lary arbitrarily. Sloganeering genstory to tell. It was a synergistic relationship erates cynicism rather than that turned out surprisingly effective, so far progress. The key is to choose the as getting the notion of transformation tied to network centric concepts was concerned. vocabulary of change carefully, It advanced the discussion about transforand to keep new terms consistent mation. It contributed to clarifying the dewith the general thrusts of the bates over transformation, explaining ideas, changes and concepts you seek to and helped focus productive action. So, if bring about. The shifts should be you’ve got something sensible to say about from the more general concepts what could be coming, and you can say it in toward the more specific and, as a interesting ways, the press will listen and, through them, almost everyone else will lisrule of thumb, they ought to occur ten.’’—Cebrowski on the power of the press. roughly every two years. Two years corresponds to the historical rate of the turnover of senior Department of Defense leadership. And it usually takes that long for large bureaucracies to smother change agents and adjust their interpretation of the new vocabulary to justify the status quo.’’

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Teach Change Cebrowski believed that for changes in vocabulary to have beneficial effects, you must do two things. You have to root the changes in logical content and back them up with systematic explication. ‘‘This means the senior leadership must continually iterate and explain the policy goals it seeks, particularly when those goals seek to alter long-standing traditions, assumptions, and processes. The hierarchical character of the defense department provides considerable leverage to the leadership when they do. But when those policy goals seek significant alterations in what is essentially an institution’s culture—which is the case regarding the effort to institutionalize a relatively high rate of change to defense planning—it takes more. It takes training—making the concept of change an integral part of the training and socialization processes in the U.S. military.’’ The U.S. military has a highly efficient training and educational system.5 Many other nations maintain similar organizations, but the U.S. military training and educational system is among the very best, if not the most effective in the world. It is certainly one of the largest, and the American military dedicates an extraordinary amount of effort—and money—to ensuring its military personnel develop habits of mind applicable to a wide range of military endeavors. Figure 7.1 portrays the formal training and education structure. It omits some of the other training and education aspects and many of the nuances, including the extensive training at the unit level, a number of specialized training programs, and a robust continuing education process. But the figure captures the core of the system. Career progression for uniformed personnel depends on successfully passing through the various levels. For example, all general and flag officers have to have gone through three previous levels before they go into the final school level. The training and education levels listed for noncommissioned officers are mandatory for promotion to the ranks indicated. The figure also indicates the primary focus of the experience in each of the levels. The distinction between ‘‘training’’ and ‘‘education’’ is fuzzy, but using the official definitions, education fosters breadth of view, diverse perspectives and critical analysis, abstract reasoning, comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty and innovative thinking, particularly with respect to complex, nonlinear problems. This contrasts with training, which focuses on instruction to perform specific functions and tasks. Virtually all military schools and professional development programs include elements of both education and training in their academic programs.6 A final caveat: the Department of Defense applies the training and education school structure in the figure much more loosely for civilian employees than it does for those in uniform. That said, the training and education system in the Department of Defense offers something few, if any other, federal government departments can: extensive formal training and educational access to the thinking and behavior of most of its members. It

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Figure 7.1 U.S. Military Training is the single, most important channel to embedding a process of change to the institution. The training and educational system is not, however, easy to manipulate for several reasons. First, until things change a lot, including such nearly immutable things like culture, the training devoted to imparting particular military skills has to continue pretty much as it has. Whether network centric operations dominate military tactics or not, men and women in uniform will have to learn how to fire weapons, fly aircraft, maintain power sources, communicate, and all the other skills a modern military needs to do anything, whatever we call it. That will take up essentially all the training and educational time of about two-thirds of all the personnel going through the system at any one time. Second, it is unlikely that system’s emphasis on developing a critical mind-set in the upper as opposed to the lower tiers will change dramatically. That mind-set is very important to institutionalizing change, and while you want it to reside where experience and responsibility can balance it, the defense department’s training and educational system currently focuses on developing this important attitude among the few, the older, and the sooner to retire. Third, the system lodges the primary responsibility for inculcating transformational attitudes with the permanent faculties at the senior service and joint colleges. Some faculty members carry this out with skill and enthusiasm. Not all do. ‘‘Indeed,’’ Cebrowski observed, ‘‘my impression is that university faculties throughout the United States, and particularly within the upper tiers of the Defense Department’s system, are not only inclined toward

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intellectual conservatism, but also generally reject the hypothesis that the U.S. military ought to be transforming constantly and at a faster rate. I hope it is a false impression on my part. But my stint as president of the Naval War College did little to disabuse me of it. That said, how do you overcome the conservatism of the training and educational establishment? We in the Force Transformation Office had considerable success in planting the seeds of change in that establishment, and, in the process, learned a lot about how to convert the department’s training and educational system into a channel for change.’’ While much of the training that takes place in the lower tiers would be the same regardless of whether the Information or Industrial Age drives it, you can portray the context in which the students receive it differently. And the substance of the training can be different in terms of the equipment and tactical procedures it uses. It is less a matter of altering the kind of training that takes place in the lower tiers than it is of getting the management of those tiers to undertake the changes. But this boils down to a traditional problem of command and is resolvable through existing channels by the right people saying, ‘‘Do it.’’ With regard to inculcating a critical mind-set, Cebrowski’s answer was much the same. ‘‘There is really no functional reason why we can’t expand systematic efforts to inculcate appreciation for transformation at both the intermediate and upper tiers of the training and education system, nor why it has to stop there. It may take changes in procedures and structure to do so: establishing new college chairs and filling them with advocates of change; setting up new research programs dedicated to better understand how to inculcate innovation; establishing new short courses focused on innovation and experimentation; and instituting new certificate programs and other honors that formally recognize the utility of instituting change. All of these techniques have good track records and appear constantly under the banner of some contemporary issue or problem. What’s so hard or wrong with doing the same thing for a particular function, like pushing the concept of change within the institution?’’ Keep Spiraling Rapid spiral development involves getting prototypes of weapons and other systems in the hands of troops as soon as feasible, then incorporating their reactions back into further development.7 It is a matter of rapid, incremental changes based on exploiting operational experience to accelerate larger jumps in concept and capabilities. It is not how the Department of Defense has done development for half a century or, with a few exceptions, does today. The traditional approach is much more cautious and slower, relying largely on an intermediate process of extensive laboratory or test facility certification before turning the finished product over to a military service that then figures how to train people in its use and adjust organization and structure to absorb it. This approach, which remains

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dominant today, involves at least three years from the point the system gets from the prototype stage, through the intermediate test and evaluation process, into the hands of the troops. The average time is closer to half a decade. The initial flirtations with spiral development indicate it can take less than a year. The directive that set up spiral development has the military service program offices identifying the capabilities they need, but not the exact requirement specifications. Instead, a program office is supposed to maintain a tight feedback loop with its contractors, designing the solution piece by piece. ’’Build a little, test a little, build a little,’’ is how industry experts describe the process. The approach encourages defense contractors to incorporate new technologies into new weapon platforms and systems, rather than delivering solutions using only those technologies that existed when the systems were initially designed. For the Defense Department, spiral development helps keep a platform technologically and operationally up to date while it is being built. The term came into vogue as a way of cutting the time it traditionally takes to move a new weapon or system from the research and development stage to the hands (or minds) of operating forces. Yet, the idea is much more than a development process time saver in two respects: spiral development promises a better development process and it is a transformational accelerator. It is a better way to develop weapons and equipment because the best way of testing new equipment is not some sophisticated surrogate for forces in the field, but the forces themselves, particularly in periods of high operational tempo. That is because real world operations are more complex and variable than analytic models or technical simulations. So they provide insights to improvements that the surrogates often miss. As Cebrowski described it, ‘‘the notion that spiral development is a way of transforming the U.S. military faster stems from the view that new technology in the hands of troops pays off in what the troops learn in using it. The transformational potential of network centric operations is an example of this. To the extent things like broadband communications enable truly different approaches to command and control, getting them in the hands of real troops in real operations generates faster understanding of what network centric operations are, how they pay off, and how to do them. The process also embeds the mind-set that continued and faster change has virtue. The bottom line is that spiral development has profound transformational implications because it accelerates the integration of new technology with new force structure, organization, and operations. In the process, it helps build the mind-set that says it’s not just okay to continually challenge the existing way of doing things, it’s natural and needed.’’ Spiral development is in the defense department to stay. It is one of the most significant process changes Secretary Rumsfeld put in place and, like all significant changes, it was not done without confronting skepticism and concerns about disrupting schedules, plans, and ‘‘the way we do things.’’ Some of the

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hesitancy continues. Only a relative few senior officials get to say which new systems go through rapid spiral development and, so far, they have not anointed very many. Those that they have let into the process focus largely on software development. But some senior members of the military have become active supporters of rapid spiral development. The Army, for example, has expanded the process within its major and very expensive development effort, the Future Combat System. And the conflict in Iraq has heated interest in rapidly getting applicable technology in the hands of the troops there. The fact is the risks associated with early force use of prototypes are manageable, and the gain from it helps overcome the strategic risks of not being able to keep up with the Information Age. ‘‘So,’’ Cebrowski said, ‘‘we need to expand the process. One way of doing it is to increase the number of officials—military and civilian—who have the authority to initiate rapid spiral development. The best way of doing that, so far as institutionalizing transformation is concerned, is to lodge the new authority with those organizations that have the most interest in accelerating change. The authority to designate spiral development candidates ought to extend to Joint Forces Command, particularly if the department adopts the force trifurcation concept and sets up the kind of ‘defend forward’ component I’ve proposed.’’8 Keep Sowing Dragons’ Teeth Dragons are disruptive forces. Many cultures, however, do not attribute the dislocation they bring to evil or maliciousness. They see them as agents of change and, as such, able to improve things by the changes they impose or foster. Chinese and some other cultures go even farther, arguing the dragon is a necessary component of life; the yin that must balance the yang—the spirit of change that must balance the spirit of stasis—if the universe is to exist in harmony. ‘‘Using the metaphor in the context of getting the right balance in transformation during a period of profound change means,’’ Cebrowski said, ‘‘we need and will continue to want more dragons in the Pentagon’s decision processes for at least the foreseeable future. What I’m talking about here are advocates for change.’’ He continued, stating that the ‘‘point is that if you want to cultivate a conscious commitment to transformational change within an institution as large as the Department of Defense, you have to establish change agents and charge them with making transformational change their primary mission. Changes in attitude, culture, and procedures that emerge from the bottom up are the most enduring. But they don’t emerge spontaneously and they don’t necessarily occur in response to admonitions from the top. It takes explanation, consistency, and effort by change agents—dragons, if you will—throughout the organization. And because dragons don’t live forever, because they often turn into sheep and

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merge with the spirit of stasis, or just vanish, we need to continually plant their teeth so that new change agents can take their place.’’ Cebrowski acknowledged that change agents do not automatically bring about change or affect underlying assumptions and attitudes about change. Their significance, power, and effectiveness flow from what is really behind the attribution of ‘‘agent.’’ ‘‘A mere office title or claims by the people in it is likely to have little real effect beyond what the skill, energy, and good timing the individuals can generate. In the Department of Defense, there are a multitude of offices, institutions, agencies, and components with people having those capabilities, but who do not favor change. There are, however, two things in the Department of Defense that can magnify the capabilities of people who want to be effective change agents. One is the hierarchical tradition and structure. The other is the power they can derive from networking. Both are theoretically available to any group or office, but there are some aspects of the role of change agents that can give them an edge in capitalizing on them.’’ Being seen by the secretary of defense or other senior authority as an agent for achieving their high priority goal provides an edge. The potency of that edge is particularly high in the Department of Defense because of the inherent culture of hierarchy and discipline. True, defense department organizational charts are not an accurate articulation of a hierarchical pyramid of power in which the pinnacle determines what is produced with taxpayers’ annual outlay of some half trillion dollars for national security. And there are all sorts of checks and balances underpinning those organization charts. But there are few governmental structures in the United States where a bureaucratic culture of hierarchy and discipline is as strong. ‘‘Subordinate offices do not always do what a secretary of defense tells them to do,’’ he acknowledged. ‘‘But the chances are good they will—better than in other government departments and institutions because of that culture. So, to the extent a secretary of defense wants to change things and identifies— clearly, strongly, and continually—specific offices as his change agents, those offices can be particularly effective within the Department of Defense. The best way he can do this is to work directly with the change agent and make sure that the rest of the department knows he works with it.’’ ‘‘Someone once asked me whether I would want to stay on as director of the Force Transformation Office if a new secretary of defense took over. I replied that it depended on how much the new secretary of defense wanted to push transformation. The response by my inquisitor was, ‘how would you know?’ I thought about it and said I could tell from how the secretary responded to the stream of people who come into his office with suggestions and advice on transformation. If, I said, the secretary said to one of his visitors, ‘I’ll get back to you on that’ and then called me in and asked for my advice on what his response should be, I’d want to stay on and work for the new secretary. But if his response was ‘go talk

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with the Office of Force Transformation about your idea,’ I’d be inclined not to want to work for him. ’’ The first response, he continued, indicates a secretary’s strong commitment to transformation. It commits him personally to a decision and response about transformation. And if he asks a change agent how he should respond, it gives the change agent far more leverage because it signifies the secretary is serious about transformation and that his change agent has access to how he really thinks about the problem. The second response signifies less commitment by the secretary. Savvy bureaucrats recognize it as the way to avoid a personal commitment, get on to more important business, and do so without insulting the petitioner. The first response requires the change agent to help the real decision maker decide on a potential change. The second requires the change agent ‘‘In retrospect, I’m surprised at how much mostly to protect the real decision the secretary of defense remained commitmaker’s inclination not to make a ted to transforming the military. The fate of decision, in other words, to help any new concept depends, of course, on the extent to which the leadership owns it the decision maker spend time on and continually promotes it. I mean continuthings other than transformation. ally and deeply. Not just with rhetoric, but It is not hard for observers to by getting down into the details and pushunderstand the power, signifiing the idea into the department’s routine. cance, and effectiveness of change Donald Rumsfeld, one of, if not the best, agents in the context of the two secretaries of defense the nation has had, kinds of responses. understood this and was tenacious in his belief in and promotion of the new concepts. Cebrowski believed strongly He announced his commitment to transforthat Secretary Rumsfeld’s commitmation upon returning to the office in 2001 ment to transformation was the and never got off it. There is no doubt that primary reason it had succeeded the actions he took to jump start it ruffled as well as it had. His admiration feathers in the Pentagon. After 9/11 as the for Rumsfeld was qualified. But global war on terrorism began, the betting he never wavered in his view that inside the building was that however much the secretary might prefer to push the transthe secretary understood proformation of the military, the exigencies of foundly what transformation the war would militate against it. The odds meant and that he dedicated himwere that the war would so consume Rumsself to bringing it about. ‘‘Secrefeld’s attention, he could not attend to transtary Rumsfeld’s relationship to forming the military at the same time. But he transformation and to the change never wavered and remained particularly agents he established to help him attuned to the examples of change and carry out that relationship provide improvements throughout the war, and, more importantly, kept pushing the departan example of how to inculcate a ment to continually incorporate them into general attitude toward change in the forces.’’—Cebrowski on Rumsfeld’s the Department of Defense. The commitment to transformation. Force Transformation Office was

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one of his change agents. Rumsfeld set it up specifically to push change in the department and to do so in effective ways. That is, we did not simply urge others to change what they were doing. We saw our role as essentially one of explaining why particular changes were valuable and ought to be pursued, a task that required a lot of research, articulation, interaction, and serious effort with and among other offices, agencies, and institutions. We were not set up to try to get a specific weapons system into the hands of the military, nor to prevent that from occurring. We were there to explicate the need for transformation, to get people within the Pentagon to buy into it in attitude and approaches, and to facilitate it. I’d like to believe that what effectiveness we had was due entirely to our persuasive capabilities. But people have to want to listen and pay attention for anyone to persuade them, and the reason people listened to us was that the secretary let them know he was interested in what we said about transformation. I always tried to make it clear that I was not the director of U.S. force transformation, the secretary of defense was. The people we were most interested in persuading knew this, and they knew we had his ear. We were not the only advocate for transformation. The secretary saw advocacy for transformation as part of the role of the major functional commands—Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, and Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska, in particular. There, too, the influence they had on the course of U.S. military transformation stemmed largely from the fact that the people in the Department of Defense recognized that those at the top had a personal interest in what they did and thought about transformation. Hierarchy helps change agents when those at the top want things to change.’’ Networking also helps change agents promote change and, more importantly, instill a general interest in changing things. It does so in many of the same ways that networking enhances competitive power in armed conflict. That is, the transactions among change agents not only enhance their knowledge and understanding of transformation, they also increase their collective capacity to articulate the specifics of transformation to others and to expand and extend the network of change agents. Here also the Department of Defense has some particular aspects that can facilitate the growth of change networks. One of the most obvious is the leverage of money. In total, the United States expends about half a trillion dollars a year on national security. Money buys influence over how people think and how fast they decide to change things. Granted, much of that annual expenditure goes to maintain the activities and institutions—and therefore the assumptions and behavior—on which the United States built its past national security. And the line of where the Department of Defense and other government agencies exercise their greatest influence is fuzzy. But the fact remains that the Department of Defense and its change agents can have great influence because of their potential leverage inside the department and in the allocation of funds. To the extent they build networks within the department, their influence will grow outside.

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How do they do that? Cebrowski’s answer was, ‘‘by influencing the flow of defense funding, of course. But this doesn’t mean simply becoming advocates for cutting edge information technology. While the technological dimension is important in transformation, more important and powerful is a broader general shift of funding toward the underlying axiom of network centric theory. When the change agents inside the department unite in funding allocations that favor the small, the numerous, and the networked, the dragon seeds growing into new change agents will flourish.’’ Expand Change Agents Networks That points to another lever for instituting transformation: expanding change agent networks beyond the Department of Defense. Many of the channels for doing so already exist. Cebrowski identified two he thought were the most important: (1) the domestic linkages among the Department of Defense, its contractor community, and the Congress, and, (2) the international linkages with the security establishments of other nations. ‘‘As the change agents that permeate these networks expand their transactions,’’ he said, ‘‘these networks will become great engines of change. This will occur not just because the change agents in and beyond the Department of Defense can draw from a broader base of innovation, but also because their transactions will alter the current dominant bias favoring slow, evolutionary change toward the Information Age bias which accepts and cultivates faster innovation. This flows from network centric theory: the power of the concept of change grows at the square of the transactions among change agents, when the substance of those transactions involves innovation.’’ There is a wide range of traditional forums that facilitate these transactions, from the formal interactions that permeate NATO and other alliance structures, through the multilateral exchanges among the training and educational institutions in the United States and other nations, to the expanding and growing consortia among private commercial enterprises and multinational businesses. Cebrowski advocated strongly supporting these institutional connections and taking new members into them both in the United States and abroad. That was not always something the United States could do unilaterally; multilateral structures require consensus among their members and not everyone, every organization, or every nation is oriented toward transformation nor interested in becoming a change agent. But Cebrowski had seen how receptive the world was to innovation and how innovative ideas, once publicized, coalesced groups of supporters who pushed the innovations forward and deepened them. He had already used this phenomenon in what he referred to as the rather disturbing attribution of ‘‘data-free research,’’ something he had run across in 1973 during his first assignment to the Pentagon.

