AFA Policy Forum

General James Cartwright (USMC)
Commander, U.S. Strategic Command
Air Warfare Symposium - Orlando
February 18, 2005

[ click here for a printer-friendly version ]

AFA Executive Director Donald L. Peterson: Our final speaker is the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. He's responsible for the global command and control of U.S. strategic forces. His command mission areas include full spectrum global strike, space operations, computer network operations, information operations, strategic warning, integrated missile defense, global C4ISR and specialized expertise to the joint warfighter. That's quite a load.

Prior to taking command of STRATCOM, he served on the Joint Staff as the Director for force structure, resources, and assessment. His operations assignments have included Commanding General, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing; Deputy Commanding General, Marine Forces Atlantic; Commander, Marine Aircraft Group 31; and Commander, Marine Fighter Squadron 32.

He graduated with distinction from the Air Command and Staff College and received his Master of Arts in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College.

It's a great pleasure to welcome General James Cartwright.

General James Cartwright: Graduating with honors means I stayed awake longer. [Laughter]

I have a speech, but I have to tell you that I'm a little bit depressed right now. Following General Hester, and when I go to his bases and see F-4s on poles, it really depresses me. When I see him bomb an LSD that I had a cruise on, it really depresses me. The only thing that raises my spirits is that he's an average crud player. [Laughter]

There was a long list of acronyms that they asked me to make comment on today in the context of this speech and I didn't know what most of them meant so I'm going to take you down a path here. I know I sit between you and golf, so I understand the threat and I'll work my way through that as quickly as possible.

We're in a different world, and I'm sure each of the speakers that we've heard has laid that out in some format. But this global environment that we exist in is pervasive. And when you spend some time like I get to looking at that, the first thing that hits you is the economy. Every day we're hit with the global environment we're in. We get off of an airplane in Osan, we get off of an airplane in Ramstein, we expect our credit cards to work and they do. We expect to be able to pick up a phone and talk to home and we can. It just goes on and on and on. In that environment we understand that the price of oil and the effect of what's going on in the Middle East on a day-to-day basis affects us. It affects our daily lives. Down to what the coffee crop in South America did this year. We are in a global, interdependent environment and it's hard to escape that. It is pervasive for us.

When you look at that environment, it's hard not to see the fact that there are challenges out there to the way we do business. We are not without tools, and I think you've had a great range of those tools over the last couple of days, but when you look at the threat that we're going to have to deal with in the future, some people say it's asymmetric. Exactly what do we mean? Well, we basically mean that a smart enemy is going to look at your centers of gravity, figure out where the vulnerabilities are, and attack them. That doesn't make them bad, that doesn't make us good. We do the same thing.

But when you look at the kinds of threats in the environment that we live in, this netcentric world, it provides us a set of challenges that are incredibly different and dynamic. They challenge the rules that we have in an industrial mindset of being able to change in weeks, months, years. Actually, where we sit right now, it's more like years. Where we've got an enemy that can change and adapt in hours and minutes.

So when I look at a set of strategic challenges out there that we ought to be thinking about, and I'm going to step down through a set of three here, I'm doing this in the environment to kind of challenge you as leadership, whether it's military leadership, academic or industrial.

The first one that comes to mind has to do with the government and that's this idea that approaching the problem from the standpoint of the Department of Defense on a global basis is a little bit unrealistic. The reality here is that if we're not pulling all elements of national power together, all elements of the government, we're suboptimizing the solution, and one element of government cannot win a conflict. As my grandson would say, “you know, duh.” But what are we doing about it? The reality here, what are we doing about it?

Are our organizational constructs really set up to go cross-agency in the government? Are our organizational constructs set up to really pull the allies in? We can go find areas where we can declare victory, but anybody who's been in that kind of conflict will tell you right away it's fraught with problems.

When you look at the academic side of the equation and you look at private industry, as a Marine I'll stand up here and tell you just like I know every Air Force officer and general officer would tell you, our pride and joy are our service members. Those young 19 and 20 year olds that get up and do things that just leave your jaw on the floor every day. You can't get away from that. But the reality here is that there's a whole bunch more of them out there in the university system. There's a whole bunch more of them out there in private industry. And the one thing that they'll always bring to the table for you is they do want to contribute to a larger good, and the fact that we're not tapping them is something we ought to be thinking about. How can they contribute?

