[House Hearing, 113 Congress] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] [H.A.S.C. No. 113-4] ===================================================================== PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE NATIONAL SECURITY ENVIRONMENT: TECHNOLOGICAL, GEOPOLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC TRENDS AFFECTING THE DEFENSE STRATEGIC GUIDANCE __________ HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES OF THE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED THIRTEENTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION __________ HEARING HELD FEBRUARY 13, 2013 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 79-492 WASHINGTON : 2013 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC area (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402-0001 SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES MAC THORNBERRY, Texas, Chairman JEFF MILLER, Florida JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island JOHN KLINE, Minnesota SUSAN A. DAVIS, California BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania HENRY C. ``HANK'' JOHNSON, Jr., RICHARD B. NUGENT, Florida Georgia TRENT FRANKS, Arizona ANDRE CARSON, Indiana DUNCAN HUNTER, California DANIEL B. MAFFEI, New York CHRISTOPHER P. GIBSON, New York DEREK KILMER, Washington VICKY HARTZLER, Missouri JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas JOSEPH J. HECK, Nevada SCOTT H. PETERS, California Kevin Gates, Professional Staff Member Tim McClees, Professional Staff Member Julie Herbert, Staff Assistant C O N T E N T S ---------- CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS 2013 Page Hearing: Wednesday, February 13, 2013, Perspectives on the Future National Security Environment: Technological, Geopolitical, and Economic Trends Affecting the Defense Strategic Guidance................ 1 Appendix: Wednesday, February 13, 2013..................................... 37 ---------- WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2013 PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE NATIONAL SECURITY ENVIRONMENT: TECHNOLOGICAL, GEOPOLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC TRENDS AFFECTING THE DEFENSE STRATEGIC GUIDANCE STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS Langevin, Hon. James R., a Representative from Rhode Island, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities............................................... 9 Thornberry, Hon. Mac, a Representative from Texas, Chairman, Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities 1 WITNESSES Berteau, David J., Senior Vice President and Director, International Security Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies.......................................... 7 Hoffman, Francis G., Senior Research Fellow, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University........ 2 Lewellyn, Dr. Mark T., Director, National Security Analysis Department, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory 5 APPENDIX Prepared Statements: Berteau, David J............................................. 73 Hoffman, Francis G........................................... 41 Lewellyn, Dr. Mark T......................................... 58 Documents Submitted for the Record: [There were no Documents submitted.] Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing: Mr. Nugent................................................... 91 Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing: Mr. Franks................................................... 95 PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE NATIONAL SECURITY ENVIRONMENT: TECHNOLOGICAL, GEOPOLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC TRENDS AFFECTING THE DEFENSE STRATEGIC GUIDANCE ---------- House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities, Washington, DC, Wednesday, February 13, 2013. The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:05 p.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Mac Thornberry (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MAC THORNBERRY, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM TEXAS, CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES Mr. Thornberry. The hearing will come to order. I think Mr. Langevin is on his way, but we have been asked to go ahead and get started. So let me just take a moment to welcome our members, witnesses, and guests to the first hearing of the 113th Congress for the newly renamed Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities. I think this added portion of our responsibilities dealing with military intelligence oversight is a perfect fit with this subcommittee's charge to look ahead at national security challenges facing our Nation in the future. And I am particularly pleased, and I can say this since he is not here, that I have the opportunity to continue to work with Mr. Langevin. Both of us being on the Intelligence Committee as well as this committee I think is a real asset to fulfilling those new responsibilities. Today we start our hearings with a broad look at global trends that may affect our national security. Recently the National Intelligence Council released publicly its latest installment of their Global Trends publication, which received a fair amount of attention in the press, and it seems to me that our witnesses today have valuable but also varied perspectives to help stimulate our thinking about the challenges that our country faces in the future. And again, that is exactly what this subcommittee has been asked to look at. Unless the gentleman from Georgia would like to make an opening statement, I can reserve until Mr. Langevin comes and let him do it when he arrives. It is up to you all. Mr. Johnson. I would like the opportunity, but I think it is best to wait for Mr. Langevin. Mr. Thornberry. Okay. I will let him make whatever statement he wants to and then his questions. So anyway, again, thank you all very much for being here. Let me now turn to our witnesses. They include Mr. Frank Hoffman, senior research fellow at National Defense University; Dr. Mark Lewellyn, director, National Security Analysis Division at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; and Mr. David Berteau, senior vice president, director of the International Security Program for CSIS, Center for Strategic and International Studies. Again, thank you all for being here. Without objection, your full statement, written statements will be made part of the record, and at this time we would be delighted for you to summarize or offer such other comments as you would like. Mr. Hoffman. STATEMENT OF FRANCIS G. HOFFMAN, SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW, INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES, NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY Mr. Hoffman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and other members. It is great to be here today, an honor to appear for you, this subcommittee, once again. It has been a long time. I am also very honored to be here with two very prominent experts who are longstanding old friends of mine. I would like to offer a much broader statement than my written statement, which was reflective of my previous work and keeping with where I think you want to go today with this particular committee. So I would like to talk about broader trends beyond the current defense guidance. There is a pernicious concept floating around Washington, D.C., right now that the tides of war are receding and that the United States can retrench without risk. There is what I call a new peace theory floating around town, reflected in prominent journals and think tanks here in town. Recently one commentator from a think tank here in Washington said that, ``There is no single causal factor at work, but all point in one direction. We are nearing a point in history when it is possible to say that war as we know it has disappeared.'' That is a bold and very dangerous statement and one I do not agree with. Great progress has been made in the last decade, but the notion of a dramatic change in human nature or a significant shift outweigh 2,000 years of recorded history is tenuous at best. I have spent 35 years in the Department of Defense, most of my career looking forward, casting headlights out with some distance to gain some foresight about the future, and I see things through a much darker lens than that. I think the new peace theory crowd is confusing correlation of data with causation. Now, there are five reasons to be satisfied today about our current security situation if one is just looking backwards over the last 10 years. These five include our current status as a world superpower, applying our stability and leadership to the world. There is a consensus on a Western model based upon rule of law, economic prosperity on a capitalistic model and a representative government. That also includes globalization's shared and equal economic progress. Since 1991 we have enjoyed a lack of major power competition. We have had extensive peacekeeping support from the international community, to include the UN [United Nations], that has been very helpful. And, fifth, there is a growth and a continued contribution from the conflict resolution community, the IOs [international organizations], the PVOs [private volunteer organizations] and the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], that has been very useful. And these five conditions clearly cause positive assessments looking back over the last 10 years. But the Emerging Threats Subcommittee, and this committee has a reputation for not driving by a rearview mirror, you are required to look forward, as some of us are in the Pentagon, and there is a number of reasons looking at things from a future tense that should make people have some pause. And the first one is, most significant I think for you and for this Congress, is the perceived hegemonic retrenchment of the United States due to some perceived decline in our capabilities or interest in sustaining our position in the world. The second reason is the rise of emerging powers. History suggests some caution when new emergent, non-status-quo powers arise and create disequilibrium by seeking to restore either their previous status or some perceived slights. I won't have to mention which state I am referring to. The third reason is continued or reduced international support. I suspect that over the next decade we are going to see a degree of peace support fatigue or simply a lack of domestic support for many allies and other agencies that have been very useful in allying with us and keeping instability down. The fourth reason is, and I am someone who is spending a lot of time in Europe these days working on my education, but there is a lot of discussion about the decay or the dissolution of important alliances to us and important alliance partners. I am particularly concerned about NATO's [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] self-disarmament. It is a group of states that has been allied with us for a long period of time to great effect, but they are going to be older, poorer, and less inclined to work with us in the future, and that should be a pause for concern. My fifth source of concern is proxy wars. These can be very catalytic in terms of conflicts. They are not intended to, but they can produce a major war out of what is supposed to be a smaller conflict. And there is new forms of conflict which this committee is very, very aware of in the cyber world in which attribution of the attacker is very hard to identify, and that can create new forms of conflict and also then catalytically lead to a more conventional kind of conflict if we perceive the attack to have been directed and attributable. Number six, resource conflicts. I think energy, water, food, rare materials, most of the time there is a body of evidence that suggests these do not lead to conflicts, but they certainly can create the tinder box for conflicts. I see actions in the South China Sea by China and its efforts to secure energy resources and raw earth assets as something to be taken seriously in this regard. There is an issue of demographic decline or demographic change in many states around the world. We used to worry about youth bulges, having very high numbers of young people in states in Africa and Asia that were unemployed or in the Middle East that might lead to destabilizing things. I think we now instead of youth bulges also have to worry about graying bulges in some areas, particularly in Southern Europe, where there are large numbers of people who are going to be pensionless, underemployed or unemployed for long periods of time. That will produce more disillusionment and more angry people than I think we have seen in the past that will lead to political instability and also allies who are more insular in their orientation rather than in exporting security. Eighth is the most obvious, is divided religions and religious extremism. The continued sacred rage coming from Islam is going to make internal fights. I think the Arab Spring has a lot of hope in it, but it is also going to produce some illiberal democracies, and we will see some other forms of government emerge out of that. And I am particularly concerned, of course, about Egypt, among other areas. We are creating a lot of fertile ground for Al Qaeda and its affiliated movements to take root in some places, and we are not going to be happy with the results. Number nine, disintegration of socio-economic stability. Again, I am particularly concerned about southern Europe and northern Africa, there is a great deal of distress, dissent, and discord there from economic instability. We need to consider the conditions in which the new normal in southern Europe where unemployment, the new norm might be peaking out and stabilizing at 25 percent, is not going to be allies and states that are going to be exporting security for us or working with us in other places. And finally, my last, my 10th point is the democratization of means of conflict. Again, the diffusion of technology in lethal and nonlethal forms is something that is creating not--I don't go as far as Thomas Friedman with super-empowered networks or super-powered individuals, but we should think of super-empowered networks with means of mass disruption that can hit us in many, many different ways. So for those reasons, those 10 conclusions make my lens look a little bit darker than some of the other people in the community here in Washington, D.C. Plato had it right. Only the dead have seen the end of war. We may not face another bloody century like the last, which was pretty bad, but the world remains a very dangerous place, and I know General Dempsey has stressed to you in the past. Trends suggest that the next decade is not going to be as placid as the last 10 or 20 were, and many of us don't think that the last decade was that great. There are folks whose real agenda is cutting defense, not contributing to our security, and you need to consider that in looking at their evidence. We have to be prepared for a much more broadening array of actors and challenges rather than one singular one that is very, very deep and of great challenge to us. We have to be ready for a broad spectrum of conflicts that range from purely irregular and terrorist at one end to perhaps rising powers with conventional capabilities at the other, and then all the messy in the middle that my statement talked about, the converging of low-end threats with high-end capabilities, producing hybrid threats. This committee's charge is at the cusp at what is emerging in the national security arena and what is going to no doubt I think generate the greatest threats and the risk to our prosperity and security in the next decade. It is a sobering responsibility. I am glad to be able to help you with that to the greatest degree I can. