 I now have the great pleasure, for the second year in a row, of introducing my, you heard this last year, but Princeton rules demand us to say this, my 1980 classmate, General Mark Milley, who is the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. He assumed duty as the 39th Chief of Staff of the Army in 2015. He has had a remarkable career, and I'm not going to go through it except to just point out a few things that I think bear directly on the future of war. He has served in command positions at bases in North Carolina, California, New York, Korea, Hawaii, Kentucky, and Iraq. So just think about that and wonder how likely that will be 10 to 20 to 30 years from now in terms of the career of the top officer in the Army. And he has been deployed to Sinai in Egypt, to Panama, to Haiti, to Bosnia-Herzegovina, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Somalia and Columbia. So ask yourself also in the future what that means about where our forces have been deployed and where they will be deployed. Please welcome General Milley. Thank you. You look so great. All right. Come have a seat here. So I get to sit on the couch. Awesome. Get people in the right reflective mood. That's right. That's right. That's right. So General Milley, at first place, we are thrilled to have you back because we heard you last year. And I want to start our conversation taking off from where we were last year. Where you said you thought that in 10 to 20 years there would be a change not in the nature of war, but the character of war. So my first question is, explain that difference. And then I want to take off from there. Well, the nature of war, I think, is immutable. It has to do with politics. War is about imposing your will, your political will, on your opponent by the use of organized violence. And that's the essential part of war. That's what distinguishes it from diplomacy. And the nature of war is characterized by friction, fog, politics, human will, those sorts of factors. And I don't think that's going to change. That's been around for several thousands of years. That's probably not going to change. But the character of war changes and changes from time to time frequently. But fundamentally, it only changes once in a while in a fundamental sense. And I think we're on the cusp of a fundamental change in the character of war. Character of war has to do with a lot of things. Technology is oftentimes one of the drivers of the change in character of war, but also the social factors. How you organize a political system, such as following the French Revolution as an example when Napoleon had a nation in arms. That was a fundamental shift in the character of war. And because it differed from the way armies had been organized in the past? From monarchy type armies, you now had a nation committed to an idea, France, and he was able to mobilize the mass of his greatest asset, which was people. Whereas the previous monarchies could only mobilize so many professional soldiers that they were willing to pay for. So that shift meant that Napoleon had a different type of army in its people based on a social or political change. Other changes that have occurred, a lot of them are technology. So the introduction of the stirrup, when people learned how to steer a horse or the bit. Thought about the stirrup. Or the change from a smoothbore musket to a rifled weapon, which increased the lethality and the range of the weapon. The introduction of machine gun, airplane, mechanization, those sorts of things fundamentally changed the character. But if you look at, for example, one of the most discussed changes in the character of war was mechanization, wheels and tracked vehicles in combination with aircraft and in combination with the radio, which allowed for dispersed command and control. All those technologies were available to all the countries of the 1920s and 30s. So the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, Germany, they all had those. But the only country that really combined them in a unique way of war, which was doctrine, were the Germans. And that allowed them then to overrun Europe between 1939 and 1942. With the Blitzkrieg. Which we call the Blitzkrieg, which is really a Western term. The Germans call it war of movement. But they were able to take the technologies and combine them in a unique way of war. So that changed the character of war at the mid 20th century. So you've got different periods of time in which character of war has changed. But the nature of war has remained pretty immutable over time. So if the character of war can change as a result of social and political upheaval technology, how you put technology together with doctrine, what is it today that you see that is fundamentally changing the character of war? There's a lot of factors, I think, that are converging in time and space. I think in terms of time, my guess is that the character of war, the fundamental shift and the character of ground war in particular, will change my guess is about 10 years from now. That's why I say we're on the cusp of it. We're not in it yet, but we can see the previews. And in terms of time, we've probably got about 10 years, maybe 15 at the outside. And what's changing, there's some societal things changing. So if you look at demographics, one of the big phenomena that's occurred over, say, 100, 150 years is the urbanization of the world's population. That's really the rise over run has significantly increased. So today, I think you might have something like 10 megacities or 12 megacities or something like that defined as over 10 million people. But by mid-century, we're going to have at least 50 or more megacities. And like 