Anarchy takes hold in Haiti

Hundreds of people looted shipping containers yesterday, carrying away televisions and sacks of flour, a day after armed opponents of the government drove police out of St Marc, a town in the west of Haiti, in a widening uprising against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. On Saturday police withdrew from the larger city of Gonaives in the north-west after failing to defeat rebels in street battles which left at least nine dead, witnesses said.

At least two people were killed in St Marc on Saturday as gunmen seized the police station and set it on fire along with the courthouse next door, residents said. One wounded man seen by journalists yesterday said he was shot in the chest by a police officer in civilian clothes.

Residents blocked streets in St Marc with burning tyres, felled trees and barbed wire.

"After Aristide leaves, the country will return to normal," said Axel Philippe, 34, among the dozens of people gathered on the highway leading to the town, located south of Gonaives.

Hundreds of looters meanwhile, carried away spoils including mattresses and iron beams from shipping containers that they prised open at the town's port.

Members of an opposition group known as Ramicos said they seized control with the help of other opponents of Mr Aristide in St Marc, which has a population of more than 100,000 and is located 45 miles north-west of Port-au-Prince, the capital.

In Gonaives, Haiti's fourth-largest city, witnesses said police pulled out following gunbattles with rebels of the Gonaives Resistance Front who seized control on Thursday. The group was once allied to Mr Aristide.

It was unclear when police planned to return, but the government has vowed to retake control following the attacks which it branded as terrorism.

At least seven police officers and two militants were reported killed on Saturday in Gonaives.

Crowds mutilated the corpses of some police officers. One body was dragged through the street as a man swung at it with a machete and a woman cut off the officer's ear.

Another policeman was lynched and stripped to his shorts and residents dropped a large rock on his corpse.

Four other police were killed after their vehicle overturned, according to one militant. He said police also killed two militants who were building barricades.

Haitian radio stations reported claims by other rebels that as many as 14 police were killed, but that could not be confirmed.

A number of people in Gonaives and St Marc said they formed neighbourhood committees to aid the militants.

In Port-au-Prince tens of thousands of government supporters marched on Saturday to mark the third anniversary of Mr Aristide's second inauguration as president. Opposition leaders had planned a protest march in the capital yesterday but said they cancelled it due to security concerns. Anger has been brewing in Haiti since Mr Aristide's party won flawed elections in 2000. The opposition refuses to take part in a new election unless Mr Aristide resigns, which he refuses to do before his term ends in 2006.

At least 69 people have been killed in the Caribbean country since mid September in clashes between police, government opponents and supporters of Mr Aristide.

NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL
and
OFFICE OF NAVAL RESEARCH

CONFERENCE ON

MILITARY EDUCATION FOR THE 21^ST CENTURY WARRIOR

Presentation by

Gen. John J. Sheehan, USMC (Ret.)

The subject that I will talk about today is why America developed a Professional Military Education system. To answer that, I would argue, you first have to address the more fundamental question of why you have a military. Discussing Goldwater-Nichols is a temporary fix.

If you look back at the early military history of the United States, the most fundamental question concerning the military was what kind of Navy we wanted? That debate had everything to do with the mercantile activities of the United States as a nation -- with protecting our coastline and commercial activities from pirates and other navies. Our economic lifeblood was our commercial trade in Europe. Our experience with British occupation was the basis for our land forces. The Congress of the United States made a decision to raise an army, but it did not want a permanent force, because of the legacy Europe had brought to the United States during the early colonial days.

These arguments framed the debate among the elite citizenry of the United States, and were the basis for the formation of, and the nature of, the military we developed. We were, for a long time, an isolationist nation -- known for our ability to fight only when we were either attacked by pirates in the Caribbean, or were invaded by another nation, mostly the U.K.

As we started to grow as a nation, our PME focus was on teaching naval officers, first and foremost, how to be officers and gentlemen. Etiquette and the fundamentals of sailing were covered in depth. As we came to grips with our expansionist internal policies, our ground-side education took on a civil engineering focus. We built forts; we opened the West; we protected wagon trains from Indians. The European ground combat influence was very much in the colonial mindset -- how we saw the battlefields and how we trained our people. It was a mathematically oriented military education system.

That was our early history. And up to World War I we, as a nation, accepted the European premise that our officers weren't good enough to command -- we weren't sophisticated enough; we weren't smart enough; we didn't have the experience of the legendary European heroes whose armies slaughtered generations of their own people. And so, I argue that our PME institutions are a product of a process in which there wasn't a whole lot of substantive thinking about why we have a military.

