 But it's my great honor to be here today with Ham and Lamb. General Ham and General Lamb. Bring your own skewer for shish kebab. And I couldn't resist. I mean, it's great. Yeah, it's got to be done. Yeah, I think so. It's actually the only reason we were invited. She had to find two old generals whose names rhyme. Yeah, that's all I got. We're done. So yeah, I apologize. General Ham, we were just talking about is one of, I think, few four stars, prior enlisted four stars. He joined the Army in 1976, I believe. 73. 73, sorry. He's even older than I thought. But he doesn't look a day older than 1976 commissioning or sorry, entry. And has had an extremely distinguished career with service in all kinds of fun places, most recently as the commander of US-African command, but also as the commander of US Army Europe and division command in Iraq and lots of other assignments. I was fortunate to get to know General Ham when he was the J-3 on the Joint Staff and ran joint military operations. A job I think that probably made his future ones seem manageable at least, if not same in some respects. So General, it's great to have you here. And General Ham is, I don't know where to start. He's been everywhere and done everything. And some of it he can talk about. And also commanded at multiple levels, most commanded the UK Special Forces was has been deployed everywhere that you can think of. And in particular, a lot of nasty places. He was probably became best known to American audiences when he was the deputy commanding general and from multinational forces in Iraq and was in charge of the reconciliation effort. And then has developed these friendships with many of our senior commanders. And so is a personal manifestation of the special relationship, I think, that we all value in treasure. So it's, again, great to have you both here. I really appreciate it. I've asked them to talk for a few minutes about a couple of things, their lessons learned from the last 10 years and 10, 12 years and whether or not we've actually been learning them and then their outlook for the challenges that ground forces may be most likely to face in the coming years. And then we'll get into a conversation with all of you. And we look forward to the afternoon. Thanks. Well, thanks, Marin. It's really two reasons that I'm here. One is when Marin calls and says we want you to do this, the only acceptable answer is yes, ma'am. So you come and do that. The second reason which is actually more compelling is that this gave me an excuse to leave a household full of moving boxes. We're in the relocation process. So this is much, this is far preferable to unpacking dishware. This is true. But I think that the topic today that they talk about the appropriate role of land power and a future role of land power. It's timely and certainly an important topic. And I think if we're honest with ourselves, the air sea battle proponents and others probably have been more effective in conveying the imperatives for operations in space, air, cyberspace and maritime domains, then have been those responsible for operating in the land domain. So I think today is an opportunity to have a dialogue about that and see where we want to go. But I think in general, my view is that the land power domain, the land domain conversation and narrative has not been as compelling perhaps as others who advocate for operations in other domains. But I think for those of us that spent most of our life in the land domain, it is an important topic and I think again, a timely one. As I look at it in my view, conflict and security are inherently human endeavors and humans live on land for the most part. And so I think there's a linkage between operations in the land domain and operations in the human domain. And the intersection there I think is compelling and one that we need to really think about. I think the senior leadership of the forces that generally operate on land, Chief of Staff of the Army, the Command on the Marine Corps and the Commander of US Special Operations Command I think have come to that same sense. And I think as many of you know, the three of them have recently issued a white paper and they have established a task force or organized principally from the Army, the Marine Corps and the Special Operations Command to take a look at what is the appropriate role and responsibility and what are the capabilities that the nation requires of its land forces for the future. Again, I think many of you, it starts with understanding what do they mean when they say strategic land power and what's the definition as the application of land power toward achieving overarching national or multinational security objectives. And I think that that's good. But what I am a little bit concerned about as a retired officer is that it almost seems that the proponents for air-sea battle and the proponents for strategic land power, they're perhaps competing narratives. And I don't think that that's necessarily where we ought to be. It's understandable to me that that may be how this is unfolding, particularly in a resource constrained environment that we find ourselves. And so we have this ongoing debate about allocation of resources. Again, understandable, but I'm not sure that that's exactly what's in the best interest of the nation. What we really do need, I think, is a very thoughtful, comprehensive review of what is it that the nation expects of its military forces. General Dempsey has talked about this a number of times. And then we need a healthy debate about how do you build the kind of force operates in all domains across the range of military operations at affordable cost given the environment in which we find ourselves. So the fiscal reality certainly will shape some of this. Lastly, I think that the strategic environment, the operational realities and the current fiscal constraints will mean that we, the US, will almost always conduct land operations, probably all operations, but specifically land operation in concert with others. And so I think that gives a particular emphasis to the Army Marine Corps special operations forces who operate on land in human terrain. How do we work most effectively with allies, partners, friends, and others as we look to the future? And I think this has got to be a very key consideration as we build a land force for the future. So with that, I look forward to the discussion, Mara, and questions from you. Thank you. Thanks a lot for that, sir. Joe Land. Yeah, I was gonna be over here in the United States for another reason. And I was gonna pay for my ticket. When we originally scheduled it. It fell by the wayside. So I've had to hold myself across from the United Kingdom to here. Just because I made a promise, which I wasn't about to break. So I flew in last night and I'll fly out tonight, but it's a real, yeah, it shows you how powerful Mara and Seruino pulled here. The two borrowed thoughts, which I'll throw your way, which I sense need to be just held as we go through this session. The first is Francis Bacon. He was a philosopher, statesman, and a scientist. He was famous for the inductive reasoning, the idea of a bottom-up logic to looking at the problem. He said things