 Good afternoon, and congratulations. You have made it to the last panel. I just want to thank whoever is making coffee down in the basement here. I was just told that 22 gallons of coffee have been consumed at this conference today. So you guys really put doing your job. I'd like to ask you to turn your attention to the television screens for the last poll question of the day. The question, and you need to go to answer it, please text if you haven't done it already, the future of war 2018 to 22333. If you've already answered the question, just choose the answer at 22333. Question is this. China, within the next 30 years, is likely to fight a war against A, Russia, B, Japan, C, United States, D, none of the above. And I'm going to give you about 20 seconds. I can't see the answers from here. I'm going to stand up and look. Just so you can't see it, it's, oh, United States is moving up. It depends on what we say. This panel would decide. OK, it's about half, say, none. 26, say, the US, 17, Russia, and nine, Japan. Where's all of the above? So the answer is probably short, Japan. This last panel, I think is a fascinating one, and as Kelly pointed out, you're not allowed to hold a conference these days in Washington without having a panel on China. My name is Tom Ricks. I'm not a China expert, but I write a column for task and purpose called the Long March. So I think they probably, oh, we long march. That's kind of Chinese. Or else it's just because it's the last panel of the day. It's a long march. On my right is Kelly Maxman. Well, basically, if you had to devise a deep state CV, this is the deep state classic actor. She is just someone who's been all through the government, National Security Council, Pentagon. This is probably Donald Trump's worst nightmare. Probably. And to her right, you can go either way, I'm told. Some people call him Tate Nerkin. Other people call him Nate Turkin. But his real name is Tate Nerkin, intelligence and security expert and consultant. I'm going to begin with asking each of them this question. What concerns you most about China now? And what do you think the average national security type in this room doesn't understand about it and the region right now? Can I begin with Tate? Sure. And I'll address that from kind of a military capabilities and defense industrial based standpoint. And I think there's a lot that concerns me about China's military modernization. And you can take off a few items and then go into depth on a couple of particular ones. But what it's doing in the undersea domain to address what is a strategically invaluable advantage for the United States, what it's doing in terms of development of MARVs, maneuverable reentry vehicles, hypersonic light vehicles, and a ship ballistic missile, what its ability to use. It's maritime militia to operate in gray zone areas and unmanned systems. All of those stand out as really big challenges for the US military. But there are two that I think probably have the potential to fundamentally upset some of the balances and more to the point stabilizing imbalances and military capabilities across the Indo-Pacific. And the first one is China's efforts in information dominance. Now this isn't new. They've been doing that for quite some time. But there's a sense, at least my sense, is that it's picking up some steam and actually becoming more effective. And it's built around this idea of integrated network electronic warfare. So really increasing coordination between the PLAs, counter space, cyber, and activities in the electromagnetic spectrum. So the idea here is if they can hold at risk the US C4-ISTAR infrastructure, then perhaps China can deter to sway US intervention or even degrade or defeat US capabilities. And they are developing really novel and enhanced capabilities in the CERA, but also organizing around this concept. And back in November of 2015, China established something called the Strategic Support Forces, which brought together the PLA organizations responsible for counter space, EW, and cyber, as well as intelligence collection. And I think that just demonstrates how important this particular capability is to the future of China's military modernization. And my concern is amplified, because at the same time this is going on within the DOD, there seems to be a narrative. I don't think I've got this wrong, but others can object. That the US kind of is sitting on the lead in the electronic warfare space. And I say that as a diehard Atlanta Falcons fan. So I know it's sitting on the lead looks and feels like. That we've allowed competitors to catch up and even surpass. The other area very quickly I want to focus on is one that's already come up a couple of times today. And it's China's investment in artificial intelligence. I see that as a way to fundamentally change the competition with the US. So they're not always catching up with this defense industrial base that they'll have a trouble catching up with. But just to beat the US to the commanding heights of cognitive warfare. They use the word intelligent eyes, but it's essentially cognitive warfare. And we've already heard about the drone tests, the largest drone swarm. I'll just quickly mention that China, last year, a month after that drone test, released the next generation artificial intelligence development plan. A very aggressive three stage plan to become global leaders and AI writ large by 2030. Two important