WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 -- One of the biggest challenges that the U.S. Army faces in the 21st century is to both absorb the lessons of Iraq regarding low-intensity conflict while also not losing its edge in conventional warfare as well, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

Addressing the Sustaining Member Luncheon at the Association of the United States Army’s Annual Meeting, Gates outlined the challenges the nation and the Army face in coming years and decades.

“It strikes me that one of the principal challenges the Army faces is to regain its traditional edge at fighting conventional wars while retaining what it has learned and relearned about unconventional wars, the ones most likely to be fought in the years ahead,” Gates said.

“We can expect that asymmetric warfare will remain the mainstay of the contemporary battlefield for some time,” he said.

He noted that after the Vietnam War, the Army shifted its training and doctrine focus away from unconventional warfare, but that in the wake of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War, few adversaries are likely to want to face the Army in a straight conventional fight. The shift in emphasis, he said, “left the service unprepared to deal with the operations that followed in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and more recently Afghanistan and Iraq, the consequences and costs of which we are still struggling with today.”

In the future, he said, conflicts would be “fundamentally political,” and require not just kinetic force, but “all elements of national power. Success will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behavior of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between.”

Perhaps “the most important military component in the war on terror,” Gates argued, “is not the fighting we do ourselves but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern their own countries.”

This relates to Iraq, where he reiterated that U.S. troops will start scaling down. “U.S. forces will play some role in Iraq for years to come, [but] a reduction in the size of our commitment there is inevitable. Most of the serious discussion today is about how and where.”

Gates said that the Army itself faces a key opportunity for reset in coming years. He alluded to one estimate that investment in Army equipment and other essentials was under-funded by $50 billion before the invasion of Iraq. “So resources are needed not only to recoup from the losses of war but to make up for the shortfalls of the past and invest in the capabilities of the future,” he said.

“The Army is expanding by some 65,000 soldiers and I am prepared to support plans to speed up that process as long as we can do it without sacrificing quality,” he added.

POC:

John Grady
Director of Communications
703-907-2613
jgrady@ausa.org