Editor’s Note: This is an abridged edited version of the address Admiral Winnefeld delivered on 21 February 2017 at the WEST Conference & Exposition cosponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute and AFCEA International.
I believe we are experiencing a disruption in our national security landscape. If so, the U.S. military, including the Navy, must act with urgency to break out of its current conceptual-technical equilibrium, or we risk failure in a future conflict.
A “revolution,” in military terms, may be defined as something we control, such as the advancements in precision-guided weapons and other technologies that shaped what many call the Second Offset. “Disruption,” on the other hand, is something over which we lose control, when a progression of events upends long-held belief systems and fundamentally reshapes or, in some cases, takes down entire institutions.
After such a disruption, organizations look back and realize the evidence pointing to the change was there all the time. Examples abound, such as our recent financial crisis or the destruction of Polaroid by the advent of the digital camera. And it happened at Pearl Harbor 75 years ago.
Historical change can be difficult to see when one is living through it. If disruption is happening today in the security arena, it is because of great turbulence within the four strategic variables—namely, ends, ways, means, and the security environment. We must keep in balance if our nation is to be secure. Whenever one of these variables is out of whack, it upsets the equilibrium, and one or more of the others have to be adjusted to restore balance.
I suggest all four variables are in shoal water today, implying that major adjustments are required. But the military directly controls only its ways, which are what it does with the means provided by our nation. Therefore, if the armed services are to do their part to restore the strategic balance, they need to work much harder on those ways, at what some would call the third horizon of innovation. U.S. Pacific Command Commander Admiral Harry Harris calls this “exponential thinking.” It will demand fresh intellectual energy from our people—in the military and industry—to face hard realities, merge completely new concepts with new technologies, and then forcefully put the resulting solutions into place.
The Deteriorating Security Environment
While the nation has faced far more dangerous times, never has it confronted a security environment as complex and dynamic as we see today. There are many threats: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and violent extremism—all of them at work on a choppy sea of globalism, population growth, climate change, and the information revolution.
Two principal factors in this environment concern me greatly. First is what our competitors are really trying to do to us strategically. Fortunately, these actors do not have both the capability and the intent to directly challenge the United States kinetically on a large scale—at least at the moment. Rather, they are going after the “global operating system”—the system of alliances, laws, rules, norms, standards, democratic principles, values, agreements, and organizations that they dislike so much.
This global system is in place because our nation’s “greatest generation” experienced two terrible wars and a great depression in the first half of the last century—which were rooted in the absence of such a system. They established it to prevent those things from happening again, and they did a pretty good job. It is something most Americans do not understand or simply take for granted. But it has kept us out of open, major power conflicts and led to unprecedented prosperity for more than 70 years.
This system is under attack and will only last as long as our nation is willing to hold it together, mostly through the use of five catalysts: credible diplomacy, security guarantees, free trade, rule of law, and values. If these catalysts degrade—through ignorance or intent—the system’s glue will start to dissolve, leading to U.S. partners hedging their bets and adversaries enjoying what Henry Kissinger called “the patient accumulation of advantage.”
There is evidence of this happening now: Russian interference in our and others’ elections; China filling a vacuum created by emerging U.S. protectionism; the Philippines edging toward China; and Iran routinely violating U.N. Security Council resolutions. These are only a few examples.
My second concern is how our major adversaries evolved to challenge the United States on the battlefield while we were preoccupied with counterinsurgency fights and nation-building. These hostile forces blend conventional, irregular, political, economic, legal, cyber, and information warfare into a cohesive campaign intended to outpace an opponent’s will and ability to respond to aggression. They have thrown away the rules, and we are not ready for it.
These adversaries also watched our military forces in action and either copied or stole technology and tactics the U.S. military developed as the Second Offset. Worse, they also invested in things we have not, including asymmetric ways to counter U.S. forces in domains where we have become far too accustomed to having unfettered access. Sensor capability and weapons lethality have now evolved to the point that, where finders have the advantage over hiders, one really does not want to be a hider. Unfortunately, that is where a good bit—though not all—of our stuff operates.
