U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel spoke to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on May 6, 2014. After thanking the hosts and noting that Chicago was "the city of big shoulders," Hagel went on to affirm that America must remain a "nation of big shoulders" in the world at large.
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. . . What hangs in the balance is not just America's military,
but also America's global standing, our global standing for years to come. Today, I'd like to discuss this transition
and the global dynamics that are affecting foreign affairs, our military, and
America's role in the world.
Unlike their predecessors of the past 13 years, our
military's newest recruits do not face the almost certain prospects of
deploying to war in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Instead, they face a fractured global security landscape, one
characterized by great uncertainty, rapid change, new and sophisticated
threats, and continued political turbulence,
The rise of Asia, the explosion of youth populations in the
Middle East and Africa, new technologies bringing people closer together, and
new threats emanating from these technologies, like cyber, deepening global
economic interdependence and the diffusion of global economic power, a
resurgence of nationalism and sectarian conflict around the world, new sources
of energy in this hemisphere and elsewhere, climate change, and more frequent
destructive natural disasters – all these realities are challenging and will
continue to challenge America's security and our prosperity.
While many of these threats are borderless, America and its
allies face a stern test in the unprecedented confluence of today's global
challenges emanating within and between nation-states. These include the civil and sectarian war and
humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, Iran's destabilizing activities, North
Korea's continued dangerous provocations in Northeast Asia, simmering tensions
between China, Japan and Southeast Asian nations in the South and East China
Seas, deadly terrorist threats to the nations of North Africa and beyond,
Afghanistan's continuing struggle for security and stability, and Russia's
blatant aggression in Ukraine.
All of this offers a reminder that the character of
international relations has not changed.
Conflicts between states, historic religious and ethnic hatreds, and
rivalries between regional powers all remain defining features of today's
global landscape. They remind us that
history and geography still matter.
Working with allies and friends, American leadership must
respond to these challenges and help shape the forces that will shape our
future. More and more people in nations
around the world are gaining a stake in the global order that we helped build
after World War II. Not only has NATO
enlarged and strengthened, but new regional systems are emerging in Asia and
the Middle East, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the
Gulf Cooperation Council that are helping nations forge new kinds of
cooperation to address common interests and common challenges.
As we witness a realignment of interests, influences and
challenges, the United States must continue to exercise strong, steady and
inspired leadership as we did after World War II. What we accomplished during that period of
time and how we accomplished it remains instructive as we work with friends and
allies to adapt and strengthen our global order to meet shifting realities.
The post-World War II decade was, like today, a time of
great uncertainty, but a time of great hope.
And America was also focusing inward.
But America's leaders -- Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall,
and Dwight Eisenhower among them -- knew that the security and prosperity of
our citizens, American citizens here at home, depended on our engagement and
leadership abroad. They stepped forward
to build alliances in international institutions, helping establish the rules
and norms that still underpin security and prosperity today.
Their success also hinged on recognizing, as George Marshall
once said, that “a very strong military posture is vitally necessary, but it is
too narrow, too narrow a basis on which to build a dependable, long-enduring
peace.” We must lead with a robust and
comprehensive use of all of our instruments of power, employing cultural,
educational, economic, diplomatic, development, and military tools alike.
In Europe, our rapid deployment of U.S. forces to Poland and
our Baltic allies continues to reassure them all of our commitment to NATO's
collective security against Russia's aggression, as we also strengthen our
diplomatic and economic options.
In the Middle East, our force posture, including more than
35,000 DOD personnel in and around the Persian Gulf, helped contribute to the
diplomatic opening with Iran and helped compel the Assad regime to dismantle
its chemical weapons program through a diplomatic process.
In the Asia Pacific rebalance, we are employing all of our
instruments of power to strengthen allies, underwrite the free flow of
commerce, and help nations resolve disputes peacefully so all nations there can
live in peace and freedom as their nations prosper.
Although Americans today are increasingly skeptical of
foreign engagement and global responsibilities, it is a mistake -- it's a
mistake to view these responsibilities as a burden or charity.
Let us remember that the biggest beneficiaries of American
leadership and engagement in the world are the American people. Turning inward, history teaches us, does not
insulate us from the world's troubles.
It only forces us to be more engaged later, at a higher cost, at a
higher cost in blood and treasure and often on the terms of others. This is perhaps more true than ever in
today's globalized world. Walking away
from the world and our relationships is not an option for the United States.