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss these challenges. [The prepared statement of Mr. Hoffman can be found in the Appendix on page 41.] Mr. Thornberry. Thank you. Dr. Lewellyn. STATEMENT OF DR. MARK T. LEWELLYN, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYSIS DEPARTMENT, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY Dr. Lewellyn. Congressman, I look forward to provide my views that will shape the national security environment looking out to 2030 and how that might affect the path set by the 2012 defense strategic guidance. The opinions stated are my own. Mr. Thornberry. Excuse me, Dr. Lewellyn, would you pull the mike a little closer or something, we are having---- Dr. Lewellyn. Good, sorry. Mr. Thornberry. Oh, that is much better. Thank you. Dr. Lewellyn. Thank you. So I was saying I look forward to giving you my opinion on how the path set by the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance will affect things. The opinions I state are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory or its sponsors. Will this strategy get the military capability we need in the near term, especially in the context of declining funding for defense? The strategy attempts to be comprehensive. However, there are some areas where we may be falling short, and we must think through an integrated response to address them. The strategy identifies a range of missions that U.S. forces need to address with the resources that are available and the threat environment in which the missions must be executed. Much of our technical effort focuses on improving the capabilities of the sensor, weapon, communications, cyber, and space systems that will be used to address the emerging threats. Our work indicates there are gaps in the capabilities we need to defeat emerging threats identified in the strategy, particularly the anti-access/area-denial threats posed by Iran and China. Kinetic weapons we are developing to counter threats launched against our forces, while capable, should be supplemented by nonkinetic systems to ensure we can deal effectively with large coordinated attacks. Nonkinetic means to defeat these threats include netted electronic warfare systems, integrated cyber-attack capability, lasers and other directed energy systems. In addition, we should explore creative uses of existing weapons to counter threat systems. We must also continue to explore ways to use electromagnetic weapons with their promise of large magazines of relative inexpensive bullets to counter threat kinetic weapons. Maintaining our access to space is a real issue, and we must pursue viable backups to counter attacks on our satellite communications networks close to denied areas and quickly reconstitute the capability they provide. This includes the need to identify methods to operate in environments where the global positioning system, GPS, is denied. We have an edge in the capability of our submarine force relative to potential threats, and we must work to maintain it. The ambiguity posed by the unseen presence of a capable submarine can be leveraged to our advantage. Exploring ways to operate unmanned systems autonomously will allow the proven capability of these systems to be used in new ways. Finally, we must ensure that our Special Operations Forces have the technology they need to perform their critical missions. While we work to improve the ability of our systems to defeat those of the threat in war, we must also consider how we can better use these systems to deter potential threats and win without fighting, much as we did during the Cold War. In China, the United States has a competitor with a coordinated strategy for achieving its national objectives without needing to resort to war. In other words, to win through shaping and deterrence, as evidenced by its development of anti-access/ area-denial capabilities. To deter China effectively, the U.S. must employ an effective countervailing strategy informed by an understanding of the implications of divergent U.S. and Chinese perspectives. We must include an understanding of these differing views as we operate our current forces and as we develop, test, and employ new capabilities to ensure that the messages we want to send to China are received as we intend. The message China sent by demonstrating its ability to shoot down a satellite several years ago was received clearly by us. So what does this mean for Congress? You should ensure that our intelligence collection efforts remain strong and that as a government we encourage openness and transparency, drawing on insights gained from social media and other information technologies. Information is critical, and there is already evidence that in the cyber world operations may be shifting beyond deterrence into more direct competition. We must ensure that our cyber forces are equipped with the appropriate technologies and rules of engagement to win. You should support the development of warfighting capabilities that contribute to deterrence, such as the aforementioned efforts to supplement our kinetic systems by developing complementary, nonkinetic means to defeat threats. These include netted electronic warfare systems, integrated cyber attack capability, lasers, and other directed energy systems as well as electromagnetic weapons. In addition, we need to maintain our edge in submarine warfare, cyber operations, and special operations capability, and because communications and intelligence are critical for deterrence, we must work to maintain our access to space and identify ways to improve resilience in our space systems. A vibrant research and development base will be critical to supporting these efforts, and I want to comment briefly on how reductions in funding for this base can be made reversible. It is important for each research and development organization to identify its core competencies and protect them when funding reductions occur. More important perhaps for us is to maintain a robust science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education program, or STEM program, to ensure a continual refresh of thinking about defense from the brightest minds of our next generation. I personally benefited from the National Defense Education Act when I was in high school back in the 1960s. Thank you for the opportunity to provide my comments. I am prepared to address any questions you may have. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Dr. Lewellyn can be found in the Appendix on page 58.] Mr. Thornberry. Thank you. Mr. Berteau. STATEMENT OF DAVID J. BERTEAU, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY PROGRAM, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES Mr. Berteau. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mister, as we say it in south Louisiana, Langevin, which is a more Cajun way of pronouncing it than they do in Rhode Island, I suspect, members of the committee. It is a high privilege to be here today, and I am very grateful to you. It is also nice to be in this room and to read Article I, Section 8 and the plaque that sits in front of us as witnesses. I teach three times a year a graduate class in Congress and national security policy, and virtually every session of every class comes back to that one sentence in the Constitution, so it is a privilege to be sitting here and reminding of that. It is also a great privilege to be in this room and look at the men whose pictures are on the walls around us here and realize the contributions that this committee has made to the success of national security over my entire lifetime. I have submitted a written statement, as you have indicated it is in the record in its entirety. I won't repeat some of the things that are in there, and I would like to emphasize just a couple of points so we can get to the questions, if you will. You spent the whole morning and a good chunk of the afternoon actually on a lot of the budget and sequestration and economic-related issues, and I will be happy to get back to those during the questions if you want, but there are a couple of key points that I would like to make. One is in the charts in my statement, and I will refer here to chart 2, the second chart, is the result of a recent study-- I am sorry, I have got my charts out of order here. It is actually chart 5. In addition to all the challenges that DOD [Department of Defense] faces with sequestration, with the problems of the continuing resolution, with the future impact of post-sequestration caps from the Budget Control Act, there is an internal cost growth problem in DOD, and that internal cost growth is illustrated here on this chart. We have just completed a project at CSIS [Center for Strategic and International Studies], and we put our public briefing out last week. We are going to put a report out later this month, and I will be glad to provide it to the subcommittee because I think you will want to take a look at it, but it basically tracks the internal cost growth of both military pay and benefits, including health care, and of the operation and maintenance account, and the degree to which that cost growth independent of the sequestration or the budget caps will by the beginning of the next decade essentially drive out all opportunity for investment costs, for R&D [research and development], and for procurement. And absent either a dramatic increase in military spending or a dramatic reduction in force structure and personnel, unless those costs are brought under control, they are going to basically squeeze out investment, and it will be hard to sustain and maintain our edge, if you will, under those circumstances. Be glad to go into that a little bit further. The second point that I would like to make is on figure 7, contract obligations for R&D. We do at CSIS annual reports on contract spending across the Federal Government, and we do a specific report on DOD. You know that this is, we are now in the middle of our fourth drawdown in the last 60 years, post- Korea, post-Vietnam, post-Cold War, and today. I hate to call it post-BCA [Budget Control Act] because that doesn't quite have the same ring, if you will. But one of the very big differences between the buildup that we have had over the previous decade and previous buildups is in R&D spending, and this probably applies to science and technology across the board. In previous buildups R&D spending tends to go up faster than the overall increase in DOD spending, and that creates a technology reservoir, if you will, from which we can draw as we are drawing down and invest in periods of decline. That did not occur in the decade of the aughts, where R&D spending both as a percent of DOD's budget and as a percent of total contract dollars actually went down, and that is what this chart depicts. We were at 15 percent in the late 1990s, we are down to only 10 percent not of the budget, but of contract spending, of money spent under contract. Now, this is unclassified R&D, it does not include classified contracts, but the trend is the same for the classified contracts as well. I just can't reflect the data in an unclassified document. What that says is we have not invested in the future in the way we typically do during a buildup. That is going to make it harder during the drawdown. And I think for the S&T [science and technology] responsibilities of this subcommittee it is something that will require some particular attention as we go forward as well. Let me focus on my last of my comments, if you will, on what does all this mean, what does it mean for industry, what does it mean for innovation? Industry itself relies upon the Defense Department for demand signals. Typically those demand signals come from the budget and they come from the Future Year Defense Program. One of the great strengths of the Defense Department is its ability to do fiscally disciplined long-term programming and then to use that as the baseline for execution. Obviously we modify it each year, this committee pays a lot of attention to that Future Year Defense Program to look at whether the investments being made today will be sustained over time. We haven't had a good fiscally disciplined FYDP [Future Years Defense Program] in a long time. We have been in two wars, we have had supplementals and overseas contingency operations accounts to pay for anything you couldn't fund in the base budget, and frankly we have lost some of the internal skills in DOD to do this and some of the processes. It is critical that those get restored. Industry does need those just as much as you do because that is their demand signals. That tells them where to invest, what kind of skills to hire, what kind of workforce to retain, what kind of technologies to be developing. Right now they are pretty much left guessing. One of the most important things that could be done, obviously there are benefits from dealing with sequestration and Budget Control Act from an impact on readiness, but there is also a big benefit from the long-term investment in industry in helping them where to go. Similarly with innovation, what we have seen is a historic shift in the development of technology for national security. We have relied for 60 or 70 years on new technology developed for national security, under DOD contract by defense contractors; DOD gets first dibs at it. That is changing, and it is changing not only because we are not investing as much as previous data show, but it is also changing because where innovation is occurring now is often in the global commercial market, not in the domestic national security market, and we need to do a better job of both identifying those kinds of technology developments, and this is everything from communications and data management and sensors and data fusion to nanomaterials and 3D [three dimensional] printing and a whole host of other technologies that DOD is paying attention to but is not the driver. And we also are about to wrap up and will also have ready later this winter and will be glad to provide to the committee some recommendations that CSIS is making on how DOD could do a better job both identifying and ultimately taking advantage of global commercial technology developments around the world. With that, Mr. Chairman, I will conclude my remarks and I will be happy to take your questions. [The prepared statement of Mr. Berteau can be found in the Appendix on page 73.] Mr. Thornberry. Thank you. And I appreciate all the comments that all three of you made. Lots of food for thought and interesting points to pursue. But at this point I will yield for any statement and any questions the distinguished ranking member would like to make. STATEMENT OF HON. JAMES R. LANGEVIN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM RHODE ISLAND, RANKING MEMBER, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, EMERGING THREATS AND CAPABILITIES Mr. Langevin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I take this opportunity to welcome our witnesses. I apologize that I had run late. I was tied up in another meeting, as often happens around here, but I am looking forward to your testimony and to getting to the question and answers. But, Mr. Chairman, since this is our first subcommittee of the 113th Congress, I will start by saying how much I look forward