[House Hearing, 113 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 113-4]
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PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE
NATIONAL SECURITY ENVIRONMENT:
TECHNOLOGICAL, GEOPOLITICAL,
AND ECONOMIC TRENDS AFFECTING
THE DEFENSE STRATEGIC GUIDANCE
__________
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED THIRTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD
FEBRUARY 13, 2013
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20402-0001
SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas, Chairman
JEFF MILLER, Florida JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
JOHN KLINE, Minnesota SUSAN A. DAVIS, California
BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania HENRY C. ``HANK'' JOHNSON, Jr.,
RICHARD B. NUGENT, Florida Georgia
TRENT FRANKS, Arizona ANDRE CARSON, Indiana
DUNCAN HUNTER, California DANIEL B. MAFFEI, New York
CHRISTOPHER P. GIBSON, New York DEREK KILMER, Washington
VICKY HARTZLER, Missouri JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas
JOSEPH J. HECK, Nevada SCOTT H. PETERS, California
Kevin Gates, Professional Staff Member
Tim McClees, Professional Staff Member
Julie Herbert, Staff Assistant
C O N T E N T S
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CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2013
Page
Hearing:
Wednesday, February 13, 2013, Perspectives on the Future National
Security Environment: Technological, Geopolitical, and Economic
Trends Affecting the Defense Strategic Guidance................ 1
Appendix:
Wednesday, February 13, 2013..................................... 37
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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2013
PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE NATIONAL SECURITY ENVIRONMENT:
TECHNOLOGICAL, GEOPOLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC TRENDS AFFECTING THE DEFENSE
STRATEGIC GUIDANCE
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Langevin, Hon. James R., a Representative from Rhode Island,
Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats
and Capabilities............................................... 9
Thornberry, Hon. Mac, a Representative from Texas, Chairman,
Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities 1
WITNESSES
Berteau, David J., Senior Vice President and Director,
International Security Program, Center for Strategic and
International Studies.......................................... 7
Hoffman, Francis G., Senior Research Fellow, Institute for
National Strategic Studies, National Defense University........ 2
Lewellyn, Dr. Mark T., Director, National Security Analysis
Department, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory 5
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Berteau, David J............................................. 73
Hoffman, Francis G........................................... 41
Lewellyn, Dr. Mark T......................................... 58
Documents Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:
Mr. Nugent................................................... 91
Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:
Mr. Franks................................................... 95
PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE NATIONAL SECURITY ENVIRONMENT:
TECHNOLOGICAL, GEOPOLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC TRENDS AFFECTING THE DEFENSE
STRATEGIC GUIDANCE
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House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and
Capabilities,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, February 13, 2013.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:05 p.m., in
room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Mac Thornberry
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MAC THORNBERRY, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
TEXAS, CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, EMERGING THREATS
AND CAPABILITIES
Mr. Thornberry. The hearing will come to order. I think Mr.
Langevin is on his way, but we have been asked to go ahead and
get started. So let me just take a moment to welcome our
members, witnesses, and guests to the first hearing of the
113th Congress for the newly renamed Subcommittee on
Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities. I think this
added portion of our responsibilities dealing with military
intelligence oversight is a perfect fit with this
subcommittee's charge to look ahead at national security
challenges facing our Nation in the future.
And I am particularly pleased, and I can say this since he
is not here, that I have the opportunity to continue to work
with Mr. Langevin. Both of us being on the Intelligence
Committee as well as this committee I think is a real asset to
fulfilling those new responsibilities.
Today we start our hearings with a broad look at global
trends that may affect our national security. Recently the
National Intelligence Council released publicly its latest
installment of their Global Trends publication, which received
a fair amount of attention in the press, and it seems to me
that our witnesses today have valuable but also varied
perspectives to help stimulate our thinking about the
challenges that our country faces in the future. And again,
that is exactly what this subcommittee has been asked to look
at.
Unless the gentleman from Georgia would like to make an
opening statement, I can reserve until Mr. Langevin comes and
let him do it when he arrives. It is up to you all.
Mr. Johnson. I would like the opportunity, but I think it
is best to wait for Mr. Langevin.
Mr. Thornberry. Okay. I will let him make whatever
statement he wants to and then his questions.
So anyway, again, thank you all very much for being here.
Let me now turn to our witnesses. They include Mr. Frank
Hoffman, senior research fellow at National Defense University;
Dr. Mark Lewellyn, director, National Security Analysis
Division at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory; and Mr. David Berteau, senior vice president,
director of the International Security Program for CSIS, Center
for Strategic and International Studies.
Again, thank you all for being here. Without objection,
your full statement, written statements will be made part of
the record, and at this time we would be delighted for you to
summarize or offer such other comments as you would like.
Mr. Hoffman.
STATEMENT OF FRANCIS G. HOFFMAN, SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW,
INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES, NATIONAL DEFENSE
UNIVERSITY
Mr. Hoffman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and other members. It
is great to be here today, an honor to appear for you, this
subcommittee, once again. It has been a long time. I am also
very honored to be here with two very prominent experts who are
longstanding old friends of mine.
I would like to offer a much broader statement than my
written statement, which was reflective of my previous work and
keeping with where I think you want to go today with this
particular committee. So I would like to talk about broader
trends beyond the current defense guidance.
There is a pernicious concept floating around Washington,
D.C., right now that the tides of war are receding and that the
United States can retrench without risk. There is what I call a
new peace theory floating around town, reflected in prominent
journals and think tanks here in town. Recently one commentator
from a think tank here in Washington said that, ``There is no
single causal factor at work, but all point in one direction.
We are nearing a point in history when it is possible to say
that war as we know it has disappeared.''
That is a bold and very dangerous statement and one I do
not agree with. Great progress has been made in the last
decade, but the notion of a dramatic change in human nature or
a significant shift outweigh 2,000 years of recorded history is
tenuous at best. I have spent 35 years in the Department of
Defense, most of my career looking forward, casting headlights
out with some distance to gain some foresight about the future,
and I see things through a much darker lens than that. I think
the new peace theory crowd is confusing correlation of data
with causation.
Now, there are five reasons to be satisfied today about our
current security situation if one is just looking backwards
over the last 10 years. These five include our current status
as a world superpower, applying our stability and leadership to
the world. There is a consensus on a Western model based upon
rule of law, economic prosperity on a capitalistic model and a
representative government. That also includes globalization's
shared and equal economic progress.
Since 1991 we have enjoyed a lack of major power
competition. We have had extensive peacekeeping support from
the international community, to include the UN [United
Nations], that has been very helpful. And, fifth, there is a
growth and a continued contribution from the conflict
resolution community, the IOs [international organizations],
the PVOs [private volunteer organizations] and the NGOs
[nongovernmental organizations], that has been very useful. And
these five conditions clearly cause positive assessments
looking back over the last 10 years.
But the Emerging Threats Subcommittee, and this committee
has a reputation for not driving by a rearview mirror, you are
required to look forward, as some of us are in the Pentagon,
and there is a number of reasons looking at things from a
future tense that should make people have some pause. And the
first one is, most significant I think for you and for this
Congress, is the perceived hegemonic retrenchment of the United
States due to some perceived decline in our capabilities or
interest in sustaining our position in the world.
The second reason is the rise of emerging powers. History
suggests some caution when new emergent, non-status-quo powers
arise and create disequilibrium by seeking to restore either
their previous status or some perceived slights. I won't have
to mention which state I am referring to.
The third reason is continued or reduced international
support. I suspect that over the next decade we are going to
see a degree of peace support fatigue or simply a lack of
domestic support for many allies and other agencies that have
been very useful in allying with us and keeping instability
down.
The fourth reason is, and I am someone who is spending a
lot of time in Europe these days working on my education, but
there is a lot of discussion about the decay or the dissolution
of important alliances to us and important alliance partners. I
am particularly concerned about NATO's [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization] self-disarmament. It is a group of states that
has been allied with us for a long period of time to great
effect, but they are going to be older, poorer, and less
inclined to work with us in the future, and that should be a
pause for concern.
My fifth source of concern is proxy wars. These can be very
catalytic in terms of conflicts. They are not intended to, but
they can produce a major war out of what is supposed to be a
smaller conflict. And there is new forms of conflict which this
committee is very, very aware of in the cyber world in which
attribution of the attacker is very hard to identify, and that
can create new forms of conflict and also then catalytically
lead to a more conventional kind of conflict if we perceive the
attack to have been directed and attributable.
Number six, resource conflicts. I think energy, water,
food, rare materials, most of the time there is a body of
evidence that suggests these do not lead to conflicts, but they
certainly can create the tinder box for conflicts. I see
actions in the South China Sea by China and its efforts to
secure energy resources and raw earth assets as something to be
taken seriously in this regard.
There is an issue of demographic decline or demographic
change in many states around the world. We used to worry about
youth bulges, having very high numbers of young people in
states in Africa and Asia that were unemployed or in the Middle
East that might lead to destabilizing things. I think we now
instead of youth bulges also have to worry about graying bulges
in some areas, particularly in Southern Europe, where there are
large numbers of people who are going to be pensionless,
underemployed or unemployed for long periods of time. That will
produce more disillusionment and more angry people than I think
we have seen in the past that will lead to political
instability and also allies who are more insular in their
orientation rather than in exporting security.
Eighth is the most obvious, is divided religions and
religious extremism. The continued sacred rage coming from
Islam is going to make internal fights. I think the Arab Spring
has a lot of hope in it, but it is also going to produce some
illiberal democracies, and we will see some other forms of
government emerge out of that. And I am particularly concerned,
of course, about Egypt, among other areas. We are creating a
lot of fertile ground for Al Qaeda and its affiliated movements
to take root in some places, and we are not going to be happy
with the results.
Number nine, disintegration of socio-economic stability.
Again, I am particularly concerned about southern Europe and
northern Africa, there is a great deal of distress, dissent,
and discord there from economic instability. We need to
consider the conditions in which the new normal in southern
Europe where unemployment, the new norm might be peaking out
and stabilizing at 25 percent, is not going to be allies and
states that are going to be exporting security for us or
working with us in other places.
And finally, my last, my 10th point is the democratization
of means of conflict. Again, the diffusion of technology in
lethal and nonlethal forms is something that is creating not--I
don't go as far as Thomas Friedman with super-empowered
networks or super-powered individuals, but we should think of
super-empowered networks with means of mass disruption that can
hit us in many, many different ways.
So for those reasons, those 10 conclusions make my lens
look a little bit darker than some of the other people in the
community here in Washington, D.C.
Plato had it right. Only the dead have seen the end of war.
We may not face another bloody century like the last, which was
pretty bad, but the world remains a very dangerous place, and I
know General Dempsey has stressed to you in the past. Trends
suggest that the next decade is not going to be as placid as
the last 10 or 20 were, and many of us don't think that the
last decade was that great.
There are folks whose real agenda is cutting defense, not
contributing to our security, and you need to consider that in
looking at their evidence. We have to be prepared for a much
more broadening array of actors and challenges rather than one
singular one that is very, very deep and of great challenge to
us. We have to be ready for a broad spectrum of conflicts that
range from purely irregular and terrorist at one end to perhaps
rising powers with conventional capabilities at the other, and
then all the messy in the middle that my statement talked
about, the converging of low-end threats with high-end
capabilities, producing hybrid threats.
This committee's charge is at the cusp at what is emerging
in the national security arena and what is going to no doubt I
think generate the greatest threats and the risk to our
prosperity and security in the next decade. It is a sobering
responsibility. I am glad to be able to help you with that to
the greatest degree I can. Thank you for the opportunity to
discuss these challenges.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hoffman can be found in the
Appendix on page 41.]
