 Good morning! How's everyone feeling today? One date closer to the graduation, right? Okay, awesome. Well, I think you're gonna really love the program today. It is my distinct honor to introduce Lieutenant General Charles W. Hooper, United States Army retired. Who is shipmate? He is one of the nation's foremost experts on China's military. U.S.-China military relations and U.S.-Foreign military sales. He served with the 25th Infantry and 82nd Airborne Division, taught at the Naval Postgraduate School and managed China and Taiwan policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He was also the senior DOD strategist for Africa and the senior U.S. military officer in Egypt. He is a fluent Chinese linguist who served seven years in Beijing, including assignments as the U.S. Defense Attache to China. In his final military assignment, he was director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, responsible for the overseas sale of all weapons, military equipment, and logistic support for the U.S. government. He has a B.S. from the United States Military Academy. Oh, come on. He has a B.S. from the United States Military Academy, an M.P.A. from the Harvard University Kennedy School, okay, and an M.S.S. from the U.S. Army War College. So please give a warm Naval War College welcome to Lieutenant General Hooper. Wow, tough crowd. Yeah, I kind of feel like we're all in Vegas. You guys paid $450 to see a show, and you're thinking to yourself, this better be good. So I'm going to start out. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here with all of you today. And I wanted to start out a little bit by telling you a little bit about myself and how I came to study China. And so I showed up at the United States Military Academy at West Point in July of 1975, and all West Point cadets were required to take two years of language. And so in those days, at the end of your summer training, you stood in line at attention and you walked up and you told the upperclassmen what language you wanted to study. And he wrote it down and gave it to the Foreign Language Department. So I had planned to study French at the Military Academy. I had studied French in high school and I had gone to the Military Academy to be an engineer, so language really wasn't my focus. And so I got to the front of the line and they said, what language, Mr? And I said, Sir, French. He said French is full pick another language. Now, the lesson, the first lesson here is always have a plan B. I did not have a plan B. And so I looked at the list of languages there and they had the usual offerings, German, Spanish, Portuguese and others. And I saw Chinese and I thought it was pretty interesting. And so I stood up at attention and I said in my deepest 17-year-old voice, Sir, I'd like to study Chinese. And he looked up at me and he looked down and he said, It's too hard for you. Pick another language. And I was a bit confused because he didn't know me. He didn't know anything about me, but he had looked at my face and decided that Chinese was too hard for me. So needless to say, we had a little back and forth. And I said, I want to study Chinese. And he said no. And we went back and forth and I insisted and dug my heels in. And I finally said, Sir, I requestfully respect to study Chinese. And the last thing that officer said to me was, it's your funeral. If you want to do that. And so I'd like to tell you that it was a great happy ending. And but by the end of my first semester, I was drowning. It was awful. I was I was feeling so badly. And I went home at Christmas time and I told my father. My father was a he was my hero. He was a Marine and Korea combat veteran and a New York City fireman. And my father was my guide and everything to me. And I said, Dad, maybe I was too proud. Maybe I need to switch to something else before I flunk out of the military academy. And my father looked at me and remember, this is 1975. So this is three years after President Nixon went to China. We didn't even have relations with China. And my father looked at me and he said, son, this China thing is going to be bigger than anyone could possibly imagine. He said, there's a billion of them. We've got to talk to them sometime and you're going to want to be there. And so I always did what my father told me to do. And so I stuck with Chinese. And as it turned out, the first A I ever got at West Point was in Chinese language. The second A I got in West Point was in a course called Politics and Government in China. And the instructor of that course was a colonel named Gerald Kay Osborne, Vietnam veteran with this big red handlebar mustache that he waxed at both ends. And he was the one that told me, you know, son, you might actually have a talent at this. You need to stick with it. And so that's how I ended up studying and devoting most of my life in my professional military career to the People's Republic of China. I want to begin with a little military history. I know we have a lot of military historians in here. And many people think that our relationship with China kind of began around the World War Two era. And then and we kind of and they kind of counted and study it from there. But in fact, I would argue that no one country has played so important a role in shaping the US military, particularly in the Asia Pacific region than China. And I and I count even Japan and Korea in that in the countries that have not influenced the American military as much as China. Let's start with the army. How many army officers out there? OK. How many active Chinese active US Army regiments have Chinese crest in their Chinese dragons in their crest? Anybody want to guess? You can shout it out. OK. Any guesses? How many active army regiments have Chinese dragons in their crest because their lineage begins with combat operations in China? OK. There are three active army regiments that have Chinese dragons in their crest because they were involved in combat operations in China. The ninth infantry regiment, the Manchu regiment, the 14th infantry regiment, the Golden Dragons and the 15th regiment, which was actually stationed in China in Tianjin during the 1920s and the 1930s. All three of those regiments have Chinese dragons in their crest because they were involved in combat operations either during the warlord period or during the Boxer Rebellion. I would defy you to find any other country so represented in army lineage because there isn't. And while we're talking about that, how many regiments trace their lineage to combat operations in Russia? Anybody know? Two, the 31st infantry regiment polar bears and the 27th infantry regiment, the Russian Wolfhounds. And the 27th infantry regiment, they became the Russian Wolfhounds because they participated in combat operations during the Russian Revolution. And they hated the white Russian leader, Admiral Kolchak, so much they named their dog after him. And the Russian Wolfhound is still the mascot of the 27th infantry regiment. Where are my Marines at? Where are my Marines at? God, guys, wake up. When did the Marines land in China? Anybody know Marines? The United States Marine Corps landed in China in 1844. When did they leave? The United States Marine Corps left China in 1949. They stayed over 100 years. What is the longest uninterrupted naval operation in American military history? And I know Tom Mangos knows this because I made all my Navy guys memorize it. The longest uninterrupted mission, operation in American military history is the Yangtze River Patrol. The United States Navy patrolled the rivers of China from 1844 until 1949. It is still to this day the longest uninterrupted operation in American military history. Who was our largest foreign military sales customer in the 1930s, FMS? And I was the director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, so I know a lot about FMS and the history of it. China was our largest foreign military sales customer in the 1930s. We were selling them fighter aircraft. We weren't selling anyone else anything in the 1930s except the Chinese. And then the last thing I'll say is what is the only veterans organization that has a chapter in a communist country? You guys didn't know this stuff, did you? American Legion China Post-1 was formed in 1919 at the American Club in Shanghai, China. It still exists. It's in exile in Henderson, Nevada. Well, where'd you think they were going to go? But it still calls itself the American Legion Post-1 China. And it traces its lineage all the way back to their time in Shanghai. And it is the only American veterans organization that has a chapter in a communist country. So the moral of this story, and the reason I told you and started out with all of this, is you may not know this, but trust me, the Chinese do. They remember because 100 years ago in China is merely a blink of an eye. And all of this took place, all these Chinese dragons and combat operations took place during what they call the century of humiliation. That's how they refer to it. And for them, it's very real and very recent. So last month, right about the time the president said for the third time in 12 months that the United States would intervene militarily if China showed aggression, military aggression against Taiwan, the Japanese and Taiwanese militaries were put on alert again as the People's Liberation Army Navy Carrier Battle Group, led by the Liaoning, which is China's first aircraft carrier, left the East China Sea and went into the Pacific Ocean for exercise. This is merely the latest in the continuing series of People's Republic of China PRC military provocations that have increased over the past years. And these have included continued fortification of the Atos and Islands in the South China Sea, almost nonstop PLA Air Force incursions into the Taiwan Air Defense Zone, and continued challenges to U.S. naval vessels and the naval vessels of other nations operating in the South China Sea and in the Taiwan Straits. And these provocations will continue into the foreseeable future as PRC President Xi Jinping continues to send the clear message to Taiwan, the United States and its allies, that China has both the willingness and the ability to use an increasingly capable and technologically advanced PLA to unify Taiwan with the mainland by force. Make no mistake, this is not a PRC bluff. The threat to Taiwan is real and it is grave. There's no question that a PRC invasion of Taiwan would be one of the defining events of the 21st century and with that in mind, most contemporary literature analyzing the China-Taiwan military scenarios focuses on the PRC's willingness, the political diplomatic and informational factors leading to China's decision to invade. Far less concentrates on their ability, the ability of the PLA to successfully execute a large-scale amphibious invasion. And this is not surprising. Analysis of political decision making, especially within the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA, is more art than science. It's subject to hypothesis and speculation. As a result, everyone from learned scholars to government officials to the novice strategists can share a reasonable assessment of what the Chinese may or may not do. Analysis of China's comprehensive warfighting capability is the exact opposite of this. It requires careful and objective understanding of information warfare, cyber and space technology, weapons capabilities, maritime and aerospace operations, logistic supply chains, geography, and even the tides and currents of the Taiwan Strait, as well as operational doctrine and kinetic weapons capabilities. If you notice, I put kinetic weapons capabilities and operational doctrine at the end of that list of things you need to know, because the truth of the matter is the things I listed earlier are far more important than operational doctrine and weapons capabilities. More objectively science than art, it requires us to develop an expertise on what the PLA can do as well as what they are willing to do. So if we're going to study this, we must deconstruct the elements necessary for any PRC attack to succeed. And I talked a little bit about some of them, weapons, technology, geography, operational doctrine, amphibious lift, logistics and material readiness to name but a few, and we need to calculate a balanced assessment of the PLA's strengths and weaknesses, and their strengths are considerable. As we know, the PLA ground forces are the largest army in the world, the largest land force in the world. They've concentrated a great deal of research on military robotics and ground systems, unmanned operations, artificial intelligence and electromagnetic attack. The PLA Navy at this point is the largest numerically the world's largest navy and has deployed is deploying and experimenting with a range of intelligent and autonomous surface vessels and underwater vehicles, including submarines and gliders with anti-submarine warfare capabilities. China has also established the world's largest facility for the testing of such autonomous underwater vessels. The PLA Air Force is continuing its research and development and operationalization of a range of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, with varying degrees of autonomy while exploring new techniques for UAV swarming and manned and unmanned teaming. And reportedly, the PLA Air Force is also funding at least seven classified projects that involve artificial intelligence technology, including intelligence imaging, unmanned swarm combat platforms, agile coherent radar, and cognitive radar. The PLA Strategic Support Forces are the center of gravity for artificial intelligence weaponization for the PLA. The PLA is looking to leverage advances in AI in support of its missions in space, cyber, electronics, and psychological warfare. The PLA Strategic Support Forces have been recruiting researchers with a background in AI, including for positions focused on aerospace artificial intelligence. And finally, the PLA Rocket Forces are the crown jewel in the PLA's array of capabilities, with about 1,250 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, 100 nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles with an eye towards doubling that number to 200 in the next five years. Most of them will be merged. They'll have multiple independent reentry vehicles. And of course, they're working a great deal on hypersonic aircraft and glide vehicles, the so-called carrier killers. They have the ability to attack the U.S. homeland with nuclear and conventional weapons. And the reason I emphasize the conventional pieces there's a tendency for us to look at intercontinental missiles solely in the realm of nuclear deterrence. But I would tell you, what's to stop the Chinese from firing a conventional intercontinental missile at the United States? Just to get our attention. Their formidable capabilities give them the ability to exercise a range of options, both kinetic and non-kinetic, from decapitating missile strikes, limited offensive operations, cyber attacks, and maritime aerospace blockades up to a full-scale amphibious invasion. And I'm going to talk about that in a minute, but people often ask me, how do you know that the Chinese feel this way? No, I spent seven years of my life living with the Chinese military. And people often ask me, how do you know that we're in a strategic competition with China? And I answer by saying, they told me. I remember in 2008, after the economic collapse or the economic issues in the United States collapsed in the United States, I had gone out to the PLA National Defense University to give a speech. And we talked about Robert Zelik's issue of being a responsible stakeholder. And I talked a little bit about the Chinese being China being a responsible stakeholder in the current world order. And at the time, the then president of the National Defense University is now the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. And I remember after I had finished speaking, he came up to me and he said, you know, General Hooper, everything you said is very interesting, but it is also irrelevant. Because Bretton Wood is dead. Now, for those of you who don't know, the Bretton Wood Conference was held at the end of World War II. And it was really more of an economic conference. It set up the economic order, post-war economic order with the gold standard at the center and the U.S. dollar as the convertible currency for the world's international economic trade. But what he was talking about, what that PLA officer was talking about was the fact that the era of the U.S. dominated world order in his mind was over. He said he used to have all of the investment banks. And this was right after Lehman Brothers had defaulted. He said he used to have all of the investment banks. Now you don't have any. Okay? And then he gave me what I call it, the agent in the matrix speech. Okay? For those of you who saw the movie, The Matrix, there's a part in The Matrix where the agent says to Neo or one of the human characters that the 20th century was your time. This is our time. And it was quite a speech. And the students that were around had heard him, literally gave him a standing ovation. And so I'm standing there and they were waiting for my response. And all I could do is by in responding was say, we'll see. We'll see. And I feel very confident about that because I've lived through the death and decline of the United States about eight or nine times since I was a young officer. And we are still here. Let me talk about a large scale amphibious invasion for a minute. These days, it's the worst case scenario that I am asked about the most. And while it does represent the worst case scenario, the so-called Thudicity's Trap that my mentor and academic advisor, Graham Allison, always talks about, I wonder how likely it is. Okay? And I'll tell you why I wonder how likely a large scale amphibious invasion is. China must successfully execute one of history's most difficult military operations and opposed amphibious landing. This is a feat that has not been accomplished since September of 1950. Okay? The last large scale amphibious invasion was the invasion of Incheon by United States forces in South Korea. The PLA must transport thousands of troops and tons of equipment 100 miles across the Taiwan Straits, one of the most militarized waterways on earth. The few natural landing beaches, and how many people have been to Taiwan, by the way? Okay? I've spent good. I've spent a considerable amount of time in Taiwan and along those beaches. The few natural landing beaches in Taiwan, both east and west, are crisscrossed with streams, marshes, and canals, and lie at the base of either buildings, cliffs, or hills. The center of this island nation of 23 million people is dominated by a north, south mountain range that would be a nightmare to assault even for the most experienced, well equipped army. And finally, I believe that they will face a motivated Taiwan military supplied and supported by the United States that has been preparing for just this battle for the last 70 years. So if they're not prepared for this battle after 70 years, shame on them and shame on us, I would add that in any conflict with Taiwan, it is almost certain to involve Japan, okay? Because Japan is the location of the bulk of our forward deployed forces. And this would be a difficult decision for our Japanese allies and partners, but I suspect since Taiwan lies less than 80 miles from the southernmost island in the Japanese chain that we have every expectation that our Japanese colleagues will be involved. And I often joke, not with our Japanese colleagues and our Japanese allies, but I often joke that Japan's involvement in this conflict is very similar to the relationship that the chicken and the pig have with breakfast. Have you ever heard this before? Okay? So the chicken lays eggs, so the chicken is involved in breakfast. The pig has to die to produce bacon, so the pig is committed to breakfast, okay? And just as that pig is committed to breakfast, we're committed to working with our Japanese allies and they will likely be involved in this conflict. While PLA forces are formidable, their leaders are inexperienced and arrogant. And once again, I've had experience personally in listening to PLA leaders who have begun to believe their own propaganda about how good they are. And I have numerous examples of this. I was just very recently before I retired, I happened to be in a forum with a senior PLA officer who was discussing, very loudly in Chinese, he was stage whispering because he didn't think anybody understood Chinese. But as Tom knows, I made a specialty of listening to arrogant people thinking that no one could understand their language. And what he was whispering was is, what he was whispering was is, you know, I don't see how anything gets done in the Pentagon. It seems that everybody's always running around the hallways. He said this, which I thought was pretty interesting. Now, he arrogantly thought that no one understood Chinese. His staff was mortified because they had my file. And they knew I understood everything he had said. The PLA is not 10 feet tall. As many of the military China hands I trained who have spent as much time with PLA officers and soldiers as anyone, they have some serious shortcomings. Their capability to leverage the advanced technology that they have developed could be hindered by a continued shortcoming in talent and human capital. And I'll tell you a story shortly before I retired and before the relationship went south, I had an opportunity to escort the commander of the PLA Airborne Forces. They took them around and they showed them a bunch of stuff, took them to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, showed them a bunch of stuff that we had. And he was, of course, very intended staff as always was taking copious notes and we had to keep telling them stop taking pictures of stuff and they were taking pictures anyway. But after all that, you know, my job was just to stay with him and gain an appreciation of his impressions of what he saw. And so I asked him, I said, of all the things you've seen, what impressed you the most? He did not hesitate. He said, your people. And in a moment of honesty, he said, your people are five generations ahead of ours. And one exchange in particular that I enjoyed very much, we had kind of a round robin with equipment and he happened to walk up on a piece of equipment with three paratroopers and a paratrooper in charge just happened to be a female sergeant. And she was very short and slight and the two other paratroopers where there were about six feet to 250 pounds, they're standing behind her at parade rest. And he was fascinated, number one, that we would have a female in charge because women do not play a prominent role in the PLA. And he asked her, well, how do you maintain control of these big men behind you? And she just smiled at him. She said, I don't have a problem with that. Okay. And the two guys behind her went and that, that made me smile. That made me smile. Despite progress in increasing realism in their training, the PLA may continue to struggle to master sophistication required for preparations for modern warfare. And they continue to struggle and with revising doctrine and adopting new theories and concepts in practice. Okay. This progress is likely undermined by poor inner service coordination and rampant corruption. Xi Jinping continues to shuffle his senior military commanders because of perceived incompetence and the fact that he simply does not trust them. And so the commander of the Western district, which borders India, and as you know, there have been several clashes with Indian forces over the last 18 months or so, that commander has been replaced four times in the last 12 months. Okay. Now, I don't know what that tells you, but what that tells me is they are serious problems in the PLA senior leadership. And finally, we must wonder whether the inexperienced soldiers and commanders of the PLA who have not mounted a large-scale military operation of any type since 1979. And this is the border clashes with India accepted. They have been principally static and not offensive operations. There's a wonder whether they can employ their advanced military technology in combat. Their lack of combat experience could result in a failure to appreciate the challenges of operating in a highly complex and automated or autonomous systems under actual combat conditions. And we're seeing some of that play out now in the Ukraine, in the Russian attacks in Ukraine, a simple lack of experience in high intensity 21st century warfare. I often tell people that while you may debate whether or not United States forces or the United States achieved its strategic objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan at an operational and tactical level, we're pretty darn good. We've been fighting for 22 years, the entire 21st century. And we are really, really, really good at this. And all of you are going to make us even better. Okay? As the Russians learned in the initial stages of their conflict in Ukraine, military technology does not translate into a military capability. And I would tell you as someone who was responsible for foreign military sales for the United States Department of Defense, I would tell you that is absolutely true. Operational doctrine and tactics matter. Logistics and geography matter. And finally, education, training, leadership, and soldier morale. Your morale of your soldiers and your adversaries, that matters as well. The enemy gets a vote on your success. And the evolution of the Russian-Ukraine conflict has surprised many students of war and no doubt has the full attention of the PLA. People often talk about what lessons, and they often ask me, and we can talk about this during questions, what lessons do you think the PLA is learning from this conflict? And I'm happy to answer that question during question and answers, but I often remember something my father once told me about lessons. It's only a lesson if you learn it. The bottom line here is we must clearly understand what the PLA can do as well as what they are willing to do. I would also say that we must clearly understand what we can do and what we are willing to do. And I want to, one final thing I want to mention to you, and this has to do with the defense industrial base and the logistics supply chain. And many of you know the old Americans saying that amateurs talk about operations and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics, sustainment, and communications. And I added those last two, but those are what's most important. We must bolster and strengthen our defense industrial base. We must understand that we are not only the arsenal of democracy for ourselves, but for our allies and partners as well. One of the things that disturbed me is I had friends call me at the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, and they told me that there were rumors that Stinger missiles were arriving in Ukraine without batteries. So the Stinger missile comes with a missile, a launcher, and a battery. And they wanted to know what's the problem with batteries and why are these missiles not arriving with batteries. And I smiled to myself because I knew exactly the answer to that question. Stinger missile batteries deteriorate at a faster rate than the missile does. So when you open the box, the missile is fine. The battery is leaking, and so you have to throw it away. And so I know exactly what they did because I did it when I was in charge. They sent the missiles and the launches without the batteries and the batteries will follow. Here's the problem. There is one factory in the United States of America that makes Stinger missile batteries, and only one. It's in Iowa. And if there's a tornado, if there's a fire, if the factory just, if the sinkhole opens and the factory disappears from face to the earth, that is the only source of Stinger batteries in the United States of America. And that is unacceptable. The other thing I'll tell you is that there are people that think we have caves in Utah full of precision-guided munitions. Okay? And some of our allies think we have caves in Utah full of precision-guided munitions. Guess what? We don't. Okay? We don't. And I was gratified to see that of the 40, the last $40 billion Ukrainian arms package, $8.7 billion of that is to replenish the precision-guided munitions we have given our allies and partners. But we have to do better at stocking these things because as we've learned from the Russian experience, if we do not, we will deplete our supply very quickly. So anyway, I want to stop there and I want to open up the floor to questions. I'm happy to answer any of your questions on China, Taiwan, foreign military sales, anything you want to talk about. So thanks for your attention and I welcome your questions. Morning, sir. Lieutenant Cassidy, U.S. Navy, Indo-Pakum, Foreign Area Officer. What effect do you think the demographic decline of the Chinese workforce and population will have on Chinese U.S. competition? No, it's a very important question and it's something I think the question was what impact do I think demographics in China will have on the U.S.-China competition, China's competitiveness both in terms of military and in terms of economically. I think that the democratic trends in China are very worrying to Xi Jinping. The country is getting older before it gets richer very, very quickly. His military is principally composed of only children, okay? Now that they've changed the policies now so that people can have more children. But the simple fact of the matter is that the target age population for his military is essentially only children. And so there's anecdotal evidence that it is quite possible that he is thinking that he must make some definitive choices very quickly before the declining birth rate and the aging of his populations makes bold decisions both economic and security untenable. So a lot of people believe that this is going to accelerate his timetable, for example, for Taiwan and a number of other things. In terms of economically, a lot of countries and companies are already looking to diversify their supply from China, okay? And they're looking at countries like India, they're looking at Vietnam, they're looking at a number of other places because they too are watching the demographic trends in China with an eye towards at what point will the profit margins for them start to decline? At what point will it become difficult to do business in China or at what point will the labor cost increase which reduces their profit margin? So I think she is concerned about this and I think that there are a lot of people around the world are watching demographic trends in China as well. And it's good to see another foreign area officer, okay? Next question. And guys, you know, if you think I'm full of crap, say so. Honestly, you're in school here, okay? And I hope that when you leave here, it's very important to know what everybody else thinks but it's most important to know what you think. What's the next question? More general, curious on the comment that the Chinese general made to you about Bretton Woods being dead, do you agree or disagree with that assessment? I was telling you and in fact it was an honor to see Professor Kennedy in the room and as a young man of course I read everything he wrote. I don't think, well, Bretton Woods as an economic system is dead. We've abandoned the gold standard and there are other convertible currencies that are becoming important. But what he meant was that the world order with the United States at its center or the United States playing a prominent role in the world order with its allies and partners and other important countries. I don't think so. And as I mentioned, I have lived through a number of cycles, the end of history and others where people predicted the inevitable decline of the United States. Even in my short lifetime it's happened like four or five times and it has never come to fruition. Okay. So no, I don't believe him. But that's not important. That's irrelevant. What I believe is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is he believes it. Okay. And so that becomes a motivation for his strategic behavior. And so when you go out here, it's important, of course, for you to understand the motivations for our strategic behavior. But it is essential for you to understand the motivations of other people's strategic behaviors and why they do what they do and why they think what they think. So to your point, I don't believe it. But if my adversary does or if someone else does, that is motivating their strategic behavior. Next question. Sir, I think we got our money's worth. I definitely got twice my money's worth this morning. My question to you, sir, is do you think China is capable and willing to do a first strike? And would they likely involve North Korea in that scenario? Okay. If anyone is capable of initiating a first strike, regardless of what they say. Okay. So the answer to that question is of course. Are they capable of doing it? Absolutely. Whether or not they're willing to do it is another story. The issue of North Korea is a very interesting one because, excuse me, as we look at potential scenarios in the Asia Pacific region that involve Chinese aggression, there's a lot of differing views on what role not only North Korea might play, but what role South Korea might play. I would tell you that your question is based upon the underlying assumption that the North Koreans will be immediately responsive to what the Chinese want. And I would tell you that that is questionable. It is questionable whether or not that certainly they'd have a great deal of incentive to go along with China. They certainly might see an advantage in taking advantage of the unstable situation to assert policies that are in their interest. Whether or not that completely was consistent with the Chinese goals and objectives remains to be seen. So I would tell you that the Combined Forces Command, US Forces Korea, the UN command on South Korea is going to play a very interesting role in any potential Chinese aggression. What that is remains to be seen, but they will be a critical player in that. Next question. Yes, sir. Morning, sir. Commander Whitrock. So looking at the Council of America has taken place here this I think this month with the Western Hemisphere. One of the comments that came from a former Mexican ambassador was that American credibility has been undermined in the recent four years. And don't make us choose between you and China. ASEAN has been saying the same thing for the last decade. So how do we offer an alternative without essentially saying you're with us or against us in the immortal words of President Bush? No, and that's a very good question. And you're absolutely right. ASEAN has said that Lee Shin-Long, the Prime Minister of Singapore, who we all have a great deal of respect for, his father, Lee Kuan Yew, was masterful, both members of the Lee family, masterful in balancing Singapore's relations between China and the United States. I would tell you that our continued ability to remain credible in the region is predicated on the value that we create for our allies and partners and the value that they perceive that we create for them. I don't think it's so much a case of doing anything in particular, but there are small ways every day in the course of our bilateral and multilateral relations that we can demonstrate that we are a credible partner. And I mean, I could tick off a list of economic issues and the President's trying to reinvigorate an economic community in Asia-Pacific region. We see informal and informal alliances being created, the Alkis, Australia, UK, US, and of course the Quad, the Quadrennial, our friends, our Indian colleagues, Japan, Australia, and the United States. So we're seeing a coalition of formal and informal alliances and partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region that could serve as an example of the United States commitment to the region. And so I think it's not a matter of something specifically that you do, it's a matter of demonstrating on a daily basis that you are committed to your allies and partners in the region. I'm a big proponent in internationalism and not withdrawing to the United States. My old boss and mentor, Secretary Mattis used to say, you can't surge trust and you have to build relationships on a consistent basis, and General Petrae said it as well. So I think it's just a matter of making sure, as the old sergeants used to say that our video matches our audio on a regular basis, moving forward. And the representation here from our allied students and our foreign students that are here I think is representative of our commitment to building relationships that last for the long term. As the DSCA director, I was the executive agent for all students studying the United States. And I very proudly would go up to the hill and talk about the fact that since 2000, we have educated one, over one million foreign students in the United States. And that's everything from enlisted and non-commissioned officers all the way up to officers. I've also encouraged everyone to view in here and I know you're getting ready to graduate. But if you haven't met some of your international classmates, you need to do that. Because trust me, you will see them again. They are not here by accident. Okay. So anyway, long answer to a short question. Next question. In the back, right here and then in the back there. Hey, sir, Lieutenant Commander Schrader, you mentioned that PLA willingness is not equal their ability and then you mentioned that military technology does not equal capability. How about we flip that around and apply that to Taiwan? Do you believe that their capability exists and do you believe that they're willing? Okay, no, that's a very good question. I didn't say they weren't, I didn't say they were not equal. I said willingness and ability were two separate issues. And it's easier to talk about willingness because you can guess whether somebody's willing. Capability, you have to actually study it. The answer to your question is I think that the Taiwan forces are far more capable than we then sometimes we perceive them to be. And this you're talking to someone who was the deputy J-5 of Paycom. So it's not like I just woke up one morning and discovered that Taiwan is a place. Believe me, a lot of people talking about it did. So I look at the fact that we woefully underestimated the Alan and the fighting abilities and the fighting spirit of the Ukrainian armed forces. Okay, let's be fair. Let's be honest. Okay, and we vastly overestimated the capabilities of the Russian armed forces. Okay, so in answer to your question, I think that they are far more capable than we're giving them a credit for. They have several advantages in terms of geography. There's only two time, and you know, you guys are all many of you are maritime officers. And so I'm sure some of you know this. There are only two times a year that it is physically possible to invade Taiwan because of the tides and the monsoon season. And anyone who's been to Taiwan knows that mountain range takes up most of the country. The third thing I would say is that we've been much more proactive now in collaborating with the Taiwan authorities and the Taiwan armed forces with respect to what they should procure. And the idea is to buy those asymmetries to help our Taiwan allies and supply them with those asymmetric capabilities that will allow them to become the so-called porcupine. Because as we know, even dragons don't swallow porcupines. And I was very gratified the other day to see President Tsai actually holding up an anti-tank missile that they make in Taiwan. And those of you who have ever, she is no dummy. She knows exactly what she's doing. And so by providing them with unique capabilities that will complicate the strategic calculus of the Chinese armed forces, I think they have half a chance. And as we know, they have to hold out so that the first carrier can leave San Diego. Okay. And we can move the forces and do all the other things we need to do. So yes, I think that they're more capable than we give them credit for. I think that they're more willing to fight for their country than we give them credit for. In the back, I think. Yeah. Morning, sir. Lieutenant Commander Taylor Shope, US Submarine Service. Questions talking about beyond a war with China, if we do get into a shooting war with them, how do you balance the cost of that and the need to maintain a force that has a sizable enough deterrent after the fact for other adversaries, say like Russia? That's a very, that's a very good question. And it's one that I can't possibly answer on this stage, but that all of you now that you've graduated and your counterparts at our in Maxwell and at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas are going to have to answer this conflict. You know, I'm very disturbed sometime when I see people who write very blithely about this conflict. This conflict is going to be long and ugly and bitter and costly because neither side can afford to lose. And we're going to have to make some very serious choices about allocation of forces so that we can maintain not only that we can not only fight and win in the Asia Pacific region, but maintain our posture in Europe and the Middle East and other places. So the short answer to your question is it's a great question. I don't have an answer for you. But I hope to God you guys stayed awake this year because you're going to have to answer this question. Okay. It was great talking to you. I hope if nothing else I was loud and entertaining. Congratulations on your impending graduation and I wish you all the best of luck. General, thank you so much for that and joining us here and we wish you the best. It's an honor to introduce to you our next guest speaker, Professor Paul Kennedy serves as the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University. He was the founding director of the international security programs there at Yale. His career has been dedicated to teaching and has influenced the many lives of the students, including those at the university, ROTC, many of our faculty and I imagine it's hard to come up with a number to really understand the influence that he's provided, including as you as mentioned in the previous speaker. He has published or edited 20 books on international history and great power competition. His books, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery and The Best Seller, Rise and Fall of Great Powers are cortexed here at the college in our strategy department. For his distinguished career, he was honored by being made the commander of the British Empire. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Paul Kennedy. Thank you sir. Well, Admiral Chatfield, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, I feel so honored to be back here this morning. I think the first time that I was invited to talk at the Naval War College was just a few years after a book of mine entitled The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism and because it seemed so appropriate in the middle of our surging competition, naval competition with the Soviet Union, there was that immediate transfer that the challenging Russia, the challenging red fleet was the equivalent of Kaiser Wilhelm's Heisei's fleet and the dominant navy of the time back there, the Royal Navy, was of course the U.S. Navy today. And with all of the ups and downs and changes in the world order and the collapse of that Soviet Union and then a variety of other challenges coming, I've always found it wonderful to come back here to the Naval War College and see how seriously the study of strategy and diplomacy and economic background to changing world forces is being discussed and analyzed at this place. There really is no other place in the world quite like this one and for those of you who are here just for nine months stay, congratulations because you have having an experience which cannot be done elsewhere. So when I asked Professor John Maurer what exactly I should be doing in my like 30 minutes of conversation with you before question and answer, he eerily said or wrote in an email to me, oh just you know how it all fits into the story of world history, the rise and fall of the great powers, the two world wars, the Cold War and then everything between now and then. And it sounded like something out of you know the first few paragraphs of the Hobbit like everything but everything between now and then. Late last night when I was rereading his email to me it was about one o'clock in the morning I thought well yes like everything between now and then. So I have a structured if you don't mind I've sort of structured the set of remarks in about five segments or chronological segments but behind it all I'm trying to give a characterization of where the U.S. Navy and naval sea power was in this particular time be it the interwar years or the Second World War itself what the big larger factors were for each of those segments in the story of U.S. as a world naval power over say the past century I've limited myself John Maurer to a century and a bit rather than 2000 years of history but I am going to do a sort of broad sweep and broad strokes here and it was actually an interesting exercise to me to say well if I had to characterize like the first rising decade or so of American sea power or the interwar years what would be the top three or four conditioning factors or larger aspects to it I would like to draw your attention to so forgive me if I sort of gallop through the decades but this is what I occurred to me to say as a remark in a tentative years of the United States becoming a great naval power that that is to say the years up until 1919 it strikes me that in those years one already has a big battle fleet navy but it is strategically a rather protected one it's a navy I would say not yet threatened by newer technologies so the battleship admirals can have their way and just tell the Congress that what you need for greater security is more battleships when the United States enters the first world war it's it's on the right side I've written out in my notes but what I meant by that is not a moral judgment it's just it's come in on the side of the predominant existing naval allies so that really what can the US Navy contribute to the what is to be the last year and a half of a war it does send a significant sort of battle squadron over to join the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet in Scapa Flow it could be there to witness the surrender of the German high seas fleet in 1919 and it could come happily home it did not have the experience of the US Army of the US Marine Corps obviously sent to fight on the Western front and it was rather lucky to its relief it was not substantially reduced in peacetime the army was clipped right back as some of you know but the navy itself it seemed to be a form of security even as the US was going into isolation you could persuade isolationist senators and congressmen that a big navy was good to preserve our isolated independence and this backdrop of rising as a large battle fleet navy not yet being really challenged a continued I would argue into what is the second segment of my remarks sorts of the larger thoughts about the interwar years for the United States and world affairs and its position there relative to because after all what are we talking about in this two days relative power us relative to China especially in Russia and other challenges in the nowadays world what was it like back then and one would have to say that the the main features even though there's significant books about worries studies about whether the US Navy had to balance the fleet between the Pacific and the Atlantic shores whether there was worry about German penetration into Brazil whether there was worry about internal security I would say the four or five defining features of the United States naval power and strategic position in the interwar years were like this they were really years of security the naval the Washington naval treaties of 1921-22 gave the US international security trade was safe the German U-boat threat which had popped up in 1917-18 was gone the costs of the navy the thing that we worry about so much today the costs of the navy were held in relatively at least until about 1937-38 other navies were also limited in cost and size and some of the former large navies in the world the German navy the imperial Russian navy was no more second point here most of the newer technologies of the interwar years when you think about it were like American base or they were in American hands the development early on of of aircraft carrier fleet technologies and the growth in the size of the carriers which we are going to build the development of dive bombers we thought it was our dive bombers which counted we weren't thinking so much of us later on Japanese dive bombers our developments in long-range flight navigation and reconnaissance Pan Am in the Pacific had a feedback loop to the security of the United States so it's only it's not until probably about 1938 did the US navy have to worry again we're coming into power that of Hitler the development very quickly of a naval branch of the Nazi armed services coming of Admiral Rader with his big ambitions and yet still I would argue the US Navy and sea powers still existing in a relatively secure world