My name is Shinseki, and I'm a Soldier. God bless all of you and your families. God bless our Soldiers and our magnificent Army, and God bless our great Nation. Thank you, and goodbye."
It is my privilege to call Ric Shinseki a classmate, a friend but most importantly a soldier who saw his duty to this country and did it.

Winning the War and Winning the Peace
An Article on Transformation Submitted to the Baltimore Sun
For Publication

Washington is a twitter with speculation about the politics of selecting the next Chief of Staff of the Army and the firing of Secretary White.  As titillating as these stories may be, the real issue is the transformation of the United States military.  The Army has traditionally been unwilling to take risks with the nation's interests or its youth and has thus avoided an over reliance on technology.
Beyond the Pentagon's politics there is need for an informed debate as to the future structure of the US military.  In the opening round of this debate, we should answer one critical question. What will it mean to win on the battlefield of the future?  Will winning mean the replacement of governments as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Will it mean something less than that?  Once we know what it will mean to win; then, and only then, will we be prepared to determine the size and nature of the armed forces required.
Winning for the United States, as the only global superpower, implies conflicts potentially across a broad spectrum of missions and locations.  Where will we have to fight and what is the nature of the opposition?  Will future opponents be as fragile as the Taliban and Saddam?  Will they learn the basic lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq?  Will we have months to prepare the battlefield and to infiltrate the special operations forces onto the battlefield?  Can the Air Force break out of its 36-hour planning cycle and become capable of engaging targets in near real time?  Or asked differently, can we develop the ability to process intelligence data and fight using precision munitions in near real time?  What is the optimum type and organization of ground forces?  Divisions?  Separate Brigades?  Special Forces A Teams?  Is there a mix that will insure survivability, agility, flexibility and responsiveness?  These are some of the tough questions that should be answered before we unabashedly start chopping the Army's force structure.
At the most basic level warfare will continue to be aimed at one purpose--forcing the opponent to change his political objectives to accommodate ours.  In the 21st century winning on the battlefield introduces all of the asymmetries in goals and techniques of fighting that Secretary Rumsfeld has spoken to.  In the fog that is the asymmetric warfare of the future we will still put soldiers on a battlefield to win.
The true challenge for the military strategist will be to translate political goals into militarily achievable objectives--thus defining winning.  This means that he must be able to answer two questions:

  1. What must we do to force the enemy to change his objectives and is it worth it?  Can he defend against it?
  2. What can the enemy potentially do to us to force us to change our objectives and can we defend against his efforts?
Future political goals probably will not include the eradication of the opponent's political system. Nor will a future opponent be as accommodating.   In other words, limited means may be applied to achieve limited ends.  An opponent's answers, based upon Iraq and Afghanistan, will have a common denominator of making future conflict protracted and expensive. 
It took a relatively small number of forces on the ground to win in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we did not fight a true asymmetric enemy that hid and fought in urban areas.  The Israeli and Russian experience against dedicated opponents in urban terrain suggests a requirement for much larger numbers of troops.  Our determination of what it takes to win against an asymmetric opponent will define what forces, by type, are needed.
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