Admiral Bill Owens — an interview

Admiral Bill Owens was raised in North Dakota and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1962. He was a submariner for more than 20 years and commanded the U.S. 6th Fleet from 1990 to 1992, which includes the time of the Persian Gulf War (1991). From 1994-1996, he served as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now retired from the military, he is Vice Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer of Teledesic, a satellite communications company. He is interviewed here by Susan Robinson King, Carnegie Corporation Vice President, Public Affairs.

SK: We’re at war in Afghanistan. Is this the war of the future that you were planning for when you were at the Pentagon a number of years ago?

BO: Well, what we were trying to think about a few years ago was the uncertainty of the wars we would be engaged in next. I, and a number of others, were concerned that what we were always preparing for was the last war that we had fought when really, what we needed to be doing was to prepare for the type of war we hadn’t seen yet. We should have been thinking about terrorism in the U.S., for example, as well as biological weapons, “dirty nukes,” security leaks and related problems.

My view has always been that the issue really is how you “see” the battlefield, whatever that battlefield is: Desert Storm or Somalia or the situation we now face in Afghanistan—or America, or someplace else.

SK: How do you see it? Someone who was closely involved in Pentagon policy during the time you were there described you as “the futurist”—the admiral who was always thinking about what was to come, in very specific ways. He credited you with the advent of night vision goggles and other high-tech equipment that has made the Special Forces so sophisticated in this war, for example. But your thinking goes beyond that. You want a more technologically sophisticated military don’t you?

BO: In Afghanistan we’ve seen some real crystal-ball-breaking things happen very rapidly. Army helicopters on a Navy carrier—you just don’t do that in the traditional U.S. military. But it was a smart thing to do and it made a lot of sense. I had done some of this back in 1991 and 1992—I took all the Navy fighter planes off the deck of a carrier and put them ashore to train with the Air Force for three weeks and instead, put 40 Special Forces helicopters on board, and I remember getting considerable flack for it. But it seemed very effective.

The critically important revolution in military affairs is one that ties together a “systems of systems,” where many sensors are linked together. You can do that with modern software. You can tie systems together so you can “see” a battlefield and then, with a sophisticated high-bandwidth communications system, you can get all kinds of essential information to the warrior, whether he or she is in the Army, Navy, Air Force or the Marines. If you can achieve that, then you start to have enormous power to do what the United States has to do in modern combat.

People say that there have been many revolutions in military affairs. There was gun powder, nuclear power, weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile. But in my view, those arenÕt the real revolutions. What some of the military theoreticians talked about thousands of years ago was knowing more about your enemy. If you know everything you possibly can about your enemy and prevent him from knowing much about you, then you have an advantage. Whether itÕs a battlefield in Somalia where we could have done a lot better if we had had an information umbrella over the country or whether itÕs the next Desert Storm, if there are ÒsmartÓ systems that give us a picture of the real battlefield, then we have a decided edge. A system of systems would also include non-combat situations where agencies such as the U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service would have access to information about border crossings, flight manifests and lists of passengers traveling on airplanes. When you see and understand this information, you have the solutions that make a revolutionary difference.

So I think what weÕve seen in AfghanistanÑArmy helicopters on a carrier, Navy jets escorting Air Force bombersÑis revolutionary; itÕs never happened as much before. And weÕre seeing an Army soldier on the ground who gets a piece of information from an unmanned aerial drone and then puts a laser spot on a vehicle in a far-off mountain range, which allows him to pinpoint location information which he then transmits to a B-52 bomber, which then drops a precision-guided bomb that precisely hits the target. ThatÕs much more than we were able to achieve in Desert Storm.

Clearly we can see progress; we are becoming more modern. But what we donÕt see is the budget changing very much. We can have all these grand thoughts and give great speeches about the future, but unless the Pentagon budget changes significantly, we arenÕt realizing our full potential. Where you put the hundreds of billions of dollars that go into the defense budget represents what Òthe policy really is.Ó What weÕre seeing in the defense budget today is rising numbers but not much more is going into the Òsystem of systemsÓ we needÑa system of smart systems, not just smarter weapons.

SK: And the hardware, of course, determines the war weÕre going to fight.

BO: Yes.

SK: IÕm also really focused on something IÕve heard you say before: that if there is too much money in the Pentagon budget, hard choices are not made, and perhaps not the best choices are made. Do you think that putting more money in defense is not going to make us stronger?

BO: ThatÕs something that bothers me a lot. ItÕs very hard to be against providing more money for defense. You can come across as a flaming liberal or as anti-patriotic, especially at a time when men and women are on the front lines, fighting. But the Department of Defense hasnÕt been pressed enough, in my view, and so when we provide more money to fund the kinds of things they have a tendency to want to fundÑnuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, big artillery pieces, the F-22 fighterÑthese programs go forward, whether theyÕre optimal or not. And these things, which are hugely expensive, end up getting money that could go to many other programs like countering biological weapons and dirty nukes. And you donÕt get the bang for the buck that you should get; instead, you bloat the military and put in place long-term contracts for big ticket-items, many of which are Òold-worldÓ programs. So I do worry about that. I think more money for defense doesnÕt mean a stronger defense.

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