 All right. Hello, I'm David Sturman, a senior policy analyst with the Future Security Program here at New America. And we're about to start. So please take your seats. Thank you for coming to this event, which is an event with New America's Future Security Program and Arizona State University's Future Security Initiative in partnership with the Army Strategist Association. Just a little bit of housekeeping for our people online and for you all. Books are on sale at the registration desk or online via the button at the bottom right of your browser window. For those online, you'll be able to ask questions when it comes to Q&A by putting your question into the Slido box. And with that, thank you all again. And I will turn our event over to Dr. Ken Clayman, Professor of Practice at Arizona State University's Future Security Initiative and President of the Army Strategist Association. Thank you. Thanks. Well, thank you everyone for joining us today. Thank you for those who are joining us here in person and those who are joining us online. I have the pleasure to introduce to you somebody who many of you already know, but Dr. Andrew Krepenevich, who he's certainly known to all Army strategists, but also very well known. So I will be very brief with my introduction of you, sir. Dr. Andrew Krepenevich, I think first came to fame for his wonderful book, The Army in Vietnam, which if you spent any time in professional military education, you read it. But he's also written several other books, including The Seven Deadly Scenarios, one of my favorite, and also one about Andrew Marshall, which I'll also mention here briefly. But Dr. Krepenevich spent a lot of time in the Office of Net Assessment, the Department of Defense think tank where he actually worked for the great Andrew Marshall who most of us know by his nickname Yoda, which I think makes you a padawan of Andrew Marshall, which is certainly a compliment. But beyond that, he's done some amazing work since then, still for the Office of Net Assessment, but also for the Hudson Institute, fairly recently with Archipelagic Defense. But here our main topic tonight is about his recent book, which I'll still call it a recent book, but it actually came out one year ago today, and we didn't plan that, it just so happened. But The Origins of Victory, and so we're gonna talk about that today. Most importantly though, I do wanna say, Dr. Krepenevich is, we like to call him the godfather of army strategy. Sorry, we gave you that name, but before the army designated, or had a career field, a functional area designated to strategy, you were an army strategist long before that was a thing. So, the book did come out a year ago, and you and I were talking about this book over two years ago. We're sitting in the open area of the Pentagon, and I think we were talking with Ben Fernandez, and you had mentioned the book, and I said, we really need to do a book event with the Army Strategist Association. Things happened, time passed, but you've been able to do a few events, but now finally we've been able to have this event, and I know that many army strategists have already read the book. I read it once when it came out, and then I read it again for this event. But if you could, can you give us a brief synopsis of the three sections of the book? Sure. So the book, part one, it makes the argument that the US military in particular, but the world in general, is in a period of disruptive change in the character of warfare, and there are three big changes. One for us is what I would call the maturing of the precision warfare regime. So in the First Gulf War, you could argue we introduced precision warfare. What are Soviet adversaries at the time called a reconnaissance strike complex, okay? And basically it has three components, what is sort of the scouting or the ISR, one is the strike, and one is the C4, the battle network. And when we looked at the, I was working in that assessment at the time, we looked at what the Soviets were saying after that war before they collapsed, it was this is what we've been talking about. So we had sort of the first early rudimentary version of the reconnaissance strike complex. At the time we thought, well, this won't last long, other militaries will catch up because we're onto a good thing here. Took over 20 years, but that revolution, if you will, that occurred, we found now that it's maturing. And my mentor Andy Marshall used to say, this precision warfare regime will be mature when somebody else has what we have. For those of us who are familiar with military terminology, it's when we no longer operate in relatively permissive environments, it's contested environments. And of course the leader in that, in terms of our rivals are the Chinese. So that's a very big adjustment. It's not just innovation that we have to undertake to deal with this particular situation, this change. It's disruptive innovation. And there's a lot of work in the business literature by people like Clayton Christensen who differentiates between innovation, which is kind of the air mobile division, and disruptive innovation, which is something like blitzkrieg, where the whole thing changes. And a huge boost to military effectiveness. So that's the first problem. Second problem is, or change, is this overlapping, emerging, we don't know what it's going to look like at the end of the day revolution that is being driven by the broad advance of technologies. And we all see it just about every day. What's going on with AI? What's going on with synthetic biology, quantum computing, robotics, additive manufacturing, directed energy? So it's advancing on a broad front. We don't quite know just how it's, who's going to gain the most advantage? Who's going to basically take this raw technology and transform it into military effectiveness? So that's the second. The third, which is not in the book, is this transition from a bipolar to a tripolar nuclear rivalry in terms of great nuclear powers. And I wrote a piece on that a couple of years ago in foreign affairs and just starting to give that more now. But so that's the first part of the book. The first part is two big changes. It's not going to be a matter of innovation. We're going to have to engage in disruptive innovation, large scale innovation. And provides a little bit of context to that. So it says the rate of change began to accelerate with the industrial revolution. And up until that time, we fought in two domains, basically the land and the sea. It wasn't much you could do if you wanted the land to influence what was going on at sea and vice versa. Well, middle of the 19th century, we move into the electromagnetic domain with the telegraph, okay? Really improves military effectiveness. Toward the end, we move into the undersea, early