st annual kermit roosevelt lecture - rusi · kermit roosevelt was the son of president theodore...

RUSI, Duke of Wellington Hall

11 May 2017

71st Annual Kermit Roosevelt Lecture The Changing Character of War: Thriving in Ambiguity and Chaos General Robert B. Brown, Commanding General US Army Pacific

71st Kermit Roosevelt Lecture: The Changing Character of War: Thriving in Ambiguity and Chaos

General Robert Brown, Commanding General of US Army Pacific

Royal United Services Institute 1

Maj Gen Nick Welch, Assistant Chief of the General Staff

I am delighted to welcome General Robert Brown to RUSI, to deliver the final lecture of the 2017 Kermit

Roosevelt Lecture series. Many of you know what the Kermit Roosevelt Lecture is about, but I think it is worth

a reminder that this annual exchange of senior officers providing lectures stretches right back to 1947 and was

started on the initiative of Mrs Kermit Roosevelt, in memory of her husband.

Kermit Roosevelt was the son of President Theodore Roosevelt and a businessman, soldier, explorer, and

writer and he served with the British Army in both the First and Second World Wars, which underlines the

importance of the relationship between us.

The lecture tour named after him is to develop a closer relationship between individual leadership with British

and Americans, for a better understanding of the military forces of the United States and the United Kingdom

and how they would contribute, in large measure, to the preservation of world peace.

This year will be the 71st of the programme and I think it is particularly appropriate that we welcome our

distinguished guest this year General Robert Brown. With over 30 years of service General Brown is a war

fighter with a pedigree in combined arms of manoeuvre on the battlefield and he has already warned me not

to read his whole CV, which I sense suggests a degree of humility about the general.

However, he was commissioned in 1981 and has commanded from platoon to corps. I think most important he

has been central to battlefield conceptual innovation throughout his career and has commanded the

‘Maneuver Center of Excellence’ and the US Army’s ‘Combined Arms Centre – Training’. While on the staff, he

was the Chief of Staff for the US Armed Forces in Europe and Assistant Professor of Military Science at West

Point. He also has operational service in Iraq, Haiti and Bosnia.

If we look at the strategic challenges today, his role in the command of 106,000-strong US Army Pacific and his

[prior] experiences make him well placed to talk about ambiguity and the threats that are constant

companions of our military profession. General Robert Brown, Commanding General of the US Army Pacific is

going to talk about the changing character of war and thriving in ambiguity and chaos.

Dr Peter Roberts, Director of Military Sciences, RUSI

On this day, 11th May 1982, Henry Kissinger made a speech in London and he stated ‘that two countries with

such divergent traditions, the US and UK, could form such a durable partnership is remarkable in itself, but

especially so given periods of that special relationship were times of mutual exasperation’.

Kissinger said that in 1982, when UK Special Forces were in the South Atlantic, embarked on the submarine

HMS Onyx, Vulcan bomber raids had taken place on Stanley airfield, and the sinking of the Belgrano had taken

place just a few days before. Yet, as we are often reminded by speakers at RUSI, all of those decided nothing.

When General McMaster spoke at the RUSI Land Warfare Conference in 2015 he recognised such features as

having very little impact on the conclusion of wars. The nature of conflict, he stated, still requires nineteen

year-olds to get up, fix bayonets and take land. A similar theme persisted at last year’s Kermit Roosevelt

Lecture, when General Abrams talked for forty minutes without mentioning money or equipment, something

very rare in the UK. Those persistent themes – people and concepts not money – are what our own research

returns to time and again, but generals engaged in this discussion can be few and far between, so it is with

great pleasure we welcome General Robert Brown.




General Robert B. Brown, Commanding General, US Army Pacific

I am very proud to be a part of the Kermit Roosevelt Lecture series; it is one of those things you never think

you will be involved in yourself. The importance of that UK-US relationship, was recognised by Kermit

Roosevelt and Mrs Roosevelt in creating this series to bring us together, and it was a great decision by General

Marshall to approve it.

I have been privileged to see the last six Kermit Roosevelt Lectures held in the United States. I can say that the

British generals do an amazing job; our soldiers always come away writing furiously and it really does achieve

that closeness that is tough to measure.