alter for the worse spontaneously if they are not altered for the better, designedly. Do nothing and you're gonna go into a very bad place. And the second is Charles Darwin, who made it very clear that it's not the strongest of the species that survive. It's not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. And of course, we represent from our previous lives and we're looking into a space that sits in a context with the other services here who are institutionally historically often fixed on what was and what they grew up with. And yet I sense the changes in this troubled century are exponential, difficult to even put a margin on how some of those outcomes could be. So there's two just so drawn to give you a thought. I have four lessons, you might say. Now lessons, I think none of them are new. The reality is all forgotten and brutally reminded over the last 10 years. You know, the most misused words in the English language are lessons learned because they just aren't. And we should, and myself and Carl would understand it's only too well, you know, we should be so much better than this shit, but we're not. You know, we've been doing it for 300 years for centuries. And yet in effect, we keep on coming across these same sort of issues and we should be better. The first really is drawn from Carl Philipp Gottfried von Klausowitz, you know, rather dull German who wrote eight almost unintelligible books on war. You know, as an aside, he talked about, you know, conflict being just a human intercourse, this idea of these, you know, battle of wills, this constant arrangement of people, between people, not between equipment. But he's almost best known for war as a continuation of politics by other means. My sense is that he never finished the sentence, which is to politics, therefore it must return. We the military, you know, we can deal with the cause, the case, that we're presented with, but we can very seldom, if ever, other than a very small tactical event like a strike operation against a very specific target, we cannot deal with the underlying cause. You know, our injunction into events here is often at best at the operational, if not grand tactical level. We talk about strategy, but the truth is we sit within a far greater network, a far greater head. Headroom, and when we talk about whole of government, which is how the British talk about the sort of what I call comprehensive approach to the whole of government, you know, what I have found over the last 10 years is I tend to drop the W, and it tends to sort of nail the problem. So that's my first point, yeah. The second is this fixation that almost came out of our upbringing in the Cold War, which was situational awareness. We've got to have situational awareness, you know. Where's the other guys, in this case, third shock, eight guards, whatever it might be, in the Cold War, you know, where was his tanks? How much ammunition do you have in them? What was the fuel states? Dirty, dirty. Didn't matter when you were here, in effect on the northern approaches or in the land battle. And we've forgotten the savage wars of peace. The realities of these small wars, the space that in fact is very much this troubled century, that it's not situational awareness, it's situational understanding that we should be seeking. And how slow and how bad have we been in trying to close with that particular issue? Albert Einstein's got a fantastic quote, you know, when asked, you've got 60 minutes to save the world, what are you gonna do? And his answer was I spend 55 minutes defining the problem and five minutes finding the solution. My experience over, probably most of my career, but in particular over the last 12 years, is I come across people spending 59 minutes trying to find a solution and then the last one minute blaming everyone else. So in many ways, you know, we just don't get the situational understanding and does it matter? Oh, you better believe it. You take something like, for instance, Yugoslavia when it fell to pieces. Do we really understand the revenge, the anger, the history that sat within single villages which all looked on the face of it to be good friends? And yet they wrapped their neighbors in barbed wire and put them through bandsaws because of an old anger from the 40s and before. And yet we go into these spaces where we don't have, I'm a Brit, the old colonial service or the political officers who would sit there. I'm just finishing Conn Cochran's book on Churchill's First War. You know, he's really angry that, you know, the political officer keeps on going out when he is a young officer, wants to go out and just, you know, kick the shit out of the opposition that are out there and the guy's sitting down and doing the jerker. Oh, sorry, sorry, who's out there and he's stopping the maneuver space, you know, the conflict of space because the political officer is understanding, understands the situation at hand. So that's my second point. The third is, if you wanna defeat asymmetry, you do it symmetrically. We keep on forgetting this. We keep on trying to apply an asymmetric answer to an asymmetric problem. You wanna crush asymmetry. You know, the fellas had to operate against you because he has not got the ability to face you. So he goes through a different method. You must do so symmetrically. So the whole of government, again, re-comes back into that place. And the final is that George Bernard Shaw reminded us the world is run not by reasonable, but by unreasonable men. You know, Kipling suggested that every so often you must go out and slay evil. You know, that has not gone away. And so the truth is that while we come into this and everybody here are good people, our politicians, our foreign office, state department are all good people. Yeah, what you mustn't do is be lost in your objectives because you listen to the moderate space. It's the unreasonable man that has brought the military to the battle space. And he or she isn't going away anytime soon. Over to me, it's the unreasonable woman. Thanks very much, both of you. I wanted to ask a couple of questions to kick this off. John Hamdap, to follow up on a theme that you raised about the narrative of the air sea battle versus the one for land power. In my opinion, one of the reasons why air sea battle has found some traction is that people can envision scenarios in which it might be relevant. And one of the challenges for land forces has been creating that same sense of relevance. So for both of you, I'd like your thoughts on where do you see land forces as most relevant in the next decade or so? And then is it in a different way than we've thought about them in the past or we traditionally think about them? What does it look like to you in the future? Yeah, I think that's one of the real challenges in the narrative of strategic land power because it isn't clean or precise. And that makes the compelling narrative difficult to build. And I think that one of the challenges that land forces in the U.S. face is that we do expect land forces to be able to operate with great effectiveness across the range of military operations. So yes, they do have to be able to, the nation expects that they can go to the Korean