part of the 20th century, and excuse me, into the air, okay? And so we're moving into more domains. What am I missing here? In World War II, we're basically operating in five domains. There's the air, the sea, the land, the undersea, and the electromagnetic. And since World War II, we've added three more by my taxonomy. We've added space, the seabed, and cyber. So not only that, but you have these increases, these rather dramatic increases in the range, the speed, and the accuracy more recently of weapons. So we can operate over much greater ranges with much higher speeds than we could, say, two centuries ago, and with the precision revolution, far greater accuracy. And what this really enables is what I would call not multi-domain, because we've been doing multi-domain for, but cross-domain warfare. And so when we think about the Chinese, controlling the seas around Taiwan, if they were doing it 200 years ago, and it was the Royal Navy, you'd have a bunch of wooden ships. Now, they can pull from all eight domains to different degrees and in different ways to exercise sea control, which is really great because it gives you a lot of options. But it's really challenging because we've gone from playing one or two-dimensional chess to eight-dimensional chess. So what is the optimum mix for any particular operational problem that you have for how you're going to address it? So, looking at all that, part two of the book says, well, if you buy the argument that you need to engage in disruptive innovation, what do we know about militaries that do it well? And so part two says, well, I really don't know. And so I've looked at four cases. I tried to look them in as great a detail as I could. In fact, most of the book is part two. So one is the Royal Navy and the so-called Fisher or Dreadnought Revolution. What is the German military with Blitzkrieg? One is the American Navy, the transition from the battle line to the carrier task force. And what is the American Air Force going from sort of the World War II era into the era of precision warfare and stealth and PGMs and so on? And basically, and fortunately, for me, writing the book, there were some common characteristics. It would have been awfully disappointing if I got to part three, but there were. There were about, I don't know, eight or nine. And so part three talks about, well, these four militaries that led the way in exploiting a new way of warfare through disruptive innovation, they have these common characteristics. And there's a little, the editors at Yale University Press and we have to tell about, you know, say something about how the American military is doing. And it turns out that we have a ways to go yet. Looking at these metrics, these sort of indicators that these four militaries exhibited. So that's kind of the book in a nutshell. That's great. Reading some of the reviews of the book that have come out, Lawrence Friedman actually reviewed the book and gave it a very good review. But I did notice that in it, he had a little bit of a criticism or caution. And he said that, referring to you in your book, his approach risks overstating technology as the driver of change. Perhaps wisely, he has not yet sought to incorporate lessons from the Russian war in Ukraine, although these might challenge some of his assumptions. Okay, so let's be unwise for a minute. And let's ask how you think the war in Ukraine and perhaps even the war in Gaza is challenging some of your assumptions. But I also wanna give you the opportunity to respond to that point that you might be overstating technology as the driver of change. Well, as you might have observed, I'm pretty old. So I, as a major in the 1980s, I had the good fortune of being assigned to the office of the Secretary of Defense as Secretary Weinberger's at the time, assistant for special projects. And so got to see how strategy was made at a very high level and then worked to work at the office of that assessment before I retired. When I was at the office of that assessment, Mr. Marshall, we were leading up to Desert Storm and he said to me, I was the guy who was working on the military balance, it was sort of the crown jewel. You looked at the central European military balance, which was NATO Warsaw Pact. And he said, I'm taking you off that. I want you to look at what the Russians have been writing about since the 70s and early 80s. They say that there's a military technical revolution coming and this war is gonna give us some data. We didn't quite know what was gonna, little side, we were, I mean, we had people who were sort of modeling the war and 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 American casualties. I had one of my fellow officers, Ned Kavanis, Colonel Kavanis, we had these bilaterals going with the Indian armed forces. And so Kavanis is looking at this stuff, we're worried, I mean, really, really worried. And he went to talk to the Indians and he said, you know, he's really gonna be rough. It's good, a lot of casualties. And he said the Indians practically left him out of the room. They said, you guys are gonna wipe the floor up with these guys. And Kavanis comes back, they're crazy. They were right. But anyway, we do, the war happens and we do this assessment of the military technical revolution which is out there somewhere, you could find it. And one of the interesting things that comes out of it is that technology while an enabler is not the be all in the end all. In fact, I wrote a piece in 1994 for the, I think it was a national interest, is that it? Okay, pretty sure. And it made the point that, while technology may be an enabler, if you look at, for example, the period between the world wars, the mechanization, aviation, radar revolution, those are the technology that underwrote that revolution was out in the commercial sector. It wasn't as though you had this proprietary technology and that's what the railroad rifle telegraph revolution of the mid 19th century, railroad telegraph commercial sector, the nuclear revolution was kind of special. And I think everybody sort of sets that to the side. But if you're looking at this revolution that might be occurring now, if you look at the technology that is in the book, it talks about basically except for, I guess, hypersonics and some aspects of directed energy. A lot of this technology, additive manufacturing, which goes by 3D printing, the biosciences, quantum computing, someone down the line, it's most of it is occurring out of the commercial sector. So the point I tried to make in that article and the point I tried to make in the book and in other venues is if you've got technology that's widely available and you think it's going to lead at some point to an enormous boost to military effectiveness, then the two key metrics, if you're a