 Well, good afternoon. I'm Lieutenant General Retired Jim Dubick. I'm your AUSA advertisement to start this conference off. Thank you for joining us for this contemporary military forum entitled Transforming Land Power to Meet Global Challenges. We certainly have, I think, the best panel of the day to talk about this. As your professional association, the United States Association of the United States Army is proud to provide forums like this throughout the year that broaden the professional knowledge base of our professionals and those who support the Army. AUSA will amplify the Army's narrative to audiences inside the Army and to help further the association's missions to be the voice of the Army outside. Of course, we don't do this alone. This AUSA relies on its members to help tell the Army's story and to help support our soldiers and families. A strong membership base, therefore, is vitally important for our advocacy to the Congress, in the Pentagon, defense industries, the public, and communities across the country and in the 122 chapters across the country. If you're a member, great. Thank you. If you're not, move out right now and go join. Just one administrative announcement before we start the panel. Because of the current environment, we've had to reduce the capacity in each of these forums. So if you leave the room for some reason, please know that you may or may not be able to get back in as we're attending the numbers outside. So with that, I turn the panel over to Frances Rose, our moderator, and I welcome all the panel members on behalf of AUSA. Good to see you. Thank you, sir. I appreciate the warm welcome. And thanks to all of you for coming. I'm really happy to be back in person. I missed seeing everyone last year. I'm a rookie compared to a lot of you. I imagine this is my sixth AUSA. And so I always enjoy coming and seeing familiar faces and meeting new folks. The discussion at hand is tremendously important. I will not bore you with the headlines that I'm sure you have already followed that make the implications of what we're discussing here clear. Transforming land power to meet global challenges. I want to welcome my fellow panelists, General Christopher Cavoli, General Charles Flynn, Vikram Singh, Corey Shockey, and Mackenzie Eaglin directly to my left. We have plenty of time for each of them to give some thoughts to begin the conversation. I will then, I have a few things that I've scribbled down that I want to ask them about. And then I hope to set aside a fair amount of time for you to be involved too. We have the microphones that you see. And there will be plenty of opportunity. So as you're thinking about what you're hearing, I welcome you to jot them down or remember those thoughts and pose them to the members of the panel. Without further ado, I'll start with General Cavoli. Welcome, and thank you very much for participating and please take it away. Thank you, Mr. Rose, appreciate it very much. It's good to be here. Thank you for the invitation to be on this panel. It's wonderful to be on a panel with such distinguished colleagues. And it's good to see so many friendly faces in the audience to include Andy Knight, who I just saw for the first time in more than a year. One of my favorite soldiers and artillery men who was so good, we gave him command of an infantry company when he was a young officer. So it's good to be here. I've been in command of US Army Europe for the last three and a half years. As many of you know, in the past year, we combined it with US Army Africa and my headquarters adopted the Africa Portfolio as well. But today I'd like just to dwell on US Army Europe for a moment and the efforts we've been taking there. So the most recent national defense strategy named adversaries, not a very common thing, but one that gave us a great deal of focus, that focus built on the focus that we had started to generate in the wake of 2008 and 2014, the annexation of Crimea and the incursion into Eastern Ukraine. And essentially, I think the big top line message from US Army Europe is we have been and are preparing training, organizing training and equipping for large-scale ground combat operations as a method of deterrence, but also because we deterred by being prepared to win. So the history of US Army Europe as many of you know started the Cold War. Huge fraction of the US Army was located for deployed inside Europe. Over time after the Cold War, we drew that down until finally in 2013, the last US tanks left the European continent soon thereafter. The events of 2014 transpired, we began to reverse that first with rotational organizations and armor brigade combat team rotating heel to toe through Europe since 2015, later a combat aviation brigade in addition to that and a division headquarters minus. So that was rotational forces where the US's first attempt to thicken our stance there. But in the past couple of years, we've had significant targeted, very specifically targeted, but significant growth. First of all, the 41st Fires Brigade, a rocket launcher brigade consisting of two launcher battalions stationed in Grafenvere, Germany, up and running fully operationally capable as of February of this year, a huge addition to our combat power on the continent of Europe. Second, we created one of the Army's first active component short range air defense battalions, the fifth of the fourth air defense artillery. It's located in Ansbach and a couple of other locations in Europe. Very importantly, the Army reestablished the US Fifth Corps and aligned it against the European problems that Lieutenant General John Kolosheski, maybe in this room right now. There he is, John Kolosheski is the commander of Fifth Corps, just finished his final certification exercise to declare operational capability in only a year after being established at Fort Knox. So a huge feat on the part of Mike Garrett's forces command and John, you personally. That operational layer of command and control will add immeasurably to our ability to prepare for operations on the continent. And most recently, we activated the first, the Army's second multi-domain task force. It'll be headquartered in Mainz, Castel, Germany, just south of my headquarters. And finally, next month, we're gonna activate the Theater Fires Command, the 56th Fires Brigade. All of that together will significantly thicken our ability to manage competition, but more importantly, to on-ramp large forces to keep the theater set for the conduct of large-scale operations. In addition to this growth, we have had a significant amount of modernization. We're about to begin the A2 upgrade to our multiple launch rocket systems. We have received the Army's first four Striker vehicle-based short-range air defense systems. They are up and running now in Germany. We have fielded terrestrial electronic warfare systems across our force, and we have had some innovative new Department of the Army aerial collection systems put into the theater that we are working to integrate into the larger Yukon collection system. That's our structure. More important is our activity, I believe. We have returned to large-scale exercises on the continent, and every year, we make them just a little bit bigger, but more important, just a little bit more complex. These exercises go by a variety of different names. The Signal One has been Defender series for the last two and a half years, but what they really bring is multi-core enabled, reinforced from the contiguous 48 states operations. So when we came out of the Cold War, we essentially turned the European theater from a Ford-Poster theater into a reinforcement theater, and so our ability to practice that reinforcement and to enable that reinforcement and to integrate it with our allies to conduct large-scale ground operations is fundamental to our existence and our future success here. In that regard, I would like to call out Major General James Smith. Raise your hand there, James, please. James Smith commands the 21st Theater Sustainment Command, which is the backbone of the reception-staging onward movement system that we have inside Europe. And Joe Hilbert commands the Seventh Army Training Command, and he performs the integration function. So we have been rehearsing at micro-scale and at macro-scale this reception of a reinforcement integration and then operations with our allies across the entire theater. In this regard, we're quite similar to U.S. Army Pacific. We have great challenges with time and distance. We have great challenges with integration of large organizations on the fly, moving directly into operations. And then finally, we have one big difference, a lot of water, a lot of land. So I'll pass it to Charlie Flynn McCartney. Before to your questions or comments. And I'll sort of capitalize on a number of things that Chris laid out. Frank, thank you on the panel for doing this and to AUSA. And it is good to see a lot of friends. So I'll sort of frame this way. I'll talk about the place. I'll talk about the adversaries. I'll talk about some of the adversary capabilities. And then I'll sort of wrap up my comments similarly to outlining what we have in the theater, what we're bringing to the theater and what we intend to do with those capabilities in the theater. So the place, obviously Asia, the Asian continent, the connection to Eurasia, and as Chris mentioned, lots of water, lots of air when you look at the map. But there is also a lot of people there. Six out of 10 today, seven out of 10 in the next decade. And those people compete largely for water, food, and power, minerals to run their countries and factories and energy, et cetera, et cetera. And there is a lot of, a number of destabilizing activities that are going on in the region along the Mekong River with damming, a lot of challenges in places like Miramar along the line of actual control of India. And I could go through a number of incidents there, what I call the sort of refer to as the soft land underbelly of China from Vietnam to India or into Pakistan. So that's one set. There's a whole, another host of challenges out in Oceania and the reach that some countries are probing into. And then of course, I think as many of you know, there's lots of challenges going on in the East, South China Sea, Taiwan, straight, so off the coast to Japan. And then of course the actor in North Korea and all the actions that they bring. Russia is also an actor in the region. So we've got the range of adversaries that are involved, not just in the Pacific Ocean area, the Indian Ocean area, but also up in the Arctic. I often refer to the Arctic Circle as Russia is in the Arctic Circle looking out and China is outside the Arctic Circle looking in and attempting to move there. So that's quick summary of the place. Lots of things going on, lots of challenges, and I can go in more if you've got questions on it. So adversaries, I mentioned a few of them there. I'll just say that the A2AD arsenal that China has built is in many ways designed to attack our air and naval assets. So I think what land power can do is enable some of those activities and some of those capabilities that we want to maintain