Leaders today are being called upon to shape the future in a very different budget environment than ever before, and this will have an impact on the Navy and all services. The challenge, according to Adm. Gary Roughead, USN, Chief of Naval Operations, is that none of us has ever had to lead in this environment. “We are in uncharted territory,” he explained at the AFCEA/USNI Joint Warfighting Conference in Virginia Beach, Virginia. And we must lead without any examples to look back upon, he added.

The path ahead is to determine how we see the future unfolding and what we want the forces to do, the admiral recommended. From that, the leaders then can make the hard decisions. As leaders look at need and size, however, they have to keep in mind the nature of the industrial base. It is fragile, and it cannot be re-created if lost, he warned.

“When the development of the joint strike fighter is done, it will mark the first time since World War I that there is not a new tactical aircraft under development,” he related, adding that “You have to take a look at keeping that base going and how do you do that. It is complex and hard, but those are the cards that we are dealt,” he acknowledged.

For all that has changed in the budget environment, there are some constants in the world we live in that cannot be overlooked, and there is a continuing need for an offshore option that the U.S. Navy and the navies of the world will provide. The stakes of growing complexity and disorder are high, and joint integration has increasing value. “Our Navy today can fit into the context of joint force and coalition forces,” the admiral stated.

Global trade and economic interest will direct the interaction of all states, and the speed of this in the information age and the speed with which events develop will change the ability to lead these developments. “The Navy’s small footprint and flexible range and platforms give the nation attractive options,” the admiral noted.

“Navy personnel are deployed in ways we would not have imagined,” he reported. The flexibility of the force is an essential capability for the United States. The Navy is not only serving in Afghanistan, but it also has provided missile support for the no-fly zone in Libya and has had assets diverted to Japan for humanitarian assistance in a three fold disaster: one that involved an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear crisis unlike the world has ever seen.

The most brutal facts of current reality must be confronted, and that starts with the national debt where we are borrowing 40 cents on a dollar right now, said Raymond Haller, senior vice president and director of The MITRE Corporation’s Department of Defense, Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence federally funded research and development center, speaking on a panel on budget issues at the AFCEA/USNI Joint Warfighting conference in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Haller suggests we are looking at a perfect storm right now with the $400 billion over 12 years in cuts being only a floor, with negotiations facing targets as high as $900 billion over 10 years. This will require not only cutting programs but finding overhead savings on headquarter staff, closing overseas bases and reducing contactor services.

Contractor services in the military budget, for the first time, are equal to contracts for products, he explained. Strategic relevance will be the acid test. “If you are not relevant and don’t have a value added then you might be in trouble,” he warned.

Contractor cuts will be in personnel areas, but the military will still be buying things and ideas. “Companies providing people who flip badges when they retire will have problems,” according to the panel moderator Dr. Dov S. Zakheim, senior adviser, Center for Strategic and International Studies and Senior Fellow, CNA Corporation former comptroller, Department of Defense.

Beyond cuts in contracting, the services must define mission in the post-Iraq/Afghanistan world and then link the means and technology to accomplish the mission. All will be designed to cost, said RAdm. Jay M. Cohen, USN (Ret.), former Under Secretary for Science and Technology, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, former Chief of Naval Research.

In a post-war world, the United States will not be recapitalizing, but we will be reconstituting, he suggested. Aircraft and other vehicles will be stripped, and those companies that can put things into the existing holes will prosper, predicted the admiral.

The future will be different, strategically, because we have no interest that justifies our forces over the long term to building nations where none exist, stressed Col. Douglas Macgregor, USA (Ret.), author. He added that our nation and our leaders have no appetite to put ground forces in Libya.

Defense is being underfunded by between 20 and 40 precent across Europe. This is an incredible reduction in defense spending, and frankly quite dangerous, said VAdm. Robert G. Cooling, Chief of Staff Allied Command Transportation at the AFCEA/USNI Joint Warfighting Conference in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

In this environment, we all need allies, even the United States. Fighting along with NATO is better than fighting ad hoc. Future operations need to be politically supportable, which means having the populace behind you, he explained.

