• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Rumsfeld Says Military Transformation Needed Now to Meet New Threats

(Pentagon releases secretary's annual report to President, Congress)
(2230)
The United States must transform its armed forces in order to win the
present war against terrorism and, at the same time, prepare for
future wars notably different from those of the past century, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the President and Congress in his
annual report.
"Current and future enemies will seek to strike the United States and
U.S. forces in novel and surprising ways," Rumsfeld said in the
report. "Now is precisely the time to make changes," he said. "The
attacks on September 11 lent urgency to this endeavor."
The secretary outlined six goals that "represent the operational focus
for our efforts to transform [the] U.S. Armed Forces":
-- Protect the U.S. homeland and defeat weapons of mass destruction
and their means of delivery;
-- Project and sustain power in distant environments;
-- Deny enemies sanctuary by developing capabilities for persistent
surveillance, tracking, and rapid engagement;
-- Leverage information technology to link up joint forces;
-- Protect information systems from attack; and
-- Maintain unhindered access to space and protect U.S. space
capabilities from enemy attack.
The full text of the secretary's report is available at:
http://www.defenselink.mil/execsec/adr2002/index.htm
Following is the text of the Message from the Secretary of Defense
that precedes the report:
(begin text)
Message from the Secretary of Defense
On September 11, terrorists attacked the symbols of American freedom,
prosperity, and military might. They visited violence on thousands of
innocent people small children, mothers and fathers, people of many
nationalities and religions. In less than a month, the United States
responded. The President issued the call. Like-minded countries joined
with the United States in flexible coalitions to fight the threat of
terrorism to international security. Military forces took up forward
positions in Central and South Asia. The United States set the
conditions to prevail in Afghanistan, sent in forces on the ground to
work with anti-Taliban Afghan forces, and launched devastating
military attacks against Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds in
Afghanistan. And before the fires at the World Trade Center had burned
out, the Taliban had been driven from power and the foreign terrorists
they sheltered, while not gone completely, were on the run.
Americans can rightfully take pride in the courage and achievements of
the men and women in uniform. But U.S. forces will face even greater
challenges ahead. U.S. military actions to date represent only the
beginning of a long, dangerous, and global war against international
terrorism. And even as U.S. forces fight the war against terrorism,
other challenges loom on the horizon.
A New Imperative: Winning the War While Transforming the Force
The attacks of September 11 showed that the United States is in a new
and dangerous period. The historical insularity of the United States
has given way to an era of new vulnerabilities. Current and future
enemies will seek to strike the United States and U.S. forces in novel
and surprising ways. As a result, the United States faces a new
imperative: It must both win the present war against terrorism and
prepare now for future wars -- wars notably different from those of
the past century and even from the current conflict. Some believe
that, with the U.S. in the midst of a difficult and dangerous war on
terrorism, now is not the time to transform our Armed Forces. The
opposite is true. Now is precisely the time to make changes. The
attacks on September 11th lent urgency to this endeavor.
Transforming the U.S. Armed Forces is necessary because the challenges
presented by this new century are vastly different from those of the
last century. During the Cold War, America faced a relatively stable
and predictable threat. The challenges of the 21st century are much
less predictable. Who would have imagined, only a few months ago, that
terrorists would hijack commercial airliners, turn them into missiles,
and use them to strike the Pentagon and the World Trade Center Towers?
But it happened. America will inevitably be surprised again by new
adversaries striking in unexpected ways. As adversaries gain access to
weapons of increasing range and power, future surprise attacks could
grow vastly more deadly than those on September 11. Surprise and
uncertainty thus define the challenge the Department of Defense faces
in this new century to defend the nation against the unknown, the
unseen, and the unexpected.
Charting a New Course: The First Year
Well before September 11th, the senior civilian and military leaders
of the Department were in the process of determining new approaches to
deterring and defeating adversaries. With the Quadrennial Defense
Review, senior leaders took a long, hard look at the emerging security
environment and came to the conclusion that a new approach to defense
was needed.
Much has been accomplished in fashioning such an approach. In the past
year, the Department of Defense:
-- Adopted a new defense strategy;
-- Replaced the decade-old two major theater war construct to sizing
U.S. forces with a new approach more appropriate for this century;
-- Reorganized and revitalized the missile defense research and
testing program, free of the constraints of the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty;
-- Reorganized to provide better focus on space capabilities;
-- Fashioned a new Unified Command Plan to enhance homeland defense
and accelerate transformation;
-- Adopted a new approach to strategic deterrence through the Nuclear
Posture Review that increases our security while reducing the number
of strategic nuclear weapons; and
-- Adopted a new approach to balancing risks.