Despite all the challenges and imperfections and problems
facing America and the world today -- and they are numerous -- we are living
still in an era of unprecedented prosperity and opportunity. It is easy to be lulled into taking this for
granted, but we cannot forget that this era resulted from decades of American
engagement abroad with our allies, as well as investments in our people and
infrastructure here at home.
In the post-war era, the United States military has
contributed to peace and prosperity not only by fighting wars, but by
preventing wars. America's investment in
its military remains a dominant factor in continuing to help build a peaceful,
free and stable world.
But we cannot assume that the clear lessons of history are
always recognized or heeded. History
informs us that allowing our military strength to weaken when coming out of a
war is always, always a costly mistake, especially costly like today when there
is no obvious peace dividend.
As forcefully as George Marshall argued for balance in
America's foreign policy, he also warned that after war, “Americans too often
allow for,” in his words, “the rapid disintegration of our once vast power for
maintaining the peace.”
We should pay attention to his words. We should also recognize that military
strength is not only defined by the size of our force, but by its agility and
how quickly it can be mobilized and how superior its weapons and technology are
always as we compare them to our adversaries.
The force must be kept in balance as we adjust to new fiscal and
strategic realities and challenges.
DOD's leaders had long expected that coming out of the wars,
the defense budget would be reduced, and it has been reduced, just like
previous wars. But the scale and the
pace of the budget cuts we're experiencing and that we have experienced in
recent years have been made far more severe and more abrupt because political
gridlock in Washington triggered steep automatic cuts to the president's budget
request by way of sequestration, an irresponsible deferral of governing
responsibility.
And even as Congress has slashed our overall budget, they
have so far proven unwilling to accept necessary reforms to curb growth in
compensation costs and eliminate DOD's excess infrastructure and unneeded
facilities.
This is not the political or budget environment that the
president or I wanted, nor any of our leadership at DOD. But it is the environment we have. It is the environment that we must deal with
and manage through.
Over the past year, DOD's leaders and I have built a budget
plan that makes a series of tough choices, tough choices to match resources to
real strategic priorities and missions.
This budget is now being debated before Congress, and that means we have
entered a crucial period for our military's future, one that will play out not
just in the coming months of debate, but over the next few years and beyond,
because the decisions we make today will determine the size, form and fighting
strength of our future military.
As we enter this period of transition, we know that we face
enormous strategic and managerial challenges.
If we fail to meet these challenges, “the yawning gap,” as this week's
Economist magazine editorial put it, “between Uncle Sam and his potential foes
seems bound to shrink.”
Sustaining our edge in the face of new strategic and fiscal
challenges will require Congress's partnership, partnership in making tough
choices, always looking at our broader national interests instead of narrow
constituencies. It will require Congress
to provide the Pentagon with the resources and the flexibility we need to meet
our national security responsibilities.
If we get this flexibility, the United States military will
emerge from this period having sustained and even sharpened its decisive
edge. Doing so will support America's
global leadership, enhance our credibility abroad, and ultimately ensure our
security at home.
We can and we must, as Tom Friedman recently noted, do big
and difficult things together, but this demands that we protect three pillars
of our military embedded within our strategy and our budget.
Our first priority is our people. The first priority of any institution must
always be its people, because it is the commitment of our people, their
professionalism and their skill, the unique commitment of these men and women
in uniform that give our military its decisive advantage.
These attributes in our service members are justly
celebrated, but they are not inevitable.
Not only do we need the right people, they must be afforded the chance
to grow, develop new skills, and make meaningful contributions to our nation's
defense in an atmosphere that fosters professionalism, dignity, and
respect. And they and their families
must be fairly compensated and cared for by the country they serve.
But what motivates people to join and stay in the military
is not just the compensation, it's the sense of purpose that comes with the
mission and the training and the skills that their services provided. That message has been driven home to me
repeatedly almost every time I meet with our troops all over the world.
Taking care of our people during this period of transition
requires that we maintain military readiness, the training and the maintenance
that keeps our force prepared. Readiness is an expensive proposition. And the difficulty with advocating for
readiness is that it lacks a built-in constituency, except among those who serve
in the military. Outside of war, readiness
is and has been historically overlooked.