An exception to this general process was the war period of 1939 to the end of World War II, when there were some bright people in the system who looked at the United States and determined that we couldn't survive as an isolationist nation. We had to do things differently. This group of people hatched most of the military ideas that were executed in World War II. But most of the people in that system were categorized as rebels by the peacetime War Department hierarchy. It was only after the early slaughter of World War II that they came to the fore. But most of the ideas executed during World War II were thought through before the war.

Fortunately or unfortunately, at the end of World War II, our military and defense institutions looked at the conflict spectrum they had experienced during the war and focused on a land Army as the basis for their strategic learning. The whole procurement cycle and thought process had everything to do with organizing and training, especially how to deal with the correlation of forces in a force-on-force engagement. We never thought through much more than the principles of mass material, and firepower and their effect on casualties.

Now, all of a sudden, the Soviet Union has collapsed. We now have this large organization called DoD and its many PME institutions. As they search around for a new direction, they must ask themselves the very fundamental question: Why do we have a military? What do you want the defense institution to do, and who will decide on a new direction?

Many people, especially those who wear military uniforms, know that the answer is, "Our job is to fight and win wars." That is fair answer because behind it is a platform-incentive thought process.

Let me show you a very fundamental document -- the Constitution of the United States. What that document really says is that your job is to "provide for the common defence." The common defense in the late 1700s had everything to do with our capability to protect our shores and to trade across the oceans. It had everything to do with our ability as a nation to expand westward and build our civil infrastructure. So we created places like West Point. Now that we no longer have a clear competitor, the question becomes, "What frames the debate about what the U.S. military does?"

Clearly there is an element of strategic deterrence that doesn't require a whole lot of thought. The consequence of not dealing with it had some consequences. But, increasingly, there is evidence that a sophisticated conventional deterrence is equal to or in some cases of greater value as a deterrent. The world you currently live in is framed by these kinds of arguments.

GEOSTRATEGIC ENVIRONMENT SLIDE

The geo-strategic environment of today looks something like this.

On the left, you have the world that most of us grew up in -- the industrial world. We view the world through an industrial lens. Our structures, our thought processes, our school systems live in this world. Our institutions -- whether DoD, the United Nations, or whatever live there too. We deal with world outside ours by trying to make it fit our current thought processes.

In the middle is the corporate economic world, where there are no borders. That is where the United States is today, whether you recognize it or not. 30 percent of our GNP is derived from exports. In 1970, that number was 13 percent. The United States today has more export trade with Singapore than it does with Italy and France. There are 11.5 million jobs in the United States that require or rely on export trade in order to survive. And most of those are not "Chicken Lickin" jobs. Most are substantive, well-paying jobs -- the economic engine of the United States.

On the right, you've got this developing world. The countries in that world are undergoing transitional political or economic processes. That developing world is trying to figure out how to deal with the already developed world. The United Nations and other large world institutions monitor this process. The World Conference on Population Control was viewed by many of these developing nations as an attempt to impose Western values on their cultures. We are creating friction points with this developing world because, in their cultural assessment, a McDonald's is not always a good deal.

And so, we're asking the military to participate in three different kinds of worlds. And to make matters worse, we've not engaged in any substantive process to understand why we want to use our military forces in the types of roles they get today.

POPULATON MOMENTUM SLIDE

Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. I argue that we have not seen the kind of change that the world is currently experiencing since about 1848 or 1850 -- the beginning of the industrial revolution. It took the human race from our beginnings to the year 1800 before the first billion people showed up on Earth. It took slightly less than another 100 years to add the next two billion. You are now looking at adding roughly the equivalent of the population of China (1.2 billion) every 12 years. The population of the United States has doubled in the last 50 years. And there is an interesting phenomenon in these numbers. If you subtract first year mortality rates from population growth numbers, the mortality rates of most nations averages out at about the same age, but that average age has been increasing in almost all nations. That global aging process has tremendous implications, not only for the recruiting force, but from the social welfare perspective. This has tremendous implications for countries, especially countries in Europe like Germany that has a high industrial base requirement but does not have the work force necessary to compete in the global market. Increasingly, those types of countries have to import younger workers in order to survive.

To make the case, when the IMF forced the Mexican government to deal with the peso devaluation, Mexico was forced to shut down 26,000 companies and put almost two million workers out on the street. What happened? They came to the United States, for the most part. It was a natural escape valve, so it didn't create internal problems. Suharto is now talking about restructuring the Indonesian economy. His first solution is to export almost two million workers from Indonesia back to where they came from: Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand. Too many workers who become migrants on a global basis cause discontinuities.