Peninsula and defeat the North Korean army on the field of battle in a very physical sense. There is that expectation and we should never forget that. But they also, as Graham points out, they also have to be able to operate in the small wars and in the distant spaces where it's less physical in terms of the physical destruction of an adversary's forces. And it's much more about supporting or compelling a population to modify their behavior or accomplish some other goal that is in our national strategic interest. And I think that's where the, I think that's what's different to me about this current debate and discussion. For most of my military career, it was mostly about how do we become more tactically effective? What are the technologies, the doctrines, the capabilities, the force structure? What are the things that are needed to make in my case, the army, more effective as a tactical entity? I think the discussion that the Chief of Staff of the Army, Commander of the Marine Corps, Commander of US Special Operations Command are now fostering is, yes, we need to still have that, but it's bigger than that. It's not, we've seen the limitations of the physical force, the overwhelming combat power. We have that and we've applied that, but yet we haven't achieved, at least not fully achieved, our national objectives simply through the application of force. So we've got to think differently, I think, about how do we get populations? And as Grammack correctly points out, the cause, witsi and trinity of the state, the military and the people, you really do have to address all three and it is not sufficient to address only the military component. Yeah, I mean, all I would add is that it's very easy when you feel the sort of fiscal pressure, and I'm a Brit so we understand, we've been feeling the fiscal pressure for a long time, but when you start feeling the fiscal pressure, that no obvious monolithic threat now, no Russia, no France, no Germany for us, no global war on terrorists would, difficult to define it, that what happens is people will then drop into the natural defense of their service. Armed forces defend the realm, you, your prosperity and your way of life. And it's really important that actually, in fact, the general officers, the admirals and the marshal recognize that responsibility. I can't think of any better chairman, in many ways, than Marty Dempsey, to be able to try and pull that debate together, but the money has already forced, I sense the services into these separated spaces because it's a zero sum game. Money's going to get tied on that, just an absolute as it sits out there. And they'll hide those spaces. Now, in what space, how should they operate? Well, you know, the reality is there's 44 million square miles of ocean out there. And a carrier group's a fantastic piece of, you know, just a fantastic organ out there in a very specific place can bring an enormous amount of power and influence. But if it's in the wrong place, that's a lot of distance you've got to travel in order to get somewhere to try and do something. And what are the something going to look like? Well, there'll be things that require air and sea engagement. But you know, Mexico has 20 million people. Mumbai, 18 million. You know, these are the low figures without going to the sunspaces. You know, there is across the world just these huge, huge spaces of people who are full of very good people, but there's quite a lot of unreasonable men and women in there to boot. And in this century, you know, we've let technology escape. You know, the 14 pages that drifted on the atomic weapon that went out of Pakistan into the hands of others, you know, had been protected for a couple of decades. Now the speed with which you can pick up either synthetic production of siren, anthrax, you call it what you will, biological, all the sort of spaces that are in there, yeah, you know, just call up the internet. You don't have to go to a library and be tagged because you took the book out, which tells you how to do kitchen explosives. You know, today, actually the NSA is looking at me anyway, they've been reading it. But the answer, you know, you know, no shit Sherlock, of course they have. You know, I'd be a man, a Brit, I'd say, of course they have. You know, and I'd be disappointed if your nation wasn't taking your protection seriously. The, but what you have now is just a few souls can deliver industrial violence. That's not casual violence, that's not what I call spectacular violence, that's industrial violence. So take 10,000 into the power of something and that's the sort of figures you're looking at and they'll rip your heart out. They'll change your way of life in a heartbeat, yeah? So the problem then, oh, I lied to that, you've got the power of communications. So the common that matters in this century is not air, land, sea, space. The common of this century is communications. I think it was T. Lawrence in the 1920s, you know, talked about the power, the most powerful weapon the general had at disposal was communication, the media space that was sitting out there and that's expanded. I can absolutely capture people's passions and emotions in a heartbeat through my Dan Blackberry, through my iPhone, through the internet. Perception becomes reality and with it, bad things happen and they will accelerate accordingly. So in many ways, what we've got is a debate that is now being polarized into very small service spaces. Yeah? Your president, Eisenhower, I think said in the 1950s, you've got a wicked problem enlarge it. You really do need to enlarge this Dan problem. Let me ask another tied two sort of questions together about our 2012 Defense Saturdays talked about developing innovative new approaches to small footprint operations. And so I wanted to get both of your takes on what might some of those things be going forward and also what's the special forces role or special operations forces role in that? And again, relatedly, what do both of you see as the evolution of soft and conventional force integration from where we are now? How do we carry that momentum forward? What does that look like? Both in a national context for us and in an international context. In U.S. Africa command, of course there was specifically designated in the Defense Strategic Guidance for Innovative Low Cost Light Footprint Approaches that basically said, you know, don't come asking us for stuff, go do with what you have. Be innovative? But what I think it means is what we're talking about today is that how do you, instead of being wholly reliant upon only the Department of Defense's assets, how do we work cooperatively with other agencies, departments, organizations, not only within the U.S. government, but in host nations and in partner nations as well? It's something that we, I think we intellectually understand, but we haven't yet put it into practice to the full extent that I think is necessary. We talk about allied and partner operations. We talk about building partner capacity, but I don't think we've really institutionalized it to the degree that we need to as we look to the future. And what would that institutionalization look like? Well, I think it's an approach that says