to working with you. I enjoyed looking with you in the last Congress and look forward to working with you in this as well. And I want to also start by again welcoming our newest Members to Congress and particularly to the subcommittee. I look forward to working with these gentlemen and ladies as well, and look forward also to our strong--their strong participation and valued input as we do our part in shaping our Nation's defense strategy. As this subcommittee is charged with overseeing the Department's authorities and investments that are primarily focused on addressing asymmetric threats as well as developing promising capabilities to address these varied and complex challenges, I am sure that our first hearing will spur some thoughts about, among our members, regarding the future national security environment and how we should best prioritize our defense resources against the backdrop of fiscal pressures and other concerns. So over the past decade we have rightly vested in short- term deliverable-based acquisitions and related research, and we will continue to provide near-term capabilities to deter and defeat our adversaries. However, as we will hear today, we must appropriately prepare for future challenges. The Department of Defense, and our interagency and international partners, confront a broad range of challenges including cyber warfare; terrorism; weapons of mass destruction; homeland defense; space; anti-access/area-denial; instability; and humanitarian operations. So I look forward to hearing more from our witnesses on how best to shift our current short-term emphasis, particularly in innovation, to one that might provide long-term benefits to our national security. As many of our past members know, I am always particularly interested in hearing your thoughts on advancing our cyber defense strategy and capabilities, which is going to become increasingly important as we go forward and will be more widely used and relied upon, as well as the advancements of potentially game-changing technologies such as directed energy, autonomous unmanned systems, and electromagnetic rail guns to name a few, some of which you have already mentioned in your testimony here today. So I also see that some of you are affiliated with universities, and I believe the members of this subcommittee would benefit from any comments you might have regarding the health of our innovative pipeline, particularly addressing science and technology future workforce needs of the Department. So with that, I again welcome our witnesses. And Mr. Chairman, look forward to working with you. Thank you. Mr. Thornberry. Thank the gentleman. And I said the same thing, but I got to say it before you got here. So would you like to go ahead and question the witnesses? Mr. Langevin. I will yield to you first, Chairman, and then I will go. Mr. Thornberry. Well, I was just going to yield to other members unless you want to. Mr. Langevin. That is okay, then I will yield. Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Nugent. Mr. Nugent. Mr. Chairman, thank you so very much. And this is my first subcommittee meeting on HASC [House Armed Services Committee], so I appreciate our panel being here, and always interesting to hear your take in regards to where we are intelligence-wise and the other. But to Mr. Hoffman, and this relates to Pakistan. You know, India is on track to have an economy, I believe, 16 times that of Pakistan. And so the question--I have multiple questions, but one is, how do we expect Pakistan to react to that in the climate that they are in, and do you think they are going to promote a broader terrorist activity to try to counter India's growing power as it relates to financially? Mr. Hoffman. Sir, I am not an Asian expert or a South Asian expert, but do have that kind of asset in my office. I can get you a more specific answer. [The information referred to can be found in the Appendix on page 91.] Mr. Hoffman. But in general I believe that Pakistan will continue doing what they have been doing for the last several years, is a much more severe acceleration of their nuclear deterrent. The scale in terms of size, population, and economic clout of India is very daunting to Pakistan, and their idea of their national narrative is, you know, that they are overwhelmed, and it gives them a justification to invest in nuclear materials. They will still also support on their perimeters the kind of alliances and proxy forces that they have had in the past, which are largely, you know, terroristic in nature. Mr. Nugent. I understand that is not your subject area, but what is the take in regards to, will Pakistan work with us, do you think, as relates to trying to move to a more free market economy which may, in fact, then counter India's strength? Mr. Hoffman. I think they are trying to. I think, you know, the ports, the activity in Karachi and the southern half, it definitely would benefit from economic development, exports and imports, and that would be an approach to take with them. But I think that the overwhelming national narrative and the scale of their relationship with India is still going to lean them towards retaining something that is the ultimate high ground for them, nuclear or some other means. Mr. Nugent. Obviously, I mean, with the Taliban and as it relates to Afghanistan and where they, you know, where they are positioned with Pakistan, it is concerning, to say the least, in regards to where they move forward, particularly as they move forward with the Taliban. But to Mr. Berteau, you know, we heard a lot today earlier in the HASC meeting reference to what is going to happen with sequestration and obviously with the CR [continuing resolution]. But how do we prioritize as it relates to prioritizing and maintaining partnerships around the world? You know, we train with other organizations, and it sounds like we are going to be cutting back our training and our ability to reach out and help. Mr. Berteau. Mr. Nugent, that question really hits at the core of I think the impact of both sequestration and the disconnects between budget requirements and the continuing resolution, but it extends well beyond fiscal year 2013 as well. I would actually start with your Pakistan-India question because I think one of the lesser understood elements of that is the economic growth and the potential value and the need for the U.S. to be both aligning itself with and actually investing intellectually and sometimes from a capital point of view. One of the unsung benefits of the way in which we have been evolving the economic strategy in Afghanistan over the last couple years is to take advantage of Indian investment in Afghanistan to bring the Pakistanis into a better economic relationship, not cross-border, but in a regional sense, and things like the TAPI pipeline, the Tajikistan-Afghanistan- Pakistan-India pipeline, goes a long way towards creating some of that economic integration that is very difficult to do. This is obviously outside the realm of the Defense Department in terms of its requirements, but it is clearly part of the broader geopolitical and geostrategic framework. When we took a look last year at the pivot to Asia and what the Pacific would respond, and CSIS did a report, I was co- director of it, that was submitted to the Congress, we testified before another subcommittee of this committee last year, one of the real things we looked at was kind of the lower end of that spectrum, engagement with countries, using training, using opportunities in humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery, using the Pacific Command augmentation teams from Special Operations Forces, et cetera, to build that engagement at a low level, but across 30 countries in the region to create more of a dynamic, and training and exercise money is a critical piece of that. It is pretty small in the overall defense budget perspective, but it is critical not to let that slip away, and yet under sequestration clearly it will. The difficulty, and you heard this from Dr. Carter and General Dempsey and the rest earlier today, is that as it is being implemented, sequestration does not permit for the allocation of those priorities. I would submit that they need that flexibility. One of the ways in which the Congress, however, can give them that flexibility is with an actual appropriations bill for the rest of the fiscal year as opposed to a CR, but even if there is a CR, at least substantial reprogramming and transfer authority within it. Even so, the question of what priorities you would apply, which is really the basis of your issue, remains somewhat unanswered from that point of view. Mr. Nugent. Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank you. Thank you very much. Mr. Thornberry. Thank you. Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is a somewhat philosophical discussion we are having today, and I will get a little philosophical. Heaven and hell, aspects of human nature, high side, low side, every human being has it. It is easy to dwell on that low side, which is fighting, cussing, trying to conquer, control, greed, those kinds of conditions. There are other conditions of living that are much higher: Altruism, compassion, mercy, spirit to see everyone be happy. Some would say that that is a utopian ideal that will never happen, and I agree that it will never happen, and it certainly will never happen if we don't work towards it. And so for the peaceniks and others who see nothing but peace and happiness, we need that group, and we also need the group that sees nothing but danger ahead, and both of those groups need to look at the situation, try to do so through the same lens, and maybe we can find somewhere in the middle where we can start making good, rational decisions about defense and security in our Nation, emerging threats. That means that the threats are there, and they are always going to be there, but they change. And so what kind of changes can we make in our defense strategy to keep us from having to go to war? And so I think maybe we could be reaching a point where we are moving away from the hard power solutions to the soft power solutions. As people get more educated and as we trade with each other more, we have less time for fighting. And that doesn't mean we don't need to be prepared for the fight. And so I actually think that we should always be willing to expand our thinking about how to address the threats that we see emerging, and soft power has to be, although it is not within the domain of this particular committee, perhaps we should pay more attention to it, perhaps there is a need for not income revenue, shifting away from hard power assets such as nuclear weaponry into things that will be more likely to happen, like cyber threats, and you know. So we have got to--I think what our tendency has been to do is with respect to defense is we plan ahead 20, 30 years, we build out, but we never do address the fact that the time has changed and as there are new threats, do we need to continue doing what we have been doing? Do we need as many personnel? Do we need that many boots on the ground in light of the threats that we are likely to face and the way that is most smart to address those threats? So I would just challenge my colleagues to look at things not as they have been but as how we want them to be. If we don't try to shape the world in a more peaceful way, then it will never get to that point. So with that I will say that I very much enjoy service on this committee, on this subcommittee, I enjoy my services on Armed Services. I think this is one of the most bipartisan committees in Congress, and I enjoy serving on it, look forward to future service. Thank you. Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Hunter. Mr. Hunter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, gentlemen, for being here today. First question is this, Mr. Hoffman, you alluded to this when you talked about think tank folks, really smart people, Ph.D.s, Secretaries of Defense of the past, I would say, too, who have said that we are not going to be in a big air war again, we are not going to be in any more pitched naval battles, we are never going to have any peer-to-peer anything anymore, warfare has changed. I guess my question to you is, where is that school of thought coming from? And I don't want to be disrespectful of those previous Secretaries or those super smart Harvard Ph.D.s that have said this kind of stuff, but how could you be so, in my opinion, naive and shortsighted that you look back a few thousand years and think that human nature has really transformed in the last 50 to where you are not going to have it anymore? I am just curious, where do you see that coming from? Mr. Hoffman. Thank you, Mr. Hunter. A lot of people put a lot of hope in the better angels of our nature. They aspire to and seek and want to see us move forward to enjoy the prosperity that our hard investments in security have created for ourselves. There is a very strong statistical case in work by Joshua Goldstein, Steve Pinker, and others in the literature right now that suggests that both the number of conflicts and the number of lethality or casualties in conflict has statistically been going down for some period of time. There is actually a factual basis for that. One can quibble, and I have, I am doing research right now for the chairman on, you know, how good some of those statistics are, but there is a general trend line. If you take World War I and World War II out of this thing, war is not a normal phenomenon. It does not always occur. It creates these big disequilibriums, and if you can invest smartly and avoid one, you would be very wise to do so. The causality for why these lines have been going down, I believe we, this body, has created with the investments and the sacrifice that our Armed Forces have created for ourselves over the last 10 or 20 years. But what I think is some people want a policy aim, and they are backing the data in to support what they want. They want to reduce defense spending. They don't understand that that defense spending has actually created the security conditions and the reduced number of wars and the reduced lethality of these wars in our favor. And they don't seek to sustain that. Mr. Hunter. Let me ask you, though, if you look pre-Cold War you have got a few engagements in the last 100 years. If you look post-Cold War you have dozens of engagements, but the lethality has gone down, but the number of events has gone up. So we aren't having--there aren't fewer hot spots than there were in the 1960s or 1970s, there is more, but there is much less lethality in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than there were in World War II, Korea, World War I. Would you agree with that or no? Do you see the number of events going down? Mr. Hoffman. The data for the number of events has gone down, but they are generalized from global statistics, from numbers of conflict in Asia and Africa in which United States had no interest whatsoever. If conflicts go from, say, 100 a year down to 5, and all 5 of them deal with treaty partners or very close friends of the United States, then I still have a cause for concern. So the overgeneralization of statistics from a mass number of global things that we never heard about and didn't care about, and if the only conflicts we care about are off Taiwan, the South China Sea, Korea, the Middle East, Iran or Israel, then we have cause for concern. So my problem is people are overgeneralizing global statistics, and they are not