30 will be in China alone when you look at the other side. That's right. So and if war is really about politics and the root word of politics is polis, the Greek polis, so it's about people and power. So if war is about politics, it's going to be fought in general where people are. And it'll be fought, in my opinion, in urban areas. So we are probably seeing a shift, a fundamental shift, in the physical terrain of where wars will be fought from rural or desert-type areas, sparsely populated areas, to heavily densely populated areas in megacities. So that means something like looking at the Fallujah or the Syrian cities. That's not sort of an anomaly. That is where you think war will be fought. When we look at these horrific pictures of Aleppo, that's I think in Aleppo, Fallujah, Mosul, in my view, these are previews of future war on a larger scale, perhaps. So like before World War I, World War I, it's long been written that the generals couldn't connect the dots of the technologies, the machine gun, the barbed wire, and some other to the artillery, the massive artillery. And it led to a huge slaughter and the ascent of the defense over the offense. So they entered World War I thinking that cavalry, chargers, and close order drill going across open fields was a good tactic. And then they ran into the machine gun and so on and led to a mass slaughter and eventually trench lines and so on and so forth. Well, the previews of World War I were already seen in the Boer War, the Russian-Japanese War, American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War and several other wars that occurred prior to World War I. But people didn't quite connect the technology with the doctrine, with the terrain, and so on and so forth and led to the result of World War I. So as we move forward, the challenge for not just the army but the Navy Air Force Marines, all of us, and I would argue all armies around the world are looking at pretty much the same thing, is how do you take these technologies that are out there, apply them to your ways of war, your doctrine, and then apply them to some of the social changes that we're seeing. So what does all that mean then? So like for the army is an example. If in fact, future war will be largely fought in urban terrain, what's the so what? Well, that has huge implications for the United States Army. The United States Army's been optimized for 241 years to fight in rolling terrain, gently rolling hills, northern hemisphere. We were sub-optimized for jungle war. We have the capability for jungle war, but we're not optimized for it. We're sub-optimized for mountain warfare capability, but not optimized. We do deserts, but not. We do deserts. We do deserts, and we're sub-optimized for urban capabilities, right? So what this means then, and I've discussed this with the Army leadership, is we're gonna have to, as we move forward, within the next 10 years, optimize the army for urban warfare. And that's a general statement. That has all kinds of doctrinal implications. How do you fight in urban area? Equipment implications for the width, size, weight of tanks, or tractor wheel vehicles, the elevation of guns, the wingspan of helicopters, or the rotor span of helicopters, and there's a thousand other implications. So you've also, when you think about the changes over history from, you know, large mass formations, I'm just thinking about the Revolutionary War, right? Do you have the British in these large mass formations? Do you have the Americans, you know, not in uniform, able to be much scrappier? What does that mean for urban warfare in terms of how the armies gotta be organized, and what kinds of weapons it faces? Well, for the organizational part, that'll be a significant change. If we optimize for urban combat, by the nature, urban areas, compartment organizations, just by streets, and buildings, and floors, and rooms, and so on and so forth. So the army will definitely have to organize differently, probably into smaller, more compartmented groups that can operate in a network. You know, your recent book there, I guess it's published today or something. You had an advanced copy. I had an advanced copy. But she's right, on the networked nature of the future. So we'll have to have, what I think, is a lot of relatively small formations that are networked and can leverage, you know, air force or naval-delivered joint fires, and leverage other units within the area to achieve a battlefield effect. When you say relatively small, how many people? Well, that's, we're debating that, you know, how big organizations, you know, these are units of action, so to think. Probably somewhere in the range of companies to battalions, something like that. Now, that doesn't mean you do away with battalions and brigades and divisions. That's not at all what it's saying. The operational unit we're talking about. Yeah, the operational, the fighting element, will probably end up having to be a much smaller entity. If you think, in some ways, you think of how some of our special operations operate today, that may be a preview of how larger armies operate in the future. And yet, when you and I also spoke before, you pointed out that with GPS and cell phones, there is no element of surprise in the same way, which also seems to me to be a major change in how you have to think about, I mean, when I think about general plotting strategy, I think, you know, obviously, where I go in the summer is where Hannibal defeated the Romans in the Second Punic War, and he did it because the Romans marched around the mountain into the rising sun, and the Carthaginians were deployed in the hills exactly where we go, and they had the element