Maritime Security Dialogue: An Update on the Marine Corps with Commandant Gen. David H. Berger

[Music] [Music] welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online [Music] good morning i'm pete daly ceo and publisher of the u.s naval institute and on behalf of the center for strategic and international studies and the naval institute we're proud to bring you this continuation of our maritime security dialogue this series is made possible through generous sponsorship of huntington ingalls industries today's topic is an update from the commandant of the marine corps a a graduate of tulane university general dave berger was commissioned in 1981 a career marine infantry officer he commanded every level a reconnaissance company 3rd battalion 8th marines in haiti during operation secure tomorrow regimental combat team 8 in fallujah iraq during operation iraqi freedom for forces pacific with fleet marine forces pacific and marine corps combat development command general berger's staff and joint assignments include serving as an assistant division commander of the second marine division he was a chief of staff in kosovo k4 in pristina kosovo and he was director of operations plans and policies at headquarters marine corps general berger's former education formal education includes the us army infantry officer advanced course the u.s marine corps command and staff college and the u.s marine corps school of advanced warfighting yields multiple degrees a master's in international public policy from johns hopkins university school of advanced international studies and general berger assumed diddy says the comment on the marine corps on 11 july 2019 dr seth jones will engage general berger in a moderated discussion that will include some audience q a dr jones is a senior vice president harold brown chair director of international security program and director of transnational threats project at csis before we go over to seth and general berger i just want to say how proud we are of the marines and what they did in kabul and we mourn the tragic loss of the 13 service members last week 11 of whom were marines and one was a navy corpsman serving with the fleet marine force they are america at its best over to you seth and general berger thanks for that great introduction and i want to echo uh pete's comments uh general berger about uh how proud we are of your marines and and the other service members uh and how much we mourn uh their losses those that are wounded and obviously the afghans as well that were killed and wounded at the bomb site so uh thank you very much for for the service of your marines appreciate it i appreciate both you all mentioning it and and uh i know there you have questions to begin but i i listening to you i would just have to tell you back uh sergeant major and i went and visited the ones who were at walter reed who were medevac back and the families at dover and uh the the ones the the marines and sailors who were at walter reed just to pass on to you all were are exactly like i think they have been for a couple hundred years all they want to do is go back to their units like have comment on how fast can you get me out of this hospital so i can go back to my unit and the corpsmen magnificently corman walking around the uh in his gown he's wounded walking around in his gown dragging around his uh iv thing to check on his marines even though the nurses don't want him not supposed to be outside his bed you're not going to stop that corpsman and up and he's going up and down the the the ward to check on his marines and his platoon i just passed it on because some things don't they really don't change no and how proud we are of them for that that's exactly the kind of people that we want serving the country so thank you thanks for the values that that you instill in them i wanted to begin with uh with force design we'll get to a number of other subjects um but one of the most important priorities that uh when when you became commandant was forced design so for those who haven't taken a look at it worth looking through forced design 2030 you indicated that a fundamental redesign of the service could address a concern that the corps was not manned trained equipped and postured to fight a pure competitor with china really as one of the key peer competitors the peer uh the main peer competitor so the the question is what what have you learned from the past year regarding the forced design and and and how is that impact where you're going to be focusing over the next year uh perhaps a couple things uh we started a couple more years ago with some assumptions like you always do in planning we began from my predecessor who actually concluded that the marine corps wasn't as you put it organized trained and equipped for the future so general neller before me said that a couple years earlier i agree with that assessment and then you if you're if that's the case then you have a couple choices you can you can make minor adjustments to the force that you have try to move that along as fast as you can or i think like some other organizations outside the military you step back and fundamentally look at where you need to be down the road which is what we chose to do what have we learned one of the things we learned is we got a lot to learn this is a this is um an environment where two forces are moving at the same time it's not one variable in motion and one static so part of it is we have an aimpoint a decade out i have a pretty good idea of where the marine corps might need to be in 10 years but equally convinced that that's not going to be how it exactly plays out because we're both trying to gain an advantage the other side is countering that so this is a dynamic that's going to go on as long as this competition goes on so if all that's true back to where i started from this learning we have to learn fast we have to experiment pretty quickly we have to