This war that we're in right now, this global war on terrorism, is pervasive. It's not aimed at the military. It's aimed at our way of life, so everybody ought to be involved in it and everybody ought to be able to contribute. We've got to figure out ways to pull all of the great strengths that we have, both in this nation and with our allies, together. So bringing in the academic side of the equation, bringing in industry, are critical pieces to the capabilities that we need to have and we are not doing a very good job of it today.

The second piece I'll talk to you about in challenges has to do with a string of acronyms, this idea of distributed, collaborative, synchronized. We work hard in those areas trying to figure out how we're going to do that. The reality is we haven't done a very good job of it.

In business school one of the first things they teach you is they give you this graph that has time across the bottom and opportunity up the side. Generally, when you describe a failing business, the leadership doesn't get opportunity until the time has just about run out. A general description of a failing business.

There's another axiom they use, which is that the size of a headquarters is directly related to the ambiguity of the information that they get. [Laughter]

If you go back to Napoleon, he was one of the first generals that figured out how to take that construct and do something with it to fight war. He came up with what we currently use today in a rough form, the military system of making decisions. The S codes, J codes, whatever you want to use, that we layer ourselves with to make sure that when the commander makes a decision, all the ambiguity has been washed out of the discussion. Probably most of the facts, probably most of the nuances, and everything else… [Laughter]

If it was good enough for Napoleon, it must be good enough for us. I mean the question here is, when you deal in a world that has distributed operations, a collaborative environment, is able to synchronize on a global basis, is that command and control system really the right way to do business? If every decision moves from one organization to the bottom of the next one, all the way to the top, all the way back down, then back, then up, then down, and on and on… When I was a kid, the little game that you played with, you get in a line and you pass a secret down and by the time it gets to the end it has no bearing on reality any more.

The question now is, is it time to take that challenge on? Is that really the way we want to do business, or are we trying to force today's generation, today's technology, into yesterday's decision processes? My gut is we are.

The closest thing that I can find right now in a movement towards a true, distributed, collaborative environment that synchronizes on a global basis is TRANSCOM. That's the closest you can come to it and my gut is that General Handy would tell you he's not there yet. It's a journey. But in comparison to almost every other structure that I look at out there from a combatant commander standpoint, that's the closest. They are light years ahead of the rest of us.

A C-17 crew that gets up in the morning in Hawaii doesn't know where they're going to end up at the end of the day. The attributes that we associate with them are they're going to move something very efficiently from one place to another. The credit is not going to be in the fact that that airplane or that squadron moves something. The credit and the value in the transaction is going to be that the global war on terrorism or the tsunami relief effort is better enabled. That's a very different way of doing business. A very different way of doing business.

When you come down to the individual—the Soldier, the Sailor, the Airman, the Marine, our pride and joy—when you look at what now is being coined, General John Abizaid uses this term quite a bit, the “Strategic Airman,” the “Strategic Corporal.” The individual, our youth, that gets up and is able in one setting to address peacekeeping; the next one enforcement; and the next one combat, and do that seamlessly and move between those three areas on a daily basis, hourly basis. You think about the quality of that individual. Think about how they cognitively understand what they're doing, apply the right rules, apply the right mindset, and apply the skills. They leave you in awe on a daily basis. All you have to do is go out and visit them. Or go to Bethesda or go to Walter Reed. They will put tears in your eyes.

Are we giving them the right environment to get the best out of them? Are we empowering them in the way that they need to be empowered from one block to the next to change missions drastically like that and move back and forth? Are our decision processes really enabling that warfighter?

The last piece that I'll step down through and then take whatever questions you have—or we can go play golf—is what's going on at STRATCOM. That long laundry list of missions, and you omitted just one—that was world hunger. [Laughter] The span of control there is something that ought to be questioned in the future. We ought to go take a look at whether that's appropriate. But having said that, when you look at those missions, essentially what you see is an aggregation of things that we're looking at as global enablers. When you look at intelligence, ISR. When you look at cyber warfare, IO. When you look across all of the other missions that they've handed me, and I guess we just got a new one about two weeks ago, that is combating WMD, because we obviously had spare time. When you look at that, the context really is one of global enablers. How are you going to approach that problem? What value added could you provide?