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‘‘George Haering, my mentor in systems analysis, proposed that if an analysis did not square with your intuition, double check the analysis because it’s probably wrong. When he first proposed it, I said it sounded ridiculous. But he responded with one of those insights that really say so much. ‘If you’re talking about the future,’ he said, ‘there are no data. So how do you do analysis?’ Haering was a true analyst who recognized it was immensely important to have supporting evidence, some vindication that your intuition is correct. He explained it was not that difficult to get, that it was out there in the world somewhere, and those that had it wanted to share it with you. We in the Office of Force Transformation discovered that his perspective rang true. We tapped that vast storehouse of knowledge out there. We would go with our intuition on issues, do some preliminary analyses to get a better sense of how firm the foundation for our intuition was, and then we would go public with the concept. I’d include it in a speech, or we’d put it out on our web site, or give it to a reporter. It would enter the public realm, and very soon people would start contacting us, always with a similar message: ‘I noticed that you’re interested in what I’ve been working on, so I attached my work on the subject.’ It was quite amazing.’’ The revelation in this was the fact of a vast reservoir of potential change agents throughout the world. Perhaps they had always been there, but the Information Age makes it possible to tap into and unite them so much easier. So long as what he referred to as the sixth lever to change existed: rapidly thinning out the vast artifact of constraints on flows of information built in the Industrial Age. Let the Sun Shine In The idea of rapidly expanding transactions by change agents across department and international boundaries has always been controversial. In national security matters it confronts concern with divulging secrets and the threat to the extravagant and largely effective security systems in which the United States and other nations have invested great wealth and energy. Cebrowski thought these concerns and the information screens they engender were not wrong. But he saw many of them as outdated because, he would argue, ‘‘National security lies less in trying to restrict information and more in knowing what is occurring and then moving quickly to take advantage of that knowledge. That is easy to say, but it implies much more than a review and adjustment of security regulations. It is a call for a different way of thinking about security, and it comes from some very potent assumptions about what constitutes national security today and in the future. The most important of these is that much more of what counts in military competition is no longer secret and may be impossible to hide.’’ ‘‘Nations or any other groups cannot prevent the global flow of information and knowledge and can no longer slow it significantly. They can only restrict it —somewhat—to themselves by withdrawing from the emerging age. Doing so

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will reduce their power and their ability to compete militarily. The key to successful military competition in the future, then, is maintaining as comprehensive an access to information as possible and building two capabilities. One is the ability to convert the information to knowledge. The other is the ability to change our assumptions, institutions, behavior, and actions in accordance with evolving knowledge and a changing world. To do that we must feed as much information as we can into the growing global network. We must become a node in the global information system, drawing and providing information so the power of the network grows. We must let the sun shine in if we are to hold the world together.’’ So, those were what Cebrowski saw as the six stimulants to transformation, and he saw them as synergistic. Change the vocabulary and imagery of defense planning, and it is more possible and necessary to teach change. As military education and training increasingly accept the concept of change and innovation, it becomes much more logical to accelerate the research, development, and procurement processes, and the concept of spiral development takes hold. That reinforces the understanding and acceptance of faster change throughout the defense establishment. And that justifies the rise and influence of new change agents who seek to increase their influence through the power of networks. As the networks of change grow, the need for opening access to information becomes more obvious. ‘‘What does this all boil down to?’’ he asked. ‘‘It requires a shift in the underlying culture, assumptions, and behavior if we are to ride the new tide of the Information Age and not be swept beneath it. The race will go to the swift, the smart, and the agile. In the Information Age, these attributes translate into the ability to leave the Industrial Age values, procedures, and goals behind—in effect, the capacity to sever the bonds of tradition. Here, we Americans have an important edge, for the capacity to leave the past behind is a function of culture and the political system. Americans have a culture that venerates new frontiers and a political system that protects diversity, the expression of ideas, and the freedom to differ. We, as a people, are the swift, the smart, and the agile. As such, we are far more willing than most to seize the opportunities of the new age.’’

CHAPTER

8

AN APPRAISAL

Cebrowski’s time as director of the Office of Force Transformation coincided with a period of rapid change inside the Pentagon. It could not have been otherwise. Tremendous economic, political, cultural, technological, and social changes drove history in the final decade of the twentieth century, sweeping Cebrowski and all the rest of us into the new century and a new age. But the Pentagon had not been in the forefront of these changes. Indeed, it had been slow to react to the demise of the Soviet Union and the military revolutionaries’ efforts to push it into a vanguard of change in the mid-1990s had largely failed. By 2001, the inherent conservatism of the military had absorbed their attempts and the Department of Defense continued to maintain essentially the same planning assumptions that had been around for decades, the same force design, and the same incremental, cautious approach to change. The Defense Department continued to go about its business pretty much as it had across the decades, across political administrations, and across generations of hard-working professional military and civilian employees. That changed in 2001 for a number of reasons, but when it happened it unleashed considerable pent-up interest in not just more rapid modernization, but an assault on some basic assumptions regarding the character and purpose of military force. The years Cebrowski served as the director of force transformation culminated his four-decade intellectual quest to reconcile the ageless tension between the destructive potential of military power and morality. He had selected a military career as a young man as young men do, entering it robustly, for the adventure, excitement, and patriotism. He joined to fly jets, bringing the athleticism and

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strength of youth, curiosity, an innate interest in mathematics, and a religious sensitivity. Like the rest of his generation that joined the military services in time of war, he had focused hard on learning the skills of war. And flying combat missions made him feel—intimately—the reality of deadly, killing violence and begin to understand the essence of military competition. Those early years kindled his interest in the deeper issue of morality and armed conflict. He dug into natural law and just war theory, back into the questions of the nature of man and whether war was part of that nature, choosing before he was in his late 20s to leave the question open of whether it was natural. But he concluded there was a competitiveness to man that would always exist and that while that did not make war inevitable, it raised its probability. That reinforced his decision on his chosen profession and, in his mind, the need to reconcile the prospect of war with morality. The just war, he understood, was a function of purpose and conduct—what its inherent violence was used for and how it was used. It was that second dimension—the moral content in how military force is used—that most drew his thinking, and he had concluded early on that the moral use of violence in warfare was an issue of precision, of avoiding harm to the innocent. His early military experience had also taught him about military competition and introduced him to the notion of military complexity. Armed conflict focused, concentrated, refined, and accelerated human competition. As such, it heightened the need for change and adaptation to the changes and to the adaptations of the opponent. Yes, he understood the absolute requirement to master the characteristics of his chosen profession—its discipline, emphasis on training and doctrine, the skills it demanded, and the reason for the mores it inculcated. But because all of this flowed from an intense form of human competition, he sensed an underlying dynamic to military affairs, a dynamic of change, a dynamic of transformation. For years that sense remained inarticulate, but as he rose through the military ranks it grew. Much the same happened with his notion of complexity. The endless variations of physical stress as he maneuvered the aircraft through the North Vietnamese air defenses into and out of his bomb runs. The mental twists as he adjusted, balanced, chose, and changed all the variables in the competition between his attack and the defender’s efforts to kill him, between what he could see and hear, between what the sensors that told him about what he could not see or yet feel and what he should believe. All that had embedded an interest in complexity. That interest grew into a hypothesis about conflict. Military theorists had long understood that armed conflict was about violence, danger, destruction, fear, and confusion. But that was not its complete repertoire, for it was also complex, a characteristic that grew from its competitive nature. Success in conflict involved mastering the complexity better than the opponent; no, more, it was about imposing greater complexity on the opponent. Doing so in effect made it

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increasingly easier for you to do terrible things to him and increasingly difficult for him to do the same to you. But the manipulation of complexity was, he began to believe, the link to morality in armed conflict. This was because of the effects of complexity. It was, as Clausewitz had pointed out in the nineteenth century, what generated the fog and friction of war, the phenomena that eroded military efficiency that led to confusion and mistakes, disrupted timing, that undermined plans, and that ultimately could result in the physical destruction of armies by an opponent. But it also had cognitive effects. It could lead to hopelessness, to the belief that military endeavors were doomed, to a sense of powerlessness, and to the rise of a desire to capitulate, to end the war. Complexity could therefore be overwhelming. To Cebrowski, then, imposing overwhelming complexity on a military opponent was a good way to think about successful military competition. But he also saw it as a means of making the inherent violence of warfare more moral, for if you could confront an opponent with overwhelming complexity, you might not have to kill him to win. If you could make him believe armed conflict was fruitless, that he was powerless, that he could not win, he would adapt. That adaptation would not necessarily end the competition. But it might channel it into different, less destructive modes; modes that would carry less risk and danger to the competitors, but also to the innocent. It was a more moral means of conducting armed conflict. It was the creation and articulation of this conceptual framework—the kind of theory of warfare attributed to Clausewitz, Sun-tzu, Jomini, Mao, and others—that Cebrowski hoped would transform the debate that had plagued the American revolution of military affairs for a decade from the buzz terms and pedantry into purposeful, effective action. To him, that was the transformation of transformation. How should we assess the impact of Arthur Cebrowski on the course of U.S. military transformation? What was his contribution? How much difference did he make? How will historians deal with him? The answers lie partially in where he fits in history, particularly in his last position as director of the Office of Force Transformation. That was when he had achieved a rank and access sufficient to make others pay serious attention to what he had to say about military transformation. It was also a period of huge changes throughout the world, changes so great that the world was particularly ripe for prophets of change and transformation. Cebrowski was such a prophet. His influence flowed not from command or political power, but from intellect and articulation. And like all prophets, his influence had an aura of both timeliness and timelessness. His views were timely, welcomed by those in power who used them to further their agendas. That much is clear. Whether they are timeless in the sense that they will continue to guide decisions and actions in the future is better left to a future retrospective. There are, however, some reasons to believe they will survive the test of time and that

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future generations of military professionals and historians will see his arguments as prescient and his concepts as timeless.

Timeliness Certainly a lot of change outside the Pentagon had been underway prior to the creation of an Office of Force Transformation inside the Pentagon. The collapse of the old bipolar international security system had occurred more than a decade earlier. The internet had already spawned the notion of continuous exponential growth in information.1 Pundits spoke regularly of globalization. Secretaries of defense were routinely proclaiming their commitment to transforming the U.S. military, even if they did very little about it. And a shadowy network, growing from the mysterious milieu of fanaticism, religiosity, anger, and deep hatreds of the sweep of history, modernism, and globalization had attacked U.S. embassies in Africa and the World Trade Center in New York with surprisingly powerful truck bombs. But for the most part, the American public had shrugged off these harbingers. The 1990s had been ripe with change in military affairs. It cascaded from the collapse of the Soviet Union; that, in turn, undermined the bipolar assumptions that had dominated security planning; that, in turn, set the alliance structures built in the previous four decades adrift; that, in turn, de-legitimized the U.S. basing system; that, in turn, demanded major force structure shifts. The U.S. reaction had been slow to begin. The National Security Strategy, signed by President George H.W. Bush in August 1991, foresaw ‘‘fundamental transformation of the global strategic environment,’’ but cautioned about making precipitous changes to U.S. military forces and highlighted the need to be able to reconstitute the size and character of the force that had served so well in the Cold War as the inevitable downsizing began. Colin Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advanced what he termed the base force as early as 1989, outlining force reductions, but made no significant recommendations regarding the force structure. While he called for changes in the global command organization in concert with the force reductions, he argued essentially for a smaller version of the Cold War force until the United States could come to grips with the new environment.2 Richard Cheney, then secretary of defense, emphasized maintaining a force that could rapidly be reconstituted—return to the size needed in the event the Soviet Union returned—in the last National Defense Strategy signed before the Clinton administration took office. The Clinton administration was also reluctant to make changes to the structure and character of the U.S. military. Its ‘‘bottom up review’’ officially ended the notion of maintaining a U.S. force designed against the prospect of a reconstituted Soviet threat, but the planning scenario it endorsed—two nearly simultaneous major conflicts in separate

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regions—consciously maintained the rationale for making few changes to the structure or character of the force. The first challenge to the penchant for maintaining the status quo came from the ‘‘revolutionaries’’ led by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Bill Owens, in the mid-1990s, in which Cebrowski had been a charter member. But, as discussed in Chapter 1, the revolution was short lived, and the last years of the Clinton administration were marked more by efforts to return to the ‘‘normalcy’’ of incremental, cautious change. Looking back at the decade of the 1990s, it is not hard to see it as a period of pent-up and growing pressure and for accelerated change. Technology, or rather the growing appreciation of the potential of precision weapons and battlespace awareness, heightened the pressure. So did the growing discrepancy in the final years of the decade between the rhetoric of military transformation and the reality of the slow pace at which it proceeded. George W. Bush turned the pressure to political leverage in his first campaign for the presidency. He did so in a speech at the Citadel, the military college in South Carolina, on September 23, 1999. The Bush campaign had chosen to make criticism of the Clinton administration’s use and, in the campaign rhetoric, ‘‘abuse and disregard of the military’’ a major theme. Most of Bush’s Citadel speech iterated those criticisms. But it also picked up the argument for faster transformation and innovation. The speech, well publicized in advance and well touted afterward, had significant impacts. It gave substance to the campaign’s argument that he not only would bring in a seasoned national security team, but that he knew what he was talking about and had a depth of insight that belied democratic accusations of superficiality. The speech was widely remarked upon and most of the pundit reviews gave it high marks. The drafting of the speech was attributed to the group of former political appointees in the Reagan and Bush administrations known collectively as the Vulcans. But the spirit and probably much of the final wording came from Donald Rumsfeld. He followed its outline almost exactly after Bush appointed him as secretary of defense. Donald Rumsfeld, in his second tour as secretary, is destined to always be compared with Robert S. McNamara, and historians will debate which of the two most defined and expanded the influence of the office they held. Of all the post-WWII secretaries of defense, they were the most significant in enhancing the power of the office in both formulating U.S. security policy and in designing the forces that implemented it during and after their tenures. They actively sought to extend the decision authority of the civilian side of the Pentagon into military strategy and force structure at the expense of the professional military. And for the most part they succeeded, establishing a different civil-military relationship than had existed at the time they entered office. Their similarities are remarkable. Both came into the office dedicated to changing it, to altering the processes through which it influenced the character of the U.S. military, and to expanding its role in defining and executing U.S. security policy. A controversial

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war enmeshed them both, and their conduct of the wars was highly controversial. McNamara, more than any other single individual, defined the concept of deterrence on which the security relationship of the United States and Soviet Union, and most of the rest of the world, rested. Rumsfeld, probably more than any other single individual, defined the post-Cold War role of the United States in world security. Both tried to implement a new security policy. McNamara’s was flexible response, and historians generally agree he succeeded in inculcating its premises into the design and use of the U.S. military. Rumsfeld’s was military transformation. It is too early for history to judge whether he was as successful and the initial reviews are mixed. Rumsfeld’s approach to transformation emphasized destroying the old order much more than specifying what the new one was to be. His commentary on U.S. military transformation consistently focused on the deficiencies of what existed in the decade before he reassumed his office and on the need for change. He frequently listed what he identified as his administration’s transformation achievements and he consistently referred to transformation as one of the department’s highest priorities. But he seldom explicated what he believed should replace the deficiencies and limitations of the past in other than general terms. He advocated agility, jointness, adaptive planning, and a score of other terms— all of which earlier administrations had also advocated. Arguably, Rumsfeld was the more vocal and consistent advocate, but he never really explained why these were goals, how to get them, or what made his advocacy different from that of his predecessors. Part of the explanation is that he did not have to. As the senior policy maker in the Pentagon, it was enough for him to point the department in a given direction, rely on subordinates to push the bureaucracies in that direction, and then check on the progress. Rumsfeld said as much when he explained to Cebrowski that what would transform the U.S. military was not just the secretary of defense’s commitment, but a commitment by the rest of the military and civilian leadership. His penchant for carefully selecting people for those leadership positions because of their commitment to transformation backs up this explanation. There were probably other factors, not the least of which was the political utility, particularly after 9/11, of emphasizing national security and the need for changes in U.S. military capabilities. But whatever the full explanation, the secretary’s approach made Cebrowski’s views of transformation timely. Because Rumsfeld did not go much beyond cheerleading for transformation, it fell to Cebrowski—whom Rumsfeld had officially designated as the director of his Force Transformation Office, reporting directly to him—to provide the conceptual substance. Had Rumsfeld instead chosen to try to provide it himself, or turned to others to do so, the interest in what Cebrowski said would have been less. And because the secretary made transformation a touchstone of his administration, participants, observers, and the

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public turned to what the designated and de facto theorist, Cebrowski, had to say about it. So, Cebrowski benefited from a congruence of factors. He had the authority to explicate the concept of transformation and the reputation of having been intimately involved in the subject for nearly a decade before the secretary of defense anointed him as transformation’s intellectual progenitor. His ascendancy took place during the political authentication of transformation by a new administration, buoyed by a growing appreciation of the technology that drove and justified the postulation of significant change in military affairs. Beneath it all was the growing belief that the counterrevolution that had set in as the American military revolutionists left in the late 1990s had run its course. That earlier, abortive revolution had generated new dragons’ teeth: midcareer military professionals who had been captivated by the ideas that spun out of the revolutionaries in the mid-1990s, and, now at the dawn of a new century, were moving into the general and flag ranks. They were arriving frustrated—frustrated that the department of defense had not seized the concepts and promises of the revolutionaries. And frustrated by the gap they sensed between the five years of glowing rhetoric about transformation and what seemed to be a cottage industry dedicated to pumping out studies, contractor proposals, and conferences that seemed only to be burrowing down into esoteric levels of increasing irrelevancy. They wanted a concept that made sense, was not just a listing of ideas or actions to justify the claim that transformation was alive and healthy, and that would put the pieces together into something they could use. The stage was set. Cebrowski had a conceptual framework that fit the times. And he presented it well.