of surprise, and they'd round a lot of people in the lake. Had people had cell phones, that would have been a little harder to do. Yeah, so one of the additional technological changes that we're seeing, and have been seeing really for 20 years or so, is sort of the ubiquitous nature of information technologies, and with that comes sensors. So all of these iPhones, for example, that are out there, are communication devices, but they're also sensors, in the sense that you can video, you can tape record, you can track them. So in a very real way, almost nowhere on earth can you be unobserved. And so for, that's the first time really in human history, that's not an absolute, that's not like you can't, it's not a total absolute, but it's, the ability to see worldwide is fundamentally different than anything previously seen in human history. So if you can be seen with the advent of precision munitions, you can be hit. So large formations running around on a battlefield will be dead formations, because they'll be able to be seen pretty quickly, and with the advent of precision munitions, they'll be able to be hit pretty quickly. So your probability of survival, then, will depend on, as in the past, when the lethality of the battlefield has increased, units got smaller, and they dispersed more widely. Now that's been true for the last four, or 500 years, and I expect it'll be true in the future. So as the battlefield becomes more lethal, because of the ability to see, and the ability to hit with precision munitions, then units will become smaller, and they will disperse even more widely than they're currently dispersed. They'll have to in order to survive. And I suspect units will have to essentially stay in a constant state of motion, because movement provides you the security and the ability to survive. If you stay stationary for any length of period of time, say more than a couple of hours, you're probably gonna get killed. So, I mean, that for me really does capture a change in the character of war. I mean, this image of small dispersed units who are in constant motion, and probably technologically an individual motion to make it harder to be seen. But we've been talking almost 15 minutes about the change in the character of war already through demography, through the terrain, through the nature of technology we already have. We haven't even mentioned what most people think these days when they think future of war, they think drones and droids, right? They think artificial intelligence and robots, but you've already captured a major shift without that. Now I wanna ask you to move ahead and imagine, okay, so what happens then when these small dispersed units are, to what degree can they be robots? And to what difference does obviously unmanned vehicles really war warriors who can be killed without, or taken out without sacrificing human life, which has always been integral to the character of war? Well, that's right. There's a set of technologies out there that, again, we're seeing previews today. Just as you saw the biplane in World War I, and then you saw fleets of bombers and fighters in World War II. So today we see a limited use of robotics. That's what you call drones or unmanned aerial vehicles. Those are not autonomous, they're semi-autonomous, they're controlled by a pilot. You'll see on ground forces, you'll see some limited use of robots in explosive ordnance disposal. Then we'll send a robot out to dismantle the bomb or something like that. And you'll see some other limited use. However, most armies, ours included, are moving out very, very quickly on the rapid development of robotic capabilities. So the Navy is moving very quickly at surface to subsurface, sail-less ships. The Air Force is moving very quickly at developing a pilotless Air Force. And maybe it won't be completely pilotless. There'll be a pilot on the ground, or maybe it'll be a lead aircraft with the wingmen will be pilotless. Things like that. The maritime and air domain from an engineering perspective, though, it's easier to overcome the engineering problems of flying a robot or sailing a robot. When you get in the ground, it's a little bit more difficult for the scientists to figure out the robots because you've got the undulating terrain, you've got rocks, you've got dirt, you've got dust, you've got the buildings, you've got all kinds of intervening variables for a robot to negotiate on ground terrain. So the ground for land warfare, the forces that operate in the ground are lagging behind air and maritime in the development of robotic capabilities. That doesn't mean they won't solve it. They're going to solve it. It's a matter of science and time. And I guess, my guess is 10 years, 10 to 15 years, you'll see the large scale introduction of robotic capabilities in land warfare. The Russians right now, the head of the Russian military has publicly stated that he wants to have somewhere around 30% of the Russian forces, ground forces, robotic by 2020. I don't know if that's scientifically possible, but it's a statement of intent. So it's clear. Little green robots. Well, it's clear that we're gonna have to move in that direction. For the US Army, we're doing that. So think for example, we've lost a lot of soldiers in the last 15 years that were driving convoys from point A to point B and were attacked by IEDs. And they were delivering food or ammunition or something like that. Think if you could about a logistics convoy delivering the required supplies to a forward unit, but there's no drivers in that convoy. This is already available in the commercial world. In California, in Texas and other states, there are driving-less vehicles in the commercial