Anyway. We usually have a very robust online audience and the distractions we want to minimize here. Thank you for joining us here. We want to talk about a new report on rebuilding the army. Its one of a series, actually the third paper thats out. The first one talked about how to think about the future, then we released one to the marine corps, this is a major paper on the army and how to think about its relationship with the imperatives of the National Defense strategy, National Security strategy and how the world is changing and recommendations for what the army needs to be and the path it needs to go down to get where it needs to be with a look out to about the 20 30year time frame and follow up with the paper on the air force which i think is coming up next month and then wrap up by the end of the year with the paper on the navy so well have all four Services Covered and how to think about preparations for the future. These papers are meant to give an independent perspective, advice and recommendations to the administration, to the military service in particular, leading officials and the Defense Department and hopefully to perform deliberations in congress and this one hits the ball out of the park on that. Starting about 18 months ago, the army did embark on a major effort driven by then secretary of defense james mat us on increaseing reality to the force and getting back to the age of peer competitor fights with major opponents like russia and china and how do you do things other than irregular warfare which is what weve been immersed in for the last 18 years. Since this paper addresses how to look at those sorts of challenges. Participating in the discussion today will be the author, tom spoehr who directs our center of National Defense at the heritage foundation. Prior to coming here, he served in the army for 36 years and retired in 2016 as lieutenant general, been a real blessing to have him here leading our defense efforts. Moderating the discussion will in. Judson, well known the Analytic Committee and is the reporter for defense news and covered defense matters in the d. C. Area for eight years or so. Previously a reporter at political pro defense and inside defense, recipient of the National Press clubs best analytical reporting award in 2014 and named the defense media awards best young defensive journalist in 2018. I dont know how you get to carry young as a title. Ive aged out already. Without further adieu well turn to a great discussion and open it up for q a and when we get to that point well pass around a microphone and identify yourself and who youre with and if you have a organizational aflation and well focus on questions and not personal statements. Without further adieu, go ahead. Thank you everyone in the audience for being here and those watching online and tom, thank you for your hard work with this report and since its been released its really triggered a decent amount of discussion and debate in the Army Community which obviously is a good thing so well dive deeper in those issues in our conversation. Its my feeling its a good time to be making suggestions to the army. Just to kick things off, if you could talk about the purpose of the reports and why you decided to write this report and how you went about researching and talk a bit about how your background applies to your report. Thank you, jen, and thanks for being here today and thanks for moderating this discussion. We embark on this project called the rebuilding of americas project or ramp project probably two years ago and didnt know what would be happening at the time these papers came out. And its fortuitous the army paper just came out now. Theyre in the process of a major change of leadership getting a new secretary of the army and secretary mccarthy had his confirmation hearing next week, the chief of staff changed over and the general moving up to be the chairman and new chief of staff taking over just a couple weeks ago. So it was a clean break point where the army could reevaluate where they are and take a look at things. As the introduction said we have a new National Defense strategy and even though it was january i think of 2018 in army terms, thats like yesterday. People say why hasnt the army or the department of defense adapted to the new Defense Strategy yet . And it is worse than turning an aircraft carrier, it really takes years to turn an organization like the army. So i think this paper came at a good time for us. The bipartisanship budget act passed a month or two ago in Congress Gives the ability now to the army to focus on their future versus these near term oh, were going to shut down, oh, were in a continuing resolution, oh, my gosh, how will we get through these months . They now have the luxury, assuming congress does what it needs to do, to think about their future in an intellectual way which is rare in washington, d. C. You could actually think about these things. Most of our research at heritage is focused on the near term fight. So we write a lot about the National Defense authorization act, the f35 fighter, things that are really kind of on congress plate. This paper and the two that preceded this is different for us. Looking out further, and i thought 36 years in the army, i thought i knew a lot about the army you would think i would know a lot about the army. Terps out i didnt know a lot about the army. Ive never been a futurist, ive always been downed on how do we get the current task done. This was a stretch for me and i had to educate myself on the army before i started writing this paper because i heard the folklore of general sullivan an john starr and all those things and just kind of accepted it as a young army officer and made me go back and actually learn it. So it was hard for me but in the end i liked it. What are some of the areas of the armys rebuilding you looked at and what are some of your conclusions . I tried to look at all of it. Because i spent a lot of time in the pentagon and particular in equipment modernization and was a general there, i probably wrote more and thought more about