Timelessness In the pantheon of Mars, god of war, there are three kinds of heroes. Warriors, known for their physical, organizational, and leadership skills and their bravery. Achilles, Alexander, Hannibal, Patton, Shaka Zulu, and others hold central positions on the pediments. There is a smattering of military historians, for how else would the warriors have made it in? And there are the military theorists, those who provided the concepts that guided the warriors and helped the historians decide which of the them deserved induction. The theorists who make it in do so largely because their views are timeless. Timelessness is an attribution bestowed by following generations of military professionals and historians. They award the attribution if they find the thoughts and views of theorists useful in dealing with the contemporary issues and problems they face or as justification of the actions they have taken to deal with them. And, more importantly, if the theories and explanations work in the military competitions in which they engage. So, whether Cebrowski gets into the pantheon or not depends on what people think about his thoughts and arguments in the future. We know enough

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about why some theorists who made it in, however, to postulate about the odds of him joining their ranks. How well they, or others, articulated their views has some bearing. Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Antoine de Jomini, Guilio Douhet—generally accorded pantheon membership by European and American historians and military professionals—all had a literary facility with the languages in which they expressed their views. Clausewitz (and his wife, whose skill in compiling his treatise on war is sometimes ignored) wrote well, blending a conciseness with imagery and metaphors that generate pictures in the minds of readers today, even if they must read translations of the German in which he crafted them. The others all expressed themselves well in their native languages. Literary skill is not a necessary condition to achieve the attribution of timelessness. The sayings attributed to Sun-tzu in the fifth century BC have a lyrical quality and poetic form in modern Chinese today, although because of their cryptic formulation, the fact that figures such as Mao Tse-tung embellished on them helped boost Sun’s elevation to the ranks of great military theorists. But whether they wrote their own material or not, the ease with which readers or listeners understood what they were saying has always been an important factor. It is a lot easier to apply the views of someone else to contemporary issues if you understand them. A more prominent characteristic of timeless military theory seems to be its breadth. It addresses not only technique in the use of military power, but provides a bridging logic to deeper dynamics; from discussion of the sources of the power and its purposes, to the character of the forces that use the power, to the political, cultural, social characteristics of the times and milieus that generate them. Indeed, it is probably this more comprehensive web that distinguishes, say, the thought of theorists such as Clausewitz from the tactical brilliance and insights of a Heinz Guderian or John Boyd. This makes sense within the hypothesis that it is the generations that follow who decide what theories are timeless. That is because the views of theorists will be compelling to future generations to the extent they not only can decide the outcome of a particular armed competition, battle, or war, but also to the extent they can explain why they will do so in all armed competitions, battles, or wars. That kind of explanation is the stuff of cosmology, and is likely to be convincing only if it fits with the prevailing assumptions of physics and of the nature of man. And those assumptions, while not entirely unarguable or inalterable, change slowly enough to last for ages. It is this dimension that will probably earn Cebrowski’s thoughts the attribution of timelessness, at least for the remainder of the Information Age within which mankind is likely to be for a considerable period. Like Niccolo Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and other grand theorists, Cebrowski framed his arguments within a broader set of political, social, and cultural assumptions. In looking back over the nearly five years of notes and transcripts of our conversations, I think the core of Cebrowski’s thinking combined moral precepts

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from two streams of thought. One was his Roman Catholicism, from which he developed his understanding of the moral use of military force. It was rooted in his belief in the worth of the individual, also, I think, drawn from his religious beliefs. While he accepted that there were evil people, inclined to perdition, he took this as a result of their choice. It was not because it was a natural condition. He took his Christianity seriously, believing that the natural inclination of humans was toward competition, but not necessarily or inevitably toward destructive, armed competition, and that such tendencies were balanced by a parallel inclination toward social amity. Human beings were naturally innocent, possessed moral worth, and, unless they chose otherwise, valuable to mankind. Because of this, to him, the essence of morality in the exercise of force was to discriminate between the innocent and those who had chosen not to be. How to do this became a central quest in his theoretical approach to military affairs. The other stream of philosophy that flowed through his thinking was that of American pragmatism. His thought inclined to the central argument of William James and John Dewey, that the truth of ideas and actions is a function of their outcomes. He did not accept either the simplistic explanation that this meant that whatever works is right, or the notion that the end justifies the means used to achieve it. Instead, he adopted the arguments that theory, concepts, rules, and ideas were all instruments that humans use to solve problems and should be judged in terms of their practical consequences for human conduct. And he believed deeply that all propositions and dogma were subject continually to rational critique. That was why he so strongly accepted what the pragmatists had nominated as corollary means of doing this: pluralism, democracy, and experimentation. Cebrowski once described a technique that I think illustrated his link to the American pragmatists, something he called ‘‘taking the inevitable and turning it into a virtue.’’ It was more of an implementing rather than analytic technique, but like analysis of the future, it also started with intuition. He offered an example: ‘‘Shortly after the Army and Marines swept into Baghdad, some of us intuitively knew that it was going to be very difficult to stabilize the situation there. Most others intuitively knew the opposite. Our intuition led us to try to figure out what to do about it. Theirs saw such efforts as unnecessary, a waste of time, and disruptive to the smooth operation of policy. Intuition drove both views; both saw radically different inevitabilities. So, where was the virtue in that situation regarding the inevitable, or rather, competing inevitabilities?’’ The virtue was on the side of those whose intuition led them to push into contingency planning, he explained. It was the more virtuous for two reasons. First, it allowed evaluation of options. There was no virtue to being surprised. On the contrary, surprise often generated irrational, emotional responses, reducing the role of reason and increasing the chances of indiscriminate use of violence. There was almost always going to be a prevailing bias with regard to the future, but just

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because it was the prevailing bias did not mean it was going to be correct. No one could accurately predict the future, and because of that, virtue stemmed from a willingness to challenge what seemed inevitable. But virtue, he argued, came from more than a willingness to challenge or question prevailing opinion. That was really only the initial step. In the example he was using, ‘‘having asserted stabilization was going to be a real problem, we’d pushed into a higher plane of analysis, away from the question of whether or not there was going to be a problem and into the question of what to do about it.’’ That allowed people to think about solutions or approaches to a problem, because ‘‘if you identify something that you think is going to be inevitable, the next step is to identify the paths by which you can get there. The virtue comes into the equation when you use moral criteria to select the path to take.’’ In effect, Cebrowski returned to what he saw as the moral thread running through the use of military force. Using violence and force for just purposes was not immoral, but using them indiscriminately in ways that brought harm to the innocent was. His phase, ‘‘make a virtue out of the inevitable’’ was not just a cute saying. It embodied a deep appreciation of how easy it was to make mistakes in using military power, the need to always remember how easy it was, and how important it was to keep the mistakes from slipping into immorality. It was the interaction of the religious and philosophical streams in his thought that drew him to John Courtney Murray’s writings. Murray had, in the 1950s and 1960s, brought the two streams together and his arguments and writings had an indelible impact on Cebrowski’s views that lasted for the rest of his life. And it showed up in how Cebrowski presented his own arguments. For a major thinker, he did comparatively little writing, preferring to offer his ideas via speeches, which he gave extemporaneously or, at most, from rough outlines or a few notes, and briefings, using the ubiquitous PowerPoint media which he never annotated. I once asked him why he so seldom prepared a written basis for what he presented. His reply: ‘‘It’s all a work in progress. I’m trying to generate reactions in order to refine and improve my thinking. So, I want to leave it easier to change for the next time I give it.’’ He took his ideas seriously, but was always ready to revise them in light of what others said. He was a synthesizer— open to dialogue and intellectual push-back, always searching for a synthesis or a new way of looking at an issue. He claimed that was what he was best at doing. What, then, are the components of his thought that are likely to remain influential? I think he presented three candidates for lasting impact, and a fourth that may eventually get an honorable mention. One candidate is what he explicated as the major military implications of information technology. Another is his articulation of network centric warfare as a new theory of war. The third candidate is the international system he sketched. The honorable mention comes less from what he directly explicated, and more from the implications of the three

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candidates he did articulate directly. He constructed a foundation for joining the American foreign policy traditions of realism and idealism. Information Technology The first candidate has to do with three aspects of the information technology now driving much of the discussion about modern warfare: how the technology changes the concept of great powers, how it posits radical changes in military organization and structure, and how it could make the conduct of armed conflict more ethical. The increasing ability to get comprehensive, accurate, and precise information of a battlespace has spawned a number of imaginative postulations about warfare, including visions of bloodless cyber battles over the control of information centers of opposing forces, mind control, and intersocietal contests of imposing perceptions.3 Cebrowski’s view was a bit more prosaic and probably more insightful. He recognized the potential military leverage of information technology, but pointed to its availability as one of its three most significant aspects. To him, the fact of global access to the technologies that could generate dominant battlespace knowledge altered, fundamentally, a cornerstone of thinking about military affairs in the Industrial Age; namely, that competitive military power was essentially the purview of large, wealthy, industrialized states that had the wherewithal to gain and use the technology that was its source. In the emerging world, he argued, access to the sources of military power was open to any nation or subgroup that wanted it. That not only turned a fundamental Industrial Age assumption about military, along with the structure of international relations built on that assumption power on its head, but it also led to the prospect of vastly expanded armed competition in which the edge would go to those who were most agile in adapting the technology to military purposes. In such a world, what was once an advantage in military competition—huge bureaucracies, hierarchical organizations, and mass—could turn out to be competitive liabilities. This led him to his arguments for radical and rapid changes in the organization and structure of the U.S. military and in the processes that designed, supplied, and maintained it. Cebrowski’s most profound and controversial argument regarding information technology had to do with the arrangement of decision authority. He advocated not just pushing information down to the tactical level, but also pushing decision authority down as well. Self-synchronization at the tactical level was his goal. It was not an alien idea in military thought. The U.S. Marine Corps had been working since the middle 1980s on the specifics of how subordinate units could coordinate their operations with little direction from above in carrying out their ‘‘commander’s intent.’’ The idea had fascinated Cebrowski since the 1970s when he analyzed the ability of separate F-14 pilots to synchronize their fleet air

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defense actions. But the U.S. military, like most militaries, approached the balance between central and distributed operational control carefully and were very cautious about delegating decision authority downward. Operational experience was highly valued and military hierarchies were there to assure that the more experienced made the decisions. Cebrowski understood this. Yet, he pushed the edge of conventional military wisdom about the proper balance, arguing that networked units would be more effective as decision authority shifted to the tactical units. Many in the military thought he was going too far. How did he react to the accusations that he would increase the likelihood of deadly operational errors by relying too much on self-synchronization at lower levels? ‘‘Finding the right balance,’’ he would reply, ‘‘is important, of course. But remember that the right balance is a function of training and rules. Neither of those is static, and it is as wrong to believe the training can’t get better as it is to ignore the need for good judgment and experience at the lower tactical levels. We need to experiment, test, and be willing to alter the training and the career patterns to make sure we get and maintain the right balance of decision authority. But what we should not do is continue command assumptions that are outdated, out of touch with what information technology can give us, and out of synch with reality.’’ To Cebrowski, the networks that allowed information to spread to the tactical level, down to the smallest units, could also facilitate collaboration among those units. And that helped sort out ground truth and increase decision and action speed. In Cebrowski’s view, the commander’s role was to express his intent, check on the way subordinates exercised initiative in its pursuit, and adjust quickly to the situation as it evolved. Network communication flows that facilitated selfsynchronization at the tactical levels would replace vertical communication flows that sought to facilitate the traditional hierarchical control system. And to the extent that force elements could self-synchronize their decisions and physical actions, he argued, the decision speed of a military organization would increase. Decision speed generated options for the force that has it and increased the complexity an opponent faces—complexity in the sense that the opponent believes you have more options than he does and can adjust more quickly to whatever he does. At a more general level, Cebrowski was challenging the long-standing notion of the fog and friction of war. He accepted some of the precepts of Clausewitz —that armed conflict carried a complexity and confusion all its own. But his views diverged from the Clausewitz dogma on what to do about it. The traditional solution was deeply rooted in the perceived value of hierarchy. On the linear battlefields that dominate Clauswitzian thinking, the fog is thickest at the front. That is where war’s uncertainty, chance, suffering, confusion, exhaustion, and fear are the most intense and the people experiencing them the lowest in rank. Hierarchy was the best means of coping with that situation; get command

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authority away from the battlefield and in the hands of those qualified by class, political connections, or training to exercise it and disciplined armies could cope with the fog of war. In the hierarchical model, information on the situation flowed upward, commands on what to do about it flowed downward. Its operational implementation generally imposed a model in which information from tactical units flowed upward to higher authorities, who compared and merged the different slices into an understanding of the conflict, from which the senior authorities would impose synchronization on their subordinates in the form of orders. The friction of war—stemming from the effects of time, space, human frailties, and the fog of war—kept the arrangement from working smoothly, but discipline and training could counteract it. Accepting the model, much of the American effort to build effective communications systems had focused on trying to smooth and speed the vertical flows of information and command. To Cebrowski, a better technical approach was to think in terms of lateral flows of information and collaboration because it would pay off both in better decisions, faster implementation speeds, and faster collective learning by the force. Command authority in the model he proposed was not strictly the property of rank, class, or experience. It was widely shared, flowing from a common understanding of the situation, continually adjusted and updated through the interaction and feedback among the different perspectives. Calling it a democratic model is pushing the metaphor too far, but it was clearly a concept that envisioned teamwork and recognized the importance of all team members. At the same time information technologies were changing the assumptions about the groups that could compete in military competitions and the organizations of authority that would be effective in the competitions, he believed the technologies were also increasing the chances of making armed competition more moral. If, as he believed, morality in the use of force boiled down to a matter of discriminating between combatants and noncombatants, the technologies offered a quantum leap in the ability to do this, and, in effect, could increase the moral quotient in armed competition. He recognized that this contention was also a leap in logic, for among other problems, it tended to paper over the nuances and gradations of innocence that had emerged in the last half of the twentieth century. He also recognized that the kind of irregular war he believed the United States would most likely face made distinguishing the innocents increasingly difficult. He thought the U.S. involvement in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad to coalition forces demonstrated that U.S. opponents would consciously and systematically seek to make it more difficult. But he argued that to the extent the United States acknowledged the moral dimension of better, more accurate, and timely information, the more the U.S. military could hone the technology to distinguish and help avoid harm to the innocent. The problem was not inherent limitations of the technology. It was the assumption it simply could not be precise enough to differentiate combatants that sought to blend into

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the civilian population from noncombatants. He was convinced it was the overhang of Industrial Age assumptions—particularly those associated with attrition warfare—that prevented the United States from trying to hone the technology to greater precision and use it accordingly. This, also, leaned against conventional wisdom. Over the course of the twentieth century, discussions of just war had gradually moved toward the Jus Ad Bellum question—the issue of the justness of the purposes for waging war—and away from the Jus In Bello question—the issue of ethical conduct of war. The shift partly reflected the World War II experiences of total national mobilization that blurred the distinction between combatants and noncombatants and the terror bombing (by the British and Germans on each other, the Japanese on the Chinese, and the Americans on the Japanese) that focused largely on the civilian populations. The expansion of destructive military power, which, by the 1960s, had theorists arguing that the surge in thermonuclear weapons ruled out any ability to differentiate combatants from noncombatants, also contributed to the shift.4 To Cebrowski, however, the primary contributor to the disregard of the moral conduct of armed competition was the concept of attrition warfare. He believed attrition warfare—essentially killing as many members of an opponent until, in Clausewitz’s phrase, the opponent could no longer resist the will of the contender—was inherently indiscriminate. Much of the world had slipped into a penchant for attrition warfare because industrialization made it easy to generate the mass to wage it, but without a commensurate ability to use the power discriminately. But Cebrowski believed the information technologies that drove the new age could make attrition warfare more discriminate. Better, it offered the chance of eliminating attrition warfare entirely, thereby providing the means for the United States to reincorporate morality into the conduct of military competition. He saw the technology opening paths not just to military applications of target recognition and tracking, but also to deeper understandings of the cultural and cognitive sources and parameters of behavior on the part of potential opponents. The technology was, to him, a lever to deeper understanding and knowledge of what an opponent thought, why he acted as he did, and how he would compete militarily. Here, too, he saw the hurdles as the existing organization, structure, culture, and operating concepts of the U.S. military. Over the decades, America had honed the Industrial Age design and character of its military to the epitome of that age’s goals. It was the military most capable of waging attrition warfare the world had ever seen. Yes, there was a moral backbone to the U.S. military. As an institution it rejected Abu Ghraib, just as it had rejected My Lai decades earlier. It took collateral damage seriously and sought to limit it. But its design, organization, and operational concepts worked against just conduct rather than

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facilitated it. And as long as attrition warfare was at the core of its design, the U.S. military would not be as effective in modern armed conflict as it could be. This was true, Cebrowski argued, because attrition warfare inherently slid into killing the innocent. That slide prolongs a conflict, inevitably pulling the original purpose of using armed forces down into the quagmire of trying to cope with second and third generation blood debts. In effect this aligned his two philosophical guidelines, the ethical conduct concepts derived from Thomas Aquinas with the precepts of the American pragmatists. Lessening harm to the innocent by exercising better means of discriminating between who was a true noncombatant met the ethical dictum, and keeping a conflict just by preventing it from slipping into blood lust and blood debts made the use of force more effective in terms of its results and outcomes. Cebrowski’s views on technology help qualify him as a candidate to the Mars pantheon because of his foresight. He foresaw the impact of information technology not just in terms of military efficiency, but in terms of innovation in military organization and structure. First-rate historians, looking back at technological advents, have sometimes brilliantly described how the new technologies changed military organizations and political systems. The list of military theorists who foresaw the military organizational and structural changes and the political innovations that would flow from an emerging technology is, arguably, shorter. That list includes some big names. Napoleon makes it for establishing the organizational framework that exists in ground forces today (although it is not clear his organizational insights were driven by technology as much as his perceptions of the implications of the leve´e en masse and the strategic impact of mobility). Douhet and Billy Mitchell make it for their implicit and explicit arguments that aircraft would restructure and reorganize land forces (if they continued to exist at all). Liddell Hart, Rommel, and Guderian make it for their views of how armored forces could change ground warfare and organizations. Cebrowski makes it because of his systematic approach to the relationship of information technology with military organization and operations that culminated in his notion of self-synchronization within a broader theory of war. That points to the second candidate for timeless thought: what he called ‘‘network centric warfare, a new theory of war.’’ Network Centric Warfare The network centric concept Cebrowski espoused flowed from his moral convictions, concern with the trend of twentieth century warfare of increasing civilian deaths, and his attack on attrition warfare. He did not reject the use of destructive violence or death in warfare, but he did not see it as the purpose of armed conflict so much as a means of bringing about an opponent’s decision to no longer compete in the conflict. The goal of military competition was to make

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the opponent decide to quit. That was different than the goal of physically destroying an opponent, although his destruction was, of course, one way of making him quit regardless of whether he decided to or not. The notion was not new.5 But Cebrowski was one of, if not the first to relate it to the emerging information technology in the context of a systematic theory. His view of network centric warfare, which his associate John Garstka helped him develop and articulate, describes the integration of the physical, social, and cognitive realms of military competition in a way that relates technology, military organization, operations, and cognitive effects certainly better than any other contemporary theorist, and, arguably, better than the masters that preceded him. He borrowed ideas advanced by others. His understanding of the relationship between transaction rates and learning rates came from economics and cognitive psychology. Certainly, John Boyd’s OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, and act) metaphor6 played a central role in his discussion of creating and maintaining viable options for actions vis-a`-vis an opponent. And his views of imposing overwhelming complexity stemmed from complexity theory and cognitive psychology. But the power of his concept came from his ability to merge these insights into a coherent and understandable proposition. The core of the proposition was that in military operations, a common understanding of the situation reduces the fog and friction of war. Cebrowski presented a consistent, logical explanation of why the proposition was true, and how to accomplish it. A significant theory of war, however, requires more than logic, for while internal logic is persuasive, the key to significance is whether military institutions adopt and use it. Otherwise, however logical and persuasive, it remains academic. The key to whether this candidate contribution gets him into the pantheon depends on whether it is persuasive enough for the U.S. military to actually adopt network centric warfare. Again, a retrospective look several years from now will provide a more definitive answer. But, here is the current evidence that suggests network centric warfare theory will, in fact, become significant because the U.S. military adopts and uses it. • We ought first to note, but not accord much weight, to the widespread obeisance paid to the concept. The Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms did not, as of early 2006, list ‘‘network centric warfare,’’ suggesting that it has not yet achieved full bureaucratic sanctity. But the term elicits about 700,000 ‘‘hits’’ when Googled, most of which flow from sources that are or are closely affiliated with Department of Defense offices. The term permeates official publications like the Annual Defense Posture Statements and Quadrennial Defense Reviews; many defense department offices note or display prominently their knowledge of or skill in it. But this kind of visibility is at most an indirect indicator that the military is incorporating network centric warfare into its operating doctrine or resource allocations. It attests to the prominence of the concept, but says little about its content.

