I think we will get started here. Thank you so much for joining us at the heritage foundation. I was told we dont necessarily have to talk about silencing cell phones, but i am going to say that anyway. We usually have a robust online audience and we want to minimize distractions. Thank you for joining us. We are going to talk about a new report on rebuilding the army. Its actually the third paper out, the first talked about how to think about the future, and we released one in the marine corps. This is a major paper on the army, and how to think about its relationship with National Security strategy and how the world is changing, and some recommendations for the path of the army needs to go down with a look out to a 30 year timeframe. We will follow up with a paper on the air force which is coming up next month, wrapping up by the end of the year with a paper on the navy so we have all four Services Covered and thinking about preparations for the future. These papers are meant to give an independent perspective, advice and recommendations to the administration, to the military service in particular, leading officials in the Defense Department and hopefully informs deliberations in congress. This one hits the ball out of the park on that. Starting about 18 months ago, the army embarked on a major effort driven by then secretary of Defense James Mattis with a real focus on getting back to an age of peer competitor fights with major opponents such as russia and china. How do you do things other than in regular warfare, which we have been immersed in for the last 18 years. This paper looks at these challenges. Participating in the discussion will be the author, tom spohr, who directs our center for National Defense here at the heritage foundation. Prior to coming here, he has served in the army for 36 years, retired in 2016. Real blessing having them here. Moderating the discussion will be miss jen judson. She is a land warfare reporter for the defense news and has covered defense matters in the d. C. Area for about eight years. Previously a reporter at and the pro defense recipient of the best analytical reporting award in 2014. Named the best young defense journalist in 2018. I dont know how long you get to carry young as a title [laughter] without further ado, we will turn to a great discussion, then open it up for q a. When we get to that point, we will have someone pass around a microphone. Are inidentify who you the organization you are with soda online audience knows who is speaking. We try to keep focused on questions, not personal statements. Jen thank you to everyone in the audience for being here, and for those also watching online. And tom, thank you for your hard work on this report. This has really triggered a decent amount of discussion and debate in the army community, which is obviously a good thing. We will dive deeper into those issues in our conversation. But it is my feeling that it is a good time to be making suggestions to the army, they are in the process of developing the multidomain operation concept, looking at force structure, and they are heading down an ambitious path of modernization. Just to kick things off, if you could talk about the purpose of the report, why you decided to write this report, and how you went about researching. Talk a little bit about how your background applies to what you were doing in the report. Thomas thank you everyone for being here today, and thank you for moderating this discussion. We embarked on this project, we called it rebuilding americas project or ramp two years ago. We did not know what would be happening at the time these papers came out. Yous important, too, as suggested, the armys paper came out. The army is in the process of a major change of leadership, secretary mccarthy has his confirmation hearing next week, the chief of staff changeover, changed over. There was a clean break point where the army could reevaluate where they are in take a look at things. As the introduction said we have a new National Defense strategy. Even though it was january of 2018, in army terms thats like yesterday. People say why havent the army or department of defense adapted to the new Defense Strategy yet . Its worse than turning an aircraft carrier. It takes years to turn an organization like the army. I think this paper came out a good time for us. The bipartisan budget act passed a month or two ago in Congress Gives the ability to the army to focus on their future, versus these nearterm continuing resolution, shutdown, how will we get through these months . They now have the luxury, assuming congress does what it needs to do, to think about their future in an intellectual way, which is rare in washington dc that you can actually think about these things. Most of our research at heritage is focused on the nearterm fight, so we write a lot about the Defense Authorization act, the f35 fighter and things on congresss plate. This paper and the two that preceeded this are different for us. Looking out further, and i thought after 36 years in the army, i thought i knew a lot about the army, you would think that i did, but it turns out i didnt. Ive never been a futurist, i was always consumed on how do we get the current task done. This was a stretch for me. I had to educate myself on the army before i started writing this paper. I heard the folklore of general sullivan and don starr. And just accepted it as a young army are sir. Army officer. This made me go back and learn it. It was hard, but i liked it. Jen what are some of the areas that you looked at, and what are some of your conclusions . Thomas thanks, jen. I tried to look at all of it. Because i spent a lot of time in the pentagon in particular, and modernization and was a general there, i probably wrote more and more about those problems with which i was most familiar. At equipment modernization, i looked at the Talent Management of general officers, i looked at the concept. I will admit, i am not a conceptual person, so i did my best. I reached out to a lot of people, including some people in this room, for their thoughts. Ive had to go to interviews because i dont live in a conceptual world. Theres a whole group thats almost a career field in the army that thinks