But in today's world, neglecting readiness is an irresponsible gamble
that we do not want to take. DOD's
senior leaders and I will continue making the argument to Congress that
readiness must be an urgent priority.
This ultimately requires tradeoffs. Some of them are politically easy; others are
far more difficult, like adjusting military compensation, retiring aging
weapons platforms, and reducing the overall size of the force, both active and
National Guard and reserve.
We must take these actions in order to maintain a ready
force for the future. It is the
responsible, the responsible thing to do.
If we do not take these actions now, then we will embark on a certain
path of demoralizing and hollowing out our force. It will jeopardize our nation's ability to
successfully respond to military crises anywhere in the world at any time.
A similar risk exists if we do not provide our men and women
with clearly superior arms, equipment and technology. That's why my second priority is investing in
the military capabilities needed to meet new and enduring threats. I'm not interested in a fair fight. And I don't want to be capable of only
fighting the last war. That was the last
war. Instead, we must rebalance and
modernize the military's full suite of capabilities. We must do so with an eye toward the most
likely and lethal threats to our future, recognizing that many of the
military's key conventional weapons platforms are aging and they need to be
upgraded or replaced.
Terrorists and insurgents are not fading into oblivion. The continued and spreading threat that they
pose was a key part of our decision to grow and strengthen our special
operations forces and capabilities, but we must also re-emphasize the
capabilities and skills needed to counter high-intensity threats from more
sophisticated adversaries. As we've seen
in Ukraine and elsewhere, we must prepare for shadowy conflicts in which
nations deploy irregular forces, conduct cyberterrorism, and seek ways to
counter our technological edge. And we
will always require a ready, capable and modern standing Army, Navy, Marine
Corps, and Air Force.
This means investing in the military's major next-generation
weapons systems, including the new Joint Strike Fighter, the new long-range
bomber, and new submarines and aircraft carriers, but it also means protecting
new tools in space and cyber, which our budget does, and investing in unmanned
systems, precision strike, and intelligence platforms. It means continuing to invest in science,
research and technology, and strengthening organizations like DARPA, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also saw a funding increase in
our budget proposal.
Modernizing all of our military's capabilities will not only
help ensure our continued military edge, it will also help sustain America's
defense industrial base. Now that
industrial base, a good amount of it here in the Midwest, is in itself a
critically important national strategic asset.
We also must adjust our capabilities to meet new global
realities, including environmental changes.
Just today, the nation's top scientists released a national climate
assessment that warns us in very stark terms that the effects of climate change
are already becoming quite apparent.
One area where we see this is the Arctic. The melting of gigantic ice caps presents
possibilities for the opening of new sea lanes and the exploration for natural
resources, energy and commerce, also with the dangerous potential for conflict
in the Arctic.
The Defense Department is bolstering its engagement in the
Arctic and looking at what capabilities we need to operate there in the future,
as described in DOD's first-ever Arctic strategy that I introduced at the
Halifax international security forum last November.
But in the face of strict budget limits, we must make many
tradeoffs in capabilities, as well.
That's why our budget plan divests DOD of several venerable, capable,
but aging platforms, like the 50-year-old U-2 spy plane and the A-10, a close
air support platform that cannot operate in the face of sophisticated enemy air
defenses. These decisions were
difficult, but they were based on real-world needs and strategic imperatives.
We cannot afford to keep all of our platforms. We must prioritize for our future
requirements. It won't be easy, it won't
be popular, but given our continued budget restraints and uncertainties, we
have no choice. And if we do not make these
choices now, we will be left with a force that is large, but not sufficiently
ready or capable to meet national security requirements.
Given budget restraints and the end of two large-scale wars,
we have accepted some reductions in the size of the force, but these reductions
need not and will not diminish our commitment to America's alliances and
partnerships which remain the foundation for our approach to global security
and for our military's global presence.
Today, the U.S. military is engaged in nearly 100 countries
with nearly 400,000 personnel stationed or deployed around the world. Strengthening these partnerships is our third
priority, because working with and working through allies and partners, just as
we did during World War II and since, is as essential today as it has ever been.
What our budget proposal and defense strategy makes clear is
that even as we shrink our military's size, we must not simply return to
garrison. We must continue strengthening
the capabilities of our allies, forming new alliances and bolstering old ones,
and investing in collective security arrangements.
