U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

WASHINGTON : 

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office

Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512–1800; DC area (202) 512–1800

Fax: (202) 512–2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402–0001

i 

45–060 2009

[H.A.S.C. No. 110–168] 

A NEW U.S. GRAND STRATEGY 

(PART 2 OF 2) 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

HEARING HELD 

JULY 31, 2008 

[H.A.S.C. 110–159 Part 1] 
(II) 

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman 

JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina 

LORETTA SANCHEZ, California 

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California 

ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey 

SUSAN A. DAVIS, California 

JIM COOPER, Tennessee 

HANK JOHNSON, Georgia 

JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania 

W. TODD AKIN, Missouri 

ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland 

WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina 

JEFF MILLER, Florida 

PHIL GINGREY, Georgia 

K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas 

GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky 

JOHN KRUSE, Professional Staff Member 

THOMAS HAWLEY, Professional Staff Member 

ROGER ZAKHEIM, Professional Staff Member 

SASHA ROGERS, Research Assistant 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS 

2008 

Page 

HEARING: 

Thursday, July 31, 2008, A New U.S. Grand Strategy (Part 2 of 2) ................... 1 

APPENDIX: 

Thursday, July 31, 2008 .......................................................................................... 35 

THURSDAY, JULY 31, 2008 

A NEW U.S. GRAND STRATEGY (PART 2 OF 2) 

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS 

Akin, Hon. W. Todd, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee ............................................................. 4 

Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman, Oversight 

and Investigations Subcommittee ....................................................................... 1 

WITNESSES 

Blair, Adm. Dennis C., USN (Ret.), John M. Shalikashvili Chair, National 

Bureau of Asian Research ................................................................................... 2 

Hunter, Ambassador Robert E., Senior Advisor, RAND Corporation, U.S. 

Ambassador to NATO, 1993–1998 ...................................................................... 4 

Scales, Maj. Gen. Robert H., Jr., USA (Ret.), President, COLGEN, LP, Former 

Commandant, Army War College ....................................................................... 6 

Zelikow, Dr. Philip D., White Burkett Miller Professor of History, University 

of Virginia, Former Counselor, Department of State ........................................ 8 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS: 

Akin, Hon. W. Todd .......................................................................................... 41 

Blair, Adm. Dennis C. ...................................................................................... 42 

Hunter, Ambassador Robert E. ....................................................................... 57 

Scales, Maj. Gen. Robert H., Jr. ...................................................................... 80 

Snyder, Hon. Vic ............................................................................................... 39 

Zelikow, Dr. Philip D. ....................................................................................... 93 

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD: 

The Coalition of Enlightened States submitted by Maj. Gen. Robert H. 

Scales ............................................................................................................. 107 

WITNESS RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ASKED DURING THE HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.] 

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted post hearing.] 

(1) 

A NEW U.S. GRAND STRATEGY (PART 2 OF 2) 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE, Washington, DC, Thursday, July 31, 2008. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:05 a.m., in room 

2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Vic Snyder (chairman 

of the subcommittee) presiding. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

Dr. SNYDER. We are going to go ahead and get started. Mr. Akin 

is on his way, and Dr. Zelikow, I think, is either finding his parking place, or has found it and is being escorted up. But he was 

scheduled to be our fourth testifier. And I suspect that he has read 

your written statements. 

We welcome you all today to the Subcommittee on Oversight and 

Investigations hearing. This is our second hearing in a series of 

hearings we are having on—we call it, I guess, a Grand Strategy— 

whether we need a new Grand Strategy. 

Chairman Skelton has expressed his support for this subcommittee’s work, and intends to hold a hearing in the fall on the full-committee level, with former Secretaries of Defense and State. 

At our first subcommittee hearing on July 15th, the witnesses 

agreed that our two—perhaps our two most important national-security challenges were actually ones we need to look at internally 

to regain our fiscal health and, as soon as possible, to have a sound 

and comprehensive energy policy. 

While focusing on these two issues, there also was agreement 

amongst our witnesses that there is no clear-cut existential threat 

to our Nation. And while these witnesses emphasized the importance of rebuilding the foundation of this country’s power as the 

basis for its Grand Strategy, they also caution that the world is too 

uncertain a place for the United States to somehow declare a timeout while we work on things like energy policy and our fiscal 

health. 

And also, everyone was in agreement we need to pay better attention to engaging our allies. 

I appreciate you all being here today. I have read your written 

statements. 

What we will do is we will turn on our little light here. And it 

will start flashing red at five minutes. But that is more just to give 

you a sense of where you are at with time. And if you need to go 
2 

on past that to finish your statement, I would encourage you to do 

that. 

Obviously, some of you have written statements. If we actually 

read the whole thing, we would be here until Tuesday, and I don’t 

intend to be here until next Tuesday, so I would hope you will give 

a more condensed version. 

But Mr. Akin is not here. When he comes here, we will give him 

an opportunity to make any comments he wants to make. 

And we will go ahead, Admiral Blair, and begin with you. We are 

pleased today to have, as our witnesses, Admiral Dennis Blair, Ambassador Robert Hunter, Major General Robert Scales—both at— 

I will say Admiral Blair and Major General Scales are retired—and 

then Dr. Philip Zelikow will be joining us—just in time. 

Oh, Doctor—and Dr. Zelikow is here with us. So, great. 

Dr. Zelikow, thank you. Thank you. 

So, Admiral Blair, let’s begin with you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the Appendix on page 39.] 

STATEMENT OF ADM. DENNIS C. BLAIR, USN (RET.), JOHN M. 

SHALIKASHVILI CHAIR, NATIONAL BUREAU OF ASIAN RESEARCH 

Admiral BLAIR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I read over the transcript of your last hearing, and I agree with 

the thrust of most of your witnesses that, probably, a tight, clever, 

sophisticated strategy is not something that is possible for the 

United States—a tight possible Grand Strategy—for all of the reasons you discussed earlier. But I do think that we can have a set 

of strategic priorities, an approach to the way the United States 

uses its power in the world. 

I would say that, because we can’t really have a tight, clever, integrated strategy, we probably need a little more power than what 

otherwise would be the case. If you look at North Korea, for example, and our interaction with them over the last 20 years, they 

have had an amazing strategy and no power. We have had an 

amazing amount of power, very little strategy. And the result, over 

20 years, has been about a tie. 

So the United States sort of needs some extra power if it is going 

to operate in the somewhat open way that we do. And so I very 

much share the views of those at that last hearing—that we need 

to work on the internal basics so that we have that power. And it 

is not only economic and fiscal power. We need to regain some of 

the moral authority that plays so powerfully for us in the world. 

So if we are to have a set of strategic principles, if not a strategy, 

what should we start with? And I believe we should start with the 

objective that we seek. And I think that is fairly simple to state: 

The United States seeks a world in the future in which there are 

nation-states which have secure borders. 

These countries can enforce the rule of law within their borders. 

The governments of these countries are representative governments—representative of the will of their people. They have, basically, market-based economies and they trade with one another. I 

think that is the kind of world we are looking for. So that should 

be at the heart of our strategic principles. 
3 

I think if you look at that end state, that vision, most of the rest 

of the world would share it. You notice that it doesn’t mean implanting American-style democracy in other countries. But if you go 

a level down, I find that if you talked with citizens of other countries in terms of these more basic principles—rule of law, representative government, secure borders and so on—you find quite 

general agreement. 

So if we phrase it in a way that translates well in other countries, I think our objective, you will find, is shared with most of the 

world that we care about. And that provides a solid basis for our 

strategic principles. 

So Strategy 101—objective—where you are now, how do you get 

there? What are the strategic principles that we should follow as 

we try to work toward that world? 

Number one: I think we should use the unique power that the 

United States has, that we have enjoyed ever since the end of the 

Cold War, to build norms of international behavior, institutions, 

precedents that favor that sort of world that we seek, and that I 

think others seek, if we communicate with them correctly. 

This has two components to it. Number one: When there is not 

some crisis going on that absorbs all of our attention, we should 

work on capacity. That is capacity within other countries. That is 

capacity of international institutions. 

This is the sort of—day-to-day work of attending meetings, building institutions, educating others in the United States, helping 

non-governmental organizations to build capacity for rule-of-law 

legal systems—democratic, representative institutions in other 

countries. And we should put a strong focus on that when—on a 

day-to-day basis. 

When it comes to handling a crisis, handling a particular situation, I think we should give a strong preference to collective action. 

The United States may lead it. The United States may not. There 

may be times when we have to act unilaterally. But our strong 

preference should be for collective action toward these common 

goals, which I think we all share. 

This is not just pie-in-the-sky. When I was in the Pacific Command and dealing with Indonesia, when we were both dealing with 

the East Timor issue, in which there was an Australian-led operation, and in the tsunami relief, in which there was a big, multilateral relief organization—the United States worked together with 

other countries. 

The result was that we rebuilt very strong relationships with Indonesia, a very important country in that part of the world. So I 

think that these principles can work. 

Principle number two—and I know it is also of interest to this 

committee—is integrating the forms of national power. And that 

means not only across the government, state, defense, intelligence 

community, but also with the private sector, both in non-governmental organizations, and with the for-profit, commercial sector— 

international companies and so on. 

I think if we follow those two principles, if we keep our eye on 

that vision of where we want the world to go, we can hand on a 

world to our children and grandchildren in which they can be free, 
4 

secure, and lead fulfilling lives. And that, after all, is the objective 

of our strategy. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Admiral Blair can be found in the 

Appendix on page 42.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Admiral Blair. 

If—Ambassador Hunter, let me give—we have been joined by Mr. 

Akin. Let me give Mr. Akin the time to make any opening comments he would like to make. 

STATEMENT OF HON. W. TODD AKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

Mr. AKIN. I am just interested in anything that is grand. And I 

have appreciated your comments—looking for more. 

And welcome, General Scales, too, and good to see you again. 

General SCALES. You, too, sir. 

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Akin can be found in the Appendix on page 41.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Ambassador Hunter, I will recognize you. 

STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR ROBERT E. HUNTER, SENIOR 

ADVISOR, RAND CORPORATION, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO NATO, 

1993–1998 

Ambassador HUNTER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. 

First, let me compliment you and the subcommittee for doing this. 

You know, we have gone, now, twice the time that we fought 

World War II since 9–11. And we still haven’t developed a new 

Grand Strategy. And the initiative that you are taking right now, 

I think, points us in the right direction. 

Remarkably, listening to my colleague here, with—I agree with 

every word he said, plus what you summarized from the last hearing. We are now building this on a bipartisan basis. And I think 

that is going to be critical for the next Administration, and for the 

next Congress. 

In fact, what you are starting today—I encourage you to continue 

it—to pair also with the Foreign Affairs Committee. And I do believe, here in the Congress, while you appropriate and authorize in 

a certain mechanism, it would be very useful if you had some committees that would look at the grand strategic picture and everything together, to help give guidance to the Administration, because, quite frankly, the barriers between the Administration and 

Congress have to fall in this area. 

We are all in this together, and that is the only way I think it 

is going to work. 