things for this conversation. One, national defense is frequently referenced. National security and defense, particularly in the last phase from 2025 to 2030. And the second thing is the timeframe. For those who watch China and many of you may do, you see these very ambitious, notional aspirational plans out of a timeframe to be the world's leader in S&T by 2049. Or in advanced manufacturing by 2045. This is 2030, which is not that far away. And so it suggests, A, the urgency of this priority. There's a national priority, there's a national defense priority. And that they think that they're part of the way there. They've got some capabilities and some levers that can be pulled to win this race. And I'll just stop there. Thank you. Kelly, your two minute rebuttal. I'll try to take it up a level. I agree with everything that Tate just outlined. But I actually think the challenge is much more significant than we think. So I think from my view, we don't really have a national consensus around the China challenge. We have nice strategy documents, the national defense strategy, the national security strategy that highlight U.S. China competition as something that we need to focus on. But we really don't have a broader sense of the scale on what it's gonna require the United States. And for me, I think much more broadly than just the defense and security space, it's about how we deal with China in the economic space. What kinds of investments we need to be making in our own education systems for the long term to ensure that our human capital stays competitive over time, used to be China. So I think the scale of the challenge is not fully appreciated yet at the national level. I'll give you an example of that. So the Pentagon came out with its new budget to implement the NDS. It increases, I think the RDT, RDT and E by 19%. What's interesting is if you compare that to the national budget on research and development, that's cut by 19%. So we're not thinking about how to compete with the Chinese over the long term in ways that are broad enough, ways that match how China's thinking about it vis-a-vis the United States. That's 0.1, 0.2. It's a question of focus. And I'll use another Bob Workline. I think he's been heavily quoted at the conference already today. But we had sort of gone down a strategic cul-de-sac called the Middle East and South Asia. Now there are reasons and valid reasons for why we did that. But the reality is if you're a national security leader, I've worked in the NSC for many years, we would have the fact that China meetings were very rare. They were driven a lot by what's happening, like today it's Syria and the chemical weapons attack or tomorrow it'll be something else, Russian election meddling. They're really, it's very hard for the national apparatus to focus on what's perceived to be on the horizon. The challenge is, as Tate sort of suggested, that time horizon is getting a lot closer than it used to be. And so that for me is the big picture concern that I have. It's a question of focus and scale in terms of competition. Tate, how screwed are we? Or to put it in a more dignified terms, how do you assess the ability of China's industrial base to get to there from here? To actually deliver on, I mean it's one thing to have a great lead forward in AI. Sure. And we're gonna do this and that and we're gonna kill every fly in the country. It's another thing actually to compete in this technological realm. Do you think they can get to a point of being militarily competitive with the United States and his partners in say the next 15 years? The short answer is yes. You know, been looking at China for a long time and I think typically, like any new threat really or any threat that's gaining a lot of attention, views cohere around polls at the end of a spectrum that run from dismissiveness to alarmism. And the alarmist perspective is China's 10 feet tall and bulletproof, I don't think that's right. They're clearly vulnerabilities that can be exploited by competitive strategies, savvy competitive strategies. But I also think that the dismissive narrative is one that's been around for a long time that China can't innovate. Culturally it is incapable of this. Structurally the defense industry is redundant. It doesn't incentivize innovation. It's not competitive. They don't involve the private sector at all. They don't trust the private sector. And all of those things are true, but that doesn't mean the narrative of incapacity to innovate is true. It just means that it's incomplete because China is innovating. And we've heard a lot about a few of those today. Think about quantum, quantum encryption in particular. And there are a lot of very aggressive, bold, sometimes apocryphal statements made by the Chinese government about the innovation that it's achieved. But you don't have to take their word for it. You don't have to take my word for it either. Because a lot of these innovations are happening in conjunction with other Western states and other science and research organizations. There was a quantum encrypted video teleconference late last year between scientists in China and scientists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. And it worked. It was something really pretty remarkable. And again, it's a validation that this technology is working. So I think there's like that super computers. China has the fastest supercomputer in the world. If