world delivering goods and services to people throughout the state. And they're doing it on a day-to-day basis. Now, a combat environment is fundamentally different than the highways and biways in Texas or California, but it is conceivable and possible. So the introduction of robotic, either autonomous or semi-autonomous land vehicles, I think is a given. I think it's gonna happen. So do you think that's gonna make war more or less likely? Because I think about, again, as war has changed, one of the big changes was that when a monarch could send out peasant soldiers, there wasn't a cost in the same way. And then as the people's army and certainly our military today, the greatest, the wadiest decision you face, the commander-in-chief faces, is you're gonna send people into war and people are gonna die. If that's less true, because you're sending in robotic soldiers, will we be more likely to do it? Or knowing the other side can also do that. Do you think that's not gonna inflict the same kind of damage, so less likely? Well, I think this is a very serious moral debate that has to take place here as to which one of those propositions is gonna hold true. At the end of the day, the nature of war is not gonna change, whether it's robots, machine guns, airplanes or whatever. It's about imposing your political will on a human opponent through the use of organized violence, that's what it's about. And arguably, if one side has a sizable robotic capability and the other side doesn't, then you could easily make the case that the side with the robotic capability is willing to take greater risk in engaging in armed conflict because the cost to that person or that society might be less. But you also have to figure out the cost of these things. So these things may be very expensive, they might be getting, they might be cheap. So there's a lot of factors that would go into it. On an ethical basis, though, if you remove death, human death from the equation of war, then the probability is conflict would increase, I would suppose. But I think it's worthy of an in-depth discussion. Another book for you. For you. So let me now move to Russia because you said the character war changes but the nature doesn't. The nature is the imposition of the will of one entity on another, one nation on another by organized violence. But throughout, we had the Cold War, right? And we had, there were hot wars as part of the Cold War but our state of being with respect to the Soviet Union was described as a Cold War. And there are people today who argue, and we heard some people yesterday at the Cyber Security Conference point this out, that with the new Russian doctrine, or not so new now, but the Russian doctrine of hybrid war, destabilization of other countries by information operations and cyber operations, which we are seeing right now is part of their war doctrine. So my question is if there is no organized violence but there is radical destabilization of another country, which is imposing Putin's will to essentially attack the West but doing it through these other means, is that still war? Because there are people who are arguing we are in Cold War II. We've had Cold War I, the United States I, Russia was humiliated, we're in Cold War II, Russia's come back, we've seen that movie before. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a tough question. I would argue that I wouldn't overly focus on the word organized violence because terrorism may appear to be unorganized, that doesn't mean it's not organized, or subversion or the use of other means other than large field armies clashing on the plains of Northern Europe. There are many ways of war, all of which are organized, but they may not appear to a casual observer as being organized, but there's certainly intent behind it. There are plans that are developed and coordinated and synchronized, and by definition, they're organized. But what you're getting at though is where do you draw the line? Where's the cut line? And that's a difficult question for statesmen, diplomats, civilian leaders, et cetera, to figure out exactly where the quote, unquote, red line is. And that's not easy. And I would argue that right now, and it's not just Russia, there are many other countries that engage in that sort of behavior, that they rationally do not want to take on the United States and head on conflict, armed conflict, but they still have national interests that they're trying to achieve. So they want to achieve those national interests and those national interests are the opposite, perhaps, of the United States. So they want to try to achieve those national interests through means short of open armed conflict and hence hybrid warfare. So they're using a lot of techniques, many of which are old. Some of these are not necessarily new. Some of the technologies they're employing might be new, but the ideas are not necessarily new. So the idea of using terrorist guerrillas and surgeons, information, warfare, propaganda, to achieve national interests, that's been done throughout the ages. It's just the delivery means today through cyber, iPhones, Twitter, all these technological capabilities that are out there in the information space, those are new, but the idea of doing it is not necessarily new. But if we could, so assume for the next five years, there's no actual violence between us and Russia, but there is active cyber war. And so let's leave out, they're not taking down the grid. It's not a specific thing that leads to death because that's just an indirect way of bringing about violence. But it is intensive cyber operations leaking exactly what we're seeing now. Would we say, I mean, as the chief of the