Lynn: U.S. Must Prepare for Future Warfare Trends

By Donna Miles

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 8, 2011 – The Pentagon must factor in major trends likely to shape the national security environment, including many that defy traditional military planning, Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III said here today.

The Defense Department must play a part in federal deficit-reduction efforts, Lynn told the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ 2011 Global Security Forum.

“Since 9/11, we have had the ability to address new defense challenges with increased resources,” he said. “We will not have that luxury for the foreseeable future.”

The challenge, he added, is to manage the coming budget reductions wisely and responsibly, and apply resources so they can best meet future warfare trends.

Lynn cited the revolutionary changes that occurred during the last half-century alone, exemplified through the life of Frank Buckles, the last surviving U.S. World War I veteran, who died in February. Buckles saw the horrors of trench warfare during World War I, was rescued as a World War II prisoner of war just as the design for an atomic bomb was finalized, and lived to have his own Facebook page before he died at age 110.

The three revolutions that Buckles’ life encompassed -- industrial, atomic and information -- “brought an avalanche of military technologies and introduced whole new dimensions to war,” Lynn said. “The issue for us as we consider what capabilities and programs to protect in a defense drawdown is what course future technologies will take.”

Lynn identified three strategic trends he said are likely to shape the future U.S. national security environment: increasing access to lethality across the threat spectrum, longer-duration warfare, and the growing prevalence of asymmetric threats.

“They are each, in different ways, the result of our entry into a new era of war, one driven primarily by the overlay of the information age atop the industrial and atomic revolutions,” he said. “They can and they must inform our defense planning. What we need to do at this juncture, in this fiscal environment, is to take the long view about what strategic trends are important.”

Gone, Lynn said, are the days when the most economically developed counties possessed the most-lethal military power, and others had second-rate capabilities or little or no access to highly lethal technologies.

“Today, this linear relationship between economic and military power no longer holds,” he said. “Terrorist groups with few resources can mount devastating attacks. Insurgents can defeat our most advanced armor with fertilizer bombs. Rogue states seek nuclear weapons. Some criminal organizations even possess world-class cyber capabilities.”

This change has increased the risks the United States faces and broadens the range of threats it must be prepared to confront, he said.

“Defense planning must reflect this development,” Lynn said, ensuring the military has the capabilities to confront both high- and low-end threats.

“We have decisions about how to size our forces for these disparate contingencies, but we must equip for both,” he said. “In other words, we will need both fifth-generation fighters and counter-[improvised explosive device] technology.”

Current reality also challenges the long-held assumption that kinetic engagements would be relatively short, Lynn said. Noting that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted longer than the U.S. participation in World War I and World War II combined, he said military planners must be prepared to sustain long-term commitments for a range of plausible conflicts. Their planning, he added, must account for enough force structure to provide adequate troop dwell time between deployments.

“This is likely to have important implications for how we size, structure and utilize our reserve force components,” he said. “We need the ability to scale-up force structure for longer conflicts. The long-term costs of extended conflicts must be considered in our strategic calculus.”

Another trend Lynn said must be taken into account in posturing the military for the future is the increasing prevalence of asymmetric threats.

Recognizing that they can’t go up against the United States militarily, adversaries use asymmetric approaches that Lynn said “target our weaknesses and undercut our advantages.”

As a result, “insurgents such as the Taliban and al-Qaida in Iraq avoid engaging our military in direct force-on-force engagements,” he said. “Instead, they use IEDs and assassination as their weapons, and they hope to use the longer duration of war to wait us out.”

Traditional powers also seek asymmetric capabilities, increasingly turning to area-denial and anti-access tactics through the proliferation of precision-strike weapons, he said.

Sophisticated precision-strike technologies, once exclusive to the United States and its allies, will be available to more nations in the next 10 to 20 years, Lynn said. This will have a cumulative effect he said will challenge U.S. power-projection to distant parts of the globe.

“To address these anti-access tactics and defeat area-denial strategies, we need to develop a range of capabilities, particularly missile defense and long-range strike,” Lynn said. He cited major investments being made in a long-range strike system that will enable the United States to penetrate defenses and deliver munitions worldwide.

Lynn also cited the potential use of asymmetric tactics in cyberspace -- a development he said that would threaten the Internet technology that increasingly underpins U.S. military and economic strength.