When I give you the context of wanting to basically have a construct that allows you to get all elements of national power, all of the value that your allies can bring to the table, all of the value that the academic community can bring to the table and private industry, how do you build that into a construct? How do you do it in such a way that it's flat enough that we aren't doing this kind of a decision process for Napoleon day-in and day-out and coming up with wonderful decisions and information that is no longer relevant to the decision cycle? How do you start to bias an organization that way?

It's not about technology. There are some technical challenges out there, but it's really not about technology. It's really more about culture and how we handle change and our ability to handle change in drastic ways and in short periods of time.

What we put in place to handle these broad mission areas were functional components. They're not all that new, but how we did it is probably. The jury's still out, but it’s a different way of approaching the problem.

For me, my functional components have significantly more authority than I do. That's a real unusual paradigm. I'll pick ISR as an example. I use Admiral Jake Jacoby as the head of DIA as my component for ISR. He has authorities in the intelligence world, in Title 50, that I will never have. He has authorities with Justice and with State that a combatant commander will never have. He has authorities as a milestone decision authority that I don't have. The decision authorities have been pushed down to a lower level.

Net warfare. I use NSA as my component for net warfare. General Mike Hayden has authorities in Title 10, with Justice, with State, in Title 50, that I certainly will never have and is also a milestone decision authority. Pushing that down to where execution and planning actually have the authority to do things, so I'm not doing this kind of stuff day-in and day-out.

That goes across the rest of our mission areas. It's a significant departure. But when I go back and talk to you about distributive and collaborative, I'll be the first to tell you that as we stand up these functional components, they're standing themselves up in the image of the Napoleon structure and trying to get them to start to think in a different way is where we're going to run into friction.

My intent, and time will tell, but my intent here is one, I provide capability to regional combatant commanders and in some instances I have capability resident inside. Some of the capabilities need absolute, positive, sure control. But for the most part, all of our capability is to provide to a regional combatant commander.

In that mindset, it's not about, as I talked about in the example with TRANSCOM, what STRATCOM's going to do. If CENTCOM, PACOM, whoever, wants to come in and wants to avail themselves of network attack capabilities, when they walk in the door at NSA and say, “I need to do this,” what they're walking into the door is a virtual environment that allows and mandates that everybody is working that solution. My net warfare people, my ISR people, my missile defense people, my global strike, space, combat—they get the entire enchilada no matter what door they walk in, and they also get all of the national labs. They also get a portal that we have now established with industry. So when a problem comes in the door, the value added is not what net warfare did, the value added here is what did we do in the context of the global war on terrorism, what did we do in the context of the entire enterprise. The solution space is out there in cyber. It is not at someone's headquarters. That's going to be a difficult mindset to work our way through.

The good news here is that, in my mind, we've been very interactive with the Chiefs on this trying to make sure that as we've moved down this road we got a good understanding of what it is we're trying to do and the opportunities, and I get great advice there on how to move forward and great support. The tough part is the culture is just really going to struggle with some of these challenges. It is real easy to say that I'm distributed and netcentric and interdependent and all of those things and I'm going to change to be that way, as long as it doesn't affect me. At the end of the day, it is going to affect each and every individual.

I'll leave you with one last piece here. Like I said, until it affects you, it's all okay. The guidance and the agreement that I have with the Chiefs is that standing up all of these components will not come at the expense of growth and manpower. My headquarters was the largest combatant command when we started. Within the next six months, we'll be the smallest. The components are going to do the work. We're going to push the decision authorities and responsibilities down and we're going to make sure, because we're all Type As, if I keep those people in my headquarters, they'll do the component's job for them. We're going to make sure that that doesn't happen. That's going to put a lot of stress in a lot of different places, but I think it's the right thing to do.

Like I said, I think it's only fair to give it a couple of years to try, but we've got to find a way to get the empowerment, the decision authorities, the decision cycles flatter, quicker, more responsive, able to take advantage of all the elements of national power, able to take advantage of our allies' contributions, academia and the private industry. If we can't do that, we'll suboptimize. We'll still be the greatest military around, but that might miss the mark.