We want our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen and Marines
active around the world, deploying with greater frequency and agility, with the
skills and expertise needed to build security capacity in each region. An example of this kind of mutually
beneficial partnership that we now seek and we pursue can be found here in
Illinois, where your National Guard has built a more than 20-year relationship
with the Polish armed forces. Leveraging
the expertise and skills of our guardsmen, we have helped Poland become a more
capable ally and contribute to the mission in Afghanistan.
Building stronger partnerships does not require large-scale
deployments. As we continue to shift
forces and operational focus to the Asia Pacific region, we are pursuing new
access agreements, agreements like the one President Obama announced last week
in the Philippines, which enable us to sustain presence without a rigid and
costly basing structure.
We've also begun new deployments of Marines to Australia and
Navy Littoral Combat Ships to Singapore, where they're available to operate
with partners and respond to contingencies, and we're also deploying more
advanced capabilities to Japan and South Korea, our allies in Northeast Asia.
At the same time, we're finding new ways to team up with
civilian counterparts to strengthen the capacity of partner nations in Africa
and Latin America. I saw this firsthand
last month in Guatemala, where our troops were helping build schools and
provide medical education and assistance.
And tomorrow, I'll meet with the president of Djibouti to talk about how
to bolster the regional training activities the U.S. military conducts with its
partners in that country.
A final critical aspect of strengthening partnerships is our
engagement with multilateral organizations.
This not only includes NATO, but also regional institutions, like the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Last month, I hosted the first-ever
U.S.-ASEAN defense ministers' meeting on U.S. soil in Hawaii. We focused on our common security interests,
our common challenges, our common opportunities, and how we can continue to
build cooperation in areas like humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.
This month, I will
travel to Saudi Arabia for a U.S.-Gulf Cooperation Council defense ministerial
with all the defense ministers from the GCC countries, focused on regional
security issues. And early next month, I
will participate in my fourth NATO defense ministerial, a tribute, of course,
to Ivo.
At all these forums, the U.S. participation and engagement
is welcomed, if not overtly sought, as Ivo and many of you in this room
know. And that has everything to do with
the respect afforded our men and women in uniform and the unmatched
capabilities they bring to bear around the world.
Our people, our capabilities, our partnerships, these are
what make the American military unique and the envy of the world. They will be my guiding focus, all the
leadership of DOD's guiding focus as we reshape, rebalance, and reform our
defense enterprise for the challenges ahead and ensure America's global
leadership.
This will require innovation and agility in every area. And it will require engagement around the
world.
From our own history, we know why America's global
leadership is indispensable to our own future.
This history is reflected in the story of this council, the Chicago
Council on Global Affairs, an organization founded in 1922 to fight against the
rising tide of isolationism that gripped America after the end of World War I.
Fifteen years after this council was founded, Franklin
Roosevelt -- then President of the United States -- came to Chicago to talk
about the rising threats posed by Japan and Germany. He delivered his most passionate case to date
about the need to turn away from the isolationist path, the insular, inward
look, and he said, "We are determined to keep out a war, but yet we cannot
have complete protection in a world of disorder, in which confidence and
security have broken down."
We all know that these appeals were not enough to summon
action at that time. President
Roosevelt's speech was greeted with protests and anger from a public determined
to stay out of international affairs.
But we also know what followed -- the costliest conflict in world
history.
At his Fourth Inaugural on January 20, 1945, President
Roosevelt reflected on the lessons of that conflict. And he said, "We have learned that we
cannot live alone at peace, that our own well-being is dependent on the
well-being of other nations far away. We
have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community."
These words echo even more loudly today and summon us to
meet our responsibilities around the world.
America must not succumb to the temptation to turn inward. We do not engage in the world because we are
a great nation. Rather, we are a great
nation because we engage in the world, and because we engage with confidence and
purpose.
This is a complicated and challenging time. But it is not a time to lose confidence in
ourselves, who we are, what we believe, and what we represent. Though the challenges that face our world,
our nation, and all of its institutions are great, so is our capacity to deal
with these problems if we are wise, steady and resolute. Never in the history of mankind has the
nation possessed so much capacity to help make a better world for all mankind. We must not fear change, but embrace it. We must not only look inward, but also upward
and outward. We must remain a nation of
big shoulders.
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