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you.
Dr. Lewellyn.
STATEMENT OF DR. MARK T. LEWELLYN, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY
ANALYSIS DEPARTMENT, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS
LABORATORY
Dr. Lewellyn. Congressman, I look forward to provide my
views that will shape the national security environment looking
out to 2030 and how that might affect the path set by the 2012
defense strategic guidance. The opinions stated are my own.
Mr. Thornberry. Excuse me, Dr. Lewellyn, would you pull the
mike a little closer or something, we are having----
Dr. Lewellyn. Good, sorry.
Mr. Thornberry. Oh, that is much better. Thank you.
Dr. Lewellyn. Thank you.
So I was saying I look forward to giving you my opinion on
how the path set by the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance will
affect things. The opinions I state are my own and do not
necessarily reflect those of the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory or its sponsors.
Will this strategy get the military capability we need in
the near term, especially in the context of declining funding
for defense? The strategy attempts to be comprehensive.
However, there are some areas where we may be falling short,
and we must think through an integrated response to address
them.
The strategy identifies a range of missions that U.S.
forces need to address with the resources that are available
and the threat environment in which the missions must be
executed. Much of our technical effort focuses on improving the
capabilities of the sensor, weapon, communications, cyber, and
space systems that will be used to address the emerging
threats. Our work indicates there are gaps in the capabilities
we need to defeat emerging threats identified in the strategy,
particularly the anti-access/area-denial threats posed by Iran
and China.
Kinetic weapons we are developing to counter threats
launched against our forces, while capable, should be
supplemented by nonkinetic systems to ensure we can deal
effectively with large coordinated attacks. Nonkinetic means to
defeat these threats include netted electronic warfare systems,
integrated cyber-attack capability, lasers and other directed
energy systems. In addition, we should explore creative uses of
existing weapons to counter threat systems. We must also
continue to explore ways to use electromagnetic weapons with
their promise of large magazines of relative inexpensive
bullets to counter threat kinetic weapons.
Maintaining our access to space is a real issue, and we
must pursue viable backups to counter attacks on our satellite
communications networks close to denied areas and quickly
reconstitute the capability they provide. This includes the
need to identify methods to operate in environments where the
global positioning system, GPS, is denied.
We have an edge in the capability of our submarine force
relative to potential threats, and we must work to maintain it.
The ambiguity posed by the unseen presence of a capable
submarine can be leveraged to our advantage. Exploring ways to
operate unmanned systems autonomously will allow the proven
capability of these systems to be used in new ways.
Finally, we must ensure that our Special Operations Forces
have the technology they need to perform their critical
missions. While we work to improve the ability of our systems
to defeat those of the threat in war, we must also consider how
we can better use these systems to deter potential threats and
win without fighting, much as we did during the Cold War. In
China, the United States has a competitor with a coordinated
strategy for achieving its national objectives without needing
to resort to war. In other words, to win through shaping and
deterrence, as evidenced by its development of anti-access/
area-denial capabilities.
To deter China effectively, the U.S. must employ an
effective countervailing strategy informed by an understanding
of the implications of divergent U.S. and Chinese perspectives.
We must include an understanding of these differing views as we
operate our current forces and as we develop, test, and employ
new capabilities to ensure that the messages we want to send to
China are received as we intend. The message China sent by
demonstrating its ability to shoot down a satellite several
years ago was received clearly by us.
So what does this mean for Congress? You should ensure that
our intelligence collection efforts remain strong and that as a
government we encourage openness and transparency, drawing on
insights gained from social media and other information
technologies. Information is critical, and there is already
evidence that in the cyber world operations may be shifting
beyond deterrence into more direct competition. We must ensure
that our cyber forces are equipped with the appropriate
technologies and rules of engagement to win.
You should support the development of warfighting
capabilities that contribute to deterrence, such as the
aforementioned efforts to supplement our kinetic systems by
developing complementary, nonkinetic means to defeat threats.
These include netted electronic warfare systems, integrated
cyber attack capability, lasers, and other directed energy
systems as well as electromagnetic weapons. In addition, we
need to maintain our edge in submarine warfare, cyber
operations, and special operations capability, and because
communications and intelligence are critical for deterrence, we
must work to maintain our access to space and identify ways to
improve resilience in our space systems.
A vibrant research and development base will be critical to
supporting these efforts, and I want to comment briefly on how
reductions in funding for this base can be made reversible. It
is important for each research and development organization to
identify its core competencies and protect them when funding
reductions occur. More important perhaps for us is to maintain
a robust science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
education program, or STEM program, to ensure a continual
refresh of thinking about defense from the brightest minds of
our next generation. I personally benefited from the National
Defense Education Act when I was in high school back in the
1960s.
Thank you for the opportunity to provide my comments. I am
prepared to address any questions you may have. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Lewellyn can be found in the
Appendix on page 58.]
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you.
Mr. Berteau.
STATEMENT OF DAVID J. BERTEAU, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND
DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY PROGRAM, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC
AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
Mr. Berteau. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mister, as we say it
in south Louisiana, Langevin, which is a more Cajun way of
pronouncing it than they do in Rhode Island, I suspect, members
of the committee. It is a high privilege to be here today, and
I am very grateful to you.
It is also nice to be in this room and to read Article I,
Section 8 and the plaque that sits in front of us as witnesses.
I teach three times a year a graduate class in Congress and
national security policy, and virtually every session of every
class comes back to that one sentence in the Constitution, so
it is a privilege to be sitting here and reminding of that.
It is also a great privilege to be in this room and look at
the men whose pictures are on the walls around us here and
realize the contributions that this committee has made to the
success of national security over my entire lifetime.
I have submitted a written statement, as you have indicated
it is in the record in its entirety. I won't repeat some of the
things that are in there, and I would like to emphasize just a
couple of points so we can get to the questions, if you will.
You spent the whole morning and a good chunk of the
afternoon actually on a lot of the budget and sequestration and
economic-related issues, and I will be happy to get back to
those during the questions if you want, but there are a couple
of key points that I would like to make.
One is in the charts in my statement, and I will refer here
to chart 2, the second chart, is the result of a recent study--
I am sorry, I have got my charts out of order here. It is
actually chart 5. In addition to all the challenges that DOD
[Department of Defense] faces with sequestration, with the
problems of the continuing resolution, with the future impact
of post-sequestration caps from the Budget Control Act, there
is an internal cost growth problem in DOD, and that internal
cost growth is illustrated here on this chart.
We have just completed a project at CSIS [Center for
Strategic and International Studies], and we put our public
briefing out last week. We are going to put a report out later
this month, and I will be glad to provide it to the
subcommittee because I think you will want to take a look at
it, but it basically tracks the internal cost growth of both
military pay and benefits, including health care, and of the
operation and maintenance account, and the degree to which that
cost growth independent of the sequestration or the budget caps
will by the beginning of the next decade essentially drive out
all opportunity for investment costs, for R&D [research and
development], and for procurement. And absent either a dramatic
increase in military spending or a dramatic reduction in force
structure and personnel, unless those costs are brought under
control, they are going to basically squeeze out investment,
and it will be hard to sustain and maintain our edge, if you
will, under those circumstances. Be glad to go into that a
little bit further.
The second point that I would like to make is on figure 7,
contract obligations for R&D. We do at CSIS annual reports on
contract spending across the Federal Government, and we do a
specific report on DOD. You know that this is, we are now in
the middle of our fourth drawdown in the last 60 years, post-
Korea, post-Vietnam, post-Cold War, and today. I hate to call
it post-BCA [Budget Control Act] because that doesn't quite
have the same ring, if you will. But one of the very big
differences between the buildup that we have had over the
previous decade and previous buildups is in R&D spending, and
this probably applies to science and technology across the
board. In previous buildups R&D spending tends to go up faster
than the overall increase in DOD spending, and that creates a
technology reservoir, if you will, from which we can draw as we
are drawing down and invest in periods of decline.
That did not occur in the decade of the aughts, where R&D
spending both as a percent of DOD's budget and as a percent of
total contract dollars actually went down, and that is what
this chart depicts. We were at 15 percent in the late 1990s, we
are down to only 10 percent not of the budget, but of contract
spending, of money spent under contract. Now, this is
unclassified R&D, it does not include classified contracts, but
the trend is the same for the classified contracts as well. I
just can't reflect the data in an unclassified document.
What that says is we have not invested in the future in the
way we typically do during a buildup. That is going to make it
harder during the drawdown. And I think for the S&T [science
and technology] responsibilities of this subcommittee it is
something that will require some particular attention as we go
forward as well.
Let me focus on my last of my comments, if you will, on
what does all this mean, what does it mean for industry, what
does it mean for innovation? Industry itself relies upon the
Defense Department for demand signals. Typically those demand
signals come from the budget and they come from the Future Year
Defense Program. One of the great strengths of the Defense
Department is its ability to do fiscally disciplined long-term
programming and then to use that as the baseline for execution.
Obviously we modify it each year, this committee pays a lot of
attention to that Future Year Defense Program to look at
whether the investments being made today will be sustained over
time.
We haven't had a good fiscally disciplined FYDP [Future
Years Defense Program] in a long time. We have been in two
wars, we have had supplementals and overseas contingency
operations accounts to pay for anything you couldn't fund in
the base budget, and frankly we have lost some of the internal
skills in DOD to do this and some of the processes. It is
critical that those get restored.
Industry does need those just as much as you do because
that is their demand signals. That tells them where to invest,
what kind of skills to hire, what kind of workforce to retain,
what kind of technologies to be developing. Right now they are
pretty much left guessing. One of the most important things
that could be done, obviously there are benefits from dealing
with sequestration and Budget Control Act from an impact on
readiness, but there is also a big benefit from the long-term
investment in industry in helping them where to go.
Similarly with innovation, what we have seen is a historic
shift in the development of technology for national security.
We have relied for 60 or 70 years on new technology developed
for national security, under DOD contract by defense
contractors; DOD gets first dibs at it. That is changing, and
it is changing not only because we are not investing as much as
previous data show, but it is also changing because where
innovation is occurring now is often in the global commercial
market, not in the domestic national security market, and we
need to do a better job of both identifying those kinds of
technology developments, and this is everything from
communications and data management and sensors and data fusion
to nanomaterials and 3D [three dimensional] printing and a
whole host of other technologies that DOD is paying attention
to but is not the driver.
And we also are about to wrap up and will also have ready
later this winter and will be glad to provide to the committee
some recommendations that CSIS is making on how DOD could do a
better job both identifying and ultimately taking advantage of
global commercial technology developments around the world.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I will conclude my remarks and I
will be happy to take your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Berteau can be found in the
Appendix on page 73.]
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you. And I appreciate all the
comments that all three of you made. Lots of food for thought
and interesting points to pursue. But at this point I will
yield for any statement and any questions the distinguished
ranking member would like to make.
STATEMENT OF HON. JAMES R. LANGEVIN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
RHODE ISLAND, RANKING MEMBER, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE,
EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES
Mr. Langevin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I take this
opportunity to welcome our witnesses. I apologize that I had
run late. I was tied up in another meeting, as often happens
around here, but I am looking forward to your testimony and to
getting to the question and answers.
But, Mr. Chairman, since this is our first subcommittee of
the 113th Congress, I will start by saying how much I look
forward to working with you. I enjoyed looking with you in the
last Congress and look forward to working with you in this as
well. And I want to also start by again welcoming our newest
Members to Congress and particularly to the subcommittee. I
look forward to working with these gentlemen and ladies as
well, and look forward also to our strong--their strong
participation and valued input as we do our part in shaping our
Nation's defense strategy.
