Air Force FIFTY
TWO DAY INTERNATIONAL AIRPOWER SYMPOSIUM
April 23-24, 1997...Las Vegas, Nevada

Dr. William Perry

"Changing National Strategy"

The day that I turned 17, I borrowed my Dad's car and drove down to Pittsburgh to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. I was accepted in their pilot training program and was put on a waiting list for entering the air cadet program. As I drove home, I found myself humming that song so well known to all of you, but in those days it had a different ending: "We live in fame or go down in flame, nothing can stop the Army Air Corps." What a difference 50 years makes.

You've gone from the Army Air Corps to the U.S. Air Force. We've gone from B-29s to B-2s. From propeller fighters to F-101s to Stealth fighters. We have seen amazing changes in technology, especially aerospace technology and computer technology. And we have seen equally amazing changes in geopolitics, especially in national security.

Today I will talk about the truly dramatic changes in our national security these past 50 years and the role that technology played in dealing with those problems. And, I will look to the future, how the dramatic new developments in technology now underway will be used to deal with the challenging new problems we face in national security.

Try to take your mind back 50 years. Fifty years ago, I was in the Army of Occupation in Japan. I saw first hand the devastation that had been wrought by the Second World War. Both Europe and Asia then were trying to recover from that devastation with nearly all nations having a shattered economy and an infrastructure in shambles. At his critical time in history, the United States took an action unprecedented in history. It offered major assistance to other nations, in Europe and Asia, friends and foes alike, to rebuild their economy. Indeed, it was just 50 years ago this June that George Marshall made his famous speech at Harvard where he proposed what came to be known as the Marshall Plan. All the Western European nations, Germany and Italy included, gratefully accepted this plan and the miraculous economic recovery of Western Europe was underway. But Josef Stalin turned down the Marshall Plan, not only for the Soviet Union, but also for the Eastern and Central European countries under his control. And so began the Cold War with an Iron Curtain drawn between Eastern and Western Europe for more than 40 years.

The Cold War was one of the most dangerous periods in our history. The Soviet Union continued to maintain a large and powerful army. They coerced the nations of Eastern Europe into joining them in an alliance called the Warsaw Pact and they invested enormous resources to try to equal or succeed America's capability in nuclear weapons. This military policy was coupled with an aggressive foreign policy designed to expand their influence throughout Europe and throughout the world.

For the first few decades of this period, the strategy of the Soviet Union enjoyed some success, but at the expense of impoverishing their people and crippling their economy, thereby unwittingly planting the seeds for their eventual collapse. The United States on its part was determined that this Soviet expansionism would not be successful. So we adopted a policy that came to be known as containment. An important part of this policy was forming military alliances, most notably NATO. At the same time, we were determined that we would not cripple our own economy by maintaining a huge standing army. So we adopted a policy of deterrence by which we built up an enormously powerful nuclear arsenal which could devastate any nation which attacked us or our allies. During the height of the Cold War, the Air Force became famous through its motto in the Strategic Air Command: "You can sleep tight tonight, your Air Force is awake."

Well, the Air Force was awake and nuclear deterrence did work. But the Soviet Union also challenged our interests with proxy wars, which required a response with conventional military forces, where they had an overwhelming quantitative advantage. So we also adopted what came to be known as the offset strategy. That is, we decide to maintain a qualitative advantage in our conventional military forces to offset the Soviet advantage in numbers.

We had three main strategies during that period: containment, deterrence and the offset strategy. The key to the offset strategy was the application of American technological superiority to our weapon systems. Thus the partnership between American technologists and our military, which began during the Second World War, was carried on in the Cold War. Each of the military services and a newly created organization called ARPA, developed technical teams to work with industry and universities to apply American technical know-how to military weapons. This led to military sponsorship of all the most advanced and innovative programs then underway in aircraft and missile design, computers and space communications, semi-conductors and material sciences. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say, that American leadership in aerospace, computers, communications and semi-conductors in the 50s and the 60s stemmed in the first instance from military support of R&D in these fields.

The results were spectacular, both technically and militarily. During this period, we developed super computers, used in decryption and the design of nuclear weapons and in the simulation of advanced missiles and aircraft. We developed new generations of military aircraft, culminated by the F-117 and the B-2, which essentially rendered useless the extensive and expensive Soviet air defense system. We went from the V-2 to the Peacekeeper, from the buzz bomb to the air-launched cruise missile, systems which completely outclass their counterparts during the Second World War. We developed military satellites for global communications, reconnaissance, and navigation. We developed ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet. We flew one of the first integrated circuits on the Minuteman missile. And, we embedded many computers into weapon systems to give them an operational flexibility and a precision previously unimaginable. The Soviet Union, inspite of an extensive and expensive effort was simply unable to compete and their military fell far beyond in technical capability.