Q: What is your view on the approval of the Robust Nuclear Penetrator by the Congress?

General Cartwright: You wanted to be sure that I got in the press here. Okay. [Laughter]

The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, from a technology standpoint, was an idea that there is certainly a target set out there that has a significant amount of value that we might want to hold at risk, but right now our technical means to do that is somewhat challenged.

The difficulty here is that when you label something like “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator,” you get at least four names there that can find people and areas that have concern. ‘Nuclear’ jumps out in that particular acronym very quickly.

When I look at the new triad, which is offense, defense and infrastructure, and I look at it in the context of the capabilities that I'd like to be able to present to the nation, I end up with about three scenarios that I can step through.

The first one is the general, all-out nuclear war exchange. Very regretful. We have weapons and we have capabilities in that area that I think will hold us well, but that's an ugly fight.

The second one is one that a regional actor starts doing something, stacking a missile, doing something provocative for which we are very concerned, clearly has the potential to do grave damage to us, but there's so much ambiguity in the intelligence that you don't know whether you want to preempt, you don't know whether you want to try to stretch out the decision time, you're just not exactly sure. And when called, my options that are currently available to the Secretary and the President are for the most part nuclear and for the most part self-deterring. That puts me in a real difficult position. And given extended timelines, we can come up with numerous ways of going very hard to get at problems, but generally these things are overnight, and they're very difficult to deal with, and I don't have a lot of options.

The third issue is one that's probably more recent, more current with today's world. But the fact that there are areas in the world in which our forces have to be at a posture to respond in minutes rather than days or weeks. Areas where the enemy is so close to us, and we just talked about the DMZ, that we're not going to have weeks to close. So you have to have forces on alert. To the extent that we have done that in the past with Korea being a classic example, we have a large amount of force there, a large amount of capability that is based overseas to handle that kind of reaction time. The question in my mind is, as I look out at the world and I look at hotspots, are those places starting to grow? Can we afford to put large amounts of force on every border? That's where global strike starts to come into the equation, and what are the options that we can offer to the President and the Secretary in the context of being on the other side of the earth in minutes, to offset the requirement to put large formations in those places?

So those are the three challenges in the context of this.

I know it's a long story, but to me when you do the analysis of that you come down to two critical leverage items. The first one is precision. If you can put effect precisely on target, you really change the dynamic. Now this is a duh for the Air Force, but the reality here is it's not that well understood. If you can use just one safe, sure, reliable, secure weapon for the right effect—whether that weapon be nuclear, conventional, or non-kinetic—and you can do it in minutes and seconds, you start to change the fundamental characteristic of the stockpiles, you start to change the fundamental characteristic of the delivery platforms, and it ripples on down. There is a dramatic knee in the curve, a leverage point on accuracy, that comes at about 50 feet down to about five. If you're in that window, the leverage of the accuracy against your infrastructure, your defense and your offense really is tremendous. That's point one.

Point two is nothing so neatly military at all. It is the value and the investment that this nation has put in modeling and simulation. This one is a little harder to grab onto, but the reality here is we've made massive investments in super computers, the federal government has. We've made massive investments in labs. We've made massive investments in the ability to take information, model it, simulate it, such that we are getting to the point now where we can identify a problem, figure out a material solution, and take it straight to production without massive amounts of testing.

If you can do that, you really start to change fundamentally the problem. Now, RNEP. If what I'm trying to do is get deep in the ground but my only solution is a nuclear weapon, there are an awful lot of self-deterring scenarios associated with nuclear weapons. But in the testing, which is a critical part of RNEP, I can learn two things. One, I can understand the value and the attainable opportunity that I have for precision. If I can understand what it will take to put a round on the other side of the earth in something between 100 and five feet, somewhere in that area, what's my capability? I really open up a whole bunch of options for the President that don't necessarily have to be nuclear. A.

B, if my modeling and simulation really understands the environment in which that weapon will go to, I can do things with it that allow me to stay within the law which says that I have to leave the current warhead configuration as it is, but that I can take my 1966 Mustang, which is when most of these assets were made available to me, and I could put seatbelts, airbags, antilock brakes, GPS in it. I could do a whole bunch of things that would fundamentally change the characteristic of that stockpile.