those problems with which i was most familiar, so i looked a lot about equipment modernization. I looked at the talent managements s. E. S. s and general officers. I looked at the concept. Ill admit im not a conceptual kind of person so i did my best and reached out to a lot of people including some in this room for their thoughts and i had to go to interviews because i dont live in the conceptual world and there is a whole group, almost a career field in the army that thinks about concepts and i never was in that group so i had to talk to those kinds of people to better understand that. By and large, my conclusion that i reached fairly early on was that the army was on the right path and that a wholesale revision of the armys modernization plans were not needed and there of course were corrections. I saw some areas where the pap estri was fraying the tapestry was fraying around the edges and they could tighten up their story and justification for things. Some places i could not understand why they were pursuing a particular Modernization Program to the degree they were, longrange strategic cannons falls in that category. I did my best to understand but there could be things that are classified that they werent able to share with me to help me better understand. Another example of that were the requirements for the optionally manned fighting vehicle. I did my best to understand them only to find out at the end they are classified fouo and i couldnt get them and i couldnt fully explore why the army was pursuing that vehicle like they were. And i looked at manpower and how big should the army be and how quickly should they grow their force, and i looked at organizations, what type of organizations do they have now and which they grow in the future. I found some areas where i think they should develop some new organizations. Ms. Hudson diving more in the modernization side and theyre on track but this obviously is a complicated thing and theyre moving very quickly so theres probably a lot of room for error at this point. But it sounds like since its so early on and corrections can be a good thing. But what are some of the future challenges they could be facing in executing modernization plans . Mr. Spoehr there are a lot of plans. I looked at the history of modernization and discovered luck plays a big underappreciated factor. You can have the best thought out conceived plan and if the world environment changes and your army needs to go do something, fight a fight, youre not going to be able to modernize to the degree maybe youll salvage some aspect of your Modernization Program but wont carry out the plan that was envisioned. Looking back it didnt occur in some cases. The army kept driving on thinking whatever were fighting, thats just going to go away and we can continue with our plans. You see that with f. C. S. So the army valuiently tried to keep going down the path of a future combat system in the face of fighting two counterinsurgency fights and in the end they won and f. C. S. Lost. Thats the most salient example to me, not the first time it happened. So if your funding gets cut and whether or not you like it or not, the armys funding gets cut once every 15 years fairly dramatically. You cant modernize if youre trying to keep your service alive and your nose above the water. You do the best you can to survive until you start to get another influx of funding. And you cant protect your service and modernize. Its just too hard. That was something i realized. So i think the army is doing a good job. One of the things that was underappreciated to me was the difficulty of facing two threats simultaneously. And so we talk about russia and china. Its almost like a hyphenated word, him russiachina. When you look one level below that, its different types of threats they present. China representing more of an air time war threat and russia more of a conventional ground threat and for the time being, they are using the same concept and essentially the same types of equipment to address both threats. My sense is over time that will become harder and harder as these threats diverge and china becomes more and more capable and its going to be hard to manage that duality of threat and also maintain your counterinsurgency capabilities. Ms. Hudson you talk a lot about successes and failures and mention f. C. S. Can you dive deeper in terms of the successes and failures weve seen in the past and do you think the army is applying Lessons Learned from those . Mr. Spoehr yes. So ill talk about some of the i dont know whether you want to call them failures because its so pejorative. I talk about talking about the Pentomic Division, this reaction to president eisenhowers focus on Nuclear Weapons and how the army almost was in danger of becoming irrelevant. So the chief of staff was per situated to change his entire force to focus on Nuclear Warfare so he created this thing called the Pentomic Division with five large battle groups and the idea was so big a division, so disburse it could survive a Nuclear Attack and also employ Nuclear Weapons. They rushed into this design and it almost immediately, maybe even before it was fielded, people figured out this was not what the army needed it to be. And it was an example of where they rushed into a design, starting designing the force before they even had the concept figured out. Depw and d to tradock and had a plan that was in response to a huge army threat in Central Europe and how do we come up with a concept to fight this. He came up with an idea, brilliant man of fighting an active defense and it fell back o various different strengths. The dilemma was he didnt share this concept widely with the army so it was kind of a small staff group at training and endoctrine headquarters so when he finally uncorked this bottle of wine, if you will, it didnt meet with acceptance to the army and whether you like it or not, aance acceptance in the army is a determination whether theyll succeed or not and he brought it out and one, the army hadnt shared it and two it had the countercultural premps for the defense