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‘‘Network centric warfare’’ has, for example, spawned at least two major different interpretations and emphases. To Cebrowski and Garstka, it had always been about military operations and the military structures and organizations that facilitated those operations. To the department’s chief information officer, it had always been about the design and systems engineering aspects of the communications architecture, leaving issues of how to use the technology, structure, and organization up to others. These are not incompatible; indeed, they are different sides of the same transformational coin. But, to the former, network centric warfare connoted revolutionary changes in operations, structure, and military organizations. To the latter, it was simply technology that could be applique´d to the existing military force. • Stronger evidence comes from the analyses and studies of U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a broad spectrum of them—from journalistic overviews often pushing a particular point of view, but sometimes also providing insights not found in official assessments, to detailed technical analyses. The best evidence that network centric warfare concepts are taking hold emerges from the extensive lessons learned documentation. The U.S. military has always taken post-operations analyses very seriously and probably devotes more effort to them than any other military force. While some of them— particularly those given widespread public distribution—sometimes slip into a form of public relations, most do not. A review of the lessons learned analyses coming out of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (2003–2006) revealed two things bearing on the adoption of network centric warfare concepts. The first is a noticeable shift in the orientation of the analyses. The classic U.S. military lessons learned analysis focused on identifying ‘‘mistakes’’—essentially, deviations from existing operational doctrine—that resulted in inefficiencies, ineffectiveness, and unintended consequences or losses. The concern was why the deviations occurred and how to prevent similar mistakes in the future. That is, the ethos of the classic U.S. military lessons learned analyses deals with what went wrong. The analyses coming out of Operation Enduring Freedom (the umbrella term covering U.S. operations in Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (covering operations in Iraq) are different. A significant percent do not fit the classic mold, instead focusing on variations from the doctrinal norm that resulted in greater than expected effectiveness and efficiency. Instead of searching for what went wrong, the questions of what went surprisingly well and why now drive contemporary lessons learned efforts. This shift implies a greater, less doctrinaire openness to change, an emphasis on adopting new modes of behavior rather than conforming behavior to preexisting ones. But what are more relevant to the issue of network centric warfare conceptual viability are the categories of investigation flowing from the nonclassical analyses. Many of them deal with the general network centric categories. That is, they are replete with foci on transaction rates among U.S. military forces and their results on collaboration, decision rates, and their relationships to military effectiveness, speed and accuracy of implementing decisions, and the cognitive (in addition to the physical) effects on the opponents. The adoption of the network centric warfare concepts is pronounced in the assessments of interactions among different services, especially in the area of air-ground operations at the tactical level and logistics at the operational level. Both these areas have traditionally been at the forefront of cross service interactions and attempts to refine and operate from a common situational understanding. They are probably the two areas in which the

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Transforming Military Force technological aspects of network centric warfare are the most rooted and the cognitive aspects most intensely analyzed. • Force planning is another area where there is relatively strong evidence that Cebrowski’s views of network centric warfare have found fertile grounding. The Navy, whose Cooperative Engagement Concept in the 1980s had been one of the wellsprings of his theory, had been reluctant to embrace his refinements.7 But by 2005 it had accepted both the littoral combat ship Cebrowski had advocated and, more importantly, was experimenting seriously with the operational concepts Cebrowski associated with it. It was the Army, however, that was the most interested in reidentifying its formal endorsement of network centric warfare in the design and early construction of what it called its Future Combat System, or FCS. Although the FCS stirs controversy over its cost, technological risk, and whether it is really anything more than an evolutionary development of the current,8 Industrial Age Army, the Army’s description of what it intends the FCS to be and how it will operate posits just about everything that Cebrowski outlined in his network centric warfare concept. It remains to be seen whether the FCS will live up to the description—the current schedule calls for the Army to field it between 2010 and 2014. But it is clearly evidence that Cebrowski’s concepts are woven into the character of what the Army seeks to build.

Cebrowski’s New International Order The third candidate is his set of propositions dealing with international relations, and in particular his view of the dynamics and relationships between what he called the ‘‘core’’ and the ‘‘gap’’—terms his friend and associate, Tom Barnett, had originated and that Cebrowski had incorporated into his own venacular. Here, also, it was not so much his explication of how to help the world get along together that makes what he had to say a candidate. It is how he fit his recommendations into his theory of network centric warfare and the philosophical streams of thought that ran through all his work. Cebrowski believed some of the ideas imbedded in his theory of network centric warfare applied more broadly to international relations. The idea that increased transactions among the components of a military force would lead to faster rates of developing and maintaining a common, accurate, comprehensive understanding of the military situation had a parallel in international interactions. The connection between transactions and the development of a common understanding, for example, was a result of the blending of the different perspectives of those involved in the transactions. Instances of how it worked within a military force included things like target recognition and identification: two people looking at an ambiguous object from different perspectives had a better chance of deciding whether it was a truck or a tank if they exchanged their observations. Cebrowski had reasoned that the phenomena justified greatly expanded transparency and interactions regarding both the development of information technology and its military applications as a means of accelerating the transformation of the U.S. military (see the discussion in Chapter 5). He had done so

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in the face of claims that such an approach would be tantamount to giving away vital national security secrets and voluntarily relinquishing the U.S. lead in network centric warfare, because he believed that in the Information Age the approach would actually help the United States maintain rather than lose its advantage. But was there an even broader arena in which the notion of expanded transactions and greater transparency applied? His answer was yes. An analogous phenomenon occurred in the growth of scientific knowledge—the more open exchanges of information among scientists, regardless of their nationalities, the faster scientific knowledge expanded. Could it occur internationally in the social, political, and cultural realms as well? He recognized he was not raising a new question. Globalization, driven by information technologies, had already generated the issue and the sides in the debate were pretty well drawn. Thomas Friedman and others had popularized the notion that the expansion of global transactions and transparency spawned dangerous push-back from groups that feared the loss of their insularity and what they characterized as the pollution of their doctrines.9 But, to Cebrowski, the essence of the inevitable globalization that marked the Information Age was the rapid acceleration of transaction rates among nations, groups, and individuals who previously did not interact as much. Yes, the interactions were sometimes traumatic because just as increased interactions among the components of a military force altered the perceptions of the participants regarding the military situation, the interactions by the components of different nations, different ethnic, religious, and economic groups altered the perceptions and beliefs of the participants in each of these categories. Some would retreat to the bastions of dogma and tradition and strike out against the new perspectives or those who generated them. But it was the defense of their insularity and their fear of different perspectives, not the inevitable increase in global transactions across the social institutions that separated humans. To Cebrowski, greater transparency and increased transactions were not the problem; they were the solution. And there was an important role for the United States and its military to play in expanding and accelerating both. He died before he fleshed out this argument in detail but outlined enough of its central points to allow speculation on where he was headed. He spoke of the U.S. military becoming a ‘‘systems administrator,’’ again a concept that Barnett had formulated, to help facilitate access to the benefits of globalization on the part of those who lived in what he called the ‘‘gap.’’ This was one of the dimensions of his thought that he had least developed, but he had offered a few examples of how the United States would use its military to do it. Some of them echoed traditional roles. For example, he believed that U.S. military presence was a stabilizing and assuring factor. The content and style of the presence would have to change. While he thought combined military exercises with indigenous forces could provide mutual benefit and bolster the prestige

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of shaky governments among their constituents, he was interested in how the U.S. military could provide the benefits of globalization directly to populations of the gap. The U.S. military’s response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (caused by the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of December 24, 2004) was, to Cebrowski, an example of how it could be done in response to natural disasters. Within 24 hours of the quake, U.S. Navy P-3 Orion reconnaissance aircraft began flying missions over Indonesia in the search and rescue effort and to assess the damage. The U.S. military committed about 16,000 personnel to humanitarian efforts in its response to the tsunami, most of whom were assigned to the two dozen ships and 100 aircraft used in the operations. Sixty helicopters and fixed wing aircraft (mostly C-130 and C-17 transports) flew over 2,200 and 1,300 missions, respectively, delivering relief supplies. Overall, U.S. military personnel delivered 24,000 tons of supplies and equipment from early January through February, 2005. Six Maritime Preposition Ships from Guam and Diego Garcia provided drinking water. Probably the most important contributions were the command, control, communications, and coordination provided in support of the multinational relief efforts. To Cebrowski, what made the U.S. response to the destruction and prospects of death left by the tsunami successful was the ability of the military to apply information technology to the situation; specifically, the capacity to rapidly generate a common understanding of where the emergency resources were most critically needed—and to facilitate the global response. It was a real world example of ‘‘systems administrator’’ role. It came at a time when U.S. prestige had fallen precipitously, particularly among Moslem communities worldwide. Yet, the U.S. response to the emergency was significant not just because it countered the decline in national prestige. It was also a potential harbinger of a new global system in which the U.S. military could facilitate dealing with nonmilitary problems centered largely within the ‘‘gap.’’ The issue was the extent to which the U.S. military should and could facilitate more than specific responses to natural disasters. It was clear that the current structure of the military with its orientation toward waging conventional, regular warfare did not make it easy. That was part of Cebrowski’s rationale for the trifurcation of the force discussed in Chapter 4, particularly regarding what he called the stabilization component. With the force structure he envisioned, it would be easier to think about and undertake the kind of missions that fit within the kind of activities he associated with the systems administrator role. The stabilization force component would, in his view, provide the United States with a new capability to facilitate the civil societies that he believed were needed to integrate people in the gap into the core. He believed opposition to globalization was not national so much as it was rooted in subnational groupings: tribal, religious, ethnic, and economic. Within all of these groupings, one could find broad ranges of reactions; Moslems were no more unanimously anti- or pro-globalization than were Christians, Shiite no

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more than Sunni, Europeans no more than Asians or Americans. Nations throughout the world had elements that favored and benefited from globalization and elements that did not. Differences of views were not the problem. The problem was that they were occurring in the absence of civil societies. He took the term to mean pluralistic social and political structures in which trust and confidence characterized the interaction among groups; there was a general egalitarian culture and credible state impartiality in law enforcement. The security danger to the United States was not that globalization was generating opposition; it was that the opposition it generated tended to erode or attack these pillars of civil society. As a result, pluralistic societies were polarizing and in some areas of the world increasing sectarian violence, destruction, and hatreds accompanied the polarization. Globalization had changed the significance of this by making it virtually impossible to isolate the effects of the violence, by providing the United States and other beneficiaries of the fruits of globalization as targets of those who were not benefiting, and by giving the disenfranchised and disaffected access to the means of striking out with great effects. So, intervention was in the interests of the beneficiaries of globalization, and the logical goal of intervention was to bring the benefits of globalization to those who were not yet receiving them. More specifically, it boiled down to helping bring or restore civil society to those areas that were without it. Cebrowski recognized that the U.S. military could not do this on its own; even restructured in the way he suggested it was not solely sufficient to the task. But he believed it was probably necessary to successfully perform the task, particularly in those situations where the sectarian, tribal, or group frictions had already become violent, the state or states involved had failed, and the conditions of civil society did not exist. The military was probably the only institution that could deal effectively with the violence, a necessary condition for other institutions to assist in the creation or restoration of civil society. Finally, he was intrigued by the notion that the U.S. military could play a significant role in a U.S. effort to provide global transparency. He did not mean black propaganda; that is, the conscious and systematic falsification of information. He meant transparency; the real time location of tangible things—forces, groups, armaments, infrastructures—and intangible phenomena; patterns of behavior, information flow directions, and information content. True transparency; not just descriptions by those who professed to have seen data or visuals of things or phenomena, but the data and visual information from which they drew the descriptions. He referred to it as an information umbrella. Trying to make the world more transparent by in effect opening up global access to many of the products of U.S. intelligence collection efforts was a radical step, though not unprecedented, for the United States has judiciously made some imagery and other intelligence data public for decades. But what he postulated went well beyond earlier practice. He was suggesting that the United States

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should shift its bias that favored constraining its intelligence information to a carefully selected group of individuals to a bias that favored unrestricted, global distribution. His reasons were that much of what had earlier been only the purview of the military superpowers—space-based surveillance, for example—was increasingly available commercially, and while there remained some information the United States should keep to itself, there was more value in sharing much of what it had earlier restricted. Greater transparency would deter some modes of behavior the United States would wish to prevent and increase the credibility of U.S. explanations as to why. Global transparency was a precondition for the extension of the benefits of globalization and given a U.S. policy commitment to extend those benefits, anything the U.S. military could do to advance transparency would become a logical implication of the policy. Cebrowski saw international relations as a competitive arena, in which the competition sometimes expressed itself in armed conflict. But armed conflict was much less the dominant mode of competition than was the competition of ideas, concepts, theories, and doctrines. It was essentially the competition of ideas that, to him, was at the base of the great tensions between the modernizing core of the world and gap that lagged behind. Success in this competition had to draw from the same sources of power as did the military, the information technologies that were heralding the new age. The United States had to counter terrorists with ideas as well as armed force. Cebrowski believed the United States would win this competition—it was only a matter of acting in accordance with the precepts of the American political system and intellectual foundation. Here, also, his belief flowed from the two philosophical streams that colored all his thinking: that see value in all human beings and in their pluralism, that believe transactions across the distances and different viewpoints generates common knowledge and understanding, and that believe in progress. So Cebrowski’s new international order assumed an activist United States. He believed that the administration’s argument that part of the reason for the invasion of Iraq was to further the growth of democracy in the Middle East and supported the action as a legitimate goal for the exercise of military force. He wanted the new international order to reflect the strengths of the American experiment in democracy and believed there was a moral obligation on the part of Americans to see that it did. An Honorable Mention: Bridging Realism and Idealism in U.S. Foreign Policy Cebrowski gets an honorable mention—extra credit in evaluating the significance of his thought—for implicitly building a bridge across a historical debate as to the purpose and character of U.S. foreign policy and the use of military force. It is an honorable mention because he did not seek to build such a bridge;

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he never tried to consciously adjudicate between the realist and idealist schools that drive the debate. On the contrary, he consciously sought to avoid political commentary on how that debate dealt with the global war on terrorism and its implementation in Iraq, the elephant in the room that paralleled his tenure as director of the Office of Force Transformation. He never publicly criticized the administration’s conduct of the war nor the views of those who did, although privately he expressed his concern to me with both. He was assiduous in his professionalism and in his focus on U.S. military transformation. But the basis of this focus and his thought in general provides, I think, a way of resolving the schizophrenic American discussion and debate over foreign policy and the use of military force. Two schools of thought have debated the purpose and conduct of U.S. foreign policy for decades, but the debate recently has been particularly divisive. The contending views are those of the realists and the idealists. With apologies for shaving some important nuances, the realists, often associated with Henry Kissinger and traditionally connected with the conservative side of American politics, emphasize national self-interest in U.S. foreign policy. They generally argue altruistic efforts to spread democracy or human rights abroad have value only to the extent that they clearly advance U.S. national interests in international relations. Otherwise, what goes on inside a nation is its sovereign business, and the United States ought to leave it that way. The idealists have traditionally been associated with the liberal side of the American political spectrum, but in the contemporary reflection of the debate, ‘‘idealism’’ is more often attributed to the ‘‘neoconservatives.’’ Idealists favor spreading democracy and human rights because they believe doing so is in the interests of the United States. Traditionally, idealists have emphasized cooperative internationalism, favoring institutions such as the United Nations, NATO, and international agreements from arms control to environmental accords. The more recent association of idealism with neoconservatism has stressed greater unilateralism on the part of the United States, cautioning against the constraints on U.S. actions in pursuit of democracy expansion that come from collaborative international efforts. The clash of the realist and idealist views colors, explains, and, in some respects introduces a schizophrenic aspect to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. In the first six years of the twenty-first century it has contributed to what many see as the polarization of American politics. Cebrowski’s concepts could serve as a synthesis of the two views. His arguments regarding the use and character of U.S. military force, and his views on what I call his new international order were firmly rooted in the realist’s axiom that U.S. foreign and military policy must serve American interests. But he also clearly had abandoned the realist’s indifference to what goes on inside other nations. His view of the growing interconnectiveness among nations, groups, and individuals flowing from the Information Age and globalization convinced