He notes that trust among nations is a two-way street, and the all of government approach is a force multiplier. In all situations, interoperability is critical, he maintains. He gave credit to the United States as the force behind improving interoperability. It was critical to have it in Afghanistan, and it is showing to be successful in operations in Libya, he related.

Addressing the topic of the Joint Forces Command disestablishment as part of the United States’ cost-cutting measures, the admiral stressed that this disestablishment does not signal an end to transformation in Europe or in the United States. The foundation is solid, and the forces are the same. But where links become severed, ACT will create new links, he said.

The admiral suggested that in the tight fiscal environment the industry is facing that the Framework For Collaborative Interaction might be an organization that could play an important role. The purpose of this group is to enable collaborative work to be carried out in a nonprocurement manner between ACT, industry and academia and to leverage the expertise that each party brings to Alliance capability development efforts.

Despite budget considerations, NATO still has a lot of efforts underway. With all the activities of NATO today, including those in Afghanistan and Africa as well as those focused on piracy, transition training in Iraq and the no-fly zone over Libya, it is important to determine how to balance support for operations today with planning for those tomorrow. “We must find the sweet spot between preparing for current operations and planning for future operations,” Adm. Cooling added.

NATO includes conventional, nuclear and missile defense forces, but it also needs to develop cyber defense capability and prepare for such threats from state and nonstate actors. NATO is developing an in-depth cyber defense policy, but its first priority is to establish a definition of what constitutes a cyber attack. “Cyber space has yet to quantify its set of rules, and without rules, you have no rule breakers,” he says. Although, the rules are not there, he adds, it is clear that harm and uncertainty have occurred. NATO will provide assistance to nations to develop their own cyber defense capabilities he continued.

“In Europe, we cannot afford to be too precious about sovereign capability development,” the admiral stated.

The word cyber is frequently discussed, but depending on perspective, the definition varies. On a panel led by LtGen. Jeffrey A. Sorenson, USA (Ret.), former Chief Information Officer/G-6, Department of the Army, experts from different perspectives came together to discuss cyber in support of the warfighter.

There was agreement across the panel that the domain of cyberspace is big and man-made, as BGen. Joseph A. Brendler, USA, Chief of Staff, Defense Information Systems Agency, suggests, but RAdm. Edward H. Deets III, USN, Commander, Naval Network Warfare Command, adds that the cyber domain allows “good guys and bad guys to operate side by side.” Cyber, he says, makes it difficult to distinguish between the two. The admiral adds that cyber is “more joint than anything else we do in defense.”

The battlespace is rapidly changing on both the technology and people side of it. “Technology we understand, but human side drives how fast change happens,” relates Adm. Deets. The need for Web access is growing, and exposure can be reduced by locking down the network, he says, but when the network is locked down, “we don’t have the network to use, and we eliminate the ability of our people to take innovation on the network to the next level,” he warns.

Col. Timothy Hill, USA, Director, Futures Directorate, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, says the challenge is maintaining consensus and momentum from what he calls the “coalition of willing people who are moving out into cloud computing and are not scared by the technology.” Cloud computing is an inevitable wave, and we need to grasp it and understand the risk. There are a lot of flavors of clouds, and these are available in non proprietary open architectures that allow us to benefit from the entire commercial market, he explains. He adds that we must overcome the challenge of policy trailing technology. Policy was not designed for the technologies we are seeing today, or the risk, he adds.

Gen. Brendler explains that the direction is toward better application portability achieved by virtualization of servers, desktops and storage…not just redundancy in standby elsewhere, but in many locations with load balancing so that if one system fails the effect felt by the user is zero. The need is to support warfighter missions by having an infrastructure that is always on and secure. The assurance and freedom of maneuver are achieved by having the right amount and correct balance of diversity and capacity, he continues.