I will start with Kermit Roosevelt, who was an interesting individual who, when he signed up for World War

One in the American Army, wanted to see combat. Since he was the son of Theodore Roosevelt, a former

President, he was told he was going nowhere near combat. So, frustrated, he resigned and joined the British

Army and then saw quite a bit of combat in Mesopotamia, present day Iraq. He would also serve in World War

Two, with some tremendous stories about the Harvard educated adventurer. It is a real honour to be here to

keep that legacy going.

Figure 1

I want to talk about complexity and the changing character of war; how complexity is changing the world and

what impact that has on all of us; it has an impact on business, and anybody in just about any field, but

certainly any of us in the military profession.

Increased connectivity is significantly changing things; it is changing the velocity of human interaction. [Figure

1 demonstrates that] in 2003, there were more people than things that were connected to the internet. In

2008, there was a shift and in 2020, just three years from now, 50 billion things are expected to be connected

to the internet.

When I was young the fog of war was not having enough information; you would just get one or two pieces of

information. It was actually quite a bit easier to have a little initiative because you only got one or two pieces

of information and no one would was going to second guess you. But what is the fog of war now? Too much

information.

Figure 1




The overwhelming amount of information changes the equation. Now there are haystacks of information and

you are looking for that golden needle to make a decision, which can be overwhelming and changes things like

initiative. It changes the speed of what happens, the speed of information moving and how rapidly it diffuses

and is changing things very significantly.

Global connectivity, complexity and the velocity of human interaction are picking up to a point that, for both

the UK and the US militaries, it has changed our style of command, from Command and Control (very strict ‘go

left, go right’) to what we call Mission Command. We empower people as we understand how critical people

are in spite of technology and the speed of connectivity – people are more important because decisions are

made at lower levels.

If you consider this democratisation of information. Previously it took a nation-state or somebody very well

educated with access to this information to make decisions. Now what do we do? We Google it. It does not

mean it is necessarily right, but we can Google it pretty darn quick.

I have three daughters and four grandchildren. My eldest granddaughter, when she was four, could do way

more than I could on her mum’s iPhone. She is a digital native, while I am a digital immigrant. I noticed that

she would call up a cartoon and if it took more than a couple of seconds she would get frustrated, and I

realised how our expectations have changed. I was happy when I was a kid with my black and white TV, I

would get the rabbit ears [aerials] and be happy if I could see something, it did not matter what it was. Now

there is frustration that it does not come up right away; it is a change of expectations. So this level of

information and connectivity is [layered on top of perception].

Perception has always been significant in conflict and, as I experienced as a commander in combat, perception

can really start to shift momentum. I was in Mosul, Iraq as a Stryker Brigade Commander and we were having

elections. We knew that people would expect to see some change after the elections, even though we all

know that it takes time. So we decided to do some projects that could show some progress. Mosul was a city

where nobody was voting and the people were stacked up, until a woman in her eighties walked across the

street to vote and then the floodgates opened, so we had to keep the polls open later.

Afterwards, one of the projects we did was to hire folks to paint the curbs yellow because the curbs were

painted yellow before the war. Mind you the curbs were blowing up at the same rate as before the election,

from Improvised Explosive Devices etc. But people saw the curbs were now being painted and this perception

started spreading rapidly; markets opened, people were out on the streets, there was a whole shift and

perception that things were getting back to normal – perception is critical.

We used to say, ‘we have to do the right thing while nobody is watching’ and that is still a good thing, wanting

to do the right thing when no one is watching. But what has changed is that now we have to do the right thing

because the entire world is watching. Something that Private Brown does, Sergeant Brown, General Brown, it

does not matter. It is going to be on CNN or the BBC that night.

Everything that happens – whether in humanitarian assistance, disaster response or conflict – will be blogged,

texted, and tweeted about. No longer can anyone say ‘it did not happen, no one is going to see it’. It is very

similar to the challenges going on in the United States right now with the police. People are capturing videos of

the police and unacceptable behaviours, which have always been unacceptable but nobody saw them, are

now seen by the entire world. The whole world sees and this has changed things quite a bit.