there were worries therefore about that German straight in the Atlantic about the Japanese threat in the Pacific after the end of Washington and London naval treaties on a hell for Betsy beginning of a naval race in the Pacific and those are genuine enough but still they have to be balanced ladies and gentlemen when you think about it by the the good news for the US Navy it was still geostrategically secure as war approached and into the war the British and French navies provided a block to Germany and the Japan which we regarded was having such big potential with Japanese admirals especially their generals fearing isolation actually moved quite cautiously the United States was still massively secure and that security did not depart when Europe went to war in 1939 the more I think about it the more I write about it in my recent book on victory at sea how critical in retrospect were the two years of 1939 to 1941 and so the bullet points I would make about that period in the evolving history of American naval power in the great power system is that the Atlantic front was held despite all of the batterings it takes in the Norway campaign of Dunkirk and elsewhere the Royal Navy stays in charge admirators fleet dreams and ambitions about the size of the German fleet in 1945 and 1946 had to be were squashed by Adolf Hitler's decision to make war and risk run the risk of war in 1939 I'm sorry radio said Hitler to the Grand Admiral we have to go now one wonders this is a point of speculation among German and Hitler historians one wonders if Hitler himself had a sense as the Japanese were going to have a sense that if you don't move in the next year or two this economic giant over there but that means us is just going to make our possible success strategy impossible so we we have to go now but in 1939 to 41 the US could still observe and build up strength and learn lessons from the war the advantages of staying out in the first world war to stay out for three years before you go in and the second world war to stay out for two and a half years my word I mean Bismarck would have admired that what a clever way to do in a great power conflict that is to say wait a little while to see how it unfolds and when Japan does attack in December 1941 with the whirlwind and blitzkrieg right across Asia South Asia and right away down to the Indonesia or Dutch East Indies and the attack upon Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong and northern Malaya remember it does it alone it does it while at the time that Hitler's generals are beginning to sense that the battle around Moscow in December 1941 is not going as well as they hoped and 5000 miles away Hitler's Japanese ally does it alone attacks alone against an Anglo-American world this is how it must have been seen out of Bijeng itself and when the US battle fleet was annihilated at the attack on Pearl Harbor what was needed really for the US was just another breathing space a two-year breathing space until mid 1943 when those congressional allocations came through a congress which if you know the story was meeting to discuss the navy's requests for appropriations in the middle of June 1940 when that same morning the news came that the French government had asked Hitler for a negotiated peace and the alarm there of the US congress sort of resulted in a doubling of the size of the requested allocations what a dream these days you can you imagine going down to congress now and saying we would like our naval budget for the next five years to be such and such and such and such and the congress turns around and says heck no we're so worried about things Admiral we're going to double your naval budget wow the admiral the admiral said at the time in June and in June the 17th and 18th must have said wow you know like like George Bush and Skokrov when when when Gorbachev said he was dissolving the Soviet Union did I hear that correctly did I hear that we were going to have a doubling of our navy but that was back in 1940 and as you well know it takes so many years to develop and then build and then launch and then train those aircraft carriers so you needed you needed a further two-year gap in the great power story and so by holding in the pacific by the successful battle of midway 80 years ago this month by holding Guadalcanal on the one hand and seeing the essentially Royal Navy and Royal Canadian Navy win the battle against the U-boats by May and June 1943 then at last the longer big dream of US admirals could be realized when Admiral Nimitz looked out of his window as commandant chief of a pacific fleet in early June 1943 and saw they're coming into the harbor the first of the new Essex class fleet carriers with only one US carrier active down in the southwest Pacific Halsey and Saratoga in that month of June 1943 and shook his head I just imagined that it was in relief and at the beginning of July 1943 the second Essex class carrier comes in and then at the end of July the first of the the smaller fleet carriers come in the Princeton class and then a fleet carrier every month inconceivable to our minds now that would happen when the big step forward occurs against the Gilbert Islands at the end of 1943 US Navy has 10 carriers at its disposal the transformation due to the colossal development of US naval shipbuilding construction by 1943 is just eye-popping we're building submarines on the Great Lakes we were building large warships on the west coast the east coast and in the Gulf through the interwar years the US Navy though it had it felt to deal with the parsimonious budget kept sending at least a sufficiency of of fiscal support to keep its four large Navy yards its own government Navy yards going and to subsidize four other large yards which were in private hands so that when it went to the build-up the necessary build-up it had these substantial shipbuilding and trained shipyard workers ready eager to take the new orders I come back to that in a minute by 1943 also you know Italy had surrendered the Anglo-American forces had taken North Africa they were pretty well dominant there this was now just the need to turn and apply that overwhelming force as Winston Churchill called it the inevitable unfolding of overwhelming force I don't know how many of you remember that sentence of of Winston's he writes it in his war memoirs he says when he heard the news of the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor and upon the British installations in December the 7th and 8th 1941 Churchill said he went to bed grateful and relieved that night because he said we were saved and what was going to happen was the inevitable unfolding of overwhelming force I know a number of people have accused me from time to time ladies and gentlemen of being a sort of economic determinist because I sort of pointed the comparative GDPs and production figures well yeah of course I'm a bit of an economic determinist when I look at say US aircraft production totals in the second half of the Second World War US aircraft production total in like 1942 of a mere 20 000 aircraft and the next year 40 000 aircraft and the next year 84 000 aircraft is kind of hard not to be an economic or productive determinist when you think of those aircraft going out across the Pacific and across the Atlantic so it was possible from 1943 onwards to think of this newly invigorated and developed American seapower not just with the carrier task forces but with new amphibious capacities as well and by 1943-44 the US submarine service had got rid of its early torpedo problems by that time it was emasculating the Japanese merchant ship by that time from 1943 onwards the giant bomber forces were moving in so here of course is the irony in this story about this fantastic rise almost inevitable you might be saying although nothing in history is inevitable and leadership and decision-making and good eye for budgets and technology are part of this story but here is the irony that just as these colossal American naval and naval amphibious forces were just moving on from Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns in the spring of 1945 and getting ready for that colossal invasion of Japan which was to start in November 1945 Operation Downfall I always think Admiral Chatfield it must have been a great a great job to be the person who chooses the name of you like the next operation which Americans and British are going to do Operation Downfall some of these operations like torch are very neutral or they're very powerful Operation Dynamo my favorite is when the the British decide that they're going to be part of his American and British joint attack on the toe of Sicily in July 1943 and I don't know how they got away with it but the the name of the two British landing operations at the very heel of Italy in July 1943 I guess what Admiral was called Operation Slapstick as if it was a sort of a theater a comedy theater slapstick as it nearly nearly was how did they know just as they were preparing and trying to do some of the casualty estimates for what it would take to invade the fiercely held Japanese homeland just then comes the news of the dropping of the atomic bomb and so the end of a war and a move into what was soon to be the Cold War because relations with Russia deteriorated so quickly after Potsdam that period was one in the first few years of I think it has to be said and some of the historians have said existential anxiety for the US Navy what if in this new atomic age there really was little place for the US Navy what if one or two large bombs could finish the next war in a space of a month what if all you needed and this was the claim of course of the US Air Force at the time what if all you needed was a large Air Force why need an expensive big fleet what were these new battle wagons to do even even what were the new carriers to do in the atomic era therefore it has to be said that the US Navy in the decade or so after 1945 after 1947 was saved by I would guard three things the Korean War you had to resuscitate that Navy including the amphibious Navy the rise of a red Navy especially by the 1970s 1980s and by America's vast global commitments in the Atlantic in the Mediterranean in the Persian Gulf now the collapse of the Soviet Union by 1999 might have reduced the need for this large Navy but then ironically in bitterly it seems to me at least 9-11 was a great boost America wasn't a different but uncertain world and therefore all of the US Armed Services needed fiscal support all of them are going to receive large funding roughly speaking one third for the Air Force one third for the US Army and Marine Corps and one third for the Navy the Congress had agreed until today still agrees that the US should stay number one so when one reflects as I will in just these last couple of minutes about American seaport today and into the future let me end with three further bullet points if you like all around the question of is there right now an American hyperpower as Michael Mandelbaum in New York says in his new book American power great power superpower hyperpower is there now an American hyperpower or do we see an overstretched naval giant rather gaudy rather worried there is a giant opposing size and extent of the US naval power today as you measure it in all sorts of ways fleet tonnage and the rest I have behind me on the screen which I hope is coming up or husband up for a while you see the transformation of what happened in the during the Second World War of the 1943 the continuation of this comparative measure of of total battle fleet total fleet surface fleet tonnage meant with the US state so far ahead of everybody else all the way through the Cold War if one continued that figure that graph you would see how quickly now but only in the years after 1900 after the after 2000 I beg your pardon after 2000 the total Chinese tonnage is catching up so among the huge problems the huge questions they must be for the leaders of the new US Navy and I've got no particular order and these last two or three remarks what is the challenge really of asymmetric warfare I am afraid I cannot work it out it looks serious to me all of the new forms of asymmetric weaponry especially those is being developed by the Chinese you just heard it in the previous speaker's talk what is there for the consequence for asymmetric weaponry on the future of the US carrier and all of our large surface warships the admiral staff readers nightmare if we send up carrier fleet over there is it going to be sunk by a host of missiles what about the erosion of our shipbuilding capacities as compared with those which were there in existence all during the interwar years what about the loss of so many of our skilled shipyard workers and what's the Navy supposed to do about that and then there is finally something which is this this to do with the China drum beat I hear all the time the ghost of another possibly equally large naval power in 20 years time in the form of China maybe not a worldwide one like the Royal Navy in 1900 or the US Navy in 1960 maybe with a large Indian ocean Navy as well perhaps pushing us steadily out of Asia what would shared naval power look like Admiral Chatfield we've never really considered that question what would happen if we our naval power was told you can have this part of the world but east of Suez you cannot have it and west of Guam you cannot have it and finally finally how do we pay for all of this halfway through that disastrous war which Spain Imperial Spain was fighting as it participated in the 30 years war in the German lands in 1916 18 to 1638 and then on to 1658 a Spanish general wrote back to his monarch Philip IV he said all that is needed to win a war your majesty how many of you know this quote all it is needed to win a war is money more money and yet more money I wonder what the king of Spain thought of receiving that sort of letter so I've tried to outline for you today this morning this sweep of things which brought the US Navy through a century of being in some ways relatively strategically protected able to develop its capacities with a large amount of reserve capacity and now more much more uncertainty than in any of those previous times in history that I can think about so I'm not going to try to predict the future that Arab saying I quite like the Arab saying that he who predicts the future and gets it right is not clever he's just very very lucky indeed Admiral Chatfield ladies and gentlemen thanks for your attention this morning thank you I understand there's not much time left but can we take a couple of questions let's please professor I'm not sure how to how to address you professor what is the Chinese and the American or the western allies views on expenditure of life excuse me for asking a question in this audience did I hear you say the future of life yes on the expenditure of life China has about four four times the number of people we do they have about the same number of same land mass so four to one what is our likelihood of winning okay thank you for that question again and again I hear ladies and gentlemen questions about the comparators with China and one of those clearly is the demographic size of China compared with that of the United States briefly you're looking at a country of 1.4 1.45 billion people as opposed to a country here of about 330 million and when you break down the age ranks of those two populations you see at first sight you realize that both of them have substantial elderly populations aging populations are true in in this country as it is in China but nonetheless this country has a demographic which is more vibrant it has a better fertility rate that's the number of children per woman born each year the Chinese government struggles a great deal wondering about how 1.4 billion people can be sustained in their welfare and in feeding them which is now impossible to do from home resources so China is dependent upon imported foodstuffs so overall when you look at the demographic for a moment not the navy sizes not the GDP but the demographic and you say yes there's a question pointed out China's total land mass is almost the same as that of the United States in in square miles but isn't it better to be in the country which has a 300 million more vibrant younger base more balanced demographic than that of China so this is possibly the biggest Achilles heel for China if you think of the sweep of this 21st century perhaps nothing else counts as much at the end Napoleon was quite right he thought at the end of it all numbers counted but it's the quality of the numbers the age brackets of the numbers which count more than anything else and give you the chance for a much more sustained and better life and capable of dealing with the environmental challenges which are bearing down on us so fast thanks my professor i'm looking at your graph right there and you mentioned that you were an economic determinist that graph particularly from you know the end of the war through the 1960 was those returns were captured by us international corporations if you're going to argue that the graphs below particularly that that blue line is challenged by a growing prc line beginning with 2020 out through something or 2000 out through some year yes in the environment where you have a world economic environment dominated by multinational corporations how does that impact both the blue line and the growing red line in your analysis thank you so i have to clear things up i made a joke about being an economic determinist all i meant was please please i tell my three sons i'm not an economic determinist but it is true that numbers and productivity and relative size count because gdp's can be turned into newer technologies of research and development and everything else but if there's something else going on in this world which is the evolution of multinational corporations even though i think that the lessons of things which have happened in world politics since 9 11 suggest to me the limitations of the power and influence of international corporate international great companies even so there still is a world in which international business finance banking is still held very strongly by the united states and the west it still is the case if you go to the davos world economic forum it just looks to me ever more a reflection of that american-led world order of post 1945 it's mutated in other ways but it is still there so here's the biggest question for us all and i work right now at the very end of my session here when i said the the arab quote is we don't know and you're lucky if you get it right nonetheless it's clear that the big debate is out here the united states is the largest force in world affairs the united states has so many plus factors on its side including the world of international trade and corporations and finance so you think that what have you got to worry about go to sleep and the other side of it is well in the past 20 years certain things which i've tried to outline are a cause for worry are a cause for your not being complacent are a cause for your going back to the congress and the president and saying we have to keep an eye on this transformative new warfare that overstretch of us all over the world are we ever going to ask and answer the question are there places in the world which we may not need to get invested in i ask that question and it's so difficult to answer it so the challenges are there but my word the resources are still very very strong indeed i'll leave you with that middle of the morning consolation sentence the resources are quite strong indeed thank you very much admiral first candidate thank you so much for joining us and for all those wonderful thoughts to think about good morning admiral good morning colleagues students guests i welcome to day two's panel we have a very impressive panel for you today for the current strategy forum day two i am professor kathleen walsh i go by kate and i have taught policy analysis here at the naval war college in the national security affairs department since 2006 our first speaker who is joining us virtually is dr andrew may who has been working at the pentagon's office of net assessment even longer uh if my internet research is correct since 2005 i believe dr may is currently the associate director of the office of net assessment which is now part of the office of the secretary of defense and he's written several volumes about the office about on a founder famously and g marshal and about net assessments of course past president in future as an essential element of strategy among his numerous other publications and presentations his most recent publications are two kind of two chapters in an edited volume by tom mankin well known to us here at the war college on net assessment and military strategy his first co-authored chapters with barry watz on beyond the cold war and the other is a concluding chapter on pardon me the future of net assessment dr may is also an adjunct professor at georgetown university's school of foreign service center for security studies where he teaches a course on net assessment and strategic thinking he received his phd from emory university enroute his dissertation on the ran corporation and the dynamics of american strategic thought 1946 to 1962 our next speaker professor michael beckley who is here with us in person uh is an associate professor of political science at tufts university and a non-resident senior fellow at the american enterprise institute previously he was an international security fellow at harvard's kennedy school of government and worked for the u.s department of defense the ran corporation and the carnegie endowment for international peace he continues to advise officers within the u.s intelligence community and the u.s department of defense and this is a leading expert on the balance of power between the united states and china he's the author of two books and multiple award-winning articles his most recent book being unrivaled why america will remain the world's sole superpower published by cornell uh studies in security affairs in 2018 and our final speaker dr orianna schuyler-master who is also joining us virtually is a center fellow at the freeman's boli institute for international studies at stanford university where her research focuses on chinese military and security policy asia pacific security issues war termination and coercive diplomacy she is also non-resident senior fellow at the american enterprise institute a former stanton nuclear security fellow and continues to serve in the united states air force reserve for which she works as a strategic planner at indopay com dr master has published widely her most recent book uh is being being the cost of conversation obstacles to peace talks in wartime published by cornell university press in 2019 which also won the 2020 american political science association's international security section uh booked by an untenured faculty member she holds a b.a. in east asian studies from stanford and an m.a and phd in politics from princeton university in 2016 she won the individual reservists of the year award for contributions to u.s strategy in asia so it's promised a very accomplished very impressive panel for today's topic which is relative power the united states perspective and with that i'm going to turn the floor over to dr mayer first speaker dr mayer thank you so much kate uh i like to think i have a very low profile on the internet so it's a little a little alarming how much you put together but um but thank you very thank you very much um i don't think i need to give any more introduction about who i am based on the fairness of that just to just to thank you for for hosting me um and let me spend some time with you i thought i'd try to talk about three things one is a little bit of my view of net assessment as an approach or a way of thinking uh just a couple of words about ona the office at net assessment as an office and what we do in the inside the pentagon inside the department and then a few of the kind of common challenges or things i see going on in the government generally that make comparative analysis important but also are maybe challenges in a way and are things for you all to think about and i hope for you all to improve um over the course of time so uh first a little bit on net assessment um i i hope that the term is not totally unfamiliar to you all but the basic the very basic idea is the net means red and blue so this is a comparative diagnostic picture of how things are going in a particular um competition now it could be a business competition or something else but for us obviously this is a military competition um there are other comparisons like the joint staff the chairman produces the gymna which is intended to answer the question of