So, these strategies, containment, deterrence and offset strategy were the components of a broad holding strategy during the Cold War. I call it a holding strategy because it did not change the geopolitical conditions which led to the Cold War, but it did deter another World War and it did stem Soviet expansion in the world until the internal contradictions in the Soviet system finally caused the Soviet Union to collapse. The holding strategy worked.

Today, as a result, we are facing an entirely different situation. The Soviet Union has collapsed. The Warsaw Pact has dissolved. Russia, and the other successor states in the Soviet Union, are trying to form economic governments with free market economies. Europe is no longer threatened by a Soviet blitzkrieg. The world is no longer threatened by nuclear holocaust. But it is still a dangerous world.

The peaceful transition to democratic with free market economies is difficult and accompanied by turmoil. As the Italian philosopher Gromsky once said, the old has died, but the new has not yet been born. In the meantime, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

These morbid symptoms in Eastern European nations cause problems for them and for their neighbors. But the morbid symptoms in Russia pose a potential danger for the whole world, because Russian turmoil coexists with more than 20,000 nuclear weapons. Moreover, rogue nations -- Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea -- are trying to get nuclear weapons which would great add to the danger they already pose to their neighbors with their large conventionally armed military forces.

We live in a new era with new and very different security problems from those we faced during the Cold War. During the Cold War, we dealt with our security problems with the containment strategy, deterrent strategy and an offset strategy. What are our strategies for dealing with these new problems? And how will these strategies affect the Air Force as we go into the 21st century?

Today, instead of containment of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, we seek engagement with the newly independent nations formally in the pact. An example of our engagement policy is the Partnership for Peace in which all 16 NATO nations work together with 27 Eastern and Central European nations to demonstrate how the military can support democratic institutions. Another example is the effort to bring about a peace in Bosnia, where NATO nations worked cooperatively with 16 Eastern European nations, including Russia.

Similarly, instead of practicing deterrence, we practice preventive defense. Preventive defense is like preventive medicine. It is those actions which create the conditions for peace thereby preventing the need for military conflict. An example of preventive defense is the cooperative threat reduction program of the Defense Department, wherein we have spent more than a billion dollars of Defense funds to assist the nuclear states of the former Soviet Union to dismantle their Cold War nuclear legacy. In the last four years, this program has led to the dismantlement of 4,000 nuclear weapons formerly aimed at targets in the United States. It has led to the destruction of 800 launcher and total elimination of nuclear weapons in three former nuclear states.

While we have changed our policy of containment and deterrence, we have remained constant in our policy of maintaining military technological superiority. During the Cold War, we maintained technological superiority as a way of offsetting the numerical superiority of the Soviet ground forces. Fortunately, we never had to put this strategy to a test. But the high-tech weapon systems we developed for that purpose were put to a test in Desert Storm. There, we were fighting against a foe equipped with Soviet weapons but in about equal numbers to the allied force. The U.S. forces were equipped with the new weapon systems that had been developed during the 70s: advanced sensors to locate every target on the battlefield, precision guided weapons to strike those targets, and stealth technology to evade enemy defenses. As a consequence, we won quickly, decisively and with remarkably few casualties. The lesson from this is that when our technological advantage is not needed to offset superior numbers, it can be used instead to achieve a battlefield dominance over a foe with equal numbers. Having seen the results of battlefield dominance in Desert Storm, we decided that we liked it and that we wanted to keep it.

So today, our military strategy calls for maintaining battlefield dominance over any regional power over whom we might conceivably be engaged in conflict and to do that through our leadership in technology. In a sense this is the same strategy of technological superiority we had during the Cold War, but now, for a different reason. Now it is no longer an offset strategy, but a strategy of battlefield dominance. Not only has the reason has changed. So also has the way of achieving this technological superiority change.

During the 50s, 60s and 70s, the Defense Department was the principle support of R&D for the computer, communications and semi-conductor industries. Some of the most significant advanced were developed first for military systems: supercomputers, geosynchronous satellites, internets and integrated circuits all were developed first for military programs and industrys R&D was largely supported by the Defense Department. In effect, our nations commercial industry was riding on the shoulders of the Defense Department.

