Rethinking the Next Wars
Arthur Cebrowski, Military Transformer
Arthur Cebrowski is not your typical sailor--his jokes have G-rated punch lines. When articulating matters of bombs, bombers, and bullets, the retired admiral has a tendency to draw indecipherable 3-D diagrams, quote Jesuit theologians, or discuss the military applications of differential calculus.
Yet if the military is too often accused of fighting the last war, Cebrowski is thinking two wars ahead. As head of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, Cebrowski is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's man in charge of building a U.S. military that can operate in the global chaos that has defined the first years of the 21st century. A military that has ousted two regimes in two years and spends $400 billion annually is still in many ways unprepared to take on the threats of international terrorism, cyberwarfare, and sabotage in space. The 61-year-old Cebrowski, who came to the job just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, knows better than most that victory on the battlefield is often the biggest obstacle to change. "This is an enormously successful institution, so people are not inclined to think it's broken," he says. "Those successes breed elements of arrogance."
Planning ahead. Having spent most of his 37-year Navy career strategizing against a massive Soviet military arrayed against NATO in Europe and at sea, Cebrowski says it was during the U.S. mission in Somalia that he first glimpsed the future of war. Commanding an aircraft carrier group off the coast of Africa, he watched as some of the world's most awesome firepower was unable to avoid ignominious defeat at the hands of poorly trained and ill-equipped Somali militia fighters. As Cebrowski contends--and as the United States is now experiencing in Iraq--"political victory" is usually more elusive than outright military victory.
His mind-melting presentations draw ridicule from some top officers, and there are those in the Pentagon who charge that his office is too much PowerPoint, not enough progress. As one Army official puts it: "That guy needs to come up for oxygen more." Yet Cebrowski rejects the criticism that he is heading up an ivory-tower think tank and argues that his staff is always ready to "roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty."
Which might be why his office recently commissioned a study that advocates overhauling the way the U.S. military conducts peacekeeping and stability operations around the globe. With the United States playing nation builder in Iraq and Afghanistan, many in the Army are realizing how poorly U.S. soldiers are trained to win the peace long after the big armies have melted away. For all Cebrowski's concern about a messy future, it is the messy present that must be dealt with first.
KEEP AN EYE ON: JOHN THAIN The newly chosen CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, a low-key former Goldman Sachs executive, will strive to clean up the exchange's image and compete with computerized trading rivals. He replaces Richard Grasso, who held the chairman title until ousted over his $188 million pay package.
This story appears in the December 29, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.