Now if I can do that through modeling and simulation I might be able to really change the way we do business. RNEP is nothing about anything going bang, it's about running around into a cement wall on a sled and making sure that the modeling and simulation is accurate. Should we do that? Gosh, yes we should do that. Should we do it in the name of nuclear? Probably not. But to jam into the name of one particular test, one particular characteristic, really misses the point in how we do business today, and anybody in this room that's in the private sector will tell you. I may make a discovery over here in this department, but if I don't connect my departments, I'll never get economic or competitive advantage. I've got to cross-pollinate all of my technology. That's what we're trying to do here.

So, from my standpoint, the great value added is that I will get to validate the environment in which my fuses and warheads, whether they be conventional or nuclear, have to live and convince myself so that I don't have to go out and do a whole bunch of testing. Whether I'm testing a conventional weapon or a nuclear weapon. That's the RNEP argument. It's a tough one.

Q: Kind of tagging along the discussions about using an ICBM with a conventional weapon, do you see that happening in the near term?

General Cartwright: I don't know how to define ‘near term,’ but my sense is that if we're allowed to do the modeling in RNEP and we're allowed to go out and demonstrate the value of adding GPS to our intercontinental weapons, and when you do those tests you find out you're inside that window and that you can have great effect and that you could start to affect those three scenarios so that you really are giving the nation choices—choices that they can make—then to me a conventional weapon that gets to the other side of the earth in 30 minutes has great value. So does a cyber weapon. We're probably not as close on those.

Q: You mentioned the new mission of WMD elimination. Have you had a chance to do any thinking in terms of doctrine and organization?

General Cartwright: Combating WMD is a broad mission area and it's somewhat pervasive in almost anything that you want to do. It is the thing that both presidential candidates said keeps them up at night. It certainly keeps me up at night. Homeland Security says the same thing.

So how do you go at this? In my mind right now, and given a whole two weeks of maturity in this, I think one thing that you want to have right at the beginning is this cross-agency relationship and it probably needs to be more than coordination. In other words, we have to build a construct, whether it be a functional component or something else, that allows us to go cross-agency because almost all of this activity will occur in an environment where Justice will have clear authorities that nobody else will have, the intelligence world will have clear attributions that nobody else will be able to bring to bear. When you look outside the United States, State will have relationships that nobody else can usurp. And inside, Homeland Security. So how do you lash this up?

My sense right now is that the Defense Threat Reduction Agency is probably a good place to focus in on. If it has a disadvantage, it's probably that it's got a D at the front of its name and how we get past that yet bring those types of attributes to the table is going to be important.

That's probably a good construct for planning and day-to-day work. They have the technical expertise and reach to do it. They have the interconnecting authorities to do that. Execution in this environment is probably, and I'm not sure yet, but is probably more in Joint Inter-Agency Task Force (JIATF) type mindset. Now, whether that fits under DTRA, whether it fits under STRATCOM, how it goes—I can't imagine an action that would not have the agencies in a relationship, whether it's in execution or planning, that allows us to do this job.

Those are kind of the early attributes that I see in the organization.

Q: It goes without saying that STRATCOM has a lot of change going on and certainly as we talked about earlier, a large portfolio of missions. How is the relationship with your components now in carrying out those missions, supporting those missions?

General Cartwright: I think, and most of them are out here, but I think the component relationships are very good, although we're at that point now where we formed them, we're starting to push the people out. I talked a little bit about the size of the headquarters at STRATCOM. The promise that I made to the service Chiefs was that I would go from something in the neighborhood of 4,000 man-years down to something in the neighborhood of 1,000. The delta would be pushed out to these organizations. They would get the joint structure, the people, the billets so that we could put the joint flavor there without building new headquarters.

We've gotten to that point. We've negotiated the bodies, the hostage exchanges, etc. We've worked our way through that. We have the initial ConOps, we're working our way through that. I would say that right now in the ConOps is where we are and that I'm starting to try to push them to find measures of value that optimize distributed, synchronized organizations. There's tension there. We all grew up that, “I am STRATCOM, I'll have my headquarters and I'll do all of my functions, the guy at the top has all the authorities, etc.” Trying to push that down and trying to empower people is a real challenge culturally.