it is in the United States' best interest to help others achieve security goals that are important to them, but that are also consistent with our own. So it's not building partner capacity for building partner capacity's sake. It's targeted, it's operating in areas and helping other nations develop the security capabilities that they need to achieve their own security objectives, but security objectives that are consistent with our own. US Marine Corps a few years ago, I remember doing some work with General Wilhelm, Charlie Wilhelm, who's just a top dollar sort of fellow in my book. You can write, you could just take it down and just then hand it out as a book. He's got that sort of accuracy. Whereas my books would always be about this long and then you have to get out all this sort of, the swear words that they've become about this big. But he was looking to sort of, I think it was called Distributed Warfare or the idea of, in fact, how to look at small teams, interconnected communications, UAVs as hot carriers and the sort of what I call bringing ammunition, taking casualties out, a whole range of things which in my view was thoroughly innovative in the sort of thinking about how you might want to operate and how you could operate and then bring technology and then this balance between what the sea and the air space and the space space and communication space can bring to your understanding. You take, for instance, the moment, the argument that's going on in the United States between Palantir and DCGSA or whatever it's called. Then you think, hey, let somebody else carry the dollar bill while they produce something that's pretty damn good and can be adapted on the space. But that's, that's another argument. But I think the Distributed Warfare is a good piece of thinking. What we do need to get across and get over is my experience of defense is you keep on going with the old maximum equal shared pain for all. We, where Brits have been making that mistake, year on year, decade on decade, if you are running a business and you turn around and say, let's say, it's a body shop, body shop doing really well, let's expand into America, yeah, and then you turn around and say, hey, America's not really working for us but equal pain for all. The receivers will be in within a fortnight. You need to turn around and say, America's not working, cut America. Just come back in and go into costasis, yeah? So in this case, if something's working well, reinforce success, they'll max in from the Russians, don't reinforce failure. And so the idea of taking your money and using it intelligently matters. Here's an interesting sort of thought piece which is the problem with great institutions, departments of state, and we're exactly the same, we're a lot smaller obviously than something like VOD. You know, what you do is the department manages its responsibilities and budget. When you're in operations, you run the operation as you would do a business. But back here, it's different. No one's running the business. If you were to try and run the business of defense, I reckon people would be taking some very bold, some very innovative and very forward-looking decisions. They don't. They just manage a given, which is the budget that's coming, and that is what's gonna hang you in a heartbeat. I'd absolutely agree, the symmetric whole of government approach and the like, importance of partnership matters hugely because if you haven't got the sort of footprint or the force that you're gonna put into some of these spaces, you know, all right, let's go downtown Mexico City. The truth of the matter is, you do absolutely need to partner with a cultural awareness and people who know what they're talking about. And so the idea of crossing into that cultural space, go back to my point, good old Einstein, it's about situational understanding, not just awareness that underpins this. Actually, the truth is you've gotta bring and make those words and give them true meaning. And at the moment we tend to give it, we want partners to do what we want them to do rather than a partnership, which is about two equals on the same stage, having a conversation about saying, have we a common problem? And so it's not about containment, it's actually about a strategy for all of us, UK, United States, of convergence. So that's not how we currently see this wicked world. One last question about how this transatlantic relationship ought to evolve before we get your questions, I think people are picking up cards and if you need more, put your hand up and you'll get them. But as we evolve together and have many shared interests, where some people have argued there should be an sort of implicit division of labor where Europe takes more responsibility for North Africa and the Middle East and we look more to Asia, and is that what we should be doing? Should we make it more explicit? How should we move forward together? Well, it's the old spheres of influence discussion and of course that's fraught with danger. If we subscribe to that then others will as well and we might not like the spheres of influence that they establish. I think there is, the United States is in a special place. It has a global leadership role and that means global is global and prioritization is one thing and that makes a lot of sense to me, but that doesn't mean that we don't operate globally, I think as has been our history. The special relationship with the UK, I think is one that for all the right reasons we selfishly need to sustain. And I would just cite lots of years in Europe and these past couple of years working in Africa, that's not an area where the US military has great depth of experience and I was pretty typical I think of most US military officers serving in Africa with the exception of a small cadre of extraordinary foreign airy officers and a small number of focused intelligence analysts, most of us are novices about Africa. That's not the case in the UK where they have officers who have and not in the US military, and non-commissioned officers who have long service here. Sir David, he's one of the people that I went to see early on because of his broad experience. So selfishly, we wanna sustain that relationship, maintain those ties and because our, at least in my opinion, our national interests are so closely aligned that most places I think we're gonna find ourselves working shoulder to shoulder and that's, I think, good for us. I'd just say that there's a real danger on relying upon too much on Europe and saying, well, they'll do all these pieces. You know, I went to the first Gulf War and I remember only too well the Belgics wouldn't sell us ammunition. Just because they had taken a political decision which is entirely right, the sovereign government, they can do what they like here but that they didn't wanna lead into this particular space so we couldn't get 155 ammunition off them. And you think, hang on a minute, that doesn't make sense. You take the last time we went into Iraq, 2003, Turkey for, again, very clear reasons said not through our space, even though you say they're part of NATO. So there's a real danger in having a sort of work, what would look on paper to be a Olly North, a