getting down to the meat and specifics of threats to friends and interests of the United States. And they are wrong. We need to continue to invest in security, but smartly, and we need a comprehensive approach that both prevents and deters conflict. Mr. Hunter. Let me ask the other witnesses, too, a totally separate question. Do you see a point in which technology and its ubiquity, and as the cost of technology gets lower and lower, it is offsetting our personnel problem at any point? Is there a tipping point where you can say we don't need as many people, we don't need as many hospitals on base, we don't need as many day care centers because we have the ability to strike nonkinetically, we have the ability to deter with other means besides manpower? And if you see that, is there an actual tipping point there or do you think it is always going to take one and the other kind of hand in hand where you have the choice between going kinetic or nonkinetic or using high technology stuff versus stabbing people in the face when you have to go door to door? Mr. Berteau. Mr. Hunter, let me take a first crack at that. First of all, with respect to are we having more hot spots now than before, from the U.S. perspective clearly yes, but I think one of the biggest differences--and I think it permeates this whole discussion--during the Cold War there were parts of the world we could ignore. We and the Soviets essentially had agreed we will leave those guys to sort their own thing out, it is not part of our fight. Today there is no part of the world we can ignore. The nature of a failed state, the nature of a vacuum in governance, the nature of a vacuum in economics creates both an intelligence threat and an opportunity for bad guys that is something we can no longer ignore. Part of that is because of the spread of technology. But your point on can we trade technology for human beings, that is actually been what we have been doing really for the last 30 or 40 years. It clearly has a point in the curve where that will slow down. I don't think we yet know for the advanced unmanned systems that we have in place today what the long-term tail requirements are to support and sustain those, and you may trade military personnel but not necessarily cost and investment, if you will, in terms of the long-term ability to sustain and support that operation. Ultimately I think it still needs to be a blend. I mean, time and again we see that the human being in the loop is critical to mission success at whatever level, squad, all the way up to theater. And I don't think we will ever bypass that part of the product. I don't know if Mark has anything to add to that. Dr. Lewellyn. I would say it is a matter of looking at over time what mix we need. When you fire a kinetic weapon, it blows something up, you can see the effect. With some of the nonkinetic weapons you don't really know what effect you have had until either the weapon from the other side doesn't show up or it misbehaves. So we need to have a spectrum of responses now and look for a cost-effective mix. In terms of costs, one thing I have been personally struggling with over the last several years is figuring out how much a pound, for want of a better term, a pound of cyber costs. You know how many people it takes to man a weapon system and support it. To get the level of cyber defense and attack capability we need, how many people do we need? How do we do that equation? I think we are very immature in that area in terms of understanding the personnel needs in that area, and we need to do more to do that over time. Mr. Hoffman. Could I add on to that? Mr. Hunter. I am so far past my time. Mr. Thornberry. If you have something to add to that. Mr. Hoffman. Just add something. Mr. Hunter and I share a background with bad haircuts and running clubs and stuff like that, so I have to disassociate myself from any implication that I might think that technology is the solution to a lot. We think of warfare, unfortunately, in stovepipes called air, sea, land kind of domains, and we associate either institutions or technologies with those. To me the most decisive domain, the most important aspect of the conflict spectrum is a human domain that cuts across all those, and that would be my principal investment area, and technology is not going to be--is always an enabler in the right context, employed properly with judgment, and that judgment comes from investment we have made in commanders and people who are working in that battle space that understand that. But the human domain is the most decisive domain. Mr. Hunter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Thornberry. Thank you. Mrs. Davis. Mrs. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for being here. And perhaps just going along with that line, Mr. Hoffman, and if that is the case, would you say--how would you characterize our ability to organize ourselves and have a military strategy around that? Is that where we are? It seems to me we are kind of far from there, and how do we get there if you think that is appropriate? Mr. Hoffman. No, I think our strategy in the past, at least in my time of service and in the Department of the Navy, has been to understand that we need to recruit, sustain, educate-- where I now work in an educational facility--retain and take care of the All-Volunteer Force. And in the Defense Strategic Guidance, I am surprised, you know, there is an element in there in which sustaining the All-Volunteer Force and treasuring that in the modern sense is an important part of the strategy. Keeping that sustainable is, you know, is an issue because of the cost that it has derived. But I think there is a recognition in the strategy and the building and the Services that, you know, the quality of the force is important, the investments in the human domain is important, but all these investments are going to be prioritized and pressurized in the next few years, both on the civilian side and in the military side. Mrs. Davis. Is that well organized to fight the hybrid wars that we have now? Mr. Hoffman. I believe we are organized to fight the hybrid wars. The SOF [Special Operations Forces] community has made a lot of developments over the last few decades, or at least the last decade, which also needs to be sustained and examined relative to the future. We have other investments, though, on the nonkinetic and the cyber community, do we have the right workforce and how do we sustain that workforce? We have done research at NDU [National Defense University] on what does that mean in the Cyber Command, what aspect of that needs to be in the military and what needs to be civilianized. You can get a very nice clearance for a military officer with 20 years in the Air Force or the Marine Corps, but some of the people we need in the cyber community are like some of my daughters or some of the boyfriends that come into my house that have--that wear jewelry in places that I don't attach, you know, things, and they are different. How you bring that into the community, too, and sustain that so you have a very capable force? That might be an area to explore. Mrs. Davis. Mr. Berteau, would you like to comment on that? I mean, you seem to suggest that perhaps at least the way we organize our new defense strategy doesn't necessarily comport with what we are doing right now. Mr. Berteau. Thank you, Congresswoman Davis. I think it is a little bit hard to tell. You know, the redone strategic guidance issued January a year ago was driven by the $487 billion over the 10-year period that came out from the first tranche of Budget Control Act cuts, and it was clearly, by the comments of DOD afterwards, it was pretty close to the thin edge of what was sustainable against those dollars, right? Because no sooner had it come out then you had generals and DOD senior civilians saying if you cut further we are going to have to rewrite the strategy. Well, it is not a very robust strategy if you have to rewrite it every time the number of dollars goes down a little bit. So you have to say to yourself perhaps we need a slightly less fragile strategy. But if it was at the thin edge then we haven't really tested it, because what DOD did is they said we built the 2013 budget consistent with that strategy. But if you look at the issues, most of them were shoved into 2014 and beyond. We haven't yet seen that 2014 budget or the Future Year Defense Program associated with it, but right now the number that that is built to is not the number that is consistent with the cap of the Budget Control Act. It is $50 billion too high, or $45 billion if you believe the latest reports. It is awful hard to assess the disconnects or even lay out priorities when you don't have enough money to fund the basic piece of it. But what is distressing is those priorities have not come into play in the sequestration debate. There has been no argument back that says forget this everybody takes the same percentage, let us prioritize and put that in place through a priority process. Nobody has made that argument. It is hard to tell whether it is because we don't know the answers or because it is just caught up in a much broader net and DOD is just part of that trap, if you will. Mrs. Davis. Dr. Lewellyn, did you want to comment as well? How do we fix this? Dr. Lewellyn. I think, you know, flexibility is the key. I have spent a lot of my career working with Navy and Marine Corps, and they are very much into task organization and flexibility. So I think the more we can get away from standard ways and units of approaching things the better. In my own line of work in research and development, I think sharing and collaboration is being facilitated by information technology. I am amazed at the amount of ideas that pass around among the younger folks that work for me. One of the big problems I see, however, is sharing across classification boundaries, looking hard at what needs to be classified, what doesn't, so we can get the brightest minds working on the hard problems, and that is a challenge we have to struggle with. Mrs. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will come back. Thank you. Mr. Thornberry. Dr. Heck. Dr. Heck. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for being here this afternoon. And, Mr. Hoffman, in your opening statement you referenced our, the United States' hegemonic position that we now hold across the globe and the fact that we have really no near competitor. In today's earlier full committee, you know, we heard about the potential impacts of sequestration and those indiscriminate cuts, and Chairman McKeon stated in his questioning that his concern, and I believe rightfully so, is that as we make these cuts we may see a decrease in our standing not just amongst potential adversaries, but also amongst our allies as showing a sign of weakness. The question is, my question is, where does that, where does sequestration, where will it have an impact on those emerging threats? What types of threats may emerge due to the fact that we go into sequestration and there is this potential perceived weakness now of the United States in the loss of our hegemonic position? And short of actually replacing the sequester, on which capabilities do we concentrate our remaining resources to best deter those emerging threats? Mr. Hoffman. Until you got to the last thing, I thought I could answer the question. The impact of sequestration at a strategic level is a torpedoing, I believe, of the perception that America is interested and willing to lead. That literature in Tokyo, in Australia and in London, where I do VTCs [video teleconferences] or have visited in the last year, is commonly now referred to in white papers, that America either doesn't want to lead, doesn't have the will and the wallet to lead, even though the relative power balance for us is we are in a rather significantly advantageous position right now, particularly in the measures that we add--you know, how much money we are spending into defense--which doesn't necessarily always equate to an output that is equal to the same thing. But we focus on numbers like 535, 555, 575, and we think that equates to something, and generally it does, but maybe not in regions and other places where people are measuring things. The Chinese have their own way of measuring aggregate national power, and they put other tangibles and intangibles into that. They may perceive it. But in Australia and the government in Japan, this idea that we are not able to come to an agreement on the spending and the spending priorities and put our house in order has already undercut us. And they talk about it in papers and they talk about whether or not they need to be intimidated or appease China in compensation for that the conventional deterrent that we are offering, that extended deterrence, is somehow weakened. And the other impact on sequestration is, I think in both 2013 or 2014, we are going to torpedo the industrial base. It is far too fragile. I spent 2 years as a political appointee in the Department of the Navy working on naval industrial base and investments, and I think we will hurt ourselves in that sense. And it can be rebuilt, but it is far easier to crash it than it is to rebuild it over a period of time. So the impact on the threats is not really the threats, it is our allies and our perceived perception of who and what we are in the world. Mr. Berteau. Could I piggyback on that just a little, Dr. Heck? You raised the question of potential enemies or adversaries showing that America is weak because we can't even get our own act together, if you will. And I think that is a legitimate concern. You know, the whispering that says, you see, you really can't trust the United States. They are going to pull back. They are going to leave. They are not going to be here. Dr. Kissinger in his seminal book on China recently said ultimately all of those nations in the region that are not seriously already our allies really only want two things: Don't make us choose, but don't leave. And anything that creates a signal that we are leaving opens a vacuum, if you will. But it is equally true for our allies and partners who won't sustain what they have. Mr. Hunter asked earlier about partnership capacity. And we spent a lot, in fact this subcommittee has spent some time on building partnership capacity and looking at the questions. But a lot of that is at the low end of the spectrum, which is where the threat is. There is also partnership capacity we already have in high abundance with our serious allies, with Japan, with the Republic of Korea, with the United Kingdom, with France, with NATO. We need to sustain that partnership capacity as well. And whatever we do sends signals to them that it is okay for them to do it as well. You know, we have done some look at European defense spending, and of course, as you all know, it has been coming down dramatically and it is going to drop even further. But for the first decade of this century, European defense spending dropped but spending per soldier actually went up. Their technology investment was sustained, if you will. Why? Because their force structure actually came down faster than their spending did. They protected their investment in research and development, whereas we use it as a bill payer right off the top of the bat. Those are the kinds of signals that are not only important internally, but are important externally and globally as well. Dr. Lewellyn. I would just add to that, that I think looking more over the long trend getting past sequester with defense funding coming down, the R&D community needs to look smartly at how we are investing our skills and capabilities, looking across mission areas about what is common technically across them to make sure we maximize the commonality. And that is the way I would answer your question and deal with the science and technical community and our allied countries so we convey to them that, hey, we are thinking this problem through smartly and we are going to come out the other end as good a position as we can be. Dr. Heck. Thank you. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Carson, would you like to ask questions? Mr. Carson. Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is becoming increasingly clear that our offensive use of cyberspace is pretty much a growing threat. While there are sophisticated computer systems getting cheaper each and every day, it is pretty easy to imagine that some countries or even terrorist organizations would lack the resources and knowledge to really conduct serious cyber attacks. As we develop increasingly sophisticated countermeasures, do you believe that we will continue to see cyber threats from around the world or will they be pretty much contained to sophisticated governments like China? Dr. Lewellyn. I think there is certainly a sophisticated end, you know, states can organize a lot more capability. That doesn't mean I dismiss so-called lone actors. I think we are still getting a handle in some areas on the vulnerability over all of over systems. There are industrial control systems on Navy ships that were bought before the days that we worried about cyber attack, and understanding those vulnerabilities, which the Navy is starting to do, is important. So I think there is work we need to do. We need to be careful about the information we put out to share, to understand the vulnerability of that information, and be more sensitive to the way cyber has infiltrated into all of our lives, both personal and from the Government perspective and military perspective. So I am not quite at the stage where I think it is going to be something that we are going to have to worry about for some time. Mr. Berteau. Mr. Carson, in many ways the cyber threat is the ultimate of asymmetric threats, but it is a very scalable asymmetric threat and can quickly become a symmetric threat, if you will, because the vulnerabilities that we have continue to increase almost at the same rate as in fact our ability to defend against and respond to the threats of those vulnerabilities. My own view--and this is not sustained by any particular research but by long-term observation of it--is that the various roles of the parts of the Government still remain to be resolved a bit. You know, the President's Executive Order that he announced last night in the State of the Union that we got to read publicly yesterday takes some modest steps in this direction, but clearly a lot more is needed, and the role of the Congress in providing that more is quite powerful. Mr. Carson. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back. Mrs. Hartzler. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I had an interesting discussion with a person on the plane ride home last week. And he is a third-generation Latino, had relatives along the southern border, and we had a lot of discussion about many topics, but certainly one of them is the rise in narcoterrorism on the border. And I see, Mr. Hoffman, that in your testimony you mention that as one of the threats and the challenge of the gangs you say as a disruptive force inside America and in Mexico portend greater problems down the road. And certainly we are starting to see more and more of it in our neck of the woods. So could you describe more in detail the challenges that you think might be faced with the Mexico scenario, from technical, intelligence, manpower, and others, and how might the U.S. deal with it? Mr. Hoffman. Excellent question. It is a little more speculative aspect of my statement, but I didn't like the trends over the last number of years. More sophisticated forms of attacks. More planning of ambushes. More overt acts of terrorism against police. Ambushes against American officials. Body armor-piercing ammunition. The acceleration of learning curve on detonation means of forms of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] in Mexico have been going up. These are not good trends. So it is in the higher end of the narcoterrorism category, not yet merging and converging with kind of the conventional capabilities and the irregular tactics of the hybrid threat, but it is on the trend line to get there. There are a few open source indicators with Middle Eastern sources, to include Hezbollah's interest in Latin America and Mexico,that would offer more learning curve increases that bother me as a concern. I don't have any validated intelligence on those whatsoever. When Admiral McRaven and maybe Judge Webster are here at the HASC with their Intel overview it might be a question to pull out in both classified and unclassified sessions. But I have had some visits with Southern Command when Admiral Stavridis was down there as well, and the development of submarines. The sub kind of thing is, when we are talking about state level capabilities being employed by narco- organizations is sort of a hybrid capability that we are starting to see. So you see this emerging. It is still somewhat speculative in my mind. But we are now seeing this kind of activity, and the gross acts of violent terrorism to clearly, if not eradicate, just make some of the Mexican government irrelevant in certain areas is a source of concern. What has been going on with our intelligence sharing and the training from both, I think, SOF and the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], there has, you know, there has been assistance down there that is building partnership capacity that is perhaps on the low end, as David suggested, but it probably has a significant impact. The casualty totals from Mexico, you know, the lowest is 30, the highest is 60,000 dead. This kind of puts to shame the statistics that people are using in Foreign Affairs and big journals right now to suggest that the world is getting rather placid. Those people don't count in the total. They are not considered to have been casualties in a combatant conflict, but clearly these elements, the nonstate actors in Mexico, who are doing this deliberately. Mrs. Hartzler. It is devastating. And you are right, I think a lot of people don't think about there is at least 35,000 that I have heard, casualties, there. And I mean this is just south of us. This is a war going on. But I missed the first part of the hearing. So could you clarify what you just said about submarines? Who is---- Mr. Hoffman. Again I am trying to separate my time in the Department of the Navy with the clearances I had in this particular session, in this particular format. Mrs. Hartzler. You are saying the drug cartels down there are building a submarine? Mr. Hoffman. Yes, ma'am. I think the total number of captured submarines now is somewhere between 9 and 12. Mr. Berteau. That number is not for public. Mr. Hoffman. I have seen photographs of several that we have and one of them is in fact framed and positioned in front of Southern Command's headquarters. Admiral Stavridis mounted one of these submarines in front of his command post. Mrs. Hartzler. In my 24 seconds I have left, what can we do in the United States to counter this? What would you advise? I see you talked about the intelligence sharing. Mr. Hoffman. Intelligence sharing. I believe there is terrorist financing and network analysis that is probably useful to the Mexican authorities. The training. They have done much themselves. They have been rather courageous in facing up to some of this. There has been a lot of intimidation. It is very violent. It is very sophisticated. It is the other southern states in Latin America that have more of the submarine problem where the drug cartels are sourcing the cocaine from for trips up into the United States. And military assets and intelligence is necessary to help defeat that. JIATF-South [Joint Interagency Task Force-South] is part of that, which is an interagency, more of a comprehensive approach. Mixing law enforcement and military assets together is probably the solution. Mrs. Hartzler. Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Thornberry. Which makes it even more disturbing that under sequestration the Navy says they are going to pull all the ships out of Central and South America. And so you have got these drug runners with these submarines or semi-submersibles, various things, bringing drugs up and we are not going to have any ships there. Mr. Gibson. Mr. Gibson. Well, thanks, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the panel being here. Broader question. Assuming American interest protecting our cherished way of life and a flourishing form of life, thriving economy, in your research, in your reflection, in your perhaps modeling, might there be other strategic approaches beyond the one that we have certainly been engaged in since the Second World War, initially to confront communism and then since that time with regard to hegemony and our presumed responsibilities and roles attendant thereof? Are there other approaches that you have contemplated beyond, say, combatant commands with responsibilities throughout the globe and forward military ground forces? Might there be other approaches that would secure our way of life and advance our economy? Mr. Berteau. If I could, Mr. Gibson, start one minute on that and then ask my colleagues here on the panel to comment. Mr. Johnson raised earlier the idea of soft power. We looked at CSIS about six years ago at something called smart power, which is really an amalgam, if you will, how do you integrate better across the Government all of the capabilities, not just the military and kinetic capabilities or even the intel capabilities. I think that the question that Dr. Heck raised about the role of technology in coming into play here, the question that Mrs. Hartzler raised about narcoterrorism, points out to a host of seams, if you will, that are inside. And the chairman alluded to the consequence of sequestration will actually exacerbate those disconnects, if you will. It is a hard thing for the executive branch to work together in a national security establishment, even in good times when everybody has a lot of money. In bad times, when everybody is trying to protect their money, they tend to hunker down around their core business and not worry so much about everybody else. So what you need is a scheme, if you will, that will let you rise above the core competencies. It is much easier for you, because you can be on one committee and another committee and cross jurisdictions pretty quickly that way. It is much harder for them. And I think that the difficulties are exacerbated in a time of sequestration and budget uncertainty. I will leave these guys to come up with solutions. Dr. Lewellyn. I am reminded of a couple of years ago, when the Navy had an advertising slogan called, ``the Navy, a global force for good,'' that emphasized its role in providing relief in situations after bad weather, tsunamis, protecting the sea lanes to encourage trade, providing a framework of international agreement and law so that economies can flourish. And I think that fundamental mission of alliances and strengthening and supporting economic growth short of war, part of the shaping and deterrence that I talked about in my statement, are critical. And, you know, certainly cheaper than fighting a lot of wars both in terms of cost of weapons and lives. So I think we need to focus on that, the soft power or smart power going forward. Mr. Hoffman. I have been working on a grand strategy approach to try to think through I think what is our need for a balanced and sustainable grand strategy, and I have argued for something called forward partnership. It is in the current issue of Orbis and the January issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings, and the reason it is in the Naval Institute Proceedings is it privileges naval forces. I would declare victory in World War II and would declare victory in the Korean War at this point in time and probably bring back more ground force structure from overseas and maybe reduce that and take a total force perspective on what our ground force requirements are. We have a million-man land Army today, plus a 250,000-man Marine Corps when you bring in the Reserve into the picture. So I believe we have just postured ourselves differently and we need to stop doing some things we have been doing. And I would use the naval forces and SOF to generate the degree of engagement and partnership that is forward. That I think we should do, but it is going to have to be less static, less vulnerably positioned in one fixed place, and we need more freedom of action to move around the world from crisis to crisis, because we are not going to populate every crisis with brigades or Marine forces, and then leave them there for a decade or more. So we need some more freedom of action, and the strategy of forward partnership is my solution, which I can provide for the record. Mr. Gibson. Thank you. I would be very interested in taking a look at the article. My staff will probably pull it for me, though. But thank you for those thoughtful comments. What comes to mind is, you know, we certainly saw the rise of China's involvement in Africa, and our response was I would say pretty typical. I am not so sure it was effective. We created another combatant command for it. And I wonder if we might be better served leading with the State Department, certainly using assets from across the Federal Government, to be sure. But when we constantly lead with forward military presence, I wonder if we are not fully achieving what it is we are trying to do and incurring the cost that evidently is difficult for us. Mr. Berteau. The question, the core of the question you raise, sir, is at its heart, what is the boundary of what is DOD's mission and what is the military's mission here? And if there is one important lesson from the last 10 or 15 years, it is that DOD thinks it knows where those boundaries are. But when the Nation needs more in something else and it turns around and looks, okay, where else in the Federal Government is this capability, and it turns out it is not there, then the choice is either let the military do it or have it not be done. And the military will say every time, send me, I will get it done to the best of my ability. That is what happens. We do need to look at that from a broader perspective. We need to fund it and prioritize the resources so that capability is there, and we need to make sure that at the national level that kind of capability is in place. That is a hard thing to do. The Congress has pushed for that a number of times. Twenty- seven years ago this committee took the lead on creating jointness inside DOD through the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act. However, that is all under one Cabinet officer, and that starts in Title X with subject to the authority, direction, and control of the Secretary of Defense. It is pretty hard to look at the Federal Government and start with that same sentence, because if you say subject to the authority and direction and control of, ultimately we know who it is. It is the President. But to organize and sustain that at a lower level bureaucratically, institutionally, is