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By GEN Colin L. Powell,
U.S. Army
U.S. Naval Institute Second Annapolis Seminar and 118th Annual Meeting, U.S. Naval Academy, 24 April 1992.
Thank you for that kind introduction, Admiral Lynch. The U-S. Naval Institute is well-known in our profession for the risks it is willing to take. Years ago it took a risk on an unknown insurance salesman named Tom Clancy. Last year it took a risk on a retired businessman named Ed Miller, who wanted to write about War Plan Orange. It turned out to be a magnificent book. And today it is taking a risk in putting me up here on the platform—sandwiched between Bill Buckley and Bob Woodward.
Frankly, I can’t say enough good things about the U.S. Naval Institute.
In my judgment, you publish one of the very best Defense journals in the world. I have read it ever since I was a young officer. I can’t wait to read each new issue. Why? It’s not because reading Proceedings makes me feel good every time, and it’s not because I agree with everything that appears in it—that’s for sure. And it’s not because I know everyone who writes for it. The Naval Institute tries to grow so many different kinds of authors that there’s no way I could he familiar with them all. No, it’s because Proceedings makes me think.
It presents articles that are not afraid to take a stand. It gets my juices flowing and sometimes it even gets my blood boiling. But that’s what I need, and that’s what I want, to better understand not only the Sea Services, but more and more about joint operations, and about what our troops are thinking out there in the field.
I like Proceedings so much that I even wrote for it once. In the May 1990 issue, I had an article that talked about the future. It looked back at the great changes hat had been afoot in the world for the preceding five years, and it projected a continuing need for strong U.S. military forces. That was only two years ago—I had just begun my tour as Chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff]. But today, it seems like 20 years ago. Look at all the changes that have swept over the world since then: The East German regime, the Soviet Union, and the Warsaw Pact are all gone now. The Iron Curtain has ceased to exist. The Red Army is out of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and also on its way out of Poland and Germany. It is on its way out at home, too, as the successor republics to the old Soviet Union fracture into new political entities, all of which want the old Red Army to go. The once-might Soviet Navy is splintered, too. Many of its units lie rusting at their moorings.
In Vladivostok last July, I saw many of them. Other ships, especially those of the Black Sea Fleet, are involved in an ugly tug-of-war among the republics. Still others are being peddled in the marketplaces of the world for cold, hard cash. And even now, the vaunted super-secret Soviet shipyards no longer keep secrets, as they look for commercial work.
Nonetheless, there are still some fine warships in that navy, and nuclear weapons are still carried on board many of them; we cannot dismiss that capability. On the other hand, the fleets and the naval aviation arm and the ambitions of Admiral Gorshkov rapidly are joining the Red Army as subjects for history books— but not for the next edition of the Naval Institute’s Combat Fleets of the World.
Yes, the Cold War has run its course—but there have been many other changes, as well, since 1990. Most important have been the changes brought about by Operation Desert Storm, which was, of course, a victory: a victory for American foreign policy, a victory for American leadership, a victory for American diplomacy and—above all—a victory for American arms.
Perhaps Desert Storm’s greatest significance to men and women in uniform has been its role as a change agent. Our experience in Desert Storm has truly changed much of what we are doing. In particular, it has changed forever the parameters of the Defense debates that take place in this country. What once was hotly debated is now moot or uncontested; what once was unthinkable is now a matter of routine discourse. For example, there can be no more debate about the relative importance of sea control, power projection, or sealift— we have seen clearly that we need all three now. There can be no more debate about the feasibility of short- notice multicarrier operations, or of carrier operations inside confined waters such as the Persian Gulf. Desert Storm made such exercises routine. There can be no debate any longer about maritime strategy versus coalition warfare, for the Sea Services have demonstrated clearly their integrated mastery of both. And there can be no more debate about the utility of amphibious warfare or of maritime prepositioning ships or of Tomahawk missiles or of joint air operations. They proved their value, once and for all. Desert Storm did that for us—allowing us to move upward and onward to a new level of discourse, a new level of discussion.
The tired old Defense debates, going back to the 1960s, have finally given way to discussion of new issues that are relevant to the 1990s and to the 21st century. The Cold War is over and, at the same time, our experiences in Desert Shield and Desert Storm have unshackled our minds. What have these developments meant for the United States and for our armed forces?