neat idea, a neat solution, which has all the pieces that just perfectly fit. Well, you can guarantee that you're gonna end up with a crossword puzzle that's 500 pieces, you're at 250 and you're not gonna be there, yeah? And you're gonna be guessing what the damn picture looks like. So that assured support is a difficult one. Now, we the Brits can sit on a sort of back in our laurels a little bit, look across Yaule. You take Libya as a good example, yeah? And rely upon SENTCOM and the good officers of the United States of America, the administration, the president, DOD and all friendships to in fact lean into these things, yeah, and provide a whole lot of stuff that we just don't, we don't pay for. We can't afford, we don't have, in order to sort of round off that sort of balance. If you start dropping all that stuff, then you're definitely gonna have some big pieces that are missing and therefore that sits as a problem. On the UK-US relationship, we made a decision probably back in the 1920s, probably the last grand strategic decision my country has taken, which was we would err towards America rather than Europe in our relationships and that decision has served my nation extraordinarily well. This last, I don't know, 100 years plus. Yeah, coming into that sort of space. But we need to identify very clearly where we have common interests, where we have common values and the two are quite different. We have common values, we have common interests, we have a way to look at things, but our common interests can sometimes come across where the assumption, Vietnam's a good one, where America said, hey, you'll lead in with us and Churchill said, no. You know what, it is not in our interest to go there, just as in Suez, you know, you rightly, or you turn around and say, hey, we're not gonna lead into you either. So the idea that your special relationship, this linkage is one that always demands that you're there on every occasion, actually, I think, is misunderstood. The idea that we have common values is the part that really matters, that we have a view about the rights and wrongs about how society should engage, how the Westphalia model of nations should stand up to the responsibilities. That's the stuff that I think genuinely matters. We don't talk about it enough and we should do some more, but I think that is in many ways, you know, what carries the weight here. But having a clever jigsaw or a clever model which just fits all the pieces like an old McCano set, you know, which sees, you know, this idea of a sort of great Western or, you know, solution to a fiscal or a public or a political problem would probably be fought with some serious danger. The McCano set's gonna go nowhere. Okay, let's get to some audience questions. Great, I'm gonna try to group some of these together so we get to more questions. The first one is about interoperability between the US and UK and there are a couple of sub-questions there. You've addressed this a little bit, but the type of interoperability we see, we saw between the US, UK, French and other coalition partners during Libya was on the Air Force side. Where are we going in terms of trilateral, specifically French, US, UK cooperation in land forces specifically in Africa and to include SOF. And the other question is how difficult will it be to achieve US, UK land power interoperability with an increasingly rotational model of US Army presence in Europe? I'll take a piece of that. As Martin mentioned, I previously served as the commander of US Army Europe and it was a real concern to me that as we drew down particularly Army forces and headquarters structure in Europe that it would become increasingly difficult to stay connected with our NATO allies. In fact, a British officer once said to me that said, if you take away the fifth corps which cased its colors last week and no longer have a divisional headquarters in Europe, I don't know how we connect with you. So I think that's a real problem for us in maintaining, it'll be harder for us to maintain the same kind of relationships that were frankly were normal to me growing up in the Army in Europe where frequently we're working with not only the UK but other NATO allies as well. I think what that means for us in the future, particularly in the area of leader development which I think is at least as important if not more important than technical interoperability. We'll have to make a concerted effort to make sure that our leaders who here at the fore have had the opportunity to interact with NATO leaders on the other side of the ocean just as a matter of course through repetitive assignments. We no longer have that. So we're gonna have to make sure that we have some means to make sure our leaders stay connected. On the interoperable piece, within NATO it's pretty easy and obviously that paid great dividends in the early stages in Libya before it became a NATO operation and even those non-NATO countries who contributed forces had been trained and designed their systems to meet a NATO standard particularly in the air domain. And so that made the interoperability significantly easier. I don't know what that means for the future. You now have multiple sources for military hardware and I think certainly was a challenge for us in Africa where even inside a single nation's forces they might have a varied mix of equipment that they'd purchased or had been donated by a number of different nations and that really complicated the efforts to build a cohesive force. The, there is a danger always in trying to establish a way forward if you just go on a structural approach. It looks very neat and NATO's a good one to do it and it's proved to be extremely resilient and very useful over time. But if I was to turn around and look at the last 10 years at what have been quite extraordinary friendships forged in battle, trust and that relationship, you know we are at a completely different level today. And those, that relationship resides in people not technical hardware. You know Krasovitz again, the art in the science, the art of people. I did some work with General Mattis, again just extraordinary, I just loved him a bit. You just can't help yourself. The other day, you know, what was it, the be polite, be professional, we'll have a plan to kill everyone, you know. He's just an extraordinary, and a huge interlake. But I remember doing some work with him for Chairman Mullen again, an extraordinary chairman. Which I listened to a guy from, a fellow from MIT who had a head about the size of a planet, but his brain seemed to be about the size of a universe, which is like what you all do here in MIT. But after about 30 minutes of a bit like listening to Krasovitz or reading Krasovitz, you know, unintelligible sort of, you know, I thought, God, you know, that is absolutely draining. But I think what he's just told me is that the next three to five years is all about innovation and integration. And 2020-25 is all about invention and discovery. Now, the assumption is you therefore have to wait to find the unknown. What it tells you is you basically look at what you've got and making it work better, understanding how it's applied in the near space, and your slightly distant