well if there's a war soon you know kind of how do we think it's going to go that's not really our job our job is to look more at warfare areas almost like businesses so in from that perspective the defense department's not unlike a corporation that has it's in a lot of different businesses we're in the undersea warfare business we're in the space combat business we're in the maritime warfare business um and we try to answer questions basically of well how is business going um are there new competitors coming into the business who are changing things we're threatening our position um are there new technologies coming into our business that might change the way things are done um or sometimes more rarely is the whole character of the business changing sort of in the way that maybe it is in space or undersea now where new roles and missions are emerging um wholly new ways of operating might be coming along and we need to think through well our you know this is the key business for us and it looks like it might be upended um how should we think about how we're going to perform in this area and all of the thinking here really comes back as kate mentioned to mr marshall and the analytic work he did while he was at rand thinking about the long-term competition and the peacetime competition and that's really the bedrock for us just as an aside a lot of those seminal papers are now available on the rand website there's a foundation that's doing some work to catalog some of his writings and there are now a couple of books about him and i encourage anybody who wants to learn about this or even just to learn how to think uh ought to go try to find some of his papers or there's a new book out of interviews with him very very good and very illuminating and very rich and might be useful in learning more about this um the the other thing in addition to this peacetime competition where the idea is that um the systems aren't in an action reaction cycle but there is some loose coupling some of what the other side does is in response to what we do a lot isn't a lot is driven by their own internal institutions and organizations um but but some is driven by what we're doing and that creates opportunities to shape the the other guy um to push their investments in any in particular areas to adjust their behavior in particular ways and one of the notions that mr marshall came up with was looking for opportunities like that where you might be able to push the competition in areas that you prefer for it to go or impose costs on the other guy and complicate life for him um and and so this led to trying to take a much more sort of three-dimensional look at the competitor uh not take him as a threat input but try to really understand the competitor as a set of organizations um as an organization that was going to make mistakes it was going to make poor decisions it's going to misunderstand things the way that all organizations do and while it's important sometimes militarily to take the worst case scenario and assume that your adversary is going to be competent um and is going to make good decisions and so forth in a competition it's important to understand that they might be irrational and make mistakes and have problems and that we should be looking for those as ways of exploiting their foibles the way that we have foibles ourselves and so ideally when a net assessment is completed it's not an IG investigation that says we've been buying the wrong stuff under for the undersea warfare business and it's not an NIE which is a sort of general assessment for broad readership but is instead a kind of management document aimed at one person really or two people the secretary and the deputy as strategic managers um laying out how business is going and identifying where we see some opportunities to complicate life for the other guy and therefore improve our own position in the competition and then we step out then it's a secretary's job to think um is that the way I want to behave in this competition is this important to me do I want to invest the time and if so then they can meet with um the chief of staff of the appropriate service or combatant commanders or the chairman or whoever they think is appropriate to figure out how exactly they want to take advantage of this that's not our job we shouldn't be telling people what to do we're identifying emerging problems and opportunities and trying to identify kind of build a framework within which the secretary could then have more um directed conversations um with his or her senior leaders and you wonder well why was this needed in the first place I mean this seemed like a very obvious um function and every senior manager would want this um and so it's not clear why this had to be created in the 1970s now I would say the first is the surprising realization at least for me that the secretary is a very poorly supported person in a lot of ways I mean okay great yes in a certain sense all of OSD the whole department works for them you know lots of personal care and so forth but analytically you know the secretary doesn't have a CAG the secretary has a very very small team to turn to and there aren't many people most of the people who go see him have a decision they want him to make and a side that they are pushing um he doesn't really have a lot of um sources of even-handed diagnostic analysis and one of the things that we are intended to do is provide that another reason is there's a kind of uneven information flow for senior managers um they get from the intelligence community they get a lot about what the other side is up to right and it's usually um about actions improvements um acts of aggression on the other side right they developed this new weapon system they built an island over here they're spending such and such a percent on defense it's um a pretty scary picture overall but when it comes to dealing with ourselves mostly senior leaders are dealing with problems there are cost overruns in a big program there are personnel problems um you know it's mostly difficulties and it leads to a sense in a way uh it leads to a kind of warped view that the other guys are out there and they're just doing things and meanwhile we're beset by all of these problems because generally speaking people aren't coming and talking to them about the problems that the other guys are having and by and large people aren't giving him an intelligent style projection of our own capabilities and so one of our jobs is to try to make it more of an apples to apples comparison and more a projection of here's how things are going for us but here's how things are going for them and it's not so easy over there and they've got their own problems and their own difficulties and while we don't set out to be rosy by any means one of the effects of putting things in a comparative framework tends to be you realize that the other guys have some problems and we have some strengths that we take for granted um and overlook much of the time um and you generally come out with a sense of opportunities to improve our position rather than a long list of problems to solve um so that's sort of a little bit on net assessment as an approach I don't want to get too much into the office of net assessment in what we're doing now rather than to say we're fully in the business of doing it assessments um they're they're focused on the sorts of warfare areas you would imagine we would be focused on we are overwhelmingly focused on China as we happen since the 90s mr marshall made a decision in the mid late 90s to start concentrating on china um nobody cared for a very very long time and suddenly everybody cares a lot um and one of the last gifts he gave to the office and to the department was 15 or 20 years of investment um that suddenly is being turned back into value for the office and for the department um the other thing to say about it is we have a tremendous amount of freedom it's a very very privileged position for us we're very very fortunate um it's very rare for a secretary or a senior leader to say you have to do this it's uh I can't think of a time when we were told we can't do something we're really allowed a tremendous amount of liberty to decide what we think is important what needs to be studied and certainly we have complete freedom in our conclusions in what we determine how we decide things are going um it's very very fortunate now I mean it's not always easy right I mean we're trying to work at the pace of analysis which tends to be measured slow in a department that is all about action today and so that there can be some difficulty in trying to create a cocoon of analysis in a department that is mostly about action and it can be difficult to be helpful without being reactive we are able to help because we take a long time to try to understand things in depth and that means not being a quick turn shot so one of my jobs to try to anticipate what the problems will be so that when those things emerge we have work that is deep and that means sometimes problems come up obviously that I didn't anticipate at all and we get asked if we have anything and we have to say no we don't say no but we can work something up in three months we say no we don't have anything on that and that that's a hard thing to say um and then sometimes of course I make a bad bet and we have lots to say about something that nobody cares about but if I'm doing my job and Jim Baker's doing his job and we're working together we're able to have some of this anticipation and be able to produce deeper work when it's useful and then finally just a little bit on the kind of challenges I see both in doing the sort of analysis and then broadly in the department or in the in the country internally I'd say there are three some sound little and silly and but turn out to be important and some you'll get right away the hardest in some ways is getting data about ourselves we don't really keep very good track of ourselves and then we do have data about ourselves it tends to be about budgets or personnel we don't have historical accounts of the development of our capabilities in our organizations and the way that we do about our adversaries and so it's very difficult to create a story about ourselves like we can tell about our adversaries so we spend a lot of time just trying to learn about ourselves another difficulty of course is difficult to get people to restrain themselves from making policy prescriptions you'd like to hire bright and experienced people they often have ideas about how things could be better and that's not our job our job is to explain what's been happening and where we think things are going to go and stripping out those preferences and those policy prescriptions and those programmatic prescriptions takes time and is difficult and requires discipline but I think is ultimately very useful and then finally another internal challenge before I get to the external ones another internal challenge is it's often difficult to get people to write about their judgments there's something happening I think maybe it's just in the military defense culture maybe it's more broad people are very even very people who are very brave in other parts of their lives are often uncomfortable writing on paper I think it's going to be like this I think the other guys have a problem over here the evidence is very scant it's a supposition or a hypothesis or a bit of speculation based on my whatever 20 years studying this people get very very uncomfortable doing that and one of the hardest parts of my job is to push people out into making informed speculation rather than strictly hard evidence based analysis and then finally some challenges more on the customer side or in the department more generally first there's a challenge we don't have anymore which is for 20 years we weren't allowed to say China right we would have these ridiculous maps that with made-up country names it was we went through this ridiculous period where we wouldn't acknowledge that these guys might be a problem okay well that's more or less over and a big improvement in our lives but nevertheless things aren't all better we actually have this sort of opposite problem now where a lot of people and Mike will be able to talk to this a lot of people are uncomfortable now acknowledging China might have some problems people who work for the last 20 years to get us to recognize China as a competitor are now worried that if we start talking about the problems that the Chinese have it's going to be taken as an excuse to stop competing and there and that's not an invalid concern that that's there's merit in that concern but we we have to discipline ourselves and talk seriously about the problems that we think these people have as a way of competing more effectively not as a way of saying therefore we don't have to worry but as a way of saying we should be concentrating on where they are weak so we can put our strengths against that and really stick it to them we shouldn't be competing by making a list of our problems and trying to solve them but it's very uncomfortable now right now some people very uneasy with the idea of talking about Chinese problems another problem is we're just really late to this competition and we've got some problems and we haven't been thinking about it and so a lot of the investments and decisions we have made over the last 20 years start to look really unwise and that's uncomfortable because a lot of our senior leaders were involved in making those decisions and in making those policies and they're not looking too good in hindsight and it's an uncomfortable conversation and then finally we've got a kind of I don't I don't know exactly what to call it a kind of dominance disease in a sense where we've been ahead in everything for so long that most people in the defense department don't know what it's like to have a mix of strengths and weaknesses and advantages and disadvantages you know I mean obviously in the Cold War we were ahead in some areas like precision strike and then behind in other areas like overall manpower and then we accepted parity wisely or not in other areas like nuclear weapons we couldn't afford it wasn't realistic to believe that we could be ahead in everything against them all the time we're probably headed for a similar period but we're unaccustomed to thinking about a portfolio of advantages and disadvantages there was a recent secretary not this one but and a good secretary who said he didn't want to hear people talking about the United States being in second place in anything and I mean I sort of admire the competitive spirit but but that's not responsible from a strategic management perspective if we have a high-end competitor we're going to probably need to be honest with ourselves about what our goals are in some areas and maybe they're not always dominance but we're not used to thinking in those ways anymore and it sounds defeatist and it sounds an American but probably we're going to have to get there so those are things that sometimes make our assessments land with a thud despite all that we're in the last kind of point I guess is I think overall we have more advantages than disadvantages in this competition and that while China has dangerous ambitions and real strengths they've got profound weaknesses and our strengths match up for us very well against those weaknesses and I think if we have a good strategy and good leadership and some discipline and the and kind of insight into the competition we have a we can outcompete these guys so I'm by no means defeatist but it's past time I think for us to get to to get serious and with that I'll stop and hand it back to you thank you again for hosting me thank you dr. may perfectly timed great well thanks so much for for having me out here it's really an honor to be with such an esteemed crowd I'll basically pick up where Andrew left off in terms of competing with China I think in net assessment we spend most of our time talking about the dangers of a rising and increasingly confident even cocky China but I think we should also spend some time considering the possibility of a different and more volatile threat namely a peeking China that's facing slowing economic growth at home and increasing strategic pushback internationally and I actually think in the years ahead that's the more likely China you'll face in the field and I've been doing a lot of research both on my own and with the the great historian Hal Brands down at Seiss Johns Hopkins about what what happens when a rising power starts to slow down and we found that nothing really good happens that these peaking powers actually tend to be the most dangerous kind of country because on the one hand this era of rapid growth and rising power and international prestige has inflated their egos and given them the means to shake up the world and then they're confronted by this sort of looming specter of potential future stagnation and strategic pushback and that actually gives them the motive to start moving more aggressively in the short term to try to alter those long-term trends or to grab what they can before it's too late so it's this exhilarating rise followed by the prospect of future decline that's really dangerous and as I'll discuss in a second I'm actually very concerned that China displays some of the classic worrying signs and so what this means for the United States is you basically need two China strategies on the one hand you need one obviously for the long game how to manage the relationship with China over the course of this entire century the 100-year marathon the new Cold War whatever you want to call it but I think you also need another short-term strategy that's prepared to deal with what could be a surge of Chinese repression as well as external aggression so to elaborate I'll basically just make two points in the next 15 minutes to spell those out the first is just why I think China's rise is is slowing down and second why I think this fundamentally changes China that it changes the domestic political situation in China and it also fundamentally changes China's foreign policy calculations and you'll be happy to know I brought some PowerPoint slides because my short time at the Pentagon ever since then I don't even cross the street without a PowerPoint presentation so I have a few things for you to look at besides my face while I talk so on the first point why I think China's rise is coming to an end that probably sounds crazy to many of you just because China's obviously been rising for so long and so fast that we tend to think of it as like a constant of the international system I mean because if you were born after 1978 you have you've only lived in a world of a rapidly rising China at Tufts where I teach I teach a class I'm mandated basically to teach a class called the rise of China as if it's like as eternal as gravity and you know intro to astrophysics or something like that but I actually think the past few decades of peace and prosperity if you look at the broad sweep of Chinese history there are actually kind of an anomaly in in Chinese history and that China's exceptional rise over the last 40 years I think is the result of a few exceptional trends that are increasingly fleeting and so the first of those trends is just basic security China has enjoyed the most secure geopolitical environment that's been largely underpinned by at least a decent relationship with the United States over the last 40 years and that was that's actually been crucial for China because China is in a very rough neighborhood it's got 14 countries around it most of which are either very powerful and scary or unstable or some combination of those two things if you've ever played risk you know that trying to hold Eurasia is damn near impossible and that's basically what China has to do every single day and so because of that you know if you just look at Chinese history really from the first opium war in 1839 until the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 China is ripped apart by imperialist powers and internal conflict then even after China unifies under the CCP in 1949 it quickly becomes America's enemy number one because of the Korean War and so the United States adopts a policy of pressure that's basically intended to dismantle China as a great power and then when China's alliance with the Soviet Union falls apart in 1960 China becomes the main enemy of both Cold War superpowers and so you know isolated surrounded impoverished it's not a surprise that life in China was very difficult during those times and so this is why the opening to China in the 1970s is is is a really important event because Beijing suddenly has a sort of quasi superpower ally and the United States on several occasions actually warned Moscow not to attack China and more importantly fast-tracked China's integration with the wider world and so by the mid 1970s China has a relatively safe homeland and increasing access to Western markets and capital and China's timing couldn't be more perfect because China starts integrating with the West right as this period that we now call hyper globalization really kicks into high gear China both propels as well as rides this wave of hyper globalization where world trade surges sixfold just between 1970 and the early 2000s and China is clearly the main beneficiary of this riding this wave to become the workshop of the world so the first the first asset that China had going for it for most the last 40 years was just basic security and economic access and a big part of this was underpinned by a decent relationship with the United States and its allies and everything else that goes along with it the second factor was just that the Chinese government right around the same time in the 1970s suddenly becomes capable of exploiting this historic opportunity so Mao dies in 1976 and the CCP leadership or at least the majority of it says okay let's not do another cultural revolution and so China's government becomes for the first time committed to some semblance of reform and opening and so they start to reward officials for good economic performance not just sort of blind political ideology and loyalty rural communities are allowed to set up loosely regulated enterprises and then in preparation to eventually join the world trade organization China basically overhauls its legal and tax collection systems and so it really starts to develop the right package of policies to thrive in a world that is starting to open up for the Chinese the third fleeting factor is just that China had the greatest demographic dividend in in recorded history at least that I'm aware of so China for much of the last 30 years had 10 working age adults for every senior citizen in its population most countries don't even get anywhere close to five I think right now the United States has three to four workers per retiree so this graph here you know the top line is workers the the second line is Chinese children and elderly I put the United States in there just as a point of comparison so China has this massive demographic bubble over the last 30 years and that's the one time result of a very peculiar population history so basically in the 1950s in 1960s Mao encourages Chinese families incentivizes them to have many children because the Chinese population had been decimated by years of warfare and famine and Chinese families obliged and the population explodes 80 percent in just 30 years but then the Chinese government starts to worry about overpopulation and so in the 1970s they do a 180 and they implement the infamous one child policy and so the result of this sudden change is that for the last 30 to 40 years things have been great from a demographic perspective because you've had this huge population of baby boomers who are in the workforce and they have relatively few elderly parents to take care of because so many of them had perished in the wars and the famines of the really bad years and they also have relatively few children to take care of because they're not allowed to have them and so I don't think any population has been more better poised for productivity than China has been over the last 30 to 40 years and then the fourth factor and the final one I'll highlight is just abundant natural resources so starting in the 1970s you know one sort of silver lining to underdevelopment is usually a relatively pristine environment and so China started out relatively self-sufficient in things like water, food, energy and easy access to those resources plus weak environmental protections made rapid growth very cheap so you could just set up a factory, you could plow through resources, cheap resources and cheap labor helped make China an industrial powerhouse so China really had it all from the 1970s to the early 2010s but now I think all four of