army that we are in a kind of war and we're just fighting back with cyber weapons? I just, I'm reluctant, I'm careful about the use of the word war. We've had, you know, you have war on drugs, war on terrorism, war on poverty, war gets thrown around very loosely as a term. But for me, I think we should be a little bit more disciplined in the use of what, you know, the word war because it has all kinds of implications. Just this morning on the news, there was a, I forget who it was, but there was someone who said that the Russian efforts to, in the US election, was an act of war. That's pretty strong language. And if it's an act of war, then, you know, you gotta start thinking about your response to that sort of thing. So I would caution people about use of the term war and make sure that we're clear eyed about what war is and what it isn't. There are a lot of acts that are aggressive, assertive, subversive, working against your interests that may not rise to the level of war. And it's not a crystal clear line. It's something that you have to apply reason to judgment to. It's not crisp. It's not like crossing the white line on highway, changing lanes sort of thing. There are sometimes where it is, on attack on Pearl Harbor, for an example, the invasion of Poland, but there are other times when it's a little bit more murky and we have to be careful about it. Thanks. So let me ask you one last question before we turn it over to the audience questions about different varieties of power. So we've been talking about the power to coerce and that's hard power. But of course, there's also soft power, the power to attract and all the ways in which we can solve problems without actually using violence or overt coercion. So we've just seen a skinny budget from the president and that budget, indeed he said it's a hard power budget that was part of the rollout of the skinny budget. It's a hard power budget. And so it included a radical cut to the State Department and USAID which is really the locus of soft power. So I wanted to ask you about that as Secretary of Defense General Mattis or Secretary Mattis now said, and we've heard Secretary Gates used to say this, but Secretary Mattis said, if you cut the State Department, you got to buy me more bullets. And other folks would say, even if you buy the military more bullets, we can't win without soft power. So I did want to ask you to reflect on that. I think, yeah, I mean, in the conduct of international affairs, you have to have both. I mean, it's not one of the others, not a one and zero sort of equation here. And the United States is a global power and we definitely need soft and hard power tools in the kit bag. The fundamental basis though, in international politics, in my view, the system, the international system is anarchic by definition. Is anarchic. Anarchic by definition. And there's no higher power, there's no higher power to impose order. So in the United States, the system works because you've got various levels of government, federal and state and local governments and you have police forces and other enforcement agencies that can enforce the rule of law. Internationally, it is not that capable internationally to, there's no higher order with a single so legitimate use of force in the international system, which all states maintain within this sovereign boundaries. So by definition, the international environment's anarchic. And when it's anarchic, you get into states have to develop hard power in order to survive. Number one, and number two, to achieve whatever their national interests are. So the United States has a variety of national interests. It's global in nature. And we need, definitely need, in my view, a significant hard power capability. And I would define that as both economic and military. Economics, I would argue, is a form of hard power. I agree with that. So. But out of the State Department or the Treasury. Well, yeah. But I would say that wielding an economic weapon, if you will, is a form of hard power. That's hard power. That is true. And then the military peace. And I firmly believe that history tells us it's peace through strength sort of thing. It's what George Washington said is farewell. It's what many, many other people have said. It goes all the way back to the Roman times when people said if you want peace, prepare for war sort of thing. So if you are very strong, the probability is that your interests will be protected and that your vital national security interests, protection of the Homeland of the United States, for example, are more likely than not to be safe. If you are weak, the probability is they won't be. So militarily I think you have to have a large capability, in my view. But secondly, you also have to have the soft power skills. Because at the end of the day, if you don't have attractive soft power skills and tools, then everyone will lie against you and then you're standing there by yourself. So that's not a good thing either. At the end of the day, I mean, what is power all about? Power is really about getting an opponent or someone else to do what you want them to do that they would not otherwise have done. So you can do that the easy way or the hard way. So you do it the easy way through soft power, powers of persuasion, powers of attraction, logic, diplomacy, et cetera. But at the end of the day, if it's a vital national security interest and that's what's at stake, then you have to have hard power to enforce your will. If you don't, you're gonna lose. But you have to have both. You have to have both. There's no question in my mind. Thank you. All right, so we are opening the floor to questions. The light is a little bright here, but