War on the Rocks Interview with GEN Martin Dempsey

Hear the Chairman describe how the US will keep the force highly-trained and ready despite the constrained fiscal environment:

The sacred responsibility is to ensure that we never send a man or woman into combat unless they are prepared – best-trained, best-led, best-equipped and prepared to overmatch any adversary decisively, you know. And those words are carefully chosen. You know, we don’t want to just win. You know, we want to win 50 to 1, not 5 to 4 because we should be able to do that, you know; the nation has given us the resources necessary to do that.

Toward the end of the article, he also explains that the phased, structured approach to operations planning may be mistaken:

Once you introduce yourself into an experiment, you change the outcome. And I think that’s true. And that’s somewhat how I’ve watched the use of the military instrument evolve over time, where, in particular in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think we’d have to admit that although we had what we thought was a definable end state and a series of objectives, that when we touched it, it changed it. And when it changed it, we then had to adjust the end state because some of it became literally infeasible and others opened up opportunities.

I think we’ve got to develop strategic thinkers who, although they understand how to – how to identify an end state, back plan, phase – you know, put in these extraordinarily exquisite phases – that’s all important work, but it’s not actually the way it plays out. The way it plays out is once you touch it, it changes and then you’ve got to be adaptable.