As this subcommittee is charged with overseeing the
Department's authorities and investments that are primarily
focused on addressing asymmetric threats as well as developing
promising capabilities to address these varied and complex
challenges, I am sure that our first hearing will spur some
thoughts about, among our members, regarding the future
national security environment and how we should best prioritize
our defense resources against the backdrop of fiscal pressures
and other concerns.
So over the past decade we have rightly vested in short-
term deliverable-based acquisitions and related research, and
we will continue to provide near-term capabilities to deter and
defeat our adversaries. However, as we will hear today, we must
appropriately prepare for future challenges. The Department of
Defense, and our interagency and international partners,
confront a broad range of challenges including cyber warfare;
terrorism; weapons of mass destruction; homeland defense;
space; anti-access/area-denial; instability; and humanitarian
operations.
So I look forward to hearing more from our witnesses on how
best to shift our current short-term emphasis, particularly in
innovation, to one that might provide long-term benefits to our
national security.
As many of our past members know, I am always particularly
interested in hearing your thoughts on advancing our cyber
defense strategy and capabilities, which is going to become
increasingly important as we go forward and will be more widely
used and relied upon, as well as the advancements of
potentially game-changing technologies such as directed energy,
autonomous unmanned systems, and electromagnetic rail guns to
name a few, some of which you have already mentioned in your
testimony here today.
So I also see that some of you are affiliated with
universities, and I believe the members of this subcommittee
would benefit from any comments you might have regarding the
health of our innovative pipeline, particularly addressing
science and technology future workforce needs of the
Department.
So with that, I again welcome our witnesses. And Mr.
Chairman, look forward to working with you. Thank you.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank the gentleman. And I said the same
thing, but I got to say it before you got here. So would you
like to go ahead and question the witnesses?
Mr. Langevin. I will yield to you first, Chairman, and then
I will go.
Mr. Thornberry. Well, I was just going to yield to other
members unless you want to.
Mr. Langevin. That is okay, then I will yield.
Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Nugent.
Mr. Nugent. Mr. Chairman, thank you so very much.
And this is my first subcommittee meeting on HASC [House
Armed Services Committee], so I appreciate our panel being
here, and always interesting to hear your take in regards to
where we are intelligence-wise and the other.
But to Mr. Hoffman, and this relates to Pakistan. You know,
India is on track to have an economy, I believe, 16 times that
of Pakistan. And so the question--I have multiple questions,
but one is, how do we expect Pakistan to react to that in the
climate that they are in, and do you think they are going to
promote a broader terrorist activity to try to counter India's
growing power as it relates to financially?
Mr. Hoffman. Sir, I am not an Asian expert or a South Asian
expert, but do have that kind of asset in my office. I can get
you a more specific answer.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix
on page 91.]
Mr. Hoffman. But in general I believe that Pakistan will
continue doing what they have been doing for the last several
years, is a much more severe acceleration of their nuclear
deterrent. The scale in terms of size, population, and economic
clout of India is very daunting to Pakistan, and their idea of
their national narrative is, you know, that they are
overwhelmed, and it gives them a justification to invest in
nuclear materials. They will still also support on their
perimeters the kind of alliances and proxy forces that they
have had in the past, which are largely, you know, terroristic
in nature.
Mr. Nugent. I understand that is not your subject area, but
what is the take in regards to, will Pakistan work with us, do
you think, as relates to trying to move to a more free market
economy which may, in fact, then counter India's strength?
Mr. Hoffman. I think they are trying to. I think, you know,
the ports, the activity in Karachi and the southern half, it
definitely would benefit from economic development, exports and
imports, and that would be an approach to take with them. But I
think that the overwhelming national narrative and the scale of
their relationship with India is still going to lean them
towards retaining something that is the ultimate high ground
for them, nuclear or some other means.
Mr. Nugent. Obviously, I mean, with the Taliban and as it
relates to Afghanistan and where they, you know, where they are
positioned with Pakistan, it is concerning, to say the least,
in regards to where they move forward, particularly as they
move forward with the Taliban.
But to Mr. Berteau, you know, we heard a lot today earlier
in the HASC meeting reference to what is going to happen with
sequestration and obviously with the CR [continuing
resolution]. But how do we prioritize as it relates to
prioritizing and maintaining partnerships around the world? You
know, we train with other organizations, and it sounds like we
are going to be cutting back our training and our ability to
reach out and help.
Mr. Berteau. Mr. Nugent, that question really hits at the
core of I think the impact of both sequestration and the
disconnects between budget requirements and the continuing
resolution, but it extends well beyond fiscal year 2013 as
well.
I would actually start with your Pakistan-India question
because I think one of the lesser understood elements of that
is the economic growth and the potential value and the need for
the U.S. to be both aligning itself with and actually investing
intellectually and sometimes from a capital point of view. One
of the unsung benefits of the way in which we have been
evolving the economic strategy in Afghanistan over the last
couple years is to take advantage of Indian investment in
Afghanistan to bring the Pakistanis into a better economic
relationship, not cross-border, but in a regional sense, and
things like the TAPI pipeline, the Tajikistan-Afghanistan-
Pakistan-India pipeline, goes a long way towards creating some
of that economic integration that is very difficult to do. This
is obviously outside the realm of the Defense Department in
terms of its requirements, but it is clearly part of the
broader geopolitical and geostrategic framework.
When we took a look last year at the pivot to Asia and what
the Pacific would respond, and CSIS did a report, I was co-
director of it, that was submitted to the Congress, we
testified before another subcommittee of this committee last
year, one of the real things we looked at was kind of the lower
end of that spectrum, engagement with countries, using
training, using opportunities in humanitarian assistance and
disaster recovery, using the Pacific Command augmentation teams
from Special Operations Forces, et cetera, to build that
engagement at a low level, but across 30 countries in the
region to create more of a dynamic, and training and exercise
money is a critical piece of that. It is pretty small in the
overall defense budget perspective, but it is critical not to
let that slip away, and yet under sequestration clearly it
will.
The difficulty, and you heard this from Dr. Carter and
General Dempsey and the rest earlier today, is that as it is
being implemented, sequestration does not permit for the
allocation of those priorities. I would submit that they need
that flexibility. One of the ways in which the Congress,
however, can give them that flexibility is with an actual
appropriations bill for the rest of the fiscal year as opposed
to a CR, but even if there is a CR, at least substantial
reprogramming and transfer authority within it. Even so, the
question of what priorities you would apply, which is really
the basis of your issue, remains somewhat unanswered from that
point of view.
Mr. Nugent. Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank you. Thank
you very much.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you.
Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This is a somewhat philosophical discussion we are having
today, and I will get a little philosophical. Heaven and hell,
aspects of human nature, high side, low side, every human being
has it. It is easy to dwell on that low side, which is
fighting, cussing, trying to conquer, control, greed, those
kinds of conditions. There are other conditions of living that
are much higher: Altruism, compassion, mercy, spirit to see
everyone be happy. Some would say that that is a utopian ideal
that will never happen, and I agree that it will never happen,
and it certainly will never happen if we don't work towards it.
And so for the peaceniks and others who see nothing but
peace and happiness, we need that group, and we also need the
group that sees nothing but danger ahead, and both of those
groups need to look at the situation, try to do so through the
same lens, and maybe we can find somewhere in the middle where
we can start making good, rational decisions about defense and
security in our Nation, emerging threats. That means that the
threats are there, and they are always going to be there, but
they change.
And so what kind of changes can we make in our defense
strategy to keep us from having to go to war? And so I think
maybe we could be reaching a point where we are moving away
from the hard power solutions to the soft power solutions. As
people get more educated and as we trade with each other more,
we have less time for fighting. And that doesn't mean we don't
need to be prepared for the fight.
And so I actually think that we should always be willing to
expand our thinking about how to address the threats that we
see emerging, and soft power has to be, although it is not
within the domain of this particular committee, perhaps we
should pay more attention to it, perhaps there is a need for
not income revenue, shifting away from hard power assets such
as nuclear weaponry into things that will be more likely to
happen, like cyber threats, and you know.
So we have got to--I think what our tendency has been to do
is with respect to defense is we plan ahead 20, 30 years, we
build out, but we never do address the fact that the time has
changed and as there are new threats, do we need to continue
doing what we have been doing? Do we need as many personnel? Do
we need that many boots on the ground in light of the threats
that we are likely to face and the way that is most smart to
address those threats?
So I would just challenge my colleagues to look at things
not as they have been but as how we want them to be. If we
don't try to shape the world in a more peaceful way, then it
will never get to that point. So with that I will say that I
very much enjoy service on this committee, on this
subcommittee, I enjoy my services on Armed Services. I think
this is one of the most bipartisan committees in Congress, and
I enjoy serving on it, look forward to future service. Thank
you.
Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Hunter.
Mr. Hunter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, gentlemen, for being here today. First question
is this, Mr. Hoffman, you alluded to this when you talked about
think tank folks, really smart people, Ph.D.s, Secretaries of
Defense of the past, I would say, too, who have said that we
are not going to be in a big air war again, we are not going to
be in any more pitched naval battles, we are never going to
have any peer-to-peer anything anymore, warfare has changed.
I guess my question to you is, where is that school of
thought coming from? And I don't want to be disrespectful of
those previous Secretaries or those super smart Harvard Ph.D.s
that have said this kind of stuff, but how could you be so, in
my opinion, naive and shortsighted that you look back a few
thousand years and think that human nature has really
transformed in the last 50 to where you are not going to have
it anymore? I am just curious, where do you see that coming
from?
Mr. Hoffman. Thank you, Mr. Hunter. A lot of people put a
lot of hope in the better angels of our nature. They aspire to
and seek and want to see us move forward to enjoy the
prosperity that our hard investments in security have created
for ourselves.
There is a very strong statistical case in work by Joshua
Goldstein, Steve Pinker, and others in the literature right now
that suggests that both the number of conflicts and the number
of lethality or casualties in conflict has statistically been
going down for some period of time. There is actually a factual
basis for that. One can quibble, and I have, I am doing
research right now for the chairman on, you know, how good some
of those statistics are, but there is a general trend line. If
you take World War I and World War II out of this thing, war is
not a normal phenomenon. It does not always occur. It creates
these big disequilibriums, and if you can invest smartly and
avoid one, you would be very wise to do so.
The causality for why these lines have been going down, I
believe we, this body, has created with the investments and the
sacrifice that our Armed Forces have created for ourselves over
the last 10 or 20 years. But what I think is some people want a
policy aim, and they are backing the data in to support what
they want. They want to reduce defense spending. They don't
understand that that defense spending has actually created the
security conditions and the reduced number of wars and the
reduced lethality of these wars in our favor. And they don't
seek to sustain that.
Mr. Hunter. Let me ask you, though, if you look pre-Cold
War you have got a few engagements in the last 100 years. If
you look post-Cold War you have dozens of engagements, but the
lethality has gone down, but the number of events has gone up.
So we aren't having--there aren't fewer hot spots than there
were in the 1960s or 1970s, there is more, but there is much
less lethality in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than there
were in World War II, Korea, World War I. Would you agree with
that or no? Do you see the number of events going down?
Mr. Hoffman. The data for the number of events has gone
down, but they are generalized from global statistics, from
numbers of conflict in Asia and Africa in which United States
had no interest whatsoever. If conflicts go from, say, 100 a
year down to 5, and all 5 of them deal with treaty partners or
very close friends of the United States, then I still have a
cause for concern.