I—just to summarize very briefly, I think there are a number of 

areas. One is in strategic thinking. You are already initiating that. 

Second, as you mentioned, strength at home—a whole series of 

areas: It is not just energy and fiscal soundness, but things like 

health and education, the strength of our people, infrastructure 

and, yes, our reputation, and what the world wants to look at the 

United States—even though, sometimes, it sounds like a hackneyed 

phrase—as a ‘‘City on the Hill’’. I think we are moving in that way. 
5 

You also have to have, as you well know, popular support of the 

American people. I have long believed that any President who has 

a policy he cannot sell to the Congress and the American policy 

doesn’t have a foreign policy. That is an absolute requirement. 

In terms of tasks and priorities, I think we know some of the 

near-term ones—terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, the places 

where American fighting men and women are at risk today, in Iraq 

and Pakistan—sorry—in Afghanistan—with a major element of 

Pakistan involved in that—the Middle East, where we are going to 

be preoccupied for the indefinite future. 

But I want to raise the question whether we need to find a way 

to depreciate the amount of time and effort we have to put into the 

Middle East, when there are others who might be able to do it with 

us, and things we may be able to build for the future so that we 

can get on as well with some of the critical things that are happening in the world, and particularly in the Far East—China and 

the new, emerging issue of Russia. And, of course, we have to do 

an awful lot with the global economy. 

And then there are three long-term issues—resource scarcity, 

particularly oil, the environment, and global warming—that have 

a real problem in that these, for every leadership in every country, 

are beyond the political horizon of action. We are going to find a 

way—and you are leading on this—to collapse that. 

Tools: I agree entirely with what the admiral said. We need to 

be looking for force multipliers, power-and-influence multipliers, 

and security multipliers, particularly, the integration of instruments of power and influence. 

We have just finished a project at the RAND Corporation with 

the American Academy of Diplomacy that will be out a couple of 

weeks from now—fully consistent with what Secretary of Defense 

Gates has been trying to do. In fact, there is a new report mentioned in the Washington Post this morning. 

It is to deal with this extraordinary phenomenon of asymmetrical 

warfare, which is going to preoccupy us for the foreseeable future. 

We need to have engagement in the outside world on a governmentwide basis, not just the military, not just the State Department. 

In Afghanistan, today, there are exactly three employees of the 

United States Department of Agriculture. That is nonsense. We 

need to have purple-suited civilians like under Goldwater-Nichols. 

We need to have culturally sensitive people. We need a nationalsecurity budget, even if it is not actionable, put up by the Administration and by Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Congressional Research Service 

(CRS)-Air. 

And we are going to need to shift resources. The ratio between 

the 050 account and the 150 account, right now, is 17.5 to one. The 

people who will tell you we need to shift resources are the military 

people who had to do things in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and in Afghanistan. 

Now, allies—the admiral has already mentioned that. We are 

going to need allies elsewhere. And, in fact, we are going to have 

to put the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies on 

greater notice of their responsibility, along with us, to do things, 
6 

like in Afghanistan. They have got to pull their weight more, not 

just militarily, but also non-militarily. 

We are also going to have to demonstrate to the Europeans that 

we continue to care about their security. And one thing I worry 

about is a further reduction of U.S. troops in Europe. That is going 

to cost us a lot in influence, and not save much money. That is one 

of the things we have to do together. 

I think we have to have a new U.S.-European unit and strategic 

partnership in health, education—a whole series of things—and to 

break down the barriers between the European Union (E.U.) and 

NATO. 

A final word on the Middle East: We have an awful lot we have 

to do, and we have to do it all together—not just Afghanistan and 

Pakistan by itself, and Iraq by itself, Iran and the Arab-Israeli— 

but altogether. 

And three big points: One, as we reduce our position in Iraq, we 

have to do it in a way in which the world will know we are still 

a critical Middle East power, and our reputation for power and influence is intact. 

Second, we need to work out a relationship with Iran. And I believe the first thing we should do is finally offer them a deal: ‘‘You 

behave; we will give you security guarantees.’’ We ought to do that 

with North Korea. Maybe they will say, ‘‘No.’’ At least we will have 

tried. 

Because we are going to be there and they are going to be 

there—we are going to be the big power no matter what happens. 

They are going to be a minor power. 

Final thing in addition to Arab-Israeli: We need to create a new 

security framework for the Middle East that will, in time, enable 

us to take a bit of a step back a bit more over the horizon, while 

everybody knows the United States, as elsewhere, will continue to 

be the security provider of last resort. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Hunter can be found in the Appendix on page 57.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Hunter. 

General Scales. 

STATEMENT OF MAJ. GEN. ROBERT H. SCALES, JR., USA (RET.), 

PRESIDENT, COLGEN, LP, FORMER COMMANDANT, ARMY 

WAR COLLEGE 

General SCALES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am a military historian, and so my view of a future Grand Strategy will really reflect more of my academic than my military background. 

I would like to just, in the five minutes I have, make a couple 

of quick points. And then, what I would like to do at the end is 

offer some suggestions from a military perspective of what the military services need to do, over the next generation or so, to ensure 

that we meet the needs of of this strategy. 

I think that one of the conclusions that have come out of the last 

seven years is that we, as a Nation, can no longer go it alone, and 

carry the burden of global security on our shoulders. We can’t do 

it. 
7 

In Iraq, I think that we are beginning to see, with the number 

of soldiers and Marines available to carry that burden is diminishing in proportion to the size of the mission. 

It seems to me that we, in the future—in the distant future—as 

a goal, we need to return to a more traditional supporting role in 

our partnership to defeat global threats. 

And I think I view this as a generational effort. It is not anything you are going to solve by—in the next years’ budget. But 

what I suggest in my statement for the record is, over time, we 

need to re-look at our coalition and alliance-building, and build 

what I call a ‘‘coalition of enlightened states,’’ the ability to pursue 

a global strategy led by regional governments, rather than led by 

the United States. 

We still need, I believe, to protect ourselves against radicalism 

by protecting the traditional state system. But we need to move 

away from this cycle of seemingly perpetual violence. And I believe, 

frankly, that if we treat this as a generational effort—that time is 

on our side, because all radical movements contain the seeds of 

their own destruction. 

As they become more radical and they feed on more and more violence, then the revulsion among enlightened states begins to increase. You reach a tipping point. And these things tend to burn 

out over time. 

Clearly, we need a capability for direct confrontation. This is enemies that happen to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. But 

I strongly believe that containment and prevention are better than 

direct confrontation. 

Still, in this new era of a coalition of enlightened states, many 

of the basic Cold War instruments are still useful: Collective defense, regional alliances, economic develops and so forth. 

So we have to move away from short-term, preemptive action, to 

a more patient, nuanced, and longer-term policy of reinforcing our 

allies. 

An alliance of enlightened states built over time should be more 

expansive and more global than the Cold War alliances, like 

NATO. One of the things that is important is to cast a much broader net and build alliances around people who—around nations that 

have common interests, nations that are fearful of radicalism. We 

need to have a focus to reinforce statism, rather than policies that 

take apart statism. 

And there are really three purposes. One, obviously, is education 

and economic development. Probably the most important, Mr. 

Chairman, is a strategy focused around defeating insurgencies 

early, pre-insurgencies. A policy—a strategy—that focuses on preinsurgency, rather than counter-insurgency pays far more dividends in the long term. And, of course, we still have to remain 

powerful to defeat conventional threats. 

A couple of quick words about how tomorrow’s military needs to 

reshape itself in order to—and to support this coalition of enlightened states—I believe it has to be built around embassies and this 

country-team alliance, rather than simply reinforcing combatant 

commands with military power. 

Centered around that, of course, it is principally or, overwhelmingly, an Army and Marine Corps mission to focus on the advise, 
8 

train and assist functions. It is also interesting to note that we do 

this better than any other country in the world. We have a long 

tradition of success in places like Greece, Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, and now Iraq and Afghanistan. 

I draw your attention to the Lodge Act, 1950, which was an act 

that brought in aliens from Eastern Europe. And there was a point 

in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, where the entire 10th Special Forces 

group was made up of emigres who were brought in from Eastern 

Europe and put into uniform, served five years honorably. And if 

they served five years, they and their families were automatically 

fast-tracked to full citizenship. 

What a huge difference that made in winning the Cold War, and 

not many people know about it. 

We need to look at something like a universal—foreign-area officers—do not have a specialty, but build foreign-area specialties into 

the entire officer corps, because this can’t be a small part of the 

military if we are going to build these alliances. 

And the final point I will leave with you is: The challenge of 

building a coalition of enlightened states is that it is a human, 

rather than a technological or material-type. It is a policy built 

around the human element, rather than the technological element, 

of war. 

You know, war is a thinking-man’s game. And if we are going to 

build a new generation of officers—and I would argue, senior noncommissioned officers (NCOs) who are particularly good at training, assisting, and advising this new alliance—then we have to 

start educating them from the very beginning of their commissioning, all the way through senior service. 

We will know we are successful some time many years in the future, when a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff served a great 

deal of his career as a foreign-areas officer, as well as an operator. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of General Scales can be found in the 

Appendix on page 80.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, General Scales. 

Dr. Zelikow. 

STATEMENT OF DR. PHILIP D. ZELIKOW, WHITE BURKETT MILLER PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, 

FORMER COUNSELOR, DEPARTMENT OF STATE 

Dr. ZELIKOW. Mr. Chairman, I am a historian, but I have also 

been a trial and appellate lawyer. And I have served in government 

in seven different Federal agencies, one state agency, and as an 

elected member of a town school board. So my experience with 

these kinds of issues of strategy is eclectic, both in domestic and 

foreign policy. 

We Americans are really at an extraordinary moment in world 

history, where we have an opportunity to reflect on what our purposes are in the world. I am glad the committee is holding this set 

of hearings. 

Our country, because of its separated and overlapping powers, 

generally has problems with concerted action, except when a common sense of purpose draws us together. Such a sense of purpose 
9 

transcends party. It actually sets the framework within which the 

parties argue. 

There have only been a handful of these sort of Big-P policies in 

the history of the United States. One of the earliest was ‘‘No entangling alliances.’’ The latest was, ‘‘Containment plus deterrence.’’ 

We have not had such a large, common sense of purpose since 

the end of the Cold War. Since 1991, the United States has brought 

to a bewildered, confused, globalizing world, a bewildering, confusing melange of policy ideas. Politicians and officials talk about 

terror, democracy, proliferation, trade, the environment, growth, 

and dozens of other topics. They strike 100 notes, but there is no 

melody. 

There are already many arguments about how the United States 

should try to manage the post Cold War world. They tend to take 

current issue sets as a given, and focus on how we can handle them 

better, smarter, stronger: ‘‘We should use more military’’; ‘‘We 

should have less military, more diplomacy, better diplomacy,’’ and 

so on. 

I have worked on a number of these proposals, including on the 

intelligence establishment, and would be glad to discuss specific 

ideas. But I urge the committee to dig more deeply into the core 

problem, which is, I think, a lack of clarity about the problem 

itself, lack of clarity about, ‘‘What is special about this moment in 

world history, and what role does that, then, create for the United 

States in defining a broad sense of purpose?’’ 