be able to weave that back into the changes that are in the in the force and our cycle is not built our mechanics our bureaucracy isn't built for that kind of speed and not built for that kind of velocity so so far the premise of flat budgets china is the pacing challenge and indo-pacific is the primary theater but not the only one all those still to me seem to be holding true thanks they do seem to be holding true one of the issues and i know you've discussed this uh as well is uh you stated in the past that the fiscal realities today and in the future dictate that we must first divest of some legacy programs in order to generate the resources needed to invest in future capabilities and as you have recognized this may create some near-term risk uh that has to be managed in order to obtain uh the force in 2030 that we require so can you talk a little bit about how your what what some of these risks are how you're managing them and then you know how to ensure that the marine corps is prepared to contribute both to the joint force in crises in in 10 years but as well as deal with with issues that are potentially more near-term um perhaps helpful to break it into two basic buckets or two categories one is capabilities and one is capacity so i think the challenge for service chiefs me included is managing to your point how much capacity inventory how much stuff people do do we have today do we need today and the capabilities that are associated with that to generate whatever the whatever the secretary of defense needs us to do but also posture ourselves so that we're not caught six seven eight years down the road with a force that's not a match for the operating environment we have divested we have gotten rid of some things that we we know we love they're proven in the past but in our estimation are not the right fit for the future those are decisions that are hard to make because it would be great to hold on to everything and all of your structure and just keep it all and protect it all but in my estimation that force was not going to be a good match for what we need to do to in the future and i'll just use end strength as an example the the size of the marine corps there's some who uh and this is a fault perhaps of mine and not communicating clearly enough we are we're 20 000 smaller than we were 15 years ago we're not shrinking we're not contracting the marine corps in order to save money we're contracting the marine corps to size it for what we need to do in the future sometimes in other words smaller but better is what you need so the from the individual marine and the training that we are now shifting into giving them to the capabilities that they'll have that they don't have today it's not shrinking the size of the marine corps to save money and then pour that money into the new force it's size the force for what you need what you think you'll be asked to do in the future yeah and one one follow-up so just out of just out of curiosity you you mentioned some of the capabilities uh available today not gonna need 10 years from now what are what are some examples of that that that you might highlight well thus far we've gotten rid of all heavy armor in the marine corps we've um divested of we've gotten rid of some portion of our towed artillery um moving towards the direction of much more unmanned both both grounds in other words vehicles plus aerial both and i think uh surface as well because we're we're going in the direction of a long-range unmanned surface vessel as well and some most of these will be platforms with unmanned platforms on them in other words unmanned autonomous vehicles that can launch unmanned uavs or un unmanned aerial vehicles same with the long range surface vessel can we get a vessel that can go out um unmanned then launch aerial vehicles and they need to recover them or they're disposable so the systems that we're moving to are not completely unmanned it's i think the magic of it is marrying up platforms that are not manned but there are people in the background with them with the man part that teaming part is where we're going to generate actually this the velocity the speed the momentum that we're going to need into the future so i think the size of the marine corps one thing the armor the artillery those are things that we're shrinking down or completely getting rid of moving into unmanned paired with artificial intelligence and autonomy um married up with human beings with people who have the skill sets to really employ that capability that's where we're headed so just to pick up on this point i know the the department has spent a lot of time thinking through issues related to the future of warfare including the joint warfighter concept the whole jad c2 construct so and we've talked to folks in the navy in this program previously about jet c2 and and how to link sensors and information from your standpoint and from the marine from from a marine standpoint how are you applying and thinking through these developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence and advanced technology you've talked about unmanned systems uh aerial systems uh c systems and then linking that together how does that how does that jad suit jad c2 concept and the technology fit into how you're thinking through the next decade or so of warfare i think it's essential the where it takes us join all domain command and control where it takes us sort of like force design i think we don't know perfectly where it might end up but we know we must go in that direction and i think for our role as the stand-in force which is where the marine corps sort of natural fit is forward inside an adversary's collection range inside their weapons range that in tight force which is where the sweet spot is for the marine corps and i would argue naval expeditionary forces this is where we belong so how does jad c2 how does that fit into that but what we're learning in