a much tougher question. And ultimately we turn back to DOD and DOD gets it done. Mr. Thornberry. Let me back up from Mr. Gibson's question I guess one level. And I suspect I know Mr. Hoffman's answer to this because of the article he just referenced. But I guess one question is, do we need a strategy? A lot of what you all have talked about is the incredible amount of uncertainty in the world today. And I think everybody can agree we are not going to be able to predict, you know, this conflict or this situation. And my perception is that largely we lurch from crisis to crisis, making decisions as we go. My perception is we didn't do that in the Cold War. There was at least an outline of a strategy that was generally followed. And so I don't know, Mr. Hoffman, do we need a kind of larger national strategy in such an uncertain world? Mr. Hoffman. Yes, sir. Mr. Thornberry. Why? Mr. Hoffman. Emphatically. Mr. Thornberry. Why? Mr. Hoffman. You need to communicate to the American people what treasure they are putting up and why to sell it and make it sustainable. You need to shape the instruments of national power relative to those that are either soft, medium, or hard. You need to articulate to future aggressors what those capabilities are and you need to sustain them over a period of time. I don't know any way of doing that without a strategy. I had prepared a statement--there is a book I particularly like by an author named Rumelt, which Mr. Marshall in the building and Dr. Krepinevich also likes, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy [Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters], and it has got a couple good lines in there. But particularly this idea that strategy is not a dog's breakfast of everything you want to do just piled up. It is focused effort, prioritized resources, which are tradeoffs. I am not comfortable with some of the tradeoffs in my own strategy. One takes an Army below 500,000 and we start absorbing risk. The Marine Corps goes down to a certain level in the 175s, and for every 5, 10K, we start absorbing risk. But we are also absorbing risk by continuing to borrow the amount of money we are borrowing. Very soon we will have interest debt payments that exceed the Department of Defense's TOA [total obligation authority]. That is the ultimate limitation of strategic action, being constricted by ourselves over time, because we are going to pay off old decisions and choices and tradeoffs that we weren't really willing to make. When it gets down into force planning and strategy, Professor Colin Gray in Europe, one of my mentors in life, said there are only two principles: Prudence and adaptability. And we need to be very prudent about the risks that we are absorbing and very conscious about those, and maybe perhaps adaptable is a better term than flexibility. Flexibility is a force that can do a lot of things, you are trading off some readiness. But adaptable is somebody that can learn faster than the opponent. It is a football-soccer--or a soccer fullback that finds himself in a football game playing fullback and actually can learn the position fast. And that is the challenge we had in 2003 to 2007 in Iraq. We might have been flexible but we weren't adaptable. We didn't learn fast enough. But I believe a strategy is essential. Mr. Thornberry. Do you all have comments on that? Dr. Lewellyn. I would just add, I think, you know, I have spent my career in the business of trying to help the Government develop things the private sector isn't developing on their own. And so I think you need a strategy to guide defense Government investment in technologies that wouldn't naturally flow from the private sector in the dealings in the marketplace. And so to the extent that it is important to develop capabilities unique to the Government, you need a strategy to guide that. And to the extent it is interlocked with a diplomatic strategy so we take advantage of both soft and hard power, I think that is good. Mr. Berteau. Mr. Chairman, I have a predisposition that is in line with the idea that maybe we don't need a strategy. I am ultimately a resources and management guy, and it is my belief and my observation over 35 years that resources drive strategy way more than strategy drives resources. But ultimately much of the debate we have about where we are going to take our national security establishment, and particularly the technology investments for that, is a fight between the past and the future. And in that fight, the past is much more powerful than the future. It has all the champions, it has all the advocates, it has all the four-stars. They are all lined up. And the strategy is the best hope that the future has to be able to stand up in that fight and make it more of a fair fight. And so I tend to lean back toward, yes, we probably we do need a strategy, even though ultimately it is the budget that matters. Mr. Thornberry. Interesting perspective. By the way, I was on that smart power commission 6 years ago, which I think was very helpful, look at having this full array of tools. The Government is not very well positioned to use them all. Dr. Lewellyn, I wanted to get back to some things that you talked about at the beginning. And I know this is an interest Mr. Langevin and I certainly share about nonkinetic weapons of various kinds. And you mentioned them. I would be interested in your evaluation of how well we are pursuing those things. Mr. Berteau talked about that a lot of innovation these days is coming from the global commercial sector, not from Government contracts. You know, I kind of wonder how that applies to development of lasers and the other kinds of nonkinetic sorts of things that you referenced. So kind of give me an evaluation of how we are doing in pursuing those things. Dr. Lewellyn. My sense that the effort put into those areas is greatly increased over the past few years as emerging threats in the A2/AD, or anti-access/area-denial area, have grown. A lot more cooperation in research between the Services and their research establishments and reaching out into the private sector to address those things. So I see a lot more effort going into those areas. One of the complicating factors is a lot of the capability is covered by fairly strict classification guidelines, and overcoming those and working within those guidelines is one of the challenges, I think. Mr. Thornberry. Well, is another challenge what Mr. Berteau just said: The past is fighting the future. The past is all about kinetics. They have got an advantage. And aren't there real issues of just in competing for increasingly scarce dollars about what some people will consider pie-in-the-sky sorts of stuff? Dr. Lewellyn. My own view is that dealing with some of the emerging threats strictly with kinetics is prohibitively expensive. And so to deal credibly with the threats people are seeing, I think you need the mix of capability. You need to be able to take advantage of all the tools that are out there. Some of them are unproven yet in the real world, and so we need to be sensitive to, you know, backup capability, as I mentioned. One of the great advantages of kinetic systems is you can immediately see their results. And so developing our abilities to understand how effective we have been quickly will be part of developing some of these new systems and tools. Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman. Yes, sir, I think you put your finger on something. In the business literature we refer to this as bringing about disruptive change, and the barriers to entry culturally, psychologically, the metrics that are available. In my time during the DON [Department of the Navy] trying to bring around the electromagnetic railgun, to kind of scale the power system is something that basic technology can be developed in the civilian world. But the things that we really need in the Department of the Navy for the scale of that kind of system, the power generation of 30 million joules or something to launch something, once that technology comes about it is going to go have to be induced by Government because of the scale. But there are some great savings and great strategic utility. But it is very hard to bring that about. The same thing goes on with the UCLASS [Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike] with the Department of the Navy trying to bring unmanned systems. We have existing programs in the F- 35 [Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter], and we have a future. We have a fair idea what the cost of capability is going to be over time, and we have a program, and we have all the pieces in place, and we have another potential. And when do we shift over from 100%/0% to some mix of manned and unmanned aircraft is a hard thing for military cultures and institutions to bring about. Mr. Berteau. Mr. Chairman, could I add one sentence to that? I recognize the time constraint here. For many of these if we don't figure out how to take advantage of them and incorporate them, somebody else will. And we need to take into our calculus and our calculation as well, because otherwise we will be on the losing end of the asymmetric advantage if we are not careful. Mr. Thornberry. Well, and actually that is what I wanted to ask you. So economies that are more controlled than ours, do they have an advantage in developing some of these nonkinetic systems, as an example? Mr. Berteau. I think there is an advantage. And, you know, you look at the Chinese economy, which has been a remarkable story of economic growth and distribution internally. But much of it has been essentially copying what others have done. I mean, if you look at the ratio of new patents per country, if you will, you know, China still trails far behind. But they are very good at taking what is developed elsewhere and manifesting it and magnifying it considerably. And I think they will continue to get better at that, if you will. Clearly our relationship with China from a geostrategic point is way more complicated than we can go into in the context of this hearing. And I think we are still looking for the recipe book of how do we get a decent meal out of this? But nonetheless we have to recognize that they can bring critical mass to bear on these kinds of tasks, if you will, in a way that a free market economy often will not do, because it is not just driven by market opportunities, it is be driven by a longer-term view. Mr. Lanvegin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And to our witnesses again, thank you. This has been a fascinating discussion. And I would like to maybe turn back again to the discussion we were having about soft power and where we target our resources. And one of the reasons why I thoroughly enjoy serving on the Intelligence Committee and also serving here--and I am very pleased that the committee has decided to roll the intelligence portfolio into this subcommittee--is that good intelligence is always going to be the pointy tip of the spear. You know where to put your resources, you know where the enemies are, you know where your adversaries are, you know where to focus your resources. And that in and of itself becomes a force multiplier. So what I want to know is how do we get better at predicting and therefore targeting, you know, where the problems are before they arise? It astounds to me that we haven't gotten better at that. In particular, you look at Mali, for example. The enemy there, the universe of the enemy there, if you will, is in the hundreds. You know, we are not talking about tens of thousands of enemy combatants. It is in the hundreds. And yet you have a nation-state like France has to, you know, come in with overwhelming power and rout out the, you know, the enemy there. It just seems it is such a disproportionate way to use resources, if you will. If we could have gotten better at predicting that something like Mali would have arisen, a lot of these things could be avoided. So how do we get better at that and where do we target our resources in terms of developing that soft power capability so it is both predictive, but also responsive? Mr. Berteau. This is a question we have been wrestling with literally ever since the commission completed its work in 2007 and CSIS issued their report. A lot of effort was focused on an organizational structure, if you will. How do you get a national security infrastructure in line that will wrestle with these questions? But that almost falls into the category of you have got a different tree but you have the same monkeys. The same problem, if you will, are still there. Changing the tree doesn't remove the problems. Ultimately I think it comes back to an integration across the branches of the Federal Government, and that is both on the executive branch side, where that is very difficult, where every institution is required to take care of itself, and on the legislative side, where there are champions for each of those and the structure on the legislative side is set that way. The Intelligence Community actually offers an opportunity to offset that, and the creation of the Director of National Intelligence, and that infrastructure, if you will, both to focus the sharing opportunities and to make sure that resource are allocated to the most significant threats or payoffs was a very positive step in that direction. It is a long ways away from being successfully implemented, but it is a core enabler, if you will, to move forward in that regard. You probably need the equivalent infrastructure in other areas of that enabling capability. You are right about Mali. It is not only--only a handful of people. They didn't sneak up on anybody. I mean, we saw them coming for years and we knew what was going to happen, we knew what happened when it happened. And yet it takes--prevention would have been far easier, if you will, than the cure now has turned out to be. The issue seems to be can we do that for everywhere for everyone? And the answer to that is: Probably not. So then how do we choose amongst those? We don't have a good structure in place to do that, either inside the executive branch today or on the Hill for that matter. And again the Intelligence Committee is about the only place where those things come together, but the reach from there to the solutions is bounded by the institutional structures that are in place. I will have to think harder on that question. I mean, I think I have actually helped you define the problem better than helping you answer it here this morning--or this afternoon. I apologize for that. Mr. Langevin. I appreciate your thoughts. Anybody else want to comment. Dr. Lewellyn. I would agree that organization is the issue. And this is illustrated by a story I recently heard during a military operation. I heard from someone that they got some very useful information from a former--from a naval officer who had student friends from a former involvement with an overseas university who was getting compiled Twitter feeds from the country of interest, and it was leading in the intelligence by several hours. So, again, taking advantage of all the information that is out there, it is an organizational issue, I think is something we all have to struggle with and understand how we can do that in a Government context and take advantage of all the information that is available to help us. Mr. Hoffman. Very quickly, I am not sure that the solution is technological in nature. It is about investing in people, relationships, understanding foreign cultures, and understanding at a level of detail