- We have had to develop a new strategy.
- We have had to come up with a new force mix.
- We have had to determine new force levels, for what we call the Base Force.
The strategy is now in place. It acknowledges the realities of the world we are entering and it derives from the national interests and objectives of the United States as we encounter those realities. Our new strategy is neither a continental strategy, nor a maritime strategy, nor an aerospace strategy. It is a National Military Strategy for a nation whose geopolitical and economic realities make it simultaneously a continental power, a maritime power, and an aerospace power. We are a world power—the world power—like no other in history. Our strategy must reflect that reality; and our strategy does.
Our National Military Strategy also provides the rationale for our future force levels. The base force concept is firmly in place today. I’d like to hit the rewind button for you and go back to late 1989, when we began to formulate the strategy that is now on the street. At that time, we also began to design the Base Force that we believe is now the right force for the nation, to face the challenging years ahead.
When I became Chairman in the fall of 1989, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and I sat down and began to look at where we were heading. With respect to that changing world, the two of us had come from similar backgrounds and shared similar perspectives. For the preceding two years I had served in the National Security Council, as Deputy National Security Advisor and later as National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Mr. Cheney had been in the House of Representatives, of course, as the Republican Whip. The two years I spent at the NSC were a remarkable time for me. I had been an Army Corps commander in Europe, right up against the Iron Curtain—and then suddenly I was in the West Wing of the White House, working with President Reagan and his Cabinet to deal with a major change in the world scene that seemed to be coming in the person of Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev, and perestroika and glasnost. Every week, a new initiative would come along. Could we believe what we were beginning to see? Or was this a trick or a big trap? We had to wonder.
In the course of those two years, I participated in three summit meetings with Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev. With each new meeting it became clearer to me that President Gorbachev was deadly serious about restructuring the Soviet Union. He convinced me that he had come to the realization that the Soviet Union was broken. It was not ready for the 21st century, and only the most fundamental sort of change would make it ready. I recall two particular meetings with Mr. Gorbachev. In one, with Secretary of State George Schultz present in Moscow, Mr. Gorbachev said, “I'm not playing a game. This is for real. I m going to work as hard as I can for as long as I can to bring these changes about, and whenever I step off the stage, what I will have done at that point will be irreversible—they will not be able to go back.”
Then in December 1988, a few weeks before the end of the Reagan administration, Mr. Gorbachev came to New York and gave a historic speech at the United Nations to announce—unilaterally, without concessions on our part—that the Soviet Union would reduce its armed forces by 500,000 troops. Then he came over to Governors Island to meet with President Reagan and President-elect George Bush. He looked across the table and said:
"Some of your advisors think this is a game, but it is not a game, it is for real. It is a real revolution. People cheered when I announced the revolution in 1986. The cheering was not so loud in 1987. Now it’s 1988, and the'cheering has ended. The people don’t like the revolution. But we are going to have a revolution. It is here. It is going to be difficult and you will see that I am playing real politics and I am going to change my country in a way that no one could have imagined.”
At that point I became convinced that he was deadly serious.
A year later, I became Chairman. Having seen another year’s worth of change in the Soviet Union, we knew that the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the civilian leaders in the Department had to begin planning for a future that was going to be fundamentally different from anything we had seen for the preceding 45 years. And that’s exactly what we did. In the fall of 1989, we began to examine what that future might look like if Gorbachev’s revolution actually were to transpire. The following things might happen:
- The Warsaw Pact would collapse.
- The Berlin Wall would come down.
- Germany would be reunified.
If you carried this to a logical conclusion, it ultimately meant major reductions in the Soviet armed forces—reductions of a type we could never have imagined before. The only reason Mr. Gorbachev would have wanted a world with less tension would have been to give him the opportunity to reduce his military strength. Those funds, those resources, and that energy then could be used to save his nation and his people, by getting them ready for the next century.
We made assumptions in the fall of 1989 that by the middle of the 1990s we would see reductions of 40-50% in the size of Soviet armed forces, or whatever forces might come after Soviet armed forces—and similar reductions in the size of their military budget.
We also said if that proved to be the case, logic then dictated that the entire notion of fighting a global World War III was behind us. The concept of global war had vanished, taking with it the fundamental, theoretical underpinning of our strategy or the preceding 45 years. This gave us the opportunity to design a new strategy and a force structure appropriate to that strategy.