So the overgeneralization of statistics from a mass number
of global things that we never heard about and didn't care
about, and if the only conflicts we care about are off Taiwan,
the South China Sea, Korea, the Middle East, Iran or Israel,
then we have cause for concern. So my problem is people are
overgeneralizing global statistics, and they are not getting
down to the meat and specifics of threats to friends and
interests of the United States. And they are wrong. We need to
continue to invest in security, but smartly, and we need a
comprehensive approach that both prevents and deters conflict.
Mr. Hunter. Let me ask the other witnesses, too, a totally
separate question. Do you see a point in which technology and
its ubiquity, and as the cost of technology gets lower and
lower, it is offsetting our personnel problem at any point? Is
there a tipping point where you can say we don't need as many
people, we don't need as many hospitals on base, we don't need
as many day care centers because we have the ability to strike
nonkinetically, we have the ability to deter with other means
besides manpower? And if you see that, is there an actual
tipping point there or do you think it is always going to take
one and the other kind of hand in hand where you have the
choice between going kinetic or nonkinetic or using high
technology stuff versus stabbing people in the face when you
have to go door to door?
Mr. Berteau. Mr. Hunter, let me take a first crack at that.
First of all, with respect to are we having more hot spots now
than before, from the U.S. perspective clearly yes, but I think
one of the biggest differences--and I think it permeates this
whole discussion--during the Cold War there were parts of the
world we could ignore. We and the Soviets essentially had
agreed we will leave those guys to sort their own thing out, it
is not part of our fight. Today there is no part of the world
we can ignore. The nature of a failed state, the nature of a
vacuum in governance, the nature of a vacuum in economics
creates both an intelligence threat and an opportunity for bad
guys that is something we can no longer ignore.
Part of that is because of the spread of technology. But
your point on can we trade technology for human beings, that is
actually been what we have been doing really for the last 30 or
40 years. It clearly has a point in the curve where that will
slow down. I don't think we yet know for the advanced unmanned
systems that we have in place today what the long-term tail
requirements are to support and sustain those, and you may
trade military personnel but not necessarily cost and
investment, if you will, in terms of the long-term ability to
sustain and support that operation.
Ultimately I think it still needs to be a blend. I mean,
time and again we see that the human being in the loop is
critical to mission success at whatever level, squad, all the
way up to theater. And I don't think we will ever bypass that
part of the product. I don't know if Mark has anything to add
to that.
Dr. Lewellyn. I would say it is a matter of looking at over
time what mix we need. When you fire a kinetic weapon, it blows
something up, you can see the effect. With some of the
nonkinetic weapons you don't really know what effect you have
had until either the weapon from the other side doesn't show up
or it misbehaves. So we need to have a spectrum of responses
now and look for a cost-effective mix.
In terms of costs, one thing I have been personally
struggling with over the last several years is figuring out how
much a pound, for want of a better term, a pound of cyber
costs. You know how many people it takes to man a weapon system
and support it. To get the level of cyber defense and attack
capability we need, how many people do we need? How do we do
that equation? I think we are very immature in that area in
terms of understanding the personnel needs in that area, and we
need to do more to do that over time.
Mr. Hoffman. Could I add on to that?
Mr. Hunter. I am so far past my time.
Mr. Thornberry. If you have something to add to that.
Mr. Hoffman. Just add something. Mr. Hunter and I share a
background with bad haircuts and running clubs and stuff like
that, so I have to disassociate myself from any implication
that I might think that technology is the solution to a lot. We
think of warfare, unfortunately, in stovepipes called air, sea,
land kind of domains, and we associate either institutions or
technologies with those.
To me the most decisive domain, the most important aspect
of the conflict spectrum is a human domain that cuts across all
those, and that would be my principal investment area, and
technology is not going to be--is always an enabler in the
right context, employed properly with judgment, and that
judgment comes from investment we have made in commanders and
people who are working in that battle space that understand
that. But the human domain is the most decisive domain.
Mr. Hunter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you.
Mrs. Davis.
Mrs. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for
being here. And perhaps just going along with that line, Mr.
Hoffman, and if that is the case, would you say--how would you
characterize our ability to organize ourselves and have a
military strategy around that? Is that where we are? It seems
to me we are kind of far from there, and how do we get there if
you think that is appropriate?
Mr. Hoffman. No, I think our strategy in the past, at least
in my time of service and in the Department of the Navy, has
been to understand that we need to recruit, sustain, educate--
where I now work in an educational facility--retain and take
care of the All-Volunteer Force. And in the Defense Strategic
Guidance, I am surprised, you know, there is an element in
there in which sustaining the All-Volunteer Force and
treasuring that in the modern sense is an important part of the
strategy. Keeping that sustainable is, you know, is an issue
because of the cost that it has derived.
But I think there is a recognition in the strategy and the
building and the Services that, you know, the quality of the
force is important, the investments in the human domain is
important, but all these investments are going to be
prioritized and pressurized in the next few years, both on the
civilian side and in the military side.
Mrs. Davis. Is that well organized to fight the hybrid wars
that we have now?
Mr. Hoffman. I believe we are organized to fight the hybrid
wars. The SOF [Special Operations Forces] community has made a
lot of developments over the last few decades, or at least the
last decade, which also needs to be sustained and examined
relative to the future. We have other investments, though, on
the nonkinetic and the cyber community, do we have the right
workforce and how do we sustain that workforce? We have done
research at NDU [National Defense University] on what does that
mean in the Cyber Command, what aspect of that needs to be in
the military and what needs to be civilianized. You can get a
very nice clearance for a military officer with 20 years in the
Air Force or the Marine Corps, but some of the people we need
in the cyber community are like some of my daughters or some of
the boyfriends that come into my house that have--that wear
jewelry in places that I don't attach, you know, things, and
they are different. How you bring that into the community, too,
and sustain that so you have a very capable force? That might
be an area to explore.
Mrs. Davis. Mr. Berteau, would you like to comment on that?
I mean, you seem to suggest that perhaps at least the way we
organize our new defense strategy doesn't necessarily comport
with what we are doing right now.
Mr. Berteau. Thank you, Congresswoman Davis. I think it is
a little bit hard to tell. You know, the redone strategic
guidance issued January a year ago was driven by the $487
billion over the 10-year period that came out from the first
tranche of Budget Control Act cuts, and it was clearly, by the
comments of DOD afterwards, it was pretty close to the thin
edge of what was sustainable against those dollars, right?
Because no sooner had it come out then you had generals and DOD
senior civilians saying if you cut further we are going to have
to rewrite the strategy.
Well, it is not a very robust strategy if you have to
rewrite it every time the number of dollars goes down a little
bit. So you have to say to yourself perhaps we need a slightly
less fragile strategy. But if it was at the thin edge then we
haven't really tested it, because what DOD did is they said we
built the 2013 budget consistent with that strategy. But if you
look at the issues, most of them were shoved into 2014 and
beyond. We haven't yet seen that 2014 budget or the Future Year
Defense Program associated with it, but right now the number
that that is built to is not the number that is consistent with
the cap of the Budget Control Act. It is $50 billion too high,
or $45 billion if you believe the latest reports.
It is awful hard to assess the disconnects or even lay out
priorities when you don't have enough money to fund the basic
piece of it. But what is distressing is those priorities have
not come into play in the sequestration debate. There has been
no argument back that says forget this everybody takes the same
percentage, let us prioritize and put that in place through a
priority process. Nobody has made that argument. It is hard to
tell whether it is because we don't know the answers or because
it is just caught up in a much broader net and DOD is just part
of that trap, if you will.
Mrs. Davis. Dr. Lewellyn, did you want to comment as well?
How do we fix this?
Dr. Lewellyn. I think, you know, flexibility is the key. I
have spent a lot of my career working with Navy and Marine
Corps, and they are very much into task organization and
flexibility. So I think the more we can get away from standard
ways and units of approaching things the better. In my own line
of work in research and development, I think sharing and
collaboration is being facilitated by information technology. I
am amazed at the amount of ideas that pass around among the
younger folks that work for me.
One of the big problems I see, however, is sharing across
classification boundaries, looking hard at what needs to be
classified, what doesn't, so we can get the brightest minds
working on the hard problems, and that is a challenge we have
to struggle with.
Mrs. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will come back.
Thank you.
Mr. Thornberry. Dr. Heck.
Dr. Heck. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you all for being here this afternoon.
And, Mr. Hoffman, in your opening statement you referenced
our, the United States' hegemonic position that we now hold
across the globe and the fact that we have really no near
competitor. In today's earlier full committee, you know, we
heard about the potential impacts of sequestration and those
indiscriminate cuts, and Chairman McKeon stated in his
questioning that his concern, and I believe rightfully so, is
that as we make these cuts we may see a decrease in our
standing not just amongst potential adversaries, but also
amongst our allies as showing a sign of weakness.
The question is, my question is, where does that, where
does sequestration, where will it have an impact on those
emerging threats?
What types of threats may emerge due to the fact that we go
into sequestration and there is this potential perceived
weakness now of the United States in the loss of our hegemonic
position? And short of actually replacing the sequester, on
which capabilities do we concentrate our remaining resources to
best deter those emerging threats?
Mr. Hoffman. Until you got to the last thing, I thought I
could answer the question. The impact of sequestration at a
strategic level is a torpedoing, I believe, of the perception
that America is interested and willing to lead. That literature
in Tokyo, in Australia and in London, where I do VTCs [video
teleconferences] or have visited in the last year, is commonly
now referred to in white papers, that America either doesn't
want to lead, doesn't have the will and the wallet to lead,
even though the relative power balance for us is we are in a
rather significantly advantageous position right now,
particularly in the measures that we add--you know, how much
money we are spending into defense--which doesn't necessarily
always equate to an output that is equal to the same thing. But
we focus on numbers like 535, 555, 575, and we think that
equates to something, and generally it does, but maybe not in
regions and other places where people are measuring things.
The Chinese have their own way of measuring aggregate
national power, and they put other tangibles and intangibles
into that. They may perceive it. But in Australia and the
government in Japan, this idea that we are not able to come to
an agreement on the spending and the spending priorities and
put our house in order has already undercut us. And they talk
about it in papers and they talk about whether or not they need
to be intimidated or appease China in compensation for that the
conventional deterrent that we are offering, that extended
deterrence, is somehow weakened.
And the other impact on sequestration is, I think in both
2013 or 2014, we are going to torpedo the industrial base. It
is far too fragile. I spent 2 years as a political appointee in
the Department of the Navy working on naval industrial base and
investments, and I think we will hurt ourselves in that sense.
And it can be rebuilt, but it is far easier to crash it than it
is to rebuild it over a period of time.
So the impact on the threats is not really the threats, it
is our allies and our perceived perception of who and what we
are in the world.
Mr. Berteau. Could I piggyback on that just a little, Dr.
Heck? You raised the question of potential enemies or
adversaries showing that America is weak because we can't even
get our own act together, if you will. And I think that is a
legitimate concern. You know, the whispering that says, you
see, you really can't trust the United States. They are going
to pull back. They are going to leave. They are not going to be
here.
Dr. Kissinger in his seminal book on China recently said
ultimately all of those nations in the region that are not
seriously already our allies really only want two things: Don't
make us choose, but don't leave. And anything that creates a
signal that we are leaving opens a vacuum, if you will. But it
is equally true for our allies and partners who won't sustain
what they have.
Mr. Hunter asked earlier about partnership capacity. And we
spent a lot, in fact this subcommittee has spent some time on
building partnership capacity and looking at the questions. But
a lot of that is at the low end of the spectrum, which is where
the threat is. There is also partnership capacity we already
have in high abundance with our serious allies, with Japan,
with the Republic of Korea, with the United Kingdom, with
France, with NATO. We need to sustain that partnership capacity
as well. And whatever we do sends signals to them that it is
okay for them to do it as well.