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him that the Westphalian notion of state sovereignty could no longer work and should not determine U.S. policy. The idealist’s commitment to spreading democracy and human rights appealed to him on moral grounds and he leaned toward being quite active in the efforts to do so. He was not, however, strictly a unilateralist, for while he saw nothing wrong with using U.S. military force unilaterally or preemptively when a threat to the United States was clear, he appreciated the value of doing it with international support and collaboration. And while he thought seriously about how the U.S. military could be used in extending the benefits of globalization to those who were not benefiting from them— from the ‘‘core’’ to the ‘‘gap’’ in his analogy—he saw it as ancillary to using other institutions and in collaboration with other members of the ‘‘core.’’ He did not accept, therefore, the neoconservative opposition to international cooperation. Nor did he go along with their reasoning that international collaboration would necessarily constrain U.S. actions in negative ways. Indeed, both his concept of network centric warfare and the value he placed on global transparency accepted the idea of constraints on U.S. behavior, albeit in the context of ‘‘we’ll accept constraints when they constrain other nations as well.’’ Network centric warfare rested on the interaction of different perspectives. The greater the interaction, the more accurate the understanding—in a way, because the process constrained a single perspective from dominating and as originally proposed unless it survived the interaction among the others. More often, however, the dominant perspective would be one that had been refined by the interactions. Constraint, in that context, was to be welcomed because the resulting understanding would be more accurate and timely. Likewise, his notion of the United States imposing a greater transparency on the world implied an acceptance of constraints on U.S. behavior. The value of transparency was a function of how it constrained the actions of actors the United States sought to deter by the approbation of the world. It could obtain that value only if the United States was also subject to the transparency, for if it was not, the transparency it provided would not be accepted as honest, complete, or real. And as what the United States was doing or planned to do became more transparent, the United States would increasingly be constrained from doing things it otherwise would not want anyone to know about. In short, Cebrowski’s ideas offer a bridge across the realist-idealist debate that conditions U.S. foreign policy and the use of force. It provides the intellectual connection between the realists’ emphasis on national interests and the idealists’ emphasis on the spread of democracy and human rights and discards aspects of the debate—U.S. unilateral actions and fear of too many constraints, to name two—that currently stoke the polarization of American politics. These, then, are the candidate elements of his thought I believe will be the most timeless and, as such, will condition the design and use of U.S. military forces. Because he wove these elements together and because what re-

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sulted is a body of thought that Assessing Defense Community Views of applies across the levels of warfare, Military Transformation: that is internally consistent, and that seems flexible enough to • How fast is transformation occurring? fit to the changes the future always • How fast should it occur? brings, he will make it to the • Why? pantheon. • How should the department measure Is there any evidence that these transformation rate? ideas are actually taking root? Per• How should the department modulate the haps. In late 2005 I led a small rate? research team that sought to gauge the views of U.S. military transfor(Organizing questions in interviews and mation held within the defense documentary survey) community. We interviewed 47 ‘‘influentials’’—mostly senior members of the military services (three- and four-star rank) and civilian defense officials (undersecretaries and assistant secretaries), but also including several members of the Congress, senior defense contractor officials, and members of various think tanks that focus on national security. In parallel with the interviews, we surveyed most, if not all, the public reports and analyses produced by the military services and the office of the secretary of defense on military transformation between 2001 and 2005. We also looked at all the reports and commentary on transformation put into the public record by the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service, and the Congressional Budget Office for the same period. We built the interviews around five interrogative questions to which yes or no replies were inappropriate and organized the document survey around the same questions. Our assessment of the responses suggested there was, in fact, a broad recognition that the Department of Defense was involved in extraordinary changes that well exceeded those usually associated with normal modernization and, more importantly, that it should be so involved. Beneath that general consensus—which is itself evidence of a shift in assumptions—lies considerable diversity, however. Nobody was against transformation. On the other hand, there was little agreement on how to define, measure, or modulate the rate at which it occurred. One of the most interesting diversities was that among the military services in the discussions of transformation rate. Nearly all the professional military personnel we interviewed made the point that accelerated rates of change, however necessary, carried costs and risks for military institutions. Large institutions, such as entire military services, find it very difficult to sustain high rates of change for extended periods because of their size and readiness requirements. Change introduces internal tensions and erodes standardization. Because institutions cannot easily change everything simultaneously, some components almost always get the new materiel, weapons,

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organizations, training, and operational capabilities before others. (Even minor changes in uniforms usually occur in sequence with some components getting the new belt buckles, service caps, boots, etc. before others do.) Some decline in standardization and cohesion, and therefore in readiness and capabilities, almost always accompanies periods of rapid change. As one respondent put it, ‘‘changes introduce differences and centrifugal forces that tend to tear military institutions apart. Change is, of course, inevitable and the military is good at managing it, so long as we know ahead of time what and when things will change and [that] the rate of change is moderate. But when the change is accelerated, controlling how much the institution will suffer gets harder and the pain gets bigger.’’ That was why, he argued, ‘‘We tend to think of transformation in terms of an ‘S’ curve, in which the institution’s normal rate of change goes through a period of much faster change followed by a return to what was previously the normal rate so the institution can pull itself back together and consolidate all the changes.’’ We followed up on statements like that—they were often echoed by other military interviewees—and got the following image as to where the military services saw themselves, institutionally, on that curve. Interviewees from the Navy tended to see their service coming out of a period of rapid change that had begun nearly 15 years earlier in Operation Desert Storm. Prior to that operation, which coincided roughly with the demise of the Soviet Union and collapse of the Soviet military, the U.S. Navy had focused on what it called the maritime strategy—sea control to contain the growing Soviet

Figure 8.1 Transformation Rate

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submarine force and to pose a direct threat to the USSR from the ‘‘flanks’’ of the Norwegian Sea and northern Pacific. Operation Desert Storm had demonstrated that the Navy, honed for blue water sea control, was not optimally designed for the kind of littoral conflict that suddenly seemed much more probable. So, the Navy did, in fact, undergo considerable transformation in the decade and a half following Desert Storm. It cut the U.S. submarine force by half, surface warfare admirals replaced submariners at the pinnacles of the Navy’s planning hierarchies, a new doctrine focused on littoral warfare ascended, and major shifts in training, concept development, procurement, and ethos all accompanied the most visible manifestations of change. From the perspective of early 2006, the Navy’s view that it was entering a much needed period of consolidation and return to normalcy rang true. The Army had a very different institutional view. It believed it was just beginning a period of much greater and faster change. Unlike the Navy, the Army left Desert Storm with a deep sense of vindication for the changes it had instituted after Vietnam. From the mid-1970s until 1990 it had designed and honed a ground force for a slug fest with the Soviet tank armies, emphasizing armor force maneuver in the attack and backing up that vision with new equipment, training, and doctrine. The Iraqi force that invaded Kuwait was not the Soviet military machine the U.S. Army post-Vietnam leadership had been planning to defeat, but it was equipped with Soviet tanks and trained in Soviet armor doctrine. Some wags had claimed the Iraqis had the world’s third most powerful land force. And the U.S. Army had run through it in 100 hours. So, for most of the decade following Desert Storm the U.S. Army kept honing what was clearly the most powerful conventional land force in the world, seeing nothing to refute the attribution and wanting very much to maintain the status. The conflict in Kosovo started to erode this view. (Despite an abundance of leaflets warning the Serb forces that the U.S. Army Apache helicopters were coming into the fight, the Army could not get the logistics and defenses straightened out in time to get them into the fray.) While the initial invasion of Iraq and advance to Baghdad early in 2003 had underlined the conventional prowess of the Army, the occupation suggested that prowess did not automatically transfer to irregular warfare. By the time of our survey, the Army leadership had changed, improvised explosive devices had become the single greatest threat in Iraqi, and Secretary Rumsfeld had cancelled the Army’s Crusader artillery weapon on the grounds that it was a Cold War system. The Army had committed itself to the largest equipment modernization effort—its Future Combat System—since World War II. As in the Navy’s vision of where it was in the transformational process, the Army’s institutional perception that it was on the cusp of a greatly accelerated rate of transformation rang true, even though it was dramatically different from how the Navy saw its future.

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The Air Force’s view was different still. Like the Army, it had left Desert Storm convinced that its design and long-term plan was on the mark. Unlike the Army, however, it did not see itself at the start of a period of rapidly accelerating transformation. The perception by our senior Air Force interviewees was that an acceleration in the rate of Air Force transformation was premature and awaited three preconditions. The first was a new longer-range strike capability, essentially a new long-range bomber. That platform could be manned or unmanned, but the determination of which, or what portions of each would contribute the new capability, depended on the second precondition; namely, resolution inside the Air Force of the cultural questions raised by the growing possibilities of shifting traditional Air Force missions to unmanned aerial vehicles. The third precondition was a much clearer understanding of the extent to which political and technological limitations would continue to constrain the military use of space for both defensive and offensive actions. Until these three conditions were satisfied —and estimates of when that would be varied from as early as 2012 to as late as 2020—the Air Force saw little rationale for entering a period of faster transformation than what it was currently experiencing. What does this say about how firmly rooted Cebrowski’s concepts had become by early 2006? On the one hand, the diversity of institutional views as to where each of the military services saw themselves in the transformational process suggests that the parochial stovepipes Cebrowski had sought to overcome were still firmly ensconced. With radically different views of the rate of change each expected to experience, the notion of greater interdependency among the military services seems tenuous. There is some contradictory evidence here, however. In discussing the findings with the interviewees, the differences surprised none of them. They all knew enough about each other’s military service to expect the variations and, more importantly, to understand why the variations exist. So, while the stovepipes may still exist, they are at least not as opaque as they once were. One of the respondent’s remarks was insightful. ‘‘Look,’’ the recently retired Navy admiral said, ‘‘the differences are inevitable, and that’s not bad. The issue is whether we can combine the differences in ways that make any use of military force by the United States more effective at any given time. And that’s a function of how well we communicate and collaborate across the services and how much we understand each other. Both the ability to communicate and interest in collaborating are much, much greater today, and the mutual understanding of how each of the military service components operates is light years ahead of where it was a decade ago.’’ Then he offered an unprompted addition: ‘‘Cebrowski gets a lot of credit for the change. He was the one who went beyond the exhortations about how great jointness is and how important it is to move toward interdependency. I didn’t agree with everything he said, and certainly didn’t understand all of what he said. But, he was the only one who actually talked about why jointness was

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better; he put it into a broader, coherent framework. At the end of the day, it was his explanations that gave transformation real substance and kept it from slipping into just another buzz term. Cebrowski, more than anyone else, brought about a conceptual change because he was the first one to provide a new doctrinal framework that tied our military capabilities to the new reality.’’ That is a telling perspective coming from another U.S. military professional. The primary stewards of military continuity are the military professionals. They place high value on tradition and doing things in accordance with rules, regulations, and standard operational procedures. So, when one of them acknowledges the need for a new doctrinal framework and credits an individual with providing the one needed, that is about as high a level of praise a military professional can give. It is because of the central role military doctrine and operational concept play in U.S. military affairs. Outsiders think the military is most defensive with regard to its weapons and other equipment. That is what gets the most journalistic play, and the amount of testimony, commentary, and debate that goes into the fate of the Air Force’s F-22, or the Navy’s next aircraft carrier, or the Army’s Future Combat System backs up the contention. But it is not true. The professional military is most defensive of its operational concepts and doctrine. The military derives its operational concepts and doctrine deductively. This is not to say that militaries reject empiricism or adhere blindly to doctrine in the face of countervailing experience. But in the United States, deductive approaches permeate military thought; starting from objectives and goals and working downward to how to meet them and what doing so requires is part of the genetic code of professional militaries. All the weapons journalists claim are so important to the soul of a military force—the F-22, aircraft carrier, Crusader artillery system—are important not as ends in themselves, but because they are logical extensions of the deductive process that really is the soul of military planning. They are important because of the process that gave them value. As long as the more general assumptions, goals, and doctrine are maintained, military institutions believe logic will point to the weapons and other systems that the military requires. The fall-on-our-sword reaction to a challenge to a weapons system comes not because of the particular weapons system the challenger has targeted, but because of the military’s institutional belief that the challenger is rejecting the basic assumptions and logic that led to the military’s choice of the weapons system. U.S. military services have no inherent institutional commitment to a particular weapons system. Individual servicemen and women build personal attachments to a weapons system because of bonding experiences with them. So, when the Commemorative Air Force10 flies one of its B-17s to an air show, it draws admirers because of the direct or vicarious experiences people had with the WWII aircraft. But these are individual attachments. Military professionals and the military institutions in which they reside welcome new technology—as long as it flows logically

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from familiar assumptions, goals, and doctrine, and the logic was worked out by their institution, not an outsider’s. Of course, the assumptions, goals, and doctrine all change. Each of the military services dedicates considerable manpower and money to assure they evolve, and each of the military services has at times sought to accelerate the evolution. The U.S. Army did so after Vietnam in the 1970s; the Navy did so after Operation Desert Storm. But, the military services approach their assumptions, goals, and doctrine with a reverence and protectiveness you do not find in other institutions. And they do not like outsiders who try to enforce the changes on them, particularly big changes. Cebrowski was not an outsider. He was a military professional, tested in battle and the rigors of a successful military career. These were the credentials that prompted Rumsfeld to bring him in to lead the transformational assault on military doctrine and provide a credibility the military would cede to no civilian. As a professional, Cebrowski shared the military professional’s reverence for American military traditions, assumptions, and doctrine. He understood them and he understood why they were important, and he understood how military professionals understand them. But he was and remained an iconoclast so far as the conceptual foundations of the military traditions, assumptions, and doctrine were concerned. Other military professionals respected him for his wisdom and for the openness and honesty with which he pursued his iconoclasm. They did not, however, easily accept the arguments he presented for it, the intensity with which he went about it, what he proposed as replacements, or his advocacy of an acceleration of change. They recognized Cebrowski was not espousing conceptual evolution. He was calling for revolution.

Conceptual Change So, when his contemporary professional peers credit him with providing the needed shift in operational concept and doctrine, it is prima facie evidence that the judgment of history will be that he did, indeed, significantly affect the course of military thought. Yet, can we credit Cebrowski with shifting basic concepts? Certainly a big shift occurred during his tenure as director of force transformation. In force planning the ‘‘lesser included cases’’ became the primary cases. Deterrence gave way to prevention and preemption. Homeland defense and the notion that the United States could, indeed, now be as important a battleground as any abroad, moved to the forefront. Defending forward would remain important, but, in sizing and structuring future U.S. military forces it would no longer be sufficient. While ‘‘fighting the nation’s wars’’—the mantra many in the military had used to argue the military should avoid nation building and peacekeeping—would remain very important, it was no longer going to be the sole

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purpose of American military power. And the U.S. military would fight the nation’s wars differently. In the first five years of the new century these were central arguments inside the Pentagon. They were arguments more than assumptions through most of the first half decade, for the momentum of the earlier assumptions was powerful, and the procedures through which such arguments could make a difference worked against change. The vocabulary had clearly changed. But what sometimes happens inside the Pentagon in the face of vast changes outside—like the collapse of the Soviet Union—is that the vocabulary changes even as the substance remains the same. Part of the reason this happens is the system promotes it. The political system designed specifically to avoid radical and rapid change— truly, the genius of American politics—works. The internal Pentagon planning process, designed in the Cold War to manage the high-stakes face-off between nuclear super powers and avoid precipitous change, also continues to work as it was then intended. Cebrowski saw this in the first responses to the Draft Transformation Planning Guidance the secretary issued in 2002. This document was largely unprecedented. The planning and programming guidance documents that every secretary of defense from McNamara on called for and directed changes, and every secretary over the last forty years has annually pointed to the changes that have occurred since he called for them. But, they all ascribed large changes— revolutionary or transformational changes—to decades or more in the future. And the changes they advocated for the immediate future were far more evolutionary in character, essentially producing the rate of change dictated by the programs of record. Secretary Rumsfeld’s Transformation Planning Guidance was different. It advocated more rapid and fundamental changes. Rumsfeld described the purpose of his draft on transformational guidance in 2002, stating that, We must transform not only the capabilities at our disposal, but also the way we think, the way we train, the way we exercise, and the way we fight. We must transform not only our armed forces, but also the department that serves them by encouraging a culture of creativity and prudent risk-taking. This document . . .depicts the outcome we must achieve: fundamentally joint, network centric, distributed forces capable of rapid decision superiority and massed effects across the battlespace. Realizing these capabilities will require transforming our people, processes, and military forces.11

The responses, in the form of draft transformational road maps by each of the military services, were hesitant about picking up the flag of accelerated change. The words were there—‘‘transformational’’ became a favored adjective. Each of the goals the guidance had listed was abundantly associated with the actions, plans, and programs undertaken by each of the military services. But they were veneers. There was little cross referencing among what the military services were doing and little sense that the services had begun new programs, actions, or plans because of the transformation guidance. Instead, they had simply painted

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previously existing efforts, goals, and programs with a transformational hue. It was a reflection of the power of the past and the system built in the past. But part of the reason was also due to the absence of a coherent substitute for the preexisting operational concepts and doctrinal framework. Cebrowski provided that framework—which the preceding chapters have attempted to collate and describe—mostly in his briefings between 2002 and the summer of 2005. Our review of the documents produced between 2002 and 2005, however, traced a distinct shift. It began to appear between the draft transformation roadmaps the services submitted in 2003 and their final submissions in 2004. The final responses treated transformation as something that was much more than a veneer. They no longer were strictly introspective and reflected an awareness of and interest in what the other military services were doing. They had shifted from the mechanistic and perfunctory allusion to interoperability to the more profound understanding of interdependence. Jointness had become of age; it no longer remained a summation of what each of the military services would bring to a fight. Now it was the goal of individual contributions. Transformation was no longer simply the association of the adjective with existing plans or programs. Now it was real and the services were changing their programs accordingly. Here is the Air Force: ‘‘Systems or capabilities based on arguments that do not consider the emerging joint character or the asymmetric nature of warfare will find themselves obsolete, irrelevant, and candidates for elimination.’’ The Army: ‘‘The Army’s Transformation Strategy has three components: the transformation of Army culture, the transformation of processes—risk adjudication using the Current to Future Force construct, and the development of inherently joint transformational capabilities.’’ And the Navy: ‘‘Today’s Navy–Marine Corps Team is transforming to exploit the emerging joint war-fighting trends of increased speed, precision, shared awareness, persistence, and employability.’’ Granted, this is evidence of a change in tone, not necessarily a change in resource allocation or a shift in criteria for allocating resources. Evidence that the services were willing to put money where their rhetoric was going is less clear. There were some significant adjustments in some programs. Two of the most notable were Army systems: the $11 billion Crusader artillery system, cancelled in May 2002, and the $39 billion Comanche reconnaissance/attack helicopter, cancelled in February 2004.12 The Crusader system fell as a result of Secretary Rumsfeld’s decision; the Army on its own cancelled the Comanche. In the case of the Crusader’s demise, the Army’s response was less one of going back to the drawing board to design a less robust, heavy artillery system. Instead, it reached out to the Air Force and naval aviation to fill the role earlier intended for the Crusader and initiated a series of exercises and experiments with the Air Force to refine and expand on the successes of collaborative ground-air operations. It disbanded some artillery units and transferred their personnel to military police and other units that were in much higher demand in the aftermath of