OUR WORLD SLIDE

The world you live in is not the world that you represent. Look around the room. You are a statistical minority, as a group. If you took the world and shrunk it to a village of 100 people, this slide shows what your world looks like: there are 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western hemisphere -- North and South America, 8 Africans. Seventy are non-whites, 70 are non-Christians. Fifty percent of the entire world's wealth is in the hands of six people, and they're in the United States. Seventy are unable to read. Fifty suffer from malnutrition. Eighty live in substandard housing. Only one has a college education.

At the end of World War I, about seven million people in the world lived homeless, slum type areas. Today there are seven hundred million such people. That type of discontinuity is also occurring here in the United States. So the question that you, as a military, should be asking is where you fit?

SECURITY REDEFINED SLIDE

I would also make the case that the definition of security is being redefined for you. One of the great tragedies that's occurred over the last couple of years is that we have been unable to define where the United States fits in the world and what instruments it should use to execute its foreign policy. For 50 years, we have defined security purely in military terms. There was a correlation of forces. The German border was the central front. We understood kinetics. We worked at great lengths here at the Naval Postgraduate School figuring F-pulls for air-to-air missiles.

Increasingly, that is not true. Increasingly, it's about economics. And if you don't think that's true, just replay the last six months in the Asian economy. If you don't think it's about culture, go to Bosnia. You could move the entire NATO structure into Bosnia, and you're not going to solve the problem. Bosnia is about culture. Bosnia is about economics. Bosnia is about leadership.

Go to Kyoto, Japan and participate in the environmental conference. What that is really about is a tax transference from the industrial world to the third world -- to somehow or another level the playing field.

Why is it that private security firms in Australia, South Africa, and in the United States spend more money on security than every nation in NATO, save the U.S.? The budget for private security firms is 50 billion dollars a year. France is the closest, with a 46 billion dollar defense budget. Why? Why is it that 23 percent of Americans live in gated communities? Why do assault rifles cost 17 dollars a copy?

You're dealing with a different world, and what happens by default is you end up with somebody saying, "Let's go to Somalia because there are people dying. It's on CNN, so let's go there and stop the dying." It's a legitimate mission. Let's go to Rwanda to stop the dying. Let's go to Haiti to restore democracy. Let's go to Bosnia so we can create a unified state. Those are what I would call fundamentally different missions.

Who do you go with to these battle spaces? People you never thought of. Ninety days ago now, I parachuted into Central Asia. In the aircraft there were 500 guys -- myself and the 82nd Airborne, a Russian company, a Turkish company, and one company from Khazakstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. The C-17s, as we approached Kahzak air space, were escorted by MiG-29s. Close air support was flown by Russian helicopters called HINDS and HIPS. Now, if that's not a different world, I'm missing something.

The resource base has declined. Those of you who somehow or another think that, because you read in The Washington Post that we have a balanced budget, you're crazy. You do have a balanced budget today and maybe through the rest of the calendar year. But when you look at the out-years of this global aging process that's taking place, especially here in the United States, you had better realize that entitlement programs are going to be a major debate in which DoD is going to pay part of the bill.

That's not just true in the United States, it's also true in Europe. As Europe moves down the road of the EMU process and moves to meet materiel requirements, there's not a nation in Europe that will spend more than two percent on defense. And so the discontinuity you have between the very highly sophisticated force in the United States and what I call a constabulary force in Europe is becoming more and more pronounced.

That has tremendous political implications in terms of how you view the use of force, -- and what it means if you fight a sophisticated force and the front end of that spear is U.S. forces . The political side of that is, you have events like what occurred in Mogadishu, where you get 18 Rangers killed, and the next day you change the policy.

So the asymmetrical nature of what's going on in the world essentially says that, if you want to defeat the United States, don't fight in a force-on-force engagement. Rather, kill as many Americans as quickly as possible early in the conflict, and fight it out on the international media stage.

The center of gravity for the use of military force in the United States today is not the intellectual capital of National Defense University. It lies on the floor of the Congress of the United States. So you'll not get somebody to take you on a force-on-force engagement except to kill people for TV purposes. The great lesson that came out of the Gulf War is, never give the United States six months to get ready.

Today's forces have to fight on arrival. To do that, you've got to win, and win quickly. What you see today is a whole bunch of activity that looks like this.

