All right, i think well get started here. Thank you so much for joining us here at the heritage foundation, release of a major paper, which will be the focus. I was told we dont necessarily have to talk about silencing cell phones. We have a robust online audience, and, you know distractions, we want to minimize that here. Thank you for joining us here. Were going 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, the one released one on 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, how the world is changing, and some recommendations for what the army needs to be and the path it needs to go down to get to where it needs to be with a look out to about the 2030 year time frame. Well follow up with a paper on the air force, which i think is coming out next month, and then well wrap up by the end of the year with a 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 inform deliberations in congress and this one really 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 Mattis on increasing lethality across the force and a real focus on getting back to an age of peer competitor fights with major opponents such as russia and china, how do you do things other than irregular warfare, which is what weve been immersed in for the last 20 years. This addresses those sorts of challenges. Participating in the discussion today will be the author, tom spoehr. He has served in the army for 36 years and retired in 2016 as a lieutenant general, its been a blessing having him here leading our defense efforts. Moderating the discussion will be miss jen judson. Shes the land warfare reporter for defense news and has covered defense matters in the d. C. Area for about eight years or so. Previously a reporter at politico pro defense and inside defense, a recipient of the National Press clubs best analytical reporting award in 2014. And named the defense media awards best young defense journalist in 2018. I dont know how long you get to carry young as a title. Ive aged out already. Is that it . Okay. Without further ado were going to turn to a great discussion and open it up for q a later. When we get to that point, identify yourself and who youre with so our online audience knows whos speaking as well. Try to focus on questions, not personal statements. Without further ado, take it away. Thank you to everyone in the audience for being here and for those also watching online and tom, thank you for all your hard work with this report. Since its been released its really triggered a decent amount of discussion and debate in the army community, which is obviously a good thing. So well dive deeper into those issues in our conversation. But, you know, its my feeling that its a good time to be making suggestions to the army. Since theyre in the process of developing the multido Main Operations concept, relooking at force structure and theyre heading down an ambitious path. Just to kick things off, tom, if you could talk about the purpose of the report, why you decided to write this report and how you went about researching and talk about how your background applies to what you were doing in the report. Yeah, thank you, jen, and thanks, everyone, for being here today and thanks for moderating this discussion. We embarked on this project, we call it the rebuilding americas project or ramp project probably two years ago. We really didnt know what would be happening at the time these papers came out and its really fortuitous as you kind of suggested that the army paper came out now. Theyve just had a theyre in the process of a major change of leadership. Getting a new secretary of the army, secretary mccarthy, has his confirmation hearing next week. The chief of staff changed over. The new chief of staff, general mcconville taking over a couple weeks ago. There 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. Even though it was january, i think, of 2018, in army terms thats like yesterday. People say, hey, why hasnt the army or the department of defense adapted to the new Defense Strategy yet . It is worse than turning an aircraft carrier, you really it takes years to turn an organization like the army. So i think this paper came at a good time for us. The bipartisan 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 are we going to get through these months . They have the luxury, assuming that congress does what it needs to do, to think about their future in kind of an intellectual way. Which is rare lately in washington, d. C. That you could actually think about these things. Most of our research at heritage is focused on the near term fight. We write a lot about the National Defense authorization act, the f35 fighter. Things that are really kind of on congresss plate. This paper and the two that preceded this are 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. But turns out i didnt know a lot about the army. Ive never really been a futurist in the army. Ive always been consumed on how do we get the current task done . This was a stretch for me. I had to educate myself on the army before i even got started writing this paper because id heard the folklore of, you know, general sullivan and don star, those kinds of things and it just kind of accepted it as a young army officer, this made me go back and actually learn it. That was forward for me. But in the end i liked it. So jumping in, what are some of the areas the army is rebuilding, did you look at briefly and what are some of your conclusions . Thanks, jen. Tried to look at all of it. You know, i because i spent a lot of time in the pentagon, and particularly 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 Management of secs and general officers. I looked at the concept. I will admit im not a conceptual kind of person so i did my best. I reached out to a lot of people, including some in this room, for their thoughts. And so i had to go to interviews because, you know, i dont live in a conceptual world. Theres a whole group thats almost a career field in the army that thinks about concepts. I was never 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 pretty early on was that the army was on the right path and that a wholesale revision of the armys modernization plans was not needed, that there were course corrections. I saw some areas where the tapestry, if you will, was kind of fraying around the edges and that they could tighten up their story and they could tighten up their justifications for things. Some places where i could not frankly understand why they were pursuing a particular Modernization Program to the degree they were, long range strategic cannons falls in that category. And, again, 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 is the requirements for the optionally manned fighting vehicle. I did my best to understand them only to find out near the end that theyre classified fouo. I couldnt get them. I couldnt really fully explore why the army was pursuing that vehicle to the degree it was. I looked at manpower, how big should the army be, how quickly should they grow their force . And i looked at organizations. What kind of organizations do they have now and what should they grow in the future and found some areas where i think they should develop some new organizations. Diving a little bit more into the modernization side, and you seem to think theyre on track. But, you know, this is obviously a complicated thing and theyre moving very quickly. So there is probably a lot of room for error at this point. But it sounds like since its so early on, course corrections can be a good thing, what are future challenges they could be facing in modernization plans. Lots of challenges. One of the first things i figured out is i looked at the history of modernization, luck plays a big underappreciated factor. You can have the best thought out conceived plan. And if the world environment changes, if your army needs to go do something, fight a fight, youre not going to be able to modernize to the degree you may be able to salvage some aspect of your Modernization Program but youre not not going to be able to carry out the plan you envisioned. Looking back you can see that that didnt occur in some cases. The army kept driving on, thinking that this whatever were fighting, thats just going to go away and we can continue with our plans. You see that with fcs. And so the army valiantly tried to keep going down the path with future combat system in the face of fighting two significant counterinsurgency fights in iraq and afghanistan. In the end they won and fcs lost. Thats not the first time its happened but thats the most salient example to me. So luck. 