‘WIN IN A COMPLEX WORLD’—BUT HOW?
IF YOU DON’T WANT [THE ENEMY] TO DO SOMETHING, YOU PROBABLY OUGHT TO BE VERY GOOD AT IT TO PREVENT THEM FROM DOING IT.
PERKINS: When you think of oppor- tunities, again, what I try to do is back out and say, what are the problems that we deal with, especially on a strategic and operational level? As a military guy, what I’m always trying to do is reduce tactical risk. … At the strategic level, what our policymakers are trying to do is reduce strategic and political risk. … And some- times those are diametrically opposed. Te example I’ll give you [is this]: If I’m going to go do an operation—and I’m an armor/infantry kind of guy, so I’m a maneuver guy—I’m going to go deep, so I want to make sure I have enough supply, lots of ammo, fuel and water. I want lots of supply convoys on the road, so I have more than enough bullets and more than enough fuel, because that will reduce my tactical risk. I don’t want to run out of fuel, I don’t want to run out of bullets.
Te problem with that is, for instance, that while I’m trying to reduce my tac- tical risk, I am possibly raising strategic risk because now I have a lot of supply convoys on the road and I have a lot of Soldiers there. In fact, if you look at Iraq, one of the areas where we lost the most Soldiers to IEDs [improvised explosive devices] was conducting supply convoys. … We were trying to reduce tactical risk, but in some ways we were raising strate- gic risk because the chance of someone being taken captive or getting killed was quite high. We’re always balancing one against the other.
So, for instance, taking a look at our capa- bilities—that’s what an Army operating concept does—I want to simultaneously
114 Army AL&T Magazine January–March 2015
reduce tactical and strategic risk. One of
the areas that I think does that
GEN Sullivan [GEN Gordon R. Sulli- van (USA, Ret.), 32nd chief of staff of the Army] always reminds us, the intellectual leads the physical. Te biggest concern I have is that we will be unwilling to have the courage intellectually to change what we have to change to produce the physical that we need to have.
is
autonomous operations. What if you could supply tactical troops in contact without incurring additional strategic risk? … What if you could have autono- mously operated vehicles, what if you could have unmanned aerial things that could deliver supplies, et cetera? … It’s really a combination between technology and the concept—not just technology for technology’s sake, but what can it do for me at the tactical and operational level? Tat’s how we have to take a look at it so we’re not just jumping on the latest shiny object, but we take that shiny object and we lay it on top as a way to mitigate risk from the tactical to the strategic level, not just one level. Tat’s the problem we have when we look at technology. Sometimes technology reduces one level of risk, but it increases another echelon of risk.
ARMY AL&T: What do you see as the biggest challenges, i.e., the possible impediments, to achieving the vision for Force 2025 and Beyond?
PERKINS: Number one, I think, is sort of lack of imagination. Really, I do. Number two is a lack of willingness to take risk, to change the way we do busi- ness, everything from the way our leaders think about war to the processes, and then, therefore, a lack of risk in coming up with new and innovative concepts, and a lack of taking risk with regard to form- ing the process where we take a concept and form it into a capability. [Te chal- lenge] really is much more in that area than it is in actual technology itself. As
ARMY AL&T: How does the defense budget, especially the need for (and often lack of) predictability, factor into the development of this new AOC?
PERKINS: Te basic answer is, it has no impact whatsoever, and I’ll explain that. I brief the AOC, we’ll have a PowerPoint slide and [people will say], “Oooo, that looks expensive.” If you read the AOC, it’s not about force structure. It doesn’t talk about divisions or brigades or bat- talions, even though I’ve commanded divisions, brigades, battalions. What the AOC is, really, is a way to think about the future. (In some ways, you could say that’s priceless, right?)
We hear a lot of, “It’s a resource-con- strained environment. Can you afford this?” We can’t afford not to do it. Because in some ways, if you have tons of money, like we did until the last couple of years, … it’s not as important that you have a well-defined vision and that you set pri- orities and that you have a way of getting there, because you have so much money that you just throw it all over the place and eventually, hopefully an answer will spring up. But if you are in a resource- constrained environment, it’s even more important that you have a vision. It’s even more important that you have priorities. You know, if all of a sudden you are in a household and one of the breadwinners loses a job, don’t you spend even more time saying, “Gosh, what
is the most
important thing? What groceries are we going to buy? How much are we going
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