military, one is who figures out how to put this stuff together better than the other guy first, okay? Who figures out Blitzkrieg, who figures out the fast carrier task force, who figures out long range gunnery and flotilla defense which is what Fisher was working on. Who figures out the reconnaissance strike complex and that has a lot to do with what's mentioned in the second part of the book which is it's about technology but it's about organizations and innovation and how they figure this out. And then the second metric, you want to figure it out first, but particularly now because it's so complex you're playing this eight dimensional chess, okay? And the other guy may be asymmetric. He may not fight you the way that you think about fighting him. It's going to be a, the book argues it's kind of dueling reconnaissance strike complexes, us and the Chinese. But the Chinese have, as they would say, reconnaissance strike complex with Chinese characteristics, it's not the same as ours. And so, and neither of us are going to get it perfectly right even if one has an advantage over the other. So the second key issue is if and when we go to war we're going to figure out, this is not working, this is working and so on. Who can adapt faster to fix the problems that are revealed in the crucible of war? So I thought Larry Friedman's point there was a little, certainly you don't want to overemphasize technology. And in fact, Mr. Marshall when we were finishing up the second version of the military technical revolution he found that when I would go out and present it to folks that they were, they were calling it the military technology revolution and that really ticked it off. So the Russians were using another phrase, revolution and military affairs. Marshall said, well that's what we're going to call it now. Okay, so that's the first part. The second part about Ukraine is, you know it's, I could say it's too, too to tell. But just a couple of observations. One is the book really talks about warfare at a high level. And I would argue that this, if you want to say World War II, you know the Germans and the French, the Germans and the Russians, we and the Japanese. This is not that, this is more like the Spanish Civil War. It's, the Ukrainians do not have a reconnaissance strike complex. The Russians, if they do, can't seem to execute it very well. I think there are some interesting aspects of what's going on in the war. One is it really brings home what Sir Michael Howard in his famous 1979, four affairs article calls the Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy, the Social Dimension. What if Zelensky had fled the country? What if the Ukrainians hadn't rallied to the flag? To me that's what if it's Lord Halifax and not Winston Churchill in 1940. And what if it's Alph Landon and not Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. So people, leaders really do matter. Second is there's a lot of drone stuff, a lot of writing about drones that I'm following, you get to find out stuff. When I was chairing the CONO Executive Panel, we actually had a fellow, Brand Farron, who runs Applied Binds. He also was, early on, he was head of Disney Imagineering. So really fascinating guy. And he would keep, every meeting, he had to give Brand 15 minutes. He was talking about drone swarms. And that, for him, that was one of the next big things. And it's, I talk about a bit of the book and it might be a big thing. I'm not quite sure. We have sort of a definitive result, sort of a Blitzkrieg event. France gets defeated in six weeks and there's something very new and different going on here. One of the things we ran into in the discussion on the CONO Executive Panel, was you have these trade-offs with drones. And so, the small drones, the quadcopters and so on. If you want to, you have to trade off between range and payload, the more fuel you put on, the more range, but the less payload you could have. Okay, well, if I have less payload, of course, if I want to make the drone lighter, then can I use it in all kinds of weather? All these issues. And you find out, there's some interesting stories coming out. They have drones now with AI, drones that are remotely piloted and they see this guy and the drone goes and kills the guy outside the tank. And some really fascinating things going on. I'm just not sure that this is a game changer. Again, to me, it's too soon to tell. And people say, well, this is more like World War I. Well, a lot of it depends on the military balance and how you plan to fight and these sorts of things. But yeah, in some ways, it is a lot like World War I because it's very static warfare. It's a war of attrition. And one of the issues that comes to my mind is you're gonna have to find a way to, as the Germans did after World War I, how do you reintroduce mobility on the battlefield? And they found out how to do it. And again, it was a metrics thing to some extent. They looked at tanks. I would argue significantly different than the French did. So if you think you're replaying World War I, you want tanks that emphasize armor and armament. You want a tank that can take a hit and add to the artillery firepower. If you wanna fight Blitzkrieg, you want tanks with speed and range because your stormtroopers and the tanks are gonna break through, but you have to be able to get deep and quickly before the adversary can reform the trench line. So even with common systems, and you think about that today, our drones, their drones and so on, our hypersonics, what trade-offs are we going to make? The British carriers emphasized armor plate and guns for defense. Our carriers had wooden decks, and they emphasized getting as many planes on the carrier as possible because they said the best defense is a good offense. Plus, they were fighting in the med, and we were fighting in the Pacific, which makes a big difference. So, you know, I was glad Friedman wrote a good review, and we would have an interesting discussion if we were able to get together and have dinner. Fantastic. I will say that the case studies are rich, and in each of the case studies, there is a conflict, a smaller conflict where a lot of learning takes place and deliberate learning, so I think that's... One, today, sometimes I run into people and they, oh, we're already doing that. And one indicator, if you're really doing disruptive innovation, is there's going to be blood on the floor, okay? When Fisher tried to engage in disruptive innovation with the Royal Navy, which was... He had something called the scheme, and there were everything from education to communications to operational. And there was something called the syndicate of discontent that formed against him. Admals, politicians, people in the press, and it got so nasty, it was headed by this fellow Admiral, Admiral Beresford, that there was actually hearings in the Committee of Imperial Defense that we're asked with. The Prime Minister was basically chairing them, where Beresford and Fisher were having it out and basically destroyed both their careers. They said, one of the architects of Blitzkrieg, Junior Officer, this guy is crazy. This guy is nuts. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Same thing with carriers. There was something called the gun club, the battleship animals, and Admiral Moffitt, who was head of the Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy, had to basically do all sorts. The guys who succeed in these histories actually engage in some shenanigans to actually advance the ball. So there's a whole soap opera going on behind the scenes as these people, and it happens out in the business world too. There's a great piece by Michael Cotter in an issue of Harvard Business Review that talks about why transformation efforts fail, why these big attempts at innovation. So not only do you have to have the good idea, not only do you have to have the resources and the political support, but you also have to fight the political opposition. So when somebody says to me, well, the American military, we're moving out. If you're moving out, well, the one example I can give you is the Marines because there is kind of a knife fight going on in the Marine Corps right now, or force design 2030. And whether you like it or you don't like it, you at least know the Marines are trying to do something right now. That gets us kind of to today. So I actually want to... I'm going to turn to a page in the book. It's actually the last page, because I think it's pretty strong in the way that it's phrased, and I'm just going to read you the last paragraph of the book. So finally, we have a preliminary assessment of the U.S. military's efforts at disruptive innovation. It finds that from the Revolutionary Military Affairs and efforts at transformation in the decade following the Soviet Union's collapse to the rise and fall of Joint Forces Command to the repeated attempts to develop operational concepts over the past decade, the United States Armed Forces exhibit few, if any, of the characteristics of military organizations that succeed in this endeavor. Okay, so that's kind of a harsh indictment. But I'm an optimist, and this book came out a year ago, and so I'm kind of interested to know, have you seen any encouraging signs that lead you to think that the U.S. is on a path or at least promising small paths to correct some of these errors? For example, are we any closer to identifying that key challenge? Have we clarified the problem in the joint warfighting concept and clarification in joint warfighting concept going together as, you know... Have we resource testing and evaluation? Have we solved this issue of the turnover of key leaders? I mean, these are some of the items that you found were key in seizing these opportunities in disruptive innovation. Have we gone backwards? Are we getting better? I would say we're getting better, but not fast enough, not anywhere near fast enough. So I mentioned, you know, some indicators, some common indicators of these four militaries. And I'll mention... I guess there's about eight or nine. I'll mention a couple and just give you an example because they kind of stand out in my mind. One is extended tenure. Basically, you're talking about an effort that's going to take probably 10, 12 years to bring about. And we give most of our senior commanders two, three years. I was involved in creating joint forces command when I was served on the National Defense Paddle back in 1997 and then served on its advisory board until it went belly up, which I recommended along with a couple of others because it wasn't doing what we hoped it would. So you give a senior general, say the person heading joint forces command this job, but you don't give them enough time to do it. So I'll give you an example. Fisher is number two in the Royal Navy, that he's head of the Royal Navy for six years. He leaves for a couple of years after the bloodbath with Beresford. And then they bring him back. Vonsect is head of the shadow... the tropodon to the shadow German general staff for I think six years. Moffat's head of the Bureau of Aeronautics for 12 years. The only reason he leaves is he dies in an airship crash. You know, there's Rick Over, which is not one of the case studies, but holy cow. And then there is General Creech, who I had never heard of before. I said he was head of TAC from 1978 to 1984, and he actually gets the Air Force reoriented in a way that helps it win Desert Storm. When Mattis was getting ready to shut down joint forces command, he asked me to come down and spend a couple of weeks, and so I did. And one of the things I said is if we really did this right, I said you would have a person come in, they would run GIFCOM for three years. And if we thought that they were on to something, we'd give them another three-year tour. That's six years. And then, you know, if progress is still being made, we'd fleet him out to be Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for four years. That would be the 10-year run. The Navy has something, in fact, one of his key deputies at the time, John Richardson, head of naval reactors. I think the tour is six or seven years long. You can't do some of this stuff. And so what you do is you tell a guy or a gal, you know, you have two or three years, and you sort of bend the whole effort into what can I get done in a couple of years? And the, of course, what you also want, even if a person is not going to be around for 10 or 12 years, you give that person time to institutionalize. So Fisher had something called the Fishpond, which were his acolytes. And he was very good at placing them in key positions. General Creach, American Air Force, same thing. Moffat made sure that they changed the personnel system so that if you were going to command a naval air, yeah, a naval air station or a carrier, you had to be a naval aviator. So he would carry command slots, paths to Adble for these people. That's a big part of the effort. So I just don't see that right now. And when I was chairman of the CO&A executive panel, we really tried to resurrect. I was calling it, they had something called the Strategic Studies Group that walk-ins set up in the 80s to do strategic planning. And you got some really good people in there. They became animals. They became leaders of the service. They kind of lost their way. They were disbanded, but creating something like the Strategic Planning Group, resurrecting that up in Newport, and things like that for the other services, I think would be a good thing. So that's one. Another is how are you going to find out