by having a terrestrial based force with a wide range of sensors to be able to see, sense, understand the environment and the conditions that we're confronted with out there and the complexities that go really from the West Coast and the continental United States all the way into Eurasia. So the adversary and the capabilities that they're presenting to the joint force create challenges for us, but I do think that, again, some of the things that General Cavoli mentioned here with capabilities that the Army has brought to bear in Europe were attempted to do a number of those things in the Pacific as well just to name a few. So the first multi-domain task force is established at Joint Base Lewis McCord, has been for nearly two years, and the Fifth Security Force Assistance Brigade which is established at Joint Base Lewis McCord now in 10 countries in the region and operating. They're co-located with First Special Forces Group, part of United States SOCOM, but an enabling capability that is part of the land power and the land domain extension into the region. And then, of course, the capabilities that reside in Hawaii itself and Alaska, these three power projection platforms that we use to generate readiness and put that readiness in the region in Hawaii alone, including the Hawaii Army National Guard. There's 10 flag officer headquarters. One of them is commanded by Major General Dave Wilson sitting right behind the sustainment commander from Europe. So again, the theater opening, theater distribution, theater sustainment, largely the glue that binds the joint force together is done often through what I refer to as the foundational capabilities that only the Army provides the joint force commander from civil affairs to medical to sustainment, integrated air missile defense, military police activities, Corps of Engineers, again, I could go contracting, I could go on and on, but these capabilities that are at the theater army level are really to enable all of the joint force to operate with freedom of maneuver, freedom of action and be able to capitalize on some of the situations that happen day to day in competition. And I'll say that from the West Coast to Alaska to Hawaii, to the forces that we have forward in Japan and Korea, obviously in my AOR, the posture that we have in the northern, what I refer to as the northern corridor of the region is pretty strong and has been strong for the better part of 70 years from South Korea to Japan to Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast. Where we are trying to do some unique things is in the Southeast, West and Central corridor of the region. And again, I think Chris described quite well what they're doing with Defender Europe. This past year, we had a similar operation called Defender Pacific. The future will continue to operate and call it Operation Pathways, different from Defender in Europe. And I would just say that the combined effects of having an operation and an exercise go on between Cobra Gold in Thailand, Gruda Shield in Indonesia, Orient Shield in Japan, Talisman Saber in Australia, Balakantan in the Philippines, and then some experimental operations that were going on with Army Futures Command between Guam, Tinian Side Pan and Palau. Over the better part of about three months, we wanna continue to do those types of operations because the amount of readiness that we get by operating in the region, in the conditions, and in the environment where we're most likely to be gaining, increasing our joint readiness, increasing confidence in what our allies and partners need from us and expect from us. And then by way of denying key terrain from the PRC or any other adversary that is trying to fracture or destabilize the vast populations that have to live out there and have to live and continue to get along with one another because of the competitive nature of things that are happening, whether it's in technology or whether it's in power, water, and food, as I was talking about earlier for, which really is generated out of the global commons. So anyways, I'll let to say, I look forward to your questions. I hope that gave you a little bit of a sense of the place, the capabilities or the adversaries and the adversaries capabilities and sort of what the theater army is doing. I look forward to your questions, thanks. General, thank you very much. Both generals, thank you very much. Mr. Singh, why don't you take the first civilian position, respond either to what the general said or let us know what you brought with you for us to think about. Okay, great. Francis, thanks so much. And gentlemen, I hope I'm, there's a nice sign up here saying, pull the mics close and speak directly into them. So we'll try to do that across the board. Thanks, gentlemen, for your remarks and for all you guys are doing and all your men and women in uniform are doing to try to pivot to really what is a new era of great power competition. I mean, I know it gets thrown around a lot. That, you know, we're at this moment of change, but essentially what we're facing in Europe and what we're facing in the Pacific really are the potential for major power adversaries to shift our strategic reality in a way that would affect many generations of Americans, would affect our national interests not just in some abstract way, but actually our ability to be secure and be prosperous going forward. If, you know, if China really does reorder the Asia Pacific or if Russia really does succeed, you know, not just in dominating Eastern Europe, but really in managing to fragment NATO and sort of exploit what we're seeing as weaknesses in democratic societies all around the world. Those opportunities are viewed from Beijing and Moscow as real pivotal 21st century opportunities for them to change their fundamental position. Their fundamental position has been as major but not great global superpowers, major powers but not superpowers. And for Russia it's about getting back. For China in a way it's about getting back its stature, something that the Chinese have taken deeply to heart about being mistreated and held down and disrespected for a century. It's about regaining that power but it's also about displacing or at least becoming a true peer with the United States. And Russia probably doesn't have the prospect of really doing that. China may have the prospect of really doing that but in both cases the challenge is not that they're trying to meet some, this peaceful rise that you hear from China. It's not that they're trying to just meet their aspirations. It's that part of the way they wanna meet those aspirations is gonna potentially make the world a much more dangerous place and make the world truly hostile to the kind of future we in the West and in Western democracies wanna see. So I think that one of the questions becomes, okay, what does warfare look like? What does it look like if it goes bad, right? And I think there's a tendency right now to focus in Asia on maritime and air and in with regards to Russia and Asia with regards to Europe and Asia on the sort of the critical future aspects of conflict which is what I focus on myself actually, technology, cyber, information capabilities, a lot of gray zone and hybrid warfare issues. But what you need to remember is when it comes to deterrence and when it comes to fighting and winning if we end up in conflict, land power is absolutely essential. And I think it's easy to get distracted and think it's not and we're fortunate that General Cavoli, General Flynn and their men and women in uniform are staying highly focused on what it looks like to be effective at deterring and to be prepared to fight and win if you end up in a full scale conflict. Those things are fully tied together. If the adversary, be that Beijing or be that the Russians or the Chinese that's who I'm focused on. If they don't really believe that we are willing and able to actually deploy land forces in a conflict, our deterrence is fundamentally weakened. In fact, I think I would go so far as to say I don't know that deterrence really holds up in a situation where you don't believe your adversary is willing to actually deploy forces on the ground. It's really hard to see. It stays too abstract. So while wars get fought in all domains, at the end of the day, the end of the day you're fighting for your towns, your cities, your people, your population, you're fighting for what's on the ground. And so the army is at a moment of having to figure out how it fits into and supports this new era of conflict. Peace time conflict, the information operations, the cyber operations, financial tools that are being used to fragment and weaken societies. Things we've always called irregular threats, whether that's trafficking in arms or narcotics or terrorism. All of those things are part of what's gonna be a different picture if you look at conflict in the future. And the army has a critical role across the board. Just look at our recent challenges. COVID, who's been critical to the COVID fight across the board? Natural disaster responses, CT terrorism threats across any theater, whether you're talking Africa, whether you're talking Asia, you see the role that the army and ground forces play in general. Nios, just look at Afghanistan right now. And Marines, 82nd Airborne, required to make that happen, even though it was great tales flying in and out that got most of the video coverage. It's deployed US Marines that took the casualties. And so at the end of the land forces remain absolutely vital. And I think that one of the shift needs to be to developing the technologies, developing the capability in areas like cyber, developing the capability in areas like sensors, being able to help us have operational understanding of the environment we're going into. And then almost forgotten, but something that especially, I think Charlie really touched on, the enabling relationships, right? So these alliance, our alliance partnerships, our security assistance, what, you know, it's building partnership capacity. It's almost an un, it's almost a intangible in the big picture. People sitting up and looking across from 60,000 feet are sometimes miss the importance of all the exercises we're doing, of increasing the complexity of that activity, of building the fabric of those relationships. A huge amount of that happens obviously across all the services, but a huge amount of it is army to army. A huge amount of it is a comment, it's what Fayos do. It's what happens when we do large scale maneuver exercises, army to army. It's what happens when we do joint exercising, training. And it was what happens in the classroom education that we offer, the IMAT programs that we offer. And it's important to remember that while we think Air and Maritime an awful lot, especially in Asia and I'm an Asia guy, that's my focus is China and China's influence in the region. We have a lot of army centric partners. Now we may feel that that's not exactly the best, maybe they are imbalanced. They take in Indonesia, take in India, are really critical partners in the region. Most of these countries and China itself actually are fairly army focused in how they've