MILITARY MISSIONS IN THE NEW SECRUITY ENVIRONMENT SLIDE

It's interesting in the bottom part of this is where Most of the service chiefs will say, "Our job is to do combat operations." If you read the most recent study that the Army produced the soldiers serving in Bosnia, what is going on is the internal deterioration of both morale and leadership because it's a static operation. It's not even a fight. You create activity in lieu of substantive analytical thought that says, "Let me tell you why and where we're going to use force."

There is nothing wrong with stopping the dying in Mogadishu. But taking the next step, to say we're going to rebuild the failed state, is a stupid idea because Mogadishu or Somalia never existed as a state. Before you went to Rwanda, the international community put almost three billion dollars worth of aid into Rwanda, all of which went down the tubes during the massacres.

There are some parts of the world that are just not in our national interest. Understanding what those nations are and what their relevance is, is not something we're capable of doing right now because we don't have an intellectual framework for determining how and why we use force.

Let me give you an example of what the activity quotient looks like.

TASKS IN REBUILDING A FAILED STATE SLIDE

Everyone thinks it's a great idea to stop the dying. I support that concept a hundred percent. And when you get there to do that, all of a sudden someone says, "Let's also repatriate the refugees. Let's also figure out the displacement processes. Let's also figure out the warring factions."

I built this slide after Haiti. A few days after we arrived in Haiti, the guys from the 10th Mountain Division discovered the Haitian national prison -- a room that's probably one-third of the size of the room that you're in now (100'X300'). In one cell there were seven hundred people. It was clearly an inhumane situation. We took the people out, washed them off, gave them medical treatment, and fed them. Eight months later, our MPs were still running the Haitian prison, because there was no mechanism for the Federal Bureau of Prisons -- the people trained to do that type of thing -- to do it. So we've created this whole subculture in the system, that we have these conferences on operations other than war.

Go to the National Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and you'll find civilians on the battlefield. The lessons we're teaching the lieutenants and captains is how to deal with them. It's probably necessary because, in today's conflicts, about 60 to 65 percent of the people who get killed are civilians and kids. So you have to figure out how to teach people how to deal with the problem.

What is the real message in our educational institutions for the young lieutenants? Because what's going on -- not only in the United States, but on a global basis -- is that you have restructuring because of the technological revolution.

On the ground side, you can see what's going on. And on the air side, There's an interesting phenomenon going on that somehow or another says that these parts really don't fit. The average cost of a tactical jet today is about $70 million a copy. The roll-out cost of an F-22 is a 150 million dollars for the first couple. At the same time, there's a proliferation of shoulder-fired weapons systems at about 10 thousand dollars a copy. What's the economic exchange rate? Why is it that, when you get an F-16 shot down over in Bosnia, the pilot gets to go to the White House for lunch? What's the unintended signal?

What you see in this world, the military at large, is a leveling process. You have a veneer of technology that's being bought outside of the United States and goes to different parts of the world. It doesn't have the depth and width that exists here in the United States, but there's enough to give the enemy an ability to deal with us on the battlefield. There's enough of a technological edge to give the opposition force the ability to kill "enough" Americans during the first couple days of conflict, to force you to fight on two fronts: one on Second Street and Pennsylvania Avenue and the other on the battlefield itself.

EVOLUTIONS OF JOINT OPERATIONS SLIDE

Now let's talk about where we think we're going. This slide doesn't have any JCS Pub 1 sanctions. This is something we might use to figure out where we are really going. It's interesting that after Goldwater-Nichols was written into a law, we started this joint business. But even in the passage of the law, there's what I would call a cooperate and graduate syndrome. There is nothing wrong with the law from an execution perspective. There is everything wrong with the law in terms of people not being willing to take on service-parochial interests.

And so what you saw here, in joint specialized operations, was the Gulf War -- multiservice, multidimensional, multifunctional. It was driven by two common objectives. One, kick the Iraqi's out of Kuwait, and two, the fear of General Schwartzkopf. As we moved up the food chain to the synergistic joint operations, we're talking operations like in Haiti. For the first time, we will have cross-decked different parts, different core competencies, to build a better battleforce.

The decision to put the 10th Mountain Division and some of the soldiers on an aircraft carrier caused absolute havoc in the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps. It became a roles and missions fight, instead of an answer to the question, "What sea-based platform can provide me with 4.2 acres of helicopter launch space and operate in a non-ASW threat environment?"

Where do you need to go? Clearly, it has to do with joint operations. Each service, in its institutional process of education, teaches a culture. Whether you accept it or not, it happens. It's derived from the educational institution which you represent. It comes from the hardware that you give the people to operate. And it's driven by budget that says protect certain kinds of things.