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major combat operations in Iraq. In other words, the Army began to put resources and effort into its proclaimed goal of developing inherently joint military capabilities. It moved toward the concept of interdependency. When the Army canceled the Comanche, it sent the resources saved to a number of smaller programs. The two decisions represent a reorientation of the Army’s leadership toward some of the premises of transformation, namely, the payoffs from integrating service capabilities and from larger numbers of networked smaller units. The most direct evidence I found that Cebrowski’s concepts are having an impact on how defense resources get allocated came in the research on defense community views of transformation. The interviews indicated a lot of discomfort with the fact that there were no authoritative measures of transformation rates. We found the expressions of discomfort surprising, since we had assumed that most of the participants in the annual fight for budget shares would welcome the ambiguity. Ambiguity regarding metrics in effect allows everyone to use their own metrics and thereby claim they are transforming. Our assumption that the participants in planning and programming would be comfortable with the absence of an authoritative designation of metrics for transformation, however, turned out to be wrong. When we asked why in the follow-up discussions, we got some interesting answers. Many of the interviewees wanted an authoritative, fairly specific set of metrics to, as they said, provide an even playing ground. They feared that the defense budget was going to go down, or at least no longer rise as rapidly as it had in the first half of the decade. That would make the competition for resources more intense, and ‘‘since it’s logical that the winners in that competition would be chosen in part for their transformational impact, it was a lot better if everyone agreed beforehand on what the criteria were going to be.’’ Beyond that, however, there was something more than bureaucratic in-fighting. We kept coming across what seemed to be quite sincere expressions of the desire for an agreed rationale on which to pursue transformation along with an honest and sincere discomfort with relegating something as important for the U.S. military as transformation to the status of a buzz term. As we pried into these sentiments, we found widespread appreciation of what Cebrowski had sketched as transformation metrics. The respondents were not sure they understood what imposing overwhelming complexity on an opponent meant, nor whether such a goal could ever replace the more traditional standard of destroying an opponent until he was unable to resist your will. But, they understood enough of what Cebrowski had argued to accept network centric warfare metrics as the foundation for judging transformation rate and transformational initiatives. They saw power and logic of what he had proposed as a standard for making defense resource allocations. There was something else. Perhaps it was when we were doing the interviewing (the winter of 2005 into the spring of 2006), for it was a period when the insurgency in Iraq was slipping into increasing sectarian violence and particular

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difficulty for the U.S. military. It was a period that underlined Cebrowski’s arguments about entering a new age, the need for a new theory of war, and the relationship between military power and morality. Whatever its origin, the new thread that ran through the views and comments of the interviewees was the search for a different approach to the use of military power and the sense that Cebrowski had the solution. It is that epiphany, driven by the intersection of his conceptual framework with a real world military challenge and the eternal quest for the moral use of military power that probably elevates Cebrowski’s legacy to the status of grand theory.

NOTES

Preface 1. There were clues to what was coming before the Soviet collapse. Escalating ethnic and religious strife, the reshaping of nation states, new economic centers, the proliferation of information technologies in relatively underdeveloped nations, and the emergence of global, transnational terrorism had been underway well before the end of the last century. We did not pay enough attention. Even as the threat of great power war diminished, we remained focused largely on state-vs.-state conflict—with the threat recast as ‘‘rogue’’ nations. 2. Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950). 3. These were not new themes. Concern with internal threats to national security was an integral part of the independence movement of the eighteenth century, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War. This concern accompanied World War I, World War II (the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent was the most obvious example), the post-Korean War (most dramatically in the McCarthy and House Un-American Activities Committee activities), and the Vietnam conflict. But, arguably, the dominant American theme has been founded in a recognition and celebration of pluralism and a strong legal and political tradition in protecting it. The link between U.S. national security and a need to modify the international system has a long pedigree from the Declaration of Independence to Wilson to the Marshall Plan and into the present era.

Chapter 1 1. See, for example, Norman Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London: Time Warner Books, UK, 1991), particularly chap. 1. 2. Comments made before the Procurement and Research Development Subcommittees of the House National Security Committee, 20 March 1997.

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Notes 3. Comments made before the Procurement and Research Development Subcommittees of the House National Security Committee, 20 March 1997. General Van Riper’s written submission to the committees, iterating his skepticism, was published in the Marine Corps Gazette (June 1997). See also Paul Van Riper and Robert H. Scales, Jr., ‘‘Preparing for War in the 21st Century,’’ Parameters 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 4–14. 4. A notable exception was the Polaris submarine ballistic missile program, which took only four years from the final ‘‘go ahead’’ to first deployment.

Chapter 2 1. See James Mann, ‘‘Close-up: Young Rumsfeld,’’ The Atlantic Monthly (November 2003), for a good sketch of Rumsfeld’s early career. 2. Rumsfeld established the SLRG originally as an informal group of high-level defense officials with whom he had fairly extensive interactions with prior to and during the 2000 presidential campaign. By the end of 2001, it had become a more formal body, the official membership including the deputy secretary of defense (Paul Wolfowitz, who would chair the discussions in the secretary’s absence), the undersecretaries of defense, director of program analysis and evaluation, the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Cebrowski was one of several ex officio members who participated in discussions of military transformation or related subjects. 3. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute SIPRI Yearbooks 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–2004). The number slipped to 24 in 2001 and to 21 in 2002. In 2003 there were 19 major armed conflicts in 18 locations worldwide, the lowest number for the post-Cold War period. Armed conflicts in 2001 changed the governments of 24 nations, killed 300,000 worldwide, and probably reduced the potential gross product of the world by about 10 percent. 4. Since Vietnam, analysts have speculated that an opponent could go after the American will to fight by, among other things, inflicting enough casualties to generate political pressures on the government to withdraw from the contest. This is where the discussion of potential military ‘‘quagmires’’ or an opponent’s use of weapons of mass destruction originates. These qualify as means of asymmetric warfare because of the (often unstated) assumption that an opposing regime would be less democratic and therefore less amenable to public pressure and more ruthlessly willing to accept more casualties. 5. Martin Van Creveld, Supplying War, Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 110–13. 6. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Random House, 1997). 7. See Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1618–1991 (London: McFarland and Company, 1992), 2 vols. 8. James S. Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Williamson Murray, German Military Effectiveness (Annapolis, MD: Nautical and Aviation Press, 1992). 9. Before and during WWII the strategic air campaign was a concept calling for attacks against the populations to collapse their will and ability to support the enemy forces in the field. 10. Carl von Clausewitz fought against Napoleon, and, following the defeat of Prussia, was a staff officer and military educator dedicated to the resurrection and retraining of the Prussian

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army. He rose to the rank of major-general, married into the high nobility, and is best known for his book, On War [in the original German, Vom Kriege (see note 13)] published by his widow after he died in 1831. The work was prominent in Europe prior to WWI but several notable British and French scholars denigrated the work in the first half of the twentieth century, largely because of its role in German military education prior to the First and Second World Wars. But, particularly after WWII (and the excellent translation by British historians Michael Howard and Peter Paret), many American military theorists and historians have argued the book is a timeless, universal aid to understanding modern warfare. It is required reading at the U.S. Military Academy and used throughout the professional military education and training system. The views expressed in On War figure prominently in current discussions of transformation because of a suspicion that advocates of transformation downplay the complexity of modern armed conflict, and, spuriously I think, rely blindly on technology to overcome or cope with those complexities. 11. It was no surprise that bureaucratic theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used the organization and structure of Industrial Age militaries as their conceptual touchstones for effective organizations. 12. British historian John Keegan and others address the evolution of military command and control patterns, making the same observation. See Keegan’s The Mask of Command (London: Penguin, 1987). 13. See Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Berlin: Dummlers Verlag, 1832), erste Buch, Kapital 6 (Nachrechsten im Kriege—information in war), zweites Buch, Kapitalen 2 (Uber die Theorie der Krieges—the theory of war), 3 (Kriegskunst oder Kriegswissenschaft—art or science of war), 5 (Kritik—critique). 14. Perhaps the post-World War II American fascination with Clausewitz reflected the advent of effective tactical aircraft in the 1940s. Prior to that, battles were usually fought within the line of sight of tactical and operational commanders and this real-time, personal feedback conditioned command philosophy. In World War II, however, the tactical aircraft and the greater mobility of ground forces undercut this perspective, forcing tactical commanders increasingly to command beyond their line of sight and in the absence of realtime feedback. It may have been this quandary that made American theorists so interested in Clausewitz’s insights regarding the fog of war. In any case, the quest for better command and control through much of the last century sought to reestablish the feedback regarding the tactical situation and effects of commands that were lost as battles slipped beyond the immediate line of sight of the commanders who fought them. 15. Boyd was instrumental in explaining and disseminating the concept of ‘‘cycle time’’ and ‘‘getting inside the adversary’s decision cycle’’ via two briefings: ‘‘Patterns of Conflict’’ and ‘‘A Discourse on Winning and Losing’’ over 1,500 times. The ideas, words, and phrases contained in Boyd’s briefings, which began as one-hour long presentations and grew into 15hour sessions given over two days, have penetrated not only the U.S. military services but also the business community and academia around the world. The OODA loop is now used as a standard description of decision-making cycles. 16. See, for example, Stephen Biddle, ‘‘Victory Misunderstood: What the Gulf War Tells Us About the Future of Conflict,’’ International Security (Fall 1996); Paul Van Riper and Robert H. Scales, Jr., ‘‘Preparing for War in the 21st Century,’’ Parameters (Autumn 1997); Williamson Murray, ‘‘Thinking About Revolutions in Military Affairs,’’ Joint Forces Quarterly (Summer 1997): 69–76; Paul Van Riper and Frank Hoffman, ‘‘Pursuing the Real Revolution in Military Affairs: Exploiting Knowledge-Based War,’’ National Security Studies Quarterly

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(Summer 1998); Stephen Biddle, Wade P. Hinkle, and Michael P. Fischerkeller, ‘‘Skill and Technology in Modern Warfare,’’ Joint Forces Quarterly (Summer 1999): 18–27; and John A. Gantry, ‘‘Doomed to Fail: America’s Blind Faith in Military Technology,’’ Parameters (Winter 2002/2003). 17. Although Cebrowski was the most prominent proponent of network centric warfare, he developed many of its precepts with his colleague, John Garstka. Garstka and Cebrowski began developing their concept in 1990, when Garstka worked for Cebrowski in the Joint Staff. When Cebrowski became the director of the Office of Force Transformation, Garstka joined him as a deputy director and focused on testing and explicating the concept through a series of case studies. 18. See Carter Malkasian, A History of Modern Wars of Attrition (Westpoint, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002); Paul Davis, Aggregation, Disaggregation, and the 3:1 Rules in Ground Combat (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1995) MR-638-AF/A/OSD; and William A. Owens, ‘‘Revolutionizing Warfare,’’ Blueprint Magazine (Democratic Leadership Council) (1 January 2000). 19. The most prominent example of the pattern at the tactical level is, perhaps, the ‘‘OODA loop’’ metaphor proposed by John Boyd’s model of air combat, for the observe, orient, decide, act cycle. 20. For a recent, innovative analysis, see Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 21. The Office of Force Transformation has sponsored a series of case studies that look at the hypothesis in some detail. They are available from the office’s web site, http:// www.oft.osd.mil/initiatives/ncw/studies.cfm. 22. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the Senate Armed Forces Committee: Defense Strategy Review, 21 June 2001.

Chapter 3 1. See, for example, Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, eds., Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Why and how Germany’s Heinz Guderian combined tanks, dive bombers, and radio communications into new tactics and a broader operational concept called ‘‘blitzkrieg’’ fascinate them. Developments that took place elsewhere at about the same time also provide abundant historical grist for studies of military innovation. The naval air power and aircraft carrier operations by Japan and the United States, emerging amphibious capabilities, strategic bombing concepts and long-range bombers, and even France’s ill-fated large-scale integrated defensive fortifications and concepts all continue to generate arguments about the process of innovation. 2. The size of Germany’s army when Guderian was developing the blitzkrieg was less than 200,000 personnel. The size of the Japanese or U.S. navies never exceeded 250,000 until their prewar buildups began in 1936 and 1940, respectively. The French developed and built the Maginot Line when the French Army averaged less than 200,000 per year. Since the end of the Korean War, the size of the U.S. military has never dropped below 1,000,000 active military personnel. But it is incomplete to count only those serving in the active forces when you compare the U.S. military today with the size of the militaries engaged in the innovations of the interworld war period of the twentieth century. Today a reserve component with about the same number of personnel bolster and back up the personnel in the active component. A contracted service manpower pool—roughly the size of the active manpower pool—that has interests in maintaining what it does and suspicions about rapid change supports the active

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and reserve components. And an industrial manpower pool, with at least half a million employees in it, that builds the equipment the military buys has a financial interest in continuity. Producing weapons and systems designed earlier and for which the production learning curves, tooling expenses, and training have all flattened generates real and large revenues, today. Developing new systems and weapons for tomorrow costs money, today. 3. Thomas Barnett addresses the distinction in The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004). There are, of course, many more complexities and shades of grey than the bifurcation of the world into two ‘‘domains’’ implies, but, in general, it is possible to distinguish the two in terms of some common national measures, such as average life spans (itself a function of the complex interaction of economic, political, and physical factors), relative per capita wealth, and various other economic and political criteria. 4. Cebrowski and Barnett developed a strong intellectual working relationship while both were at Naval War College through which Cebrowski absorbed many of Barnett’s views of globalization, the bifurcating effects it was having on world affairs, and what that implied for the United States in the years ahead. He often acknowledged Barnett’s contributions to his thought. As director of the Office of Force Transformation, Cebrowski promoted Barnett’s conceptualizations in his own work and in facilitating briefings by and discussions with Barnett throughout the upper levels of the Defense Department. Barnett also acknowledges the intellectual benefit he gained from the interaction, refers to Cebrowski as a prime mentor, and morns the loss of Cebrowski to the school of strategic thought they were both trying to construct. 5. United Nations, World Population Prospects, The 2004 Revision, vol. 1 (New York: United Nations, Population Division, 2005), 5; and estimates by the Population Reference Bureau. 6. See, for example, James A. Dewar, The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1995), http://www.rand.org/ publications/P/P8014/. 7. On August 16, 2004, President Bush proposed to significantly alter the U.S. overseas military basing posture. The proposal would establish new overseas operating sites and transfer up to 70,000 U.S. troops, plus 100,000 family members and civilians, from Europe and Asia back to the continental United States (CONUS). See Jon D. Klaus, ‘‘U.S. Military Overseas Basing: Background and Oversight Issues for Congress,’’ Congressional Research Service Report, RS21975, 17 November 2004, http://www.fas.org/man/crs/RS21975.pdf. 8. Quoted in Inside the Pentagon, March 25, 2004. 9. George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 2002 (Washington, DC: The White House, September 2002), 13–14.

Chapter 4 1. The president exercised his authority to declare partial mobilization to call up reserves for the Iraqi conflict. Partial mobilization allows the president to call up not more than 1,000,000 Ready Reservists (units and individual Reservists from all services), for 24 months or less, and the resources needed for their support to meet the requirements of war or other national emergency involving an external threat to the national security. 2. ‘‘Actively prevent’’ is the politically correct way of talking about military preemption and since this latter concept carries considerable controversy, it is worth a bit more discussion of the rationale for arguing that the United States needs to develop its military preemptive

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Notes capabilities. While the U.S. military has had some preemptive military capabilities for decades and has never formally relinquished the option to strike first, it is neither designed nor deployed to do so. The U.S. military is designed as a punitive force—to respond to aggression or attack in ways that should make potential opponents very reluctant to trigger U.S. military retribution. This design emerged as a rational response to the nuclear parity that characterized the military relationship between the United States and Soviet Union beginning roughly in the early 1960s. Through most of the last half of the twentieth century, the United States designed and used its military forces to avoid implying it would attempt to preempt an opponent’s military actions by destroying its forces or otherwise removing the opponent’s option to attack. Throughout most of the last half of the last century, republican and democratic administrations alike viewed a preemptive military force as inherently destabilizing. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, much of the earlier rationale vanished because although a preemptive force design might truly be inherently destabilizing, the instability it may engender does not appear to carry the same holocaustic outcome. Today, preemption does not connote first strikes against a nuclear superpower that could trigger a devastating counter blow. It is based largely on the assumption—with considerable empirical support— that the threat of punishment has much less deterrent effect on would-be martyrs who are willing to sacrifice themselves in part to trigger such a punitive response by the United States by attacking it. 3. Cebrowski searched for the right connotation, here. He did not mean the ‘‘world’s policeman,’’ not only because that term carries so much negative luggage but also because it implies a focus on coercive law enforcement. What is involved in the core-gap metaphor is the notion of an evolving set of rules as the world works its way into the Information Age. Barnett had coined the ‘‘systems administrator’’ and Cebrowski thought it came the closest to the notion of rule making and rule enforcement undertaken within parameters that the rule makers adhere to rather than dictate. So, he adopted it as a good descriptive term. 4. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was established in 1980. It is a joint headquarters designed to study special operations requirements and techniques; ensure interoperability and equipment standardization; plan and conduct joint special operations exercises and training; and develop joint special operations tactics. JSOC’s stated purpose is to provide a unified command structure for conducting joint special operations and exercises. In 1998 the U.S. Department of Defense’s top policy official acknowledged that the military has special mission units (SMUs) to combat terrorism and to counter potential terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). ‘‘We have designated special mission units [SMUs] that are specifically manned, equipped and trained to deal with a wide variety of transnational threats,’’ said Walter Slocombe, undersecretary of Defense for Policy. 5. As measured in terms of numbers of personnel assigned to units whose missions fall within the demands associated with stabilization and restoration (civil affairs, military police, civil engineering, combat support engineering, and so on), or the numbers of personnel normally assigned to units whose missions fall within the demands of rapid response (for example, forward deployed naval forces to include afloat Marine Corps units, alert Army and Special Operations units, and quick response Air Force units). 6. This resurrects some of the original concept of a ‘‘vanguard force’’ devised by the Joint Staff in the mid-1990s. That idea, subsequently dropped during the thermidor period of the American revolution in military affairs, involved the allocation of a considerable portion of the active force that would be given preference for new equipment and serve as the joint experiment base.