“We have made the leap from cyber being a black box techie thing to being a global warfighting joint domain, but we have not made the leap to understanding what it is as a joint domain because we still have multiple different networks within each service, according to VAdm. Nancy Brown, USN. Adm. Brown also recommends that we not assume we have a dot-mil domain around which we can build a parameter that makes us secure…not as long as there is one connection to the Internet, she emphasizes. “We have to figure out not how to build a parameter but how to break down the parameters and operate securely.”

The fiscal crisis in the United States is its primary security threat today, explained Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, USA, commander, Joint Forces Command at the AFCEA and USNI Joint Warfighting Conference in Virginia Beach. The previous decade was one of military expansion, but the next one will be a decade of contraction, he warned. But the most important thing is that “we do not get caught in the trap of doing more with less. There are still redundancies, and we have to figure out how much we need to eliminate them,” he explained, but he says this needs to be done carefully within a process.

To reach the sizable cuts, there has to be a strategy about what we are willing to stop doing, and that has to be followed by a national security discussion, he said. “From a policy perspective, we have to decide what cuts are going to result in savings and reductions and then see if we can accept the risks.”

The way forward is through a more integrated joint force that eliminates redundancy. The military and civil government must mitigate reduced capacity by working together, and military leaders must have a view that encompasses all the services.

The general also stressed that it is important to leverage the success of recent joint and coalition warfare and more importantly to learn from shortcomings as well as from successes to go forward in changing times.

The United States’ international partners are also facing fiscal challenges, and so it must remain engaged with the global world. The general called for the United States to continue to reach out and enable and train its coailition partners, both now and in the future. The world today, he related, is increasingly changing and complex with people connected immediately in many places, but many still live in isolation. “The globalization by communications and technology has allowed the disenfranchised to see what they are missing and challenge the status quo at the speed of Twitter,” he emphasized.

It is in the United States’ best interest that all nations enjoy better prosperity and security, he added.

New technologies that are under development may not appear without hard decisions that must be made in a time of fiscal uncertainty, according to experts on a 2011 Joint Warfighting Conference panel. These decisions must take into account funding for the defensive technologies as well as changes in the force makeup that could remove missile defense deployment options.

Vice Adm. Peter H. Daly, USN, deputy commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command, noted that the Aegis ballistic missile defense system is being fielded on a multimission ship—not buttonholed on a mission-specific platform. The versatility of the system has led to its being deployed to Romania, he noted.

Building on that, Rear Adm. Joseph A. Horn Jr. USN, program executive, Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, cited the need for a system having a balanced role in a multimission ship. Future systems should be built off of a strong service foundation, so that sailors can use familiar equipment for an unfamiliar mission.

However, Cdr. Bryan McGrath, USN (Ret.), director of Consulting, Studies and Analysis, Delex Systems, Incorporated, decried the drive for warship balance and advocated its elimination. He advocated specialization to achieve the best potential capabilities to deter as well as defend. This may require choosing certain capabilities over others, which in turn will require difficult decisions, he said.

Being successful in the era of irregular warfare will require a focus on new ways of building and preparing the force, according to a panel of military and civilian experts. Speaking at the 2011 Joint Warfighting Conference, the Wednesday panelists emphasized training and education using innovative approaches to build a force capable of winning in a rapidly changing arena.

Brig. Gen. John W. Bullard Jr., USMC, prospective deputy commanding general, Marine Corps Combat Development Command, declared that the key to the future will be education—however, there is no silver bullet. The military must invest in officers and senior enlisted personnel both in training and education. The true art will be not necessarily having the answers, but instead knowing to ask the right questions, he said, citing the need for a doctrinal framework that is flexible.

Training should focus on methodologies and critical thinking rather than on specific skills that might not be useful, emphasized Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., USAF (Ret.), former deputy judge advocate general, U.S. Air Force. Capt. Evin Thompson, USN, Naval Special Warfare Branch head, Expeditionary Warfare Division, Navy Staff, decried the military culture that does not like to share information. We need to turn our military into an organization with an external outlook so that we can communicate with everyone with whom we share this world, he stated.