Let me give you an example: carrier deck cycles. The centerpiece of the U.S. Navy is the aircraft carrier. It runs in a cycle of 17 to 19 hours, depending on which carrier you're talking about. But if you're in the Air Force business and you're true to doctrine, you're in a 76-hour thought process. Clearly, you can change it but, by and large, it's 76 hours. And if you're in the heavy Army business, you advertise you can fight for 24 hours on a sustained basis, but that's not true. It's basically a 20 to 22 hour cycle. If you're a light guy, like the Marine Corps, depending on night vision and tactical capability, it's between 9 and 11 hours.

You come to the battlefield either as a commander or as a staff officer with a predisposed understanding how battlespace is put together. The problem is, the joint force commander has to synchronize the different battle rhythms of different forces. That's the challenge today -- different battles, different battle intelligence cycles, and different thought processes.

Our national intelligence apparatus is not operationally focused. It's focused on the decision cycle within Washington D.C. And you find that the vast majority of the intelligence information goes to Washington staffs -- to people who have no business being in the policy business because they don't understand the difference between management and policy.

If you're a staff officer on a joint staff somewhere, you're also an advocate. You're an advocate for a platform or an advocate for a service. And the question then becomes, where does the advocacy role start and stop, and where does "truth in lending" start and stop? In most cases, we've not been able to figure out what truth in lending really is.

It's the same thing in TRANSCOM. TRANSCOM advertises 98 percent delivery. It's probably true statistically, but between the time the first aircraft lands and the time you close the force, almost 30 percent of the airlift does not arrive where and when you need it.

My point is that, as we build joint operations, there has to be some other way for our educational institution to teach this business about battle rhythms, not from a Service perspective, but to truly understanding what you get when you have a Service platform perform in a joint battle space.

In today's ground combat, you cannot ask an F-16 or F-15 driver to stick his nose into any fight because our systems are not interoperable. If you divert an aircraft into a battlespace, he has a 39 percent chance of getting to the right target with the right bomb at the right time -- he has a 60 percent chance of getting it wrong. What will the system do to him if he is wrong? It'll kill him. He'll be court-martialed. It is because we can't get an agreement between the Army and the Air Force on Link 16 and variable message formats. All the while, we argue bureaucratically back in Washington, D.C. about whether my system is better than your system.

IMPEDIMENTS TO ACHIEVING SECURITY SLIDE

And so what are the impediments of the process? First and foremost is our Cold War structure. Much of what you currently see in overhead is a direct growth out of or a direct transfer from the Cold War. Our whole unified command plan does not make sense. Our whole structure inside of Washington D.C., in terms of the Goldwater-Nichols intent, does not make sense. It does not reinforce civilian control of military.

If you're really going to exercise oversight, how does the Secretary of Defense do it? He does it three ways: through policy, through budget, and through operations. But the Secretary of Defense has zero control over operations. He does not know why it costs $268,000 dollars a year to keep one soldier in Bosnia. That's what it costs. It's now a $2.3 billion bill and John Hamre tears his hair out every day trying to get control of an operation that has been going on for almost three years.

Who do you think controls combat strength -- the front end of the process, the operating forces? No! You are hollowing out your military because of the disproportionate weight you're putting in the staff service.

FUNCTIONAL VERSUS NAPOLEONIC STRUCTURE SLIDE

A revolution is going on in the commercial world as the decision process is greatly facilitated by technology. At the same time, we're dealing with a hierarchical system that is not responsive.

When we were doing air strikes in Bosnia a couple years ago, the secretary general of NATO was told that an air strike was going to take place. It took some eight hours before he got his first operational report because it went from the field, where the event was taking place, through 34 echelons of command.

In today's world of instant telecommunications and press access, you have the press on the beach meeting the Marines, or you have 250 reporters standing on the top of Haiti's Montana Hotel who know exactly where the target sets are. You are unable to maintain strategic surprise because of the telecommunications capabilities of the press or even of your own soldier. The average soldier on today's battlefield is carrying a cellular phone and calls his mother with status reports. You can buy a commercial, one-meter resolution satellite imaging system through the Internet for 15 hundred dollars. So strategic surprise simply does not exist anymore.

We are asking our commanders to go into a battlespace, in most cases not prepared for the multidimensional world we're placing him in. The great thing about each of the events that have occurred over the last five years -- whether Rwanda, Haiti, Somalia, or whatever -- is that they've been politically unpopular.