You know, we have done some look at European defense
spending, and of course, as you all know, it has been coming
down dramatically and it is going to drop even further. But for
the first decade of this century, European defense spending
dropped but spending per soldier actually went up. Their
technology investment was sustained, if you will. Why? Because
their force structure actually came down faster than their
spending did.
They protected their investment in research and
development, whereas we use it as a bill payer right off the
top of the bat. Those are the kinds of signals that are not
only important internally, but are important externally and
globally as well.
Dr. Lewellyn. I would just add to that, that I think
looking more over the long trend getting past sequester with
defense funding coming down, the R&D community needs to look
smartly at how we are investing our skills and capabilities,
looking across mission areas about what is common technically
across them to make sure we maximize the commonality. And that
is the way I would answer your question and deal with the
science and technical community and our allied countries so we
convey to them that, hey, we are thinking this problem through
smartly and we are going to come out the other end as good a
position as we can be.
Dr. Heck. Thank you. Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Carson, would you like to ask
questions?
Mr. Carson. Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It is becoming increasingly clear that our offensive use of
cyberspace is pretty much a growing threat. While there are
sophisticated computer systems getting cheaper each and every
day, it is pretty easy to imagine that some countries or even
terrorist organizations would lack the resources and knowledge
to really conduct serious cyber attacks. As we develop
increasingly sophisticated countermeasures, do you believe that
we will continue to see cyber threats from around the world or
will they be pretty much contained to sophisticated governments
like China?
Dr. Lewellyn. I think there is certainly a sophisticated
end, you know, states can organize a lot more capability. That
doesn't mean I dismiss so-called lone actors. I think we are
still getting a handle in some areas on the vulnerability over
all of over systems. There are industrial control systems on
Navy ships that were bought before the days that we worried
about cyber attack, and understanding those vulnerabilities,
which the Navy is starting to do, is important.
So I think there is work we need to do. We need to be
careful about the information we put out to share, to
understand the vulnerability of that information, and be more
sensitive to the way cyber has infiltrated into all of our
lives, both personal and from the Government perspective and
military perspective. So I am not quite at the stage where I
think it is going to be something that we are going to have to
worry about for some time.
Mr. Berteau. Mr. Carson, in many ways the cyber threat is
the ultimate of asymmetric threats, but it is a very scalable
asymmetric threat and can quickly become a symmetric threat, if
you will, because the vulnerabilities that we have continue to
increase almost at the same rate as in fact our ability to
defend against and respond to the threats of those
vulnerabilities.
My own view--and this is not sustained by any particular
research but by long-term observation of it--is that the
various roles of the parts of the Government still remain to be
resolved a bit. You know, the President's Executive Order that
he announced last night in the State of the Union that we got
to read publicly yesterday takes some modest steps in this
direction, but clearly a lot more is needed, and the role of
the Congress in providing that more is quite powerful.
Mr. Carson. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Mrs. Hartzler. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I had an interesting discussion with a person on the plane
ride home last week. And he is a third-generation Latino, had
relatives along the southern border, and we had a lot of
discussion about many topics, but certainly one of them is the
rise in narcoterrorism on the border. And I see, Mr. Hoffman,
that in your testimony you mention that as one of the threats
and the challenge of the gangs you say as a disruptive force
inside America and in Mexico portend greater problems down the
road. And certainly we are starting to see more and more of it
in our neck of the woods.
So could you describe more in detail the challenges that
you think might be faced with the Mexico scenario, from
technical, intelligence, manpower, and others, and how might
the U.S. deal with it?
Mr. Hoffman. Excellent question. It is a little more
speculative aspect of my statement, but I didn't like the
trends over the last number of years. More sophisticated forms
of attacks. More planning of ambushes. More overt acts of
terrorism against police. Ambushes against American officials.
Body armor-piercing ammunition. The acceleration of learning
curve on detonation means of forms of IEDs [improvised
explosive devices] in Mexico have been going up. These are not
good trends. So it is in the higher end of the narcoterrorism
category, not yet merging and converging with kind of the
conventional capabilities and the irregular tactics of the
hybrid threat, but it is on the trend line to get there.
There are a few open source indicators with Middle Eastern
sources, to include Hezbollah's interest in Latin America and
Mexico,that would offer more learning curve increases that
bother me as a concern. I don't have any validated intelligence
on those whatsoever. When Admiral McRaven and maybe Judge
Webster are here at the HASC with their Intel overview it might
be a question to pull out in both classified and unclassified
sessions.
But I have had some visits with Southern Command when
Admiral Stavridis was down there as well, and the development
of submarines. The sub kind of thing is, when we are talking
about state level capabilities being employed by narco-
organizations is sort of a hybrid capability that we are
starting to see.
So you see this emerging. It is still somewhat speculative
in my mind. But we are now seeing this kind of activity, and
the gross acts of violent terrorism to clearly, if not
eradicate, just make some of the Mexican government irrelevant
in certain areas is a source of concern.
What has been going on with our intelligence sharing and
the training from both, I think, SOF and the FBI [Federal
Bureau of Investigation], there has, you know, there has been
assistance down there that is building partnership capacity
that is perhaps on the low end, as David suggested, but it
probably has a significant impact. The casualty totals from
Mexico, you know, the lowest is 30, the highest is 60,000 dead.
This kind of puts to shame the statistics that people are using
in Foreign Affairs and big journals right now to suggest that
the world is getting rather placid. Those people don't count in
the total. They are not considered to have been casualties in a
combatant conflict, but clearly these elements, the nonstate
actors in Mexico, who are doing this deliberately.
Mrs. Hartzler. It is devastating. And you are right, I
think a lot of people don't think about there is at least
35,000 that I have heard, casualties, there. And I mean this is
just south of us. This is a war going on.
But I missed the first part of the hearing. So could you
clarify what you just said about submarines? Who is----
Mr. Hoffman. Again I am trying to separate my time in the
Department of the Navy with the clearances I had in this
particular session, in this particular format.
Mrs. Hartzler. You are saying the drug cartels down there
are building a submarine?
Mr. Hoffman. Yes, ma'am. I think the total number of
captured submarines now is somewhere between 9 and 12.
Mr. Berteau. That number is not for public.
Mr. Hoffman. I have seen photographs of several that we
have and one of them is in fact framed and positioned in front
of Southern Command's headquarters. Admiral Stavridis mounted
one of these submarines in front of his command post.
Mrs. Hartzler. In my 24 seconds I have left, what can we do
in the United States to counter this? What would you advise? I
see you talked about the intelligence sharing.
Mr. Hoffman. Intelligence sharing. I believe there is
terrorist financing and network analysis that is probably
useful to the Mexican authorities. The training. They have done
much themselves. They have been rather courageous in facing up
to some of this. There has been a lot of intimidation. It is
very violent. It is very sophisticated. It is the other
southern states in Latin America that have more of the
submarine problem where the drug cartels are sourcing the
cocaine from for trips up into the United States. And military
assets and intelligence is necessary to help defeat that.
JIATF-South [Joint Interagency Task Force-South] is part of
that, which is an interagency, more of a comprehensive
approach. Mixing law enforcement and military assets together
is probably the solution.
Mrs. Hartzler. Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Thornberry. Which makes it even more disturbing that
under sequestration the Navy says they are going to pull all
the ships out of Central and South America. And so you have got
these drug runners with these submarines or semi-submersibles,
various things, bringing drugs up and we are not going to have
any ships there.
Mr. Gibson.
Mr. Gibson. Well, thanks, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the
panel being here.
Broader question. Assuming American interest protecting our
cherished way of life and a flourishing form of life, thriving
economy, in your research, in your reflection, in your perhaps
modeling, might there be other strategic approaches beyond the
one that we have certainly been engaged in since the Second
World War, initially to confront communism and then since that
time with regard to hegemony and our presumed responsibilities
and roles attendant thereof? Are there other approaches that
you have contemplated beyond, say, combatant commands with
responsibilities throughout the globe and forward military
ground forces? Might there be other approaches that would
secure our way of life and advance our economy?
Mr. Berteau. If I could, Mr. Gibson, start one minute on
that and then ask my colleagues here on the panel to comment.
Mr. Johnson raised earlier the idea of soft power. We looked at
CSIS about six years ago at something called smart power, which
is really an amalgam, if you will, how do you integrate better
across the Government all of the capabilities, not just the
military and kinetic capabilities or even the intel
capabilities.
I think that the question that Dr. Heck raised about the
role of technology in coming into play here, the question that
Mrs. Hartzler raised about narcoterrorism, points out to a host
of seams, if you will, that are inside. And the chairman
alluded to the consequence of sequestration will actually
exacerbate those disconnects, if you will.
It is a hard thing for the executive branch to work
together in a national security establishment, even in good
times when everybody has a lot of money. In bad times, when
everybody is trying to protect their money, they tend to hunker
down around their core business and not worry so much about
everybody else.
So what you need is a scheme, if you will, that will let
you rise above the core competencies. It is much easier for
you, because you can be on one committee and another committee
and cross jurisdictions pretty quickly that way. It is much
harder for them. And I think that the difficulties are
exacerbated in a time of sequestration and budget uncertainty.
I will leave these guys to come up with solutions.
Dr. Lewellyn. I am reminded of a couple of years ago, when
the Navy had an advertising slogan called, ``the Navy, a global
force for good,'' that emphasized its role in providing relief
in situations after bad weather, tsunamis, protecting the sea
lanes to encourage trade, providing a framework of
international agreement and law so that economies can flourish.
And I think that fundamental mission of alliances and
strengthening and supporting economic growth short of war, part
of the shaping and deterrence that I talked about in my
statement, are critical. And, you know, certainly cheaper than
fighting a lot of wars both in terms of cost of weapons and
lives. So I think we need to focus on that, the soft power or
smart power going forward.
Mr. Hoffman. I have been working on a grand strategy
approach to try to think through I think what is our need for a
balanced and sustainable grand strategy, and I have argued for
something called forward partnership. It is in the current
issue of Orbis and the January issue of the Naval Institute
Proceedings, and the reason it is in the Naval Institute
Proceedings is it privileges naval forces. I would declare
victory in World War II and would declare victory in the Korean
War at this point in time and probably bring back more ground
force structure from overseas and maybe reduce that and take a
total force perspective on what our ground force requirements
are.
We have a million-man land Army today, plus a 250,000-man
Marine Corps when you bring in the Reserve into the picture. So
I believe we have just postured ourselves differently and we
need to stop doing some things we have been doing. And I would
use the naval forces and SOF to generate the degree of
engagement and partnership that is forward. That I think we
should do, but it is going to have to be less static, less
vulnerably positioned in one fixed place, and we need more
freedom of action to move around the world from crisis to
crisis, because we are not going to populate every crisis with
brigades or Marine forces, and then leave them there for a
decade or more.
So we need some more freedom of action, and the strategy of
forward partnership is my solution, which I can provide for the
record.
Mr. Gibson. Thank you. I would be very interested in taking
a look at the article. My staff will probably pull it for me,
though. But thank you for those thoughtful comments.
What comes to mind is, you know, we certainly saw the rise
of China's involvement in Africa, and our response was I would
say pretty typical. I am not so sure it was effective. We
created another combatant command for it. And I wonder if we
might be better served leading with the State Department,
certainly using assets from across the Federal Government, to
be sure. But when we constantly lead with forward military
presence, I wonder if we are not fully achieving what it is we
are trying to do and incurring the cost that evidently is
difficult for us.