structured themselves for national defense. And so it's important to go to where your partners are and those relationships, those army army to relationships are really critical. So in some I think that we are at a point of shifting our attention and our resources. We have a lot of very hard choices to make from an investment standpoint. Obviously we need new and novel technologies across the board. Obviously there are air, maritime, space, cyber capabilities that have to be invested in. And I think one of the key things is how integrating across our planning and integrating across the joint force so that we don't end up making redundant investments across the services or leaving gaps unfilled is going to be extremely critical. But make no mistake, where the army goes so goes our ability to deter and prevail in conflicts in both these theaters. Really look forward to the conversation. Thanks guys. Vikram, thanks very much. Dr. Corey Shockey is next. And I have done enough of these with you in the past to know that while your prepared remarks, I'm sure are quite instructive. I would be very curious to know what you have been very actively scribbling in that book. So I invite you to dispense with those remarks and just share with us what you've scribbled in the book if you would. Because Frank and I are friends. He is very nicely giving me a get out of jail free card for not having prepared remarks and giving me just the fun of responding to what I'm hearing. Thank you for that my friend. I owe you a drink. I'll take it. I was struck listening to General Cavulli that you had actually nothing to say about Africa which is given the nature of Chinese moves in Africa I thought was striking. And it strikes me that that may be a useful fingerprint about what we need to push ourselves to think anew about. For example, that the Army's mission in Europe is large scale reinforcement from the United States strikes me as actually the wrong mission. Because there is no place in the world where the United States has more capable allies in larger numbers and with more direct interest and more direct focus similar to our focus. And I think if General Eisenhower were here he would be astonished that we still have troops stationed in Europe this long after the end of the Cold War and I'm not arguing against the stationing of US troops in Europe. I favor it very strongly. But I do think our major mission in Europe should be orchestrating other armies into the fight. Not orchestrating our own from the continental United States or any place else. And that might be worth some more thought. A second thing is you come as a force provider to other theaters because I'm I think perhaps more confident than General Cavoli about the strength of deterrence for a major ground war in Europe. And I'm I think a little bit less confident about the need about our ability to flow forces either from Europe and not just American forces. Because we're gonna need to be the mobility for lots of other people's forces. Should they choose to join us in fights in Africa or in Asia? I was heartened to hear General Flynn's discussion about the Army as an enabler for joint operations throughout the expanse of Asia. That strikes me as the right kind of focus. And also the Army's day to day in and out of the engagement with forces in the region because it's gonna be a really hard slug to align countries in Asia into thinking about China the way we are worried about China. And especially if the test becomes the defense of Taiwan, our advantage strategically is our operational burden which is getting everybody else lined up on our side and moving forward with us. And that's a whole lot of day to day hand holding. As Vikram said, being worried about problems that other people are worried about instead of the problems that we are worried about. Because most militaries would love to have the problems you all spend your time worrying about instead of the problems they have to spend their time worrying about. Which makes me happy that it sounds like the new defense strategy in the works or the new national security strategy in the works will dispense with great power competition as the frame of reference. Because that actually plays to China's advantage. This notion that there are rising great power and we're sparta a declining great power facing Athens in their fulgency. And that's actually not what we're doing. It's us and just about everybody else having agreed on a set of rules about, for example, how ships on the open ocean behave. And the Chinese wanting to unilaterally change those rules to their advantage and the disadvantage of everyone else. So every time we talk about great power competition which I grant you is a useful way for us to organize ourselves. Which is to say, finally, finally people prioritize as Mackenzie Eaglin keeps telling us we need to do. And focus on China. But that's actually not a useful way to talk about it with everybody else because it will make the very cooperation we need harder to get from those countries. There is a beautiful little pamphlet that I encourage for your thinking about these problems. It was written by an Army Lieutenant Colonel name of Red Reader. In 1941 or 42, General Marshall sent him to the Pacific. Understanding, of course, that once the Army had won the war in Europe, we didn't have a force large enough that we wouldn't have to swing it to also win the war in the Pacific. Which goes to the point that I think all three speakers made that we're not gonna have the luxury of optimizing just a one set of challenges. We don't have a big enough military now, we didn't have a big enough military in 1942. And so the pamphlet that Lieutenant Colonel Reader writes, Marshall sends him to interview all of the Marine commanders in the Pacific to figure out what they had done wrong and what they figured out how to do right. So that the Army could actually train soldiers while you were swinging from Europe to the Pacific for the challenges of the Pacific, because they're different kinds of wars. Because obviously you have different kinds of adversaries. And if I were worrying about the war, we would have to fight in the Pacific. It would look to me a lot like the early thinking about war in the nuclear age. Namely what in the Eisenhower administration they call broken back warfare. Where at first you have all of the high tech, spiffy, the kind of war Vikram was talking about. And then all that stuff gets destroyed and you have to have grit and soldiering to carry you through when everything else is already gone. Cause that's what in my judgment a war with China would look like. Moreover, that's what allies need from us. Cause they're not gonna have the spiffiness that we have in toys we're playing with. And they may not even have a common operational picture, which means getting them into the fight is gonna be a really hard part of the problem. Last couple of things. We are doing a pretty good job as a government and especially as a defense establishment in gearing up for managing a broad-shouldered, aggressive, repressive China, right? We're not doing half that about that. I went back incidentally not long ago and read the 2016 National Security Strategy. And I was struck that it's not actually a great power competition, China strategy. Mostly that's what DOD did in the transition from the National Security Strategy to the National Defense Strategy. And it was really a nice magic trick that even I who pay pretty close attention to this didn't realize how much more focused the NDS was than the National Security Strategy was on China. And we've done a really good job. Mackenzie will point out where, well, among the many things Mackenzie will do, is I hope point out the necessity of greater prioritization and the budget gaps of achieving it. But it looks to me like the gears are meshing. What I think we're not thinking enough about is the problems attendant on a failing China. Because it looks to me like that's what we are already facing. So what is propelling China now is the momentum of a rise that has stalled, where pro-market reform stopped happening in 2002, where ask yourself, why is China making the moves they're making now? Because why not just wait till they've won the AI race? Why not wait until the Trump administration had actually collapsed America's alliances? They're not waiting for any of that. And it's at least worth considering that they're trying to take advantage of a window of opportunity that they feel is closing. And the last thing that occurs to me listening to my military colleagues is that we need to help the Biden administration understand, to a greater degree than I think the Trump administration understood, that military deployments aren't a proxy for credibility and that coming out of the policy decisions we have made in Afghanistan and are likely to make in Iraq and Syria, that we actually need them to get serious about the relentless diplomacy and civilian leadership of these problems rather than expecting the arrival of a ship pulling into port or an exercise to be all we do in order to signal credibility. Because as I think General Cavoli started, deterrence is the actual game we're in. I think rather than some pointed comment I will just say follow that. Thank you, your Francis. I've learned a lot actually just being up here for the half hour so far. And I'm glad that on this panel we have agreement where I don't think there is much else in DC on a couple of questions. And so what do I mean by that? So I think there are several sets of big unanswered questions by civilians that the Army needs clarity on to continue to keep the unsteady piece I guess is what I would say. And while it may seem like there is agreement in Washington because of the remarks that we've made on this, there's an absence of clarity because I think partly these are politically hard questions and so when you bring that element into it, it just gets things get harder. And so what are some of the big unanswered questions? Well, when I'm a force planner for DOD and I look around the world, is it deterrence and competition or is it winning the war fight? Because while there is some overlap, sure. The numbered plans are different than the day to day grind that the generals have to deal with. The presence, assurance, deterrence, dissuasion, persuasion, all the other not conflict missions that they're doing every single day around the world with just as many forces forward at the height of the war. So what are they doing? They're doing all that other stuff. But the numbered plans are what we size and structure and build the defense department and budget the defense department around. And so while there's many plans, of course, some are preferential and it's increasingly unclear and the overlap isn't gonna be enough to get us there, right? Where you have, do you want specialized forces for general purpose and how much of which kind? And if it's deterrence as the name of the game, is it by denial or by punishment? Because those are also, again, they're different solutions, different services, different risk horizons or different risk appetites and different time