how you can bring all these elements? How you wage cross-domain warfare across eight domains with all these different capabilities? And the way it's done in the book is... The way I... I guess I realized how it was being done by these four militaries was something I called the virtuous cycle. So you would do it now... Somebody would have a vision. You know, this is the next big thing. Okay. They would do analysis. Then they'd do a war gaming. And then they would do exercises. But they would do these exercises not at the tactical level. They would do it at the operational level. And then they would feed... It was a constant feedback loop. Over and over. The American Navy is the poster child for this. Between the two World Wars, they ran something like 130 war games on War Plan Orange at the Naval War College. They ran fleet problems every year where they took most of the fleet out of the Pacific and the fleet fought the fleet. Some of these ran from Alaska down to Hawaii and to the West Coast. That's the area they were conducting these exercises. And they were finding out what worked and what didn't work. And they were building momentum for change because these officers who were out there doing these things, they would see what was working. And you couldn't unsee it. The big example with the Germans was in 1937, the first time they used a Panzer Division and the North German plane exercises. The Panzer Division was tearing up the whole exercise. They had to shut down a two-week exercise after three days. And General Beck, who was head of the German General Staff, had a mini-fit. But again, you can't unsee what these people were seeing. And so to me, that's the way you find out faster and better than your adversary what's going to work. So that was another issue. So these, again, I've been campaigning for a combined training center. In fact, about 20 years ago, I talked to Hugh White. He was then basically our USDP for the Aussies. And I said, we need something big so we can radiate. Because a lot of this is going to be jamming and counter-jamming and so on and trying to break up the battle networks. And I said, Australia, that's what I want. I want Australia. And he said, we have big parts of the country that are basically empty. He said, the only reason you don't have that kind of a center in Australia is because you haven't asked for one. And I don't know. 25 years ago was a long time. Actually, it was longer than 25 years. And I think this is what Admiral Harris was. I've had some conversations with him when he was, in fact then, I guess, that was Pekong, wasn't Syncfac. Yeah, that's what we need to do. We need to find out. Now, one of the problems you're going to run into, one of the problems we ran into at Joint Forces Command is when you do something like that, if you are engaged in disruptive innovation, if you think that things are really going to change big time, you're going to create among and within the services some big winners and losers. And the losers tend to see things, I would think, that's where you get the syndicate of discontent. That's where you get the fighter mafia and so on. That's where you get the gun club. So that's, I think, one of the key reasons why we have not seen this kind of capability created. And then I'll shut up. But if you look at the administration's budget that's just come out, and if you look at our strategy that goes back, I think the NDSS 2017 or 2018, we're only going to fight one big war. Well, think about World War II. We fought two big wars in World War II, but there was no patent third army out in the Pacific. There was no task force 58, 38 in the Atlantic with Halsey and Spruince running it. A war with Russia is very different than a war with China. And you can't just say, well, we'll go here and we'll go there. Well, no, unless you want to be suboptimal for both. So unless you're going to actually spend the money that we need and which we could if we got our fiscal act together, you're going to have to make a choice. And I came up with four metrics, you know, Russia, China, Russia, China. And the metrics are who has the greatest military potential over the next 20 years because if we go to war today, you know, we go to war today so we have to think about what we're planning. And it's clearly China. I mean China's economy is just ginormous compared to Russia. There are so many other ways. So that's one. Two, where do we have strategic depth? Well, we have it in Europe. We don't really have it. You know, first island chain, some of that stuff goes going to be awfully hard to get it back. Okay, so those two for China. Third is, do we have a great power ally that's on the front lines? Well, we don't in Europe, but we do in Asia. We have Japan, arguably Korea, maybe even Taiwan with their Jippies, you know. So, again, it's China. And fourth is, you know, if there were no United States, who would stand a better chance of defending themselves? And it's the Euros. The Euros have a much bigger population. They have great technology. Britain, France, Germany, and Italy all have GDPs bigger than Russia's. So, you know, whether, you know, we tried to coddle them. We tried to encourage them. We tried to beat on them. You know, no matter what we do, the Euros don't seem to be stepping up. And in the past, we could kind of get away with that, but we can't do that now. So, if it's China, then we have to begin to focus on that. But we can't have a joint operating concept that's got to fit everything because you're not going to fight in the Pacific the way you fight in Europe, let alone the Middle East. I'm going to stay one more question, and then we're going to go to the audience. And I have to ask it because in the book, you talk about, you know, one of the great things to have is a little bit of serendipity, so a little bit of luck. And then, of course, you also talk about the difference between a first-mover advantage and a second-mover advantage. So, you know, I'm curious because, you know, when I was in Dopecom with Admiral Harris, we had a lot of concerns about the INF treaty and what it was doing to us. And I can't help but think, you know, the INF treaty provided China with a little bit of serendipity because, you know, they were able to have a first-mover advantage on hypersonics and longer-range precision munitions. But, you know, do you agree that that happened and do we gain any second-mover advantage from, you know, what, in mine and others' opinion, we may have lost about 10 years in development. Well, so far, we haven't lost anything. So, one of the things that you look for in developing strategy are symmetries or advantages, okay, and how important are they? And so, but it goes back into, well, what are you trying to do? You know, are you trying to defend the