I see a question right there. Just wait for the microphone and then please introduce yourself. Hi, Cameron Keyes, Army Budget Office. I wanted to thank you for being here, sir, because you allowed me to get out of the office. Why aren't you working on my budget? You should be back in the Pentagon. Headed right back there, yeah. You can get my car on the way back. The question I have about the changing character of war in urban areas is about the civilians as targets, whereas historically it's armies battling armies. And I wonder also about climate change and natural disaster as part of the character of war now and responding to those forces. So I'm curious what you have to say about maybe humanitarian aspects, dimensions of conflict and what the army might be doing in the future to take care of those things. Yeah, so I believe that most armies, most militaries carry the values of their society into combat. We're not a light switch and suddenly turn off the values of America as America's army goes forward. So America's army has in the past and will continue in the future, place high value on the lives of the innocent and noncombatants and we will have to do that. And that's one of the problems in an urban environment. It's much, much more difficult with noncombatants. So how do you deal with that? One of the things I think is obviously training, but it's also leader development. So one of the deductions, if you accept the fact that you're gonna fight in urban areas, one deduction will be an increased number of civilians in the area and therefore our forces are gonna have to be much more highly trained in discriminating fire, the application of direct or indirect fire with a high degree of discrimination because we can't go out there and just slaughter people. That's not gonna work. We can't impose carthaginian peace on an opponent. That's not gonna work with American values. And nor should it. So highly trained forces on the use of discriminatory fire. That then places a huge burden on leader development. So one of the things, for example, we're gonna have to, I think, you'll have smaller organizations in these battlefields and again I'm talking beyond 10 years and beyond, but we're probably gonna have to have more mature, more seasoned leaders at lower levels than perhaps the organization Design Calls For Now. Again, I look at the special operations as a model, as a potential model. They have majors in special operations, commanding companies. The regular army has captains. Is there a big difference? There might be, I don't know. We're gonna take a look at that. But the idea of civilians on a battlefield in an urban environment, that will be a fact. There'll be high densities of them. Then from that, you have to deduce that we'll have to have higher degrees of discrimination in our fires, both direct and indirect. And we'll have to have higher degrees of very mature, seasoned leaders. Which then brings you to one more factor that I've talked to leaders about. It's the ethical part of war. So there are some who would argue that war inherently is unethical. And that's fine. So I'm gonna put that to the side. I'm not one of those people. I think there is an ethical use of armed conflict. But what it requires are leaders at the pointy end of the spear that are gonna have to have very, very high degrees of ethical skill and resolution resilience, ethical resilience, to be able to deal with incredibly intense issues in ground combat. Which is fundamentally different in any other form of life. So fighting inside an urban area, fighting by itself, it's a very intense experience, ground combat. Fighting in an urban area is 10x levels of intensity. And the ethical decisions that are required in very short amounts of time, seconds sometimes, are huge. And we're gonna have to train our soldiers and our junior leaders in the ability to make correct ethical decisions in a very, very intense and ethically ambiguous environment. So there's a lot of deductions that we have to take from a simple comment like, hey, it's gonna be more urban warfare. That'll be very difficult. That is fascinating. There was a question back in the back over there. Yeah, right there. Thank you. My name is Steen Ruding. I'm from the University of Southern Denmark and currently American University. Thank you for your comments, General Mimmi. My question is, if the future is urban warfare and smaller dispersed flexible units, how does that tie in with the units or the army you need to counter spheres of interest politics that is expressed in A2AD, problems in the ability to overcome the denial of access or ability to operate within spheres of interest? Do these two armies, do they overlap? Can you make them compatible? Can you optimize for both scenarios or how do you see that relationship? Thank you. Yeah, I mean, the several nations around the world who have developed very complex, very sophisticated anti-area and anti-access area denial sort of capabilities. Obviously Russia, China, to a lesser extent, Iran, North Korea, they've developed some very sophisticated networks. I would argue that those, that A2AD structure is highly lethal and operating inside that structure in large formations will also get you killed. So smaller dispersed, very agile, very nimble organizations that are networked into other lethal systems that are either delivered by air maritime forces will be essential also to rip apart the A2AD networks that are out there. So I do see that we're gonna have to do that. One of the things I'm looking at putting together is what we're calling multi-domain task force, a relatively small organization, something we're experimenting with it now, something