you're thinking about artificial intelligence and big data, that's a pretty important capability to have. It actually displaced a Chinese computer, which had the previous record. So there are areas, deep sea submersibles. China's one of three countries in the world to dive to below 10,000 meters below the sea. Again, the undersea domain. And I just think, you know, instead of just dismissing this as being imitative, we'll say, well, China innovates differently. And we need to understand that innovation system a little bit better and start to understand what the risks are to China, what the risks are to us, and begin to balance those and begin to think about competitive strategy. We used to call that a net assessment, but I don't know if that's still a term we use. Bob Work talks a lot about hypersonics. Is that a concern of yours? Sure, yeah. I mean, I referenced the Mars. I mean, I was in a workshop recently when we were talking about China's hypersonic glide vehicle program. That's a hypersonic cruise missile program. The glide vehicle one is the most destabilizing. And a very hawkish person on China, you know, just stopped the workshop and said, you know, I'm not an arms control nut, which is a derogatory term, but I don't mean that in a derogatory way. He certainly isn't. But why aren't we talking to China about these things? These are really destabilizing weapons. In my view, others may disagree. And I think they invite preemption. It's not a race we want to be second in, but it's another example, like electronic warfare, where the narrative within DoD is, you know, we kind of took our foot off the gas on this one, and now we've got to get the advantage back. And that can be very hard to do when China has some forward momentum, seven tests, six successful. No, I think this is an area of concern. Speaking of destabilization and conflict, Kelly, what are the ways in which you see or worry that conflict could emerge if we're not careful between the United States and China? Yeah, to Tate's point, I think strategic stability is one. These kinds of destabilizing systems and what they might mean, so we have no tested escalation scenario with the Chinese. I worry about a military accident, frankly. In the Obama administration, I was in the Pentagon, we worked a lot on confidence-building measures around air and maritime safety. We did that for a reason. The airspace and the sea lanes are getting a lot more crowded than they used to be, and we're bumping into each other. The Navy's doing a good job of clearing them out. Right. But I actually worry that a P3 incident, like you had in 2001, if that happened today, I don't know what the scenario would be. So I do worry a lot about a potential for accident in guidance and conflict. I worry about that, especially if we don't have really good conversations going, mill-to-mill conversations going with the Chinese. The problem with mill-to-mill dialogue with China is as relative, the current ones that we have in place now are relatively stilted. They're formulaic. You show up to a meeting. Yeah, you exchange talking points, and you could literally save yourself the air travel and just exchange the talking points. They're not real, and they're not meaningful in terms of working with the PLA to figure out how to reduce these potential for conflict. The other places I see potential are that China overreaches, as it is prone to do occasionally, especially vis-a-vis Taiwan, or potentially the East China Sea in Japan. I actually think, to your question at the beginning of this panel, I actually think the potential for conflict is the most high vis-a-vis Japan. And then finally, I think North Korea is the other sort of segue into a potential U.S. direct conflict with China. So that's the sort of four areas where I see the potential. Doesn't China always overreach, step on its neighbor's toes, piss off everybody? Isn't that our ace in the hole? It could be. I mean, it certainly is a vulnerability, whether the United States develops policies that take advantage of it is another question. So we need to rethink our approach to alliance management, our allies and partners in the region are a huge asset for us. We know how to do this. We've done it well in the past. China, as you mentioned, sometimes struggles with engagement in the region and outside. I'd agree with that. I would just add, China policy, people always tend to approach it just from a U.S.-China perspective. This needs to be a kind of outside-in strategy. It needs to be through our allies and through our partners if it's gonna be effective. And right now, I think the temptation is to just go straight to a China strategy or a U.S.