horizons when you're talking about how exactly what deterrence looks like in these problem sets. And then thinking about if it's the war fight as opposed to the competition slash deterrence slash presence, what happens, I guess Corey said it pretty well, what happens, what if war is just more than the giant missile exchange, which increasingly is what I hear around town when that's over and the battle is not. We're not pretty good at ending wars. I think we just saw that in Afghanistan, unfortunately. We don't do treaties and armistices anymore. So what if that doesn't end it? Then is war still more than giant missile salvos and exchanges or is it a battle of people and wills? I think this group would agree, but in Washington it's hard to, that costs a lot of money when we're starting to talk about people and wills. And then on the threat priority, just listening to, it was a really good panel setup, not because we're on it, but because of the two generals and the two theater perspectives that they bring. Is it a three theater force sizing construct that we're talking about? Basically balance of power slash deterrence in Europe and Asia with an economy of force mission in the Middle East. Is that the essential job du jour of the department? And if so, we're doing it all wrong because as Corey's heard me say, that's a trillion dollar defense budget. I think it's actually what we're doing on the ground, but it's not what we say we're gonna do in paper and in budgeting. So I'll close it out by saying, again, Corey said, we don't have the luxury to optimize to one challenge. Amen. I agree with that, I know I'm calling for priorities, of course. But who is doing that? The Marine Corps. The Marine Corps, that's over there. They can do things that the other chiefs can't do, the Commandant and get away with it. It's remarkable. So force design 2030, it's lauded all over town as being a brilliant, goring sacred cows, forward looking, all the right answers document. And that may be true, or is it just really, really, really risky business to specialize in this luxury of one problem, one challenge, one enemy? And while you're doing that, shift burden of responsibility onto other services, namely the United States Army, for what you're giving up. Armor, artillery, rotary wing capability, specifically helicopters. So when the Marine Corps gets rid of it all, who's gonna pick up that bill? The Army. But I didn't hear any brilliant exchange by civilians in Washington making that overt choice. As far as I know, there's no agreement with the chiefs that this was the agreement. So it's just, and the Commandant's moving forward. It's already happening. So what does this tax mean on the Army? The Army's already getting taxed with pandemic relief and response, more climate, everything, and additional domestic missions, border, housing of 60,000 Afghan citizens and SIVs and other personnel at US military bases. The list goes on and on and on. And so, I guess I would conclude by saying, that sounds smart. Forces 920-30, people like to say, well, we never fought at the full to gap, Francis. But guess what we did do? We fought proxies of our enemies during the Cold War, everywhere else around the world in the small, messy wars. And I think we'll continue to see that in the future with China and with Russia. But we're not being honest about that, I guess is what I'm saying. So my watchword is honesty today, thanks. I have a note, by the way, you've been invited to be on a panel called the Future of the Marine Corps. They would very much like to hear your thoughts about what that looks like. I doubt they would. When I spoke to the commandant privately recently, he shook my hand and said hello. I was on my panel and he shook my hand and said goodbye. I think that sums it up. You all have used your opportunities to talk at some length or other about allies and partners. And I would like to start with General Cavoli and General Flynn and raise a point that I think Corey might have brought up. What is the expectation in your interaction with our allies and partners, what they have regarding land power in the future from the United States? General Cavoli, you wanna go first, please? Yeah, our expectations derive directly from our planning efforts and our expectations can be measured, both in terms of quantity and quality of forces available. So I have to study the actual force that's on the ground facing the NATO alliance. And it is a very, very significant force that cannot be assumed away or wished away. And it's proximate to the borders of the alliance in some cases and not that far removed in others. So there's a time and distance consideration that goes to the readiness, the availability, the quantity and the quality of the allied forces that would face it. So what we actually expect is probably shouldn't be discussed very much in this forum, but it's quite a bit. And it does rely on US enablement at the higher end. And of course, to get it into the fight, to facilitate it into the fight, as Dr. Shockey described, it requires US presence, US participation and US leadership. So there's a reason forces remain on the continent, American forces remain on the continent. There's a reason we practice reinforcement because you can't wish away the force that's opposing us. It's there, it's really there. And it requires a force that is capable of defeating it in its own domain as well as across multiple domains. So that's kind of what we work on. In terms of how that plays out, Mr. Rose, across our interactions with our allies, we rehearse the parts we practice, the things we think we would have to do in a large scale fight with our allies. We rehearse them very frequently. I see Adam Yokes there from the Polish Army. We have participated together in numerous wet gap crossings, for instance, bridging operations. Very complicated things in which all of our forces would have to pool assets successfully to negotiate the number of obstacles that we would face in operations. We practice parachuting operations together for rapid contingency response to include preparing to bring forces over from U.S. Army Pacific and parachuting into our area. So the things that we anticipate having to do in a large scale fight drive our interaction with our allies on exercises and our preparatory interactions with our allies are determined by what we expect to do with them on exercises. So it all kind of comes together from I met as Dr. Singh talked about a moment ago all the way through the large scale exercises that we do. Everything we do in U.S. Army Europe is done with allies. In fact, it's hard for me to think of any activity we conduct that is not conducted with our allies and in some cases, special partners as well. General thanks, General Flynn. So a lot of similarities. So I won't re-grind a number of things that Chris mentioned. I will say where there's a binding collective security arrangement and forces that, as Chris described, are working day in and day out. We have a little bit of a different challenge in, you know, across the Indo-Pacific. While we do have some partners that, you know, we have treaties and obligations that we will meet, there are others that are, there are, our work with them requires to meet them, I think as Dr. Shaki mentioned, to meet them forward and be forward with them and seek ways to, for them to identify the things that they would like our help with and then conversely, the things that we can learn from them. As Dr. Shaki was talking, I thought of a few years back, I remember taking a core commander from a country in Southeast Asia into one of our ops centers. And when we walked out, I was sort of feeling very proud about all the technology that we had there. And I said, you know, General, what did you think? And he said, I think we'll never be like that. And then we continued to walk and he stopped and he pointed over to the jungle and he said, but that's not why you need us. And so I think that that was an illustration to me of the help and assistance that we can give to them because there were things in the command post that added value to the operation that we happen to be on, but there were also things that we need to learn from them. And I think that that, I know that Chris's team is doing that every day. Everything that we're trying to do in the Indo-Pacific is with our allies and partners, everything. And the more we do that, I think the more confidence that they gain by being alongside us, by learning from one another, by us reaching out to them to find out what is it that they need from us. And then conversely, what is it that they offer to us that we need to learn inside of our own formations because there are an enormous amount of skilled professionals out there in the region that we can benefit from. And so I think, you know, in addition to what Chris is saying, one other comment that I wanted to sort of emphasize that Chris mentioned. On the other side, there is a known adversary, multiple known adversaries. I mean, you can't discount the 10,000 tubes of artillery that are facing down into South Korea. So it's there. And we, while we may size for competitive activities, these are real numbers with real forces and they really could do something. And so we have this delicate balance that we have to walk about doing a range of competitive activities that are direct and indirect in support of our allies and partners, but we also have to be able to execute in the event that something goes terribly wrong. And so that's what I think that we're faced with each day and every night and we have to be very pragmatic about our ability to respond to that. General, thank you. And similarly, Charlie, I think it befalls you and me to distinguish between the way we aspire to fight someday in the future and the way we have to prepare to fight with what we have right now. And those aren't necessarily the same thing and it's easy for us in academic discussions to conflate those sometimes. So we kind of are the place where you have to, where we got to unsort those two and make sure we're able to prepare for the latter while we're able currently to execute the former. General, thanks. Corey, since you started this discussion about what allies need from us, what should they expect from us or what should we be able to contribute to them and what is reasonable for us to expect, as General Flynn said, that's not why you need us. What should we, what's reasonable for us to think that we can gain from them? That's a great question. And I think the answer, like with any good question, is it depends, right? It depends on whether you have a defense treaty with them. We, in Europe, we have tried to blur the line between those countries that are NATO members and those countries that we just want to defend. And the Russians have driven the cost way up to keeping that line blurry. And I think we should expect adversaries in Asia to try and do the same. Which is why the Quad is such an interesting innovation because it does blur the line in interesting and important ways. I think AUKUS blurs the line in interesting and important ways. And we should, it is to our advantage