Today, that has all changed. The technological explosion in computers, communications and semi-conductors has led to an amazing new set of products for industry, businesses, school and home. Indeed, all of these different users are being tied together today by the world wide web in a way few could have predicted a decade ago. Commercial applications of computers are leading military applications in all of these fields and for computer companies, commercial revenues dwarf defense revenues. So today, defense is riding on the shoulders of our commercial industry. This has required a profound change in the way the Defense Department does business with industry and the way it supports R&D.

First and most importantly, defense can no longer support a unique defense industry isolated from the commercial industry. During the 80s, the Defense Department spent many years and many billions of dollars developing a family of defense-unique computers. By the time the military development cycle was completed, these computers were obsolete and were incompatible with the standards that had evolved in the computer industry. This example made it clear that our nation should have a single industry which supplies defense and commercial needs alike. This requires defense to give up its unique specifications and conform to industry standards and to give up its unique buying practices and employ best commercial buying practices.

Transforming our acquisition process is the linchpin of our military dominance strategy. Indeed is it required if we are to maintain the dominance of our military forces into the next century. That is why acquisition reform was a primary goal of mine when I returned to the Pentagon four years ago. Victor Hugo once wrote, "More powerful than the tread of might armies is an idea whose time has come." Four years ago, I told our acquisition team that after decades of false starts, acquisition reform was an idea whose time had come and that we really were going to transform the ways we specified and bought goods and services and that they should either get on the team or get out of the way. Most of them enthusiastically got on the team and we are already seeing the results. For example, we have a pilot program in acquisition reform called JDAMS, the Joint Direct Attack Munitions System, which most of you are familiar with. Essentially, it turns dumb bombs into smart bombs by employing global positioning satellite inputs. Using the new acquisition system under this pilot program, which employs commercial standards, commercial components and buying processes, we have reduced the cost on that program not 5 percent or 10 percent, but 70 percent. And commercial buying will save us $3 billion on that one program alone.

A more recent example is the Joint Strike Fighter program. Here also the program manager will be able to use commercial buying processes and components and, as the name implies, this is a joint program with 80 to 90 percent commonality of parts in the different service programs. Most importantly, the requirements for the Joint Strike Fighter were traded off against performance by a process action team which used cost as an independent variable and the costs considered were not just acquisition costs, but life cycle costs. As a result of these reforms, we expect to save tens of billions of dollars in acquiring the JSF and an additional tens of billions of dollars in operating it. The Joint Strike Fighter will truly be the flagship program of acquisition reform.

But acquisition reform is about more than saving money. It gives the Defense Department better and faster access to the new generation of computers, microchips, communications and satellites. In the past, our procurement process has put up a barrier to defense contractors using commercial components. These barriers prevented timely access to the information technology which was developing at a breathtaking pace in the commercial marketplace. Acquisition reform is breaking down those barriers, speeding up our access to information technologies by several generations. The acquisition reforms I've described are well underway and are truly revolutionizing our buying process.

But transforming acquisition process means much more than simply overhauling the way the Defense Department buys its goods and services. It means a tectonic shift in the way the Pentagon relates to the commercial sector of the American industrial base. It means a tectonic shift in the way we adopt and adapt technology from the commercial sector to the military uses. And it means a tectonic shift in the way we get that technology into the hands of our troops.

Our major weapon systems take 10 to 15 years to develop and then are in the inventory 20 to 40 years. But the computer technology that most influences our competitive advantage changes every few years. So we need to evolve a systems strategy that keeps major weapon systems in the field for several decades, but updates them every few years with new information technology whenever real military advantage is realized from the introduction of this new technology.

We have underway in all of the services today experimental programs to do just that. I am going to give you one example from the Army because I've just returned recently from a visit to Fort Hood and Fort Irwin where I saw this experiment underway. Army calls their experiment Force XXI, the digital battlefield of the 21st century. I witnesses two of these experiments and both hold promise to dramatically improve the way we adopt and adapt modern technology to military uses. The concept behind the first experiment was simple, insert appliqués of digital subsystems into our current weapon systems, thereby giving them a quantum increase in capability. In aggregate, these appliqués form a system of systems, an integrated network of powerful computers and high speed communications, in effect, a local area network or an internet out on the battlefield.