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7. It was the need to synchronize the introduction of new equipment across the military services that aborted the vanguard force concept in the mid-1990s. The difficulty then was not the complexity of working out the specifics of such synchronization as much as it was the basic reluctance of the individual services to cede influence on their planned acquisition of new major weapons systems to the vagaries of another service’s plan. 8. It is not just the issue of who sets military requirements. Major commands ostensibly have played a more important role in the requirements process since the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Recently USJFCOM’s has expanded formally within the process and that role is now exercised in ways that go beyond simply submitting the sum of the service component command views of requirements (views which in reality were generated largely by the services headquarters in Washington) through the major command. But, given the notion that the prevent forward force component would be a critical mass for joint experimentation, it is likely that over time joint requirements would often overrule military service requirements in reality as well as rhetorically. In other words, military service priorities would increasingly be subordinated to joint priorities largely defined by the functional commands. 9. During the late 1960s and early 1970s when information technology in the form of mainframe and early personal computers was entering the private sector, for example, manpower reductions in office personnel were balanced by manpower increases in computer support personnel. It was only in the early 1980s, as e-business approaches to large-scale transactions began to take hold, overall personnel reductions became more obvious, and by the mid-1990s the kind of network refinement pushed by firms like Wal-Mart in the commercial world was clearly driving personnel reductions. In each of these periods, the introduction of information technology was responsible for greater efficiency, and, in the commercial realm, with higher productivity as measured by profit. 10. Over the last several years, for example, there has been growing support for the view that the information systems entering the U.S. military are capable of building a dramatically more effective logistics system. Referred to as the ‘‘sense and respond logistics concept,’’ research and experimentation indicates such a system, which assumes cross-service pools of logistics and transportation assets, can generate better logistics support with fewer personnel. See Operational Sense and Respond Logistics: Co-evolution of an Adaptive Enterprise Capability (Washington, DC: Office of Force Transformation, 17 November 2003), http:// www.oft.osd.mil/library/library_files/document_229_SRL%2013-pager_%20v81.doc. 11. Personnel functions defined: Command and Control.—Exercise of authority and direction of forces to accomplish an assigned mission. The function normally includes planning, directing, coordinating, and controlling operating forces in accomplishing missions. Fires.— The effects of lethal and non-lethal weapons. The purpose of fires is to destroy an enemy and/or facilitate the maneuver of friendly forces. Maneuver.—Movement to place forces in a position of advantage over an enemy. The goals of maneuver are to enable the destruction of an enemy by fires, to prevent or limit an enemy’s ability to maneuver, and/or to avoid an enemy’s efforts to destroy friendly forces. Logistics.—Provision of material, maintenance, and other support required to sustain and prolong operations or combat until successfully completing missions. This function usually includes medical, strategic transportation, personnel administration, and equipment provisioning and repair. Force Protection.—Actions to prevent or mitigate hostile actions against friendly forces, facilities, and critical information, but do not include actions to defeat the enemy or protect against accidents. Information Superiority.—The collection, processing, distribution, and display of information in time and sufficiently to provide a militarily significant edge in all other military functions (with the possible exception of

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the next one, institutional). Institutional.—Administrative activities, including pay, career processing, education, and training. This function also includes activities to enhance understanding of and loyalty to the institution and activities involving the design, experimentation, building, and testing of future forces. 12. The Army was developing the Crusader self-propelled howitzer as a replacement for the Paladin, until May 2002 when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld terminated the Crusader program, arguing it was not sufficiently mobile or precise for the evolving security needs of the twenty-first century. 13. See, for example, Institute of Defense Analyses, Comparison of Potential Future Fleet Architectures (Arlington, VA: IDA Paper P-3980, January 2005).

Chapter 5 1. Francois Heisbourg, ‘‘A Work in Progress: The Bush Doctrine and its Consequences,’’ The Washington Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 82. 2. John Dowdy, ‘‘Impotent Europe,’’ Wall Street Journal Europe, September 21, 2001. 3. Anthony H. Cordesman, The TransAtlantic Alliance: Is 2004 the Year of the Greater Middle East? (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of International Security, January 2004); Stanley Hoffman, ‘‘Perpetual Problems in the NATO Alliance,’’ in American Defense Policy, ed. John F. Reichart and Steven R. Sturm, 5th ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982), 323–32; and Alfred Grosser, The Western Alliance: European-American Relations since 1945 (New York: Vintage, 1982). 4. Some European commentators argue the demise of the Soviet threat makes the United States more willing to use its military force because the recipient cannot threaten the kind of destructive retaliation the Soviets could. While U.S. unilateral action in the global war on terrorism no longer raises the similar possibility of tilting the world—including Europe—into the civilization-ending conflagration it might have done in the Cold War, these commentators point to the concern that Europe is more vulnerable to terrorist action in response than is the United States. See, for example, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘‘The Tragedy of Tony Blair,’’ The Atlantic (June 2004). 5. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld press conference, 22 January 2003. 6. Following WWII, unconditional respect for sovereignty gave way formally (in, for example, the United Nations charter) to a much more interventionist regime of international relations. Of itself, sovereignty was no longer a sufficient qualification for membership of the international community. Instead, formal recognition of nation state status involved commitments to adhere to basic principles of economic and political behavior. States that did not adhere to these values were ostensibly subject to a range of punitive measures from economic sanctions to military invasion. The rivalry and confrontation of the Cold War introduced gaps between the de jure and de facto adherence to such principles. But it is fair to conclude today that military intervention for humanitarian reasons is a legitimate use of military force and increasingly viewed as contributing to both national and global security. See, for example, David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2002); David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue, Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 7. See, for example, Jay Stowsky, ‘‘Secrets to Shield or Share? New Dilemmas for Dual Use Technology Development and the Quest for Military and Commercial Advantage in the

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Digital Age’’ (Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, University of California, Berkeley, 2003), http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context=brie. 8. The European Rapid Response Force was created by the European Union in 2004. The United States has no direct participation in the force, and it is currently focused on peacekeeping missions. Formally, the European forces that took over the stabilization roles from the United Nations mandated force in Bosnia in 2004 were part of the European Rapid Response Force. 9. Following the attacks, Russia agreed to a new relationship with NATO, agreed to reduce its nuclear weapons, accepted the United States’ withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and the United States’ deployment of a national ballistic missile defense system, and accepted full NATO membership for Poland and the Czech Republic. In a five-point support plan for the U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Vladimir Putin committed Russia to (1) share intelligence with the United States, (2) open Russian airspace to U.S. military flights, (3) work with former members of the USSR to get them to open their airspace for U.S. military operations, (4) join search and rescue operations, and (5) increase direct humanitarian and military assistance to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. 10. Zbigniew Brezinski, ‘‘NATO Should Remain Wary of Russia,’’ Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2001. 11. Leon Aron, ‘‘Putin’s Progress: Russia Joins the West,’’ The Weekly Standard, March 11, 2002.

Chapter 6 1. A capabilities-based model—one that focuses more on how an adversary might fight than who the adversary might be and where a war might occur—broadens the strategic perspective. It requires identifying capabilities that U.S. military forces will need to deter and defeat adversaries who will rely on surprise, deception, and asymmetric warfare to achieve their objectives. 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 30 September 2002), 14. 2. See John B. Wilson, Maneuver and Firepower: The Evolution of Divisions and Separate Brigades (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1998), www.army.mil/ cmh-pg/books/Lineage/M-F/index.htm. 3. Probably the most influential advocate was the Congressional Military Reform Caucus in the 1970s. Gary Hart, who with Newt Gingrich co-chaired the Caucus, argued in 1985 that ‘‘The reformers emphasize such characteristics as small size, reliability, ruggedness, ease of maintenance, rapid effect, and numbers. The same characteristics that give a weapon tactical quality—small size, simplicity, ruggedness—also tend to make it cheaper. Thus, the real choice is not between quality and quantity but between technological quality in small numbers and tactical quality in large numbers. In other words, in most cases we can choose between a small number of weapons quite likely to be ineffective in actual combat and a large number of effective weapons. Current Pentagon policy prefers the former.’’ Air University Review (SeptemberOctober 1985). 4. Formally, the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 (PL 99-433). The act reorganized the U.S. military chain of command by establishing by law that the chain ran from the president through the secretary of defense to the unified combat commanders, bypassing the chiefs of the military services. It also made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs the principal military advisor to the president and secretary of defense, for both operational and force planning.

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5. Norm Augustine, Augustine’s Laws, 6th ed. (Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., 1997),104–6. 6. See discussion, Chapter 2. 7. See, for example, David P. Reed, ‘‘The Law of the Pack,’’ Harvard Business Review (February 2001): 23–25. Reed advanced what he called ‘‘Reed’s Law,’’ postulating that the utility of large social networks scaled exponentially with the size of the network. 8. See, for example, Science Applications International Corporation, ‘‘The Sense and Response Logistics Capability and Operation Iraqi Freedom,’’ report prepared for the Office of Force Transformation, 2003. 9. The Office of Force Transformation’s page provides documentation for the concept: http://www.oft.osd.mil/initiatives/srl/srl.cfm. See also, Bobby Chin, ‘‘Sense-and-Respond Logistics Evolving to Predict-and-Preempt Logistics,’’ Army (May 2005). 10. One of the things that distinguishes the U.S. military from other armed forces is the extent and seriousness with which it undertakes ‘‘lessons learned.’’ In part driven by the relatively greater military operations research assets developed both within the military itself and in the supporting contractor base, the focus on lessons learned has increased because of the differences between the actual operations undertaken by the military in the post-Cold War and the mainstream of training. 11. Each of the military services, Central Command, Joint Forces Command, and Transformation Command all launched major ‘‘lessons learned’’ efforts, many of which surfaced in unclassified form. See, for example, E.J. Degan, Gregory Fontenot, and David Tohin, On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom (Fort Monroe, VA: Center for Army Lessons Learned, Army Training and Doctrine Command, May 2004), http:// www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2004/onpoint/index.html; Third Infantry Division (Mechanized), After Action Report on Operation Iraqi Freedom, http:// www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2003/3id-aar-jul03.pdf; U.S. Marine Corps, Reserve Force Combat Assessment Team, Marine Reserve Forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom: Lessons Learned (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps Combat Development Center, January 2004), http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2004/usmcr-oif-ll_efcat_5-20-2004. pdf; Assessment and Analysis Division, USCENTAF, Operation Iraqi Freedom: By the Numbers (McDill, FL: CENTAF, April 2003), http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/ 2003/uscentaf_oif_report_30apr2003.pdf; and U.S. Navy, COMPACFLT N4, OIF Lessons Learned and Fleet Quick Hits (COMPACFLT, HI: August 2003), http://www. globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2003/compacflt_oif_lessons-learned_aug03.ppt. 12. For a discussion of the Crusader cancellation, see, James L. Davis, The Cancellation of Crusader: A Study in the Dynamic of Decision Making, Report A321414 (Carlisle, PA: Army War College, 7 April 2003). For an overview of the Comanche cancellation see, the Global Security, Inc. review, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/rah-66.htm.

Chapter 7 1. One of the best recent analyses of Clausewitz’s views on ‘‘friction’’ in war is by Barry Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: National Defense University, McNair Paper No. 68., 2004). Watts surmises Clausewitz had identified five sources of friction: ‘‘(1) danger’s impact on the ability to think clearly and act effectively in war, (2) the effects on thought and action of combat’s demands for exertion, (3) uncertainties and imperfections in the information on which action in war is unavoidably based, (4) friction in

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the narrow sense of the internal resistance to effective action stemming from the interactions between the many men and machines making up one’s own forces, and (5) the play of chance, of good luck and bad, whose consequences combatants can never fully foresee.’’ 2. Watts and other Clausewitz admirers usually do not discuss the specifics of what their hero had to say about coping with friction, because his remedies—mass, centralization, iron discipline backed by severe punishment, and restricting information to the senior command levels—so strongly reflect nineteenth century views of social class distinctions. It is important to remember that Clausewitz, for all his insight, was a product of his age and its underlying assumptions, many of which the Information Age is undercutting. His most direct answer to how to cope with the friction of war was to enforce the techniques of the professional armies ¨ l fu¨r diese Reibung?—Nur eins, und dieses eine at the time: ‘‘Gibt es nun kein milderndes O steht dem Feldherrn und dem Kriegsheer nicht nach Willku¨r zu Gebote: es ist die Kriegsgewohnheit des Heeres.’’ 3. The Pentomic division emerged in the late 1950s as the Army’s response to the nuclear age. The Army expected nuclear weapons to be an important part of future battle and thus imposed the Pentomic design on its infantry divisions with the hope that they could undertake both conventional and nuclear missions, employing tactical nuclear weapons while also surviving the enemy’s own nuclear strikes. As a result of technological and other materiel limitations, the Pentomic division proved to be neither capable of conventional offensive action nor survivable on the nuclear battlefield. Acknowledging the inadequacies of the Pentomic design and the new national strategy of ‘‘flexible response,’’ the Army introduced the triangular ROAD (Reorganization Objectives, Army Divisions) in 1961. See John J. Midgely, Jr., Deadly Illusions: Army Policy for the Nuclear Battlefield (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986); and Andrew J. Bacevich, The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army Between Korea and Vietnam (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1986). 4. See, for example, Lorna S. Jaffe, The Development of the Base Force, 1989–1992 (Washington, DC: OCJCS, Joint History Office, 1993). 5. One of the best overviews of the training and educational system for U.S. armed sources is Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction on Officer Professional Military Education Policy, 1800.01b, 30 August 2004. 6. Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction (CJCSI), 1800.01b, 30 August 2004. 7. The term spiral development originated in software development. In the mid-1980s, Barry Boehm, then a chief scientist at TRW Inc., devised spiral development as a way to reduce risk on large software projects. Because software engineers often designed and built large software programs with little ongoing consultation with their customers, the resulting programs did not always meet the end-user requirements. Boehm introduced a cyclical approach in which customers evaluated early results and in-house engineers identified potential trouble spots at an early stage. The Department of Defense adapted the technique in May 2003 to get newer technologies into large platforms, such as assault vehicles and computer systems, much more quickly. 8. See Chapter 3.

Chapter 8 1. The internet experienced a period of astronomical growth in 1995 and 1996 and then reverted to an approximate doubling each year in 1997; it continued growing at about that rate through 2001.

238

Notes 2. See Lorna S. Joffe, The Development of the Base Force, 1989–1992 (Washington, DC: Joint History Office, Office of the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1993) for the best description of General Powell’s base force development. 3. See Ryan Henry and C. Edward Peartree, ‘‘Military Theory and Information Warfare,’’ Parameters (Autumn, 1998): 121–35. 4. Through the nineteenth century about 10 percent of those killed directly by armed conflict (not counting deaths to starvation and other results of the physical destruction of war) were civilian. In WWII roughly 50 percent of those killed in military operations were civilians. In the last four decades of the twentieth century, civilians made up about 75 percent of those killed directly by military operations. 5. Sun-tzu had formulated it in the fifth century, BC: ‘‘To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.’’ 6. John Boyd, a fighter pilot in the Korean War, used the OODA loop abstraction to describe the sequence of events that often takes place in military engagements. He used it to discuss how to gain a superior military position by shrinking the time it took to successfully complete the sequence or by extending the time it took the opponent to do so. 7. See Chapter 4. 8. See, for example, Congressional Budget Office, The Army’s Future Combat System, statement by J. Michael Gilmore, assistant director, before the Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, House Armed Services Committee, 4 April 2006, http://www.cbo.gov/ ftpdocs/71xx/doc7122/04-04-FutureCombatSystems.pdf. 9. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999). 10. The Commemorative Air Force is an all-volunteer, nonprofit 501(c)3 organization incorporated under Texas laws for charitable and educational purposes. 11. Secretary’s Foreword, Transformation Planning Guidance (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, April 2003). The Office of Force Transformation circulated a draft of the guidance, using the same wording, early in 2002, and the military services responded with what were essentially draft ‘‘transformation road maps’’ about a year later, shortly before Secretary Rumsfeld signed out the official planning guidance in April 2003. The services submitted their responses a year later in the spring of 2004. 12. For a discussion of the Crusader cancellation, see, James L. Davis, The Cancellation of Crusader: A Study in the Dynamic of Decision Making, Report A321414 (Carlisle, PA: Army War College, 7 April 2003). For an overview of the Comanche cancellation see, the Global Security, Inc. review, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/rah-66.htm.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Further Reading This bibliography focuses on what Arthur Cebrowski described as the intellectual currents that most influenced his views of military transformation. These were the shifts in assumptions that accompany the transition from the Industrial to the Information Ages; the contributions to Roman Catholic thought by Augustine, Aquinas, and John Courtney Murray; the arguments and perspectives associated with the American revolution in military affairs in the 1990s; and network theory, particularly that associated with his development of network centric operations. An asterisk indicates those works Cebrowski mentioned as specific contributors to his own views. The others provide additional insights and background to his thinking.

The Transition from the Industrial to the Information Age Chua, Amy. World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. New York: Doubleday, 2003. De Vries, Jan. European Urbanization, 1500–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. *Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999. Friedman’s glib and clever overview of the tensions between the desires for economic development and the maintenance of traditional identities is probably the most widely read popularization of the interaction of globalization and tradition. Built around anecdotes, the book provides almost as many insights to the social and political implications of globalization as it does to the author’s ego.

240

Bibliography Landes, David. The Unbound Prometheus: Technical Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. *Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: WW Norton & Co., 2002. Stiglitz is a former chief economist of the World Bank, a Nobel Prize Laureate, and was President Clinton’s chief economic adviser. This book is primarily an insider’s critique of the International Monetary Fund’s approach to economic stabilization. But his discussion of the East Asian financial crisis of the 1990s and Russia’s efforts to shift to a market economy offer some of the best insights to the economic implications of globalization. *Wrigley, Edward A. Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. A short, well-written argument focusing on the causes of the Industrial Age and the conditions that generated them.

Roman Catholic Thought: Augustine, Aquinas, and John Courtney Murray John Courtney Murray was an American Jesuit who in the 1950s developed a view of church/ state relationships and religious freedom based on the American experience. He argued that a government limited by law could protect the liberty of all religious communities equally, and that the Catholic Church should work within society without relying on government intervention to enforce the church’s status and influence. Based largely on Murray’s historical research and theological argumentation, The Second Vatican Council supported a doctrine of Dignitatis Humanæ calling for recognition of a fundamental freedom from coercion in religious affairs. Cebrowski credited Murray with prompting his view that the interaction of different points of view leads to a higher rate of accurate understanding of complex situations. He pointed to the following works as the sources of his appreciation of Murray’s theology. *Murray, John Courtney. ‘‘The Declaration of Religious Freedom: Its Deeper Significance.’’ America 114 (April 23, 1966): 592–93. *———. ‘‘The Issue of Church and State at Vatican II.’’ Theological Studies 27 (1966): 580– 606. *———. The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. *———. The Problem of Religious Freedom. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1965. *———. We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 1960. For additional discussions of Murray’s views and other Catholic theologians, see the following: *Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967. Curran, Charles. Catholic Social Teaching, 1891–Present: A Historical, Theological, and Ethical Analysis. Washington, DC: Georgetwon University Press, 2002. Ferguson, Thomas P. Catholic and American: The Political Theology of John Courtney Murray. Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1993. Finnis, John. ‘‘Aquinas’ Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy.’’ In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. Spring 2006 ed. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2006/entries/aquinas-moral-political/.