Mr. Berteau. The question, the core of the question you
raise, sir, is at its heart, what is the boundary of what is
DOD's mission and what is the military's mission here? And if
there is one important lesson from the last 10 or 15 years, it
is that DOD thinks it knows where those boundaries are. But
when the Nation needs more in something else and it turns
around and looks, okay, where else in the Federal Government is
this capability, and it turns out it is not there, then the
choice is either let the military do it or have it not be done.
And the military will say every time, send me, I will get it
done to the best of my ability. That is what happens.
We do need to look at that from a broader perspective. We
need to fund it and prioritize the resources so that capability
is there, and we need to make sure that at the national level
that kind of capability is in place. That is a hard thing to
do. The Congress has pushed for that a number of times. Twenty-
seven years ago this committee took the lead on creating
jointness inside DOD through the Goldwater-Nichols Defense
Reorganization Act. However, that is all under one Cabinet
officer, and that starts in Title X with subject to the
authority, direction, and control of the Secretary of Defense.
It is pretty hard to look at the Federal Government and start
with that same sentence, because if you say subject to the
authority and direction and control of, ultimately we know who
it is. It is the President. But to organize and sustain that at
a lower level bureaucratically, institutionally, is a much
tougher question. And ultimately we turn back to DOD and DOD
gets it done.
Mr. Thornberry. Let me back up from Mr. Gibson's question I
guess one level. And I suspect I know Mr. Hoffman's answer to
this because of the article he just referenced. But I guess one
question is, do we need a strategy? A lot of what you all have
talked about is the incredible amount of uncertainty in the
world today. And I think everybody can agree we are not going
to be able to predict, you know, this conflict or this
situation. And my perception is that largely we lurch from
crisis to crisis, making decisions as we go. My perception is
we didn't do that in the Cold War. There was at least an
outline of a strategy that was generally followed.
And so I don't know, Mr. Hoffman, do we need a kind of
larger national strategy in such an uncertain world?
Mr. Hoffman. Yes, sir.
Mr. Thornberry. Why?
Mr. Hoffman. Emphatically.
Mr. Thornberry. Why?
Mr. Hoffman. You need to communicate to the American people
what treasure they are putting up and why to sell it and make
it sustainable. You need to shape the instruments of national
power relative to those that are either soft, medium, or hard.
You need to articulate to future aggressors what those
capabilities are and you need to sustain them over a period of
time.
I don't know any way of doing that without a strategy. I
had prepared a statement--there is a book I particularly like
by an author named Rumelt, which Mr. Marshall in the building
and Dr. Krepinevich also likes, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy
[Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it
Matters], and it has got a couple good lines in there. But
particularly this idea that strategy is not a dog's breakfast
of everything you want to do just piled up. It is focused
effort, prioritized resources, which are tradeoffs. I am not
comfortable with some of the tradeoffs in my own strategy. One
takes an Army below 500,000 and we start absorbing risk. The
Marine Corps goes down to a certain level in the 175s, and for
every 5, 10K, we start absorbing risk. But we are also
absorbing risk by continuing to borrow the amount of money we
are borrowing. Very soon we will have interest debt payments
that exceed the Department of Defense's TOA [total obligation
authority]. That is the ultimate limitation of strategic
action, being constricted by ourselves over time, because we
are going to pay off old decisions and choices and tradeoffs
that we weren't really willing to make.
When it gets down into force planning and strategy,
Professor Colin Gray in Europe, one of my mentors in life, said
there are only two principles: Prudence and adaptability. And
we need to be very prudent about the risks that we are
absorbing and very conscious about those, and maybe perhaps
adaptable is a better term than flexibility. Flexibility is a
force that can do a lot of things, you are trading off some
readiness. But adaptable is somebody that can learn faster than
the opponent. It is a football-soccer--or a soccer fullback
that finds himself in a football game playing fullback and
actually can learn the position fast. And that is the challenge
we had in 2003 to 2007 in Iraq. We might have been flexible but
we weren't adaptable. We didn't learn fast enough. But I
believe a strategy is essential.
Mr. Thornberry. Do you all have comments on that?
Dr. Lewellyn. I would just add, I think, you know, I have
spent my career in the business of trying to help the
Government develop things the private sector isn't developing
on their own. And so I think you need a strategy to guide
defense Government investment in technologies that wouldn't
naturally flow from the private sector in the dealings in the
marketplace. And so to the extent that it is important to
develop capabilities unique to the Government, you need a
strategy to guide that. And to the extent it is interlocked
with a diplomatic strategy so we take advantage of both soft
and hard power, I think that is good.
Mr. Berteau. Mr. Chairman, I have a predisposition that is
in line with the idea that maybe we don't need a strategy. I am
ultimately a resources and management guy, and it is my belief
and my observation over 35 years that resources drive strategy
way more than strategy drives resources. But ultimately much of
the debate we have about where we are going to take our
national security establishment, and particularly the
technology investments for that, is a fight between the past
and the future. And in that fight, the past is much more
powerful than the future. It has all the champions, it has all
the advocates, it has all the four-stars. They are all lined
up. And the strategy is the best hope that the future has to be
able to stand up in that fight and make it more of a fair
fight. And so I tend to lean back toward, yes, we probably we
do need a strategy, even though ultimately it is the budget
that matters.
Mr. Thornberry. Interesting perspective. By the way, I was
on that smart power commission 6 years ago, which I think was
very helpful, look at having this full array of tools. The
Government is not very well positioned to use them all.
Dr. Lewellyn, I wanted to get back to some things that you
talked about at the beginning. And I know this is an interest
Mr. Langevin and I certainly share about nonkinetic weapons of
various kinds. And you mentioned them.
I would be interested in your evaluation of how well we are
pursuing those things. Mr. Berteau talked about that a lot of
innovation these days is coming from the global commercial
sector, not from Government contracts. You know, I kind of
wonder how that applies to development of lasers and the other
kinds of nonkinetic sorts of things that you referenced. So
kind of give me an evaluation of how we are doing in pursuing
those things.
Dr. Lewellyn. My sense that the effort put into those areas
is greatly increased over the past few years as emerging
threats in the A2/AD, or anti-access/area-denial area, have
grown. A lot more cooperation in research between the Services
and their research establishments and reaching out into the
private sector to address those things. So I see a lot more
effort going into those areas. One of the complicating factors
is a lot of the capability is covered by fairly strict
classification guidelines, and overcoming those and working
within those guidelines is one of the challenges, I think.
Mr. Thornberry. Well, is another challenge what Mr. Berteau
just said: The past is fighting the future. The past is all
about kinetics. They have got an advantage. And aren't there
real issues of just in competing for increasingly scarce
dollars about what some people will consider pie-in-the-sky
sorts of stuff?
Dr. Lewellyn. My own view is that dealing with some of the
emerging threats strictly with kinetics is prohibitively
expensive. And so to deal credibly with the threats people are
seeing, I think you need the mix of capability. You need to be
able to take advantage of all the tools that are out there.
Some of them are unproven yet in the real world, and so we need
to be sensitive to, you know, backup capability, as I
mentioned. One of the great advantages of kinetic systems is
you can immediately see their results. And so developing our
abilities to understand how effective we have been quickly will
be part of developing some of these new systems and tools.
Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Hoffman.
Mr. Hoffman. Yes, sir, I think you put your finger on
something. In the business literature we refer to this as
bringing about disruptive change, and the barriers to entry
culturally, psychologically, the metrics that are available. In
my time during the DON [Department of the Navy] trying to bring
around the electromagnetic railgun, to kind of scale the power
system is something that basic technology can be developed in
the civilian world. But the things that we really need in the
Department of the Navy for the scale of that kind of system,
the power generation of 30 million joules or something to
launch something, once that technology comes about it is going
to go have to be induced by Government because of the scale.
But there are some great savings and great strategic utility.
But it is very hard to bring that about. The same thing
goes on with the UCLASS [Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne
Surveillance and Strike] with the Department of the Navy trying
to bring unmanned systems. We have existing programs in the F-
35 [Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter], and we have a future.
We have a fair idea what the cost of capability is going to be
over time, and we have a program, and we have all the pieces in
place, and we have another potential. And when do we shift over
from 100%/0% to some mix of manned and unmanned aircraft is a
hard thing for military cultures and institutions to bring
about.
Mr. Berteau. Mr. Chairman, could I add one sentence to
that? I recognize the time constraint here. For many of these
if we don't figure out how to take advantage of them and
incorporate them, somebody else will. And we need to take into
our calculus and our calculation as well, because otherwise we
will be on the losing end of the asymmetric advantage if we are
not careful.
Mr. Thornberry. Well, and actually that is what I wanted to
ask you. So economies that are more controlled than ours, do
they have an advantage in developing some of these nonkinetic
systems, as an example?
Mr. Berteau. I think there is an advantage. And, you know,
you look at the Chinese economy, which has been a remarkable
story of economic growth and distribution internally. But much
of it has been essentially copying what others have done. I
mean, if you look at the ratio of new patents per country, if
you will, you know, China still trails far behind. But they are
very good at taking what is developed elsewhere and manifesting
it and magnifying it considerably. And I think they will
continue to get better at that, if you will.
Clearly our relationship with China from a geostrategic
point is way more complicated than we can go into in the
context of this hearing. And I think we are still looking for
the recipe book of how do we get a decent meal out of this? But
nonetheless we have to recognize that they can bring critical
mass to bear on these kinds of tasks, if you will, in a way
that a free market economy often will not do, because it is not
just driven by market opportunities, it is be driven by a
longer-term view.
Mr. Lanvegin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And to our witnesses again, thank you. This has been a
fascinating discussion. And I would like to maybe turn back
again to the discussion we were having about soft power and
where we target our resources. And one of the reasons why I
thoroughly enjoy serving on the Intelligence Committee and also
serving here--and I am very pleased that the committee has
decided to roll the intelligence portfolio into this
subcommittee--is that good intelligence is always going to be
the pointy tip of the spear. You know where to put your
resources, you know where the enemies are, you know where your
adversaries are, you know where to focus your resources. And
that in and of itself becomes a force multiplier.
So what I want to know is how do we get better at
predicting and therefore targeting, you know, where the
problems are before they arise? It astounds to me that we
haven't gotten better at that. In particular, you look at Mali,
for example. The enemy there, the universe of the enemy there,
if you will, is in the hundreds. You know, we are not talking
about tens of thousands of enemy combatants. It is in the
hundreds. And yet you have a nation-state like France has to,
you know, come in with overwhelming power and rout out the, you
know, the enemy there.
It just seems it is such a disproportionate way to use
resources, if you will. If we could have gotten better at
predicting that something like Mali would have arisen, a lot of
these things could be avoided. So how do we get better at that
and where do we target our resources in terms of developing
that soft power capability so it is both predictive, but also
responsive?
Mr. Berteau. This is a question we have been wrestling with
literally ever since the commission completed its work in 2007
and CSIS issued their report. A lot of effort was focused on an
organizational structure, if you will. How do you get a
national security infrastructure in line that will wrestle with
these questions? But that almost falls into the category of you
have got a different tree but you have the same monkeys. The
same problem, if you will, are still there. Changing the tree
doesn't remove the problems.
Ultimately I think it comes back to an integration across
the branches of the Federal Government, and that is both on the
executive branch side, where that is very difficult, where
every institution is required to take care of itself, and on
the legislative side, where there are champions for each of
those and the structure on the legislative side is set that
way.