those assets are quickly becoming liabilities so for starters China is running out of resources so since the 1970s half of the rivers in China have disappeared 60% of the groundwater is so polluted that the Chinese government has deemed it unfit for human contact so you can't let alone drinking it like if you come into contact with it you're in trouble 40% of the farmland has been turned into desert or so polluted you can't grow anything on it and almost all of the exploitable energy reserves have been burned up the oil reserves rather so now China is the largest importer of food and energy in the world some of its cities are suffering severe water and food shortages Beijing has about as much water per capita as Saudi Arabia does and food is becoming scarce I mean the government just banned banquets and binge eating because they're so concerned about the the food supply and this resource scarcity issue is not just like a humanitarian issue it makes growth more expensive so now economic growth like each unit of GDP is three times more expensive to produce today than it was even in the early 2000s just because it you have to find resources in more far-flung areas or import it from abroad the second liability is just that China's running out of working age people thanks to the one child policy so just between now and the early 2030s so we're talking in the span of a decade to maybe 12 years China is going to lose 70 million working age adults and gain 130 million senior citizens so that's like taking an entire France of consumers and taxpayers and workers out of the population and adding an entire Japan of senior citizens just in the space of 10 to 12 years and then from the mid 2030s to 2050 things get really bad for China it's going to lose an additional 105 million workers and gain another 60 to 70 million seniors the estimates I've seen suggest that age-related spending so that's you know medical care social security is going to need to triple as a share of GDP between now and 2030 just to keep seniors from you know dying and abject poverty and all of these numbers I should point out we're based on sort of the pre-covid census data that we have the the latest census which has been kind of slowly leaking out of the Chinese government actually suggests that the Chinese government has been over counting the birth rate by substantial margins for the last 10 years and that China's population could collapse in half sometime between 2060 and 2100 so we're talking a major die-off in aging of the Chinese population so you know dealing with all these problems I think is going to be especially difficult because of another factor which is that China I think by all accounts is now ruled by a dictator who consistently sacrifices economic efficiency for political control so for example private firms generate most of China's real wealth but under Xi Jinping inefficient state-owned enterprises still receive roughly 80 percent of the loans and subsidies doled out by Chinese state-owned banks his anti-corruption campaign which has purged more than a million ccp officials has scared local leaders for understandable reasons from engaging in the kind of economic experimentation that was actually really critical to China's rise he's essentially outlawed negative economic news that's not explicitly sanctioned by Beijing that makes it really hard to to course correct like if you're you know locking down the entire population due to a zero COVID policy and he's also passed through this wave of politically driven tech regulations that has erased more than two trillion dollars in market capitalization from the most dynamic firms in the country so needless to say none of that really bodes well for long-term sustainable economic growth and then the the last factor is just that I think the world is becoming abatedly sort of less welcoming to China so obviously you have the trade and tech wars that the United States has been waging against Beijing but just in general you can actually count these things Beijing now faces thousands of new trade barriers today that it didn't face 10 years ago many of the world's largest economies are doing everything from trying to wall off their telecommunications networks from Chinese influence they're looking for ways to incentivize their companies to relocate outside of China and so that it's just a less welcoming world that China confronts so these these for what used to be tailwinds now turned headwinds I think are already taking a toll on China's both economic and geopolitical position so China was actually in the midst of its longest economic slowdown of the post-Mao era before COVID so from 2010 to 2019 growth rates dropped by half and then COVID brought those growth rates down by another two-thirds and now zero COVID may result in you know marginal if any economic real economic growth this year and I think the the worst point because you know if China's can restore three to four percent growth you know we would kill for that here in the United States but I think the worst issue is just that a lot of China's growth especially since the 2008 financial crisis has come from the government's force-feeding capital through the economy so essentially stimulus spending and if you subtract that out there's not a lot of growth left over in the real economy so productivity you know producing more output with the same units of input that has actually been declining for more than a decade now and a lot of my research like compares the trajectory of of great powers I'm actually glad to see Paul Kennedy in the audience because he's a great hero of mine and got me started in this sort of type of analysis but I you know I've struggled to find a productivity collapse similar to what China has experienced in recent years since the 1980s Soviet Union now obviously China is not 1980s Soviet Union I don't think the regime is going to collapse anytime soon and the Soviet Union had many other problems it was dealing with imperial overstretch you know an oil crisis but just in terms of the sheer amount of very costly growth that is being churned out low productivity growth in recent years it's it's quite alarming and there's lots of interesting qualitative accounts that look at you know the rise of ghost cities in China or the fact that a quarter of the houses and apartments in China are unoccupied or the fact that you know two-thirds of the recent infrastructure projects are calculated to never recoup the costs that they they had to be expended to build them and the obvious implication of all this is is rising debt so China's debt has surged more than eightfold just over the last 10 years so you know any country that has accumulated debt this fast or lost productivity at anything close to China's current pace has gone on to suffer at least one decade of one lost decade of near zero economic growth and so maybe the Chinese can somehow beat those historical odds but what I'm trying to tell you is that history anyway does not bode well for China's future trajectory and you know all of this is happening at the same time that China is now starting to confront a more hostile external environment so negative views of China have risen to levels we haven't seen since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 the United States obviously is belatedly starting to contain China you know the most aggressive use of tariffs since World War II the tightest investment restrictions since the Cold War a military build-up and arms transfers to China's rivals and other nations to varying degrees are starting to follow suit so you know Beijing faces increasing the hostile governments in Asia at sort of every direction from India to Japan Australia Taiwan even in South Korea where people used to lean more towards China China's now more hated at least in terms of public opinion than Japan is which is as someone who's half Japanese that's remarkable given the brutal history between those countries and I think more concerning for China is that this anti-China sentiment is because starting to become more organized than it used to be so you know AUKUS the Quad the Indo-Pacific economic framework these sort of fledgling organizations that suggest like-minded countries are starting to talk the fact that even you know the Europeans have suspended their investment treaty with China label China systemic rival and are sending sort of token warships in the South China Sea that may not really matter from like a direct strategic point of view but it's sort of an ominous sign for the future and so I think this all just adds up to the fact that policymakers in Beijing have a lot on their plate and so that begs the question of like how are they going to react to this and you know but the the final point I make is just that I think it's time to start looking at China more as a risen power rather than a rising power so yes it's acquired formidable geopolitical capabilities but I think it's days of rapid growth and friendly relations and easy access abroad are pretty much over and while on the one hand I think that makes it a less competitive long-term rival to the United States than many people believe it could also make it a more explosive near-term threat because the CCP is going to be more desperate to find wealth new sources of wealth where it can it's going to be more prime to overreact to any perceived slight or setback I think we're already seeing that with this sort of wolf warrior diplomacy where Chinese diplomats give other diplomats the full North Korea style condemnation for any kind of slight and this this fits a historical pattern of when a rising power slows down they generally don't mellow out they usually crack down on dissent at home to secure their regime will start while expanding abroad to drum up new revenue streams to ward off or beat back foreign rivals and to try to accomplish long-standing national aims before windows of opportunities start to close so it's this rise followed by the specter of a fall that's really dangerous and in my research along with Hal Brands we've been looking at all the historical cases where this has happened and it's hard to find cases where a rising power just sort of quietly accepted the new normal of slower growth and rising in circle man the vast majority tried to batter their way essentially through these tough times you know just to give you a couple of cases I think the United States is actually ironically an example because you had a big boom in the economy after the civil war that then fizzles in the late 1870s going into the early 1880s a series of depressions violent and U.S. government reacts essentially by suppressing labor movements in high school in the United States you have to study you know the homestead strike and the polman strike and the latin massacre and at the same time the United States you know starts pumping investment and exports into latin america and east asia eventually annexing territory there and building a massive navy and more importantly a naval war college you know to start protecting some of these far-flung assets so when times got tough the united states really got going around the same time russia its economic boom fizzles and the czar responds by putting 70 percent of the country under martial law while also building out the trans-siberian railway and militarily occupying parts of korea and manchuria and basically keeps pushing until the russians get booted out by the japanese and the russian japanese war you know 1930s germany and japan after the great depression and economic turmoil we know how that turned out for the world but there's also you know more recent examples and obviously the crisis we see in europe today is very complicated and has many different sources but you know i think it's important to note that in the 2000s when the oil price was high and russia's economy was booming and putin's popularity was surging along with it putin was a much more cooperative international actor but after the 2008 financial crisis and you have the collapse of those energy prices and it takes the russian economy and putin's popularity down with it that's when russian policymakers start coming up with this idea of a eurasian economic union like we need a more coercive version of nafta to force former soviet states to be sort of economic satellites to rejuvenate our sagging domestic economy they start putting immense pressure on ukraine which sets up a showdown between you know the part of ukraine that wants to go with the eu and you know people that want to go with russia and sets this up for a conflict that we have today so i think all these and many other examples show that rising powers can become prickly and aggressive when their economies start to slow down and i think today china just checks a lot of the worrying boxes you have the slowing growth you have the strategic pushback you also have just a brutal authoritarian regime and a historical axe to grind and revanchist territorial ambitions and i think you know we're already seeing china engaging in the practices that would be expected from a country in its position sort of the sort of slide to neo totalitarianism this big military buildup and this massive drive for greater economic self-reliance so um you know i think just all this simply means that while the united states certainly needs this long-term strategy to manage its relationship with china we need to be thinking also very near term about a strategy about how to deal with a potential surge of chinese repression and aggression obviously taiwan is one of many focal points i imagine oryana will talk at length about that but there's other areas too where china is going to be i think rushing to lock down long-standing aims while it's still on the rise and before or to try to alter or restart its rise as it confronts these growing headwinds abroad so on that happy note i'll turn it over to the other speakers thank you very much thank you very much just when you think you understand china you don't dr master over to you please well these are some pretty tough acts to follow and i guess what i'm really hoping to do today in my talk is make the audience question everything they've just heard and often question what i'm about to tell you as well um what i worry about i'll give you sort of a brief anecdote about how i think you know we have all these myths about china and now we pat ourselves on the back because we're like well we thought liberalization was going to lead to democracy and now we know it doesn't like how stupid of us to think that way before oh we thought the u.s. military presence was going to deter chinese aggression but instead it just encouraged them to build a military that could counter our own how stupid we were before but there are just as many myths in my view about how we think about china today than there were 20 years ago and a lot of it has to do with not only mirror imaging but but relying too much on past examples and looking for um uh similarities from the past instead of really realizing how unique china's rise has been and if anything it's really the differences that we should be looking to for the sake of competition the differences between china and the united states and the differences between china and other powers now when i talk about the differences and i'll give you many examples today what is not different about china is that every rising power has been different so i don't mean to suggest that somehow china is doing something differently and all other rising powers have pursued similar trajectories instead countries that have successfully risen to great power status and here i really agree with you know michael like you know china's rise it's it's like at some point you know it became embarrassing that i was in these like young foreign policy professional groups i don't know what point michael fell the same way but it's like i'm not that young anymore right at what point do i sort of like transition um into you know not not being a part of the young members delegation but i think china has risen to this great power status and one of the things i see historically that really stands out is that every rising power has in some ways pursued power differently those that have been successful the united states did this as well right instead of pursuing colonies like bright britain the united states decided to set up international institutions the united states was extremely innovative with the building and exploitation and use of soft power in the international system the united states instead of occupying most other countries decided instead to have military bases from which you could prove you know project power rapidly at any given period of time uh i i think i don't know if it was mentioned but i'm calling from florence italy today um and one of the things that stands out even we were pushing the stroller down this the road and my husband was like i get the italians invented roads but they haven't improved on them since you know same same sort of thing i mean every great power did something different that's what we remember right we remember the persian empire that was able to incorporate a lot of different religions into the system for the first time we remember the romans for their infrastructure building we remember the colonial empires of the past we remember the united states for the us led world order and so right now what i'm doing is working on a book that tries to evaluate what has been entrepreneurial about china's rise because i also i think andy may is you know right on point sort of thinking about things from a business perspective to assume that a company entering a market to gain market share from another that has been a monopoly dominant that has more resources has more experience are they going to try to produce the exact same product in the exact same way not if they're going to be successful right the first they have to do things in an entrepreneurial way because to catch up you not only have to build power but you have to do it in some ways better right or you're always going to be behind secondly you have to exploit gaps you have to look forward competitive forces are the weakest and this is where i see china doing a lot you know we talk about us china competition but in a lot of areas the united states is not competing and i'll give a few examples of that in a second and then lastly you know i think what we largely assume is emulation we assume that china is going to build power like we do which makes us blind to the effectiveness of some things they're doing it's not just the united states behavioral economic shows that when people do things differently than you first it takes you longer to recognize it and secondly you tend to underestimate it i can't tell you how many times over the past 20 years people have been talking about how china's going to build an overseas basing network that is similar to that of the united states and you know constantly with this idea that well china cannot protect their economic interests without this right because if the united states could have figured out how to do it we would have already done it so there's this constant mirror imaging that makes it in my view what i'm worried about is we are as analysts like a taxi company looking at uber and saying well we own more cars true but is that now the measure of power so to give you a few a few examples of the types of things that that i'm looking at when i look at china's rise there are very few situations in which china actually emulates the united states i sort of call it selective strategic emulation the united states has laid out situations under which building and exercising power are appropriate and not only appropriate but you get like brownie points for being responsible china has seized all these sorts of opportunities right so peacekeeping operations having you know embassies and stuff abroad high level visits these are all seen as of ways of exercising power that are appropriate and legitimate for our country to do so when china does these types of things joining international institutions initially and participating in those institutions this actually reassured the united states part of my argument is that for the most part if you do what the great power does it really triggers threat perceptions sooner because you're threatening their equities right just imagine of 20 years ago you know china did form an alliance with mexico or russia a traditional military alliance and started putting you know bases close to united states immediately we would have recognized this as a threat but when they first announced belt and road people that might not remember this but everyone was like ah you know this is just going to be really expensive and was it going to get them anyway we don't recognize things that are different than than what we do so for the most part emulation is not a good idea because it really sparks those threat perceptions and indeed now that china has become more powerful and more aggressive in some ways like michael has pointed to they're acting in some ways more like us and that's how we recognize that they are a threat right when they say the south china see is ours and other countries can't come here you know that's like you know taking a page from playbook of the united states or you know this territory is ours and we're going to take it when it comes to taiwan i'm happy to talk a bit more you know about taiwan you know the united states has engaged in over 100 military intervention since world war two we are a pretty belligerent power in the international system you know and one of the things i would point out i think you know those military interventions might have worked for us and this also leads to the point of why you don't emulate is we have different competitive and comparative advantages when i look at chinese strategists and what they're saying a lot of times they're not they're not saying okay let's not you know oh we can't do this about you know we can't do what the united states has done a lot of times they're saying it doesn't make sense for china to do it that either china for example competing in arm sales china does not have as good arms as the united states to sell and there's a path you know trajectory in which a country starts buying arms from what it's very difficult for them to switch to another so in my research i not only look at how china builds power but also the reasons for and a lot of times the chinese look at how the united states does that and they say great for the us but that's not going to work for us for a number a number of reasons so they do emulate to us to a degree but for the most part what i look at my book is how they do things differently and the gaps that they exploit so a few examples of what i'm talking about when i'm thinking about entrepreneurial ways of building power and a lot of these you might dismiss because we actually don't know that much about them because one of the downsides of assuming china's going to do what we do is we count the stuff that we do right so we count the joint exercises that china does with other countries because we're like well that's a way of you know exercising and building power because that's what it is for us but you know the seventh fleet conducted more more joint exercises in the south china scene and the whole chinese military did from 2012 to 2019 this is not sort of a key way they're trying to build power and so while i can find data sets on joint exercises part of my book project is building new data sets of other things i think are important that i can't find a lot of data on so in that case instead of trying to be the external security partner of choice i see china very deliberately trying to be the internal security partner of choice they're training police forces all around the world coast guards all around the world just like our leaders when we do visits there's perhaps a component in which we are trying to facilitate a large arm sale package right sell a couple of fighters along with and the u.s government might you know give some some incentives to do that shijin ping does that for ai-enabled surveillance equipment and which he gives not only subsidies to these different companies you know but also when he has high level visits with leader he tries to hawk these types of wears so it's a very similar pattern to how the united states thinks about we provide you weapons we provide you training we will be your partner of choice when it comes to external security and that will give us some a privileged position and your policy decisions china is trying to do that but instead is the internal security partner of choice so right now i've been putting together this data set to show the types of you know which police forces they're training who they're hosting for