space is all about a massive investment in people. Because they will come out of left field with something that just takes your heart away and absolutely will take out the heart of an enemy. And you just don't even know where it's at right now. So those relationships in many ways matter. The interesting thing if you look at Special Force and Special Relationship, the UK and the US, yeah, we go way back. You know, I remember Charlie Beck was coming across in the 70s, Bucky Burroughs, I did selection with Bucky Burroughs. The, you know, he was just told go and do selection, the son of a bitch past it. You know, I've been training for about a year, you know, really hard, but it spoke volumes about a young officer at the age of 23, he had 1,000 mountaineers under arms up in the Highlands as a Green Beret. You know, extraordinary. Again, you know, that was a relationship. So that relationship is, if you go into Europe, quite interesting. You know, the French have a different special forces. You know, in many ways the special forces in Europe that we, the Brits, can relate to us to is the Norwegians. And that sounds, you know, I think, hey, where'd that come from? You know, in many ways it's just how the structure fits together as is. So the idea of, oh, they're SFs, so they're all just not in together. Raid and all the rest here are a different combination of the way that in fact the French political authority, and don't forget, you know, they were drawn and fitted and armed in 1962, 63, to jump in on Paris and remove de Gaulle. You know, so the French political system has never forgotten that. Now, their officers, their NCOs, and their soldiers are extraordinarily brave and absolutely well up for the fight. But actually understanding the context in which their decision making takes place, just as, you know, title 50, title 10, all the rest, you know, I understand all this stuff with America's idea and how the Brits do it. Just look at something like, for instance, you know, GCHQ, NSA, the authorities we have, which are really quite extensive in some of the abilities you have, which are very extensive, but actually your legal ability to use them, again, have been today restricted. And so in many ways, I think that bringing this stuff together is, you know, it requires a lot of art. And if you're trying to apply a structural science to it, you'll be disappointed. It'll look great, and it just then won't damn well deliver. If I could make one last comment. Marin, you mentioned that the relationship between land forces, conventional forces, or general purpose forces, and special operating forces, I think that is one of the things that has fundamentally changed in our profession over the last 10 years. For most of my service, growing up on the general purpose force side, there was very little interaction with the special operations forces. The campaigns in the Balkans, later in Iraq and Afghanistan, have forged a much closer relationship between the general purpose forces and special operating forces to the benefit of both and to the benefit of the nation. And that's something that we don't want to lose. So where does that go from here? Well, I think that the challenge is, this is a good challenge to have. You know, that battle was the forcing function. We conventional forces and special operating forces came to work together because of the pressures on the battlefield. What we have to figure out now is absent that. How do we preserve in our training and our preparedness and our exercises, in this notion of regionally aligned forces, how do we make sure that we sustain that very close and beneficial relationship between conventional and special operating forces? Yeah, I mean, if I look at where our conventional forces, general purpose forces, how they started in 2001 to take this near term of the last 10 years, where they were and where they are today, you know, they look like the SF five years ago. You know, their equipment, their methodologies, their approach, their ability to be able to fill that task. The truth is that, you know, to go back to my sort of, you know, contextual one about power one, about industrial violence, about uncertain world, about nothing comes up the way you're expecting it, about adaptability and all that, you know, the SF space needs to be moving into that new, that upper, you might say, you know, take it up another level. Actually, the conventional forces need to be absolutely consolidating where they've been and here's the problem, no more money. Yeah, your money's fixed. In fact, actually, your money's not only fixed, I sense your money's gonna be going south. And in that case, people will defend the big programs because that's what the industrial defense base, again, good old President Eisenhower, but where the industrial defense base, they produce some fantastic equipment. They have absolutely manned up the job, but, you know, every force and equal and opposite, there's a darker side to that, which turns around and says, this is what you're gonna get rather than what you want because that's what we're producing, these are jobs and all the rest here, so the relationship between them and the hill matters a great deal as to how they run things. What really matters is how you can then pick up the pace for your own ground forces to be able to now consolidate all the stuff they've learned, all the way they've looked at, what they were doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and take them into a new level. And then you can start saying, oh, when you look at, therefore, conditions-based numbers and this sort of affair, then you can start reviewing numbers. If I look at a thousand-man battalion going across the line on the first day of the Somme, and you try and now work out what that looks like in the way of combat power and what I call stretch and reach within the sort of units, then the numbers begin to change dramatically, but you have to make that investment. You have to put the R&D in. You have to look at, you know, automated weapon systems, a whole range of stuff that is sitting out there, but you won't have the money because what will die immediately as the cash goes down is your activity levels and your ability, therefore, to have these young men and women, in fact, consolidate that expertise. You will not have the money to put into the R&D, which is a space that you absolutely, America, please do so, be absolutely leading on that because everybody else is struggling to find the cash to do it, and you are a technological giant in many spaces here, and then you're gonna turn around and say, oh, and then you're not gonna have the ability to be allowed to do it because you'll be told what you need to be buying on the basis of a reduced budget, and you'll lose your brightest and your best because they'll move on the basis there's no activity and the proposition has now, in effect, degraded from one which has enjoyed the last 10 years of supplementals. These are things which I absolutely recognize as a Brit because we've been there. You historically have not, and yet the challenges are just so much larger, but as this enormously important superpower, this world global leader, you know, I