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 keep 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 you cant protect your service and modernize. Its just too hard. So that was something i realized. So i think the armys doing a good job. One of the things that i also was underappreciated to me was the difficulty of facing two threats simultaneously. And so we talk about russia china. We almost its almost like a hyphenated word russiachina. But when you look one level below that, you know, its very different type of threats that they present. China presenting more of a maritime air threat. 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, thats going to become harder and harder as these threats diverge, as china becomes more capable and its going to be hard to manage the duality of threat and maintaining your counterinsurgency capabilities. You talk a lot about successes and failures in the past and you mention fcs. Can you dive a little bit deeper in terms of the successes and failures that weve seen in the past, and do you think the army is applying Lessons Learned from those . Yes. So ill talk about some of the i dont know if you want to call them failures. Its so pejorative. I start out in the paper talking about the pan tommic division, which reaction to president eisenhowers decision to focus on Nuclear Weapons and how the army was almost in danger of becoming irrelevant so the chief of staff was persuaded to change his entire force to focus on nuclear warfare. He created this thing called the pentommic division that had essentially five large battle groups. The idea was so big a division and so dispersed it could survive Nuclear Attack and 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 to be. And it was an it was an example of where they rushed into a design, started designing the force before they even had the concept figured out. Fast forward to depew and tradeoc, had good ideas how to change the army. Concept called active defense, in response to a huge soviet army threat in central europe. How do i how do we actually come up with a concept to fight this . He came up with an idea, brilliant man of fighting an active defense. And it postulated falling back to various positions of strength, trading the enemy. The dilemma was he didnt share this concept widely with the army so it was kind of a small little staff group down in training in doctrine headquarters. When he finally uncorked this bottle of wine, if you will, it didnt meet with acceptance through the army. Whether you like it or not acceptance in the army is really a critical aspect of whether a concept is going to succeed or not. He kept it kind of close hold, brought it out and the army won because he hadnt shared, two, because it had this countercultural preference for the defense and 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 was still i could sense that the moment i came into the army how we had this concept that nobody really bought into. In terms of successes, those are more fun to talk about and so ill talk about the striker brigade combat team, conceived s as the interim force. It was fielded by the army in record amounts of time, less than five years from the idea that we want an interim force, that we had striker brigade combat teams, maneuvering in the area of canakandahar rather iraq, im sorry. Very quickly got that concept out and it was just an example of how when you set your mind to something and you have cohesive leadership and focus on it it really can come together. Another example would be task force modularity. In the middle of the iraq afghanistan fights when the army was presented with a requirement for more brigade combat teams than it had it modularized its brigades and created more of them, they were selfsustaining, had their own artillery organic, all the capabilities it would need organic to that brigade and that happened in almost 18 to 20 months. It was really a quick effort. The classic example most Army Officers will point to is Airland Battle conceived by don starry, and codified in the 1982 edition of 1005 operations where he really followed all the precepts of successfully changing the army. He was intellectually prepared. He had a great team. He did the homework. He took it everywhere. Talked to everybody about it. And in the end it was a concept that served the army well for over ten years. I know one of the more controversial parts of your paper as regarding reordering prioritizations, you know, long range precision fires you said to keep at the top but you suggested bumping next generation combat vehicle down to the bottom and then 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 . Yeah, thanks, jen. Youre right, the moment my paper was published, my inbox lit up, my email inbox lit up mine did too. The number of people interested in my reordering of the modernization priorities. And 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 of the successful execution of multidoMain Operations in the year 2030 . Looking forward, reading the concept, accepting it for what 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 have a wonderful fleet of soldier lethality weapons, in my view we would be a 6 then. Were already where we need to be to execute multidoMain Operations in the area of soldier lethality. I took that very simple matrix and applied it to the six modernization areas. And in multidoMain Operations, long range precision fires are critical. And were in very poor shape today. So long range precision fires came out right at the top. And then if youre going to employ any of these capabilities, especially in multidoMain Operations, the network is key. I mean, multidoMain Operations talked about the rapid and continuous integration at war fighting domains. If you dont have the network to do that you cant do multidoMain Operations. That came out on number two. And then similarly i just went down the line. So air and Missile Defense we are in pretty poor shape right today and thats going to be a big thing in multidoMain Operations. It came out number three. And just on down the line. To make the list of the six modernization priorities already means your thing is important. So the fact that, in my ranking future vertical lift came out number six, does not mean future vertical lift is not important because thats 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 some of my friends. So it was useful for me. And 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 or refresh them, whatever they do, that they also release their rationale for how they came up with this listing so that i can say, oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. I understand how soldier lethality came out to be number six or Something Like that. I could not track the pedigree in the multidomain concept of their modernization priorities. I think thats an important point, and something i asked fi defense News Conference a few days ago of general murray,