The result is we are on the back side of the well-worn anti-access and area denial (A2AD) curve. Let us face it, we have not yet encountered in combat a sea-skimming, supersonic, weaving cruise missile with a sophisticated multi-mode seeker and its own digital radio frequency modulation jamming. But they are out there. And there are almost daily reports in the media about threat advances in anti-satellite and anti-underwater cable capabilities, offensive cyber, antiship ballistic missiles, long-range air-to-air missiles, and other technologies that are raising the bar even further.
So, the security environment variable in our strategic balance is trending badly. But there are three other variables in the balance we can adjust, so what about our ends?
The Ends of Strategy
Our ends are our national security interests, including the choices we make about which ones we will advance or protect, and which ones we will not. At the highest level of strategic thinking, our security interests need to be enduring and abstract. Otherwise it is tempting to use the term in an undisciplined and expedient way, which unfortunately happens a great deal. Moreover, our interests need to be prioritized lest we try to do too much with too little. As such, five high-level interests should help guide our choices:
- Survival of the nation
- Prevention of catastrophic attacks on the nation and its citizens
- Protection of the U.S. and global economic systems
- Cooperation with secure, confident, and reliable allies and partners
- Sustainment of our values, which are strategic assets in and of themselves
Our national leaders can use a list of interests like this in at least two ways. First, they can guide wise policy judgments regarding whether and how to use the instruments of national power, including force. The greater the correlation of a situation with our abstract interests—in terms of how many are affected, their priority, and the degree to which they are affected—the more likely we would be willing to use force, to do so unilaterally, at great risk and fiscal and opportunity cost, and to push hard against international law. And the reverse is true.
Second, our leaders can use the list to help guide security investments based on an assessment of risk within each interest—namely, the gap between a threat’s capability and our ability to mitigate it. It stands to reason that a higher risk threat within a more highly ranked interest should be addressed first.
These five interests roll up into two pillars. The first is the physical defense of our nation, its people, and their prosperity. These reflect the highest items on the list. The second pillar is the global operating system, which is reflected in the lower items on the list.
How different political leaders approach these interests illuminates their actions. For all the understandable criticism President Barack Obama received for his cautious approach to global leadership, he realized these pillars are important and deeply interrelated, and he factored them both into his decisions.
President Donald Trump’s America First approach appears to place almost exclusive focus on the first pillar at the expense of the second, including challenging diplomacy, alliances, free trade, democracy, and values. Some may believe trimming back our ends in this fashion is the right way to restore an out-of-balance strategic equilibrium. Perhaps we can trim our ends a little—conducting fewer nation-building operations, for example. But I, for one, am not ready to give up on the global operating system just yet; it is far too important to our security and prosperity to let go. Hopefully, our capable new National Security Advisor, Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, will push an apparent internal administration debate in a balanced direction.
In any case, the armed services simply do not control this—it is a political question. But it is vital that they understand the answer. So, until the current administration’s policy becomes clearer, let us assume the hardest case, and that the variable of ends will not change.
Means: Irrational Exuberance
If the security environment is deteriorating, and our ends are fixed, then something has to give. Would not it make sense to just apply more means to restore balance?
All the talk about a major plus-up for defense has many people in the services and in industry excited about how all this new money might be used. There are two problems with this. First, does anyone believe the Congress will get this done? We are talking about a major DOD plus-up, a huge infrastructure project, an expensive wall, no changes to entitlements, and a very contentious tax reform package.
Such an approach sounds like a real deficit buster, especially in an era of rising interest rates. Of course, we hear the normal bromides that the government will become more efficient, and the newly stimulated economy will pay for everything. But any plus-up will need 60 votes in the Senate, which means eight Democrats will need some domestic-spending love and some budget hawks will need serious tender-loving care.
Do not forget that we are also entering the longest time in recent history that our nation has ever gone without a budget. If the Congress cannot get its act together—and its track record is not good—we may even see a year-long continuing resolution. That would be a disgrace. In times of great budget turbulence, it is not wise to bet on a large increase.