The cyber threat is maturing, Lynn said. Not only are its effects escalating, but more capabilities are being developed within terrorist groups which are hard to deter because they typically have few assets to strike back against.

“If a terrorist group gains a disruptive and destructive capability, we have to assume they will strike with little hesitation,” he warned. “So in cyber, we have a window of opportunity to act before the most malicious actors acquire the most destructive technologies. We need to continue moving aggressively to protect our military, government and critical infrastructure networks.”

Looking to the future, Lynn said the challenge is to navigate current fiscal circumstances without disrupting the capabilities of the world’s most effective military force.

“We need to make the right judgments about the nature of our future security environment,” he said.

“We need to invest in the right capabilities and force structure that address the trends in warfare, … and we need to relentlessly adapt our technology and our doctrine as threats evolve and mature,” Lynn said. “If we do these things, we will ensure our forces are ready for the future of war.”

World War I Vet Welcomes Celebrity of His Generation

By Lisa Daniel
American Forces Press Service

March 7, 2008 - Frank Woodruff Buckles lived an unassuming life for 105 years. That was until word got out that he was among the last of a generation that his countrymen only recently seemed to embrace. In 2006, Buckles' quiet life on his 330-acre cattle farm outside of Charles Town, W.Va., changed when renowned portrait artist David DeJonge contacted him about being part of a photography exhibit of nine of the known remaining U.S. veterans of World War I.

Pleased to represent those few remaining patriots, Buckles agreed. What followed was close work with DeJonge and more than a year of intense media attention. By the time the exhibit was unveiled at a Pentagon ceremony yesterday -- following meetings with President Bush at the White House and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates -- Buckles was accustomed to daily media interviews.

"It doesn't bother me," Buckles told a crowd of reporters and photographers gathered around him after the Pentagon ceremony. As he had told the audience in the packed auditorium minutes earlier, "I feel honored to be a representative of World War I. As the years went on, I found I was among the last of those who served."

Buckles was a 16-year-old farm boy from Missouri when he fulfilled a dream of becoming a soldier. It was the spring of 1917, and he began seeing the patriotic posters hanging in his local post office encouraging boys to fight "over there."

"I was interested in the Army when I was a boy," Buckles told the reporters in the interview 91 years later. "When I was 12 or 13, I slept on the floor" to prepare for a soldier's life, he said.

"I knew what was going on in the world," said Buckles, who still reads daily from his home library full of military and current events titles.

The young Buckles visited a Marine Corps recruiting office at the Kansas State Fair in Wichita in 1917. "I said that I was 18, but the understanding sergeant said that I was too young. I had to be 21," he wrote in a brief biography offered to reporters.

Determined to serve, Buckles returned to the Marine recruiter and was rejected a second time. He also was rejected by the Navy, he believes, because they were suspicious about his age. He then traveled to Oklahoma City, where he was again rejected by the Navy and Marines. Finally, an Army recruiter took his word that he was 18 -- Buckles told them his small town didn't keep records of birth certificates and none existed -- and he enlisted on Aug. 14, 1917.

Buckles followed a sergeant's advice that serving with an ambulance company was the quickest route to France, where the most fighting was. He was sent to Fort Riley, Kan., for training in trench casualty retrieval and ambulance operations. He deployed in December 1917 from Hoboken, N.J., across the Atlantic with 102 men who made up the 1st Fort Riley Casual Detachment. They were aboard the HMS Carpathia, the vessel famous for rescuing passengers and crew of the Titanic five years earlier.

Buckles spent several weeks as a driver at a hospital near Winchester, England. He was anxious to get to France, even requesting a meeting with his commanding officer, a colonel, to press the issue. "He explained to me that he, too, wanted to go to France, but had to stay where he was ordered," he said.

Finally, Buckles was assigned to escort an officer to France. There, he had various assignments at several locations. After Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918, he was assigned to a prisoner-of-war escort company to return prisoners back to Germany.

In January 1920, Buckles returned to the United States, without injury, on the USS Pocahontas. He was paid $144, including a $60 bonus. He went to business school and built a career in the commercial shipping industry.