in the range of about 1,500 or so troops, probably led by a colonel, maybe a brigadier down the road. And it is capable of engaging in what we're calling multi-domain battle. So that organization will be capable of space, cyber, maritime air and ground warfare. And that these organizations will be highly lethal, very fast, very difficult to pin down on a battlefield. And there'll be very, very high tech organizations that will be very effective inside of A2AD type network. That's so interesting, because it's a different, you know, when we've been talking about hybrid warfare, this is a different kind of hybrid in the sense of integrated, right? Where you take the different domains and you integrate them in the past flexible way. And that's key, that's gonna be key. That's fascinating. I'm neglecting this side. So there we have, they're in the back and I'll come back to you. Hi, Zach Beggs, a reporter with Janes. So the supplemental budget request just went over and includes about 977 million for additional troops for end strength personnel. If that gets approved, do you know how many more soldiers you'd have and how would you intend to use that extra budget? Is there a particular focus maybe for more future warfare capabilities you'd want to put those soldiers towards? Yeah, so. This is a highly specialized audience. Yeah, no, obviously you read the budget. You can check in with my budget guy over here. So. No, it's a great question. I mean, so the short answer is yes, we do know how we're gonna spend that if we're given that money. That budget has yet to, you know, get passed. But our intent in terms of people end strength is to take the regular army, the active duty army, which was on a glide path to go to 450,000 active duty soldiers, turn that around, stop the downward trend and go to an active duty army of 476,000 by one October of this year. We're already recruiting to that. Now, what's the purpose? Where are we gonna put those extra people? Essentially, my guidance is fill in the holes. So we have a readiness issue. You've got a capacity issue, size of the force. You've got a capability issue, which is the modernized technology and the capabilities of the inherent in the organizational structure. But you've also got a readiness issue. So the equipment that you have, is it on hand? Is it ready to, is it fully mission capable? Do you have enough people in the organization? Do they meet the right rank and skill level, et cetera? The biggest drag on army readiness right now is personnel. And we have units out there, many, many units, that have significant holes in their personnel structure. And we need to fill those holes in order to make the current existing legacy army, the one that you see on a day-to-day basis, to make that ready for whatever the president needs it to do, or whatever the nation needs it to do. Right now, we have readiness, significant readiness issues. The biggest one is personnel, and essentially we're gonna fill the holes. We're gonna fill the holes in existing units. So we've got time for two more questions. I'm gonna take them together and then let General Milley ask them together. The first is here, and the second is Doug Alvon. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Ayub Erfanyan. I'm from Afghanistan. Today, the beginning of New Year in Afghanistan, 1396, Nauruz, I wish you all the best and happy Nauruz to all of you. General McMilley, I can't afford to lose this opportunity to express my gratitude on behalf of Afghan people for your excellent service for Afghanistan, for all U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and your sacrifices, we keep dear, and we highly appreciate that. My question is in line with your colleague from the budget also, the challenging environment of war in urban areas. As you know, the brave U.S. special forces back in November 2001, Faut was, as you can see, the General Dostum, which I'm an advisor for him right now, and a very difficult train and on horseback against Talban, Al Qaeda. And now, after 15 or 16 years of engagement in Afghanistan, when our Afghanistan is approached, war terrorist groups, IDEs, what is the lesson there in Afghanistan and how we can deal in mountain areas, not in urban and mountain areas to fight in the future? Thank you. Great, hold that. And Doug, do you wanna ask the last question? It's coming on the... Thanks. General McMilley, Doug Alvent, retired Army officer now at New America. The battlefield you're describing is very interesting and high demand. You kind of gave an illusion of maybe having majors command these companies, but is that really the point of failure? Isn't it the individual soldier who's the point of failure? Special forces are able to operate in these small teams because the youngest person on that team is 24, maybe 25, with a lot of experience. What do you do about these 19 year old infantry men or women these days that may not have the emotional maturity, the training, the judgment, the resilience to operate in this fast, the lethal, dispersed manner? So we've got two questions, one ranging from fighting on horseback still and the mountains of Afghanistan to the future. And I have to say as the mother of an 18 year old and a 20 year old, two boys, it's a very salient question. And to mom, we can't wait to get them in the Army. They would help. Would help them. Be happy to take them on. Don't worry about that, Princeton, our one actor and one musician. So you are welcome. We have lots of bands. So for Afghanistan, Afghanistan is very important. It's doesn't get a lot of coverage, but people need to continually remind themselves, I suppose that the attacks of 911 came out of Afghanistan