various trainings on information control etc etc and it's actually not just a talk the majority of their clients for surveillance equipment for example are democracies largely because of public safety concerns but just from a competition point of view you know china hasn't fought a war since 1979 sure their military is strong but any country that can receive training from the united states would prefer to be trained by the united states but china does spend more on its internal security and they have for better or for worse honed a system that has worked for them and that you know other countries and now we're dealing in a world where it's you know no longer the majority of the world or are established democracies so a lot of countries are really interested in the chinese way another sort of entrepreneurial thing i see them do an informed policy is they do not have alliances but instead they've been using strategic partnerships and this is another area where the chinese writing is very clear like alliances never made sense because for their rise they needed to be close to the united states and us allies so trying to have a main organizational construct that basically eliminated your ability to be close to the most strategically important countries in the world just didn't make sense for china they wanted something that allowed them to be close to everyone and primarily economically and all these strategic partnerships they aren't just a different word for alliances there are no defense pack type of language in them if anything there are times not aggression uh packed language but there's always a line about taiwan and how whatever happens with taiwan is not going to get in the way of the economic relationship between these countries you know i am also you know perpetually hopeful that countries will start to prioritize more their security interests over economic but even you know i have a piece coming out in the washington quarterly about the steps i hope south korea makes when it comes to supporting us military operations in the region but even here we're talking about like maybe letting the united states use us assets in south korea under certain conditions same in japan you know we hear a lot of harsh statements coming out of japan but then when i talk to the japanese government i'm like but you guys aren't actually going to do anything if china attacks taiwan and they're like oh of course not of course we won't actually we won't actually do anything we're not going to like fight a major war with china over this but like you know we said some stuff right so from my perspective until countries actually start prioritizing the security over the economic we don't have a strong enough you sort of deterrent against china um with in the sense of a full body coalition but but that being said a large part of this is a lot of countries signed these strategic partnerships the european union you know signed one saying like okay we won't punish you basically economically if something happens over over taiwan so the strategic partnerships are one internal security you know partner of choice these are more foreign policy things and when it comes to gaps in foreign policy i mean i think foreign visits is a huge one when you look at the patterns of where the united states visits and where china visits uh and and someone can correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think u.s president has ever visited some of these central asian countries that china visits often you know shijin ping has visited like 38 african countries president obama who i think visited the most visited 11 for some reason i mean i guess we know why but like i when i look at the data i'm like how many times do our presidents have to go to the uk in germany like how many times like back and forth back and forth and meanwhile china is really trying to position itself as a leader of the developing world and i'm no expert on the developing world but one thing at least in my advising to the government that i'm constantly bringing up is i don't think we have a strategy towards the developing world and honestly i don't think we care i think the u.s position has always been as long as we have a handful of countries that like us like and support us that's enough you know japan australia uk germany great but that's not how that's the strategic environment has changed since our rise that's not how the world works anymore and china is getting like the rest of the world in their camp while we are ignoring them right i think president biden is trying to have the second uh african summit you know president obama had won president biden will have a second you know china has these every year and in which they are you know more successful at co-opting elites and yes we can talk to the fact that that they have become less popular in recent years but their popularity for example in africa is still quite high and you can often rival that of the u.s the areas where they try to emulate the united states i mean one thing i want to point out is i don't think we should be fearful of china trying to be like us if china wants to build bases all over the world i'm all for it because they're going to be bad because they are bad at it and that's where the costs come in in my book i look at examples of when they do try to emulate the united states when the conditions aren't really ripe and they feel every single time they spend five times more than we do on public diplomacy and their soft power is still horrendous i mean even the amount of money they spend on making movies and submitting movies for prizes in paris and things like that you know as a chinese linguist it really hurts me how bad their movies are i don't know how they can reverse engineer everything but they can't make a good movie to save their life and i'm always trying to watch them to like practice my chinese and i'm just like oh my god like why is this so hard guys but their soft power you know even under president trump in which according to soft power indices the u.s dropped from like number one to like number four china has always been at the bottom you know no one buys a huawei phone like if they can get an apple phone you buy a huawei phone because you don't have any other choice but it's not only in these sort of areas of foreign policy i also look very much at military strategy and this is another you know not only am i not sort of fearful of chinese overseas basis i mean the united states has this military presence we have a quarter of a million people overseas at any point in time china during this whole period of its rise in which i think we can say they have been somewhat successfully competing with us at least to the point that we have now decided we are in a great power competition with us they've only had 3200 people overseas at any given period of time their strategy at least for now is to rely on host nation forces to provide security coupled with strategic use of peacekeeping operations and peacekeeping forces free riding over off of other countries militaries meanwhile the united states is constantly fighting wars abroad and not to say that we should or shouldn't but one statistic that that really stands out to me is that the war in afghanistan cost 10 belt and road initiatives right we could have done belt and road 10 times but instead we fought that war in afghanistan so when people come to me and they say oh china has all these resources for the past 25 years and even today the chinese economy has been smaller than ours right they have been able to compete from this weaker resource position from a smaller economy in the 1990s in which less than 4% of their equipment was modern you know and and they had they didn't have diplomatic relations with a lot of major countries like south korea they weren't members of most international institutions and yet they were still able to compete with us from that position so even if you know mike is right and their power has peaked even if their economy is stagnant for the next 25 years they'll have more resources over the next 25 to compete with us than they've had in the past 25 and they've done a pretty good job today and elastic also bring up as an example is nuclear strategy as i know everyone's concerned about china building nuclear weapons again this is an area where i'm not very concerned like if the china so the china has had a completely different approach to nuclear weapons it's whole history and not even just the number of weapons that it's built right that have you know basically been in in the low 100s and yes they've ramped it up right so now they have you know estimates have have wavered around 320 nuclear weapons compared to the us 5800 right so in the 1990s we had 47 times more nuclear weapons than they did even by the worst case estimates which a lot of people say i mean the chinese don't even have the nuclear reactors to build a thousand nuclear weapons but let's just say they did build a thousand nuclear weapons their arsenal will still be 17 percent of that of the united states they've had this minimal deterrent no first use policy in the united states has never had a no first use or sole purpose policy when it's come to nuclear weapons 76 percent of their weapons are land-based and they're very late to add on a sea triumph right 2015 while the majority of us forces um are not land-based they don't have tactical nuclear weapons which is 30 percent of our budget is for a weapon that china sees as completely relevant to war fighting they have the strategic rocket force we abstract comm etc etc so what area where they do emulate is a non-proliferation agreements but when i look at those agreements the 17 that they're a part of they all are to constrain china from doing things that they weren't planning on doing anyway so they look at in some cases we see them as responsible but all they're doing is saying okay we can constrain the united states in some ways it costs us nothing let's do this so when i look at the china problem now i'm constantly trying to ask myself like what are our conceptions of power are they correct in the new strategic environment you know are we sort of this big company are we in ibm doubling down on the way we've always done things when that era is over should the united states be thinking about new pathways for new institutions new types of relationships i think we have a lot of assumptions about how we do business that if we look deeply are not based in good you know theory or empirics for example when a country is engaging in human rights abuses we cut we cut our relations with them or we reduce our presence or an engagement why don't we double the size of our embassies in those countries well that's not how we do things why don't we take positions on territorial disputes in the south china sea that's not how we do it why aren't eez is a part of our defense agreements because that's not how it's been done i would just sort of say that there's a lot of these ideas that come from our assumptions about how autocracies work that everyone in china like must hate shijin ping because he's an autocrat that you know our our strengths lie in our democracy and our alliance system and the chinese people are just waiting for a moment to overthrow their government and if we fought a war with china the whole world would agree that the united states was in the right china was in the wrong and they would all come in support of us for all these things i'm just not so sure i think it requires work i think it requires work that we're not putting in uh in order to compete so i'll conclude with one thing a uh an advisor of mine at princeton bob cohen who's you know a brilliant mind in my view one said to me in a meeting one paper i wrote i don't even remember what's about he said orianna you remind me a lot of yourself of myself and i was like okay this is going really well right and then he said in that you have so many bad ideas so i would just say that you know and i'm at you know air force obviously i'm here only you know speaking to my civilian capacity my views do not represent those of the department of defense united states air force or the u.s government but because i'm air force i'm always thinking of the udalup right and you always have to remember brainstorming is the first part and the one thing i don't see a lot of space for at least in the do d is for their brainstorming phase you know i come up with a lot of ideas and maybe most of them are bad but but people won't even consider doing things differently than the way that we've done them and there's a lot of risk aversion in our leadership for this as well um and so i'm kind of that pain and that pain whether i'm in uniform or not that's always like this doesn't why do we do this why do we do this i know how annoying it is because i have a two-year-old and three-year-old so it's like i get this all the time at home but that's what i want to leave you with is just i think we need to question if we're going to compete effectively we need to question how we've done everything how we do everything and think is this really the best way because if you told someone running a business you need a business plan and you cannot deviate from it for the next 25 years but i want you to be a top company they couldn't do it yet experimentation trying to take the first step revisiting and relooking pivoting is very hard in our system in our political environment so hopefully in this discussion we can we can talk a bit more about that moving forward and thank you for having me well thank you all a tremendous and fascinating discussion uh while all of you form your questions i'm going to ask a very quick question and please because we have two virtual speakers please identify the speaker or speakers that you'd like to address your question to uh so i'm going to ask primarily dr may um but also if our other guests have have comments uh ukraine the war in ukraine is that in your view and in terms of doing that assessments in the art of it um is that a significant event in terms of i'm thinking particularly about china and the sino russian comprehensive strategic partnership now without limits uh is that something that if you had you know prior to february a net assessment then the war in ukraine has happened that's something that you would factor in is is there a level of threshold or critical mass of a world event that you would factor in do you think it's significant thank you thank you i um my views on this oriana's caution should be extended to me too my my views on this are probably completely out of step with the administration um so i'm this is definitely just my own view uh well obviously it's very hard to say my own sense as an analyst i tend to be skeptical of an enduring friendship between or even functional alliance between the russians and the chinese um there are just lots of reasons to think that they're not destined to be effective working together over the long term um that said you know one of the challenges we have right now i think in thinking about the war in ukraine is 20 years from now what do we think the russia's role is going to be in the international system i i have a hard time imagining them as a permanent vassal to the chinese uh on the other hand i'm not sure that we want them to be a kind of north korea like pariah um but then it starts to get very uncomfortable because then you start thinking well how you know what are they going to be the things that try to move countries to reintegrate them and right now that's a very uncomfortable conversation because their behavior is so low so um so right now we're sort of you know one of the benefits of being in that assessment is that we can explore lots of possibilities and we don't have house school solutions we get to look at a variety of futures and one of my jobs to be able to hold two competing ideas in my head at the same time and so we're we're certainly looking at possibilities in which there is this alliance and it does endure and i'm wrong which like orianna happens to me all the time um and we're looking at the possibility where where that alliance does not endure the last thing i'll say is the the real lesson i think for us coming out of ukraine when we make our assessments there's a natural inclination to look at the things that are easy to look at and talk about for structure muzzle velocity uh people get uncomfortable making judgments about skill level training competence command and control um but we're confronted again and again with the reality that these are the things that really move the needle and one of the reasons that our assessments tend to be so judgment driven is we're looking for military experts to look at another military and say yes i see they've got all this stuff but i'm not sure they're really going to use it effectively and it or maybe we think they are and it's hard to make those um those judgments but it's just clear again as it's been exhibited in military case after military case that those intangibles those things that are very hard to identify and discuss turn out to be the things that that that matter as much or more than than for structure thank you for the question if i can just weigh in um so i agree with everything that was just said i will also say that this is in my research i've written extensively about how i think china is seriously considering using force against taiwan and about a year and a half ago when i wrote this article in foreign affairs everyone was sort of like well you know then why aren't they going to do it right now right if you're if you're so worried about it you know and i'm worried that it's going to happen many a few years from now but given how slow we move i was kind of you know wanting to get that sense of urgency going but the two things i pointed out a year and a half ago that the chinese were concerned about were logistics and command and control shijin ping in 2013 recognized these as the two main weaknesses of his military they restructured it to have you know a joint logistics uh force and to improve their command and control structure those sort of things have now been in place for a couple of months but but my assessment was that they wanted to do more exercises they wanted to hone it a bit more and this was before ukraine right so i don't think that chinese will look at what the russians did a lot of my colleagues are like well russia performed badly so china is going to perform badly and i'm like you know and if anything there's a lot of parallels between the united states and russia like the united states is russia this big military with like obsolete equipment like aircraft carriers right can i say that at the naval war college i don't know and then you know china is the the asymmetric right they're the ones with the javelins like also known as the df 21d so it's like we can do a lot of those comparisons but i would just say that you know the chinese took a look before that and they were like this is what we need to win and at least a lot of the stuff i've read coming out of china and it's always hard because like they also can be kind of cocky in their writing and not not in a way that's really informative of their own thinking because they also have insecurities but there's a lot of this writing about how they would have done this campaign better and i think they they look at the russians and and they've always thought now that they are better than russia and now they really think they're better than russia so i don't think it gives them i think they already were cautious about what to do about taiwan because they were concerned about these things so i don't think it impacts their thinking greatly and i'll just say about the alliance or the alignment for two years i've been writing this paper about china russia alignment i put you these data sets on everything that they've done and said together and a new framework to try to understand it because again like we look at our relationship with our junior alliance partners and we then try to see if russia and china are doing those things but great powers at least countries that see themselves as great power they don't ever let other countries have bases on their territory they don't put their forces under the command of another country this isn't about closeness it's just it's just about what they they want to do so i'll just say my bottom line of all this work which hopefully i'll submit from publication sometime soon is that so the china russia alignment is is very deep but the scope is extremely limited it's only to russia helping china challenge the united states in asia and even when i talk to my chinese colleagues about the statements made about you know there's you know no end to the cooperation and i'm like okay so are you guys going to be more involved in europe and they're like oh no there's no end to the corporation that like russia can give us in asia right so that's how that's how they primarily see it and i think russia can create a lot of problems like an alliance gray zone situation in which they serve as the strategic rear they support china in terms of equipment logistics and other things in a war that make it even harder for us to win over taiwan especially in a protracted conflict in which the russians don't have to fight with china or in support of china to create headaches for us so that's that's one area that i continue to look at great thank you very much questions from the audience please sir ma'am lieutenant colonel john kelp over us army um so i'm not sure who would like to handle the question but yesterday we spoke or we learned about the idea that china would be able to create somewhat of a sizable blockade around taiwan that would prevent us from doing the reinforcement that we've been successfully doing in ukraine so with that idea of of not being able to maybe help them as quickly or as effectively as we've done in ukraine what would be the advantages and disadvantages of a loss of taiwan to the chinese would like to say that mic and then sure uh so i wasn't privy to the discussion but i mean it's certainly just given taiwan's dependence on external fuel food etc it's totally plausible that china could do that now can china sustain a blockade under heavy fire from the united states any other allies that's an open question but the idea that we can just resupply taiwan in the same way that weapons have been funneled into ukraine is pretty clearly not um an easy option and so i think you know that in when we were looking at the lessons that need to be learned from the ukraine crisis i mean i'm obviously going to defer to andrew but it seems like a pretty clear one is that if you are going to have a real defense that you have to get things in position early that you don't have this option of waiting till the war breaks out and then eventually sending supplies and so the efforts that the administration is trying to make to accelerate arm sales to change the nature of those arms sales for more asymmetric defense in taiwan i mean i think that needs to be redoubled especially given some of the scary timelines we're looking at or possible conflict over taiwan yeah if i if i could just add to that you know to the difference of thinking so i'm about to go military orders out here for a nato thing next week and i've done some nato stuff and and all my pme with the military and i get on that annoying person that every time we learn something i'm like none of this applies to to war with china like you're not going to do any of this when it comes to fighting a war with china i remember we had some great briefers come explain to us like medevac type of things like how quickly they can get someone from afghanistan to a hospital in germany and and i sort of brought up a born asia and they were like well i mean we're not even going to come get people and i'm like well do your pilots know that i mean we have this this whole generation of military people who are used to thinking about war in a certain way and it's like we can't even get close like you're on your own like once you fly over there like you're on your own so so a lot of the way that we think about fighting wars is is is a lot harder when it when it comes to china and absolutely like resupply is like not going to be happening now your question then kind of turn to this harder question of like is taiwan even important uh and it's something you know as someone who's pretty quickly deployable for these things like i think about a lot and and i come down to sort of two main points which are not potentially like rigorous in terms of like academic thinking but the way i think about i mean the first is war is really easy to avoid if you give the other side everything they want and at some point you know for the united states china being able to control asia which