My argument is that the greatest challenge today—and it is one 

that is not just evident to wonks, it is evident to ordinary people 

in the United States and all over the world—is the tension between 

globalization and self-determination; globalization versus self-determination. 

Globalization is a familiar concept, and I don’t need to elaborate 

it to the committee. Self-determination is familiar, too. What may 

be less familiar, though, is a point that a number of world historians have made, is that, actually, globalization and self-determination are two sides of the same coin. They are as connected as summer heat and thunderstorms. 

Indeed, the term ‘‘self-determination’’ doesn’t exist before about 

the middle of the 19th century, when you see a lot of phenomena 

in which people, basically, are buffeted by global forces, ideas, culture, new ways of doing business, that are affecting the way they 

are used to organizing their societies. 

And then they react to that with defiant assertions of self-determination, often with extreme violence, which convulsed much of 

the world during the middle of the 19th century, and then led to 

repeated convulsions in the 20th century. 

In this era of unprecedented levels of globalization, we are going 

through this phase again. Actually, I think it is most reminiscent 

of the period about 100 years ago. It even includes the element of 

nihilistic transnational terrorists who frighten all civilized people. 

Back then, they were anarchists and they would throw bombs in 

opera houses, instead of subway stations. 

Globalization versus self-determination is the combustion engine 

that is now driving debates not only in our country, but in China, 

Pakistan, Iran, India, Brazil. The issue is: Will countries trust that 
10 

interdependence will work; that the global forces can be mastered 

to their benefit? Or will they start fortifying themselves in 100 

ways, listening avidly to the ideologues who will tell them why 

they have no other choice? 

In other words, Mr. Chairman, we have now unleashed global 

forces in a variety of ways—energy, ideas, commerce—that are 

without precedent in the history of mankind. The forces are unprecedented. But men and women are still being made in about the 

same size they have been made in for a long time. 

And the fundamental issue that people are having is: ‘‘Can our 

communities grapple with these forces? Can we manage this in 

some constructive way?’’ Or, because we can’t manage them, we 

need to fort-up in fear, with a variety of ways in which we defiantly 

assert how our communities will protect themselves against all 

these different things—incoming people, incoming ideas, incoming 

capital—in a variety of forms. 

The agenda that, then, flows from that, which I elaborate further 

in my prepared statement, is an agenda that calls for an open, civilized world. A frank discussion of the principles that animate an 

open, civilized world—and I offer a suggestive outline—and an 

agenda in which you are basically saying to people, ‘‘We can develop global frameworks for about five or six of these forces that 

look like they are credibly capable of starting to manage them,’’ 

and reassure you. 

And these frameworks need to be loose enough to allow communities to still feel, ‘‘We can determine our own identities our own 

way.’’ But these enormous forces—the diffusion of ultra-hazardous 

technologies, the consumption of energy, arable land, clean water, 

at unprecedented rates—are more or less being managed so that 

we have a safe framework in which our communities can define our 

identities the way we want, and the healthy way. 

Or else, what we will see is self-determination will take on the 

kind of toxic forms that, then, characterize most of the 20th century. That is the kind of danger that I think we need to avert. And 

that is the focus of the Grand Strategy I propose to the committee. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Zelikow can be found in the Appendix on page 93.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you all for your written and your oral statement. Your written statements will be made a part of the record. 

I also want to let our committee members know, this is our second hearing. Our first hearing, we had folks who, through most of 

their career, had been affiliated with the kind of the think-tank aspects of things. Our panel today are four folks who, either, through 

their career in the military or in government service, have been 

practitioners of the art of looking at strategies and the implementation of strategies. 

I also want to acknowledge that we have some guests here 

today—some legislators both from Kenya and from Macedonia— 

that I have met with here, briefly, this morning. 

We welcome you. I understand you will have to be leaving some 

time during our hearing. We appreciate your attendance today. 

You can go ahead and start the clock here. 

I wanted to just ask some specific questions from several of you. 
11 

Admiral Blair, you make one very specific—that—of course, we 

are talking about a strategy. I am going to ask some very specific 

questions about comments you make. 

You mentioned language skills as being important. 

General Scales, you mentioned it, too. 

And, in fact, I think General Scales is going to quote a couple of 

your comments. You, specifically, in your written statement say, 

talking about military officers—‘‘No officer should be allowed beyond the grade of lieutenant colonel without demonstrating a working knowledge of the language spoken in a region potentially 

threatening to the interests of the United States.’’ 

And, then, on page 12, you say, ‘‘Cultural awareness and the 

ability to build ties of trust will offer protection to our troops more 

effectively than body armor.’’ And that is your statement, General 

Scales. 

That is one of those issues that this subcommittee is working on. 

The obvious statement is that the military and the diplomatic corps 

inherits the language-skill deficit that we, as a Nation, have. And, 

in fact, then, we expect the military and the diplomatic corps to 

solve this problem for us; to somehow fill in your ranks, even 

though we don’t have very deep language skills within our country. 

At least, we are not accessing those, perhaps, that we do. 

Do either of you, or any of the four of you, have any further comments to amplify on this issue of language skills and cultural appreciation? 

Let’s start with you, Admiral Blair. 

Admiral BLAIR. Mr. Chairman, I think there are two aspects to 

it. I would—more than language skills, I would say regional studies 

or cultural studies. 

I find that if an officer, particularly a senior officer, has studied 

one different country culture in-depth, he knows that—he or she— 

knows that one pretty well. But more important, he knows that you 

need that sort of awareness. 

So if I found, when I was dealing with a country that I didn’t, 

perhaps, know a great deal about, I knew enough to get somebody 

who did. And then—so whenever there was a difficult issue with 

one of the 41 countries in my area of responsibility, I would get the 

right people to do it. 

And you could find them in many sources. Some of them had uniforms on. Some of them didn’t. They were out there. 

So I would agree that we need this for—I think diplomats get it 

naturally. Intelligence officers should have it. They shouldn’t just 

be technical experts. Military officers—I agree with General 

Scales—should—it should be a required part of their education. 

And—so that they know who the right people are to pull on when 

it is time to deal with another country, another culture, in a sophisticated way. 

General SCALES. Mr. Chairman, I guess the phrase I have used 

in some of the stuff I have written before—I call it sort of ‘‘the cultural right stuff.’’ 

You know, it is hard to put a finger on it. It is—it could be language. But there are other things. And I agree with Admiral Blair 

on this. There are certain personal attributes that make people 
12 

really good at this—sublimation of ego is one thing; the ability to 

be collegial and convivial when dealing with alien cultures. 

I think the poster child that we all refer to in this business is 

Karl Eikenberry. I mean, here is a guy that speaks fluent Mandarin. He is married to a—his wife is Chinese. He was the defense 

attache in Beijing. And where was he sent to be most effective? Afghanistan. And my point is that he was effective there—he was so 

effective there, not because he—there were a lot of Afghans who 

spoke Mandarin, but because he just had this certain nature about 

him that allowed people to trust him. 

And I am not saying we should have a military occupational specialty called ‘‘trust,’’ but we ought to at least be able to go through 

the officer—and I would argue, senior NCO corps—and find those 

who have this—these unique abilities, this cultural awareness, this 

right stuff, if you will, to—and then build on it over time. 

I believe that there are actually ways now—talking to some of 

my social-science friends—when you can actually give folks instruments that will allow you to determine whether or not they have 

this—think of it as sort of a cultural Myers-Briggs—that will allow 

you to determine whether or not people are built for this sort of 

thing. 

And I think that is—as we look to the future, if we are going to 

build these new coalitions from scratch, many of them, we have to 

find the right people to do the job. 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Zelikow. 

Dr. ZELIKOW. If I could, Mr. Chairman—I have a little personal 

experience with this. You see, the Air Force tried to teach my son 

Arabic as a crypto-linguist. And he is now, actually, majoring in 

Japanese, and will be taking off for Japan in a couple of months. 

My daughter is spending her whole summer reinforcing her classics 

training by studying Latin, which, I am afraid, is not of very much 

use to the national-security establishment. 

What comes out of my experience, though, just with my own family, is just two suggestions—two prescriptive suggestions. First is, 

because the overarching common is you actually have a lot of 

Americans who understand that we are in a globalized world. And 

I think you will see general trends of interest in foreign-language 

education, broadly speaking, on the upswing. 

But I think the two suggestions are—you will need to incentivize 

people studying the languages you want. I think the—you don’t 

need to incentivize people to take an interest in the world. I think, 

by a lot of measurements—junior year abroad, things like that— 

those are on the upswing. But you will need to incentivize studies, 

say of Dari or Pashto—things like that. 

The second is you will then—in the best case, you will have a 

larger quotient of people in the general population who have language skills you may need in a crisis, but you won’t know which 

languages you will need. That triple-underscores the value of investment in a civilian-reserve-corps idea, so that you, essentially, 

create basic training for cadres whom you need to call upon when 

you wish to surge certain skills; in this case, language skills. 

It is a precedent the military understands very well, for a variety 

of kinds of skill sets, including language skills. And I think we just 

need to carry that over into the civilian sector in a way that allows 
13 

us to tap what I think will be a larger and larger residual quotient 

of people whom, properly incentivized, can meet our needs. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you. 

One comment, and then we will go to Mr. Akin—consistent with 

you, General Scales. We had someone testify here a couple of weeks 

ago that, just because you might find somebody—an American, 

and, perhaps, a naturalized American—perhaps, somebody raised 

in, say, a Farsi-speaking home—don’t assume, then, that that 

means they automatically have the cultural sensitivity—— 

General SCALES. Exactly. 

Dr. SNYDER [continuing]. The kind of—just because they have it. 

General SCALES. Exactly. That is right. 

Dr. SNYDER. Let me go to Mr. Akin, Ambassador Hunter, if you 

don’t mind, since I have already overstepped my time. 

Mr. Akin. 

And then we will—I will give you time, Mister—Ambassador 

Hunter, when—on the next go-round. 

Mr. AKIN. Well, first of all, to our panel of witnesses. I think you 

guys have about hit the ball out of the park. Maybe that is just because I agree with all four of you—and I didn’t as much in the previous panel of witnesses. But it seems to that you have raised some 

of the questions, and defined things very clearly in terms of—and 

it is a common sense kind of thing. 

I mean, I think if you took your testimony combined and ran it 

past Americans, you would get an 80-plus percent buyoff by most 

people—just common sense. 

I have got one sort of a technical, how-do-you-handle-this question. And then I have got one sort of halfway-answer question. 

The first is: When you have got, potentially, very unstable nation-states that have a supply of oil or something else valuable, 

where they can develop weapons that are extremely dangerous and 

toxic to civilization in general, what do you think of this expanded 

Monroe Doctrine? And do we have to work on a preemptive basis? 

Certainly, all of the things you have said are good to be doing— 

the containment and the kind of sowing the seeds that are going 

to produce stable civilizations. But how do you respond to that idea 

of the preemptive strike in situations like North Korea or—but just 

in general. First, that is theoretic. So let’s do that question first. 

