Senate Hearing on 06 QDR

Rumsfeld's statement, direct quotes in italics:

The military must be above political and parochial views.

Only 200,000 soldiers in the Army on Dec. 7, 1941. Ranked right below Romania.

Within 3 months Taliban and Al’Qaeda were routed in a land-locked country thousands of miles away.

Urgency of the military changes made plain on Sept 11.

Radical Islam is a cult of murder and suicide. They cannot win battles, they must challenge us through other means.

They are experts at manipulating the global media. They have a strategy: force us to abandon Iraq, thereby gaining a base of operation. Expel the Americans from Iraq. Establish Islamic authority. Extend the Jihad.

It is not a war between Islam and the West. It is a conflict between moderate and radical Muslims.

We need to leave behind an inclusive, competent government that will be dedicated to moving the country forward.

We must not only meet today’s threats, we must plan for tomorrow’s contingencies.

No nation, no matter how powerful, has the resources and capability to defend everywhere at every moment of the day or night against every conceivable type of technique. The only way to protect the American people, therefore, is to provide our military with as wide a range of options as possible, to focus on developing a range of capabilities, rather than preparing to confront any one threat.

The word transformation has attracted a good deal of attention, but in many ways it’s more accurate to see this process of continuous change as a shift in emphasis or a shift in weight, from the practices and assumptions of the past to the kinds of arrangements necessary in the 21st century. We’ve shifted, for example, from preparing to fight conventional wars, which we’re still prepared to do, to a greater emphasis on fighting unconventional, or irregular, or asymmetrical against terrorist cells or enemy guerillas.

One of the most important shifts underway is the role and importance of intelligence. The US military has long excelled in engaging targets once they’ve been identified. In the future we must be better in ascertaining where the enemy’s going next, rather than simply where the enemy was. We’ve got to be able to find the enemy, and to fix the enemy, as well as be able to finish. The United States military has enormous capacity to finish, and insufficient capacity to find and fix. And this means upgrading US intelligence capability, both human and technological, and more effectively linking technology to operations, in real time, in the field.

We’re also shifting from the typically American impulse to try to do everything ourselves, to helping partners and allies develop their own capacity to better govern and defend themselves. This is particular important in the GWOT where many of our nation’s most dangerous enemies exist within the borders of countries we’re not at war with. The shift is at the heart of the effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other nations like the Republic of Georgia and the Philippines.

There are many other shifts in our posture and thinking: from a peace-time tempo to a war-time urgency, from operating in an era of certainty to one of surprise, from avoiding risk to managing and balancing risk, from confronting other nation-states to confronting decentralized terrorist networks, from garrisoned force defending fixed frontiers to expeditionary forces that can be deployed rapidly to anywhere in the world.

We have the most agile, skilled, and expeditionary Army in history. Any who use the word broken are incorrect. Think about the many rapid, complex, and dangerous operations the Army now undertakes all around the globe. They’ve made the extraordinary so routine that nobody pauses to think about what they do.

Where is this heading? Imagine a colonel proficient in Arabic whose knowledge of city management equals his skill in marksmanship, a commander with the flexibility in tactics and options that President Roosevelt entrusted to General Eisenhower, a self-sustaining brigade that surges rapidly from the US to a forward-operating facility elsewhere in the world to work with newly-trained allies against terrorist cells that threaten a new democracy. As we imagine that colonel, that commander, that brigade, and that facility, we have a notion of what America’s transformed armed forces might look like in the years ahead: changes that will be essential to defeating a range of enemies, changes essential to keeping our nation safe.

In discussing all this, the tendency will be to talk about numbers—numbers of troops, number of weapons, number of platforms, and the like. But I want to conclude by talking about a different metric that crossed my desk a few months ago: the number 371. That’s the total number of silver stars and service crosses that have been awarded since September 11, 2001 to our nation’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Were it not for the exacting standards the military has for these awards, I suspect the numbers would be much higher, given the superb performance of our troops in places like Falluja, Ramadi, Kandahar, and other grueling battlefields in this global war on terror.

In a conversation about this war a few weeks ago, I was asked, “Where are the heroes? In prior wars everyone knew the heroes.” Well, there are a great many, and they’re doing exactly what needs to be done, to keep our country safe and to preserve freedom for our children and theirs. I think we can all do a better job, media and the military alike, telling their stories. They are volunteers, every one of them, who could be doing something else, certainly something much easier, much safer, better compensated, but they step forward each year to raise their hands and say, “Send me.”

Eisenhower said, “We face a hostile ideology, global in scope, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. To meet it successfully, we must carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle, with liberty the stake.”

We will persevere in the Long War we face today.