What were the threats that would remain to our nation after the demise of the Cold War? After the demise of the possibility of global war?
The first thing we concluded was that the world is still a dangerous place, and the end of the Cold War still leaves widespread uncertainty and instability. There will be challenges to democracy, challenges to peace, and challenges to freedom. People around the world will look to the United States to provide the political leadership and the military strength to deal with those challenges. Accordingly, we began to formulate a strategy that would deal with regional crises that would require our response: Southwest Asia seemed to be the most critical of those; Northeast Asia, especially Korea, seemed to be another potential scene of regional crisis. Then, we also determined that after the Cold War the United States needed to remain as politically and militarily engaged across our oceans as we ever were during the Cold War. During this period of instability, our friends and our potential enemies still needed to see us in Europe, in the Pacific, in East Asia, and in Southwest Asia. So we needed to maintain our forward presence, and we needed to be able to respond to crises. We also needed to be able to reconstitute our forces if we guessed wrong, and Mr. Gorbachev and his successors proved less successful than we had hoped.
Then we talked about our needs for forces across the Atlantic, and talked about our need—again, after the Cold War—for forces across the Pacific. We talked about contingency forces to respond to crises and then we discussed a final category: strategic forces. We must never lose sight of the fact that the Soviet Union or any nation that might take the place of the Soviet Union Would be nuclear armed, with a capability of destroying the United States. In order to maintain our presence across these great oceans that mark our frontiers, and to be able to respond to crises, we will continue to need significant sea-control and power-projection capabilities.
With this strategy in hand, we began the more difficult task— fhe far more difficult task—of designing a structure to support h. Now, the classic way to design a structure is from the bottom up, by determining what forces you need to meet your worldwide requirements, then building them from scratch. We did that. As a result of that effort, we got to a level that we call the Base Force. We knew quite clearly that we could make signif- tcant reductions in our forces deployed in Europe and we slashed Army and Air Force strength there by more than 50%, while Waking only modest reductions with respect to our naval presence across the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea.
We knew we could also make some modest reductions in our Air Force and Army forces in the Pacific as well, and we could make some reductions in our base structure here in the United States. Through a process of debate and dialogue, we finally got to what we believe was the right level. It amounted to roughly a 25% reduction in the overall size of our forces. We presented it to the President. He approved it, and articulated the strategy and the structural concept in a speech he gave on 2 August 1990, the day the Iraqis invaded Kuwait.
So rather than drawing down at that time, we went off to fight, in one of the most difficult challenges the U.S. armed forces have ever faced. Six months later, having succeeded in that conflict the new, post-Cold War world. And now we are executing that plan. It was a bottom-up design, but—as I tell all of my questioners in Congress, I do not have a bottom-up force. I am responsible for a much-larger force-in-being. If we are to let go 500,000 active-duty men and women, to take out 250,000 reservists, to eliminate 100 programs, to "shut down 700 bases, and cut out 200,000 civilian employees, we must do that gradually over time not at the snap of a finger to deal with a particular budget problem. These are men and women who have dedicated their lives to the service of our nation. So we must draw down slowly, giving all of us enough time to get down to this new Base Force level in an orderly way.
We think this strategy is sound. We have been making the case to Congress and I am very pleased to say that so far I believe that Congress will understand this case—at least for the next few years. That is how we put together the National Military Strategy and the Base Force. They weren't designed for 1990 or 1991 or even 1992. They were designed assuming positive trends in the world environment. We will not reach Base-Force levels until 1994 or 1995. Any calls for us to go lower or to draw down faster at this point are misguided, for they would not serve the interests of our nation well. We are not going to break this force by demobilizing while the world is in'such a period of uncertainty and instability, because we could be called tomorrow to face another crisis, somewhere else in the world.
The Base Force we field must be every bit as good and every bit as proud as the one you saw in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. We owe that to the American people. And if there is one thing that I am committed to, the Chiefs are committed to, and the President and the Secretary of Defense are committed to—it is that we will not let this force be broken while we are bringing it down to the proper level.
The National Military Strategy isn’t perfect; the Base Force isn’t perfect; but neither is the world we face. The National Military Strategy is a reasonable statement of what the United States needs to survive and prosper in the turbulent world of reality. The Base Force is a robust threat-based and capabilities-based force that will protect the nation amid the uncertainties of the future.