experimentation in wargaming so far is one of the key roles of that stand-in force is the ability to collect paint a picture of what's in front of the joint force and strip away their collection capability as well the reconnaissance counter reconnaissance or i don't know where his book is over here wayne hughes would say it would call it uh scouting and counter scouting and that's where originally where i got the idea from i think this is a key role for us going forward jad c2 enables us to tie in the sensors unmanned and man that we will use forward to try to collect against what's in front of us and also strip the threat's ability to collect against our force without chad c2 there's no way we'll be able to pass that information so jet c2 in in i'm just going to over simplify here i think as a extrapolation of what chris bros was writing about in terms of kill chains now we're in to kill webs because i'm assuming they're going to you know a good adversary is going to try to break down our command and control so we now need kill webs they need to be resilient enough and we need the an architecture that stitches all that together so that whatever platform or human being is detecting something in front of them it's woven in through this web system this architecture so that it's shared from that forward and backward and we can act on it and um at us inside an adversary's uh not ooda loops so much but they're they're kill chain yeah because your kill chain your your cycle has to be inside theirs or else it's a it's a mess it's a too much of a symmetrical fight you want you want to be inside that yeah yeah you do um i wanted to just uh take this in a slightly different direction just focusing on the indo-pacific theater i think for any of us that have been in the military particularly dealt with our nato allies dado's got an architecture for sharing information so you know there's all of the sharing when we talk about chad c2 just among uh even the u.s side and the services the indo-pacific doesn't have that kind of architecture right now so i'm i'm wondering what your thoughts are on how to you know what what are the whether they're policy issues to think through or an infras information sharing architecture between the u.s that includes the marine corps and regional partners we've got south koreans japanese australians singapore and others and you know just even looking recently at information coming off say f-35s we have challenges sharing information quickly with allies and partners particularly in the indo-pacific without any kind of architecture right now so i'm just wondering if you could sort of paint through some of the challenges as you see it and some possible solutions particularly for the indo-pacific region um more than half of my career has been in the indo-pacific i would agree with you doctor it's when people compare and contrast nato europe with indo-pacific you know i think in our brain we want that to look like that it doesn't and it won't and we shouldn't um actually we should accept that and embrace it in the indo-pacific to your point in it there is no nato equivalent but what there is because of the nature of the countries that are there things are bilateral they're multilateral to a degree but it's one by one sort of arrangements as i think as a u.s we just want the one-size-fits-all can we not just create a nato in in the pacific what if you've been operating there for 20 30 years you realize that's an impractical approach not not going to work so i think the last my experience the last 10 years at least much effort done in bilateral us in japan us in singapore us in the philippines australia and japan australia and the us and then gradually i've watched over the past 18 24 months especially the past year um more of a move towards things like the quad that i think are the nascent part of that is provides perhaps part of the answer to that that question or that dilemma of how do you move information especially classified between friends so i think the watching the quad sort of slowly quietly get off the ground a great thing i would say below the surface there are already existing frameworks for how we share information with australia japan south korea the republic of korea the philippines but their one-to-one arrangements on the bright side and i'll just uh turn it back over to you on the bright side i would i would i would uh watch carefully things like the deployment of the queen elizabeth ii right now and next month i think it's next month or november i'm not sure we're going to do we're not going to go on deployment with but we're actually going to fly us marine corps f-35s off of a japanese ship these are these are the beginning steps of what you're talking about we've been on deployment now for five months with marine f-35s and british f-35s on the same ship and i've been on that ship multiple times to try to get to the answer you're talking about where there's two skiffs across the passageway from each other a uk and a us gif we're i'm just we are working our way through that in a very good way i think in the coming years pressed by you know what those countries in indo-pacom see from china they're they're much more leaning into okay how do we how do we plug into this network and share information to your point they bought the f-35 now how do we make them communicate how do we move that targetable information back and forth freely between them so i watch things like the izumo class things that we'll do this fall the queen elizabeth 2 deployment all the way from the uk to the pacific and back again these are great steps in moving that ball forward i think yeah and i think the the reason some of these issues come up is is uh in any of the exercises or war games uh in the indo-pacific area obviously there are a number of different allies and partners uh that come together so thinking through these issues obviously is important before ever