NYT : Gates Says Military Faces More Unconventional Wars

Gates Says Military Faces More Unconventional Wars

By DAVID S. CLOUD | October 11, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Wednesday that the Army needed to improve its ability to train foreign militaries and to prepare for other unconventional conflicts that it was likely to face in coming decades.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates spoke in Washington on Wednesday to a gathering of current and retired soldiers.

Speaking to a gathering of current and retired soldiers, Mr. Gates sketched out a vision for making the Army better at conducting wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he said would “remain the mainstay of the contemporary battlefield for some time.”

His message was in many ways a blunt challenge to the Army not to treat the current conflicts as anomalies and to retreat into the more familiar task of preparing for conventional combat, as it did after the Vietnam War. Future conflicts, he said, “will be fundamentally political in nature and require the application of all elements of national power.”

“Success will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behavior of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between,” he said.

He noted that a vital capability that the military needed was “standing up and mentoring indigenous armies and police” — a task the Army has struggled to carry out in recent years in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But he offered no specific proposals for improving the Army’s abilities in this area.

He was speaking to the annual convention of the Association of the United States Army here.

Mr. Gates alluded to the desire among some officers to spend billions of dollars on re-equipping the Army and to return to training for what the service called “high intensity” conflict, a euphemism for conventional combat.

While supporting the idea of large outlays in coming years for new equipment and to expand the size of the Army, Mr. Gates said that the Army had to regain its edge in fighting conventional wars while retaining what it had learned about fighting unconventional wars.

The adaptations the Army has already made in Iraq and Afghanistan have been “impressive,” he said.

But in the future, he said: “Army soldiers can expect to be tasked with reviving public services, rebuilding infrastructure and promoting good governance. All these so-called nontraditional capabilities have moved into the mainstream of military thinking, planning and strategy, where they must stay.”

Also on Wednesday, Maj. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, commander of the Army Recruiting Command, said at a Pentagon news conference that in fiscal year 2007, 18 percent of the military’s recruits had prior criminal records and needed a waiver to join, up from 15 percent the previous year. He said 87 percent of those were for misdemeanors like joy riding or violating curfew.

David Chu, the Defense Department’s under secretary for personnel, defended the waiver policy, saying it took into consideration the whole person and his or her future abilities, not just mistakes the person might have made. Mr. Chu announced that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines had all met their recruiting targets last year.