If that is the world in general, let us focus on the Pacific region and the complexity of the region that I am in

with my 106,000 troops. Approximately 52% of the earth’s surface is the Asia-Pacific Region and it is a complex

region. Thirty-six nations, sixteen time zones, thousands of languages, a very complex region.

We say it spans from Hollywood to Bollywood, from penguins to polar bears. My responsibilities extend from

the west coast of the United States, up in Alaska, all the way down to Hawaii, Japan, Guam, Korea, American

Samoa, and Saipan.

Figure 2

As you look, this circle up here [Figure 2] does not even cover the entire Pacific AOR, but more people live

inside this circle than in the rest of the world put together. By 2050, seven out of ten people in the world will

be living inside this circle.

There is great opportunity within the circle, but there is also great competition for resources. Seven of the ten

largest armies in the world reside in the Pacific region. This differs from what a lot of people think, that ‘there

is a lot of blue’ and it is just a naval and air theatre, but the people there live on the land.

If we consider the trend in megacities, cities with ten million people or more, which is growing and by 2050

25% of the world’s population will live in a megacity. There are thirty-six megacities currently in the world and

twenty-four are in the Pacific; megacities come with their own challenges and issues as very complex areas to

operate and I will dive into the five regional challenges we recognise.

North Korea is the most significant and the threat that keeps me up at night. They have an incredibly

belligerent attitude towards the world and are trying to develop capability. I will show you a little chart here

[Figure 3], going all the way back to Kim Jong-un’s grandfather’s regime and his father, in his time, tested

thirty-five rockets in nineteen years.




Figure 3

Kim Jong-un is well up over one hundred just in his short time. He is after a capability here and while some

may say ‘it is the aggressive posture [of others] that is causing this’, it is clear he is trying to get a capability to

reach out with nuclear weapons and chemical weapons.

A part of that is because his conventional force is a million-man army, facing off against a million-man army in

South Korea, with only the demilitarized zone between them; it is the only place in the world where this is the

case. There remains an armistice because the war was never concluded and sometimes we forget that because

it has been sixty-plus years and a lot of hard work has gone into maintaining that peace and stability.

Russia is also in the Pacific. They just flew a Bear Bomber around Japan for the fifth day in a row, which has not

happened in a long time, and they flew a Bear Bomber right up to the edge of Alaska.

Of course, China is in the Pacific. Six months ago I was in China and saw the challenges, but competition does

not have to mean that you are in conflict. We were doing an exchange on disaster management, with 1,000 US

soldiers and 1,500 Chinese soldiers, and it was fascinating to see the team work together, so my emphasis is

on the things we have in common.

If you go back to World War Two, the Flying Tigers were US pilots who flew for the Chinese Air Force and more

recently with Ebola, our 101st Airborne Division went over to Africa to stop the spread of Ebola and many

nations sent folks to help, from doctors to troops and China sent a tremendous medical detachment that made

a huge difference.

You can find areas in common so that you can talk about your differences. If you only concentrate on the

differences it is not good for anybody and it is going to lead to conflict.

Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly Islands, which at high tide it is underwater, has undergone massive reclamation

efforts over ten years. Images of Fiery Cross Reef in 2016, still not classified as an island, show a runway,

hangars, fuel supply, and unknown structures. All of which looks extremely militarised and military equipment

is landing there, adding to the challenges we are facing and the complexity around the world today.




We also, unfortunately, have violent extremist organisations in the Pacific. As they are being pushed out of

other areas, whether the Middle East or Africa, they are flowing in and finding places to go across the Pacific.

They are being found in Bangladesh, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, where thirty violent extremist

organisations recently pledged allegiance to ISIL.

The good news for Indonesia is that it has an excellent counter-terrorism cell, being the largest Muslim country

in our AOR and world, so they are getting after it but there are still violent organisations of huge concern.

The most likely thing to happen, when you look at the complexity in the world and the Pacific in particular, is

disaster response. Seven out of ten people in the world killed by natural disasters are in the Pacific, the ‘Rim of

Fire’. So the most likely thing we are going to do is work very closely with every nation in the Pacific to save

lives when this does happen.