getting to a conflict uh situation i wanted i wanted to move just briefly um we started off just talking briefly about afghanistan i just wanted to come back um to afghanistan uh for a moment and the the first question and it's something you've written about recently but i think it would be helpful for folks other than just marines to to hear this as well and you posed a question in a letter you wrote recently on was it all worth it you asked about the deployment in afghanistan and and i think it was an inspiring letter that you and sergeant major sergeant major black wrote but i i think it's important to to ask you that question again was it all worth it what are your thoughts here a couple of us were talking this morning on that topic it took timely first of all i would say first of all while it's relatively fresh in our minds we need the honest open critique or a commission or whatever it is that cracks open you know what were the options that were available did who made what decisions at what time not so that we can penalize or hang somebody by a yard arm but actually so that we can learn so on the marine corps side yesterday and today we're going back through the holloway commission the long commission there's others as well now to try to figure out a framework or how can we study to your point what went right what went wrong what can we learn going forward it the events of the past 10 days have not at all altered my view of was it worth it here's how i know to a person if you were to go to walter reed right now to visit a a marine or a sailor or a soldier who's wounded and you ask them that question they would they would respond with i know it is because i can tell you how many people we process through our evacuation control center and put on a plane this is their yardstick right they're not political they don't know about they don't really care about international relationships what they do know is exactly to the person how many people they pulled over the wall out of the canal and put in in a safe place and then put on a plane and to them that's that's worth it there's there's a baby who's going to grow up here in the united states never probably going to meet that marine or soldier who pulled him over the over the canal but they'll be they'll live a free life here and i think them so yes is it worth it yes were there decisions that were made that we ought to go back and scrub absolutely yeah should we go back and look at the options themselves yeah absolutely how did this surprise us that in the span of 11 days it's so fundamentally changed so those are things critically as um as a government as a military we absolutely ought to unpack it does not for me change anything in that letter and and my verification my confirmation is is the service members who were there it would do it again because they they feel like they saved lives and if they had not that those people on the other side of the canal would have who knows what happened so to them was worth it thanks and uh is that again an inspiring letter that you and the sergeant major wrote on that um and uh definitely worth uh worth worth everyone taking a look at i wanted to just keep with afghanistan briefly but look forward the u.s intelligence assessments not just in afghanistan but also in a few other places also highlight some concerns about um terrorism remaining a persistent problem uh in afghanistan itself uh there are moves underway uh to put together a prime minister um minister of defense one of the key individuals that's being looked at for a senior taliban position as the deputy right now siraj shakani who i have spent considerable time tracking in my time in the government uh he is he is very close probably the most important conduit to al qaeda so we have groups like that we obviously still have the islamic state conducted an attack against marines and others in kabul itself as the president recently noted in his talk even yesterday uh there are concerns about west africa the horn other areas of the middle east he mentioned syria and iraq as well so the question for you is there clearly is a shift to the indo-pacific as you noted earlier it's not the only uh region we're looking at but how do you balance some of these uh uh big pure competitor threats with uh what are clearly some non-state threats that will likely to continue how do you how are you prepared for all of the above um i'll try two or three perhaps approaches first i think our approach in the marine corps is we understand who the pacing threat is pacing challenges that's the plan so we must build a force that can match up to that force because if we don't then we won't even be able to operate in the neighborhood we won't even there'll be so much overmatch at the tactical level you couldn't operate in you couldn't do your job okay so that's the pacing challenge that's the bar for their military capability that we must measure up against and our premise is if you can design that force then a marine commander well trained with a well-led force will use that force and adapt it for other missions anywhere on the globe because if it like you all i mean doctor you you've heard this a hundred times but i believe that it's true we have an absolutely perfect record of getting wrong where the next crisis will happen so we cannot we're not banking on a war in china at all i think on the spectrum of likelihood way down near the bottom this there will be another crisis somewhere but we need the capabilities that allow us to match up and deter deter the plan a couple of other things uh in terms of balancing this i think the global force posture helps answer that equation or answer that question where in other words if you have x amount of military force in the department of defense where do you spend it where do you put it i think the pace at which you drive that force is also a factor in the end though i think here's where i come down