The Base Force will also pay a peace dividend. I defy any other department of government to make the claim that I am able to make—that the Department of Defense actually is paying a peace dividend, by cutting its work force, by cutting its programs, and by turning money back to the U.S. taxpayers. It’s also a force that discharges our alliance obligations—even while reducing commitments overall—so that all of our allies remain protected. Forces are still deployed in Europe, in Southwest Asia, in the Mediterranean, and in the Indian Ocean. Capable U.S.' ground and air forces will still be available to work with our friends in Europe and in Northeast Asia, because that’s where our friends still want them—and that’s where it is in our national interest for them to be. For their part, naval forces will remain strong, capable, and able to stand offshore, to provide ready presence or rapid response to crises.
Most important, the Base Force has given us something we can believe in and something to fight for—something we can take to the American people, something we can take to the Congress, and something we can show our friends to comfort them and something we can show any potential enemies to chill their ambition. Above all. our new strategy and Base Force protect our young men and women in uniform today. These are not draftees waiting to get out; all of them are volunteers, who hope to stay in. We have a solemn responsibility to show them that their recent sacrifices were not in vain, and to keep alive their hope that most of them will have bright futures, as they continue to serve this great nation and people.
This brings me to a final observation:
Last year was remarkable for yet another reason. The parades in support of Desert Storm veterans brought this nation together—once again—with the young men and women who serve it so well. Last year, a love affair exploded between the armed forces of the United States and the American people. Our pub- lie saw the very best and brightest of our youth—proud, clean, patriotic, loyal, trained to do a job, and willing to do a job, willing to sacrifice—and the country fell in love with those young men and women. It is our responsibility to make sure that love affair continues. It is our responsibility to make sure that if another crisis ever comes along—this year, next year, or at the end of the century—we will have young men and women who are well trained, well equipped, proud, loyal, and enjoying the full support of their countrymen. We owe the American people no less—and I’m determined that we will give them no less.
Question: When you were planning in 1990 for the Base Force, you also were prescribing a change to the Unified Command structure. You have accomplished one of the changes that you proposed by instituting the Strategic Command. Would you comment on what happened to the other part of that proposal? Powell: It was rumored that we planned to change, totally, the Unified Command Plan. We were examining the Unified Command Plan to see if there were efficiencies we could generate as the force got smaller. There were some who believed that when we used the terms, “Atlantic Forces,” “Pacific Forces,” and “Contingency Forces,” we tipped off what we intended for the Unified Command Plan. One Proceedings author even took it to the extreme: that Army general in the Pentagon was going to put another Army general in Norfolk, to take over the Atlantic fleet. But that was not our plan. We were not out to change the entire Unified Command Plan; we only wanted to do what made sense. So far, we have not eliminated a single unified or specified command, because—over the past two years, as we went through this—we saw that during this period of transition each one of them continues to perform an important function by representing us around the world, by maintaining presence, and by working with our friends and allies.
In Atlantic Forces, for example, there will continue to be the Atlantic Command, European Command, Central Command, and—backing them up—the Forces Command, to provide forces for deployment. The only change we have made so far—which seems to us to be very sensible—is to eliminate the Strategic Air Command and create the Strategic Command, which finally puts together the Air Force elements and the Navy elements of our strategic forces. That command will stand up on 1 June 1992 and will be commanded by Air Force General Lee Butler, the' current SAC commander. Then it will rotate to a Navy admiral, who then will become responsible for all U.S. strategic forces. This is not to say that—as we get smaller—we can’t make sensible choices with respect to the command structure. For example, we’ve got to cut back on headquarters staffs. We cannot bring out 50% of our troops in Europe without downsizing the headquarters we had there for twice as many troops. So we are compressing—but so far, I have not found any particular unified or specified command that I am prepared to recommend for elimination.
Question: Would you comment on what role the Merchant Marine will play in the new military strategy?
Powell: One of the things we put into the Base Force was quite a bit of additional funding for Sealift. One of the shortcomings we had during Operation Desert Shield—and its been a shortcoming we’ve had for many years—is the ability to project conventional ground power (e.g., heavy Army divisions and sustaining support for all our forces) across the oceans. Congress had given us $1.8 billion of prior-year funding for this purpose. And this fiscal year we’ve added another billion dollars to our Sealift program, to do several things:
> Purchase commercially available Roll-On/Roll-Off ships.