which I don't think we had in that particular case. And I am always very concerned when I hear the word ``predictive'' and strategy is based upon some sort of a forecast and some kind of a logic. But the reason some of these people end up where they end up is not because we didn't predict, it is because they are human on the other side, and we are in a competitive relationship and they have gone where we are not or where their greatest advantage is. I don't know if we can anticipate that interaction all the time over a long time. But we can make some forecasts about technologies and investments and move the ball down the field. Mr. Berteau. Could I add one thing to that? The budget cycle that we provide resources is so long and slow. The review board that the Secretary of State put in place after the Benghazi incident made a whole host of recommendations and they were presented up here some months back. One of them was to create a fund that would be available for the 20 most at-risk embassies and consulates so that we could rush security to those when it came time. But if the look at the lead time to put that funding into the budget, for September of 2012, when the Benghazi attack occurred, it would have had to have been in the 2012 budget, which the State Department started putting together in the summer of 2010. So in 2010, somebody would have had to say, okay, let's look at Libya. Well, next year there will be an uprising, Gadhafi will fall, we will be moving in, we will have a consulate in Benghazi, and it will be at high risk, and therefore we have to put the money in the budget right now. Can you imagine them putting that money? Can you imagine OMB [Office of Management and Budget] actually approving it? And can you imagine the Appropriations Committee leaving it in there? We have a real disconnect between the cycle time from building the resources and the necessity to respond quickly and with agility to evolving dynamics, and that is something that we are going to have to wrestle with very clearly. That is much more than an organizational question as well. It is really a very fundamental process question. Mr. Langevin. Let me turn to another area that I spend a lot of time on. That is on the cybersecurity issue. And obviously that is--it is an issue that is going to be with us to stay for the foreseeable future and it is going to become more and more challenging and important as we go forward. So the Pentagon right now is in the process of what could be a major shift in how they are organized and how they defend and also dealing with offensive and exploitation, as well as other things. So how do we rightsize our cyber force, if you will, and our cyber strategy? Obviously, the Pentagon hasn't quite figured that out either, although they are getting there and it is starting to coalesce, if you will, around a structure. But we are not completely where we need to be. And in addition to that, as we saw on the news lately--and this is something that Mac and I have--the Chairman and I have studied for a while--that we don't nearly have the right personnel, enough of the right personnel in the right places in terms of what we actually need. Mr. Berteau. It is very instructive to look back at Secretary Panetta's speech last October in New York, which was a sea change in the way that the Defense Department was publicly characterizing both its thinking about cybersecurity-- he used the cyber Pearl Harbor, et cetera, example--but more importantly about how he saw and how the Department saw its role in this process. Because that statement very clearly said we have wrestling with the--I am paraphrasing--we have been wrestling with the question of, is it DOD's job to defend DOD or is it DOD's job to defend America? And Secretary Panetta came out clearly and publicly stated it is our job to defend America. That was the first time that DOD had publicly laid that out. The implications of that for the kinds of structure you need, for the kinds of capability you need, for the kinds of people you need, for the kinds of funding you need are still being sorted out. Whether they are going to be reflected in the fiscal year 2014 budget that ultimately finds its way up here remains to be seen. The impact of sequestration just on personnel alone, just as the economy is starting to come back we are going to take all of the people we have been struggling to rebuild the workforce that got gutted in the previous drawdown and have finally started to get it back up, not just in cyber but elsewhere, and now we are going to say to these folks, well, take a day off a week without pay but keep doing 100 percent of your work, just with 80 percent of your pay and then we will get back to you. Anybody who has got a better opportunity to go work this somewhere else is clearly going to at least consider that opportunity more strongly than they did before. Dr. Lewellyn. As I said earlier, I have been struggling personally from an intellectual level about how to figure out how you resource cyber? How much do you need for a pound of cyber? I think one of the key issues Mr. Hoffman alluded to is what is the right mix of private sector, Government civilians, Government contractors, and military folks to deal with some of this stuff once you sort out what the missions are going to be and what the responsibilities are, as Mr. Berteau talked to. So I think--it is not a very satisfying answer--but I think we need to do a lot more work at how we want to sort out those responsibilities and the amount of money it is going to cost to do so. Mr. Hoffman. Sir, Mr. Thornberry and I worked on this particular problem more than a decade ago, kind of struggling with this during the Clinton administration, whether or not certain tasks belonged in the Commerce Department or the FBI. The Clinton administration had gone with the law enforcement model and most of the constituencies in telecommunications, banking, finance, and the computer companies didn't want to participate at that time. I don't know if we have gotten to the recognition in the country yet that the character and nature of the threat is so severe that this is something we want the Pentagon to do beyond the military sphere, so defending itself. That is a larger strategic issue of what is important to the country and what political values and traditions we want to adapt perhaps to a new reality. A decade ago I would have been resisting. I resisted the FBI model of the Clinton administration and we tried to create something else I don't think has emerged with the right level of robustness. Most of that comes, however, from the American population and business leaders who are not interested in the Pentagon running airports, running ports, or running networks necessarily. That is a huge strategic issue. For the committee, however, getting the right size and the structure of the organization, what needs to be a joint entity and what needs to be repeated, and what I have seen is the proliferation of cyber commands in the Services, that is a macro-level mission issue, a Key West II kind of issue that I think does merit, just inside the Department of Defense and your committee, some serious consideration, and from that you will get the right size and the right population mix from that. But that is an important thing to take on. I don't have an answer for you. I just noticed that we have been standing up something that I don't know can stand up to a management and strategy review right now. Mr. Langevin. Well, on that point, I think this is an area where you all could make major contributions in helping us to answer these questions of what does the right size of a cyber force and strategy actually look like. And hopefully we can continue our discussion. With that I will yield back. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Gibson, do you have any other questions? Mr. Gibson. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. While I have you, I am just curious your response on a few things here. China. Given their economy, given their current investments in national security, do you think they are on a trajectory to be aggressive and bellicose towards their neighbors? And how do you think they view the debt that we have to them in relation to any of this? Mr. Berteau. We did take a hard look at that in the study we did on the Pacific and the pivot to Asia last year, and I will be happy to provide you with that report, if you will. Many of the focuses were aimed at DOD, but obviously we had to look at China as a big part of that. The U.S. has an enormous opportunity today across the Pacific Rim, in part because China overplayed its hand pretty heavily in 2009, 2010, 2011. It gave the opportunity for a number of countries to encourage more U.S. engagement and more U.S. interaction with them, if you will. We need to be careful, though, that we don't build the strategy on the assumption that China will always be more heavy-handed than we are, because we can't necessarily count on them to play that out over time. So there is a rare opportunity for us as a country to take advantage of building better relationships with partners across the region. But I think the question of the future trajectory of China is really one that is not predetermined by either the amount of money they are spending--which is huge, they have quadrupled their defense spending over the last 10 years, which has no country in the world has done, and they are on a path to continue building that up. They are a long ways away from being able to be seen as a peer competitor to the U.S., but within the region in which they operate that is not necessarily the standard that they have to aspire to. But it is far from inevitable that that is the outcome that we are going to play. We became convinced--I certainly became convinced--I mean, I am a cold warrior in the way I think about things because that is the world I grew up in and it is what I was trained in, and it took me a while realize that the old strategy that we applied to the Soviet Union is not going to work with China, you know, and in the long run the whole world may be worse off if we attempt to do that as well as the region itself. But what we replace that with is still evolving, if you will. How do we behave in such a way that it encourages China to become a viable participant in a global economy, which is clearly in their interest in the long run but may not be in the interest of the leadership in the short run, is a challenge we haven't begun to sort out yet. There is a very strong military side to it, though. Every morning when the Chinese wake up and they ask themselves the question, is today the day that we should go confront the U.S., we want them every day to answer that question, not today. And that is an important part of the equation that I think we have to sustain all the way through the process. Dr. Lewellyn. As someone who focuses on science and engineering, I like empirical things, okay, and one of the empirical things about China is something that Mr. Hoffman mentioned, namely the demographics, their aging society and the economic strain that it is going to put on them. So I think in the long term I am not clear where China is going in terms of their ability to put money at the rate they have so far into defense. To echo what Mr. Berteau has said, I think going forward we need to maintain our edge, but we need to be very sensitive about how the way we use our military force in the area is understood by China. We don't want to do anything in terms of a test of a system or reaction in some way that we don't understand that they might not see it as, I wouldn't say benign, but nonthreatening to them, if it is not aimed at them. So I think there is a community of people looking hard at how the leadership in China thinks and how the people react to that leadership and we need to be sensitive to that going forward. Mr. Hoffman. It is a crucial issue to try to get our hands around. Again, I am not an Asian expert; I am more of a generalist. But it is important to point out that this is not a monolithic entity, that there are factions in there. The way the military is acting vis-a-vis policy elites or the ruling class is somewhat different. This is a command economy that we are dealing with. I find military modernization to be significant, but not overly concerned. I think as David pointed out, a peer standard is not necessarily the standard. The investments seem to be smart. They seem to be niched. They seem to be deliberately asymmetric, not, you know, out of complete whack. Dr. Lewellyn's comment, he has got some good comments in there about strategic culture, I am not sure we understand or have invested enough to the same degree we did for those of us who were Cold War warriors. We thought we understood the Soviet Union and we had Russiantologists. I work with a China center at NDU that was created by the Congress and we work at that, but it is a small shop. It is worthy of thinking through. My one caution with them, in thinking about them--and David pointed out they have been a good strategist for us, they have created more problems for themselves and have brought more of our allies towards us, so that is a really good deal--but they got so aggressive when their economy was one-third of the size of ours, and it is now in the 40s going to about 50 percent, and depends on where we are 5 or 10 years from now. If they got that aggressive when they were one-third, what is it going to be like when they are at half and two-thirds? And this gets to the comments you see in the Japanese literature and the Australian white papers. Those kind of trend lines and the crossover points are being watched by people in the Pacific and it raises concerns to them. Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Hoffman, going back to the work you have done on hybrid warfare, it seems to me there is a trend toward states using hybrid tactics, maybe through others or employing others. The country may get organized crime to do their bidding or, you know, that sort of thing. Not direct state action, but kind of working in and through others, using a variety of tactics. Do you think that is a trend that is happening and will we see more of it? Mr. Hoffman. I do believe it is a trend. I do believe we are going to see more of it. But a lot of it is going to come from the bottom coming up. Smaller actors are finding lethal means cheaper, more lethal and more effective for them. So that is kind of bringing the lethality up to what used to be the low end of the conflict spectrum, so Mexico, Latin America, Hezbollah, these other kinds of actors. But I do believe that states are sending some of this technology to the level. So I see things converging, the nonstate actors getting state-like capabilities because of just the lower cost and the proliferation, and then the Hezbollah, particularly the Iranian export of this and the use of proxy forces by people like in Iran the Quds Force. This is their art form. And they make things like EFP [explosively formed projectile] or they make the tactics and the training to bear. So when it shows up in Venezuela or shows up in Latin America or Mexico I have a cause for concern. This is one of the issues with the work in the QDR [Quadrennial Defense Review] and the DSG [Defense Strategic Guidance], is the conversation in the Pentagon is that threats are diverging, we have low-end threats and we have high-end threats. And my perspective is the opposite. We have a convergence in the middle, which is why my statement says--and RAND concurs with me--we need to mind the middle. This is where the future is going in terms of more frequency than we thought of in the past. Mr. Thornberry. Yes. And kind of springing from there, Mr. Berteau, you talked about CSIS' work on internal cost growth within the military. So X number of people are costing us more and more, someday there won't be anything left for investment. And yet we have to look at this full array of challenges. How are we going to--I don't know, this is, I guess, the too difficult question to ask, but you just have to think, how do we get from here to there with the limited amount of investments and this battle between the past, the future, all of that? Mr. Berteau. And that convergence of both state and nonstate. Nowhere is that probably going to be more evident than in the realm of cyber, where in fact not only is it already sort of overlapping, but we have our biggest challenge is identifying and characterizing the source of the activity when it occurs and tracking it back to anybody. In terms of how do we get our arms around this, you know, it is pretty easy to sit here and say we should be able to defend America pretty darned well for $500 billion a year. And ultimately if you started from the ground up and built the Defense Department to be able to respond to all these threats, you probably wouldn't build the Department that you have today. So the real question is, how do we evolve to what we need to have from where we are right now? I characterize that as a battle of the past and the future, but it is really more complicated than that. That sounds way too binary, if you will. I think it comes down to incentives. Where are the incentives lined up that reinforce behavior that strengthens the status quo, or that focuses on looking backwards, if you will, versus the incentives that realigns towards strengthening the agility and the flexibility to deal across the future? One of the powerful forces of Goldwater-Nichols was it changed the incentive structure, and it changed it at every level, from the individual promotion all the way to the institutional alignments and so on. I haven't manifested that in kind of a portfolio of solutions, but we have been spending some time wrestling with that question of, how do you structure incentives? It would go all the way from the 6.1 basic research at the universities and how do you structure an inventive that will sustain and maintain that capacity independent of return on investment kinds of figures, all the way up to the broader institutional levels of how do you incentivize the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Defense Department, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department to cooperate more together in that global interaction, if you will, at the lower end of the spectrum? So I think those incentive structures are the key, and it is what we are going to try to focus our research on in the coming months. Mr. Thornberry. Well, I think that is something that all of us can work together on. Kind of back to money for just a second, regardless of how sequestration and the CR come out, we are going to having tight defense budgets as far as the eye can see. And yet we can still have this internal cost growth that you are talking about, we have this full array of challenges that are kind of converging, and we have this need to put money into the future. And to me that means we are going to have to figure out ways to get more defense out of the dollars we spend. I think the full committee is going to be doing a variety of things in the future looking at that. And needless to say, we need all the help we can get in trying to sort through the right incentives. A lot of times passing a law doesn't get the job done. It determines the culture and the incentives that go within that culture to really be successful. So, anyway, I think that is it. Thank you all very much for your testimony and for your statements. It has been very helpful and a good way for this subcommittee to start. So thank you. With that, the hearing is adjourned. [Whereupon, at 3:55 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] ======================================================================= A P P E N D I X February 13, 2013 ======================================================================= ======================================================================= PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD February 13, 2013 ======================================================================= [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.001 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.002 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.003 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.004 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.005 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.006 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.007 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.008 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.009 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.010 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.011 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.012 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.013 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.014 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.015 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.016 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.017 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.033 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.034 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.035 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.036 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.037 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.038 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.039 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.040 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.041 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.042 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.043 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.044 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.045 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.046 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.047 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.018 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.019 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.020 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.021 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.022 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.023 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.024 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.025 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.026 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.027 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.028 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.029 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.030 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.031 [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9492.032 ? ======================================================================= WITNESS RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ASKED DURING THE HEARING February 13, 2013 ======================================================================= RESPONSE TO QUESTION SUBMITTED BY MR. NUGENT Mr. Hoffman. Sir, as I understand the context behind your question, given the disparity in relative national power between Pakistan and India, what do we expect Pakistan to do? As I noted before the committee, I would expect Pakistan to continue its nuclear modernization program. By most expert accounts it is the fastest growing nuclear weapons stockpile in the world, but admittedly, this is coming from a smaller baseline than the major nuclear powers. Nuclear weapons have been and will continue to be Pakistan's principal strategic deterrent against what its military- intelligence leadership views as an existential threat from its larger neighbor. At the same time I would expect Pakistan's military to continue developing a broader range of capabilities to address the proximity and potency of an internal militant threat that has already caused it to move a large amount of its conventional military forces structure away from India and into its western border territories. While Pakistan's civilian leadership periodically labeled the internal threat as the nation's most severe, it remains unclear whether Pakistan's senior military and intelligence leaders view the problem similarly. Nonetheless, I expect Pakistan's military will continue to improve its training and operations against military groups in the west who formally oppose the state while retaining as much capacity as it possibly can to counter India. I do not expect Pakistan's military-intelligence leadership will extend or expand its longstanding practice of employing proxy forces or terrorist activities against those neighbors it feels threatening. I am not aware of any evidence that Pakistan's security agencies have broken its links or financial support to select militant groups it believes provide to the defense of Pakistan in some manner but have been labeled as terrorist organizations. I would expect that Pakistan's military- intelligence leadership will continue to use all the tools it has to keep India off balance and safeguard its interests inside Afghanistan. [See page ??.] ? ======================================================================= QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING February 13, 2013 ======================================================================= QUESTION SUBMITTED BY MR. FRANKS Mr. Franks. 1) I would like to know from your perspective, do you feel the Nation is currently facing a threat from an EMP attack? Do you feel that the Nation is prepared to address this threat? And if not, how would you address mitigating this threat. Further, do you feel the threat is grave enough to be reflected in our National Strategic Guidance? Mr. Hoffman. Sir, an EMP attack is an example of the sort of asymmetric approach we can anticipate from states or reasonably well- resourced nonstate actors. I believe that the most likely contingencies would be overseas rather than a massive attack in the homeland. Such attacks should be anticipated by our combatant commands and the Services in their preparations and in the hardening and redundancy of our various military C2 or ISR systems. Such attacks could be large scale in nature, by a country that detonates a nuclear-like system in the atmosphere to attempt to negate our intelligence and communications links that confer such an advantage to us. I could also imagine more tactical EMP devices being used near bases where U.S. forces are operating or providing ground-based missiles defenses to disrupt our access into a region at ports or airfields or to try to weaken our support to a coalition member or partner nation. National guidance should reflect the nature of this threat consistent with its probability and consequence among all other contingencies. Both the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security should consider this threat grave enough to incorporate into planning and acquisition requirements. Because of this threat and other cyber threats, the ability to operate under degraded C2 levels after an EMP attack is something we can and should train for. Enhancing network system resiliency is a must. Mr. Franks. 2) I would like to know from your perspective, do you feel the Nation is currently facing a threat from an EMP attack? Do you feel that the Nation is prepared to address this threat? And if not, how would you address mitigating this threat. Further, do you feel the threat is grave enough to be reflected in our National Strategic Guidance? Dr. Lewellyn. In principle, EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attacks could arise in two cases. First, a nuclear conflict between regional powers could affect U.S. military forces and U.S. citizens, allies, and commercial interests in the area. Second, a nuclear attack aimed at U.S. forces or territory would have a direct effect on military forces or the homeland. The EMP effects of a nuclear detonation could damage electronic and other equipment including satellites, mobile and line communications, consumer electronics, and power distribution systems. The magnitude of damage from EMP would depend on the altitude of a nuclear weapon when it detonates, its yield, the distance of the area of interest from the weapon at detonation, any intervening geographical features such as mountains, the local strength of the Earth's magnetic field, and the level of protection or hardening from EMP of potentially vulnerable equipment. I believe the likelihood of such attacks is small and is mitigated by our deterrence posture to include missile defense. Although not attacks per se, geomagnetic storms resulting from solar activity can cause effects similar to those resulting from a nuclear detonation. Solar activity occurs in cycles, and we have seen an increase in solar activity over the past year. Prior to this increase, the most recent significant activity occurred in 1989 when a severe geomagnetic storm caused the collapse of a Canadian power grid. This predates the tremendous increase in the use of smart phones, tablets, and other electronic devices we see today, and it's likely that a storm of similar magnitude in the future would have some effect on these systems. In my view, the Nation is not prepared fully to address this threat. Our military forces are working to harden critical systems against the effects of EMP. Some systems developed originally during the Cold War retain some level of hardening. However, the aforementioned proliferation of modern electronics--especially in systems using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology poses a problem. Some militarized COTS have some hardening and/or reside in metal ship hulls, for example, that provide some degree of protection. Nevertheless, I do not believe we have a full understanding of the vulnerabilities of these systems to EMP attacks of various magnitudes. We need to develop this understanding and improve the resiliency of these systems. At the same time, we should plan for alternative concepts of operation for cases when the use of all or some of these systems is denied. In addition, we should work to keep our deterrence posture strong to include our missile defense capability. The Strategic Guidance includes countering weapons of mass destruction and maintaining a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent among the primary missions of the U.S. Armed Forces. EMP would be just one of the effects resulting from a nuclear conflict between regional powers or a direct nuclear attack on the U.S. forces or the homeland. For this reason, I believe countering EMP threat can be considered as a component of these primary missions. Mr. Franks. 3) I would like to know from your perspective, do you feel the Nation is currently facing a threat from an EMP attack? Do you feel that the Nation is prepared to address this threat? And if not, how would you address mitigating this threat. Further, do you feel the threat is grave enough to be reflected in our National Strategic Guidance? Mr. Berteau. [The information was not available at the time of printing.]