first island chain or are you trying to defend Europe, okay? Second, how do you think you're going to do it? And, in fact, I brought a couple of copies. The operational concept. So, this is Archaeologic Defense 2.0. And it says, this is how we're going to defend the western Pacific. This is sort of an air-land battle for the western Pacific. Okay, for those of you who remember the Cold War, which I'm looking out there and I'm saying probably not too many. So, anyway, what do these missiles give you? Will they give you prompt targeting over great rages? You know, very fast. Maybe you wouldn't need them if you had hypersonics, but there's a lot of issues to be worked out with hypersonics. I don't like the fact that the Chinese have them and we don't, because if I have INF missiles and the Chinese know that I could hit targets over great distances very quickly, then they have to take that into account in their planning. They either say, you know, these critical targets, whether it's command posts or air bases or what have you, we're going to have to disperse some of the stuff. We're going to have to harden it. We're going to have to do something, make it mobile. But I'd rather have the Chinese doing those sorts of things than building more missiles to strike me or building more submarines and so on. So, to me, these missiles that they have are driving us to do things that we don't want to do and they're costing us more to offset than it is for the Chinese to create this problem for us. A problem we have with INF missiles right now is we pulled out of the treaty because the Russians were cheating according to the Obama administration and then the Trump administration pulled out. But we don't seem to have any interest in fielding this kind of capability. And, of course, part of that might be because you'd have to base them forward. You know, they're not ICBMs. And so the question then is, who will take them? And I can tell you, I talked to Abe's former, well, he's a former prime minister, was his deputy national security adviser last week. And, you know, they're thinking about these sorts of things for themselves. So they see an advantage in this. And again, but there... So I wouldn't call that necessarily serendipity. Serendipity is something like in the book. So has anybody ever heard of a flying deck cruiser? And the Navy wanted to build a flying deck cruiser in the early 1930s. Arms control limited what we could do. 25,000 tons of aircraft carrier. That's how much you could have with the Washington Naval... Washington Naval Tree, right? So Moffat, who's head of the Bureau of Air... He's scheming... He's an incredible schemer. You know, him, guys like him and Rick Over and Fisher. And so how can I get more air power out to sea? And so they come up with this idea of building... taking a ship that's building to be a cruiser and making it a cruiser on the front end and having a flight deck on the back end. And they're going to build, I don't know, five of these things. And the depression hits. And so we're not going to build these things. And you could have... I suppose you could have sat there and said, okay, well, you know, these... Oh, you don't remember the King Kong movie. Goodness, if you don't remember the Cold War. Anyway, they're these biplanes, you know, and they could take off with just about anything. They could take off in this room. But aviation technology was going like this. And so, you know, planes were getting bigger, engines were getting bigger, you know. And so they needed longer runways. They needed a longer carrier deck to be able to launch these things. And so these things are horrible. If you would have built them, you would have wasted your money. Same thing with the carrier ranger. The carrier ranger was going to be the first designed from the Keel-Up aircraft carrier, okay? It was going to be 14,000, around 14,000 tons. We had these two mistakes, Saratoga and Lexington. They were converted cruisers. You could convert cruisers under the treaty. There were some like 33,000 tons. These were too big. It was 14,000 tons. We could build a lot of rangers to get up to 175,000 tons. And that's what Moffitt wanted to do. He wanted to build five rangers. He was not particularly happy with the Saratoga and Lexington. Well, you go to World War II, and who do you read about these days? You know, read Ian Toll. Well, it's all about Saratoga and Lexington. The rangers, often the Atlantic, you know, because it's too small. You know, you need long runways for these big planes. You need big carriers because you want big airwigs. You want 100 planes. And one of the things that's interesting about early on in World War II is when you get radar and radio, you get long-range radio, long-range radar. What starts out at midway is offense dominant. I got to find the other carrier before he finds me to the Combined Operations Center. We can see them coming long way away. And so the whole air wing changes. It changes from emphasizing attack aircraft to a much greater emphasis on fighter interceptors because you know when they're coming. And so that was, again, you run into these lucky sort of, geez, you know, we could have had a lot of flying deck cruisers and rangers. That wouldn't have been very good for us. So there's serendipity. There's serendipity, you know, the Germans had to choose between von Zicht, who was Mr. Blitzkrieg, and this guy, Reinhardt, who said, we got to figure out how to fight World War I better. Well, you know, somebody made the choice for the Germans at Hitler. It was good that they made it for von Zicht. So again, luck. You know, there's a certain amount of luck involved. So we're going to go to questions. So for those of us joining online, you should have the Slido app. So you want to use that for your questions and we'll make sure to take at least one question from online. But let's start with folks in the room for questions, please. Sir, when we talk... Use the microphone because that's for folks online, so they'll be able to hear you. Sir, when we talk about the origins of victory and, you know, all of these inputs that come to that over time, one thing that I've wondered about recently and some people are writing about it is like a lack of imagination when we think about, you know, what could happen? Like one example is the 9-11 report. In the lack of capability that we necessarily had, it was our lack of imagination that didn't allow us to think that terrorists could hijack planes and attack our cities. Where do you see lack of imagination playing out now? And is there anything that we can do to zap us into thinking more imaginatively, you know, at the strategic level to maybe get after some of these things and push some limits a little bit? Well, the Scenario's book has actually held up