through other countries, perhaps, but their genesis was in Afghanistan. And our objective from the first day in there on October 7th, 2001, with some green berets and some CIA and some others, was to prevent Afghanistan from ever again being a platform from which to strike the homeland of the United States. And to that extent, at least to date, that's been successful. And the risk of failure in Afghanistan, you know, it's one of those areas that there's 20 or 30 or so international radical terrorist groups that are operating in the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Highest concentration of different terrorist groups in the world that I'm aware of. And the area is known, the general area of the Southern Stands and into Afghanistan is generally known as Kursham. And in the radical Jihadi mythology and their own internal narrative, it's the black flags of Kursham that plays high into their own internal narrative. So what you don't wanna do is hand the radical Jihadi groups a victory over a second superpower. If you wanna see radical terrorism on steroids, hand them that victory, that would be not good. So in their mind, in their narrative, the Mujahideen beat the Soviets, so they beat a superpower. In their mind, they're fighting a second superpower. Don't give them a 2-0 record. Don't hand it to them. So the lesson learned then, in my mind, is we have very good counterterrorists and counter guerrilla and counter-insurgent capabilities in our conventional forces and our special forces. We're very capable at it. But the best counter-insurgent is an indigenous force by far. And when it comes to fighting the Taliban or Al-Qaeda or Al-Nusra Front or ISIS, the best fighter is a local fighter. So the strad, the lesson learned then for us for the United States or other foreign powers is the best way to fight an insurgency, in my mind, is by, with, and through indigenous forces that are aligned to your interest. We can introduce large conventional or unconventional forces on a temporary basis to achieve certain specific battlefield effects. And that may make us feel good and it might even achieve those effects, but it won't necessarily be sustainable. The only way to sustain success is through some of the soft power follow-on activities, but also through robust, very capable, indigenous security forces, police, army, intelligence forces, et cetera. So the lesson from Afghanistan, I think, is you're more successful, your probability of success is much higher, and your ability to sustain that success is through working by with and through indigenous forces and sticking with them for lengthy periods of time with assistance, advising, mentoring, coaching, teaching, soft power, bringing in USAID and State Department so on and so forth. But I think that's my takeaway anyway from Afghanistan. On your question about individual soldier and how we're gonna do that, that's what we're wrestling with. How do you do that? How do you recruit forces that are capable of operating in this way that I'm describing? Now we have a little bit of time, so it's not gonna be like next week, but 10 or 15 years from now, how do we recruit? How do we, where do we get the human talent to populate that type of organization to deal with those type of conditions? That's a challenge, that's not easy. I don't wanna overstate the case, though. I don't want someone to walk out of here today and think that the US Army is transitioning. We're gonna take special forces and do it at scale. That's not what we're doing. We're not gonna throw the baby out at the bathwater. You have to have, the United States is a global power, has to have a wide variety of tools in its kit bag. Special forces is one of those tools. Conventional forces are another one of those tools. Subs and ships and airplanes and divisions and brigades. They all play a role, different roles to be sure, but they all play a role. And the power is all of them working together to achieve a synergistic effect on a battlefield. If you can achieve that integration that Marie just talked about, if you can achieve that networked synergy between a variety of type of forces, that's where you get real success. Armies don't go to war. Neither do navies or air forces or Marines or special forces. That's pure myth. I hear it all the time, that's not true. Nations go to war and the joint force in combination with our allies is what gets success on a battlefield and allows you to achieve and impose your political will on your opponent. But your specific question about the individual, that's one we're wrestling with, but need to think a little bit more broadly. I don't want people to walk out here thinking, oh, the whole army's shifting gears and we're gonna do special forces on steroids. That's not what's gonna happen. That is not even close to what's gonna happen. So this has been a fascinating conversation and I will just say there are two FOW projects at New America. There's future of war and there's future of work. And as you've been talking about 30% of the military, I know that's on the Russian side being robotic and smaller forces and perhaps more seasoned people, think about what that also means for our military and our military as a place where so many Americans can have a career and can start and then of course become veterans, has a lot of implications for our wider society as well. So General Milley, I have to say, Princeton's motto is Princeton and the nation service and as an alum, but really equally as a citizen, it makes me enormously proud to have you where you are, to be thinking and leading in such an important and thoughtful way. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.