about concepts. I was never in that group. So i had to talk to those kinds of people to better understand that. By and large, my conclusion that i reached fairly early on was that the army was on the right path. And that a wholesale revision of the armys modernization plan was not needed, there was course corrections. I saw some areas where the tapestry was fraying around the edges and they could tighten up their story and tighten up their justifications for things. Some places where i could not frankly understand why they were pursuing a particular Modernization Program to the degree they were, longrange fallsgic canons calls in that category. I did my best to understand, but there could be things that are classified and they were not able to share with me. Another example of that is the requirements for the optionally manned fighting vehicle. I did my best to understand them only to find out near the end that they are classified fouo and i couldnt get them. I couldnt fully explore why the army was pursuing that vehicle to the degree it was. I looked at manpower. How big should the army be, how quickly should they grow their force . And i looked at organizations. What kind of organizations do they have now and what should they grow in the future . And i found some areas where i think they should develop some new organizations. Jen diving a little bit more into the modernization side, and using to think they are on track, but this is obviously a complicated thing and they are moving quickly. There is probably a lot of room for error at this point. It sounds like since its early on, course correction could be a good thing. What are some of the future challenges they could be facing in executing modernization plans . Thomas theres lots of challenges. One of the first things i figured out is i looked at the history and luck plays an underappreciated factor. You could have the best thought out and conceived plan, and if the world environment changes in and your army needs to go do something, fight a fight, you are not able to modernize to a degree you need. Maybe you could salvage some aspects of the Modernization Program, but you will not be able to carry out the plan you had envisioned. Looking back, you can see that did not occur in some cases. The army kept driving on, thinking that whatever we were fighting, that is just going to go away and we can continue with our plan. You see that with scs. Army valiantly tried to keep going down the path with the future comeback system fighting counter two counterinsurgency fights. Thats not the first time but it is the most salient example to me. So luck. If your funding gets cut, and whether you like it or not, the armys funding gets cut once every 15 years fairly dramatically. You cannot modernize if you are trying to keep your service alive and keep your nose above water. You do the best you can to survive until you get another influx of funding. You cant protect your service and modernize. It is just too hard. That is something i realized. So, i think the army is doing a good job. And one of the things that was underappreciated to me was the difficulty of facing two threats simultaneously. So we talk about russia and china. Its almost a hyphenated word, russiachina. But when you look one level below that, it is very different type of threat they present. China presenting more of a maritime, air threats, russia more of a conventional ground threat. For the time being, they are using the same concept and same types of equipment to address both threats. Willnse is over time that become harder and harder as these threats diverge, as china becomes more capable. It will be harder to manage that duality of threat while also maintaining your counterinsurgency capability. Jen you talk a lot about successes and failures. You mentioned fcs. Can you dive deeper into the successes and failures that we have seen in the past . Do you think the army is applying Lessons Learned from those . Thomas yes. I will talk about some of the i dont want to call them failures because its so pejorative, but i Start Talking in the paper about the pentatonic division, which is the reaction to eisenhowers decision to focus on Nuclear Weapons and how the army was in danger of becoming irrelevant. The chief of staff was persuaded to change his entire force to focus on nuclear warfare. So he created the pentatonic division that had essentially five battle groups, large battle groups. The idea was so big a division, so dispersed that it could survive Nuclear Attack and it could also employ Nuclear Weapons. They rushed into this design, and almost immediately, maybe before it was fielded, people figured out this was not what the army needed to be. It was an example of where they rushed into a design, started designing a force before they even had the concept figured out. Fastforward. There was a concept called active defense in response to a huge soviet army threat in central europe. How do we actually come up with a concept to fight this . He came up with an idea, brilliant man of fighting in an active defense, and falling back to various positions of strength. The dilemma was he did not share this concept widely with the army. It was a small little staff group down at the headquarters. When he finally uncorked this bottle of wine, if you will, it did not meet with acceptance through the army. Whether you like it or not, acceptance in the army is really a critical aspect of whether a concept will succeed or not. He kept it close and when he brought it out, and because he had not shared it and it had this countercultural preference for the defense over offense, and like it or not, all the military services tend to culturally favor the offense, it so it really did not catch on. I was not in the army at the time, but i could sense that the moment i came into the army how we had this concept that nobody really bought into. In terms of successes, those are more fun to talk about. So, i will talk about the stryker brigade combat team. Conceived as the interim force , and fieldedinseki in a record amount of time. It was the idea that we wanted an interim force with stryker brigade combat teams maneuvering in the area of kandahar, or rather, iraq. Im sorry. Very quickly