is the primary goal of with of which taiwan is sort of the cornerstone of it asia is the most important region of the world like asia today is what europe was during the cold war and people say well maybe china would be nice like once they controlled our futures all i can say is like anytime china is at any power they have used it right and i don't mean i don't want to get extreme about this but i'm just thinking about like if china had the ability to determine who got 10 years of universities in the united states if china had the ability to freeze our accounts when they don't like what we say or what we do i mean they're gonna cut off all of our access to asia for trade for goods for you know our alliances anything like they're gonna use that power and so we are left with either the ability to deter china from regression in which china is going to be very unhappy or china will be undeterred but happy but we but we can't have it both ways and so from my perspective taiwan is just the first part it's less about taiwan for me and more about the fact that the united states has to be in a position to protect its security and protect its interests against chinese coercion and aggression and that to me is where the line starts good morning commander jim calling us coast guard this is primarily for dr beckley given the list of liabilities you described in the fact that even though companies and countries are attempting to decouple from china the global economy still immensely intertwined with theirs and how likely is it that they will accidentally or intentionally take the rest of the world or be willing to take the rest of the world down with them in an attempt to avoid stagnation or decline if you mean take the rest of the world down with them because of an economic crisis kind of the old adage that you know when the united states economy sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold it's not on the same level as what the united happened in the 2008 financial crisis where the us caught a very major cold and the rest of the world suffered horrifically simply because the chinese market is roughly three to four times smaller even though china's gdp is bigger a lot of chinese consumers don't spend as much so countries just aren't nearly as invested in the chinese market as they are in the american market china obviously is not floating a global currency um and china's new inroads are primarily as orianna said in the developing world trying to dole out loans there and build infrastructure so those countries might suddenly suffer a credit crunch because their main creditor has suddenly dried up and is no longer willing to dole out that kind of finance that could cause a whole raft of political instability in the developing world but if you actually look at trade and there's been really interesting studies done recently about the formation of economic blocks between the united states and its mostly rich western democratic allies and china's sort of motley crew of economic partners and there was actually surprisingly surprising amount of of trade going on within those blocks and less going across the blocks than you might assume and entire industries like um you know internet firms are already largely walled off in china so i think people actually tend to overestimate the potential global depression inducing effects of a seizure in the chinese economy although obviously there would be major effects other questions please in the back and then we'll come in front hi there steve white ron levy this is to dr becley initially but anyone obviously can uh can jump in um gideon rachman spoke about easternization um so with china at the center of a shift of the global balance of power over the past half century which continues today so even if china is a risen power as you suggest we're we anticipate other asian countries to continue to rise for example india who demographic will take over from china's the most populous country so how how could the us move from a period of great power competition to great power cooperation even if that may mean losing influence in certain regions such as western decolonization in the past so um if it depends on which country you're talking about so in some areas china is sort of doing the hard work for the united states by itself so simply by scaring a country like india which might otherwise gravitate towards china for economic reasons uh you kind of pushed india not into the us camp but certainly willing to engage much more with united states than they otherwise might be i think in a world where china is no longer the only sort of strong economy in in asia that the united states actually has tremendous amounts of flexibility in order to pick and choose partners on a bilateral basis there at the same time i don't i don't think there's really much risk of the united states losing other trade venues and the sort of easternization that rockman talks about i think is primarily about the decline of europe from its superpower status largely for demographic reasons and while i think there's a ton of truth there sometimes i think this is another area where the media representation is maybe overstating it at least in the short term because like the g7 alone controls more than half the world's wealth like real net wealth people tend to assume it's much more evenly distributed or rapidly shifting to asia that's only true if you're measuring wealth through something like gdp which is just a measure of activity if you look at the real assets and wealth it's still highly concentrated among very wealthy powers many of which are still located in europe and so even if their populations decline their share of global gdp declines it doesn't mean that they're unimportant actors or that the united states can't sustain major trading relationships with europe north america through the western hemisphere and then picking partners elsewhere um to to come along in this new trading network uh good morning captain bencip early i work in navy strategy and concepts in the pentagon uh first of all thank you very much for the incredible panel all of your perspectives have been fantastic this morning my question is really directed at dr may but i'd really appreciate uh dr beckley and and dr uh master's comments as well so the 2018 nds really talked about the importance of the gray zone the commission report uh the 2022 nds at least the what has been released on it so far has talked about the importance of campaigning uh we know that this is a tactic that our adversaries use our adversaries use and for some reason while we discuss its importance we never actually make uh either policy decisions or strategy or concepts that relate to how are we actually going to compete in the gray zone and so i just like from a net assessment perspective do you see this is an important factor to include uh and if so what are some recommendations on how we can do this better uh well thank you for the question i uh i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna dodge it uh by saying first of all you know and one of the important things for us is that we not um as an office we're more sort of where you are which is we identify this as an emerging trend and suggest that maybe this is a a trended warfare and identify certain kinds of capabilities we're likely to need in contingencies we ought to be preparing for um and then we would want the secretary to work out what to do about it with the with the people who are going to do the the implementation right i mean uh i i find generally it doesn't osd has a lot of people in it who think they can come in as civilians and tell the services what to do and while i'm a big believer in civilian control um that very rarely works out right i mean what you really want is for the the secretary and the services to to come up with a solution together that they really both believe in uh and so i'm very cherry of of as a career civilian sitting in osd and telling telling the services how to solve this problem uh but i certainly agree with you that it's a a a trend in how militaries have been behaving and it's a little bit to what oriano was saying earlier it's a it's a classic uh case of kind of a major aspect of our core business is changing and we're reluctant to acknowledge it the tools and the measures that we have invested in for the last several decades and which we are proficient aren't especially useful in these cases um and so i think the tendency has been generally to um write them off as one-offs rather than as a potential trend in the character of conflict um and i think i'm going to stop stop kind of dancing here and and see if either of the other panelists have anything more um uh pointed or concrete that they'd like to say thank you i could add a few thoughts i have a lot of ideas about brazen well i'll try to keep it brief i mean the first thing is we got to close the gaps right that china is exploiting we like to like protect like we'll be like oh there's all this norms and consensus and china's breaking them like taiwan agrees with china's position on the south chinese city not helpful taiwan india agrees with china's position on the ability to regulate military activities in the eases not helpful india right there's there is actually no strong consensus as much as we want to believe there is about our views of freedom of navigation what military should be able to you know do in all of these waters there is a contingent of countries that are more in line with chinese thinking and so we have to do the work to really build up that norm and there's a lot of ways we can make this harder for china i mean i think we should be doing a lot of summit diplomacy with southeast asian countries and get them not to agree you know which islands or whose islands but make explicit statements of maritime rights that are associated with those islands i've already mentioned the idea of maybe including easy is as part of our of our defense packs with other countries freedom of country is to you know exploit their own eases and the last thing i'll say about closing the gaps is we're always like what are chinese intentions did they do it on purpose did they not do it on purpose it doesn't matter we should stop spending our time trying to figure out what chinese intentions are and start telling china what we're gonna think based on certain behavior so one of my favorite books which is somewhat unread because he wrote so many other brilliant ones is the logic of images by robert juris and when she talks about sort of coupling signals and and if if you know as a just a personal relationship right if your wife says to you if you don't get me flowers i feel like you don't love me there's nothing you can do to uncouple that signal right you can give all the rationales in the world but once the signal is coupled the meaning goes with that action we should be doing this with the chinese all the time we should you know it doesn't matter if something like the state directed this or not directed this or if this was rogue or not rogue we will say like we will take any major military exercise in the south china see as a sign of preparations for the invasion of taiwan for example this is just a random example so the chinese this isn't a red line because we don't tell them how we're going to respond but we tell them how we view the situation which they cannot change because the signal is coupled but that they know what a proportionate response would be right we we are saying we think you're preparing for the attack of taiwan then they see our response in a certain different light and so in general i think we can complicate their use of the gray zone so it's not quite as effective as it's been but we've just been like bumbling around being like but let's talk about it and like like tell us how you feel about it and why you're doing this and like can we have a discussion when that's not really you know china is doing this stuff on purpose and so we need to lay out you know how we feel about it what we're going to think about it how you know and and the chinese can then make their own decisions internally about whether or not they want to change their behavior or a very good point suggested one thing to me which is i think one of the challenges we have in this respect and one of the big asymmetries between our system of government or our way of thinking in the chinese is that our government is overwhelmingly constituted by people who have come out of law school and they tend to one they were attracted to law school for particular reasons but certainly by that training they tend to think a lot about norms and rules and red lines and proportionate responses and they they think in a legal sort of framework well i mean that is just not where the chinese leadership comes from nor the russian leadership and so their whole view of rules and norms and how these things should be established and what order should look like i mean they're just going to be completely different just for that reason forget the cultural reasons right which are themselves profound and one of the things i one of the habits i believe our senior leaders often fall into is thinking that the rest of the world comes out of a similar type of intellectual training that in fact is almost unique to to western countries and then i'd just like to apologize i i know we started a bit late but i have to run into the building for a for a meeting so i'm going to sign off but i as you can tell i like talking about net assessment and net assessment topics and if there are people who'd like to follow up with me separately please please go ahead and do so get in touch and i'll be sure to follow up with you and thank you again to the to the college and and and all of you for for hosting me thank you well thank you very much and and i think we'll end it there because we are at risk of going beyond and we i know we have a hard stop at at noontime so please join me with hearty and great round of applause for our speakers good afternoon to all of our current strategy forum attendees it is now my honor to introduce the 38th commandant of the united states marine corps general david berger uh good afternoon and uh first thanks admiral shutfield for allowing me to speak with this group and some of you all probably have heard i i have a tremendous amount of respect for admiral shutfield and i've worked alongside her before you could not ask for a better not just person to run the college but really just flat out leadership so i'm i'm her biggest fan i would just tell you up front um thanks also to all the distinguished faculty and guests who are part of this forum and i am uh aware that the cno spoke already and that's now you get a now you get a great pairing of both of us for me this morning i got to i had a privilege of speaking to the graduating class at marine corps university in quantico and then this afternoon i get to spend time with you all so it's really just a phenomenal special day for me personally so with that uh first class of 22 uh early congratulations and uh i can what i consider graduating from an elite institution and people use that phrase i think too much but it's accurate in your in the case of naval war college i know very very aware that you've been involved in some pretty hefty discussions and thought about net assessment and great power competition i'm not sure that i rate the really the distinction of being the last speaker with the expertise that you've been exposed to so far but uh i i will hope to make a case for how net assessment is helping shape our force going forward and afterwards really want to hear your thoughts either here on the net or by email as a follow-up because really that's probably the most important aspect of today so let me get right to it um i'm going to start first by stating an obvious point that i'm pretty sure everybody there will agree with which is the age in which the u.s military enjoyed really assured cross-domain or all-domain dominance over our enemies is over at least for a while in fact and i would argue in some areas and domains we are losing more fighting advantages at a pace that sometime in the near future may leave us with parody at best and uh as you all are aware uh we engaged in a couple decades of conflict in the middle east and afghanistan and rightfully so uh but our competitors were watching and learning and i would say uh you could make the argument that the prc has been observing and adapting back as early as the 1990s which means some total there are 30 years into a really a systemic adaptation so focused on the task at hand in oif and oef we used all the proven tools and methods as a marine corps and a joint force that were required to succeed in a protracted campaign ashore but in doing so i would offer to you we lost sight of what was in front of us what was to come i think we should acknowledge that a number of very talented individuals primarily in the navy many of whom were affiliated with naval war college started thinking about the future and in the process developed as what we came to know as air sea battle and while that may have been ahead of its time and overshadowed by the demands of the current many of the foundational thinkers behind air sea battle i believe were right but they were in the minority everyone else was very hyper focused on the present most everyone except for our potential adversaries who were preparing so what were they prepared for well they were preparing for us and they specifically designed their strategies their militaries even their industries to counter us supremacy and military advantages and to do so effectively they utilized net assessment and they did it i think pretty well today in the case of china most estimates agree that we may meet today we maintain warfighting advantages in space uh undersea and seabed warfare and long range penetrating airborne surveillance and strike and those are substantial advantages to be sure and some may argue that we may still have an advantage in offensive cyber and nuclear second strike but even these advantages are eroding and we may reach parity with our potential adversaries much sooner than we thought that said i would offer to you parity is not necessarily a disadvantage and marshal many of you know have read or have met him this is what he said in 1966 merely adding up all us forces and comparing them actual or potential present or future does not really tell one very much well if that's the case then so why net assessment well for starters a leading pla military official in 2012 described andy marshal as one of the most important figures in changing chinese defense thing thinking in the 90s and the 2000s so i figure if they listen to him we probably ought to also and of course mr baker jim baker who you had the pleasure of listening to earlier but the reality is the chinese probably have done a little better job of listening and learning than we have they are completing i would argue one of the most ambitious and impressive military overhauls in history and on the surface it appears to have been the product of conscious thought projected over an extended time span kind of sounds like net assessment net assessment encourages us to take that extended view and warrants against short-term decisions subject to the budgetary and political pressures of the day as americans we tend to think through one of two lenses the new cycle or maybe the rotation of political administrations and i admit even after three years of being a common on in this job it's very difficult to look beyond the next meeting the next budget cycle or the next crisis but we must if we want to compete effectively with our pacing threat another aspect of chinese modernization that merits our attention is a clear definition of the competition they are in the problem in other words they are trying to solve and that problem was us as admiral aquilino stated in his confirmation hearing last year china's goals are to supplant u.s security leadership in the region overall and generate a change in the international rules to the benefit of the prc now that might not be an easy problem for them to solve but it certainly is a clearly defined problem and they have a clearly defined remedy systems destruction warfare which is based on their net assessment sense strategic forecasting anyone who is interacted with a practitioner of net assessment recognizes in them a universal trait the ability to discover and properly frame the critical question at stake problem framing as an example for the plan the right question is not how to prevent us submarines and surface combatants from operating in the near sea or contested spaces the right question for them is how to take advantage of systemic vulnerabilities like the need we have to reload the ls or to refuel i think that is the question they're probably asking themselves what's the overlook but important common denominator for those questions you probably picked up on logistics but more on that in a minute a few years ago general meller my predecessor made a simple but powerful assessment of the state of the marine corps he said the marine corps is not organized trained equipped or postured to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving future operating environment i could not agree more and while not the product of a formal net assessment it was an accurate identification of the central problem for the u.s. marine corps knowing what he knew about the changing character of war and where we stood as a force general meller properly framed the issue and for the record general meller was a lifelong student of idf operations and of successful military adaptation but asking the right question by asking that in the right way our 37th common not before me forced us to look at ourselves and ask if we do nothing what's the result was i'm sure most of you are aware over the past three years the marine corps has undertaken a modernization effort in answer to that question and that effort involved change changes necessary to align with the national defense strategy and defense planning guidance and like most change many of the decisions were really hard to make they were about things you could probably guess where should we invest limited resources to either gain or maintain a relative advantage what is the relevance of certain capabilities and platforms what are the models for organization and employment of the force within the context of service and joint war fighting concepts those decisions were based on many of the tools employed in that assessment including scenario thinking war games we used modeling and simulation we use trend analysis and those tools produced estimates on which we began to act so for us embarking on a campaign of learning that reveals new insights every day every week that refines our estimates and betters our understanding of the problem and i will not pretend today that we've gotten everything right we have not but i do know that we haven't gotten logistics right but we're not alone in that regardless estimates are often wrong and decisions of this magnitude deserve scrutiny but for an estimate to be wrong it has to exist first and then be tested and that process of iterative learning that's important given the complexity of today's operating environment in some ways the bureaucracy was like intentionally created and structured here in the department of defense in the pentagon to prevent rapid change unfortunately the pace of change exceeds the pace of our bureaucracy but this is why we had to get started and why we will press forward we cannot afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good through time-consumptive research and analysis the world is simply changing too fast i echo andy marshals thought that when he said i'd rather have a decent answer to the right question than great answers to irrelevant questions that's what happens if we do nothing we become irrelevant earlier i pointed out the obvious that we no longer have a decisive advantage in most domains against the pacing threat and this is a problem we should become comfortable with because the reality is the pace of innovation is creating a paradigm we have not seen before like all of you i'm watching and learning from the conflict in Ukraine and other recent conflicts and i'm seeing signs that point to the shifts on the battlefield by the way if you haven't read um seven seconds to die this is about the recent conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh i would command you to add that to your reading list simple inexpensive systems are growing the relative power of small distributed forces against traditional large formations and i know many others have recognized this for a long time within the marine corps there were many who watched the 2006 second Lebanon