pretty well and there were some... They actually talked about a... The book was published in 2009 and talks about a pandemic and talks about problems at the border. So anyway, I would say you have to have... You have to have the right kind of thinkers. There's people who are particularly good at that. There's a book by Nobel Prize winner named Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow. He talks about the difference, you know, thinking fast, those are the fighter pilots, you know, I've got to make decisions real fast. Thinking slow, you know, people like me, very slow, very reflective, you know. The slow thinkers typically come up with this stuff. Maybe they have more time to smoke weed or something. I don't know. It's... It is interesting when we ran... So Archipelagic Defense comes out of the 2014 summer study and... So this may help a little bit. So OSD... So let me read... In 2008, I'm running the Center for Strategic and Vegetarian Assessments and we do... With ran, we do a... a PACAF game out in Hawaii. And we're just starting to look at the Chinese because it's sponsored partly by Mr. Marshall in that assessment. And Bob Work comes back. He was working with us at the time. And Bob said, we need something like Air Land Battle for the Western Pacific. Again, I'm... This is how we were going to fight the Cold War in Europe. And... So we did something called Air Sea Battle. And the Pentagon picked it up. They had an Air Sea Battle office and so on. And so... But one question I have is, why didn't the Pentagon pick this? Why aren't these really bright military officers? So that was one issue. But by 2014, about five years later, the Air Sea Battle office has been folded into the Joint Staff, you know, mega... Joint Battlestory Galactica operational concept. And... By the way, there's a great short story called Complexity. And it is by Arthur C. Clark, you know, the 2001 guy. You can probably find it online. It was written in the early 50s. But anyway, I just commend that to you if you have time. It's about technology and its uses and its misuses. But... And by 2014, OSD policy said, well, you know, we have the Air Force and the Navy talking about how they would fight in the Western Pacific. Why not the Army? Where's the Marines? And the Army is doing stuff like, well, the Army is a strategic force with anti-manned power, and everybody's got an Army, but not everybody's got a Navy. And it doesn't... We'll tell us how you're going to fight in the Western Pacific. And so we ran this summer study, and we resurrected kind of the color plans that we had prior to World War II. We said, OK, plan orange is how we're going to defend Taiwan against a blockade. Plan green is we lose Taiwan. We're going to use the Philippines as a staging area for a counteroffensive. And the idea was how are we going to blockade China? And so, you know, we were looking at these. So what happens if a war starts in Korea and we start funneling forces into Korea, but the real attack is coming in the South China Sea? And so we're looking at these sorts of things. And, you know, there's no monopoly on thinking about this stuff. If you looked at the Cold War, so I'm working for Weinberger and Carlucci, you know, back in the day in Cheney when they were Defense Secretary. And we had three different mobilization plans for Europe. OK. We had, you know, the big war. We had one called the Hamburg Grab. Anybody know what the Hamburg Grab is? It's not, you know, you go down to, you know, hearties. Never mind. So it was, what if the Soviets, Hamburg was, anybody know how far, oh, you know, how far is it? From the inner German border. It's not far at all. So it was, you know, the Soviets are just going to, you know, put a bunch of tanks together, race across, grab Hamburg, and say, let's negotiate. And, you know, you want to go to nuclear war? You want to risk that? Oh, the Euro's no, no, we don't. So, you know, the idea was how are we going to stop from doing that? Because if they do that, you know, does that fracture the alliance? Another one was they had the Soviet forces in Hungary. We thought they were going to go south. But they said, well, you know, they could go through Austria, you know, up the chute there. What are we going to do about that? So there was a whole range of contingencies that were being looked at. I went and was talking to some Navy admals recently, and this is another thing. We glad to get some feedback from the audience. So there was something, and this wasn't secret stuff. This is appearing in what we call the posture state of Echel. So it's 2, 4, 10, 14, 21, 30. And 2, 4 was we get two days warning, the war starts on day four. We get 10 days warning, the war starts on day 14. We get 21 days warning, the war starts on day 30. So we would look at, you know, in terms of the mobilization buildup, where bumps were occurring, where they would suddenly get an advantage, a big advantage, and that would be the point where we need to either hammer it down or they would have incentive to go to war at that point in the mobilization process. And that's where the Army got pompous. Anybody know what pompous is? What's pompous? It's preposition, overseas material, configured in unit sets. So we had about four or five divisions of just equipment. As I was stationed in Texas, they said, go check out our equipment in Germany. And you go to Germany, and there it is. You know, the German's very neat, very clean. There was all set to go. So just fly the troops in. And there's one thing I would say positive. It seems to me that General Flynn is doing about as good a job as he can given. So they're, you know, trying to preposition stuff forward. For example, you know, the pompous of the 21st, Westpac pompous or something. But again, here's a commander who's got a couple of years. And if he has a vision, you know, can he transmit it to enough people? And, you know, one of the things I always experienced with commanders in the Army when I was in is, well, if, you know, if Krepitovich made his mark doing this, I'm going to make my mark doing that. He's already done this. So again, it's going to take some serious leadership from the top to make some track, get some traction here. Sorry for going on for so long. No, that's great. If you want to make, General Flynn's a good friend of the association. And if you want to make him go high and right, tell him that ask him about Indo-Pacon being a maritime theater. Anyway, just to emphasize it is absolutely a joint theater because of that has to go on there. Well, we did. So this came out of the summer study that year. And the question was, go tell us, you know, what can the Army do? So we said, well, what's the Army's competitive? Well, ground forces, deep magazines. You can harden ground forces