to have those lines blurry. But the problem is, when your marker gets called in on that stuff, you actually have to be willing to do it. And I was pleasantly surprised at how far forward the Biden administration has been leaning on Taiwan, for example, but as General Flynn said, these are non-trivial challenges when you actually have to execute on them. And what I would want if I were an American ally is a lot less nonsense from us, right? A lot less grandiose statements, a lot more practical nuts and bolts under what conditions can you rely on these things. Let's codify them in more plans. You can't reliably deliver the United States unless the Congress is engaged in the activity. So agreements that don't have congressional ratification aren't really agreements. And that the increasing seesawing of executive orders across administrations only reinforces that for allies. So what I would want from the United States is less nonsense and more practicality. What I think they have a right to expect from the United States is clarity about what we can and can't do, and honesty about, as McKenzie was saying, honesty about what we will and won't do, which is a hard conversation to have, right? Because there are lots of things we may want to do that we won't do when push comes to shove. And making the best of that is, I mean the United States is a difficult ally. We're an unreliable ally, even though that's not how we like to think about ourselves. We think about ourselves even in the context of World War II as the war-winning ally. And what we looked like to the British is somebody who wouldn't show up for three and a half years, and we look like that to a lot of continental Europeans too. So I think less chest-thumping triumphalism out of the United States, and a lot more good old-fashioned strategy, which is, so Shaki's theory of strategy is that every good strategist is fundamentally a desperate paranoic because strategists spend all their time thinking about, oh my God, what if a trapdoor opens underneath my chair and I fall into the sewer underneath this building? How did you know that we had one of those? Well, I think you don't because you would have exercised the button by now, Frank. Lastly, what I think we can expect from allies. I hated the way President Obama would always say, we can't care about it more than they do because that rings of the arrogance of a country that's never had to face an overwhelming challenge. And we ought to ask ourselves what the people of my great home state of California would do if they were facing a 10 to one challenge of conquest, and we should be actually nicer and more reassuring about even if we can't defend your territory from the outset, we will help you reconquer it eventually because that's reassurance I would want if I were an American ally. Vic, what do you think is the right exchange between allies and partners in the United States regarding the topic at hand of lamb time? I'm sorry. Go ahead, no, go. I was gonna jump in while you were talking to us. No, go for it. I think that, Corey said something that I think is pretty provocative, and really important, which is that we tend to dress it up in a lot of pomp and circumstance. This are the alliances and they're unbreakable and they are these forever commitments. Of course, everybody knows that alliances are not forever commitments and that they are sometimes very successful. They're more like marriages in a lot of ways with all the work that goes into having a marriage be successful. It's not just you sign the treaty and now you're forever more gonna be there for each other. And I think that what we have is something really uniquely important, which is that we have this network of allies and partners. It is our strength. Back again to something Corey said, it's not us versus China and us versus Russia in a lot of these shaping of the 21st century. It's us and a whole bunch of other countries who kind of share a vision of what we would like the world to look like. And Russia and China having revisionist ideas to one degree or another about a lot of those things around which there's pretty broad consensus in the rest of the international community. But then what we forget is the day to day for those allies and partners looks very different. For every ally and partner we have in the Asia Pacific, China is an overmatch, right? China is crushes them very quickly. And so their perspective on what they can do in terms of showing spine and standing up to China and talking truth, that looks very different for them. For every one of the countries in ASEAN, China is their largest trading partner for every and for even big powers like India, India's not catching up to China, guys. It's not catching up on fighters. It's not catching up on submarines. It's not, you know. Now, so then you start to have to look at the little things. What are the little things? The little things are how does a Taiwan respond to aggression from Beijing in terms of like what we've seen recently with all of the aid is, you know, incursions? How does an India stand up to a Gowan incident where it has soldiers killed for the first time in 45 years on its disputed land border with China, right? How did, and then what do those allies and partners, how do partners in the South China Sea respond to essentially China's extension of its dominance to the first island chain, right? You know, South China Sea and further east. How did they respond and look to handling that? And then how do we help back up what works for those allies and partners? Because one of the things you can't do to have a successful alliance is to expect more than your partners are capable of doing, right? You need to figure out how you partner effectively and play to each other's strengths. What I do think we need to expect from our allies and partners though, you know, to channel some of that what you were hearing from President Obama and I've heard from leaders, political leaders on both ends of the spectrum about getting allies to step up. I think what we need to expect from them is the same kind of clarity about how they wanna face these challenges. Because when you shut the door, they all agree that they don't like the coercion and the pressure that's coming along with the BRI projects and the ability of the Chinese to turn the screws on them, the willingness of the Chinese to do economic coercion, like what we've seen with Australia over a long period of time now, they don't like it but they also know they can't count on us to essentially save them completely. So they need to understand what's the strategy for mitigating, managing and deterring the worst possible outcomes from the assertiveness of their big neighbors who they are also so dependent on. Thanks for that. I wanna give you a chance to answer Mackenzie to wrap up this part, but I wanna let you know that when she's finished, we're ready for questions from the audience. So if you would like to ask a question, you're welcome to go to one of the microphones and we'll begin that part of the conversation. Go ahead, please. I wanna go back to a comment by General Cavulli, which I think was the honesty about which I'm preaching is needed but not enough of, which is essentially boiled down to all paraphrase what you said into the first part of it is what Donald Rumsfeld said. So right, you go to the war with the army you have so you're gonna fight tonight with the army you have but yes, we have to aspire to what changes our head and the force of the future so to speak. But in this disconnected town, this Washington, it's increasingly the emphasis is on in terms of planning and programming and buying the emphasis is on the war we wanna fight in the future and it comes at capacity of the force today and that's the fundamental budgetary and political trade-offs that's happened now for I'd say the last five fiscal years so it's not even exclusive to one administration or another. And I think that has pretty, that can have obviously pretty disastrous and dangerous outcomes because the focus, for example, the feta-compley scenario with Taiwan and preventing that but I think Russia is increasingly demonstrating capability and exercise and willingness that it could perform the feta-compley in the Baltics tonight. And we only talking watching about one other, one feta-compley. And so this willingness to take risk in the present moment for the future that doesn't ever seem to quite get here or quite fully get here is a sucker's bet but it's the one Washington keeps taking because it sounds smarter like forces in 2030 or like the kill chain or like any other pick similar argumentation. It's just, it sounds smarter, it definitely is sexier, it's cooler but until that Skynet so to speak is in hand, I'm not willing to take that risk. And so it's not about allies but about kind of what were the assumptions that we project on them and I think the wrong ones that we're projecting. Thank you for that. Corey, do you want to follow on or just cheering her on? I was just cheering. Excellent. I want to ask General Cavoli and General Flynn, you both talked about the similarities between your commands and you touched on the differences but I wonder if each of you would explore the differences between your commands in whatever way you would choose for a few moments and maybe General Cavoli would go first please. Yeah, I would say the first difference is the geographic proximity of another combatant command to the European theater, specifically Africom. So I think it was a very big advance that we incorporated the Africa portfolio into the US Army Europe portfolio because it allows us to think in a large scale conflict, it allows us to think of the Mediterranean basis as a single theater of operations which it basically always has been. I mean from the Punic Wars, right? So I think that's a difference. So Charlie does have other theaters but these are land masses that are managed by different parts, different organizational structures that abut each other in very close proximity. So I think that's one difference. I think a second difference is the nature of the potential adversaries. The military problem it presents in the case of Europe, there's a very big mass challenge that is proximate to our forces on land. So there's not a water gap that has to be crossed. There's not an air gap that has to be crossed but there's a continuous land mass that has two large potentially opposing land forces and I think those are two from a military perspective and a military technical perspective operationally, those are very salient differences. So a couple things, one, as I mentioned earlier, so we have a challenge with the practical application of forces on the Korean Peninsula and then we have another challenge with the, again, the sort of the geometry of the geography that we have in Asia in the rest of the theater. I think one other point I'd like to add that's a bit of a difference is that we have to support the 13 states, territories and possessions out to the second island chain and that's under the Indo-Pacom commander for Homeland Defense and Defense Support to Civil Authority. We also have