on the sort of approaches we've talked for a long time i don't know how long you probably know better than i do about a whole of government approach we talk about it in an academic kind of manner it's brought to reality when you're up against an adversary that is a whole of government approach so now i don't think we have an option now i don't think it's an academic discussion any longer we either get there or we will certainly be overmatched there is no military solution to deter china there's also no military to solution to deter terrorism i'm i'm beyond that is my point in both cases on the low end and on the high end it's going to require much more of a whole of government integrated approach than we have right now or neither will work not the terrorism part and and not the deter china part neither one will work unless we get all parts stitched together in what secretary austin calls integrated deterrence yeah i hope we've we've learned that i think i think that that is clearly a lesson that stands out to me anyway the importance of other instruments of power uh applied i mean you can see it too with the way that china has attempted to project power in part through its belt and road initiative which is largely economic and technological and using that for political and in some cases military intelligence leverage so our our competitors are using other instruments of power to achieve their main objectives i think you know you can see it russians as well if i just not to not to i don't i wouldn't argue with anything you just said it has to go beyond using the other instruments they actually have to be stitched together this is what we're not doing right now in other words as good as we're going to need to do it's not good enough to do economic stuff and then some diplomacy and then some mill that we haven't we need a coherent stitched together effort so i think yes the elements of national power all have to be brought to bear the more difficult part will be tying it to stitching it together in a coherent manner yeah that is the challenge i think that is without a doubt the challenge otherwise you've got you've got potentially multiple instruments operating not either not efficiently or in some cases even against each other um i wanted to just turn briefly to a uh case which i think gets to an issue of uh readiness and sort of highlights the evolution of warfare and it's one that you have talked about which is the armenian azerbaijan case it's kind of an interesting one because during the recent conflict uh armenian ground forces that some might have labeled ready to fight were targeted by azerbaijani forces using precision strike loitering munitions lethal unmanned systems and so the question here is what do examples like this imply about readiness and how does the marine corps at least from your perspective embrace this new readiness paradigm well that's a that's a great topic to unpack you brought up one example i think israel hamas i think there's a bunch of them that you could look at it go wow they had they had forces they weren't short of that but it didn't work very well um i think there's a couple lenses here perhaps to look at one is the temporal lens there there is a writing maybe 15 20 years ago about ready for what when okay so we have to think our way through that aspect of it for example you could spend all of your resources this afternoon thrown against problems around the world expend all that energy and effort but what you're what you're not thinking through that is you actually spent what you're gonna need to deter three years from now okay that's a problem that's a temporal sort of an issue there's a relative advantage you can have another aspect not kinetic um the maritime militia coast guard from china their actions right now an aircraft carrier ready capable 5th gen doesn't deter it so we have to we have to learn how to match up a capability that's gonna especially i think below the threshold sort of in that gray zone because we're learning that the things that we built and bought for conventional deterrence don't always deter other kinds of actions they're right below there you can you could drive three aircraft carriers into the east china sea it's not going to deter the coast guard of or the maritime militia that's scaring away a fishing fleet so we are we're going to have to become much more nuanced and match if we're going to deter match a capability so that has a relative effect and that's that's learning we have to do i think the example you brought up is is is another great one had armor had tanks not so good against loitering munitions that have a top down attack capability you had no what you thought was a ready force and enough capacity not a match a complete mismatch for uh for another type of lethal capability that they weren't just not ready for at all well i think it's worth highlighting just to push this point a little further too that when you look at russian seizure of territory in crimea it was done without firing shot eastern ukraine where they were involved was heavily involved in supporting partner forces proxies to do most of the fighting in syria russians did not put a lot of ground forces they worked with lebanese hezbollah among other forces and i think to your china point china uh seized built islands in the south china sea with dredgers they didn't actually go in and seize territory the way one might do conventionally they essentially did it overnight and built bases with dredgers um and so i think you know i think that that looks like it's a challenge is how do we how do we operate or how do we think about not escalating uh and how do we operate in that in that gray zone so uh i don't know if you have any other thoughts before we move on all right i think we have a lot of learning to do on deterrence let's just say there was a there was some real expertise a deep bench i think in the 50s 60s 70s in the