just absolutely need you to be doing the right thing. Yeah, and not just in effect, what I call following a rather, and I could almost write the script now as to what is likely to happen, and it's not a great tale. I'll lend a few questions here. One of them deals with the active reserve component mix. Where do you see that going, and how will that in the long run effect the agility and the quickness of the force? Will it? Can we make sure that we have the forces and the places that we wanna need it? And then sort of shifting modes. What challenges do you see in getting mechanized infantry to train for maneuver warfare as well as coin simultaneously? If I may take the second piece, I just last week was out at Fort Riley, Kansas. It is the home of the brigade that is the Army's regionally aligned force for Africa, and it's the First Infantry Division and having some close association with the Big Red One. It was nice to be back there and being present at the birth of the Africa regionally aligned force. It was interesting to talk with them as well. That brigade is a heavy brigade, a tank Bradley fighting vehicle brigade. And they have the dilemma of how do you train that brigade for its conventional mechanized combat force? Because they certainly have that. They can be called upon tomorrow to go fight someplace if that was necessary. But the Chief of Staff of the Army has also given them the responsibility to say, and oh, by the way, I also want you to be able to deploy in small units with small capabilities, very tailored in support of US Army Africa in their engagements with African land forces across the continent. So it's a tough balance and the brigade commander is wrestling with that. It's when they were standing up the brigade and they focused on their conventional combat mission that was, it's never really easy, but it was bounded, it was clear. They have a cadre of officers and non-commissioned officers who grow up in the Army knowing how to do that. It's familiar territory and they can do that. Africa, on the other hand, is all new to them. So they really had to craft their skills. What the brigade commander is now wrestling with is they went through a combat training center rotation, they did all the things they're necessary for them to do. Now his challenge is how does he sustain an adequate level of conventional combat capability for a heavy brigade at the same time he's deploying small units in company size and smaller across the continent of Africa? They'll figure it out, but they're not gonna figure it out top driven. They're gonna do it as Graham said. It's gonna be the sergeants and the lieutenants and the captains, this extraordinarily experienced and imaginative and adaptive force that we have, they'll figure out how to do that as one example. So the brigade commander is saying, hey, the Moroccans have M1 tanks. Why don't we figure out how do we do a tank gunnery with the Moroccans? You know, we're doing two things. We're fulfilling our regionally aligned force responsibility and we're simultaneously sustaining our own conventional combat skills. So these guys are pretty amazing. They'll find a way, but it is not gonna be easy to meet both tasks satisfactorily. I think my part would be the idea of a holistic approach to a wicked problem. You know, if you look at Germany in the 1920s, you know, they frameworked their ability to be able to expand from a very small and very restrictive because of the rules and regulations that we had laid down upon what they could have by way of equipment and what they could do, but they were able to in fact very rapidly fill the space. If I look back and remember my father, you know, when he talked about the, you know, as a young officer in, he went from Alameda all the way through the water, the Reichfeld, but you know, he was always very clear that in an odd way, Dunkirk was a necessary sort of event to almost get some of the old guard out of the way and the new guard in, which then went on to a citizen army go on and take a conventional battle to Germany. The problem is what we try and do is we keep on trying to do everything with everybody. If you take the special forces in turn and I say why are your special forces, you know, whether it be Delta or the SEAL forces, you know, any one of the TF-16, you name it, you know, how are they, you know, for people like me who's a professional sort of in that field, turn around and just, you know, big respect, you know, not just sort of, you know, superficially, but you know, I've operated with them, you know, just of an extraordinary talent. Well, what you haven't tried to do is turn around and say, I want you to be conventional, I want you to do this, I want you to do something else. What you said, I need you to be really, really good at this particular complicated adaptability space here. And so when you turn around and try and, and I hear the argument coming around every so often, I remember coming through the last 10 years, you know, oh, is it CT or is it coin? Give it a little, oh, come on. It's all of the above. It's CT, coin and conventional. It's all of that stuff all together, you know. You don't just somehow, you know, take the old magic dust and sort of what I call, you know, fire the silver bullet and, oh, the CT's gonna solve all your problems at the end of the day. You know, Mr. Jones can just piss off a whole nation in a heartbeat, you know. And so, but is it a great weapon system or you better believe it? You know, if you want that sort of accuracy. But I think there's a danger that what we're trying to do is we're not just balancing the force. And so the relationship, and you age your thinking between, you know, your guard, as I recall, you know, you put a brigade alongside spaces in the United States that had a million men and women. You know, it was about just keeping an eye on your own. That was the sort of what I called structural maneuver in the military. Now, in this case, you turn around and say, actually, how does the reserve fit into the conventional battle? It may be that the reserve and your guard are the conventional forces, predominantly. Yeah? That doesn't mean they're gonna do it all and they're not gonna do the front-end stuff yet, but the truth is, in fact, and then you need to. And therefore, how does the rest of your force fit into other spaces, which are those which in many ways you may well find yourself fighting in rather than what is historically, oh, air, land, sea, you know, the old modeling which comes through. That's not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but actually, this debate, in my view, needs to take place. And what you shouldn't do is just assume that what you had before will work for the future. You've got some extraordinarily talented, I mean, just extraordinary experience, men and women now, from the last 10 years, who have a perspective. You have a huge base of great thinkers from the Cold War era, Frank, all these guys at the end of the day. And so, you need to bring them into a space which genuinely begins to look out there and say, you know, what are the challenges that we face and therefore, what is the force fit to fight? I think that's right, in my view, the