By Cheryl Pellerin
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2014 – The threat of sequestration and
an era that has produced simultaneous global crises is challenging future
military readiness and may prompt Defense Department leaders to rethink core
strategies going forward, senior DoD civilian and military officials said
yesterday.
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael G.
Vickers and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. participated in
a panel discussion at the 2014 Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley,
California.
The audience included defense community leaders and key
stakeholders, including members of Congress, DoD officials and military
leaders, and defense industry representatives.
Vickers, who first entered public service as a special
forces soldier in 1973, said he and some of his senior colleagues have agreed
that they’ve never seen such a number of diverse defense and intelligence
challenges facing the country.
Multiple Challenges
“A lot of [the challenges] are likely to be enduring,” he
noted, citing “the rise of China, a resurgent Russia, North Korea and Iran,
widening instability across the Middle East and North Africa, and the Syrian
civil war and centered on that the expansion of the global jihad, and then of
course cyber.”
Vickers added, “It is very important that we not just adapt
but really rethink some of our core strategies going forward.”
The national security challenges are not only numerous but
many are unconventional, he said.
Russia is using unconventional and indirect approaches to
achieve its aims, Vickers said. Some, like cyber, also are novel, and there are
unconventional global strategies as well.
Dunford said the number of crises around the world makes it
difficult to resource the current defense strategy.
But, he said, “It’s all the more important in times like
this to have a strategy, otherwise you end up, figuratively speaking, reacting
to bright flashing objects.”
What should be clear to everyone, he added, is that the U.S.
military can't address simultaneous crises all over the world by itself.
Partners with Common Interests
It’s important to find partners that have common interests
and for partners to craft collective responses to some of the current
challenges, Dunford said, adding that multiple crises “make it imperative for
us to grow our alliances and ensure that we can approach [challenges]
regionally with very strong partners.”
Partners are especially important, he added, as troops draw
down in nearly every service.
The Marine Corps had 200,000 Marines a couple of years ago,
the general said, as a result of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. After a
thorough analysis by the Force Structure Review Group of potential future
security environments and requirements that the combatant commanders would
likely have for Marines, it was determined that 186,000 Marines would be able
to do what the nation needed them to do.
In the current fiscal environment, the general said, “we'll
… be about 184,000 [Marines] by the end of this year and the budget calls for
us to be at 182,000. So there's a little bit of a difference between what we
thought was the optimal force and the force that we're headed for.”
Meeting the Requirements
“We can manage that risk and today we are meeting the
combatant commanders' requirements, and we can meet the requirements of the
[defense] strategy with the force that we're currently on a path to have in
2016,” Dunford said.
The general said the Marine Corps and probably every other
military service branch is paying for today’s readiness by assuming some risk
in modernization and infrastructure, eating away at future readiness.
“I'm comfortable with the risk we have with today's
readiness,” he said. “I'm not comfortable with the path we're on for tomorrow's
readiness, and quite frankly if sequestration were to occur that would make it
difficult not only to meet the requirements for tomorrow's readiness, it would
make it difficult to meet today's requirements.”
Dunford said 50 percent of units that are at home station
today are at a degraded state of readiness, due to equipment shortfalls or
personnel shortfalls, because of the current high operational tempo.
The problem with that, he said, is “the units at home
station are exactly the units that will [be called on to] respond to the
unexpected. They'll be the units that will respond to a major contingency, and
those units are not at the level of readiness that we want them to be today.”
Unexpected Crises
Dunford explained, “We didn't expect to have a
special-purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force for crisis response in the Centcom
area in addition to a Marine Expeditionary Unit” in response to the threat from
the terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, “and we didn't
expect to have a special Marine Air Ground Task Force crisis response in
Africa.”
Those added requirements inhibited the Marine Corps’ ability
to address the readiness challenges they have at home, the general said.
For Vickers the scenario is familiar.
The challenges facing the intelligence community are very
similar to those facing the Defense Department, he said, “and that is we
prioritize current operations. But if these [austere] budget levels are
sustained, our future readiness will be impacted principally through
modernization.”
Changing Security Environment
In the rapidly changing security environment, Vickers said,
“even today some of the decisions we thought we could rationally make a year or
two ago about rebalancing our portfolio a little bit have been called into
question.”
One such area, particularly because of the ISIL fight in
Iraq and Syria, he said, is intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or
ISR.
“There is just not enough of that capacity to go around
right now,” he said, adding that primary reconnaissance aircraft in demand
include the Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles.
“We're making due,” he added, “but we're taking more risk in
some areas. The demand now in Iraq and Syria is very high and we have
challenges in Yemen and Libya and elsewhere, so we're working hard to fix this
but it's not something you can get out of right away.”
Without going into specific shortfalls, the intelligence
official said, “we're concluding that we will need more [drones] going forward
than we might have thought a year ago if we hadn't had Iraq-Syria and this
situation.”
Geopolitical, Security Landscape
Another intelligence tool that Vickers finds useful in the
changing geopolitical and security landscape is human intelligence, known as
HUMINT, being cultivated in DoD as part of the Defense Clandestine Service.
The DCS, announced in 2012 as part of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, combined several defense HUMINT, intelligence and
counterterrorism activities into a more focused DoD capability.
Vickers said he is a proponent of the DCS because it
strengthens the department’s human intelligence capabilities “particularly for
this changing landscape.”
A Diverse Set of Issues
He explained, “We’d developed very good HUMINT capabilities
from the two wars we've been in, but in terms of the global problems we face
now and the very diverse set of problems -- from high-end weapon systems to
terrorists -- we needed to reform our capabilities.”
The DCS isn’t something new, he added, it takes what the
department had and adapts it to the changing environment in an essentially
resource neutral way.
“It’s been underway for a couple of years and it's going to
take some years to get it where we want to go. A key principle is integration
with our other intelligence capabilities,” Vickers said.
Emphasis on Partnerships
The changing geopolitical and security environment also
calls for a modified take on partnerships.
In general, Vickers said, “the challenges we face are as
much from nonstate actors as from states. It's a combination if you look across
the globe. And in countering some of these challenges, irregular forces or
paramilitary forces are often very important.”
A successful program in Afghanistan involved the Afghan
local police, who extended a lot of government-of-Afghanistan reach into rural
areas, he added, and such engagement also is important elsewhere.
“In Syria we need friends. We need to strengthen the
moderate opposition there, he said, adding that procedures are used to
carefully vet people the department works with.
More Risk
Paramilitary business involves a little more risk than
governments usually do, Vickers said.
“But as you saw in Iraq,” he said, “even spending a lot of
money and training government forces, stuff can still fall into the wrong
hands.”
None of this is without risk, he added, “but the question
is, what's the alternative?”
In Syria the option available to the United States to fight
there is the moderate opposition so the United States has to strengthen it,
Vickers said.
“The Kurdish Peshmerga, they're a good force, they need some
strengthening. In societies like Yemen, or we talked about Afghanistan where
tribal dynamics are very important. That's what a lot of the competition is
about,” Vickers said. “You win depending on how you do with that fight.”
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