united states thinking about deterrence now this is not the cold war today but it seems to me our bench of thought intellectual thought in terms of deterrence 2020 2030 2040 we have we have to focus there it's not the cold war it's not the soviet union and we're going to need different forms of deterrence i think to your point the threat of punishment conventional deterrence sort of conventional theory i don't think that works it hasn't clearly the last 10 years the last five years have shown that that will not work in all cases so we're gonna have to come up with some other measures things that we're thinking about is there such a thing there it doesn't exist today but is there such a thing an idea as deterrence by detection in other words if the adversary is doing all these nasty things below the radar nobody's really paying attention you wake up holy cow how did that island come from whoa where did that airfield come from if they're doing all that below the radar how do we shine the big mag light on top of that turn up the volume so that the rest of the world can see how do we how do we deter by by presenting an adversary with the perception convincing them that there's nothing they can do that we're not gonna see and we're not gonna shine a big light on and make a big deal out okay so that this is a nuanced form of perhaps of deterrence but we don't have it right now we're not using that sort of approach but my our conclusion is more of the same of what we're doing right now buying more of what they're saying so far there's no evidence that that's actually deterrent so we have to change we're gonna have to change on that point it's been interesting to watch the expansion of the russians in places like africa using some gru and svr but mostly private military companies uh to expand uh it that needs to be watched and monitored obviously they have those in in syria and ukraine and other other countries i wanted to just touch base on you've you've mentioned the navy a few times uh the the your your force design that that you've discussed at length enables the marine corps to provide obviously effects not just on land but to project power seaward in support of naval campaigns and and you've said this in other contexts you see the marine corps contributing to anti-ship anti-submarine warfare in the future and have repeatedly argued and we've heard this from the navy side as well about integration with the navy as a strategic imperative so how do you assess interoperability with the the navy and and how are you looking at challenges and trying to address them particularly marine navy integration um first of all naval integration from my perspective is begins actually up here it's not a staff thing it's not a platform it's not a tactic it's intellectual it's conceptual that's where the the the root of naval integration is i think force design their best the best evidence of naval integration is the force design effort that we're doing we're building a force that married up with navy capabilities equals a naval capability a maritime capability that a joint force commander is gonna need so i am all there completely all there but it begins with the conceptual the intellectual naval integration i am extremely happy at the speed at which numbered fleets and mess are moving to find ways from command and control to c5 isr to power projection ways that work in their neighborhood and it's going to what won't surprise you that what maybe works in sixth fleet is going to be a little bit different than what seventh fleet is going to do and i should me and the cno should be fine with that it should not be this is the one size fits all for naval integration you will all do this because the cni cno and i have talked and this is what you'll this is the template no absolutely no we have three star commanders at the numbered fleet and numbered mef levels they know their operating environment better than i do why would we not allow them to come up with naval integration that works best uh in japan or works best in the mediterranean and me and the cno should be moving are forced to support that and it may want what works good in one place may look different than the other place but i'm very excited very supportive of the speed at which they're moving we need to move faster at the headquarters to support what they're doing because frankly they're coming up with hey okay we figured out how to fight so far it looks like this i need you to bend the marine core there now and we should we should work really hard to get there fast it's good it's good being pushed so one example of this and i'm curious what what uh what you learn from uh this is the large-scale exercise 2021 which just wrapped up and which the cno who we just mentioned uh argued is the largest maritime exercise in a generation so it'd be helpful for you to just highlight what what the marine corps what role the marine corps played and then and then what even along these lines did you take away from it we have three marine expeditionary forces around the world all three were involved that's never happened before and not that size is everything it's not global isn't everything but i i think it's fair to assert that it's very possible that in a future crisis if there is one with a great with a pure competitor it's going to be more than a regional thing so we're going to have to coordinate across boundaries in a way we haven't been challenged to do in the past so this is goodness um we i view exercises as a place to try things it's not in other words a rehearsal for an o plan so i like the way that this large scale exercise was crafted in a way that allowed subordinate units to try things try capabilities try a command and control construct try things and if it didn't work okay great we learned that we should use these exercises much as we can to learn from there we should not drive a commander into you have to use this exercise