In December 1941, Buckles was a corporate executive with American President Lines in Manila when the Japanese invaded the Philippines. He was held at a Japanese prison camp for three and a half years before being rescued by 11th Airborne Division on Feb. 23, 1945. During his internment, he was fed from a single tin cup, which he still has today and is displayed as a backdrop in DeJonge's portrait of him.

Following his release, Buckles married Audrey Mayo, and they settled in San Francisco until 1954, when the couple bought the West Virginia farm, near a Buckles ancestral home. Buckles still lives there today with his daughter and son-in-law. He was widowed in 1999.

In reflecting on his military service, Buckles, who left the Army as a corporal in 1920, said his favorite memories are of driving a motorcycle with a sidecar in England and meeting Gen. John J. Pershing, World War I commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe, upon his return to the United States. Buckles said he was pleased to discover that he and Pershing grew up on farms 40 miles apart in Missouri.

Buckles rejected a media request to offer advice to today's soldiers. "I'm not qualified to tell them anything. They know what to do," he said.

Buckles seemed dismayed at the press attention to his age. Longevity runs in his family and several relatives lived past 100, he said. "I don't feel I'm any older than you," he told the press corps of people mostly less than half his age.

DeJonge told reporters that Buckles' memory is "like a computer." Asked to describe Buckles, DeJonge said, "He has an incredibly optimistic outlook on life."

World War I Vet

By Lisa Daniel
American Forces Press Service

March 6, 2008 - Defense Department officials honored one of the world's last living World War I veterans in a ceremony at the Pentagon today. "I feel honored to be here as a representative of the veterans of WWI and I thank you," said Frank Woodruff Buckles, 107, who wore multiple service medals and remained in a wheelchair. He received a standing ovation from the mostly military audience.

Buckles, who lives near Charles Town, W.Va., and his family were special guests during the ceremony, in which officials unveiled photographer David DeJonge's World War I Veterans Exhibit. Dfense officials praised the exhibit for putting faces on a war that is largely forgotten and for which its generation is slipping away. DeJonge donated the exhibit, a collection of portraits of nine WWI veterans, for permanent display in the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates thanked Buckles, an Army ambulance driver in France and Britain, and John F. Babcock, a veteran of the U.S. and Canadian armies, who now lives in Spokane, Wash., and could not attend the ceremony. Buckles and Babcock are the last known living WWI soldiers who fought for the United States.

"Whoever views this display will, I am sure, feel a connection to Mr. Buckles and his comrades-in-arms," Gates said. "We will always be grateful for what they did for their country 90 years ago."

The portraits show each of the eight men and one woman, surrounded by military medals, books and newspapers of the day. Some are framed by flags and bear bright smiles. Others appear deep in thought. All evoke the patriotism of their service. Seven of the nine have died in the past year, said DeJonge, an independent photographer who began the project in 2006 in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"History is fading away before the very eyes of America," DeJonge said in an emotional speech. Asked after the ceremony why he chose veterans for the theme of his photography, DeJonge said, "It is imperative to American history. We want our leaders here at the Pentagon...to recognize that the decisions they make here impact people for 90 years or more."

The project is important because "the First World War is not well understood or remembered in the United States," Gates said. "There is no big memorial on the National Mall. Hollywood has not turned its gaze in this direction for decades. Yet few events have so markedly shaped the world we live in as the epic blood struggle known as The Great War."

U.S. involvement in WWI was short in time, long on sacrifice. From the first U.S. Navy ship that was sank in early 1917 until the armistice was signed Nov. 11, 1918, the United States incurred more than 116,000 deaths – more than Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined, Gates noted.

Just as some have marked the 21st Century as having began with the terrorism of Sept. 11, 2001, the 20th Century "began" with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on June 28, 1914, Gates said. The war that began with a regional fight for Balkan independence, left the world a redrawn map of Europe and the Middle East, including the demarcation of Iraq. "From Baghdad to Belgrade, the places that mattered then are in the front of our consciousness today."

Army Secretary Pete Geren compared the sacrifices of WWI veterans to those serving now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Today, young men and women from our generation, the best of this generation, too, are joined in a war in a far-off land that will shape their future and the world's future for decades to come," Geren said. "As with Frank Buckles' war, someday this war will end and [they] will come home with their lives and the world forever changed." The portraits "put a human face on a faceless war," Geren said. "We are reminded and convicted of the personal debt each of us owes to those who have secured the blessings of our liberties."