- Put them through minor modifications to make them compatible with military-equipment needs.
- Begin building, in U.S. shipyards, some new ships to give us long-term capability—ships designed for specialized purposes— which will also inject some life into the U.S. shipbuilding industry.
All this suggests to me a brighter future for our Merchant Marine. We’re investing money in it now. Transportation Secretary Andrew Card and others are examining the right way to do this to establish a stock-fund arrangement, where ships would be built at U.S. government expense, then leased out privately for others to use in commercial business. We are debating whether we would recall them only in time of crisis, or whether some should be purchased and laid up, hot and ready to go, upon outbreak of crisis. I think this is an exciting good-news story—what Mr. Card is doing and what we’re doing in the Defense Department. We’re cooperating very closely.
Question: Are there any lessons or outcomes from Desert Storm that could be misinterpreted—and are not universally applicable for the future?
Powell: There are many great lessons from Desert Storm that should be applied long into in the future. There are other lessons, unique to Desert Storm, that we should not put into our general- purpose database.
In addition, there were a lot of bad lessons that came out of Desert Storm. Desert Storm was a particular war at a particular time in a particular place. I doubt that we will ever fight another Desert Storm, and we should not let the notion sink into our collective memory that we will someday have to fight another Desert Storm. What we should let sink into our memory is the idea that the nation is best served by a force of broad capability. For example, such a force includes light Army forces that can go in an hour. I can pick up a phone and within one hour they’re on their way. Within one day, they can be anywhere in the world. But this capability is not in competition with a Marine Corps that has the ability to stand offshore to maintain a presence—a very significant presence—and then strike ashore quickly, if needed. We need to have both these capabilities—and nothing in Desert Storm suggested that one is more valuable than the other. What Desert Storm demonstrated to me is that both are valuable, and both ought to be kept in our toolbox for future operations.
Much has been said about Navy air versus Air Force air. All ot it was useful. One of the statistics was that only 17% of the air available came from the Navy—or, in other words, we didn t need six carriers out there. That wasn’t the point. General Norm Schwarzkopf initially had two carriers. As we started the buildup, the thinking was to put in four carriers—and it was this Army guy—right here—who said, “No, we’re going to put in six carriers." And the only reason we had six carriers is that I didn t have time to get a seventh carrier or an eighth earlier or a ninth carrier out there. We’re going to gang up when we go to war in the future!
The lesson from Desert Storm is that the nation ought to have a full range of capabilities available to it. A number of authorities are trying to nail me to the wall by saying that I can’t justify this program or that on the basis of a specific threat. Well—I haven't fought any specific threats lately. I have to fight whatever comes along. Nobody organized a plan for the Korean War. Suddenly, it was just there—and guess what? We had no initial capability, because nobody had identified North Korea as a threat, and nobody had put capability in the force to meet t at threat. So I’m a great believer in designing our force to deal with the likely threats that are out there, but also making it robust enough to deal with the threats that no one ever dreamed of—but are still certain to come along.
The name of the game is winning. The name of the game is not seeing if a computer model will show you that one more ship or one more soldier will win the war for you, but one less ship or one less soldier will lose the war for you. I don't believe i in that kind of strategy.
Instead, I believe that when anyone decides to challenge the armed forces of the United States, the first unit that shows up with the American flag plants it in the ground. The GI with the flag may be an airman or an army troop or a Marine. Or the flag may be flying from the stern of a ship. At that very moment, any would-be adversary has got to understand that behind that first flag are coming hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands—or hundreds of thousands of American warriors, °f all services, if needed. And he'll wish he never started that War.
Question: Please comment on the future of America’s defense industrial base.
Powell: One of the elements of our National Military Strategy, and the Base Force that came from it, was a look at our acquisition, procurement, and research-and-development needs for the future. You've got to remember two things: for the last 40 years we have assumed that World War III would start on two weeks' notice. It might start in Europe, it might start in Asia, it might start in the Pacific or Southwest Asia, but World War fll would start with two weeks' notice and would involve a Passive clash of conventional forces grinding up large quantities of conventional weaponry in Central Europe, in the Mediterranean, in the northern seas, and Korea. But that idea is gone.