ways. You can't harden maritime and air forces. You can harden their communications. You know, if the satellites go out, they're not as screwed as, you know, the other components and so on. And so you begin to look at that. And you find that Secretary Hagel, I don't think, Bob Work really pushed this, but Secretary Hagel, I don't think, really grasped that as well as he might have. We said air defense, Army. We said missile defense, coastal defense, which was anti-ship cruise missiles. And I went over to Japan and they were working on that. When I came out with this, it was okay. So if the Chinese say they have to control the air and the sea and the information domains to invade, to conduct an offense, then we have to deny them that, right? The question is how are they planning on doing it and so on. But the Army can play a big role in that. Another issue which I came up with this is, okay, so suppose the Chinese get ashore, then how are you going to, you know, basically try and slow them down. And I came up in this version with, I called it turtle defenses and G-RAMR regulars. So turtle defenses come from reading Ian Toll's trilogy of the Pacific War. And there was, when they invaded Iwo Jima, one Marine captain reported to his superior that the Japanese were not on Iwo Jima. They were in Iwo Jima. Basically, they had buried themselves. And we had total control of the air, total control of the sea, and it took us months to get those guys out. And, okay, so, you know, maybe think about turtle defenses. Hezbollah. Think about what Hezbollah did in the Second Lebanon War. Think about what's going on with the Houthis these days. And I think, so G-RAMR has guided rockets, artillery, mortars, and missiles. And so irregular forces, whether it's Hezbollah or what's going on with the forces in Yemen and so on, especially with precision, you can do a lot, you can make people's lives miserable. And, you know, what about that in Taiwan? What about that in the Philippines with ground forces? And then if you're going to conduct a counteroffensive, and this is something that Bob Work and I talked about, it's the Marines don't have the capacity, I don't think, that they would need to do it all on their own. You know, a forcible entry operation, say to take back Pala Long in the Philippines. So we have Rangers. We have Air Assault. We have Airborne. You know, what about at Krepenevich's Training Center? You set the task of, okay, we have the Chinese up for, they've got Chinese equipment. They're going to set up their A2AD bubble. How do we go in and take it back? And, you know, do we have the right force mix? You know, we have these various types of forces. What would work and what wouldn't? You know, where would you do your prep fires? In World War II, we had battleships, you know, off the coast of Ibu Jima. Where would the fires come from today? You know, incredible distances. You know, obviously we saw that in Afghanistan right after 9-11. You know, we had aircraft flying off the carriers hitting a landlocked country. I think that we're getting close to time, if I'm not mistaken. But do we have enough time for maybe one, at least one from online? David, please. So we have a question from online about how one should go through the process of integrating or learning lessons from allies who have learned them, or not allies, as well without duplicating their process or reinventing the wheel. Why don't you understand that question? I think... I think what we can learn from allies that are fighting or allies that are working on operational concepts as well. Well, obviously, say the Ukrainians are our allies. Right now the Israelis, you could say both countries are de facto allies. Obviously we would want to get any lessons learned because if you look at, say, the situation in Israel, more and more the world is becoming urbanized. And so, you know, there's a... And of course, even in the Pacific in World War II, the battle for Manila was extremely costly, both militarily in terms of human life and so on. Always good. It's good to learn from your allies, good to learn from your adversaries, good to learn from anyone that you think has something to offer. So I certainly wouldn't write off our allies with me focusing primarily on the problem posed by China and the need to defend our allies along the first island chain. I certainly have talked to the Australians and they're doing some interesting work, more so the Japanese. So when... when archipelagic defense came out about two weeks later, the Japanese invited me to go to Japan, went to Japan, and went to Okinawa, went to the Western Army headquarters and briefed them on this stuff. But they briefed me. It was General Badjo at the time. And he briefed me on the things they were doing and they were ahead of us in areas like coastal artillery, for example. And they were in the midst of basically transforming one of their army brigades to do marine kind of work. They showed me videos of their exercises where they had anti-ship mines. They were dumping them in the water like tic-tacs. I mean, they were identifying the choke points and they were just flooding those areas with anti-ship mines. That's a good idea. So in this version of archipelagic defense, it's, well, how do we lay that stuff down? If the Chinese get to go first, we may have to do it with bombers, which we can do. There have been some recent experiments with mine lane using bombers because it may be too risky to get surface ships in there to do it. What you'd like to have, again, is army forces at critical choke points, positioning this stuff. So certainly a lot to learn from what the Japanese are doing. How are we on time? I think we're about done. Okay. So Dr. Krepeniewicz, thank you so much for doing this event and for being with us here. Thank you to all the people who joined us online. And then a big thank you to David Sturman and the whole crew here. It's New America for doing such a fantastic job, as well as Arizona State University's Future Security Initiative, who's also a sponsor of this event. For those who are here, there's a reception afterwards. For those who are at home, go pour a drink, and the person will be able to talk to you. But the book is called The Origins of Victory. It's still available. I think it's available on Audible now. I don't know if it's available on paperback yet. Not yet, but Yale called me the other day. They said they're coming out. The sales have been good enough that it's coming out on paperback sometime, I guess, around October. By the way, I brought three copies of Archipelagic Defense. I have to say Archipelagic at least several times a day, to get how to say it. So if anybody is interested, I just have three. So first come, first served. All right. Well, thank you all very much.