war they reached the same conclusion including retired marine dr tx hams who's written about this for years former signs of great power strength like aircraft carriers and tanks and exquisite aircraft aviation platforms even joint forcible entry capabilities are now increasingly vulnerable in an age of abundant sensors unmanned systems and long range precision missiles those are these are strategic asymmetries and in the model of net assessment we need to embrace asymmetries and exploit them i think to our advantage we may not be in an unrivaled military power anymore but beyond pure rivalry we can institute changes that highlight the differences between us and any adversary when it comes to our people our organizations our technology and our network of course of allies and partners and this will require more hard decisions and more change we're going to need to decide what capabilities to invest in to maximize asymmetric advantage things like algorithmic warfare and space denial counter space denial capabilities this may require accepting parity in other areas like defensive cyber and mobile ground launch precision fires or conceivably even hypersonics though these still require enormous effort and investment i think it also might require us to thin out or divest of redundant capabilities fourth generation aviation attack helicopters sustainment heavy ground vehicles at a minimum we're going to need to reimagine their use on the future battlefield and the Marine Corps has done both to this point but our priority is providing the joint force with a competitive advantage our primary bid to do that is to act as a stand-in force providing the naval or the joint force commander extended reach really sort of as the leading edge of a maritime defense in depth or or an expeditionary network of sense and strike options that creates disruption for an adversary as we sit here today this afternoon more than 30 000 board deployed and forward station Marines are doing just that and that's not a new role for the Marine Corps but it is certainly reimagined on today's battlefield I think never before really have we encountered the undersea portion of the maritime domain but net assessment tells us we ought to take notice in order to maximize our advantage there whether our aircraft delivers sonobuys or emerging uuv capability grants us sensing to build the maritime picture we owe it to the joint force to do that and it's no secret that I think amphibs are a short or a source of competitive war fighting advantage can note the PLAN expansion in amphibious capability but if the threat precludes their delivery of marines and ground equipment what's to say they can't carry and deliver uuvs and AUVs that sort of thicken and expand our undersea advantage another thought what if marines on amphibs provided a mobile advanced base to reload vls this creates advantage through logistics in an utterly sort of unimagined reimagined way space space has never before been a regular topic at our schools and training venues in the marine corps but we may need to host capabilities from forward positions or provide terrestrial calm communication solutions for the force to operate on should we become denied or degraded and we assume that we will and we're going to continue to provide lethal options of course to the joint force commander but that may occur by facilitating the kill chain gaining and maintaining custody of targets providing terminal guidance to munitions launched hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles away i think that is maneuver warfare it's just a modern application of it and if we can do these things instead of attacking the enemy directly we're attacking the very assessments that shape their strategy and we don't know yet everything the stand-in force can provide but by merit of their existence inside the weapon engagement zone and that might be as a marine littoral regiment or marine expeditionary unit or traditional formation i do know all of that will create opportunities for the naval component for the joint force and and our partners and allies to gain advantage and that's what we offer as a core and it's absolutely asymmetric to anything our adversaries have to offer we intend to keep it that way and we owe it to you and anyone else who fights alongside us i think to do so but perhaps i've demonstrated you'll be the judge of it my belief in net assessment i'm a believer i don't claim to be an expert but as a force your marine core is trying to incorporate and be better at it if not i'll close with this and then see what's on your mind in 2013 six former secretaries of defense wrote a letter to the president in opposition to a proposal to shutter the office of net assessment because that's what was on the table at the time they were going to close it and in it they said that andrew marshall's office had quote repeatedly paid enormous dividends during some of the most challenging periods in our recent history we're now entering another such period one in which the contributions of the office of net assessment will be needed every bit as much as they have in the past friends i don't i don't think we're entering that time we're here and i urge each of you to see the value of net assessment and to serve as practitioners for the challenges that we face again admiral shatfield i'm deeply humbled for the opportunity to join you all today and i look forward to your questions or your feedback and i'll turn it back over to you ma'am general my name is sam tengreddy uh i've got three quick questions for you all interrelated maybe you have three quick answers they're all related to your new direction of the marine core the first is stand-in force what if the philippines don't let you in the second is concerning naval strike missile and other weapons are getting what makes you think the plan is going to come within range to conduct their operations and finally what force is going to take the future uh pla and uh bases and the solomons and jibouti and other places thanks sam can you just the third part i just want to make sure i get it right what was the third part of this uh what what forces uh are gonna take the future chinese bases and the solomon islands and jibouti and uh others on a global basis got it a three four all right um to take back the you're talking about the pla and prc bases in the indopacific region and around the world if i heard you right okay let me tackle them uh and you let me know if i don't scratch the itch here what if the republic of the philippines or any other sovereign nation doesn't let the u.s uh use their territory that's the beauty of being an amphibious expeditionary force and our partnership with the navy that an expeditionary base for us could be a board ship sometimes the best expeditionary advanced base is not terra firma it's an amphibious ship so we will go where nations allow us to go uh if the philippines denies us that capability we'll operate from the sea um i think uh our take on it is you know politically the the winds change as in our country administration to administration we will need to be uh operationally and strategically able to flex with that but if at a certain given time there are restrictions on what the government of the philippines the republic of the philippines where other nations have will certainly abide by that but we are we are by nature a seago and force so sometimes the best platforms aren't aren't assured second what if the pln doesn't come in our range well we're not that's not going to be a problem because we're going to stay inside their range persistently they're going to be in in the range of our collection systems we're going to be in the range of theirs mutually we're not going to back away outside of their range this is actually the sweet spot the comfortable spot for the Marine Corps sort of i don't know a great analogy whether it's boxing or martial arts but the in close where both of you are in range of each other's collection systems sensors and weapon systems this is where the historically this is where the strength of the Marine Corps operation so we're not going to allow them to back up and we're not going to back up we're going to operate persistently persistently within each other's weapons and sensors ranges third what what forces are going to take back bases that the pr prc may have taken if we need to if the us or the joint force or an international force needs to take them back it'll be marines we will and and do today retain the the joint force of entry capability as a power projection force but it's going to be in a different way than uh you know some folks envision mentally about a you know two brigade coming across two colored beaches sort of approaches it's not going to be that but with the tools we have now we don't need to do nor want to do it in the same way it's not going to be a bunch of Amtrak's plowing across a beach we're going to we're going to if we need to take back some some real estate then we have by air by sea and and in all domains we have the means to do that we have better tools than we had 20 years ago 30 years ago so it'll be the marines with the Navy to that teamwork of the Navy and the Marine Corps together that takes those bases back if we're directed to and just let me know if i if sam if i didn't cover all the bases there thank you very much sir afternoon sir major robert bendy united states marine corps my question is what do you see as the most critical domain excuse me what do you see as the most critical domain and the operational warfighting function be it logistics needed for successful operations against china and the end of pacific theater thank you you well that's a fantastic question um just make sure i'm narrowing the question down to make sure i grasp it what do i think is the most critical domain within the logistics warfighting function or as it relates to the uh work logistics warfighting function but don't let me put words in your mouth here no sir kind of a two part what do you see as the most critical domain and then additionally what the most critical work operational warfighting function is it logistic system yeah second part is easy that i think the most critical warfighting function is logistics going forward um although i would tell you i'm an i am in a minority there even among my peers i think they would tell you command and control or perhaps fires i would proffer that it's it's neither of those at the at the highest level in other words against a peer adversary anything less than that i think certainly it's another probably warfighting function but at a peer-to-peer level it's going to be logistics the one who the one who can properly account for that in their war planning uh is is going to have a clear clear advantage and all the other all the other functions uh aren't going to work if you in other words if you fail to do that so i think like logistics is the driver going forward again in a peer-to-peer kind of uh competition or campaigning what's the most critical domain boy that's a fantastic question i suppose it depends on what the adversary is that you're dealing with do you have a particular adversary in mind are you talking about writ large what do i think is the most critical domain no sir for the for china in the endo pacific theater yeah for china in the endo pacific what's the most critical domain wow that's a great question you could make an argument probably at least three domains come to mind that you could make a strong argument for any of them i'll give you one that probably most people are not going to talk about it and it might be if not decisive um relative to the other ones what's the most critical domain it could be information um and i'm very conscious not to draw too many lessons too quick out of an ongoing conflict but more and more and more even outside of the ukraine conflict i'm watching the impact of information that domain on everything that uh two parties in conflict have in other words you can win the kinetic part and lose the information part and lose it overall um i don't see how you can win if you're losing the information space so i i think you could make an argument for several domains and probably all of them would be really compelling arguments but in terms of learning for me the information domain can might be critical uh the most critical in your words what's the most critical domain it could be that you if you gain an advantage there early on sort of like you know that uh book uh i can't think of his name there and the author the navy captain although show is going to tell me in a second here about shooting first he who shoots first um she she knows the author but i can't pull it out of my brain right now these but anyway i think in the information space it's sort of like the kinetic space only more powerful you get in front of that early shooting first in other words with information gives you a clearer relative advantage the visa v the prc but i think you could make an argument out of several domains i'm just giving you mine and so i'm gonna at before i hang up today you have to tell me who the captain something navy captain retired you just passed away last year a year before wane hueser yeah sam thank you god i would stay up all night thank you show sir thank you very much for your time my name's barrett won i'm a former uh war college professor now with leidos uh pulling the string on your discussion today about future technologies and reimagining uh roles i just wanted to know what your thoughts were regarding the use of autonomous vehicles vessels in support roles i e like supply and if any other potential usage uh for autonomy um yes i would say uh here we got to get past some emotional uh or not emotional we got to get past some biases here frankly um in in through through several lenses but assume we can vault pass over the biases that we carry around with us and go towards autonomy um first area logistics logistics logistics logistics logistics there's for all the reasons i mentioned earlier i think it is it is a determining function perhaps going forward and the more we can um allow systems to take the load off of manned systems and manned decision makings we're going to be in a better place logistically and that way the mental capacity and physical capacity we do have to apply to logistics that is necessarily manned is much less and we'll be able to do much more this is the asymmetric part i was trying to highlight if we both go at it symmetrically in logistics and apply an autonomy on the top of that i think we're we're back at parity again we don't have an advantage the value of autonomy in other words to me in areas like logistics is the anticipated anticipatory forecasted sort of mode where things are put in place are moving into place just ahead of the maneuver unit just ahead of the user and they're doing it without anybody any human being making conscious decisions they're anticipating that and by in doing that they're that generates tempo that generates relative velocity relative speed compared to your adversary so autonomy there absolutely yes the tough part is i think we're looking some people look at autonomy in the basket of a weapon system oh my god we're going to take the human out of the loop and machines are going to you know be on the kinetic end of things and i park park that off to the side and say there's probably like 17 other areas where comfortably we can apply autonomy now fast and gain a relative advantage over it really anyone else on the globe we can't be hamstrung here by human in the loop bias you know ethical concerns and i don't want to go any faster than we can solve that wicked problem we need to move much quicker than that so everything from logistics to intelligence collection which we're already applying now some autonomy too but there's so much capacity here for speed for operational and tactical tempo we're looking at mq-9s now that are autonomous takeoff and landing well why would we not want to do that so that you could use them in a way in other words in a large region that really maximizes their legs their ranges but they can land on some other field where you don't have any people already preset in place to land them do why would you not want to do that autonomously so i think from logistics to collection systems in a lot of areas we'll we'll work our way past the kinetic lethal part but that should not slow us down in advance in the value of autonomy and it's not as a replacement for in my mind it says an augment for so that whatever mental capacity you have left your carbonate a portion of it and something's taken care of that already afternoon general major courage United States Marine Corps curious sir your name's been dropped by a bunch of the other service chiefs in terms of how to enact change you've talked a bit about speed and the ability to change internally i think at least in recent history in terms of cutting things internally to pay for things today as a model going forward we just read a story this morning about the house armed services committee forced the navy to keep its commitment to amphibious ships just curious on your take where you're sitting at now with making some of the bold changes that you have with force design is that the way you change an organization looking at it with where you're sitting at now and having some some time from your initial white letter to the marine corps major curse i don't know if it's the wave of the future my understanding of force design as it's defined in in joint terminology us joint terminology was force development was the near term like one to two years sort of annual or or at most biannual sort of look at where we are make adjustments move ahead which i was very familiar with coming from command at quantico that was my job as force development for a couple of years so i was i knew i understood force development the joint definition of force design sort of analogous to uh to um non-military organizations whenever your organization reaches the point where those incremental gradual evolutionary sort of changes will not keep up with either technology or an adversary then you take a step back and whether you're a google or the u.s marine corps you look at where you need to be in the future and look at your organization fundamentally and see if you're going to be what you need to do to get to be suited for that so i don't know that it's a way for the future it's force design in other words it's not something that you do every year you do it episodically periodically when either in in our case the operating environment the adversary technology was moving at such a pace where my sense was that annual sort of force development machinery was not going to keep pace and we would at some point five six seven eight years into the future be at a relative disadvantage compared to the prc which is our pacing threat and we can't afford to to let that happen um hard to do of course right and the methodology we used is not perhaps normal we envisioned where we would need to be 10 years into the future with a lot of assumptions and then map it back to the force we have today and the concepts we have today as opposed to mapping forward if you're here and i need to get to there this is the steps to get us there we did it in reverse that's where we need to be so sort of like plan from the objective back which you know major curse kind of how we're how we're wired to think that's what we did yeah you gotta the the the decisions you have to make along the way are not certainly not easy ones and not actually once we could make a loan the navy had to be part of the discussion the secretary of defense because we're part of the joint force part of the discussion congress part of the discussion we had to convince in other words my challenge was convincing four different committees in congress these are the fundamental changes the marine corps going to need to make over the next four or five years i need your support so on multiple levels a lot of work by a lot of really brilliant people and a lot of briefs and explanations and q and a's i don't know that it's the wave of the future but certainly i would say our force development process is going to have to turn at a higher rpm then than it had to 10 years ago when the operating environment and technology we're not advancing at that pace they are today they put it in a different i've got a piece of paper here the show is going to love this like holding something up here and this is way oversimplified but that's the way the u.s. thinks it's like a linear line right we like x amount of change per year we can adjust to it we can adapt we're very very comfortable with that so is congress so is everybody else that ain't the world we're more like we're more like moore's law right like things are happening so fast uh on a curve you either adapt to that or you're left behind well i think force design is working for the marine corps we're learning rapidly not everything is working but we have such brilliant field grade officers and staff and seos that they're as fast as they're experimenting is plugging back into the to the brain of the marine corps and saying we tried that it didn't work well try something try try a different way good afternoon general tenant commander r&d is navy supper shifting back conversation to logistics in our asymmetric advantage why not pivot away from laws to a more numerous attritable maybe even autonomous asset something similar to like a narco sub that's discussed in project agrippa this would give us some effort to solve the logistics hurdles that exist was if i think that there's we absolutely have to pursue that i don't know on the light amphibious worship the law i don't know if that's a long-term answer or not but i do know that sailing big lha's and lpds around inside the weapons engagement zone is going to come at a pretty high high risk so we need something that can move smaller units hundred seventy five hundred one hundred fifty marines around um they have to be affordable they have to be low signature um enough so that we can actually do distributed operations i think the the systems you're talking about either surface or subsurface absolutely yes all i know is what our requirement is what we need to be able to do which is tactically reposition forces dynamically inside of threats um targeting cycle collection and targeting cycle we have to be able to do that whether that's i know 50 laws or 35 laws or five laws and five autonomous vessels actually i'm agnostic to we just need the means so if you have a suggestion well boy i would love uh love to talk with you and um if especially if it's a not a platform but it's a capability that you're familiar with i'd love to get your uh your email address and just get exchange back and forth got that for action sir yeah he's got homework now right just what he wanted on the last week yeah comment on that is the last question we have time for to keep you on your schedule i know that everyone in this community uh and all of our attendees today are grateful to you for making time for us we know it's been a very busy day for you but your insights have really enriched our experience here and what a fantastic gift you've given to our future graduates who will walk the stage on friday as they prepare 75 of them here will prepare to return to their operational units and i know that they will have echoes in their heads of the things that you've said today the importance of framing questions and getting those questions right before applying so much time and effort to developing solutions first so sir i don't know if you have any final words but i know that this room is and those who are attending online are grateful uh admiral i have three pages now of questions and a bad little drawing so as usual i think i'm drawing away more from the from the audience than i'm offering i'm very grateful again admiral for just the chance today to spend time with you thank you thank you a warm round of applause please well this concludes our conference today i hope that you feel that the selection of this topic for our current strategy forum was both appropriate and useful as we close out this academic year and as you position yourselves to move forward in your careers taking on more and more responsibility and working to incorporate new concepts that you will be exposed to every day for the rest of your career i want to again thank professor mike surelock our really fantastic audio visual public affairs and events teams and all who are so productive in organizing this event and mike do you have anything to say on behalf of your team okay well okay in that case um have a nice afternoon i know that there are some events tomorrow um but i'll expect to see most of you under the tent on friday thank you