The Intelligence Community actually offers an opportunity
to offset that, and the creation of the Director of National
Intelligence, and that infrastructure, if you will, both to
focus the sharing opportunities and to make sure that resource
are allocated to the most significant threats or payoffs was a
very positive step in that direction. It is a long ways away
from being successfully implemented, but it is a core enabler,
if you will, to move forward in that regard. You probably need
the equivalent infrastructure in other areas of that enabling
capability.
You are right about Mali. It is not only--only a handful of
people. They didn't sneak up on anybody. I mean, we saw them
coming for years and we knew what was going to happen, we knew
what happened when it happened. And yet it takes--prevention
would have been far easier, if you will, than the cure now has
turned out to be. The issue seems to be can we do that for
everywhere for everyone? And the answer to that is: Probably
not. So then how do we choose amongst those?
We don't have a good structure in place to do that, either
inside the executive branch today or on the Hill for that
matter. And again the Intelligence Committee is about the only
place where those things come together, but the reach from
there to the solutions is bounded by the institutional
structures that are in place.
I will have to think harder on that question. I mean, I
think I have actually helped you define the problem better than
helping you answer it here this morning--or this afternoon. I
apologize for that.
Mr. Langevin. I appreciate your thoughts.
Anybody else want to comment.
Dr. Lewellyn. I would agree that organization is the issue.
And this is illustrated by a story I recently heard during a
military operation. I heard from someone that they got some
very useful information from a former--from a naval officer who
had student friends from a former involvement with an overseas
university who was getting compiled Twitter feeds from the
country of interest, and it was leading in the intelligence by
several hours. So, again, taking advantage of all the
information that is out there, it is an organizational issue, I
think is something we all have to struggle with and understand
how we can do that in a Government context and take advantage
of all the information that is available to help us.
Mr. Hoffman. Very quickly, I am not sure that the solution
is technological in nature. It is about investing in people,
relationships, understanding foreign cultures, and
understanding at a level of detail which I don't think we had
in that particular case. And I am always very concerned when I
hear the word ``predictive'' and strategy is based upon some
sort of a forecast and some kind of a logic. But the reason
some of these people end up where they end up is not because we
didn't predict, it is because they are human on the other side,
and we are in a competitive relationship and they have gone
where we are not or where their greatest advantage is. I don't
know if we can anticipate that interaction all the time over a
long time. But we can make some forecasts about technologies
and investments and move the ball down the field.
Mr. Berteau. Could I add one thing to that? The budget
cycle that we provide resources is so long and slow. The review
board that the Secretary of State put in place after the
Benghazi incident made a whole host of recommendations and they
were presented up here some months back. One of them was to
create a fund that would be available for the 20 most at-risk
embassies and consulates so that we could rush security to
those when it came time. But if the look at the lead time to
put that funding into the budget, for September of 2012, when
the Benghazi attack occurred, it would have had to have been in
the 2012 budget, which the State Department started putting
together in the summer of 2010. So in 2010, somebody would have
had to say, okay, let's look at Libya. Well, next year there
will be an uprising, Gadhafi will fall, we will be moving in,
we will have a consulate in Benghazi, and it will be at high
risk, and therefore we have to put the money in the budget
right now.
Can you imagine them putting that money? Can you imagine
OMB [Office of Management and Budget] actually approving it?
And can you imagine the Appropriations Committee leaving it in
there? We have a real disconnect between the cycle time from
building the resources and the necessity to respond quickly and
with agility to evolving dynamics, and that is something that
we are going to have to wrestle with very clearly. That is much
more than an organizational question as well. It is really a
very fundamental process question.
Mr. Langevin. Let me turn to another area that I spend a
lot of time on. That is on the cybersecurity issue. And
obviously that is--it is an issue that is going to be with us
to stay for the foreseeable future and it is going to become
more and more challenging and important as we go forward.
So the Pentagon right now is in the process of what could
be a major shift in how they are organized and how they defend
and also dealing with offensive and exploitation, as well as
other things. So how do we rightsize our cyber force, if you
will, and our cyber strategy? Obviously, the Pentagon hasn't
quite figured that out either, although they are getting there
and it is starting to coalesce, if you will, around a
structure. But we are not completely where we need to be.
And in addition to that, as we saw on the news lately--and
this is something that Mac and I have--the Chairman and I have
studied for a while--that we don't nearly have the right
personnel, enough of the right personnel in the right places in
terms of what we actually need.
Mr. Berteau. It is very instructive to look back at
Secretary Panetta's speech last October in New York, which was
a sea change in the way that the Defense Department was
publicly characterizing both its thinking about cybersecurity--
he used the cyber Pearl Harbor, et cetera, example--but more
importantly about how he saw and how the Department saw its
role in this process. Because that statement very clearly said
we have wrestling with the--I am paraphrasing--we have been
wrestling with the question of, is it DOD's job to defend DOD
or is it DOD's job to defend America? And Secretary Panetta
came out clearly and publicly stated it is our job to defend
America. That was the first time that DOD had publicly laid
that out.
The implications of that for the kinds of structure you
need, for the kinds of capability you need, for the kinds of
people you need, for the kinds of funding you need are still
being sorted out. Whether they are going to be reflected in the
fiscal year 2014 budget that ultimately finds its way up here
remains to be seen. The impact of sequestration just on
personnel alone, just as the economy is starting to come back
we are going to take all of the people we have been struggling
to rebuild the workforce that got gutted in the previous
drawdown and have finally started to get it back up, not just
in cyber but elsewhere, and now we are going to say to these
folks, well, take a day off a week without pay but keep doing
100 percent of your work, just with 80 percent of your pay and
then we will get back to you. Anybody who has got a better
opportunity to go work this somewhere else is clearly going to
at least consider that opportunity more strongly than they did
before.
Dr. Lewellyn. As I said earlier, I have been struggling
personally from an intellectual level about how to figure out
how you resource cyber? How much do you need for a pound of
cyber? I think one of the key issues Mr. Hoffman alluded to is
what is the right mix of private sector, Government civilians,
Government contractors, and military folks to deal with some of
this stuff once you sort out what the missions are going to be
and what the responsibilities are, as Mr. Berteau talked to.
So I think--it is not a very satisfying answer--but I think
we need to do a lot more work at how we want to sort out those
responsibilities and the amount of money it is going to cost to
do so.
Mr. Hoffman. Sir, Mr. Thornberry and I worked on this
particular problem more than a decade ago, kind of struggling
with this during the Clinton administration, whether or not
certain tasks belonged in the Commerce Department or the FBI.
The Clinton administration had gone with the law enforcement
model and most of the constituencies in telecommunications,
banking, finance, and the computer companies didn't want to
participate at that time.
I don't know if we have gotten to the recognition in the
country yet that the character and nature of the threat is so
severe that this is something we want the Pentagon to do beyond
the military sphere, so defending itself. That is a larger
strategic issue of what is important to the country and what
political values and traditions we want to adapt perhaps to a
new reality.
A decade ago I would have been resisting. I resisted the
FBI model of the Clinton administration and we tried to create
something else I don't think has emerged with the right level
of robustness. Most of that comes, however, from the American
population and business leaders who are not interested in the
Pentagon running airports, running ports, or running networks
necessarily. That is a huge strategic issue.
For the committee, however, getting the right size and the
structure of the organization, what needs to be a joint entity
and what needs to be repeated, and what I have seen is the
proliferation of cyber commands in the Services, that is a
macro-level mission issue, a Key West II kind of issue that I
think does merit, just inside the Department of Defense and
your committee, some serious consideration, and from that you
will get the right size and the right population mix from that.
But that is an important thing to take on. I don't have an
answer for you. I just noticed that we have been standing up
something that I don't know can stand up to a management and
strategy review right now.
Mr. Langevin. Well, on that point, I think this is an area
where you all could make major contributions in helping us to
answer these questions of what does the right size of a cyber
force and strategy actually look like. And hopefully we can
continue our discussion.
With that I will yield back. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Gibson, do you have any other
questions?
Mr. Gibson. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
While I have you, I am just curious your response on a few
things here. China. Given their economy, given their current
investments in national security, do you think they are on a
trajectory to be aggressive and bellicose towards their
neighbors? And how do you think they view the debt that we have
to them in relation to any of this?
Mr. Berteau. We did take a hard look at that in the study
we did on the Pacific and the pivot to Asia last year, and I
will be happy to provide you with that report, if you will.
Many of the focuses were aimed at DOD, but obviously we had
to look at China as a big part of that.
The U.S. has an enormous opportunity today across the
Pacific Rim, in part because China overplayed its hand pretty
heavily in 2009, 2010, 2011. It gave the opportunity for a
number of countries to encourage more U.S. engagement and more
U.S. interaction with them, if you will. We need to be careful,
though, that we don't build the strategy on the assumption that
China will always be more heavy-handed than we are, because we
can't necessarily count on them to play that out over time. So
there is a rare opportunity for us as a country to take
advantage of building better relationships with partners across
the region.
But I think the question of the future trajectory of China
is really one that is not predetermined by either the amount of
money they are spending--which is huge, they have quadrupled
their defense spending over the last 10 years, which has no
country in the world has done, and they are on a path to
continue building that up. They are a long ways away from being
able to be seen as a peer competitor to the U.S., but within
the region in which they operate that is not necessarily the
standard that they have to aspire to. But it is far from
inevitable that that is the outcome that we are going to play.
We became convinced--I certainly became convinced--I mean,
I am a cold warrior in the way I think about things because
that is the world I grew up in and it is what I was trained in,
and it took me a while realize that the old strategy that we
applied to the Soviet Union is not going to work with China,
you know, and in the long run the whole world may be worse off
if we attempt to do that as well as the region itself. But what
we replace that with is still evolving, if you will. How do we
behave in such a way that it encourages China to become a
viable participant in a global economy, which is clearly in
their interest in the long run but may not be in the interest
of the leadership in the short run, is a challenge we haven't
begun to sort out yet.
There is a very strong military side to it, though. Every
morning when the Chinese wake up and they ask themselves the
question, is today the day that we should go confront the U.S.,
we want them every day to answer that question, not today. And
that is an important part of the equation that I think we have
to sustain all the way through the process.
Dr. Lewellyn. As someone who focuses on science and
engineering, I like empirical things, okay, and one of the
empirical things about China is something that Mr. Hoffman
mentioned, namely the demographics, their aging society and the
economic strain that it is going to put on them. So I think in
the long term I am not clear where China is going in terms of
their ability to put money at the rate they have so far into
defense.
To echo what Mr. Berteau has said, I think going forward we
need to maintain our edge, but we need to be very sensitive
about how the way we use our military force in the area is
understood by China. We don't want to do anything in terms of a
test of a system or reaction in some way that we don't
understand that they might not see it as, I wouldn't say
benign, but nonthreatening to them, if it is not aimed at them.
So I think there is a community of people looking hard at
how the leadership in China thinks and how the people react to
that leadership and we need to be sensitive to that going
forward.
Mr. Hoffman. It is a crucial issue to try to get our hands
around. Again, I am not an Asian expert; I am more of a
generalist. But it is important to point out that this is not a
monolithic entity, that there are factions in there. The way
the military is acting vis-a-vis policy elites or the ruling
class is somewhat different. This is a command economy that we
are dealing with.
I find military modernization to be significant, but not
overly concerned. I think as David pointed out, a peer standard
is not necessarily the standard. The investments seem to be
smart. They seem to be niched. They seem to be deliberately
asymmetric, not, you know, out of complete whack.
Dr. Lewellyn's comment, he has got some good comments in
there about strategic culture, I am not sure we understand or
have invested enough to the same degree we did for those of us
who were Cold War warriors. We thought we understood the Soviet
Union and we had Russiantologists. I work with a China center
at NDU that was created by the Congress and we work at that,
but it is a small shop. It is worthy of thinking through.
