12 June 2001

Defense Department Report on Defense Transformation Study

The job of transforming the United States military through training and new technologies to meet the challenges of the 21st century will not be achieved all at once, retired Air Force General James P. McCarthy told journalists at a Pentagon briefing June 12, and its principal focus will be on developing "true joint capability."

"Integration and synergy that true 'jointness' brings is the most powerful transformation. The services are very, very capable, but they still have not learned -- and they have not trained and have not exercised sufficiently -- for us to claim that we have a true joint force capability," McCarthy said.

McCarthy was announcing the results of a Defense Transformation Study undertaken by the Institute for Defense Analyses, which he conducted with a group of senior military professionals, scientific advisors, and intelligence specialists. The study's purpose is to provide Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with new concepts and approaches to transforming the military.

"Don't think of this as 'tomorrow the force is transformed,'" McCarthy said. "It is a continual process where you leverage where you can put your technology, where you can make your operational changes, to give you a more enhanced war-fighting capability."

Some recommendations may be instituted very quickly, while implementation of some, like space-based radar, "depends on how rapidly we can develop the technology, and that's basically far-term, rather than mid-term or short-term." He defined near-term as five years, mid-term up to 10 years, and far-term as more than 10 years.

Among the transformational steps he described is future use of "a lot of robotics."

"Our definition includes lots of unmanned air vehicles, underwater vehicles ... in addition to robotics of the very, very small elements on a battlefield," McCarthy said.

He said the study also recommended further development of "non-lethal capabilities as well as additional work in chemical and biological weapon defense," as well as beefing up information warfare offensive and defensive capabilities.

McCarthy said "Eighty percent of a deployed operating ground force's logistical support is in field and battery, so finding capabilities for advanced power is very significant. We've been doing research in directed energy," some of which is "showing great promise, and we would make further investments in that. Stealth and counter-stealth will remain very important in the future, and understanding how to counter it. For example, an adversary's use of cruise missiles in a stealthy mode is an important aspect of this."

All the recommendations come under the umbrella heading of enhanced military capability, McCarthy indicated. "Striking with precision, global power projection, and battle space dominance" through the various theaters of war, are important tenets, he said, and "faster applicability of new technology" is needed.

Capability can offset the importance of size, he said, often resulting in reduced operating and support costs.

"We believe that transformation is not a single event," McCarthy said, "but a process that needs to go forward in the future so that we are constantly in an evolution of transformation as time goes on."

The complete news briefing will be contained on the Department of Defense web page at: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/briefings.html