-China competition frame and not think both regionally, vis-a-vis our partners and allies, but globally, how we leverage those relationships. Are there things that we are not doing with our allies, especially in Southeast Asia, that we should be doing that you'd recommend? We're doing a lot, you know, I think some of the work from the Pentagon continues on capacity building, especially in the maritime space and intelligence sharing and information sharing that we do with our allies and partners. Exercising, and we can never do enough exercising. I welcome the sort of development of the Claw, the U.S., Australia, Japan, India frame. I think that's good. What I worry about is we're not having those same kinds of discussions with our European friends. So I think, you know, Europe is very far behind where we are in terms of understanding the China challenge that's gonna be emerging for them as well. And so we haven't done, I think, enough vis-a-vis our European friends to get them more in the game. I would agree with that, and I was gonna just mention a second ago our five eyes on European allies, because one of the central challenges here is technology protection. Even if China's able to innovate, it still does get a lot of technology from increasingly illicit ways, but from Western powers, not just the United States. So engaging both Asia-Pacific partners and European partners to establish a common understanding of the problem and then begin to develop sort of the norms and regulations around how we together protect this technology, because it's gonna get out. Whether the U.S. diffuses it or not, or is taking it from the U.S. is important, but not the whole story. So we need to have a much broader coalition of actors engaged in this. Great. I'm gonna ask one more question, then I'm gonna open it up to the audience. So if you could get the mics rolling, that would be great. It looks like Peter Bergen is carrying a mic around. Uh-oh. Maybe he's just gonna shut us down. The last question for me is, if there is this conflict with North Korea but in the United States, the previous panel looked like it was walking into, what will China do? Kelly? Well, if there is a U.S. North Korea conflict, I think that's gonna be the first thing that's gonna take us off the path of an effective competitive strategy with China. I think China, I think Kim Jong-un is very different than his father. The relationship between China and North Korea is very different than it was years ago. But the Chinese will feel compelled to act to protect their interests. It's gonna be less about protecting the regime of Kim Jong-un. It's gonna be more about protecting their long-term interests. And the one thing they don't wanna see emerge is a unified Korean Peninsula under democratic rule from Seoul. I mean, that's, to them, that's a worse outcome than the current status quo. So they're gonna work to advance whatever interests they can in that space. They're gonna go for the nukes to try to secure the nuclear sites and the chemical sites. I think the fact that we don't have very good dialogue with the PLA on these kinds of contingencies, I mean, that could be a real problem for us in terms of de-conflicting any kind of our movement north. So I really worry about that piece, but I think the Chinese aren't gonna sit on the sidelines. They're not gonna watch us reshape the peninsula on our terms. Ditto. That's exactly right. This is a core national security issue. And so to have the United States have a democratic unified Korea that with US forces on the peninsula is, I would say, a disastrous outcome. Great. Okay, we're gonna go to questions from the audience. I think the rules of the road are please identify yourself, please keep it pretty quick and please make it a question, not a speech. Hold up your hand and we'll get a mic to you. The woman in the way back there. Hi, Simone Garrow, Western Union. Looking at sort of another security threat, but taking a shift away from military. How about China's exporting a fentanyl to the West? Have you guys, is this coming across your desk and how is that affecting US-China relations? I'm aware of it and there were some, frankly it's relevant to the relationship with the Philippines because a lot of the drug flow coming out of China is going through the Philippines. So in their counter drug fight, that's been one point that we have raised with them to say, hey, you might wanna actually put some pressure on the Chinese as it relates to this. So yes, it is out there. Is it at the top of the list of focus? No, but it's certainly something that I know that Pentagon is watching very closely and probably others in the national security establishment. I just wanna say, I live in rural Maine last weekend in my part of Maine, the four counties in central Maine, there were nine overdoses. This is just stunning what's happening in rural America right now. I wouldn't have anything to add, except that I think this just sort of reinforces the point that the dimensions of this competition between the United States and China may not be fully comprehended. Or we don't necessarily understand how our vulnerabilities are being exploited at how we can redress this. Yeah, but I'm gonna stop them. We should stop the companies in America making opioids. That's right. Another question, please. Yes, young man here. Hi, I'm Ashula Munger. I'm a student in the Washington area. And my question involves, Evan Oz was published this article in the New Yorker in January, making China great again. And he ends it with this idea of the bus driver. The U.S. is the bus driver. And this Chinese scholars say that China cannot be that bus driver in its current state. So I'm wondering how you guys see the dynamics of falling U.S., but yet a China that seems quite working to list. I think we're playing that string right now in terms of American leadership on the global stage and whether Xi Jinping steps into that role and whether he can be a Pied Piper of sorts. I think there is something to that, but I also think that that dynamic is changing. Certainly, and I think initiatives from the Chinese like Belt and Road or AIIB or other initiatives