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DoD Transformation Here
to Stay, Cebrowski Says
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Jan. 2005 -- Transformation has taken
hold across the Defense Department and "will be
with us a very, very long time," DoD's top
transformational thinker said here today.
In response to President Bush's directive to DoD to
change itself to better confront 21st century threats,
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has implemented
many policies that have changed the way the military
operates and does business, noted retired Navy Vice Adm.
Arthur K. Cebrowski, director of the DoD's Office of
Force Transformation.
The admiral, speaking at an American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics- sponsored luncheon,
pointed to revamps made to the Unified Command Plan as
well other significant departmental changes that
required legislation from Congress.
The department remains committed to improved and
expanded communications capabilities, said Cebrowski,
who's slated to retire from his current position at end
of the month. "We're not going to step back to a
less-networked age," he said.
The admiral said it's "difficult to undo some of
the things that have been done." For instance, he
said, the U.S. Army isn't going to jettison its new
combat-brigade structure centered on the Stryker armored
vehicle and go back to an old-style, division-based
tactical force structure.
"That's just the way things are," he said.
Also, he noted, the U.S. armed forces "are
raising up a very large number of NCOs and junior and
mid-grade officers who have combat experience"
under the new transformational doctrine.
"That changes the force," he explained,
noting today's servicemembers "have experienced
many of these transformational things, whether they're
items for procurement or they are tactics, or they are
organizational constructs."
The Army and Marine Corps, Cebrowski pointed out,
employ "a very robust way of capturing these
(transformational) attitudes, turning them back into the
training for the forces that are going to deploy
again."
Consequently, a culture of taking lessons derived
from troop combat experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq
has been developed across the Army and Marine Corps, the
admiral noted.
And "what happens is the doctrine process just
catches up later," Cebrowski concluded.
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