And so, when General Shelton lands at Port-au-Prince Airport, he doesn't meet Jean-Bertrand Aristide or General Cedras. He meets 135 press people who ask him what he thinks. Has something changed between the time he lifted off USS MOUNT WHITNEY and the time he got to Port-au-Prince? When you ask General Shelton what would he do different, he'll tell you he wished he had a CNN television set in the cockpit of his Huey.

Why, during the fall of Srebrenica, when they handcuffed the Dutch soldiers to telephone poles on the bridge, did the Dutch Minister of Defense get called before Parliament and almost fired? Why is it that when the Khobar Towers were blown up, was there a hearing in Congress two days later during which the Secretary of Defense took responsibility? It's because the world that your commanders are living in today is a very different world. You don't have time to make excuses, and if you don't have proper guidance in terms of what the mission is and what the outcomes are, the commander is caught behind the information loop end of political management back in Washington D.C.

JOINT FORCE INTEGRATION PROCESS SLIDE

Now, how did we get here? It's easy to complain. Part of the criticism, I would suggest, is in the third step of this slide -- specifying material. We have become a nation that's equipment oriented. We buy things without understanding how they fit into an operational concept. Instead of dealing with the whole business of concept development, organizational theory, buying the equipment, and ultimately establishing training and leader development with an integrated C3I system, we are leaving the system to chance in terms of how we train people.

This is the mechanical process. But there's a bigger issue, I would suggest, in this whole business of training.

SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF TRUST SLIDE

It has to do with trust. You have to ask yourself today some very hard questions: Why are large numbers of very bright, young officers leaving all the services? Why is the resignation rate of tactical jet pilots so high? I know it's got something to do with the airlines hiring, but the kids who fly the same mission over, and over, and over again say, "It is non-threatening, non-substantive, and I don't want to do it." Why is it that 22 Marine Corps captains hand-picked to go to the Amphibious Warfare School resigned just before they got there? Why is it that JOs and deck officers in the Surface Navy are leaving?

Part of the answer is that we in senior leadership positions have failed. If a young officer out there does something because he's genuinely trying and experimenting, but fails, he will not be promoted; he will not be augmented. It has everything to do with our personnel system that says that it is of more value to be a staff officer than it is to be a commander. All of our personnel laws are written to ensure that you go through all the wickets to be Goldwater-Nichols qualified. There is not one law on the books that talks to being a proficient commander. You are, across the board, building a generation of people who don't know their trade.

It has everything to do with the personnel system that forces people in and out very quickly. The numbers that I looked at have everything to do with the amount of time you spend in the foxholes, and cockpits, or aboard ship. If you're an infantry guy on the groundside, it's about 20 months as a major. Lieutenant colonel command tours are 18 to 24 months. We have colonels today in the groundside, both in the Army and Marine Corps, who have less than 60 months operational experience. They don't know their trade.

You have one opportunity to command either a flying squadron or surface combatant vessel. During that one opportunity, do you think you take that organization or that ship and fight it to the edge of its performance envelope? Or are you careful that you don't do something, because you know down deep the senior leadership will not protect you if you make a mistake?

What you do is build a generation of people who are conservative in their thought process, and if you think or operate outside that norm, the system will kill you. The bright young kids in the system who want to experiment, who want to try new ideas, are not rewarded. If they make a bad decision, you have service secretaries who review the process and guarantee that that officer leaves the service.

There is, in fact, what I will call a crisis of confidence developing in the U.S. military. It's because people like me have failed to stand up and say, "That is not what we are about as an institution." There are certain fundamental things that you ask the American youth to do, not the least of which is to go into harm's way. If he does that, if she does that, you as an institution have an obligation to train them for this new world that you're asking them to operate in. But more important than that, you have an obligation -- senior leadership -- to insure that the guidance you give them is executable. If they do make a mistake, a good and honest mistake, you have an obligation to protect that person, regardless of sex. Or, if you see a debate taking place that says the real purpose of the U.S. military is to become a social experimentation substation, you have to ask yourself, for what?

We did it during the Vietnam War, during the Project One-Hundred Thousand. We brought into the U.S. military 100,000 people who were Category Ivs -- who could not read or write. We almost destroyed the military. The U.S. military has a social responsibility to the nation it's paid to protect. It ought to be reflective of the society at large. But at the end of a day, the responsibility of the U.S. military is to execute those missions assigned to it by the Congress of the United States, not the Executive Branch.

Good luck.

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