are places where they're clearly testing that question. And they are also working through ways to piggyback their global economic engagement with their global security engagement. So Belt Road is basically like the infrastructure and backbone for security competition as well in the maritime and the land space. So they are pushing forward on the leadership stage and building relationships at the same precise moment, frankly, that the United States is starting to step back. And that, for me, as a person who watches China quite closely, the next two, three years could be instrumental in forming whether China can lead on the global stage and what it means for the United States. I actually want to throw in one question here. It just occurred to me listening to you. It never would have occurred to me, I think, until this year. And given that today, the FBI raided the president's lawyer. It was on the news about an hour ago. Mueller did a referral to the federal prosecutor in New York who sent the FBI to raid Michael Cohen's office. And as I understand it, there are law professors here who know better, but you only raid a subject's office when there's an imminent danger of destruction of evidence or something like that, especially when the president is the client. So which country right now, at this moment, is less stable, the United States or China? Tate? No, a decline to answer that. No, I mean, clearly, the social and political issues here are very divisive and are challenging our ability to respond to global security. Is that a dodge and bobbin weave? Yeah, it is a challenge. Our political challenges are affecting our geopolitical standing and our ability to respond to a world that's moving very, very quickly. These challenges and the developments we're talking about in terms of military capability, these are no longer 30 year timelines or 20 year timelines. Some things are, but a lot of things aren't that are gonna be relevant to the future battlefield and not being able to come up with a concise message to our allies or just internal consensus around what is as we wanna achieve in this competition is a challenge and I think our stability or lack of stability politically is detrimental. Oh, I have to answer too, okay. I would say, listen, American political dysfunction has been a problem for quite some time in Asia to sort of take the heat off the president for a moment. The problem with it is that President Trump, I think in the administration, or at least President Trump, is essentially pouring gasoline on an already challenging dysfunctional political climate in the United States, whether it's over the defense budget and consistency in budgeting or passing any legislation. I mean, Asian allies and partners watch that dysfunction and they've been doing that for quite some time. Yes, please, over there. Good afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Laugh from Air University. He comment on the Sesame Credit social loyalty scores and is that perhaps China's greatest overreach yet? I don't know if it's an overreach. I think when you think about China's priorities, we've talked a lot about external priorities, but clearly the biggest priority is ensuring regime stability and security. And therefore one could argue that the investment in artificial intelligence is largely driven by a desire to ensure that either by an economic hedge against or by these social credit scores, which are really Orwellian. I do that they mine social data of these users, Chinese users and other activities and come up with a basically a credit score for your trustworthiness as a Chinese citizen and it is then used to determine who can leave the country or who. So I feel like it could well trigger things that we haven't seen in China, that have been contained in China for some time. We already see some pushback as limited as it can be to the idea that there's this degree of monitoring of behaviors. So I think it has the potential to, we'll see how it's managed, much like Belt and Road, the potential for overextension is there, but that's if we're going by the plans that have been stated and I'm sure there are frictions that will slow this down. Okay, now we're gonna go to the speed round, which is I want, if you've got an urgent question defined as if you don't get to ask it, you're gonna go home and kick the dog or something. Put up two hands if this is an urgent question. Okay, yes sir. Huge grind staff. In the last few days, there's been talk out of China about a warming of relations between the Russian military and the Chinese military. Any comment? Listen, I think that relationship is always gonna be a little more challenging than we think it is on the surface. They will cooperate when it's in their interest to cooperate and they will not cooperate when it's not in their interest to cooperate. I mean, I think that's always gonna be the dynamic between China and Russia. I will say on Russia engagement in the Pacific, towards the end of my time at the Pentagon, we were seeing a lot more Russian military engagement in the Pacific, almost to a worry degree. So it'll be interesting to see whether or not the Chinese start to pick up on that, whether they react to that in any particular way, et cetera. So you could see the potential for some friction there, but probably not in the near term. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving our panel a round of applause.