Anybody who wants to take a shot at it? It doesn’t surprise me 

you all have your hands up. 

Ambassador HUNTER. Your call. 

Let me just say one word about it. Any nation—let’s talk about 

our Nation—if it is about to be attacked or has an imminent sense 

of attack, is going to do what it has to do to preempt. The problem 

is talking about it in advance. It is the kind of thing you keep your 

mouth shut about. 

I have—when the President, to be blunt about it, gave his speech 

at West Point a few years ago, I have said, ‘‘I wish he hadn’t given 

that speech,’’ because we know we are going to have to do it. But, 

unfortunately, it displeases your friends and it doesn’t confound 

your enemies. 

So keeping the capacity to do things—trying alternatives, building allies and that sort of thing—can put the bad guys on notice 

that we will be there to do what we have to do. And there are a 
14 

lot of examples—in Korea, and, then, Saddam Hussein in 1990— 

of people miscalculating what the United States will do. Final analysis will do it. 

Dr. ZELIKOW. I have a kind of a different view. Actually, in those 

cases of miscalculation, they miscalculated, thinking we wouldn’t 

do anything, precisely because we weren’t clear enough about what 

we would do, or, actually, we had decided to do something different. 

In the case of South Korea, we had actually decided we would 

not defend South Korea. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had made a considered decision to that effect, and then decided to pull our troops 

out of South Korea. And the enemy read that. 

If—frankly, I don’t think there is as huge a difference between 

Democrats and Republicans on this issue of prevention, as you 

might sometimes hear. If you read Barack Obama’s essay on foreign affairs last year, he talks about the issue of preemption in 

terms almost identical to the Bush Administration. And he is clearly saying it publicly because he wants to reverse the burden of 

proof a little bit and put people on notice, because it does complicate their planning. 

What they would say is the big difference from the Bush Administration is—they use the term ‘‘imminent.’’ 

Mr. AKIN. Right. 

Dr. ZELIKOW. And they stress that term. 

But I urge you to think about that for a little bit. Here is an easy 

question: In August 2001—August 2001, before the 9–11 attack— 

was the threat from al Qaeda sanctuaries in Afghanistan imminent 

to the United States? My answer to that question is: Yes, even 

though we had no tactical warning about the particular attack they 

were about to launch at that stage. 

We had been on notice that they were getting ready to attack us, 

because they had already attacked us twice. And at that point, in 

my view, that is an imminent threat. 

Now, if someone else would say, ‘‘No, that is not an imminent 

threat,’’ then you are in the mode of waiting to be hit hard enough 

to react. But my standard of imminence is: Once you see the threat 

is amassed, and it is clearly poised and aimed at you, I believe that 

that would satisfy this very subjective criterion of imminence. Because, that word aside, I think we are dealing with a doctrine, now, 

in which, actually, the parties have converged more than one might 

think. 

Mr. AKIN. Thank you. I don’t know that I am going to have time, 

doctor, to go to this sort of question-answer, but it seemed to me 

that when we talk about a Grand Strategy, to a degree, it assumes 

that we have some overarching definition of who we are as a Nation and what we believe. And it seems to me that that was defined 

when we got in our first war as a Nation, in a sense, and our Declaration of Independence. 

And it was stated, maybe too eloquently, ‘‘We hold these truths 

to be self-evident,’’ et cetera. But the formula is pretty straightforward. Well, first of all, we believe that there is a God. Second 

of all, that God gives every human being certain basic, fundamental rights. And, third, the job of the government is to protect 

those rights. 
15 

I was amused a year ago, when the King of Jordan, who is Muslim, came here and said to the members’ prayer breakfast, ‘‘This 

is what we got in common: I believe there is a God that gives basic 

rights to people, and the government should protect those rights.’’ 

That was followed a week later by Senator Lieberman giving a 15- 

minute eloquent talk at the National Prayer Breakfast, saying, ‘‘I 

believe that there is a God, and that he gives basic rights to people. 

And government should protect those rights.’’ 

I am not sure that that is a hard thing to sell—as much as Europeans hate the word ‘‘God,’’ perhaps—but I am not sure that is not 

a bad formula that our founders came up with to package a Grand 

Strategy. It seems like everything you have said fits under that 

umbrella pretty easily. 

Admiral BLAIR. Mr. Chairman, I think you have to be a little bit 

careful about the terms in which you translate those basic contexts. 

There are over one billion Chinese. And I doubt if many of them 

would agree that God is the source of the government’s responsibilities to its people. 

I think that, if you scratched most Chinese down below any sort 

of ideological surface, you would find that the goals are the same. 

But I think that we would rather talk in—I think we are more effective if we talk in terms of the goal that we seek, rather than the 

source of the power or the—it gets you into tangles, which get you 

away from working on practical things together that are in your 

common interest. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mrs. Davis, for five minutes. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Thank you to all of you for being here. We certainly appreciate 

it. 

You know, on our last panel, I think there was actually refocusing in some ways, suggesting that ‘‘restraint and renewal,’’ I 

think, was one of the ways it was phrased—that we have so many 

domestic issues today, that, perhaps, we need to refocus a little bit 

on that. 

I am not necessarily sure that is where the American people are 

right now. I think they want us to not necessarily retrench. I think 

they want us to be smarter in what we do and, certainly, more 

strategic, which is what this is all about. 

What I am looking for is: How do you believe that we mesh what 

is a concern of people—certainly, the economy, homeland security, 

is a great reminder. Every time people go to the airport, they are 

reminded they have to take off their shoes. There is a threat out 

there. They need to, you know, think about their own security all 

the time. 

What is it that—how do you see—I mean, you have tried to—I 

know you have spoken about this in your papers, to a certain extent. I guess I am looking for, maybe, a simple way of talking about 

that. But it seems that we—you know, we need to work on how we 

engage people in the military, as well as in the civilian sector, to 

look at these issues in a more of a multi-prong way. 

And, yet, on the other hand, we are not very patient people. And 

what we need to do in many of the countries—and I am thinking 

of Afghanistan right now—is to be slower, to be more measured. 
16 

And, yet, we have a threat out there, and we want to jump on the 

threat. 

Can you help me out with this a little bit in terms of how this 

discussion can engage the American people better, in a way 

that—— 

General SCALES. Yes. 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA [continuing]. That they they can feel 

comfortable about it? 

General SCALES. I will try that? 

Yes, ma’am. A couple of quick points. Great powers, at least in 

the Industrial Age, tended to get themselves into trouble, and to 

march more quickly off to war, when this sort of societal frenzy 

kicked in. And we haven’t always done well at this—Spanish-American War comes to mind. It just seems to me that a couple of things 

are involved. 

Number one is: A measured pace, a strategic formulation is very 

important. One of the interesting things about militaries at the end 

of wars: Militaries at the end of—at—as wars wind down, whether 

they are winners or losers, tend to develop a more sanguine national strategy when they sit back, step back, and think about the 

future as the conflict wears down, before everybody gets too busy 

trying to charge off the prepare for the next set of threats, most 

of which are invented. 

And it just seems to me that as we move into this—I don’t know 

if ‘‘twilight’’ is the right word—but as we move into stepping down 

our commitment to Iraq, where just the frenzy of the moment is 

going to begin to dissipate and fade, and before we march off to the 

next great scare—the next two years, in particular, I think, are important to take a measured circumspect—within the military—to 

take a measured and circumspect look about what we are going to 

do next. 

Professional education systems are the way to do that. The war 

colleges and staff colleges are a place to do that. I think—officers 

don’t like to spend time reflecting. They are action-oriented, cando, go-to guys. And they want to go to their next assignment, 

where they can operate very large machines. 

But I think there comes a time, particularly as wars begin to 

wear down, when the military establishment and, I would argue, 

the—you know, the diplomatic establishment—need to step back 

and be reflective about what they are going to do, before someone 

marches off to a brand-new military strategy for the future. 

Dr. ZELIKOW. Congresswoman, if I might, I want to start where 

you began your question, which is: ‘‘If you are concerned about domestic issues, you are going to be worried about retrenchment.’’ 

And you want to urge people to be more interested in the need to 

project our presence overseas. 

The point I would make if I was talking to a rotary club in your 

district is that domestic issues are foreign-policy issues. They are 

the issues of the world economy and global-capital movements are 

affecting people in your district in a big way. The issues of energy 

and the environment are hugely important in your district as domestic issues, but the solutions to those issues lie in international 

policies. There is no way the United States solves those issues unilaterally. 
17 

And the traditional way we have thought about these kinds of 

problems, where we kind of separate the economic issues to the 

side. You have to have a Grand Strategy that integrates management of the global economy and management of these energy and 

environmental issues at the center. But, then, you are not going to, 

I think, have any trouble going to your constituents and saying 

that issues like that matter to them, because I think they totally 

get it. 

George Marshall, when he was selling the Marshall Plan, fanned 

people out all over America to talk to women’s clubs, because Marshall and his colleagues thought the women were actually going to 

determine the stands of families on these issues. Marshall himself 

went to speak to Cub Scouts in Maryland about the need for reconstruction in Europe. That is the kind of way that they bridged the 

domestic-foreign divide. 

Ambassador HUNTER. I think there—— 

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Ambassador Hunter, can—— 

Ambassador HUNTER. A couple of other points, though, as I indicated earlier—if we are going to be strong abroad, we have to be 

strong at home. You can’t just say, ‘‘We are now going to go do 

something over there,’’ without paying attention to our health system, so we have Americans who are able to do things. Education— 

we have already talked about the role of languages, which is only 

one part of it; infrastructure; a whole series of things. 

And it is for two things: So the American people will say, ‘‘We 

have the capacity to do what we have to do,’’ but also, ‘‘We are attending to things here at home.’’ That is why homeland security is 

so important, why having control of our borders is so important, 

why trade is so important. 

It is also important, I think, for the leaders to be totally honest 

with the American people; not to take some foreign event and try 

to mislead, because we are a smart people. 

I worked in the White House under President Lyndon Johnson. 

And I know how we got in trouble on that. So it is not a partisan 

issue. 

In addition, I have discovered—and you folks will be much better 

than any of us here, because you deal with the public business 

every day—the American people are prepared to risk blood and 

treasure if we fulfill three obligations in regard to, let’s say, Afghanistan and somewhere else: That it is in the American interest 

to do it; It comports with American values to do it; and there is 

some sense that there will be success. 

If you did the three of those, I think the American people will 

be willing to be engaged as long as is necessary. You get one of 

those three wrong, like we did in Somalia, where it was about values, but not interest, people are going to say, ‘‘What are we doing 

there?’’ 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Conaway, for five minutes. 

Mr. CONAWAY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Setting aside my own discomfort with the phrase ‘‘Grand Strategy,’’ which I mentioned previously—that it is a bit imperialistic— 

and also acknowledging that I am far better off listening than talking—I think better—listening to you, rather than you listen to me. 

I will pose some broad questions, in a second. 
18 

But it seems inherent in everything that each of you have said, 

is that there is some grand, controlling entity or element, or one 

conductor. 

