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M2 PRESSWIRE-3 October 2003-US DOD: News transcript. Page 1 of 3.(C)1994-2003 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

RDATE:10022003

DoD News Briefing: Army Brig. Gen. Robert W. Cone

Participating were Lawrence Di Rita, acting assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, and Army Brig. Gen. Robert W. Cone, director, Joint Center for Lessons Learned, U.S. Joint Forces Command.

Di Rita: Good afternoon. We have an opportunity today -- and I'm grateful for General Cone's willingness to do this. General Bob Cone is from the Joint Forces Command. He is going to provide for you sort of a snapshot summary of the work that we did under the leadership of Admiral Giambastiani at the Joint Forces Command to provide for a fairly broad-based lessons-learned activity that took place in the context of the development and execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Admiral Giambastiani testified -- and General Cone, as a matter of fact -- today before the House Armed Services Committee. And we asked him to come on over here and provide a little bit of an outline for you. And we'll take some questions after that.

So, I do thank General Cone for being here, and I'll just turn it over to him, and he's got a prepared brief, and then we'll take some questions.

Thank you.

Cone: Afternoon. I'm pleased to be here. I think we had a good session this morning on the Hill. And I'm here to talk really about the lessons-learned effort that's been ongoing at Joint Forces Command. And today's briefing is focused on the major combat operations phase of this operation, really on activities through the 1st of May. And the reason we did it that way is, basically, we think that there are some important lessons that we want to get out to basically the combatant commanders and get into the programmatics process, et cetera. So we've basically taken that, and that's the subject of today's briefing. And I will not be able to discuss any of the post-MCO discussion at this point.

The structure of the briefing I'm going to give; I'll talk a little bit about methodology. We did something completely different here. I think I had the opportunity in early June to talk about what we -- how we had gone about doing things, which is truly different. And then I'll talk a little bit about context, which I think is very important when you consider this conflict compared to other conflicts. And then I'll present what we call the big issues -- some 17 findings from our major combat ops, operations report. And again, we classify those as sort of the capabilities that reached new levels of performance; those that demonstrated considerable effectiveness, but still need some work; and then, frankly, some things that fell short of our expectations.

Q: Will you hand those out, or do we have to write like heck?

Cone: I believe there's a plan to hand those out as well. And then the second tier issues I will talk to if I have time. I think your focus is probably on the big things, and we can probably into those in Q&A. And then I'll also talk a little bit about how what we saw, how we think that affects and informs future transformational activities and those type of things.

Just to start off with, to talk about methodology, it has best been described by Air Marshal Brian Burridge as a dynamic assessment of the warfighting process vice a post-mortem. And too often, we wait until the war is over, and then we basically collect. And what you miss then is really the context, you miss what's really important to the warfighter. So, taking a team of 35 joint staff -- Joint Forces Command officers into the theater and embedding across the theater and observing the war as it actually...