for the offense and like it or not all the military services tend to culturally favor the offense and so it really did not catch on. And i was not in the army at the time but i could sense that the moment i came in the army about how we have this concept nobody bought in to. In terms of successes, those are more fun to talk about so ill talk about the Striker Brigade Combat Team conceived t the interim force by general senseki and feeled fielded by the army in less than five years we wanted an interim force and we had Striker Brigade Combat Teams maneuvering in the area of kandahar or rather in iraq, im sorry. So very quickly got that concept out and it was just an example of how when you set your mind to something and have cohesive leadership and focus on it, it really can come together. Another example would be task force mod you laterity modularity in the middle of the iraqafghanistan fights when the army required more brigade teams that be had it, it modernized their brigades and created more of them and were selfsustaining with their own artillery and all the facilities a brigade manager would need organic to that brigade and happened in almost 1820 months. So it was really a quick effort. Then the classic example that most Army Officers will point to is Airland Battle conseeped by don starry, codified in eally the 1982 edition of 100 5 operations where he followed all the precepts of successfully changing the army. He was intellectually prepared. He had a great team. He did his home work. He took it everywhere, talked to everybody about it and in the end it ways a concept to serve the army well for over 10 years. Ms. Hudson i know one of the most controversial parts of your paper is regarding reordering prioritizations, longrange precision fires you said to keep at the top but you suggested bumping next generation combat vehicle down to the bottom and underneath that future vertical lift from the number two and number three slots. You also recommended moving the network up to number two. Can you talk a little bit about your reasoning with those recommendations . Mr. Spoehr youre right. The moment my paper was published my email box lit up with a number of people interested in my reordering of the modernization priorities. So i dont know how the army established their first round of priorities. Theyve not shared that rationale but i thought i would just use a very simple analytic method and think about in the multidomain concept, how important is this capability to the successful execution of multidomain operations in the year 2030 . Looking forward, how reading the concept and accepting it for how it is, how important is this capability in their concept . And then looking at the current force we have today and how close is that capability we have today to what we need in 2030 . So for example, if we we have a wonderful fleet of soldier weapons, in my view we would be a six. We are where we need to be. I took that very simple matrix and applied it to modernization areas. In multidomain operations, longrange precision fire is critical. Critical, and we are in poor shape today. Longrange precision fires came longrange precision fire came out right at the top. If you are employing any of these capabilities in multidomain operation, the network is key. Multidomain operations talks integration in war fighting domains. If you dont have the network to do that, you cannot do those multidomain operations. That came out at number two. Similarly, i went down the line, air and missile defense, we are in pretty poor shape. That is going to be a big thing. It came out number three. And just on down the lane. To make the list of the six modernization priorities, the already needs your thing is importance. In my ranking, future vertical lift came out and number six but that does not mean vertical lift is not important. That is six in a list of dozens upon dozens of army programs. The fact that you made number six should make you feel really good. That was not reflected in the correspondence i got from my friends. [laughter] thomas it was useful for me. I dont presume that the army, as a result of my insightful analysis, will change their modernization priorities. But what i would like is the next time they update them, refresh them, whatever they do, that they also release their rationale for how they came up with that listing, so i could say, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. Because i could not track the pedigree on the multidomain concept of their modernization priorities. Jen i think that is an important point, and something i asked at the defense News Conference a few days ago. What was the rationale for the priorities . And actually did not really get a straight answer, but one thing he did mention was they are adamant that the priorities are not going to change right now. That is important to them making the case to congress to not disrupt the list. Thomas let me add, i did that. I had the job of responding to that, so i have been on the cynical end of this business. And often we would say, where do we have the most money . Where are we most at risk . X billionif we have dollars in aviation, it makes sense that aviation is the number one priority. Money, priorities, it all matches. I got this. Thats the pentagon view of the eers and a budget view of the world. Its not necessarily the correct view. Jen and if funding were to change, priorities could shift. Could you talk a little bit about some of the feedback you did get, without naming names . The counter rationale you got, especially in terms of future vertical lift and next generation combat vehicle. Thomas a lot of the feedback was positive. Including from the chief of staff of the army and the secretary of the army. I met with the chief of staff of the army and we discussed this concept for 90 minutes. I am due to meet with secretary mccarthy later this month. They been receptive to my ideas and appreciate of the second opinion. I dont want to characterize this as the army has circled its wagons. They are not. General murphy, i sent a copy of the draft pa