Some of these things are so complex, like in Japan a few years ago, you could not make it up. A few years ago

the Japanese were preparing for an exercise with an earthquake, tsunami, and a nuclear disaster and

everybody said ‘that’s not realistic’ and six months later it happened.

I just went through how the world is changing and becoming more complex, but what do we, the military, do

about this complexity? The key is that people are our advantage and I would say that is a lesson for both the

UK and US militaries. Existing material solutions, those things we already have, such as a tank or a piece of

equipment (of course you want the best equipment and we are very proud of what we have) – it is uncertain

how long their advantage lasts now.

When I was much younger we ‘owned the night’. We did things at night because we had the night vision

capability (the UK had it as well but nobody else). So there was a significant technological advantage for many

years, but unfortunately today you may have a slight advantage but then someone else can buy it on the

internet with better technology and faster, or even 3D print it.

You can copy it relatively quickly because of access to information and this ‘democratisation of information’

that is occurring. We want the best equipment, but you can see [Figure 4] there are clear and present threats.

Figure 4




North Korea on the left – if North Korea conducted a conventional attack, our existing material solutions would

work extremely well, when combined with the demanding and realistic training, the ‘ironclad alliance’ and

twenty-two states committed to the peninsular would defeat North Korea, no question.

However, most nations out there are not looking for your strengths but your weaknesses. As you start to look

[further right on Figure 4] this strategic uncertainty grows. If you look at things that Russia is doing, like with

the ‘little green men’, well in the South China Sea they are more like the ‘little green fishermen’.

Once you get to ISIL and cyber threats, to the amorphous and ambiguous threats the more strategic

uncertainty there is and the less value those material solutions provide. They just are not as valuable because

people are not going after your strengths.

Also, the cognitive demands on the soldier increase, so this is no longer as it was years ago when the individual

could do rote repetitions – ‘do what I say’ and we do not want you thinking – no these now have to be really

well developed, well trained, agile, adaptive leaders to solve the complex problems in a timely manner with a

creative solution.

Our hedge against this uncertainty are cohesive teams of army professionals – professionals being key today

more than ever before – because folks will try to drag you down and if you have a lapse in judgement it is

shown everywhere, you cannot hide it and the whole world is watching.

These professionals, these cohesive teams, must thrive in conditions of uncertainty and chaos. We used to say

be comfortable in conditions of uncertainty, ambiguity and chaos, but comfort does not win.

I think it was a good goal as things were changing and everybody was trying to figure this out – the

overwhelming amounts of information, the speed of everything picking up – so comfort was probably a good

goal.

But you have got to get beyond that if you want to be effective; you have got to thrive and possess leaders

who thrive, and that is what we are working extremely hard on in our training and our development, including

working with our partners, allies, and friends.

Another key aspect of this is leader development, so here is an example of leader development. People will

recognise pictures of General Eisenhower on the plains of Salisbury, talking to troops right before D-Day. (I was

there when I spoke to the 3rd (UK) Division earlier in the lecture series and what an honour it was to be there

where the 101st Airborne had been). But few people recognise Fox Connor, best known for his book ‘The Grey

Fox’ about mentorship.

Fox Connor commanded the same organisation I am in now, the US Army Pacific, but he was a great mentor

and was mentoring a young lad named George Patton as a Major. Patton invited one of his friends, Dwight D.

Eisenhower, another Major, over to dinner at Fox Connor’s house one evening.

Eisenhower had missed World War One, so thought he had missed his chance, and had not been selected for

the Command General Staff College. In those days, if you did not get selected, you would not be promoted and

he would have retired as a Major. In fact, you were promoted based on how you finished in the class, so

Eisenhower was not going and would not even have been promoted.




Fox Connor at that dinner said ‘boy this guy has a lot of potential’. Connor gets assigned to Panama and he

gets Eisenhower to go to Panama with him and starts to have him read things like Clausewitz ‘On War’, twice

by the way and it is hard to read once, but he had him read it twice.

And he was quizzing him on it and Eisenhower’s response was that ‘he re-sparked my passion for the

profession of arms, my love for the profession of arms, and reading in military’. Then Fox Connor said, ‘look

Eisenhower, you’re going to Indiana in a National Guard unit and you are going to transfer to be an AG officer,

a personnel officer’.