My one caution with them, in thinking about them--and David
pointed out they have been a good strategist for us, they have
created more problems for themselves and have brought more of
our allies towards us, so that is a really good deal--but they
got so aggressive when their economy was one-third of the size
of ours, and it is now in the 40s going to about 50 percent,
and depends on where we are 5 or 10 years from now. If they got
that aggressive when they were one-third, what is it going to
be like when they are at half and two-thirds? And this gets to
the comments you see in the Japanese literature and the
Australian white papers. Those kind of trend lines and the
crossover points are being watched by people in the Pacific and
it raises concerns to them.
Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Hoffman, going back to the work you
have done on hybrid warfare, it seems to me there is a trend
toward states using hybrid tactics, maybe through others or
employing others. The country may get organized crime to do
their bidding or, you know, that sort of thing. Not direct
state action, but kind of working in and through others, using
a variety of tactics. Do you think that is a trend that is
happening and will we see more of it?
Mr. Hoffman. I do believe it is a trend. I do believe we
are going to see more of it. But a lot of it is going to come
from the bottom coming up. Smaller actors are finding lethal
means cheaper, more lethal and more effective for them. So that
is kind of bringing the lethality up to what used to be the low
end of the conflict spectrum, so Mexico, Latin America,
Hezbollah, these other kinds of actors.
But I do believe that states are sending some of this
technology to the level. So I see things converging, the
nonstate actors getting state-like capabilities because of just
the lower cost and the proliferation, and then the Hezbollah,
particularly the Iranian export of this and the use of proxy
forces by people like in Iran the Quds Force. This is their art
form. And they make things like EFP [explosively formed
projectile] or they make the tactics and the training to bear.
So when it shows up in Venezuela or shows up in Latin America
or Mexico I have a cause for concern.
This is one of the issues with the work in the QDR
[Quadrennial Defense Review] and the DSG [Defense Strategic
Guidance], is the conversation in the Pentagon is that threats
are diverging, we have low-end threats and we have high-end
threats. And my perspective is the opposite. We have a
convergence in the middle, which is why my statement says--and
RAND concurs with me--we need to mind the middle. This is where
the future is going in terms of more frequency than we thought
of in the past.
Mr. Thornberry. Yes. And kind of springing from there, Mr.
Berteau, you talked about CSIS' work on internal cost growth
within the military. So X number of people are costing us more
and more, someday there won't be anything left for investment.
And yet we have to look at this full array of challenges. How
are we going to--I don't know, this is, I guess, the too
difficult question to ask, but you just have to think, how do
we get from here to there with the limited amount of
investments and this battle between the past, the future, all
of that?
Mr. Berteau. And that convergence of both state and
nonstate. Nowhere is that probably going to be more evident
than in the realm of cyber, where in fact not only is it
already sort of overlapping, but we have our biggest challenge
is identifying and characterizing the source of the activity
when it occurs and tracking it back to anybody.
In terms of how do we get our arms around this, you know,
it is pretty easy to sit here and say we should be able to
defend America pretty darned well for $500 billion a year. And
ultimately if you started from the ground up and built the
Defense Department to be able to respond to all these threats,
you probably wouldn't build the Department that you have today.
So the real question is, how do we evolve to what we need to
have from where we are right now? I characterize that as a
battle of the past and the future, but it is really more
complicated than that. That sounds way too binary, if you will.
I think it comes down to incentives. Where are the
incentives lined up that reinforce behavior that strengthens
the status quo, or that focuses on looking backwards, if you
will, versus the incentives that realigns towards strengthening
the agility and the flexibility to deal across the future?
One of the powerful forces of Goldwater-Nichols was it
changed the incentive structure, and it changed it at every
level, from the individual promotion all the way to the
institutional alignments and so on. I haven't manifested that
in kind of a portfolio of solutions, but we have been spending
some time wrestling with that question of, how do you structure
incentives? It would go all the way from the 6.1 basic research
at the universities and how do you structure an inventive that
will sustain and maintain that capacity independent of return
on investment kinds of figures, all the way up to the broader
institutional levels of how do you incentivize the State
Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the
Defense Department, the Treasury Department, the Justice
Department to cooperate more together in that global
interaction, if you will, at the lower end of the spectrum?
So I think those incentive structures are the key, and it
is what we are going to try to focus our research on in the
coming months.
Mr. Thornberry. Well, I think that is something that all of
us can work together on. Kind of back to money for just a
second, regardless of how sequestration and the CR come out, we
are going to having tight defense budgets as far as the eye can
see. And yet we can still have this internal cost growth that
you are talking about, we have this full array of challenges
that are kind of converging, and we have this need to put money
into the future. And to me that means we are going to have to
figure out ways to get more defense out of the dollars we
spend. I think the full committee is going to be doing a
variety of things in the future looking at that. And needless
to say, we need all the help we can get in trying to sort
through the right incentives. A lot of times passing a law
doesn't get the job done. It determines the culture and the
incentives that go within that culture to really be successful.
So, anyway, I think that is it. Thank you all very much for
your testimony and for your statements. It has been very
helpful and a good way for this subcommittee to start. So thank
you.
With that, the hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 3:55 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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A P P E N D I X
February 13, 2013
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?
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WITNESS RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ASKED DURING
THE HEARING
February 13, 2013
=======================================================================
RESPONSE TO QUESTION SUBMITTED BY MR. NUGENT
Mr. Hoffman. Sir, as I understand the context behind your question,
given the disparity in relative national power between Pakistan and
India, what do we expect Pakistan to do?
As I noted before the committee, I would expect Pakistan to
continue its nuclear modernization program. By most expert accounts it
is the fastest growing nuclear weapons stockpile in the world, but
admittedly, this is coming from a smaller baseline than the major
nuclear powers. Nuclear weapons have been and will continue to be
Pakistan's principal strategic deterrent against what its military-
intelligence leadership views as an existential threat from its larger
neighbor.
At the same time I would expect Pakistan's military to continue
developing a broader range of capabilities to address the proximity and
potency of an internal militant threat that has already caused it to
move a large amount of its conventional military forces structure away
from India and into its western border territories. While Pakistan's
civilian leadership periodically labeled the internal threat as the
nation's most severe, it remains unclear whether Pakistan's senior
military and intelligence leaders view the problem similarly.
Nonetheless, I expect Pakistan's military will continue to improve its
training and operations against military groups in the west who
formally oppose the state while retaining as much capacity as it
possibly can to counter India.
I do not expect Pakistan's military-intelligence leadership will
extend or expand its longstanding practice of employing proxy forces or
terrorist activities against those neighbors it feels threatening. I am
not aware of any evidence that Pakistan's security agencies have broken
its links or financial support to select militant groups it believes
provide to the defense of Pakistan in some manner but have been labeled
as terrorist organizations. I would expect that Pakistan's military-
intelligence leadership will continue to use all the tools it has to
keep India off balance and safeguard its interests inside Afghanistan.
[See page ??.]
?
=======================================================================
QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING
February 13, 2013
=======================================================================
QUESTION SUBMITTED BY MR. FRANKS
Mr. Franks. 1) I would like to know from your perspective, do you
feel the Nation is currently facing a threat from an EMP attack? Do you
feel that the Nation is prepared to address this threat? And if not,
how would you address mitigating this threat. Further, do you feel the
threat is grave enough to be reflected in our National Strategic
Guidance?
Mr. Hoffman. Sir, an EMP attack is an example of the sort of
asymmetric approach we can anticipate from states or reasonably well-
resourced nonstate actors. I believe that the most likely contingencies
would be overseas rather than a massive attack in the homeland. Such
attacks should be anticipated by our combatant commands and the
Services in their preparations and in the hardening and redundancy of
our various military C2 or ISR systems.
Such attacks could be large scale in nature, by a country that
detonates a nuclear-like system in the atmosphere to attempt to negate
our intelligence and communications links that confer such an advantage
to us. I could also imagine more tactical EMP devices being used near
bases where U.S. forces are operating or providing ground-based
missiles defenses to disrupt our access into a region at ports or
airfields or to try to weaken our support to a coalition member or
partner nation.
National guidance should reflect the nature of this threat
consistent with its probability and consequence among all other
contingencies. Both the Department of Defense and Department of
Homeland Security should consider this threat grave enough to
incorporate into planning and acquisition requirements. Because of this
threat and other cyber threats, the ability to operate under degraded
C2 levels after an EMP attack is something we can and should train for.
Enhancing network system resiliency is a must.
Mr. Franks. 2) I would like to know from your perspective, do you
feel the Nation is currently facing a threat from an EMP attack? Do you
feel that the Nation is prepared to address this threat? And if not,
how would you address mitigating this threat. Further, do you feel the
threat is grave enough to be reflected in our National Strategic
Guidance?
Dr. Lewellyn. In principle, EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attacks
could arise in two cases. First, a nuclear conflict between regional
powers could affect U.S. military forces and U.S. citizens, allies, and
commercial interests in the area. Second, a nuclear attack aimed at
U.S. forces or territory would have a direct effect on military forces
or the homeland. The EMP effects of a nuclear detonation could damage
electronic and other equipment including satellites, mobile and line
communications, consumer electronics, and power distribution systems.
The magnitude of damage from EMP would depend on the altitude of a
nuclear weapon when it detonates, its yield, the distance of the area
of interest from the weapon at detonation, any intervening geographical
features such as mountains, the local strength of the Earth's magnetic
field, and the level of protection or hardening from EMP of potentially
vulnerable equipment. I believe the likelihood of such attacks is small
and is mitigated by our deterrence posture to include missile defense.
Although not attacks per se, geomagnetic storms resulting from
solar activity can cause effects similar to those resulting from a
nuclear detonation. Solar activity occurs in cycles, and we have seen
an increase in solar activity over the past year. Prior to this
increase, the most recent significant activity occurred in 1989 when a
severe geomagnetic storm caused the collapse of a Canadian power grid.
This predates the tremendous increase in the use of smart phones,
tablets, and other electronic devices we see today, and it's likely
that a storm of similar magnitude in the future would have some effect
on these systems.
In my view, the Nation is not prepared fully to address this
threat. Our military forces are working to harden critical systems
against the effects of EMP. Some systems developed originally during
the Cold War retain some level of hardening. However, the
aforementioned proliferation of modern electronics--especially in
systems using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology poses a
problem. Some militarized COTS have some hardening and/or reside in
metal ship hulls, for example, that provide some degree of protection.
Nevertheless, I do not believe we have a full understanding of the
vulnerabilities of these systems to EMP attacks of various magnitudes.
We need to develop this understanding and improve the resiliency of
these systems. At the same time, we should plan for alternative
concepts of operation for cases when the use of all or some of these
systems is denied. In addition, we should work to keep our deterrence
posture strong to include our missile defense capability.
The Strategic Guidance includes countering weapons of mass
destruction and maintaining a safe, secure, and effective nuclear
deterrent among the primary missions of the U.S. Armed Forces. EMP
would be just one of the effects resulting from a nuclear conflict
between regional powers or a direct nuclear attack on the U.S. forces
or the homeland. For this reason, I believe countering EMP threat can
be considered as a component of these primary missions.
Mr. Franks. 3) I would like to know from your perspective, do you
feel the Nation is currently facing a threat from an EMP attack? Do you
feel that the Nation is prepared to address this threat? And if not,
how would you address mitigating this threat. Further, do you feel the
threat is grave enough to be reflected in our National Strategic
Guidance?
Mr. Berteau. [The information was not available at the time of
printing.]
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