as a rehearsal for that o plan that's it this large-scale exercise allowed a lot of flexibility for subordinate fleet and component commanders to try things not all of which worked but even the ones that didn't work that's probably at least as valuable as the things that did work i'm i think it was a very helpful very good exercise i also think it's going to take a while to absorb what we learned at it i think so one one broad question uh that comes from these kinds of exercises and just looking at the lay down uh uh in particular in the pacific is that sustainment and logistics are challenging probably in ways that we haven't seen at least in the middle east uh when supporting expeditionary advanced base operation in a contested littoral environment so you know we've been able to set the theater in the middle east we've had over match and that's not likely to be the case in some areas of the indo-pacific a future adversary will almost certainly make it difficult for even the marine corps to be self-sustaining so how do you see and you know you can look at some of these issues and exercises and others but what what what what do you see the marine corps or how do you see the marine corps addressing some of these sustainment and logistics challenges well if those who postulate that our logistics will be contested i am right there already we have to train that way we have to assume actually that our supply lines will be contested we've never had not never we haven't needed to do that in 70 years okay so all that we're a little bit out of practice perhaps but we're gonna have to actually protect our supply lines that's the long line the operational to strategic but mainly theater kind of level logistics we've assumed it's security can't do that anymore they're going to challenge it i think they're going to challenge it all the way to all the way to bill's garage whatever it is in idaho that produces a freaking part of a pump that goes to a jet or a ship we got they're going to try to go after that supply chain all the way back to his garage because they know that his garage is the only place that makes that bearing or that whatever it is so this is going to be an attack and a defense in depth like we have never we haven't witnessed and you're in my lifetime okay so back to the real pieces that we need to work on i mean i'm talking about cyber i'm not talking about bombs on bill's garage but i'm talking about shutting shutting him down in other ways that's just going to choke us off so i would i would absolutely assume contested logistics now so what does that mean for us i'm i'm also with you there is no more set the theater there's no more um this is how we're going to flow the force over the first 90 days i don't think that's going to work either because they're not going to allow us to follow our tiff fit so those things are helpful for planing they're not going to be executed in the way that they're laid out on paper we're going to need more agility than we have right now i believe logistics as a warfighting function is the pacing function not one of it's actually the we can have the best force postured perfectly with this magnificent giant c2 on top of it if they're able to bring us if they're able to contest and really choke us off logistically they'll take us to our knees we can't let that happen we need the organic mobility to move the force we need distribution needs that we don't have right now to move supplies and sustainment laterally inside the west inside the weapons engagement zone assume they're going to contest it we need to train our forces to forage because if you're going in there sir with a hundred marines to some place the i can't afford to fly you in bottled water if we're very much distributed no you gotta find water food transportation you gotta find all that stuff on your own and i'm gonna give you here's your checkbook okay you're gonna go in there and get all that stuff and the only thing i'm gonna fly you in ordinance and maybe jp to refuel some aircraft but it's just fuel and bullets that's what i'm going to resupply the rest you're going to have to forage so we have to train you know in a way we did before but now we're going to go back to it so one area to sort of think through some of these challenges we talked a little bit about exercises the warfighting lab in quantico broke ground a few months ago and you've stated that war gaming has helped shape your thinking on force design including how the marine corps can contribute to recon or counter recon in the maritime domain so what do you just out of curiosity what do you hope to gain from the warfighting lab to inform the future of forced design and to sort of think through some of these issues including logistics that we've just talked about the war gaming center is going to give us all the way to the highest level of classification the ability to to test drive concepts see how well they work i think if we do it right you can also bring in yours headquarters staff and practice your war plan your o plan too the primary purpose though is a way to model a way to run through concepts to see how at the very highest level of classification so it's not the brick building of course as much as it is the software and the classification capabilities inside the brick and mortar and and by the way it has to be tied it has to be able to tie into other wargaming centers so that we can actually model we can actually wargame joint capabilities in a larger framework i we don't have such a facility right now and the fact that it's right down the road that quantico is going to enable i think not just the marines but the joint force to have a place nearby go test drive joint this new joint concept we're thinking about let's go see if it actually works come back two weeks make some changes let's go try it again we don't have that capability right now yeah it'll be a great development i was just down