These achievements were accomplished while fighting a war on terrorism
-- not a bad start for a Department that historically has had a
reputation for resisting change.
Accelerating Transformation
Transformation lies at the heart of this new approach to defense. The
development of transformational capabilities and forces will be given
strategic focus by the principal challenges and opportunities under
the new strategy. The Department has distilled these into six
operational goals. In developing future capabilities, U.S. forces
must:
-- Above all, protect critical bases of operations (most importantly,
the U.S. homeland) and defeat weapons of mass destruction and their
means of delivery;
-- Project and sustain power in distant anti-access and area-denial
environments;
-- Deny enemies sanctuary by developing capabilities for persistent
surveillance, tracking, and rapid engagement;
-- Leverage information technology and innovative network-centric
concepts to link up joint forces;
-- Protect information systems from attack; and
-- Maintain unhindered access to space and protect U.S. space
capabilities from enemy attack.
These six goals represent the operational focus for our efforts to
transform U.S. Armed Forces. Our experiences on September 11th and in
the Afghan campaign have reinforced the importance of moving the U.S.
defense posture in these directions. The Department has established an
Office of Force Transformation to help to ensure these goals will be
met. It will also seek to ensure that changes occur not only in the
systems DoD acquires, but also in military culture and the
organizations that drive those investment decisions.
Through the 2003 budget, the Department has laid out the signposts for
transformation. Over the next decade, a portion of the force will be
transformed. It will serve as a vanguard and signal of the changes to
come. Ground forces will be lighter, more lethal, and highly mobile.
They will be capable of insertion far from traditional ports and air
bases and will be networked with long-range precision-strike systems.
Naval and amphibious forces will be able to overcome anti-access and
area-denial threats, operate close to an enemy's shores, and project
power deep inland. Aerospace forces will be able to locate and track
mobile enemy targets over vast areas, and in combination with land and
sea forces, strike them rapidly at long ranges without warning. The
joint force will be networked in order to conduct highly complex and
distributed operations over vast distances and in space.
Managing Risks
The Department of Defense cannot achieve the goals of the new defense
strategy without a new approach to managing different kinds of defense
risks. The previous threat-based approach placed overwhelming priority
on the near-term operational risks associated with the two major
theater war construct. This had the effect of crowding out investments
in other critical areas. During the past decade, the Department of
Defense invested too little in people, modernizing equipment, and
maintaining the defense infrastructure. As we create the 21st century
military, the defense program must invest with an eye toward balancing
the various risks.
For the first time, the program of the Department of Defense is
presented in this report in terms of a new risk framework. It
identifies the following four areas of risk and the Department's
programs to address each.
-- Force management risk results from issues affecting the ability to
recruit, retain, train, and equip sufficient numbers of quality
personnel and sustain the readiness of the force while accomplishing
its many operational tasks.
-- Operational risk stems from factors shaping the ability to achieve
military objectives in a near-term conflict or other contingency.
-- Future challenges risk derives from issues affecting the ability to
invest in new capabilities and develop new operational concepts needed
to dissuade or defeat mid- to long-term military challenges.
-- Institutional risk results from factors affecting the ability to
develop management practices, processes, metrics, and controls that
use resources efficiently and promote the effective operation of the
Defense establishment.
The purpose of this framework is to allow the Department to consider
tradeoffs in allocating resources among fundamental objectives. In
creating the 21st century military, it would be imprudent to neglect
any of these areas. The Department of Defense must wisely allocate
resources and structure programs to create a portfolio of capabilities
that is balanced appropriately for the variety of challenges we face.
The President's FY 2003 Budget Submission to the Congress establishes
such a balance.
The problems of the Department and the risks they pose have developed
over many years and will take time to redress. The immediate task
before the Department is to stop the erosion in capability resulting
from under investment during the past decade. The current budget
request focuses on this task while seeking additional investments to
put the Armed Forces on a path to reducing and managing all four
categories of risk.
Conclusion
Today, one often hears that everything has changed after September 11.
While the nation is united in support of the courageous efforts of its
Armed Forces, the danger exists that complacency will slowly return.
The temptation will arise to return to the old ways of doing things.
Free people must be vigilant to not forget or disregard the lessons of
September 11. One of those lessons is that dangers are likely to
increase, not diminish. Our lives and liberties and those of future
generations depend on the contribution of the U.S. Armed Forces. To
preserve our freedom, security, and prosperity, we must ensure our men
and women in uniform have the resources they need to contribute to
peace and security in our still dangerous world.
Each generation must bequeath to the next the capabilities to ensure
its security. Today, we have the security of future generations of
Americans in our hands. We must get it right.
(end text)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)