This system of systems transformed the way a commander and troops see and communicate on the battlefield. In the past, information was passed around the battlefield by radio conversations and type-written messages and the result was that commanders got only a fraction of the information they could really use in combat. With a system of systems, commanders have the ability to send and receive digital bursts of critical information about the location of all enemy and friendly forces, about the rate of usage of food, fuel and ammo, about the progress of current operations and the planning of future operations.

The effect on combat operations will be no less than revolutionary. Every commander will have a battlefield awareness, a constant complete 3-D picture of the battlefield. Every warfighter will have the information needed to carry out a commanders orders. And the joint operation will move as one, integrated battle system.

How does this actually work in practice? When an F-15 pilot spots an enemy target, he will have a choice: He could engage that target with the weapons on his F-15 or he can call in nearby attack helicopters, artillery, other strike aircraft or naval gunfire. Because of digital technology and the constant flow of battlefield information to all commanders, this other units can see exactly what the F-15 pilot is seeing and any one of them or any combination of them will be able to respond with equal precision in destroying the targets. As the combat is underway, the supporting logistics unit will be monitoring the ammunition usage so it will be able to conduct resupply at the time and amount needed, thereby reducing the huge logistics tail need to support combat operations. This system of systems is a brilliant application of information technology to achieve battlefield dominance without designing all new weapons platforms. This is the military of the future and it is not just on vu-graphs. It works.

We are succeeding in incorporating new information technology into existing weapon systems, but we must also develop the military tactics to get the most out of technology in a combat environment and develop the training so our warfighters can maximize the use of that advanced technology.

The challenge ahead of us is to develop the three "Ts" of force dominance: technology, tactics and training concurrently instead of sequentially. Trying to achieve this led to the second experiment at Fort Hood. Until now, we have created these three "Ts" sequentially. It has created long period of acquisition, test and evaluation, fielding and tactics development and finally, after decades, training. But if we can fuse the sequential process into an integrated concurrent process, we could cut years off the time between developing new technology and getting into the hands of troops. The answered at Fort Hood was to create a process action team composed of experts who developed the three "Ts", the acquirers, the requirers, the users and the builders, all work together on the same project action team. Against all odds and contrary to all tradition, this team is meeting with success and as a result of this project action team approach, the new equipment, tactical doctrine and troop training levels are all approaching combat-ready standards at the same time and in a realistic environment.

Just two weeks ago, one brigade of this 4th Infantry Division at Fort Hood was sent to Fort Irwin to meet the opposing force. No holds are barred. It went in there just like a combat-ready unit. They are treating this not just as an experiment, but as preparing the unit to fight a real war if it ever had to. This puts us years ahead where we would be if we were following the traditional sequential development process and for iithe first time shows us a way to get our military development cycle in sync with the development cycles in industry.

I saw how advanced information technology can serve the troops during my last visit to Bosnia in December. As I toured one of our base camps, a young soldier showed me a computer terminal hooked up to a satellite dish outside. Using this system, the troops download high resolution digital imagery of the Bosnian countryside. The imagery is routinely collected over Bosnia by satellites, reconnaissance aircraft, by drones. It is then fused and analyzed at Jack Mollsworth and then sent to the computer terminal in Bosnia within hours after it is collected. This imagery helps our troops see immediately any movement of heavy weapons in violation of the peace agreement, any gatherings of troops or mobs that could harass them on patrol. This system is just one demonstration of how information technology has been adopted and adapted to military uses. It also demonstrates why transforming our acquisition system is so important to me and why I am so proud at how far we have transformed this process during the last four years.

In sum, as we go into the 21st century, our security strategy must change to reflect the dramatic geopolitical changes of the last decade and the dramatic technological changes of the last few decades. We will proceed with a policy of engagement with our former adversaries during the Cold War. The highlight of this strategy will be the Partnership for Peace program. We will proceed with a policy of preventive defense to create the conditions for peace. The highlight of this strategy will be the cooperative threat reduction program for reducing the nuclear legacy of the Cold War. And, we will proceed with a policy of maintaining battlefield dominance of our forces by the timely application of advanced technology.

But to do this, in the face of the remarkable technological advanced being made in industry today, requires a complete transformation of the way the Pentagon has done business. That transformation has been underway for the last four years and has already met with significant success. Winston Churchill once said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing...after having first exhausted all other alternatives." (laughter) We have indeed made many false starts in the last few decades trying to transform the way we manage our Defense business, but this time, we are doing the right thing and this will allow the Air Force to lead, not to follow, the new information technology into the 21st century.