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*Gilson, Etienne. The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. Heyking, John von. Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Hooper, Leon J. The Ethics of Discourse: The Social Philosophy of John Courtney Murray. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1986. *McInerny, Ralph. Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1997. *Zumkeller, Adolar. O.S.A., (1986). Augustine’s Ideal of Religious Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 1986.

The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) *Arquilla, John, and David Ronfeldt, eds. In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age. Santa Monica: Rand, 1997. A set of essays largely by observers of the RMA who are generally supportive of the editors’ argument that ‘‘Mars, the old brute-force god of war, must give way to Athena, the well-armed goddess of wisdom. Accepting Athena as the patroness of this information age represents a first step not only for preparing for future conflicts, but also for preventing them.’’ *Galdi, Theodor M. Revolution in Military Affairs? Competing Concepts, Organizational Responses, Outstanding Issues. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, CRS 95– 117O–F, 1995. http://www.fas.org/man/crs/95-1170.htm. A good overview of the intellectual currents at the height of the debate inside the Pentagon on the RMA in the mid-1990s. *Metz, Steven. Armed Conflict in the 21st Century: The Information Revolution and Post-Modern Warfare. Carlyle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College, March 2000. A solid, cautious appraisal that portrays the professional skepticism facing Owens, Cebrowski, and the other ‘‘revolutionaries’’ in the mid-1990s. *O’Hanlon, Michael. Technological Change and the Future of Warfare. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. A readable overview of some of the key technologies associated with the RMA and an example of the tendency of observers to assume, incorrectly, that the ‘‘revolutionaries’’ were so infatuated by technology, they lost sight of the utility of military culture and tradition. Available online at http://brookings.nap.edu/ books/0815764391/html/index.html. *Owens, William. High Seas. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995. First extended public discussion of the thinking in the late 1980s and early 1990s that led to the efforts by Cebrowski and Owens to start the American RMA. *———. Lifting the Fog of War. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000. An inside view of the American RMA by one of its prime architects. For critiques or defense of the precepts advanced by Carl von Clausewitz: Much of the debate over the RMA involved a critique or defense of the precepts advanced by Carl von Clausewitz. Cebrowski, while he admired Clausewitz, was one of his most systematic intellectual critics. As such, he stirred counter-critiques from the phalanx of U.S. military historians and strategists who, unlike Cebrowski, tend to be convinced of the enduring sanctity of the great Clausewitz’s thoughts. See the following:

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Bibliography

*Bassford, Christopher. Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Bassford, an articulate admirer of Clausewitz, is an American historian and editor of the educational web site ‘‘The Clausewitz Homepage.’’ *Creveld, Martin van. The Transformation of War. New York: The Free Press, 1991. Creveld, a prolific and widely respected historian argues Clausewitz’s views were brilliant and insightful for warfare in the past but irrelevant for today’s problems of terrorism and ideologically or religious-based conflict. Corn, Tony. ‘‘Clausewitz in Wonderland.’’ Policy Review. Web special: Hoover Institution, September 2006. http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/4268401.html. *Howard, Michael E., and Peter Paret, eds. and translators. On War by Carl von Clausewitz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976, rev. 1984. This is the best translation of Clausewitz’s influential work, Vom Kriege. *Keegan, John. A History of Warfare. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. First Vintage Books ed. A broad, smoothly written exploration of, among other things, the cultural roots of armed conflict with a critique of the Clausewitz description of war as an extension of politics. *Metz, Steven. ‘‘A Wake for Clausewitz: Toward a Philosophy of 21st–Century Warfare.’’ Parameters (Winter 1994–95): 126–32. *Murray, Williamson. ‘‘Clausewitz Out, Computer In: Military Culture and Technological Hubris.’’ National Interest (Summer 1997). One of the best examples of the angst Cebrowski and Owens generated among some military historians and of the misinterpretation some of them have of the revolutionaries’ views.

Network Centric Operations *Barnett, Thomas P.M. ‘‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Network-Centric Warfare.’’ Proceedings of the Naval Institute (January 1999): 36–42. Available online at http:// www.thomaspmbarnett.com/published/7d.htm. Barnett’s critique of Cebrowski’s views of network centric warfare in this article brought the two together in an intellectual partnership that led Cebrowski into grand international theory. *Cares, Jeffrey R., Raymond J. Christian, and Robert C. Manke. Fundamentals of Distributed, Networked Military Forces and the Engineeriong of Distributed Systems. Newport, RI: U.S. Navy, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, NUWC-NPT Technical Report 11,366, May 9, 2002. Available online at http://www.alidade.net/recent_research/ NUWC_TR11366.pdf. This report outlines the characteristics of distributed, networked forces, discusses how to engineer them, and discusses the performance advantages in shifting from centralized control of forces to a decentralized/nonlinear, networked system. Cebrowski, Arthur, and John Garstka. ‘‘Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future.’’ Proceedings of the Naval Institute (January 1998). This is the most extensive discussion of network centric operations authored (in part) by Cebrowski and probably the most cited in discussions of his views. Although the article is heavy on assertions and skimpy on the backup for them, it offers a good window to the substance of his thinking and style with which he articulated it. *Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1927. This book provided part of the philosophical base for Cebrowski’s concept of network centric operations, in particular his view that increased transactions (two-way flows of information) among the individuals in a military force accelerate accurate corporate knowledge of the

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force. Dewey’s 1927 book stems from a debate with journalist Walter Lippmann regarding the growth of mass media (radio and movies primarily) and what is now, in the digital Information Age, often referred to as ‘‘information overload.’’ Lippmann had argued that it was the function of elites to use information for thought and action in order to mold and direct the emotive actions of the public. Dewey used The Public and Its Problems to argue the public was capable by itself of sorting through the new deluge of information to rational decisions and to popularize his philosophical arguments in favor of the beneficial effects of increased transactions. *Gallager, Robert. Information Theory and Reliable Communication. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968. *Gilder, George. ‘‘Metcalf ’s Law and Legacy.’’ Forbes ASAP (September 1, 1993). http:// www.seas.upenn.edu/~gaj1/metgg.html. Metcalfe’s proposition—that the value of a communications network grows exponentially as the number of users grows—originated in a briefing he gave in the early 1980s discussing the value of large members of an Ethernet. Gilder was the first to refer to it as ‘‘Metcalfe’s Law’’ in this synopsis of the context of its genesis. He iterated the article and provided more detail about the information revolution in his book, Telecosm. ———. Telecosm. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. MacKay, David J. C. Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.pdf. *McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Source of the ‘‘medium is the message’’ phrase from his argument that media—spoken, written, printed words and graphics—shape human activity. McLuhan later expanded this hypothesis in projections of, among other things, the internet. *Moore, Gordon E. ‘‘Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.’’ Electronics 38, no. 8 (April 19, 1965): 114–17. This was the article in which Moore commented that the complexity of minimum cost semiconductor components had doubled per year since the first prototype microchip was produced in 1959, thereby coining ‘‘Moore’s Law’’ and the suggestion that computing power at fixed cost is doubling every 18 months. *Nye, Jr., Joseph S., and William A. Owens. ‘‘America’s Information Edge.’’ Foreign Affairs (March/April 1996): 20–36. *Shannon, Claude E. ‘‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication.’’ Bell System Technical Journal, no. 27 (July, October 1948): 379–423, 623–656. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf Tuomi, Ilkka. ‘‘The Lives and Death of Moore’s Law.’’ In First Monday (peer-reviewed journal on the internet, University of Illinois at Chicago, November 2002). A good overview and commentary on the significance of Moore’s Law. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_11/ tuomi/index.html. Wesensten, Nancy J., Thomas Balkin, and Gregory Belenky. ‘‘Cognitive Readiness in Network-Centric Operations.’’ Parameters (Spring 2005). An experimental psychologist, psychiatrist, and behavioralist bridge the gap between advances in information technology and human cognition to elucidate the notions of self-synchronization and overwhelming complexity. An excellent overview of the dynamics behind Cebrowski’s argument that increasing transaction rates will increase learning rates, which, in turn, will increase the generation of better options for action that lead to the ability to impose overwhelming complexity on an opponent.

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Bibliography *Wilson, Clay. ‘‘Network Centric Warfare: Background and Oversight Issues for Congress.’’ Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, June 2, 2004. http://fpc.state.gov/ documents/organization/33858.pdf. A solid, intelligible description of the technologies behind the notion of network centric warfare and their vulnerabilities.

INDEX

Abu Ghraib, 206 Achilles, 199 Air expeditionary forces, 65 Alexander the Great, 199 Alliances, 133: information technology in, 138–39; new alliances, 144–45 Allied Command Transformation (ACT), 142 Alternative fleet architecture, 123–25 American pragmatism, 201 Arendt, Hanna, 16 Aristotle, 18 Army Future Combat System (FCS), 92, 123, 210, 221 Asymmetric warfare, 36 Attrition warfare, 18–19, 39, 52–53, 170, 206–7 Augustine, Norman R., 152 Automatic target recognition (ATR), 27 Automation, 114 Barnett, Thomas P.M., 71–72, 132 Barriers to transformation, 172–76 Base force, 196 Basing in the United States, 84–85 Bin Laden, Osama, 36 Bottom up review, 196

Boyd, John, 200, 208 Budgeting, 152–53 Bush, George H.W., 196 Bush, George W., 22, 62, 84, 197: Bush doctrine, 129. See also Citadel speech Capabilities-based planning, 69, 77, 148 Catastrophic challenges, 149 Center for Naval Analyses, 125 Change agents, 186–88. See also Dragons’ teeth Cheney, Richard, 21, 196 Citadel speech, 62, 197. See also Bush, George W. Clausewitz, Carl von, 17, 40–43, 118, 170, 200. See also Fog of war; Friction of war Coalitions of the willing, 135 Coates, Daniel R., 67 Cohen, William S., 22 Comanche helicopter, 162–63, 224 Command, control, communications, computers and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR), 102 Command intent, 48 Commission on the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, 22

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Index Commission to Assess National Security Space Management and Organization, 22 Common operating picture/combat support enabled (COP/CSE), 27 Congressional Budget Office, 217 Congressional Reference Service, 217 Contingency basing, 82 Cooperative engagement, 136–38, 140 Cooperative engagement concept (CEC), 27, 50, 92, 210 Cost-effectiveness, 100, 151–52 Crusader artillery system, 120, 162–63, 221, 224 Cyberspace, 166. See also New strategic commons Data-free research, 190–91 Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act, 85 Delta force, 101 Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 208. See also Network centric warfare Deptula, David A., 28 Deterrence, 35, 39, 60, 74, 79, 83, 89 Dewey, John, 201 Disruptive challenges, 149–50, 164, 167 Douhet, Giulio, 17, 40, 200 Dragons’ teeth, 186–88 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 175 European Rapid Response Forces, 144 Experimentation, 67, 141–45, 161, 178–79, 184 Fear of failure, 172, 177. See also Barriers to transformation Fog of war, 60, 118, 204–5 Force size, 38, 113–18 Force trifurcation, 121, 212 Ford, Gerald, 5, 21 Foreign policy, 83, 140, 145, 169, 203, 214– 16 Friction of war, 60, 118, 170, 195, 204–5 Fulcrums of change, 176–79 Garstka, John, 18, 208–9

Giambastiani, Edmund P., 86 Gingrich, Newton L., 67 Global command and control system (GCCS), 27 Global information grid (GIG), 27 Globalization, 31–32, 87, 94, 211–13: core and gap in, 133, 210; Globalization III, 70–75; threats from, 69–70 Goldwater, Barry M., 21 Goldwater-Nichols Act, 152 Government Accountability Office, 217 Guderian, Heinz, 200, 207 Haering, George, 167–68, 191 Hannibal, 199 Harm to the innocent, 18, 58, 170, 194, 202, 205–7 Hart, Gary W., 67 Hart, Liddell, 207 Holzer, Robert, 18 Hone, Thomas, 18 Hussein, Saddam, 22, 35 Idealist-realist debate, 214–16. See also Foreign policy Image-prone language, 179–82 Industrial Age, 4, 18–19: and globalization, 75–76; and military mass, 115–17; military metrics in, 51; military planning in, 41; organization and structure in; 40– 42; overhang of, 206; rule sets of, 37–39; war in, 39–40 Industrial Age warfare, 39, 203 Information Age: differences from Industrial Age, 78–79; rule sets in 30, 42–47; Information Age warfare, 87 Information overload, 59 Information superiority,14, 45, 47–48, 50– 51, 54–55, 115, 128 Information technology, 11–12, 19: Cebrowski’s arguments for, 203–7; and globalization, 70–75; and selfsynchronization; 92; U.S. lead in, 78 Information umbrella, 213–14 Intelligence collection, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), 26, 105 Interdependence, 159–61

Index Interoperability, 158–59 Iraq insurgency, 78, 96, 225 Irregular challenges, 149 James, William, 201 Joint Requirements Oversight Council, 5 Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), 99 Joint tactical radio system (JTRS), 27 Joint Vision 2010, 14–16 Joint Vision 2020, 16 Jomini, Antoine de, 200 Jus Bellum, 206 Jus In Bello, 206 Just War, 194, 206: Jus Bellum, 206; Jus In Bello, 206 Kissinger, Henry A., 215 Laird, Melvin R., 153 Large-scale integrated circuits, 8–9 Learning, 155–56: rates, 158 Lesser included cases, 148, 150, 164, 222 Lieberman, Joe, 67 Littoral combat ship (LCS), 123–25 MacArthur, Douglas, 40 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 200 Mahan, Afred Thayer, 17, 166 Manpower reallocation, 115. See also Personnel reduction Mao Tse-tung, 36, 200 Mass customization, 122–24 McNamara, Robert S., 23–24, 67, 150: compared with Donald Rumsfeld, 197– 98 Metcalfe, Robert M., 117, 154: Metcalfe’s Law, 117, 154 Military competence, 73 Military competition, 33–36 Military counterrevolutionaries, 25 Military culture, 165, 187 Military effectiveness, 169 Military efficiency, 169 Military expenditures, 130–31 Military mass, 19, 39, 44, 116 Military operations, 119–20

Military organization, 29, Military power disparity, 130 Military relevance, 74 Military revolutionaries, 25 Military service views of transformation, 217–21 Military structure, 29 Military training and education, 183–84 Millennium challenge experiment, 178 Mitchell, Billy, 207 Modularity, 122–24 Morality, 199 Murray, John Courtney, 11–12, 202 My Lai, 206 National Defense Strategy of the United States (2005), 149 National Security Strategy of the United States (2002), 88–89, 129 Nation building, 98 NATO Response Force, 142 Navy Strategic Studies Group, 10 Navy Warfare Development Command, 16 Network centric warfare, 19, 35, 48–54, 207–10. See also Attrition warfare; Command intent; New theory of war Networks, 154–57: change agent networks, 190–91; group-forming networks, 155. See also Learning; Metcalfe’s Law New strategic commons, 165–67. See also Cyberspace New theory of war, 17, 30–35, 51 Nixon, Richard M., 21 Nontraditional battlefields, 60 Nuclear weapons, 135, 206: nuclear umbrella, 140; proliferation, 138 Operational stress, 111 Operation Desert Storm, 11–12, 26, 46, 136, 209, 219 Operation Enduring Freedom, 162, 209 Operation Iraqi Freedom, 81–86, 136, 162, 209 Overseas basing, 80–84 Overwhelming complexity, 34, 157, 199– 200; Owens, William A., 10, 14–15, 46, 49, 197

247

248

Index Patton, George S., Jr., 199 Peer competitor, 99 Pentomic division, 173 Personnel reduction, 114. See also Manpower reallocation Planning, programming, and budgeting system (PPBS), 24: reform of 150–58 Platform centric, 153 Political polarization, 169 Powell, Colin, 173, 196 Preemption, 88–91, 98–99, 102. See also Preventive force use Precision weapons, 28, 121 Press, the, 181 Prevent forward force, 101–5, 143 Preventive force use, 88–91. See also Preemption Progressive Policy Institute, 67 Pudas, Terry, 17 Quadrennial Defense Review: (2001), 22, 148; (2006), 149, 164 Rate of change, 15, 171, 179–92 Revolution in military affairs, 15 Rickover, Hyman G., 6 Roman Catholicism, 33, 201 Rommel, Erwin, 207 Rumsfeld, Donald, 5, 21, 25, 62, 188: compared with Robert S. McNamara, 197–98 Sea basing, 85–87 Seduction of stasis authentication, 176–78. See Barriers to transformation Seeds of change, 179–92 Self synchronization, 31, 55–58, 92, 156, 203–4 Senior Level Review Group (SLRG), 23 Sense and respond logistics, 161 Shalikashvili, John, 14 Shared transformation, 135 Size and uniformity, 173–74. See Barriers to transformation Special Air Services (SAS), 172 Spiral development, 184–86 Stabilization force, 100, 108–10: and call-up

authority, 111; and Iraq, 108; role in homeland security, 111 Stimulates to change, 179–92 Stockholm International Peace Institute, 34 Street fighter, 124. See also Littoral combat ship Sunshine, 191–92 Sun-tzu, 2, 19, 24, 169, 195, 200 Surprise-free forecast, 128 Sustained combat force, 98, 105–7 System of systems, 27 Teaching change, 182–84 Terrorism, 34–35 Threat-based planning, 30, 69, 147 Transaction rates, 157–58: and interdependency, 160–61 Transformation Planning Guidance (2002), 223 Transformation umbrella, 138 Triangle of stasis, 174–75, 178. See Barriers to transformation Tyranny of the program of record, 162, 165 Unilateral use of force, 131–33 United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM), 105, 189 United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), 110 United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), 105 United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), 105, 189 United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), 105 Unmanned vehicles, 126 Van Riper, Paul, 13, 14 Villanova University, 5–6 Virtue, 202 Weapons design, 15, 120–24 Weber, Max, 41 Weinberger, Caspar W., 21 World systems administrator, 98, 212 Zulu, Shaka, 199

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JAMES R. BLAKER is a vice president and senior analyst at the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Previously, he served as senior advisor to the Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Analysis; and Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force. Dr. Blaker is the author of United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (Praeger, 1990).