You have to imagine Eisenhower saying ‘What? What’s going on here? I’m an infantryman.’ Well he got picked

up for Command General Staff College as a personnel officer, got to the college and then Fox Connor helped

him get back to being an infantryman. The infantry branch says ‘Eisenhower, you are not going to make it’ but

instead he finishes number one in the class, got promoted and the rest is history.

He did a pretty good job in World War Two and would later be a President, but he would not have been

anything if it was not for the mentorship of Fox Connor. He also mentored a guy named Omar Bradley and did

a little bit of mentorship to George Marshall, so he had a pretty good record.

Leader development is critical and I can guarantee you that any of the senior leaders in here will tell you that

they would not be anywhere without the leader development that occurred for them; I know I certainly would

not.

Leader development is important everywhere, in corporations and in any field where you want to be

successful, but people are busy and it is not considered the first priority, plus you do not get immediate

results. You may not immediately see the result but I can tell you it is the most rewarding thing, so leader

development is absolutely critical.

Now apply that to the philosophy of Mission Command. In 2008 the US Army, in the middle of two wars,

switched from Command and Control – which is a very hierarchical system where things go up and come back

down the chain – to Mission command.

We realised, Command and Control does not work as it is too slow because of the speed, connectivity, and the

velocity of human interaction, and that to combat this we must empower leaders.

The first way we accomplish this is by building trust. That is why on this visit I have been excited to see the

tremendous programmes the UK has, like Adventure Training which builds trust and pushes people to their

limit, for team building and Mission Command.

[Mission Command relies on] creating shared understanding, clear intent, exercising disciplined initiative, and

using mission orders. Do not tell people exactly what you want them to do, tell them what you want

accomplished and what is the prudent risk [Figure 5].

Some people think Mission Command is ‘go do whatever you want’, and that is not it at all because you have

got to know your subordinates.




Figure 5

When I was in combat, I had one battalion commander who I could give free reign and wide arcs, but another

commander was a little bit narrower, as he was more tentative, less experienced and needed more left and

right limits. So you have to know your subordinates.

Mission Command is key because it enables you to empower these folks to keep up with this speed and

velocity of today’s human interaction. It is also key because few armies can do it; the UK and the US can do it,

which is a huge advantage. I will give you two examples; one from World War Two and then one more present

day.

How long did we plan the Normandy invasion? About two years. There has never been an operation with a

greater amount of detail and planning. We got onto the beaches but then we were stuck by the hedgerows in

France. The enemy used the hedgerows, which divided the acreage, to channelise us on the roads and we

were having trouble.

You need a plan, so you have a baseline to go from, but a plan is never perfect, so you need folks like Sergeant

Culin. He was a young E-5 ‘Buck Sergeant’, an engineer, and he heard about this dilemma of the hedges.

On the beaches he saw the hexagons left by the Germans. He cut those off and had the idea to weld them to

the front of a tank. Sergeant Culin’s idea saved the day and enabled them to cut through the hedgerows and

the rest is history.

They were victorious, but the fascinating thing about this is considering what army would listen to an E-5 Buck

Sergeant from the beaches of Normandy with an idea that would go all the way up the chain.

I researched this when I was at the National War College as I was taking command of a Stryker Brigade, a

brand new concept [at the time] that would be deploying to Iraq. We needed innovation and I wanted to use

this as an example and the most important thing from this was that they listened to him from the bottom up.

A lot of armies would not have done, either at the time and many not even today. The UK would listen to him

and the US would, perhaps others might too, but it is amazing that we would listen and ideas could come from

the bottom up.




I went to the National Centre of Military History and did some research. Sure enough everybody had tried to

take credit for this innovation, from General, Colonel and Major. But Eisenhower's letter is to Sergeant Culin,

so the award and the recognition went to a sergeant who would go on and fight the rest of the war. Sergeant

Culin would lose a leg in the war but lived. It is typical that there were those who probably said using the

hexagons was a bad idea and the next thing you know they were claiming credit for it, but Sergeant Culin got

the credit from Eisenhower.

