Pentagon transformation chief seeks helping hand from Congress

A top Pentagon official charged with transforming the armed forces encouraged lawmakers Thursday to help the military revise its capabilities in order to face 21st-century threats.

Retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's force transformation office, told the legislators on a House Armed Services subcommittee that "continued strong encouragement and effort" from Congress would help to advance transformation.

Specifically, Cebrowski said Congress could help lower the obstacles to transformation by publicly encouraging the armed services to reduce physical, policy and fiscal barriers that impede efforts to adopt new technologies and programs.

He argued that "encouragement" from legislators to financially "devolve or devalue" old capabilities would free resources for new technologies, such as an advanced air ship or "modern-day blimp," according to a transformation office spokesman. Cebrowski also said lawmakers could help open discretionary spending to allow for more transformational capabilities.

Lawmakers appeared ready to respond. "[W]ith major changes being proposed, Congress must keep a keen eye on the process, the funding and the experiments that will be conducted to evaluate new doctrine, equipment and operational concepts," New Jersey Republican Jim Saxton, chairman of the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee, said in his opening statement.

Calling his office a "think-and-do tank," Cebrowski told lawmakers that the office "focuses on specific activities" to make transformation happen. In his prepared testimony, he also said the process is happening "much faster than what we expected when we announced the journey just 28 months ago."

He said soldiers undergo "virtual" training to combat the new threats of war, such as urban warfare, and are communicating across the services with new technologies to fight jointly.

But Cebrowski also said the office has "a long way to go." In 2004, the office plans to deploy more new capabilities that are based on lighter, more agile units, knowledge-enabled warfare and demand-centered intelligence, among other things.

He said the information age creates "predictability, optimization and efficiency" but added that a changing security environment "requires adaptivity, unpredictability" and speed. To meet that challenge, Cebrowski said the military would broaden its approach to space by integrating information technology such as micro satellites and nanotechnology into space exploration.

He also touted speed-of-light weapons, noting that today's weapons travel between 5,000 and 10,000 feet per second. "Imagine the magnitude of change possible with speed-of-light weapons," he said. The speed of light is about 186,000 miles per second.

Last year, Cebrowski's office unveiled more expeditionary and networked capabilities, as well as technologies for communicating across jurisdictions for soldiers on the battlefield.

Lawmakers also were slated to hear from representatives of the armed services on their individual transformation efforts.