You mentioned ‘‘100 notes.’’ Without a conductor, that you just 

get an orchestra warming up. 

You know, where is the leverage? Where is the ability to force, 

collectively, that all the things that you want to talk about? I 

mean, we are clearly, given this, the option of getting a coalition 

of the willing to go do something. If they don’t go do it, then we 

just simply sit back and say, ‘‘Well, then, never mind,’’ since we— 

and that doesn’t make any sense either. 

You know, Mister, I mean, General Scales, you mentioned ‘‘preinsurgency attacks.’’ How do you pull that trigger, and where has 

that ever worked? 

And then, you know, Dr. Zelikow, your five strategies that a 

globalized self-determining world could co-exist with—and, you 

know, who sets those boundaries and enforces those boundaries 

and all those rules? 

I mean, I mentioned it is a 19th and 20th century phenomenon. 

I think Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great might have had a 

difference of globalization and self-determination—tension there as 

well. 

So—and then, explain this incredible phenomenon in Dubai and 

Bahrain and Qatar, where there is just—and Kuwait—staggering 

economic development, without the ability to defend that economic 

development, and how that is not done with the implicit confidence 

that the United States is not going to let anything stupid happen 

in that part of the world. 

So how do you manage all of that? I am a certified public accountant (CPA), and I am typically a little more, let’s, you know, 

think, a chance, as opposed to kind of a fuzzy Grand Strategy stuff. 

So I don’t know if I have asked a question or plodded the water, 

but I will shut up, because, again, I am clear that I am better off 

listening to you four than you listening to me. 

Admiral BLAIR. No, Mr. Conaway, I think you are absolutely 

right in characterizing the way that we actually do things overseas 

as being an incredibly complicated process, with a lot of different 

actors, that doesn’t go to one conductor. 

And that is why I think the way that we—the only way we succeed in that sense is if we have a general idea in the back of the 

minds of those people who act independently, of where it is we are 

going, so that, as they act in their own interests, with their own 

responsibilities and their own incentives, they are sort of moving 

down the field in roughly the same direction, rather than canceling 

each other out. 

So that is what I try to suggest—that if we get that idea that 

where we are headed is a world in which we are making progress 

on those security, economic development, and the idea of representative governments and protection of minority rights, rule of law— 

the kind of world we would like to live in—then I think that, in 

each of those little sectors in which you operate as you are doing 

your small plan, you can sort of check yourself and say, ‘‘Is this in 

the right general direction? Who can help me on it? How do I link 

it together?’’ 
19 

I found that when I was out as a Pacific commander, I could get 

allies who were American businessmen operating in Asia. They 

were ambassadors at embassies. They were heads of international 

organizations. They were non-governmental organizations. But you 

could pretty quickly find out who your allies were to move toward 

the direction that you wanted to go. And you could cut actual deals 

with them of doing real things. Some of them were big, some of 

them were little. 

So I think it is that general, those general, force of magnetism, 

based on your common vision, that will align the particles to go the 

right direction, in the sort of messy world that we have. 

Ambassador HUNTER. I don’t want to give you the mis-impression that we are arguing that there can be one conductor and one 

overall plan. 

The Cold War, in which there were two superpowers, and was 

relative clarity, that was an historic collaboration. The world is 

usually a messy place. 

Now, historically, the United States has done extraordinarily 

well because we have been prudent stewards of power, and we 

have stood for things that have, I won’t say ‘‘universal’’ application, 

but—and which an awful lot of people aspire to. 

We have never gone out to try to grab territory for our own selfaggrandizement. People in Europe and Asia, after the end of the 

Second World War, we came, but then we went home. We didn’t 

try, like Germany and the Soviet Union and the—to try to grab 

this for ourselves. 

Some people were surprised that happened. But it set a standard 

out there that people expect us to do the right thing. And that 

gives us a tremendous capacity for leadership and for influence. 

Now, in terms of whether others are going to be with us, I have 

a very simple rule of thumb. We should try to do things together 

with others when we can, but do things on our own when we must. 

I think that gives us a pretty good rule of thumb. We will very 

often—got other—be with us. But if it is our national self-interest, 

particularly to protect the country, well, we will do what we have 

to do. 

If people understand that, then they are more likely to follow us 

in things that are going to help us and help them, because we are 

building to a better definition of what humanity is going to be like 

in the future. 

General SCALES. If I could just add to that. I was in China, not 

too long ago, talking to my counterpart at the war college. And we 

got into a discussion one night. And I said, ‘‘Well, what is it about? 

What is it that is American that you read?’’ 

And he laughed and he said, ‘‘Well, we read everything you 

write. We listen to what you say. But most importantly, we watch 

what you do. You know, ‘‘The thing about the Americans that we 

are most sensitive to are your actions, rather than your words.’’ 

And I thought that was significant, because one of the turning 

points in the Cold War, I believe, sir, was when Eisenhower, in the 

military, we have a thing we call a ‘‘commander’s intent.’’ And a 

commander’s intent is when the commander—in this case, the 

President—personalizes what is to be done. You know, ‘‘What are 
20 

the tasks that you need to do in order to preserve peace in the 

world?’’ 

And Eisenhower gave the commander’s intent—I think it was 

1954, after he took office, in his famous Solarium Speech. It wasn’t 

a Solarium Speech. It was a commander’s intent. It was the commander of the Nation, telling his principal staff, ‘‘Here is what is 

to be done.’’ 

And it just seems to me that one of the ways you add clarity in 

this confusing world, and the next Administration, whoever is in 

charge, is—what we need is a commander’s intent. And there are 

three elements to the commander’s intent. And since I used to 

teach it, I won’t bore you with it. 

But it is a wonderful way to put clarity into strategy; to translate 

it not only into tasks, but into a personalized version of what— 

from the commander-in-chief—of what those tasks need to be. Strip 

away all the hyperbole and all the grand statements, and all the 

stuff that confuses not only our own population, but the people who 

we deal with in the world. 

And, perhaps, someday in the future we will be able to formulate 

a commander’s intent. Call it whatever you want—Grand Strategy—but some formulation of an intent would be a great way to get 

started. 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Gingrey, for five minutes. 

Dr. GINGREY. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

You know, I wonder, if you asked the American people—average 

American—what our Grand Strategy is as a Nation, and who sets 

it—very, very few would have any idea what our Grand Strategy 

is. I think they may guess that it is set by the President and the 

Administration. 

And my question, one of my questions is: How much, if, we do, 

indeed, have a Grand Strategy—and I would like to ask all four of 

you if you think we have a Grand Strategy today, and what it is. 

Is it important that the American people know what that Grand 

Strategy is; that our high-school students understand exactly what 

our Grand Strategy is? And how often does that change? Does it 

change every four years, when you have a new Administration? 

It seems that would be a little impractical. And who, indeed, sets 

it, and what role do we, as Members of Congress, have, in regard 

to stating a Grand Strategy? And if our Grand Strategy is in conflict with other countries, such as China and Russia and other 

would-be powers, how do we mesh that? 

Do we change, based on what others are doing or what we perceive their grand strategies to be, or do we stay the course? I think, 

maybe, Ambassador Hunter touched on that just a minute ago in 

his remarks—that we should have a strategy that we don’t bury 

because of what other people are doing—other countries are doing. 

So maybe that is enough commentary that you can spend some 

time answering those questions or thoughts. 

Thank you. 

Dr. ZELIKOW. Congressman, if I could start at this end of the 

table. I do not think we have such a Grand Strategy today. 

If you have a Grand Strategy that is like the handful of large 

policies that have succeeded in the past that survived the oscillations of elections and parties, that is precisely the point—is to pro-
21 

vide concerted action that, then—so that the President and the 

Congress both understand it, and sharing overlapping powers, are 

moving in a common direction. 

We don’t have that today. If it shifts every four years, it is not 

a durable Grand Strategy. If it is not with the Congress, it is not 

a Grand Strategy at all, because you won’t get concerted action. 

The elements, then, though, are—it has to be something that 

people can understand very clearly, because it is about a subject 

they get. And it is about a subject that a lot of foreign governments 

and foreign countries get, too. 

So when I suggested, for example, a rally point of calling for an 

open, civilized world, and then laying out what that meant, the 

agenda that I outlined is an agenda that a lot of other people in 

the world care about and want. So since they want that, they want 

those forces to be mustered, they are going to have to, then, look 

to who is going to provide leadership in mustering those forces. 

And whatever the problems the United States has, there is no 

country that is—can step forward right now to supplant that role. 

So they want action, and they know we are central to getting that 

action. And if we can provide a framework in which we explain 

why the dozen things we are doing are actually moving toward a 

kind of world Americans want for their children, I think you can 

rally people across party lines. 

We will, then, still have lots of arguments about how best to 

achieve those goals, and that is natural. But we might be able to 

reestablish a degree of consensus that I think, right now, is lacking. 

Ambassador HUNTER. You know, not to repeat, but I think we 

should not believe that, suddenly, the world is going to be a much 

better place without an awful lot of effort. 

There will still be conflict. There will still be competitions for 

power. There still will be societies out there that do not wish us 

well. We see it today; we would like to see it in the past. 

Our basic requirements as a Nation are to provide the security, 

the prosperity, the independence, and the well-being of the country, 

and of the American people. 

Now, with American leadership and American ideals, and the 

kinds of ways that we express our interests, we are likely to find 

a lot of receptivity in a lot of parts of the world. We are not going 

to find it with everybody. We see a number of states today, and 

non-state actors, who wish us ill both because they want power for 

themselves, and some of them just don’t like our way of life. So— 

but the vast majority are going to be responsive to the leadership 

of the United States. 

Now, what you are touching on—I think it has two special qualities. One is education. One of the things I most worry about in the 

American state, American Nation, today, is the collapse of civic 

education in our schools. 

You would be surprised—maybe you wouldn’t be surprised—at 

how few people understand, younger people, and even some of the 

basic history of this country. We just don’t teach it to the degree 

we used to. And I think we have to get on to that in a very big 

way. 
22 

As to who will create, organize, this Grand Strategy: This hearing is part of it. As I said before, if the Congress is not involved, 

the people are not involved, you don’t have one. You don’t have a 

basic sense of where the American people are prepared to go, either 

at home and abroad. And that is why I think that for the Congress 

not to be involved would be a gross loss to the Nation. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Jones, for five minutes. 

Mr. JONES. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. 

And like Mr. Conaway said, I probably could listen to you and 

have no questions, just try to think about what you have been 

sharing with us. But I do want to go in a little direction, because 

I am sitting here listening. I missed most of your presentations. I 

did look through some of your written report. 

But your answer to Mrs. Davis and some of my colleagues—are 

we, as a Nation, getting to the point that if we do not, as some of 

you have said, start taking care of things within this Nation, such 

as health care, infrastructure—are we getting to a point that we 

are not going to be able to have the international influence? 

Because I think about the Chinese, which many of you have mentioned, they have to know that we owe China $448 billion. 

They—those leadership—military and non-military—they know 

that America is borrowing money from China to pay its bills. So 

are we losing what influence we could have with other nations because they know that we can’t even take care of our own situation? 