A more modern story of this is of taxicabs in Iraq in the city of Mosul. Mosul has been in the news a lot lately,

but they have an old car model for their taxis and they do a great job of keeping them running. They use a

panel of orange and white attached to each of the 4,000 of these taxis running around Mosul to identify them

as taxis.

Al-Qaeda came up with some pretty devious ideas of how to make an impact and go after weaknesses, so

what they did was start stuffing the taxis with explosives, creating suicide vehicle borne improvised explosive

devices (S-VBIEDs), which they would drive into innocent civilian women and children.

The challenge was, even though I had 11,000 forces they stretched from the Syrian border to the Turkish

border and the Iranian border, so I did not have the numbers to have stopped all 4,000 taxis. People were still

using them even though occasionally they were blowing up because they had to get around and make their

livelihood in the city of 1.3 million people.

A young company commander working in the sector they are actually fighting for right now, the densest part

of Mosul with around 500,000 people, had only 182 soldiers in his company but he knew that there was a

taxicab union.

I was a brigade commander, but this captain knew his area and he had built a rapport with the people. He

knew there was a taxicab union, got them together and he asked them for their input – he did not just come

up with a solution himself – and they came up with the answer together.

They wanted to remove their trunk lids and once the lids were gone you did not have to stop every taxi at

every checkpoint, you could just look pretty quickly and see if the trunk was empty or full. Obviously if they

stuffed the passenger compartment it was going to be pretty obvious that there was something inside. Such a

clever solution and the Iraqi taxi cab drivers came up with it.

The next morning, they went out, determined to take their trunk lids off, but the enemy always gets a vote.

They grabbed a taxicab driver and cut his head off, then put up a sign saying ‘if you remove your trunk lids this

will happen to you’.

The taxi drivers all went ‘woah, wait a minute, never mind’. The young company commander gets them back

together the same day and said ‘come on now, there’s 4,000 of you and we're going to stop this together’.

The next day when I went out in my Stryker I saw 4,000 taxis had their trunk lids off and we never had another

car bomb in a taxi again. Al-Qaeda moved onto another problem, but that was for another young leader.

It is a complex problem when innocent people are dying and you have to solve it with a creative solution in a

timely manner; you do not have a whole lot of time when people are dying. I saw it hundreds of times a day

and all of you out there who deployed will have seen the same thing.




The best ideas come from the lowest level, that edge, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, their lives depend on it,

so there is a lot of incentive. The other reason is that they are closest to the problem; it is not the generals that

have tremendous solutions, it is those closest to the problem.

How do you get those ideas back up? We did some things in Iraq, like a rapid adaptation cell, to which a soldier

at any location could submit ideas when there was a problem.

We would get overwhelming amounts of ideas shared through that connectivity I was talking about earlier.

That is pretty amazing and helps you be incredibly successful and spread those ideas to actually get inside the

enemy's decision cycle for thriving in ambiguity.

I like this famous picture [Figure 6] of chaos all around and a young Iraqi boy hiding behind the soldier because

he is in control and thriving in that environment. That is the direction we need to go. The people are our

advantage, empowered people.

Figure 6

But you cannot just have people, you have to have concepts and doctrine. We (Generals Perkins, McMaster

and Abrams) have been working on Multi-Domain Battle, which builds on the great successes of Air-Land

Battle in Desert Storm, plus the other domains because we are no longer dominant in all domains. That is not

just an infantryman saying that, it is the reality of the changes in technology.

We used to have dominance at sea and in the air. For the last sixty years we never had to look up and worry

was the aircraft above enemy or friendly; it was always friendly we had that dominance. Unfortunately, we do

not have it anymore. We must look at how we are going to deal with that change and Multi-Domain Battle is

what we are looking at and we are leading the way in the Pacific by developing a Multi-Domain Task Force.

The first thing we have to do – this is the absolute key – is have a mindset change to joint integration. We all

grow up in stovepipes, it is how we are brought up and our acquisition programmes are in a stovepipe.

You might have some things that pull us together and in the United States we had Goldwater-Nichols Acts to

make us more joint, but we are in stovepipes. We even have information within our own service that cannot

be shared, let alone between services. We currently have joint interdependence, as we depend on each other,

but we have to move towards joint integration.