reserve component of the US military should not just be a duplication of what's in the active force. There's gotta be a thoughtful process that says what capabilities are needed on such a short timeline that they have to be in the active forces and are there other capabilities that can reside in the reserve components that we can call upon that we have some time in order to build those capabilities. There is one specific reserve component, specifically the National Guard Program, I'd highlight in this discussion about strategic land power and operations in human terrain, and that's the state partnership program, which when I was at US Africa Command and also at US Army Europe, just a hugely powerful tool because it sustains relationship, military to military relationships over time between the forces of a state's National Guard and a particular country. And I think that's something that we can probably learn from and benefit from in the future. I just wanna talk about the point that I made earlier on, which was the idea of, oh, the NCOs will figure it out. You might think, oh, no, no, no. We are cracking case back in the UK when we were into the do-far in the early, late 60s, early 70s, yeah. Many ways where with a communist-inspired regime coming out of Yemen, pushing across into Oman. Sultan Kaboos had turned Red Guard into his father and taken position, but what to do? And the then-command officer, the Special Forces, was sitting down, in fact, with two NCOs and having a cup of tea, that's a very British thing. That's not cold tea, that's hot tea then and day. And looking up on the sort of on the battle space that, you know, the Jebel and sort of said, you know, well, what do we do here? Now, the assumption would be that, you know, here are two guys who, you know, they've been fighting in Radfan, they've been fighting in Borneo, they've been in Malaya, I don't know that sort of stuff here. They're sitting down there. And over the way, America's, in fact, the back end of Vietnam's, you've done precision weapons, you've got gunships, you've got a whole range of new technology, new systems, barrett sniper rifles, you name it, you'd have thought these guys would have turned around and given them, well, what we need is a bigger gun, yeah? They just sit down and they turn around and say, hey boss, what you need is vets and water, yeah? They absolutely nailed the operational case for turning that insurgency, which was going south the other way. So the idea that, you know, it doesn't sit outside the officer corps, all within the sort of, I call the top end of the thinkers, of how to deal with this stuff, you know, inductive learning, that sort of experience, really, you know, it's just an untruth. We've got one more quick one and we'll let them let you go run back to the airport. Back to the airport. Back to interoperability with NATO. What is the right way to avoid duplication of efforts and pool resources among European countries? And where are the niche roles that European countries might be willing to play and to invest in? Yeah, I would refer to my past couple of years working in Africa and it's not just Europeans. We're at a point now, the previous years it's been really easy for the United States to say, we're gonna go do this. And if all the rest of you wanna come along for the ride, you're welcome and contribute as you would like, but we got this and we're gonna move forward. Those days are now behind us. We simply do not have the wherewithal, either in terms of force availability or other resources, not just military, but across the government to do things ourselves. So in a simple case in Africa, where we're working a training program or something with the country, other countries, with an African country, other countries may have similar interests. And what we've gotta find is craft some mechanism that says, okay, for lack of a term and maybe it's pejorative, but the donor nations, if you will, somehow there needs to be some process for those supporting nations to coordinate their efforts. So you don't have four different countries talking to the host nation about, well, buy our helicopter, no buy our helicopter, no buy our helicopter, but we can kind of work through this and say, okay, you do helicopters better than we do and you can probably do that affordably. So why don't you guys take the lead for that? We do small patrol craft pretty well. How about if we take on the maritime domain and country X, you do pretty well with the medical training, why don't you take that on? But right now it's a haphazard process that the ambassadors of many nations try to work out together, but there's no real structure to it. And I think that's something we can work on in the future. I think understanding what they've got and not telling them what they should have, number one, and then take it up another level because there's lots of countries out there that won't have a top of the range raptor. And in fact, no one can afford it, top of the range raptor. But what they will have is maybe extraordinary influence. They might have intelligence insights which just are gold dust. You know, they'll have cultural understanding. They'll have political, they'll have medical, they'll have a whole range of things here. What we keep on doing is trying to match them up with on the base saying, here's the hardware we want. This is how you need to fit into us. The reality is, you know, NATO was fit for purpose at its time, but as we found, as you come out of that, you get into the age of NRF and all the rest here, what you have is genuine coalitions of the willing. And so therefore you can't guarantee and you can't predispose who's going to come along. What you've got to do is figure out, right, this is what we've got. And these are the spaces that would make our life more interesting, helpful, and we'll rest here. But the truth is, and then adjust your campaign accordingly, whether you elongate it in time, but not try and have this, like this McConnell said, of just how things all fit in in order to maintain a structural approach to defeat of the enemy or overwhelming force or whatever you want to put out there as being this particular answer to our maintenance prayer because it's not. Well, thank you both. I've kept you a little bit over, I apologize, but thank you both so much for coming. I apologize if we didn't get to everyone's questions, but it was a great time with both of you and we really appreciate you coming. Thanks a lot. Yes, thank you. You need to, by the way, yeah, it's a naughty problem and no one wants to go there. The numbers, numbers, yeah, hard, hard-wired numbers. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps. If you don't do it, what'll happen is, stage by stage, step by step, they'll be taken away from you and you will get nothing for it. If you made a bold correction, and just like General Schumacher made when he canceled the Comanche program and kept half the money, you might do yourself an enormous favor. It's not the way we normally think. It's not how people would address the problem, but I'm not sure and I've got a pretty lucid brain. There's any other way out of the current cul-de-sac, you're probably in.