there to take a look at it um we are almost done you've been you've been so unselfish with your time thank you very much uh just had one or two uh final questions uh first one's a tough one too uh which is um really how do you how how are you thinking about addressing some of the screening and evaluating recruits challenges about 20 of marines i i believe don't complete their first enlistment so what what are your thoughts on whether it's screening evaluating recruits etc how do you start to decrease that that number when i came in same as to last year you took we took the asvab and we took an inventory strength test that was all we knew about burger or anybody else really we have got to know a lot more about a high school graduate or college graduate than we know and we can for the last year and a half two years we've piloted programs to go way beyond the asvab and in cognitive sense more think not to the degree but along the same path as if i were to apply for the special operations community that sort of approach i mean the whole of me cognitively physically resilience wise all of that so the screening and evaluation you're talking about about what we bring into the future cannot be just the asvab and the strength this that's not gonna cut it that's not gonna get us the talent in the door that we need have to fundamentally change that so as part of the talent management as you're looking down the road you know you said that you've that that you'd like to move beyond this this what some might call an industrial era model of manpower management to an information age model that attracts flexible critical thinkers and also competes with the civilian market for this talent so so how are you thinking about doing that what initiatives are you considering to achieve that i mean i think this is just as relevant across other services as well i begin by the premise that it would even if we were and we can't design the exact perfect marine corps of the future even if we could design that it will not work with the manpower and the training structures we have today won't work and i'm also convinced that the manpower framework that we have today the construct we have today we've made a lot of tweaks to it over the years it's beyond just a little more adjustment and it'll catch up can't do that so we have to make some fundamental changes there if we're going to retain the person you spoke about they got in the front door if we're going to retain that we're going to have to do some things very much different the air force the army air force especially is used like a marketplace for assignments in other words instead of it's time for you to rotate you call your assignment person he goes i got three jobs for you to pick from what if you could see all of the possibilities that are opening up next may okay that's a whole nother world we don't do that in the marine corps right now but that if we're going to actually retain the talent that we need or let's say let's say um me i've been i graduated from college i went to work um boeing i went to work for wherever amazon doesn't matter and i worked there for six seven years and now i want to go into the military i'm in pretty good shape i'm 27 years old i'd like to go into the military you know how we're going to do that in the military we're going to make you a private okay because that's our structure or a second lieutenant because you're going to college to graduates or college degrees so we're going to make you second lieutenant why can't we figure out a way to bring that person in laterally they have seven years of doing cyber stuff why why would we start him at the bottom and as a second okay we have to say that's not great or if i'm a marine now a major whatever now and i want to go out to work in amazon for a couple years and then come back okay we don't have any way to do that it's like a one-way door so we our manpower systems i think we have very hard-working manpower people but they're working in a structure that's not going to suit us going forward well we wish you all of the luck uh and and um uh success uh because i think that is that is an important uh aspect to to think through um and i just want to thank you for for the time you've spent with us and with with all of us collectively a number of those questions i asked were were from the audience uh there was tremendous interest in hearing from you i also want to thank usni and hii in the support of this and i just wanted to conclude general berger by by thanking you and your marines in afghanistan most recently those that put their lives on the line uh in service to the country um and thank them and their families for uh for what they continue to provide to the united states and all of our allies and partners so thank you for what you're doing thank you to all of your marines for doing it as well uh they make us all proud well thanks for allowing me some time today i wrote down two and a half pages worth of questions so i'm going to we have to go back now and learn more and if i think the people that are on the net are going to help the marine corps learn we don't have all the answers regarding the marines i think you're spot on they are this the people wearing the uniform today are the very best that america has they are they literally are the very best we have they know that what they're doing makes a difference they're very proud we are proud of them too we just got to keep america behind them and we will be fine but they they just really especially the last couple weeks extraordinary just hard to describe in words you can't you just can't thank you very much general burger we we appreciate it [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 6,511

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Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics

Id: bytcHSQZroo

Length: 57min 32sec (3452 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021