The second problem, if a plus-up of more than modest size actually occurs, will be the overwhelming temptation to grow force structure. This reflects what I would label each service’s “identity metric.” In the Army’s case, it will be numbers of soldiers. In the Navy’s case, it is about numbers of ships. Measuring and then managing to the wrong metric can cause really bad behaviors. And the services’ identity metrics are real doozies.
The Navy’s latest force structure assessment recommends 355 ships as the “minimum force structure required to comply with the strategic guidance,” suggesting that this guidance is a fixed variable, and we would pursue even more ships if resources were not a constraint. But, as serious strategists know, in the words of Bernard Brodie, “strategy comes with a dollar sign.” And resources are a constraint. In February, amid much discussion of force structure growth, our military leaders testified that the services are out of resources for readiness. The media is reporting that more than half of Navy and Marine F/A-18 Hornets are not able to fly. Ship-maintenance money is in the tank.
The warning lights for a future hollow force are flashing red. What makes us think we can match a 29 percent increase in our number of ships with a commensurate and sustained increase in manpower and readiness spending, while trying to modernize as well? To be sure, the Navy needs more ships—certainly more than it has. It also is true that quantity has a quality all its own. But the nation and the Navy need ready and modern ships that support a modern warfighting concept, not simply more ships.
Fortunately, Secretary of Defense James Mattis has outlined a three-phased plan that will address readiness first, modernization second, and only then force structure. The Navy’s leaders have echoed this same prioritization. But it is going to be very hard to check the forces in Congress, the media, and the think tanks that will demand more force structure.
If the security environment is deteriorating, there is no appetite to trim our ends, and our means are a mess, then what about the only remaining variable?
Ways: The Next Failure of Imagination?
Ways live in three horizons of innovation. The first horizon is where we make incremental technical improvements to our current concept. The second is where we make out-of-the-box technical improvements, but still only to the current concept. Much of our Third Offset work, which is actually very good, resides in this area. The third horizon is where we rethink the entire concept.
Recall that the 355-ship number is based on conforming to the “strategic guidance,” which means our ability to fulfill essentially unconstrained demand signals for both presence and warfighting plans. But this leads to a self-reinforcing cycle. A combatant commander’s concept for the fight is largely based on the capabilities and capacities the services provide, of which there are never enough. The capabilities and capacities the services provide are largely based on the combatant commander’s needs—both filled and unfilled—to execute the current concept (as well as being profoundly steered by deeply ingrained beliefs held by warfare communities).
The result is that our approach to A2AD tends to preserve the way we prefer to fight. This locks us in conceptual equilibrium, which leads to technical incrementalism and demands for more forces. We end up working mostly inside our comfort zone against a set of adversaries who have proved willing and able to evolve outside that zone.
Our nation’s remarkable defense companies do exactly what we ask them to do in this regard, and are fielding superb systems that support the current concept. In fact, there is even more they could be asked to do. But, eventually the threat evolves to the point that the current concept, supported by incremental modernization, simply will not work anymore, and we are at real risk of failure. The question is whether or not we can use our imagination to break out of our equilibrium before we fail.
In his book Surfing the Edge of Chaos, Richard Pascale asserts that in biology and in business, “Equilibrium is the precursor to death.” When a living system is in a state of equilibrium, it is less responsive to the changes occurring around it, which places it at great risk. In biology, this is called genetic drift, in which a species naturally tends to refine its winning formula until an external upheaval occurs, for which it is completely misconfigured, and it fails.
In human affairs, it is exceedingly difficult to buck this same trend. The rare people—and organizations—who are able to do so often succeed wildly. Read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball or The Big Short. Those who do not embrace change often fail catastrophically. One only need recall that IBM nearly perished in the 1980s by favoring mainframes over the rise of the personal computer, even though many of the company’s engineers saw the revolution coming. As former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano said of organizations in crisis: “You spend more time arguing amongst yourselves over a shrinking pie than looking to the future, and so you miss the big turn.”
As good as we are, are we beginning to miss the big turn? Are we investing just to survive in an environment in which our adversaries are approaching the capability and capacity advantages we have counted on to overcome their advantages in distance and initiative? Just so we can continue to chase our current concept? If this is us, then we need get some people reaching for the third horizon of innovation before it is too late.