We also thought we would need the most sophisticated Weapons in the world, because technology was always chasing us as the Russians developed systems that became as good as ours. Then we had to match a Russian system that was a little better than ours. That’s gone, too. So if you are not expecting a War to begin in two weeks, and if you're no longer being chased by someone else's technology, or you're not chasing theirs, you can take an entirely new look at the research-and-development and acquisition and procurement system.
If our F-15s, for example, are at a certain level of capability and the Russians have capped out below us because their industrial base has gone to pot, then that F-15 fleet of ours is good for a long time to come. We only go up to the next family, the F-22, if the threat to justify it really exists at the time it is ready or if the F-15s are falling out of the sky through obsolescence at that point. This applies to planes, ships, tanks, trucks—everything. We can take a lot longer now to develop a system because We're not chasing anyone, no one is chasing us, and war doesn't start in 14 days. This is one of the places where we can generate huge savings, give the money back to the taxpayers, or help sustain the kind of force we will need for regional conflict, m that kind of an environment, I think it will require something of a shake-out of the defense industrial base. I think many of he companies that had invested heavily in defense as their major source of income and growth, for the last three to four years have started to reshape themselves, to do some divesting and to diversify their business interests. This also will have to apply to shipyards, to ammo plants, and to all other facilities that we had kept warm, or at least available to us, for reconstitution purposes.
While we worry about what we need in our industrial base such as the need to keep the nuclear-power-plant industry alive, we have to look across to Russia. If Russia has an industrial base that could not get started up again for 20 years, then we should not pay a large amount of money to preserve an industrial base in the United States that could start up in five or six years, because we can see our enemy much more clearly these days. We have the ability to start up much quicker than they do. The bottom line is that there's going to be a major shakeout in the defense industry, in my judgement. There will be a major shakeout in what we determine we will need for our reconstitution purposes.
Along those lines—if I could just add one more thought—we need a major shakeout in our base structure, our installation structure, and all of the facilities we have. We must get rid of facilities that are no longer needed in a post-Cold War environment for a smaller force. Any unneeded dollar going to a base or facility is a dollar that isn't going to maintain the regional capability we require. I must make a similar point with respect to our reserve components, our 1.2 million reservists. We have offered up to the Congress a proposal that would reduce that by 25%, down to about 920,000. Why? Because most of the reserve component structure, principally in the Army, is in the structure for what? To get ready for the global war that was going to take place in Europe. Against whom? The Red Army. It's gone. Global war is gone. We can bring the reserves down considerably while still having a solid Total Force policy, turning that money back to the American taxpayer or putting it to more useful work elsewhere in the Department.
Question: I'm curious as to your feelings concerning potential threats to our nation security.
Powell: The Soviet Union has gone away. I'm not terribly worried about Russia now. What I worry about in Russia is that we're looking at a nation and a government that is one deep— Yeltsin. There are no institutions yet below the Kremlin level, of a democratic nature, whose future I would be willing to predict. So we always have to keep something of an eye on Russia. It will be the other major nuclear super power for a long time to come and it will always have one or two million men under arms and will always be the major power on the Eurasian land mass. So I still have to watch Russia.
China continues to increase its defense spending, but I do not yet see the possibility of them constituting a threat to any of their neighbors, or a threat to regional security and stability in a way that requires us to do much more than we are doing with our Pacific presence. They are trying to acquire some more sophisticated airplanes from the former Soviet Union. They've even expressed interest in aircraft carriers. We'll watch that, but I think it'll be quite a long time before we would have to consider China a major regional threat. We will keep our eye on Southwest Asia. Iraq, I think, is very much down now. They are a threat to their own people there, but they are not a threat to their neighbors. We'll have to watch Iran. We'll have to watch Syria. There's a lot of money in that region, a lot of oil to fuel future military buildups—and we have to be careful about that.
And then finally, I must also touch on North Korea. Some interesting things have been happening there in recent months but it still retains a very large army. They still retain a hostile attitude with respect to South Korea, so I would have to watch that as well. Then there are lots of other places in the world where small contingencies could come up that might challenge our interests, but for the most part they would be easily manageable by any size force we keep for the major contingencies we face.
Thank you all very, very much. I’ve enjoyed this enormously. Editor’s Note: Because of space constraints, some questions and answers were not included here.