And this does impact on our military. Our military is as stressed 

as it has ever been. The equipment—we had testimony from Secretary Wynne, who is not there any longer, saying that, ‘‘We are 

putting projects behind—putting them on the backburner because 

we don’t have the money to fund everything at this particular 

time.’’ 

So I guess my question to you, do we need to take a period of 

time under the leadership of a new President, or maybe two new 

Presidents, over the next seven or eight years, and start trying to 

say to certain parts of the country—or the world—excuse me, the 

world—that, ‘‘We are there to help save you. We are there to help 

make you better,’’ when we can’t even fix our own problems? 

Do the nations that are more sophisticated, from a governmental 

standpoint, do they see us as one of those parts of history—that we 

are at a point that we—there might not be a return as a great Nation, if we don’t get serious about what is happening within this 

country? 

General SCALES. If I could just make a I think you hit on something very important, sir. 

We live in an era where global communications flies around the 

world a an unprecedented rate, and that someone with a transistor 

radio or small television in some, you know, native hut in Southwest Asia is almost as up as much on current events as those of 

us sitting in this room. 

So perception is important here. How people perceive us is im- portant. It is not just $448 billion worth of debt. But it is the subjective opinion that people have of the American people that has 

enormous power. I mean true, it can be translated into power. 

So if you—eventually, the day comes when you want to say, for 

instance, ‘‘Build a coalition, or bring in partners for a particular 
23 

threatened region of the world.’’ The easiest way to do that is to 

do the condition-setting, if you will, among folks in different parts 

of the world, such that when we show up, the perception of who 

we are is, perhaps, different than it is today. 

And I think—and that is something that you can’t do overnight, 

and you can’t do with a television ad. It is going to take a generation, in some ways, to change those perceptions. And I don’t believe 

it is necessarily related to, you know, to debt. I think it is related 

to moral debt, not fiscal debt. 

And if we can’t turn that around very quickly—and, oh, by the 

way, it is not just with the ruling elites of the world. It is with, 

you know, the common, the Arab street or the common man in Beijing. It is what he thinks about, he or she thinks about, the United 

States. It is so important. 

If we can’t occupy the moral high ground, we can’t own it in 

some way—the rest of the world is pushing on an open door. When 

we try to impose our will on other parts of the world, we are going 

to find ourselves in great trouble. 

Ambassador HUNTER. I think people are less worried about 

whether we are getting our economic house in order, provided we 

have the capacity to do things, plus what the generals have said— 

the moral high ground for the United States. 

You know, we have thousands and thousands of ambassadors— 

some of them are in the military—to go out and do things in individual villages and communities and the like, all over the place. In 

fact, the U.S. military, in terms of integrating instruments of power 

and influence, took the lead, and are now looking for other parts 

of the government to do things, because this isn’t what the military 

should have to do, even though they are also good at it. 

We have thousands and thousands of people in non-governmental 

organizations who are the face of America. The private sector—to 

a great extent, more people in the world will see somebody from 

the private sector, rather than somebody from the government—civilian military. And this is a fantastic asset. 

Meanwhile, one of the great strengths of this country—and people talk about, ‘‘Are we in decline?’’ Et cetera. I don’t think that 

is true. 

The American ship of state has an amazing keel, and we can tip 

over an awful long way, but we tip back again. And right now, this 

Nation is tipping back again, in a new era, i believe, of strength 

and purpose, across the country, across the political parties. And 

I think, to use that old acting discussion, some of our best days are 

still ahead of us. 

Admiral BLAIR. No foreign group that I talked to—leadership— 

think our influential—thinks that the United States is in some sort 

of inexorable decline, and is looking beyond us to do something 

else. I think we are more worried about our problems than foreigners are. And I think that is absolutely right, because we know 

them better. We are the ones who are going to have to fix them. 

Mr. JONES. Just real quick, but if you move into that realm of 

a perception of decline, I think of conditions after 1972–1973, or actually, after the fall of Saigon, that creates periods of strategic vulnerability, and heightens the probability of miscalculation on the 
24 

part of those—I mean, I am not saying al Qaeda is not trying to 

do mischief right now. 

But al Qaeda’s ability to garner assets and to garner his own coalition together, to take us on, increases when we go through periods of our own sense of vulnerability. That led to the Mayagis incident. 

And I could go on and on. You see what I am so—it is perception—management is important, I think, as we move through this 

war, and into the future. 

Mr. JONES. Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

Dr. SNYDER. I wanted to ask—General Scales, if you would, take 

a minute and amplify a little bet on your comment about orienting 

around embassies. 

General SCALES. Yes, I—thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I think, with apologies to Admiral Blair, I think—— 

Admiral BLAIR. Give me a chance to rebut, and I will—— 

General SCALES. Oh, absolutely. I—— 

Ambassador HUNTER. I am the referee between the military? 

General SCALES. I think there is a tendency always to view 

power or the distribution of power in the world as going through 

a military chain of command. So our instinct or—again, back to 

perceptions—oftentimes, from the other end, the perception is, ‘‘Oh, 

boy. Here it comes.’’ 

There is a perception of a military solution to a regional problem. 

And to, I forget who, the member asked me about pre-insurgencies. 

The way you keep the Nation safe in the early phases of budding 

trouble in the world, I believe, is through the country team— 

through the ambassador, through the defense attache, and through 

this sort of proto-alliance, if that is the right word—this early 

emerging alliance, where the ambassador and the defense attache 

is in charge. 

A pre-insurgency would be the ability in some threatened state 

that either has a poor military or has no military, to, through a 

very deliberate process—to begin training up to begin 

acculturating, and to begin very, very carefully, sort of passing on 

our own national and cultural values to an emerging state, such 

that when the insurgency does somehow begin to get more serious—then, the process of reacting to it is done at a more deliberate, 

cautious, collegial way, rather than having, you know, the airborne 

or the Marines suddenly show up on someone’s doorstep, ready to 

do something that, perhaps, may not agree with the world’s perception of what should be done. 

Dr. SNYDER. Admiral Blair, do you have any comments on—— 

Admiral BLAIR. No, I just—I mean, I recognize the underlying 

problem that General Scales is talking about. But just to throw a 

small organizational solution like ‘‘Organize around an ambassador’’ is just, it doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the problem. 

Ambassadors have country responsibilities, not a regional point 

of view. Many of the sorts of human skills, and also resources and 

technical skills—require decisions that go across individual countries, into regional approaches. And we have to come up with a matrix—collaborative—approach that bring to bear both military and, 

as I said, non-military governmental and non-governmental tools to 
25 

bear on the sorts of both problems and opportunities that we have 

in the world. 

And I just think it is a much more complicated problem than 

simply assigning troops in a country to an ambassador. 

Dr. SNYDER. Ambassador Hunter. 

Ambassador HUNTER. Well, in conflict situations like Iraq and 

Afghanistan, or even Bosnia and Kosovo before that, we have done 

best when there has been a strong country team in which everybody is pulling the same direction. 

It is less a matter of who is going to be in charge, even though, 

ultimately, an ambassador is—works directly for the President— 

than the fact that they know how to work together, and they have 

the will to do that. 

And we have done much better in Iraq and in Afghanistan. We 

have had that kind of team, as elsewhere. 

Let me tell you about four programs that are very cheap, that 

buy us an awful lot. The International Military Education and 

Training (IMET) program has been one of the most cost-effective 

things this country has done, creating relationships with militaries, 

which are the gold standard, when we want to get involved. 

Fulbrights, leader grants—I would want to see the United States 

Information Agency, again, created as a separate organization. It 

really works. 

One of the things we are learning about transformation is it is 

very important to have people abroad, creating relationships; not 

trying to parachute them in just when there is a crisis. Maybe that 

is more expensive in the short term. It pays off in the long term. 

And one other things which applies, I think, directly to Iraq and 

Afghanistan, which the military gentlemen, here, can have a particular view on. We tend to bring folks in for 6 months, 12 months, 

15 months, and then they leave. The relationships they have built 

with the locals then disappear, and you have to start over again. 

Now, you have to rotate people. You have to, for a whole variety 

of reasons. But there are a lot of cadres and other ancillary folks 

and non-military—who really need to be there for long tours, to 

build on these relationships so they don’t just disappear when the 

101st, let’s say, is replaced by the Marines in the northwest part 

of Iraq, and they have to start over again. 

We need to find a way so these relationships will be evergreen 

over time. And given the way Americans behave in country, these 

are fantastic resources. 

General SCALES. Let me just—I need one—for the admiral. 

I didn’t mean for the ambassador to be commanding troops. But 

what I meant was that the pre-insurgency phase of a relationship 

with a Nation under stress is something that needs to be managed 

by the company team. It is just better to do it earlier, rather than 

wait for the insurgency to suddenly inflame a country, and then 

suddenly have to react to it, rather than setting conditions before 

that happens. 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Zelikow, you have been trying to get a word in. 

Dr. ZELIKOW. I should say, General Scales’ suggestion is going— 

his heart is in the right place. But, actually, we are trying to regionalize the country team right now, not fragment it down to the 

country level. 
26 

Take, for example, sub-Saharan Africa. We need to actually regionalize the State Department’s projection of civilian power on a 

regional basis. You can’t handle the problems of the Great Lakes 

Region of Africa purely on a country-team-by-country-team basis. 

Or if I was to switch over to counterterrorism in Southeast 

Asia—pre-insurgency—if I carve that up by Thailand, Southern 

Philippines, Indonesia—the way we have tried to do is create regional field teams in which we actually pool our resources—Central 

Intelligence Agency (CIA), military, a lot of other resources—to 

work what is, in essence, a regional problem in Southeast Asia, for 

countering terrorism. 

If you took the example of Afghanistan, you can’t handle the 

problem of Afghanistan without some way of extending outward to 

Pakistan. Same goes for Iraq, when you think about the surrounding region—Turkey, Iran, other things. 

My point is that I think the country-team model is the right 

model of civil-military-intel cooperation, and I praise that. But we 

actually need to try to regionalize that model where we need to, in 

order to tackle the issues. 

Dr. SNYDER. Ambassador Hunter, I have to share with you— 

years ago, I worked at a Catholic Mission Hospital in West Africa. 

And one day, one of the nuns said to me, she said, ‘‘The priests 

aren’t really very helpful. They only last out here 35 or 40 years, 

and then’’—— 

Ambassador HUNTER. Well, Mr. Chairman, I think you need to 

do something about that, and have them stay a whole career. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Akin. 

Mr. AKIN. A different, little, less-philosophical question. I was actually amazed that there were, apparently, a fair number of Europeans, probably 20 percent of America, that believed that we went 

into Iraq to steal their oil. I mean, I think there are still probably 

a few people that believe that. 

But the fact that we have been there, now, at least, knock on 

wood, successfully, and if we close out and leave a self-governing 

state behind, does that buy us a lot of capital in a world sense, at 

least to give us some immunization from—I mean, I gather, for a 

number of years, there, in Europe, everybody was convinced those 

‘‘bad Americans, you are just stealing those guys’ oil.’’ 