Above all, the military must create an environment that effectively recruits and keeps technologically, offered Eric Bassel, director of the SANS Institute. The military needs to create a recruitment, training, education and assessment process for the cyber side to keep cyber experts for the long term.

The most advanced military in the world must prepare for a future in which enemy technologies and capabilities negate existing advances, according to Michael W. Wynne, former secretary of the air force. These advances, which comprise both kinetic and digital capabilities, threaten land, sea and air forces in areas where they currently dominate.

Existing communications and network systems are especially vulnerable, and not just because of direct action. Speaking at 2011 Joint Warfighting Conference, Wynne pointed out that software and data flow offer their own problems. Networks are drowning in gigabytes of data—“we are burying our transmission systems in irrelevant imagery,” he said.

That challenge is complicated by inadvertent problems and potential enemy action. Jamming and the loss of spectrum control by cohabitating electromagnetic signals is a threat to networked operations, Wynne pointed out. He predicted that the next war could be first to fiber, as the ability to transmit could be corrupted or jammed by enemy operations.

“I don’t think we can wait for data Armageddon,” he said.

Wynne also cited the need for continuing deployment of advanced aircraft such as the F-22 and the F-35, as competitors already are at work developing peer platforms. Upgrading existing fourth-generation aircraft such as the F-15 and the F-16 will fall short of necessary capability. Those older aircraft cannot participate in the first 48 hours of war with an enemy who has a modern integrated air defense system, he pointed out.

The United States faces increased threats from abroad that could negate is superiority in many key military disciplines unless it re-dedicates itself to investment in progress, according to a former Defense Department official. Michael W. Wynne, former secretary of the air force, warned a Joint Warfighting Conference 2011 that the United States is dropping its guard in equipping the force for future conflict.

“We have been lulled into a sort of lethargy by doing what we should be doing—exploiting the concept of total air dominance,” Wynne said in using the Air Force as an example to discuss the challenge. Potential enemies are moving ahead with efforts to negate the U.S. high technology military through direct countermeasures or the deployment of equivalent, or peer, equipment.

He drew from history in describing how Germany actually lost World War II in 1936, the year that the United Kingdom won it. Germany made a crucial error in canceling development of a four-engine Dornier bomber that would have won the air war over Britain. Simultaneously, British defense scientists developed the radar technology that enabled them to protect their domestic air bases when the Germans attacked with their light bombers. Not only must the United States avoid that type of mistake, it cannot count on cooperation from a future foe. “We can’t expect that future competitors will make a mistake in strategy like the Germans did,” he stated.

“As a nation, we are turning away from consolidating our gains, Wynne stated. “We have achieved much by dominating the third dimension. “These gains did not come without standards and vision.”

The United States must maintain a strong military, economic and political presence in the Asia-Pacific region for the foreseeable future, according to experts in a plenary panel session hosted by former Good Morning America host David Hartman at the 2011 Joint Warfighting Conference in Virginia Beach. This is necessary to counterbalance increasing Chinese influence and to keep the United States’ status as an honest security broker in the region.

Wallace “Chip” Gregson, former assistant secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, said that U.S. friends in the region want the United States to represent its values peacefully.

Ronald O’Rourke, a specialist in national defense with the Congressional Research Service, opined that every day, nations throughout the region are taking measure of each country’s strength. It is politically important for the United States to stay strong militarily in an ongoing basis. Many countries have not yet take sides in the foreign policy debate between the United States and China, he noted.

And China is strengthening its economic ties with many other countries. Gregson observed that many Asians have risen out of poverty because of China’s economic growth. He cited Cambodia as an example: The Southeast Asian country expressed a desire for a strong U.S. presence, but meanwhile China is helping build the country’s infrastructure. “China is there, and we’re not,” he said.

Both Gregson and O’Rourke, along with fellow panelist Adm. Timothy J. Keating, USN (Ret.), former head of the U.S. Pacific Command, maintained that the United States is not a fading power relative to China. Reports of waning U.S. influence have been greatly exaggerated. However, all three panelists agreed that the United States must continue to take steps to