got that concept out, and it was just an example of how when you set your mind to something and you have cohesive leadership and focus on it, it really can come together. Another example would be task force modularity. In the middle of iraq and afghanistan fights, when the army was presented with the requirement more combat team than it had, it modularized the brigades and created more of them. And they were selfsustaining, had their own alto lori their own artillery, organic to that brigade. It happened in almost 18 to 20 months. So, it was really a quick effort. And the classic example most Army Officers will point to is airland battle. It was codified in the 1982 1005 operations, where he really followed all the precepts of changing the army. He was intellectually prepared, he had a great team, he did the homework, talked to everyone about it. In the end, it was a concept that served the army well for 10 years. Jen i know one of the more controversial parts of your paper is regarding reordering prioritization. Longrange precision fire you said to keep at the top, but you suggested bumping next generation combat vehicle and down to the bottom, and below that future vertical lift from the number two to number three spots. He also recommended working the network up to number two. Could you talk about the reasoning with those recommendations . Thomas you are right. The moment my paper was published, my inbox lit up with a number of people interested in my reordering of the modernization priorities. So, i dont know how the army established their first round of priorities. They did not share the rationale, but i thought i would use a very simple analytic method in think about in the multidomain concept, how important is this capability to the successful execution of multidomain operations in the year 2030 . Looking forward, reading the concept, accepting it for what it is, how important is this capability in their concept . And looking at the current force we have today, how close is that capability we have today to what we need in 2030 . So for example, if we have a wonderful fleet of soldier lethality weapons in mind, we in my view, we would be already where we need to be to execute multidomain operations in that area. I took that very simple matrix and applied it to the six modernization areas. In multidomain operations, longrange precision fires are critical, and we are in poor shape today. Longrange precision fires came out right at the top. And if youre going to employ any of these capabilities, especially in multidomain operations, the network is key. Multidomain operations talks about the rapid and continuous integration in war fighting domains. If you dont have the network to do that, you cannot do those multidomain operations. That came out at number two. Similarly, i went down the line, air and missile defense, we are in pretty poor shape. That is going to be a big thing. It came out number three. And just on down the lane. To make the list of the six modernization priorities, the already needs your thing is importance. In my ranking, future vertical lift came out and number six but that does not mean vertical lift is not important. That is six in a list of dozens upon dozens of army programs. The fact that you made number six should make you feel really good. That was not reflected in the correspondence i got from my friends. [laughter] thomas it was useful for me. I dont presume that the army, as a result of my insightful analysis, will change their modernization priorities. But what i would like is the next time they update them, refresh them, whatever they do, that they also release their rationale for how they came up with that listing, so i could say, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. Because i could not track the pedigree on the multidomain concept of their modernization priorities. Jen i think that is an important point, and something i asked at the defense News Conference a few days ago. What was the rationale for the priorities . And actually did not really get a straight answer, but one thing he did mention was they are adamant that the priorities are not going to change right now. That is important to them making the case to congress to not disrupt the list. Thomas let me add, i did that. I had the job of responding to that, so i have been on the cynical end of this business. And often we would say, where do we have the most money . Where are we most at risk . X billionif we have dollars in aviation, it makes sense that aviation is the number one priority. Money, priorities, it all matches. I got this. Thats the pentagon view of the eers and a budget view of the world. Its not necessarily the correct view. Jen and if funding were to change, priorities could shift. Could you talk a little bit about some of the feedback you did get, without naming names . The counter rationale you got, especially in terms of future vertical lift and next generation combat vehicle. Thomas a lot of the feedback was positive. Including from the chief of staff of the army and the secretary of the army. I met with the chief of staff of the army and we discussed this concept for 90 minutes. I am due to meet with secretary mccarthy later this month. They been receptive to my ideas and appreciate of the second opinion. I dont want to characterize this as the army has circled its wagons. They are not. General murphy, i sent a copy of the draft papers and it was sent to the fourstar contemporaries and army major commands, and it has filtered all throughout the army. Feedback has been good, but i have been asked about my rationale. Aviation being one of them. Most people say, you dont understand. You dont understand why future vertical lift is so important to the future fight. I said i think youre probably right. I think i am one of 10 people who read multidomain operations, the concept, cover to cover 10 times. I have held it to the light trying to interpret it and could not really find an overwhelming argument in favor of the future vertical lift. That was one criticism. I have gotten a little bit of criticism about the priority that i ascribed to nextgeneration combat vehicles. That could be that i just cant see how they establish their requirements. The