forces in Alaska that are part of Northern Command and their Defense Support to Civil Authority and Homeland Defense. So those, I would just say there's two combatant commands that under my TJ Flick role we have to support because we have assigned forces in Indo-Pacom but they're positioned in Alaska and then we have obviously forces that must be able to defend the homeland out to the second island chain and then of course the Korean Theater of Operations and then the rest of the AOR. So there's sort of four areas within the AOR that we have to be concerned about and they have different capabilities that are required for it, different response times, different adversaries on the other side of the field so to speak. So that I think is a difference that we have between Chris's challenges in Europe and Africa and mine across the Indo-Pacific. Charlie, I'd like to underline that last one. So it's, you know, from my perspective as a commander when I think about the additional responsibilities that Charlie has to defend U.S. territories and U.S. sovereign territory, that's a big difference. That's a big difference. And then finally one last difference that I neglected to talk about but is in the military sphere. Most of Europe is governed by an alliance by the NATO alliance, which brings military advantages to it. You know, you have standards for procedures, you have technical standards and things like that. And I commanded 25th ID out in the Pacific just after Charlie did. And I'm sorry for what I did to the division, Charlie. But. You made it much better. But it's hard to overstate what a benefit it is to have a standing alliance that's more than, you know, 70 years old and where procedures and understandings have been worked out at a military operational and tactical level. Thank you. That is another very important point that is not part of the fabric across the Indo-Pacific. But the value of land power out there and again, back to the beginning, I think some of those enabling capabilities that theater armies provide. They're a bit of an epoxy that kind of binds the security architecture together because it's more than just lethal applications. There are other tools that both Chris's Theater Army has available that are both for crisis, for competition activities, but they're also there for war. And I think that those, that suite of capabilities that armies provide at scale and can provide a campaign quality to it is important. Because it's not about a period of time it's about being able to sustain it over time so that you keep pressure and you continue to foster and build and grow and enhance these relationships that are absolutely essential as a counterweight to all of the complimentary competing and compounding problems that the adversaries are throwing at us. Thank you very much for that. Tell us your name and who you're with and then fire away. Hi, this is Megan Eckstein with Defense News. I'm gonna risk poking the bear by bringing up Marine Corps force design again. But for the two generals, I was curious, obviously Mackenzie mentioned that there could be additional burden on the army with the Marine Corps pulling out of certain mission areas. Mr. Singh also mentioned the idea of overlaps and gaps between the army and Marine Corps and I wonder if perhaps there's an opportunity now for you guys to not have to worry about those issues and just kind of focus on the missions as you'd like to do them. So I wonder if we could just get some color for how this is playing out in your theater. Are you seeing any changes yet and how are you coordinating with your Marine Corps counterparts just to make sure that the transition as they pull out of the missions goes smoothly? Good question. I'll hit that first, Charlie, because in our AOR it's very simple. So our interaction drives from our planning efforts. I felt no effect from that whatsoever right now. I'm in constant contact with the Mar for your commander about our planning efforts and it just has not had any bearing yet. The nature of our mutual activities isn't such that those force design changes are gonna have that big an effect. Yeah, I haven't either. And I would also say that even the things that we're doing today to prepare for the future are complementary. Their MLR work and our MDT capabilities are, they're going to be helpful for one another. So in my view, the Mar for PAC, the SOC PAC relationship between those land capabilities are complementary and through the operations and exercises that are going on every day, I think that there's no daylight between the things that we're working on out there. Thank you for the question. We do have time for more questions if you wanna go to the microphone and ask one in the meantime. Vic, you wrote recently about technology and I have this, keeping the technological edge is no longer a foregone conclusion, but we can hold it if we focus. You talked about technology earlier in your remarks. What's the intersection of the changes that land powers undergoing talked about here and the technological edge that the military in general and the army in particular wants to maintain? You know, some of this is high tech cutting edge tech questions and some of it is just adaptation, sort of mid-tech, but how do you use it? And so Armenia, Azerbaijan, why were what the forces they would have expected irrelevant? It wasn't super tech, it was just drones and the creative and sort of mass use of drones to disrupt what one force would have thought was its relatively robust land capabilities, right? So what we face right now is sort of a critical moment in the sense that we've just gotten used to since the early 1990s being pretty far ahead and in most technology and innovation areas. And I would say we also were used to being pretty far ahead in innovating how we think about using military forces. So we've generally been fairly future focused and tried to think of creative new ways to employ our forces. So in two streams, our inventiveness and how we're going to use our forces, we've tended to be very creative. I think that's changed dramatically since the early 1990s. So in the early 2020s, you know, we're pretty far ahead and we have what it takes to keep the edge of the high-end tech space that highly dependent on continuing to draw global talent and to resource R&D in ways that we have historically done and we've sort of always done in a crunch. So if you think race to the moon, we race to the moon. If you think now, I think there's a reasonable chance that we'll try to put the pedal to the metal and really invest in those things. But if we turn away from getting global talent, which has been critical to every technological leap that we've made, we would find ourselves in real trouble. And the fact is friends and foes are closer than we realize. I mean, even the Russians in some areas and certainly the Chinese in areas like AI and quantum computing are closer than we would be comfortable with. You know, objects in the rear mirror are closer than they appear. But in terms of adaptation, in terms of not getting caught off guard by what 20 years ago would have been, you know, the famous like, oh, our ships could be taken on by swarming Iranian little fast boats or something like that. Or there's a, well, what does that look like now? That for land forces, that's become really critical because new technologies are going to be employed in creative ways in ways that could really affect what we thought was good planning. So getting ahead of that is about exercising and wargaming and, you know, and having outside perspectives, having people come and really do good, you know, red on blue practice to elicit what an adversary may do in an asymmetric way that we aren't yet prepared for. General Flynn. I just may take a different tact and maybe Chris wants to add since he's got a new, couple of new organizations in his formations in Europe. So not to discount the enormous value of technology from Vikram, but I would say that one thing that I'm, I was in my last job, I was aware of as the 357, but it's become even more clear to me being out in the Pacific now. So the multi-domain task force, the organization itself, having the organization up for nearly two years and learning and exercising and getting the leaders there and getting the skill development and building a facility, all the sort of Doppel-Pf integration that has to go on with an organizational adjustment and having that in front of the capabilities that will land in the formations say in 23, 24, 25, I think this is really important. I think that we're learning and discovering and succeeding and failing and doing all those things with that formation and other formations like theater fires commands and the information effects group. The point I'm making is I think that in the Army's case that having these organizations in front of the platform, technology, weapons development is a good thing because if the reverse were true, we would just field a weapon and we'd have to take a legacy organization and figure it out. And I don't think that that has proved well in the past. And so I think that what we're doing, and this is an area where we're sharing because Chris's multi-domain task force just deployed or is beginning to stand up in Europe. And he's got other organizations, as he mentioned in his opening remarks that are essential to his capabilities being forward. This is an area that I think is really important. I'm not discounting the technological development and the importance of that. What I am saying is I think the organizational adjustments are absolutely more important and they give us an agility in the future that we need to be working on today and pulling into our exercises and rehearsals and our own formations to learn how we're gonna do this. I agree with that last point, especially Charlie. Mr. Singh, your points about technology raise something in my mind. Frequently when we talk about striving technologically, we reach pretty deep into the future for technologies that don't yet exist and we try to plan around that, but that becomes sort of future casting where we're hoping we choose the right technology and get it right. And meanwhile, right in front of us, other folks are using existing medium level technologies in innovative new ways that create a disproportionately beneficial effect for them. I think of Azerbaijan during the recent Nagorno-Karabakh war with its use of loitering munitions and pretty rudimentary drones, not super sophisticated, medium level technology, but very well combined, present a whole different problem set. And we've seen innumerable other examples of this, the Russian Federation tends to be very good at it. So when we think about technology, I just think we have to think deep, of course, and shoot far, but we also have to think of the increments of technology between here and there because they bring pretty significant changes with them as well. It usually had a much better cost point. Thanks, General. Sir? Thanks, John Klein, Johnson Controls. As you shape your battle space, what role do you need installations to play and especially connected technologies on the