We say ‘sensor agnostic’ and ‘platform agnostic’. Does it matter if it is a Navy asset that picks up something?

Or if an Army asset engages it or vice versa? Or if it is Air Force and Navy, or cyber and another force? It does

not matter the platform or the sensor; you have to be platform agnostic.

You have to present multiple dilemmas to those that would do you harm. Our enemies have been watching

and learning; they have set up complex denial systems and they can handle linear things one, two, or three at

a time, but they cannot handle multiple complex dilemmas.

Our enemies cannot handle us manoeuvring across multiple domains to a position of relative advantage and

the domains with the greatest potential are cyber and outer space. They also have the greatest policy

restrictions and new challenges, no doubt, but they are the ones with the greatest potential. The key is the

number of dilemmas presented and providing multiple options for your leadership, if you do it right

[summarised in Figure 7].

We have thirty exercises testing this with all forces in the Pacific, including the largest maritime exercise in the

world. Exercise RIMPAC 2018 is now going to be an ‘all domain’ exercise and we will see ground forces

engaging ships at sea, cyber play, space and all other domains in play.

The US Army Pacific is leading the way for the Army and in 2019 we will have the first Multi-Domain Task Force

moving around the Pacific for nine to ten months. It will be in the Pacific but it will not be in significantly

different terrain or look much different than what would be anywhere else with those capabilities.

Figure 7

A couple of takeaways, as I have thrown a lot of stuff at you – complexity, people and a whole new concept.

The soldier’s role is key with more demands on them than ever, so you have to educate, train and then

empower them.

We have some challenges in leader development, education, and experience. In the US Army, for example, we

just recently created the Army University combining 180 schools to put them under a university structure to

improve the quality and rigour of our education.




Tough, demanding and realistic joint training, plus further empowerment through mission Command. If you

look again at tough training and technology, they empower people to make decisions faster.

Artificial intelligence has come up in the last couple of talks, asking if some day we will make use of

autonomous vehicles, meaning we do not have to put people in a resupply vehicle. It is happening already and

much can be autonomous, but there have to be people there making those key decisions and showing that

judgment that we do not think artificial intelligence will ever get to, let alone things like empathy which are so

key in these situations.

But no one is doing this alone and we have amazing relationships that are critical right now. I have been in the

US Army Europe and I know that our NATO ties are fantastic, but we do not have a NATO-like structure in the

Pacific. We have alliances, friends, allies, and multinational partners. In fact, of our seven alliances in the world

five are in the Pacific: Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia. Five of seven and those alliances

are strong; they are key because we are not going to go it alone.

In this complex world, I can never foresee a times when there will be a military-only solution, there is no way.

Whole-of-government is key; we learned in Iraq about cooperation and collaboration. The first time I was in

Iraq, the State Department just could not get in synch, but the next time I was there a few years later we did

everything together. We called it ‘Team Nineveh’ and everything we did was together and we found that had a

heck of a lot more success. The whole-of-government approach is key, as well as NGOs and their roles all

working together because these are complex problems.

So are we going to be victims of complexity? I would prefer to be masters of complexity, thriving in ambiguity

and chaos and using those to our advantage (e.g. UAS swarms).

Using all these things to our advantage does not mean there are not going to be ‘black swans’ out there. There

will always be things that come out of nowhere and, in fact, I would say that is the new norm. If you look at us

as planners we used to be ashamed if we did not predict something. I think today it is impossible because the

world is so complex.

Things will come out of nowhere and the power of a few people is greater than ever before because of this

connectivity and this access to information. If the Internet was all for people doing good things it would be

wonderful, but it is not and there are those trying to steal your bank account or putting out propaganda lies.

They can do that more rapidly than when you tell the truth because telling the truth takes time and you got to

verify it.

We have to be masters of complexity and I think this is a winning formula: working together, with the right

people, empowered, and with the right concept. As we move forward we can handle any of the things thrown

at us.

To end, I stole a quote from Prime Minister Theresa May, ‘the world is passing through a period of change and

in response to that change we can either be passive bystanders or we can take the opportunity once more to

lead and lead together’ which I think is exactly right.

I look forward to your questions.

END

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