What do you think about that? 

Dr. ZELIKOW. Well, I since I have worked on Iraq some, over the 

last few years, the Iraqis are doing very well off their oil. 

Mr. AKIN. Sure. 

Dr. ZELIKOW. And we are not going to end up stealing their oil. 

The question is actually whether or not we help them gain the benefit of their own resources, as we did in the case of Saudi Arabia. 

No one says that America now owns Saudi Arabia’s oil. But Texans, basically, helped the Saudis find the way to develop their own 

resources to its full potential. And the Saudis know this perfectly 

well. 

There is a little bit of a backlash that I am worried about, in 

which people are so paranoid about the accusation that we are 

stealing their oil, that we think it is actually in America’s interest 

for the gas problem to have all those rights. 

Ambassador HUNTER. We have a good test that you can point to. 
27 

1991, we were in Kuwait. We could have seized the Saudi fields 

and the Kuwaiti fields and kept them forever. A lot of people 

thought we were going to do that. And we left. That brought us an 

awful lot of money in the bank of influence. 

I remember once, when we had a military exercise in Egypt, and 

the Air Force wanted to stay, because there was another one coming. And I made them leave. This is back under Carter. And then, 

when President Sadat came to see the President of the United 

States, he said, ‘‘The fact that you left was more important than 

the fact that you came. You can come anytime.’’ 

People understand the United States will help out, create victory, 

give people opportunities, and then go home. 

General SCALES. I think regardless of what the conditions are, 

Mr. Akin—there is no question that the radical insurgents are 

going to view us leaving as their victory. Imagine them—that is 

just the way wars are and the way conflicts are. 

But the rest of the world—the Europeans and regional states, in 

particular—will breathe, as Ambassador Hunter said, ‘‘an enormous sigh of relief,’’ that we are adhering to our pattern of behavior, as Bob said, ‘‘a pattern of behavior that we have established, 

going all the way back to Greece in 1948–1949. 

That is just the way we act. That is how the American military, 

as advisor groups, have acted in the past. El Salvador is another 

example. We left Panama. 

So we do have a track record, which is pretty good. We also left 

Saudi Arabia. We have a track record, which is pretty good, of 

when things get to the point where stability is reasonable, then we 

pull out. 

And I think, and as Bob said, exactly right, ‘‘pulling out sometimes is just as important as going in.’’ 

Admiral BLAIR. Let’s not break our arms, patting ourselves on 

the back here. The reason that we are—one of the fundamental 

reasons that we are involved as heavily as we are in the Middle 

East is that is where the oil is. 

That doesn’t mean that we have U.S. troops around oil fields, 

and are shipping it directly into American cars. But a major reason—one of two—in which we are there, is that that is where the 

world’s oil supply is. And we depend on that to the tune of 70 percent—60 percent—77 percent—60 percent or 70 percent of the imports—to run our cars and vehicles around. 

So I think that it is an issue. As to whether that is a good thing 

or a bad thing, and what do we do about it. I personally think that 

is a bad thing. We have militarized our policy in that region. It is 

based on making sure that there is access to oil at a fair price. And 

that has all sorts of toxic side effects, which we are dealing with, 

in terms of the anti-American insurgency that is running there. 

So I think that our approach to that region, number one, needs 

to be to cut down the oil-intensity of our economy by a great deal. 

We can’t become oil-independent, but we can certainly spend a 

heck of a lot—import a heck of a lot—less oil for every dollar of 

GDP that we generate, as we did in the 1970’s, after the first oil 

crisis. 

I think we can be a lot more deft in combining non-military, as 

well as military things that we do in that region, so that we get 
28 

the benefits of being able to have a favorable relationship there, 

and don’t get all the toxic side-effects of setting up targets who can 

be portrayed as crusaders and be accused of stealing the oil, and 

get the Arab street working against us. 

So I think that there is work to be done on that score, and not 

to simply congratulate ourselves that we leave after exercises in 

Egypt. 

Mr. AKIN. I—yes, I—— 

Admiral BLAIR. Yes. 

Mr. AKIN. Just—if I could finish that thought. It does seem to 

me that there is a difference. One of the things we said about, 

‘‘Why do we go to war?’’ Well, one, that there is a national interest. 

Two, that the cause is a worthy cause and a chance to win. That 

is a pretty good three to start with. 

Certainly, we had a national interest in keeping the Middle East 

from melting down, and also from all sorts of nukes going off there; 

but, that said, we are not there to steal their oil. We are there to 

stabilize the region. And they can reap the benefits of their own oil. 

It seems like—I understand what you are saying, and, certainly, 

I agree, and been voting for eight years to get us off of our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. But, thus said, we still did not steal 

their oil, and never had the intent of stealing their oil, and will not 

steal their oil. And it seems to me that that is a fairly big point 

in that, apparently, a whole lot of the world thought that is what 

we were going to do. 

General SCALES. Mr. Akin, if I could get tactical on you for a moment. When I was in Iraq in November, one of the things that impressed me most is the quality of strategic perception management 

that has gone into the U.S. command in doing exactly what you 

suggest. 

One thing that struck me was I went into a very large headquarters, to the information-operations cell. And two-thirds of the 

people in that cell, not only were they Iraqis, but they were Iraqis 

from the Iraqi media. That is a huge seat change from two or three 

years ago. 

Now, some of the things that they report locally in their own 

media are not terribly complimentary to us. But the grand scheme 

of it—the perception, generally, of the population—has shifted 

enormously because of what Dave Petraeus and others have done 

over there to try to open up. ‘‘Open up’’ is not the right word—to 

try to give the Iraqis an opportunity to dig into our own motives 

to the degree that they can, without sacrificing security. 

And so the lesson to take into the Grand Strategy of the future, 

I think, is to put that in a bottle in some way; define instruments 

that will allow us to be open to the global media in a way that we 

have never done before, again, without violating some of the tenants of national security. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Conaway, for five minutes. 

Mr. CONAWAY. Well, I won’t use the five minutes, other than to— 

Dr. Zelikow, are you on record somewhere in 1999 and 2000, of 

wanting to intervene militarily in Afghanistan? 

You mentioned that you perceived them as an imminent threat 

well in advance of the direct attack. Is that something you devel-
29 

oped now, in hindsight, or were you ahead of the curve or record 

in that timeframe, of actually wanting military intervention? 

Dr. ZELIKOW. Well, what I did do is I joined a group that published an article at the end of 1998, in Foreign Affairs, called ‘‘Catastrophic Terrorism,’’ in which I argued that that should now come 

into the foreground as the most dangerous threat to the United 

States. It used the World Trade scenario just to show how America 

would be divided into a ‘‘Before’’ and ‘‘After’’ if we suffered such attack. 

But I did not publicly call for the United States to use military 

action in Afghanistan in that article. I was trying to put that 

threat front-and-center, because I thought that was an end very severe. 

I actually think the evident failure of our reactions to the 1998 

attacks, as evidenced after the Cole attack in October 2000, I think 

made it clear at that point that it was just a matter of time before 

they were just going to keep hitting until they got a really big 

strike, because—and nothing we were doing was interfering with 

their operational effectiveness. But I didn’t really have a chance to 

really exhume the archives of how our government had thought 

about that problem, until I directed the 9–11 Commission. 

I would say that the observation I made about the fact that there 

was an imminent threat before 9–11, and that we needed to be 

ahead-of-the-curve in responding to it—and it is a bipartisan remark that I think would be shared by all the commissioners who 

looked at that material, in both parties on the commission. 

Mr. CONAWAY. I guess the problem is, knowing today—what is 

today’s imminent threat? And that is what everybody struggles 

with. And as historians, it is a lot easier looking backwards than 

forwards. And, you know, the decision-makers today, and the guys 

who have to make those hard decisions are, obviously, keenly interested in doing it right. But it isn’t any easier today than it was in 

August of 2001 to figure out who is going to throw the next punch. 

Dr. ZELIKOW. Well, the paradox that the commission described in 

its report, is that once you have been hit catastrophically, you have 

no trouble rallying a popular consensus to deal with it. But, of 

course, at that point, thousands of Americans are dead and hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost. 

If you want to get ahead of that curve, you are going to do things 

in which you are going to have to go on judgments, and you are 

not going to have the same kind of unity behind you. That is the 

paradox, is once the threat is manifest to all, it is manifest to all. 

And so, then, the issue is—so, for example, do you bother about 

Hitler when he marches into the Rhineland in 1936? Do you bother 

about Czechoslovakia in 1938, when, ‘‘Gee, Czech’s Sudetenland’’— 

is that really worth—do you bother about Manchuria in 1931 and 

1932, when the Japanese start moving south of the Great Wall, 

and out of sight of Manchuria? 

The point is, if you want to head these things off before they become catastrophic, then you have to make tough calls that will 

seem disproportionate to a lot of people. 

Now, in the case of 9–11, you are actually talking about an 

enemy that had already attacked us twice in a long-range international operation. So this was not a threat that was purely specu-
30 

lative. And it seemed to me the case was pretty strong, certainly 

after the Cole attack, if not before. 

Ambassador HUNTER. Congressman, let me add something, because this gets directly to the problem of trying to anticipate catastrophic events, or, to use a kind of term the military often uses, 

‘‘the black swan,’’ that is something that is just not supposed to 

happen. 

As I indicated earlier, one of the things we really face today is 

asymmetrical warfare; people who say, ‘‘We cannot attack the 

Americans in a major way in the homeland, or even troops abroad. 

But what we can do is try to increase the number of casualties 

there are, so that it can weaken the American will, or we can try 

to use a relatively inexpensive weapon against an expensive weapon,’’ to use an improvised explosive device (IED) against an armored personnel carrier, that sort of thing, so that the economics 

work on that. 

The problem we face is that the leverage effect of a relatively 

minor terrorist attack in this country can be immense on the American people. It is one reason we spent so much time and effort on 

homeland security, on airport security and the like. It is also why 

we have tried to, as a Nation, to create a hierarchy of concerns. 

As the President said, ‘‘It is the marriage of terrorism with high 

technology, is what we most have to worry about.’’ So the numberone requirement is to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists, weaponizable biologicals, then radiological, and then chemical; or something that they can do which will either have a huge 

chunk effect in this country, or that could disrupt some kind of important economic node. 

To eliminate all terrorism is going to be impossible. We could 

clamp down totally in this country. We could prevent anybody from 

coming here. We could end civil liberties and all of that, and still 

somebody is going to be able to do something to us. 

So we have to create this hierarchy of protective measures and 

active measures to try to get at as much potential terrorism as possible, to keep the weapons that they could most use against us out 

of their hands, and to help the American people and others understand we are going to get much of it, but we cannot promise a riskfree environment. 

And I think people understand that and are prepared to go with 

the things we most have to do to protect our Nation. 

Mr. CONAWAY. That might fall under a Grand Strategy. 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Gingrey, for five minutes. 