installation to support what you're doing with the multi-domain force? Thanks. So a little bit, some of the challenges that General Cavoli has in Europe, we obviously have similar ones in foreign, it gets a little harder in a foreign country because we're obviously, you know, we've got to work with Japan and Korea on what are those protective measures we want to take because we just have to work with the governments to do that. I would tell you that in the areas where the largest part, the bulk of our forces are on the West Coast and in Alaska and Hawaii, we're going to need the ability to protect our signature, protect our IT backbone, protect our networks. I mean, I'm not telling you anything that you're not already aware of, but what I would say is that the ability to, there's going to be a requirement to provide capabilities that are going to not be available to do things forward in the region. And I don't think all of these things are going to be solved again by technology alone. I think what we're going to need to do is have distributed points of presence for our network throughout the region. And much like the network has to be distributed with points of presence, we're also going to have to have distributed locations of material. And I don't think this is going to require a lot of military construction. I think what it's going to require is taking the rainbow of agreements that we do have because there are a wide range of agreements out there with a number of countries. And sometimes we don't even recognize the ability that we have through these agreements that are already in place to do some things to better position, to better posture, to better enable even the allies and partners that we can have those agreements with. So I'm not of the belief that I'm of the belief we have to protect our power projection platforms and the locations where we are forward. But I do think a distributed arrangement of materials, command and control, and protection of our network architecture and the points of presence required to have operational reach is where we need some help. And it's not central sometimes in the debate, but it needs to become more and more. Again, back to my homeland problem, I have a similar situation that, those are American citizens out there and we need to protect those American citizens and be able to provide them a secure place to live and work from, even though things may be in a crisis situation. Thanks. I think the first thing we have to do is to recognize that bases to include our garrisons are part of our operational infrastructure. So I previously, during some remarks, made an inaccurate distinction between USERPAC's AOR and the European AOR. There is one place in USERPAC where two opposing forces, land forces are in direct land contact with each other. That's on the Korean Peninsula. Similar to Europe on the Korean Peninsula, the basing structure is part of the operational thought process and part of the operational arrangement. In Europe, it is also, that's the first point I'd make. I think it's an important distinction. It's not something that we've always thought about when we think about our bases. We think about them as garrisons and communities, but in fact, they're much more than that once you get into a theater of operations. The second thing is that Dr. Schaulke earlier spoke about the challenges of deployment and reinforcement. That contested reinforcement is an important thing and we're not always as well-prepared for it as we should be from home station across the lines of communication and then at the ports of debarkation from there to the operational area. Those are areas where we have to treat it separately but we have to think about contested logistics deployment and onward movement from beginning to end and our installations are a key part of that the whole way, all the way we harden them and protect them in every domain. Generals, thank you very much for the response to that question. We have about 20 minutes or so left and I think it would be useful at this point just to ask each of you if there's some point or points that you wanted the audience to take away today that you haven't had a chance to say and they haven't had a chance to ask you. So rather than starting at the other end, I'm gonna start near me and ask you to begin that, Mackenzie. Well, I wanna talk about installations for a minute actually because they are part of power projection and often are overlooked and installations have been a bill payer for 20 years in every budget to fund other pressing needs which I understand why those choices are made but increasingly money's gonna have to be poured back into installations in particular because of partly because of the decay but if you look at the Pentagon leadership's sort of top 10 technologies list and what are the game changing capabilities? What do you often hear most about whether that's artificial intelligence, big data, quantum computing, hypersonic weapons or directed energy? All of these very different capabilities have one thing in common, they need more energy and if you don't, where are you gonna get that energy? You're gonna get it from an installation or from a foreign country and so if you're not talking about how to get more energy then we've already lost. All right, Corey. So I can think of two things. The first is that is one that the army can't do anything about but I think ought to be shaping all of our consciousness which is that the gap between what we say we have the ability to do and what we are actually funding in our defense budget has been growing in a hair-raising way for about 15 years and the challenge for the Defense Department is how to be a team playing part of an administration when the administration is purporting the fallacy that the budget is sufficient to execute the strategy and that's a difficult civil military challenge when you're doing it in public but it's also just a practical challenge for the day-to-day operations of the military so I guess the thing that keeps me up at night is the gap between strategy and funding. The constructive, hopefully constructive suggestion I would offer is that I've never understood why administrations allow DOD to do a national defense strategy. I mean, I wouldn't if the reckless American public elected me president, I wouldn't let DOD do that because it gives Congress the way to grade the administration's homework. Does the budget actually match the strategy? What I would love to see DOD do is instead of purporting that here is a strategy and by the way we need three to 5% year-on-year growth in GDP to execute it, right? Why does the administration let DOD say we're banking on continuous increases in spending in order to carry this out? What I'd love to see DOD do is strategies. Namely, if we have a trillion dollar defense budget which McKinsey, England tells me is what we need to actually carry out our strategy here's the best strategy for that. If you're gonna constrain us to $740 billion a year here's the best strategy I can come up with to protect and advance American interests and if you're actually gonna, I don't know, put a $40 billion, I'm pulling that as a rabbit out of my hat, $40 billion green energy requirement into the DOD budget because it's important to the president even if it's not important to these guys' ability to carry out their missions then here's the best strategy I can come up with because if those three strategies are the same strategies they are fundamentally dishonest. Vic, I'm gonna take a pause and invite you to give your conclusion here in a moment. I'm gonna go to this gentleman here and just give us your name, who you're with and go for it. Thank you, Mark Faulkner. I'm with the Institute for Defense and Business. My question concerns deterrents and all five panel members have spoke to deterrents service component commanders from an operational perspective their own battle space and our other subject matter experts. So my, the importance of maritime enable forces lately has been getting a lot of attention and I would argue more than the other components. So my question really for our generals as well as our subject matter experts is as it relates to forward deployed land forces, permanent forward deployed land forces, do we have it right? If generals could speak from a theater perspective and then others, is it right? Do we need more to be a greater deterrent or our large scale joint exercises sufficient going forward, thank you. Thanks for the question. Generals, would you like to take that one first? I would just answer with the rather obvious response that we constantly evaluate that and then the decision on how much we put forward and how much we don't put forward depends on an awful lot of things, some of which are non military in nature as considerations. The second thing I'd point out is it is important when we think about forward posture to distinguish between like in my case on the other side of the Atlantic or did you have something more specific in mind because once you get onto the continent the more specific you get the more bound you become to a particularly imagined adversary course of action, right? So you've got to, the art of it is to be far enough forward to be responsive but not so far forward to be committed to a single possibility. So there's a balance in there just as there's a balance in the decision to do forward posture in the first place. The last point I'd make with regard to forward posture and deterrence is it is possible to posture too much forward and to become provocative and to destabilize your deterrence and therefore the calibration of how much power is how far forward and in what level of readiness it's maintained is all part of the deterrent question in the first place. I would add on the readiness part that Chris mentioned about because we do have to calibrate it. I mentioned materials that could be an element that we have in distributed locations. I think one of the important parts and this was actually what I was gonna say in closing is that when we're forward then the joint training and the joint readiness and the joint and coalition and or ally and partner confidence that's gained by being forward has an element of deterrents in it. And I think that sometimes it's kind of maybe overlooked a little bit in posture discussions because people talk more about hard things than some of the sort of off access intangibles that you gain by having capabilities forward, exercising forward, rehearsing forward, understanding the culture, the road networks, the bridges, just all of that learning that goes on by American soldier, sailor, airmen's and Marines in addition to the allies and partners that we're operating for. That in and of itself I think has an enormous deterrent value and it can be from the small to the large as Chris was pointing out, right? It's not a one for one kind of thing. It can be a different equation that can solve some of that calculus. Subject matter, you are itching. Can I have one point to that? So during the Eisenhower administration I think it's in the 1956 debates over the basic national security policy. The chief of staff