Richard Pascale tells us that the living things most likely to survive when threatened are those that move toward the edge of chaos, where experimentation and mutation are allowed to flourish, and where fresh solutions are found. The survival of such a system depends on its ability to cultivate, not just tolerate, variety in order to shake itself out of its equilibrium.
We need to introduce more chaos* into our thinking. Innovation happens, as Chris Darby, the head of In-Q-Tel, has said, “at the intersection of courage and creativity.” We need the following:
- The courage to challenge all the assumptions behind our current operational concepts, and to formulate new, more effective concepts
- The creativity to draw new capabilities from synergies among disparate technologies, both existing and new
- The commitment to set in motion a virtuous cycle between the new concepts and the new capabilities
- The energy to overcome the inevitable obstacles thrown up by our own system, with all its many tentacles
- The boldness to transition these things beyond the dream stage, at speed and scale
When all this happens, if it happens, we have a chance to maintain our edge and to forge new dilemmas for our potential adversaries that will service anew the twin deterrent mechanisms of denying an opponent’s objectives and imposing costs for aggressive action against our interests. In short, new ways will give us the opportunity to make up for our shortcomings in the other three strategic variables we must balance.
Our millennial innovators will deliver on this for the nation if they are properly empowered. In the process we will need to do the following:
- Divest self-cost-imposing approaches and anything else holding us back that consumes needed resources
- Understand that nature favors the nimble in pairing innovative concepts and technologies
- Develop new ways of simulating our new concepts and technologies with high fidelity so we can try them out before deploying them
- Leverage the great platforms the Navy already is building by focusing more on really innovative payloads
One Example of Asymmetric Low-Hanging Fruit
Ask any naval officer what is meant by mine warfare. You probably will get an answer along the lines of countermine warfare. But what about offensive mine warfare? You would be stunned if you took a look at the Navy’s current, moribund capabilities. Imagine, however, what could be done with state-of-the-art technology.
We could have systems that are weapons attached to sensors rather than sensors attached to weapons. We could have systems with which we can communicate and that can network with each other. These systems could understand the entire water column and have state-of-the art acoustic discrimination capability. With sophisticated software they could accept library updates and instructions for tailored sensor reporting and selective engagement. They would use modern battery and power-generation technology to remain operational for a long time. They could have weapons that extend their range beyond shallow water and directly overhead. And these weapons would be hard to find.
Such a capability would create a real dilemma for any competitor and could fit well within a new and different concept. So why does the Navy not have these weapons? It is a combination of factors. There really is no sponsor who believes in them and will invest the money. Maybe it seems like something only a small, weak navy would do rather than the most powerful Navy on earth. Some might wonder if we would ever even be allowed to use it. But such a capability would worry the hell out of any naval commander if he or she knew an adversary had that capability.
We Can Do This
Liddell Hart said, “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is getting an old idea out.” Getting to the third horizon will only happen when large minds in small groups, rather than the reverse, get to work. It will only occur in an environment where people feel comfortable thinking not only out of the box but all the way out of the arena. It needs to happen everywhere, including at the institutional, operational, tactical, academic, and industrial levels.
It is more likely to happen when our senior leaders know those inside and outside the institution support this kind of thinking. That is why I am encouraged when I hear commanders, such as Admiral Harris, demanding it. But we need more of our people to read and think about this, and to take the personal risk associated with speaking and writing about what they discover.
Our nation has the enduring strengths of geography, demography and diversity, natural resources, rule of law, higher education, and the world’s most creative society. It also has the world’s most capable military. While the United States currently retains the edge in the latter, it is at risk of losing it, and soon, to determined and creative adversaries. Yet our national ambitions are unlikely to change, while the means to achieve them are unlikely to grow anytime soon. So doing our part to maintain the strategic balance demands that we break out of our current conceptual-technical “ways” equilibrium. We have done so before, and we can and must do it again.
* I cannot help but note that current and able Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s real call sign is “Chaos,” not “Mad Dog”!