Dr. GINGREY. The commentary in regard to pre-emptive strategy, 

rather than a containment strategy is something I would like for 

you to touch on, because, particularly, in regard to Iran and their 

desire to have a, they say, nuclear power, but we say nuclear weapon. And, of course, if we allow them to do that, then containing— 

we add another country—a somewhat unfriendly country, with a 

nuclear weapon, I think, is a bad thing. So pre-emptive strategy, 

I think, probably, is a good thing in certain instances. 

I do want to ask about the idea of our energy policy, and what 

we are pushing for in regard to—I think Admiral Blair mentioned 

a little bit about, you know, not patting ourselves on the back too 
31 

much in regard to the Middle East, and what we have done, and 

why we did it. 

But do you see—any of you see—our energy policy, as we go forward in the future, as being part of, if not a—maybe a backdrop— 

but a significant part of a Grand Strategy as we go forward in the 

future? 

Dr. ZELIKOW. I said so explicitly in my testimony, Congressman. 

I described—I agree, by the way, with what Admiral Blair said 

about this a few moments ago. I would add, by the way, that the 

importation of oil is—accounts for half of our net current account 

deficit—and is the single most-important reason for the continuing 

indebtedness of the United States, even while we have a low dollar, 

and our export conditions are fundamentally good. 

We are not getting the benefit of that because of the scale of our 

oil imports. It is the single biggest drain on the American economy 

right now. So I think that a five-part agenda for, ‘‘What global 

forces do you have to manage to be able to offer some hope that 

we can manage these forces cooperatively in the world?’’ One of 

those five agenda items is energy and the environment, and reducing the dependence on oil and dirty coal. 

Ambassador HUNTER. I think we have to be candid about this. 

Even if we could get our own dependence down, the industrialized world is going to depend on Middle East energy. That includes countries that we relate to very dearly, including the Europeans. It can’t be done in sort of 100 years or something like that. 

So we have no choice but to try, with others, to ensure that energy resources in the Middle East will continue to flow. And, now, 

some—there are a lot of ways of looking at that—lots of threats, 

et cetera, one has to work on. 

At the same time, we will be in a much better position if we do, 

as a fundamental commitment—this is not telling anybody anything new—to try to reduce American dependence on the outside 

world. Part of that is finding other sources of hydrocarbons. And 

a lot of it is finding alternative energy. And a lot of it is conservation. 

Now, you are in the bad position that it is very difficult for you 

to go to your constituents and say, ‘‘We have to do this kind of 

thing, and you have to sacrifice today,’’ when people say, ‘‘I can understand a $4 gallon of gasoline. Get that down. I am not going to 

worry anymore.’’ 

One of the fundamental things we have to do as a Nation—and 

you folks are, not to cause trouble—is to collapse the political horizon of what people will support to meet the strategic requirement. 

So I would say energy has to be one of the three or four critical 

items of any Grand Strategy. 

Admiral BLAIR. I think, Congressman Gingrey, that the way oil 

deposits were put in the world, and the effect they have now, it had 

to have been done by somebody with a sense of humor. I mean, 

they are in the worst places, with the most unstable governments— 

violent social forces at work. And, yet, that is where they are. 

And what really worries me in the future is that a Western Africa and a Central Asia, which are the areas of most hydrocarbon deposits, behind the Middle East, in which we are in the same sort 

of situation that we are now in the Middle East—lots of troops de-
32 

ployed, unstable governments, having to cut deals with governments that we don’t really much like, being targets when we are 

out there, paying a lot of money to people who can jam it up our 

nose in other ways. 

And so I think that we need to work very much on the demand 

side in this country. We have to actively do things that will ensure 

that we get the energy that we do need from places that put us in 

a less-difficult position from using our Armed Forces and other 

tools of power, everything from importing Brazilian, sugar-based 

ethanol, which could be a partial solution, where we are going to— 

it is just fine if we send money to Brazil, as opposed to other places 

that we get on with a proper clean-based, clean-coal project so that 

we can electrify the transportation sector and not completely depend upon oil. 

It is a multi-part process that we have got to pursue with an underlying national-security rationale of not sending our troops over 

as the last resort, in places that we haven’t solved by, number one, 

curbing our activities at home and, number two, being more clever 

about the way we use our power overseas. 

Dr. SNYDER. I have one final question I wanted to ask, and then 

we will let Mr. Akin and Dr. Gingrey, any final comments they 

want to make. 

Dr. Zelikow, I wanted you to amplify, if you would, on your comment about—how did you phrase it?—‘‘I urge the committee to dig 

more deeply into the core problem, which is a lack of clarity about 

the problem itself, a lack of clarity about the character of this moment in world history.’’ 

Would you just amplify on that for me, please? 

Dr. ZELIKOW. Yes. 

Dr. SNYDER. And then anybody else that wants to comment on, 

anybody who wants to critique what Dr. Zelikow says. 

Dr. ZELIKOW. The whole notion of a Grand Strategy is we are 

trying to talk about our purpose in the world in a way that we 

think will resonate with a lot of people in the rest of the world. 

So if we are going to have a sense of purpose, that has to be oriented to some observation and diagnosis of, ‘‘What is the overarching condition that a lot of Americans and a lot of other people 

in the world care about?’’ What—you have to have some observation about the character of the moment in world history. 

In the years immediately after World War II, for example, there 

was actually a big argument in the United States about what we 

should care about. For example, Eleanor Roosevelt and Sumner 

Welles and others said, ‘‘We ought to be concerned with the remnants or fascism, Franco-Spain, remnants of fascism in Latin 

America.’’ 

A number of Republicans argued that, ‘‘We ought to turn aside 

from Europe and really concentrate on the future of East Asia, 

but—that is where, really, the future of the world is going to be 

determined. And we ought to cut back our commitments in Europe 

and redouble our commitments in Asia, and actually intervene in 

the Chinese civil war.’’ 

So—then there was a third school which said that the dominant 

problem at this moment in world history is the encroachment of 

international communism as led by the Soviet Union, and the sym-
33 

bolic effect on that on people’s hopes for whether we will live in a 

free world or not, and that the key theater for engaging that threat 

is in Europe and, therefore, the key focus of your Grand Strategy 

of containment in the first instance is going to have to be on European recovery. 

And so there was an argument that went on about that. It went 

on for a couple of years, and then it was definitively resolved in 

1947. And then they took it to the American people. Oh, well, really, the axioms of containment versus, say, rollback, after the outbreak of the Korean War, was not settled until the Eisenhower Administration—and really settled that in as a firm Grand Strategy 

in 1953. 

Now, the moment in history that I think we are at right now is 

one in which, for the first time, we now have full globalization. It 

is reminiscent of what we had at the beginning of the 20th century. 

But, then, we didn’t have the engagement of China and India in 

the world economy in the scale we have it now, and the velocity 

of movement of energy and money and ideas and people; although, 

there was enormous movements of people back then, in the tens of 

millions—and a lot of immigration issues, too. 

So if—that era of full globalization is so important—by the way, 

every—people in India get that. People in China get that. It is not 

a mystery. The reaction to that, though, is a huge push for self-determination. It is, ‘‘I am going to react against the global forces 

that are trying to reshape my community, and that I think threaten me, whether it is the immigrants coming into my community or 

the goods you are trying to sell that undercut my goods.’’ It manifests itself in 100 different ways, a lot of them cultural. 

And so that is the tension you have to manage. And, then, to 

manage that tension, you have got to convince people that nations 

in the world can get together and constructively manage these colossal global forces on an unprecedented scale, because if they 

think that you can’t manage them cooperatively, they will fort-up. 

I—fortification almost is a metaphor for lots of different ways in 

which people will fort-up. And so there is an agenda then of, ‘‘How 

do we reassure people that we are getting a handle on these enormous global forces?’’ And I talked about them in, especially, five 

items on an agenda. 

I mean, just to give you an example—the diffusion of ultra-hazardous technologies—not just nuclear energy, which I think is essential—but, say, new technologies for genetic manipulation or 

nanotechnologies, which, I think, we will hear more about in the 

coming years, and the dangers that they could pose. 

If people think that the world is not going to manage these 

forces, they are going to react to that in ways that, I think, will 

be toxic and extremely dangerous, and which brought civilian to 

the very precipice of destruction during the 20th century. We could 

find ourselves in a pattern like that again. 

So I start with the observation that the clarity about the problem 

is important, because if you agree that the core problem is the tension between globalization and self-determination, the agenda that 

flows from that is an agenda which I call ‘‘an agenda for an open, 

civilized world,’’ in my essay with Ernie May. 
34 

And then the policy agenda that goes with that is one in which 

you convince ordinary people that these unprecedented manmade 

forces are being managed through cooperation; because, if you don’t 

convince them of that, they are going to try to manage them in 

other ways. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you. 

General SCALES. If I could, just real quick. The thing that struck 

me from what my colleague just said, going back 100 years ago, if 

you were to read the press at the time, and look at the middle and 

upper-middle classes, there was a sense, through industrialization—this sense of well-being that the world was never in a better 

state than it was in 1908. 

And well, there were war-clouds, obviously, in South Africa and 

Manchuria, but those were worlds away. And Europeans and 

Americans felt really good about themselves in 1908. And no one 

would have thought that Mons and Lake Hato and a execution of— 

assassination of Franz Ferdinand would ever happen. 

And so I guess, if I could leave with something, it is always a 

caution. And I am a perennial pessimist, because I am a solder. 

But there is always this idea that any type of global clockwork 

mechanism is always fragile. And all it takes is misperception. All 

it, amplified by a global media, small minorities—your point about 

the anarchists—small minorities who inflame and accelerate and 

expand global fear—that could lead to something that, over the 

long term, could be catastrophic. 

That is why I talk so much about pre-insurgency and about setting conditions for regional stability—is the best way to offset 

something catastrophic from happening. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Akin, any final comments? 

Mr. AKIN. I could probably stay all day. I just wanted to compliment the witnesses. 

I think that there is a real synergism, in a way, because all of 

your perspectives, together, really create a tremendously helpful 

perspective for those of us that have had the treat to be able to be 

here today. So, thank you. 

Thank you for the many ways that you have served our country. 

And I really appreciate you. 

General SCALES. Thank you, sir. 

Dr. ZELIKOW. Thank you. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you all for being here. Let me give you all 

an invitation, as a formal question for the record. If you have anything you would like to add, clarify, augment—if you will get it to 

the staff in a timely way, we will make it part of this record. 

Thank you all very, very much for being here. Thank you for 

your service. 

We are adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 11:50 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 
A P P E N D I X 

JULY 31, 2008 

PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD 

JULY 31, 2008 

(39) 
40 
41 
42 
43 
44 
45 
46 
47 
48 
49 
50 
51 
52 
53 
54 
55 
56 
57 
58 
59 
60 
61 
62 
63 
64 
65 
66 
67 
68 
69 
70 
71 
72 
73 
74 
75 
76 
77 
78 
79 
80 
81 
82 
83 
84 
85 
86 
87 
88 
89 
90 
91 
92 
93 
94 
95 
96 
97 
98 
99 
100 
101 
102 
103 

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD 

JULY 31, 2008 

(107) 
108 
109 
110 
111 
112 

Æ