of the army brings up that we need to be flowing forces to Europe if a crisis over Berlin actually occurs. And Eisenhower actually says he should be impeached if he was flowing American forces to Europe in a Berlin crisis because the army would be needed to restore order in Baltimore after the nuclear exchange. Which tells you, right? Like that tells you his commitment to Berlin, which is it doesn't matter if forces are in theater because we're gonna go all the way up the escalation ladder for the defense of Berlin. Most American presidents can't pull off that party trick. That much credibility with that little stuff forward. And so what forward stationing and forces does in addition to all of the great operational advantages is it plants the flag that we are actually gonna fight for this territory. And that matters hugely. I'm not a big fan of deterrence by punishment because I don't think it actually deters nearly as well as having the ability to do what you say you're gonna do. And so I think we should actually have a big enough army to have forward deployed forces in places we actually intend to defend. Mackenzie? Bravo. That was well said. I'm not gonna say anything. All right. Thanks. Vic, why don't you answer the question and then you can give us any other thoughts that you have to share. Great. Thanks, Frances, for leading us through all of this. It's been a real pleasure. I'm right there with Corey on, I think you can people see our global posture as sometimes as something that's anachronistic. The fact is we've left the places we've lost and we've stayed in the places we've won and I actually think that suggests that going being in places that we care about has more of a signaling effect than we might realize. And so I think the thing to look at on posture is, is it the right amount in the right places? Are we, is it the right forces in the right places? And they have, and it has, obviously it has a practical element, which is what both generals are referring to, which is it's about what we need to be able to do with those partners, right? So it's about the day-to-day work. But thinking through that, the value of the skin in the game, I think is really high. And it, you know, so I would definitely not advocate, you know, bringing people home. I didn't like it when we brought people home from Europe, you know, a decade ago, I thought we should leave people, leave a lot of those units in place. It's also really cost effective, which is something, if you do Asia a lot and you look at either, you know, just Japan and Korea, or you look at, you know, rotating forces to Darwin when we were, that was on my watch, doing those negotiations. You know, it's good for us from an operational standpoint. So I think there's a lot to be said for that. You know, on the technology front, in closing, the things I would flag, and General Cavoli mentioned, I'd mentioned the Azerbaijan situation as well, like these low, you know, these like mid-level adaptations. We need to think, we need to focus on the creativity. The thing that's gonna keep us ahead are things like, okay, you know, we've been trying to secure our networks forever. Well, there's a good effort underway right now to look at what about data-centric security? What about using encryption and other tools that we know and have advanced on quite a bit to have things flow out and be able to be more network agnostic, but be secured and only be accessible to the right people in the right places? And there's a good effort underway right now to look at that. That would be critical for allies and partners. Imagine if the thing you needed to send knew that it was a secret rail Canada thing and that somebody in Canada could look at it, but somebody else somewhere else couldn't, right? This is not, that kind of stuff's not science fiction. There's a great company that's involved in those efforts right now that has already figured out how to, I won't name it so I'm not plugging somebody, but it's already figured out like how to do real-time encryption of video with those kinds of attributes at creation, so video is born, it's transmitted, it can only be looked at by people that it's supposed to be looked at. These kinds of things are like shifting how we think from securing our perimeter in terms of networks, which has proven very difficult, to saying let's make the things within the network secure. If we can get there, our ability to work with allies and partners is boosted and our overall security, all of a sudden something can be transmitted agnostic to which system it's resting on. I noticed my G6 wasn't in the room when you said that, Vikram. Too bad, you know, another. Joe, Joe, sorry man, that was a joke. Get right on it. All right, they can put you in touch. There's other things, we were talking about installations earlier. I mean again, there's a lot of commercial technologies out there right now that would transform how you do installation security for other people, where the building knows who's in the building, where the badges, you know what direction people are going, where you know there's a far greater ability and much more portable security. There's a lot of things happening that we could grab onto. And for land forces in particular, at the end of the day, land forces have to operate in the contested territory, like physically there, flying over it, they're not sailing near it, they're in it. And so figuring out how to operate more securely in more contested, complicated environments, that's gotta be just a fundamental focus of how we keep our, keep land power capabilities relevant and effective going forward. Gentlemen, before you say your closing remarks, one more question from the audience. Thank you, sir, for your patience. Thank you. My name is Cornel Albaratino, I'm the military attaché from Spain. And I would like to know your views on the possibility of a cooperation or coordination between Russia and China in their competition against the US, particularly in Africa where the force posture is not so strong, thank you. It's a terrific question. And Corey, I'm glad I'm not in between you and the microphone or I would be physically harmed. So I think we too often look at singular potential adversaries and don't worry enough about cooperation among potential adversaries. And even if there is a long-term reason to believe the Russians will bridle at being, you know, a marginal small support to China's power, they have really strong common interests in wanting to break up the existing order and wanting to create payment vehicles that are outside the dollar zone, right? The Petro-Yuan and the way that the Russians are playing around with crypto to try and prevent sanctions from being able to bite them. They have a lot of common interests in, for example, containing Japan's burgeoning power and activism in the region. They could stumble over conflicting interests in Central Asia, but that's a long time coming. And the problems we imagined them having with each other when we were imagining this 15 years ago was the demographic boom of China moving into the empty Central Asia and into the Russian East. And now that has collapsed. So mostly strategic failures are failures of imagination. And I agree with you that we don't, we aren't exercising enough imagination about what their cooperation could mean. One other point, though, there's a scholar at Stanford University, also associated with AEI, Orianna Schuyler-Mastrow, who is doing very detailed research on the kinds of specific military cooperation they have going and the degree of interconnectedness, it portends. So it's a really good source for making for making serious judgments about the degree of cooperation and what it could mean. With all due respect to Vic and Mackenzie for the purpose of time, I'm going to defer to the generals and invite you to either close General Flynn or answer the question from the last questioner. I'll just wrap up by saying thanks. I appreciate the discussion. And I'm thankful for all of you and your interest in the challenges that we have. Thank you. General Cavoli. First, Colonel, with regard to your question, sometimes it might be better for me in uniform not to consider too much about will they cooperate, will they not? But just to observe that clearly the action of one could produce opportunities for the other. And would the other have the agility and the ability to take advantage of that opportunity? That's what I have to think about. So that might be one way to look at it. With regard to closing comments, one thing that we didn't get a chance to touch on but I would like to briefly is the question of interoperability. And I bring it up because many panel members have raised the point that our allies are our strength, our allies are a source of strength, our allies can substitute, compliment, work with our forces in many, many cases. I think this is very important but it really works best when we have a certain level of interoperability together so that we can function at a military technical level together. We divide interoperability into three categories, right? Human interoperability, procedural interoperability and technical interoperability. I would like to focus on the undervalued first one, human interoperability. We undervalue it sometimes because it's squishy and it's subjective and it's not as easy as saying my radio does not talk to your radio, we have a technical problem or you do this differently than I do, we have a procedural problem. But in fact, it is really, I think, both in both of our theaters, human interoperability, cognitive commonality is really the thing that will allow us to bridge gaps in the other two domains of interoperability. And in that regard, I would like, hey, Charlie, would you stand up and introduce your deputy, please? Thank you. John, would you stand up and introduce your deputy? These are just two small examples all over the world and all over the United States, we have officers from close allies serving side by side with us and we have our officers in their formation serving side by side with them. And I just saw both of you sitting there and I wanted to call attention to the important fact that you're not just in our Army, you're also at AUSA. Thank you very much. I'm gonna take advantage on that. So I have a deputy from Australia. Actually, interestingly enough, the chief of the Australian Army today was the first deputy in the United States Army, Pacific Command, Rick Burr. There's a New Zealand deputy in the division that Chris and I commanded formally and then we have a Canadian deputy at both First Corps and Washington State and a Canadian deputy in United States Army, Alaska. So again, another illustration that Chris pointed out and I couldn't agree with him more about the human interoperability and actually with the pandemic, it's even more important that we get that and regain that with some of the separation that occurred naturally because of the pandemic. So thanks. Thanks to all of you for joining this conversation today. Grateful for your time. Thanks to AUSA. It is wonderful to be back in person and thanks to all of you for your attention.