 Welcome to the Naval War College. I'm Toshio Shihara, the John A. Van Buren Chair of Asia Pacific Studies. Today it is my pleasure to welcome Admiral Dennis Blair to speak to us about a whole range of strategic issues confronting Asia and the world. It's a great pleasure to welcome you today. The home of thought at the Naval War College. Let me first of all ask you a general question. Related to your experience here, we're always very excited to have someone of your stature to be associated with or to have a connection with the Naval War College. You served as a fellow of the Strategic Studies Group, which reports directly to the Chief of Naval Operations. I just wanted to ask what you remember about your time here and about your work here as a fellow of the Strategic Studies Group. Well, the Strategic Studies Group was a wonderful opportunity for someone who's had about 20 years of service in the Navy to be able to try to make sense of what you've done for the last 20 years and try to think out into the future. I have to admit that we weren't very prescient in our project for my year. This was 1986, 1987, and we were talking about new concepts of operation against the Soviet Union. Well, it turned out, well, we were thinking about that. The Soviet Union was falling apart. And a few years later, there wasn't much left to talk about on that line. But the process of trying to think deeply about your profession to work with officers of the same experience, but very different backgrounds in the Navy and the Marine Corps was just priceless and something that stood me in very good stead for the rest of my time in the Navy. I wanted to ask you about this book that you recently published. It's an edited volume with the Brookings Institution entitled Military Engagement, Influencing Armed Forces Worldwide to Support Democratic Transitions. It's a book that looks at the role of armed forces in helping the democratic transitions of a variety of nations around the world. You assembled a really impressive lineup, a really a who's who on this topic to write a variety of case studies for this volume. What I'd like to first of all ask you is, can you tell us a little bit about why this project, why you decided to pursue this topic? It was mostly based on my experience as a naval officer and commander, mostly in the Pacific, particularly my last job as the commander in chief of the Pacific Command. And I found that we were dealing with many countries that were in transition from dictatorial authoritarian governments to a more democratic form of governments. And the role of the armed forces turned out to be crucial in many of those countries in Indonesia, for example, where the government system and dictatorship had been tightly integrated with the armed forces to support them in the Philippines, where President Marcos had basically declared military law and used the armed forces to support his grip on power. There were other experiences in the Pacific in which transitions had been made quite peacefully in South Korea, in Taiwan, for example, places in which the armed forces had been very strong supporting a one-party state had made a transition as those countries increased. So it was clear that the armed forces in many countries played a big role in their form of governments. We were dealing with these countries all the time, yet I found that as a senior military officer and commander, I hadn't thought much about these issues of civil military relations. If you grew up in the armed forces of an established democracy, it's like breathing. You don't think about it, you just do it. Do you understand this business of how countries set up systems to control their armed forces, to defend them, and yet keep those armed forces with their enormous power from being a threat to the citizenry? So I thought that American and the armed forces of other democratic, established democratic countries needed to understand more about this process, to understand more about what was going on in the countries that they dealt with, and they could then play a positive role in influencing their counterparts to if not initiate democratic change, at least stay out of the way or support it once somebody else started it. I think you can make a very strong argument that armed forces in democratic countries are far better off than they are in dictatorial countries, which is sort of counterintuitive. We sort of think that the dictators and armies go together like a hand in a glove. That turns out not to be the case. There's a lot of internal tension. But more than that, I think you'll find that the military forces and democracies are generally better paid, better respected, have a, can concentrate on their profession as opposed to many of the other unsavory aspects of governing in a dictatorship. And most of all, they will never have to turn their weapons against their own people, whereas the implicit bargain between a dictatorship and an army that supports it is that one day, the dictator will say, well, you have to go out and put the people down. And no military officer wants to do that, however corrupt, however entrenched in the system. So I thought that the armed forces of democratic countries ought to understand a lot more of that so that they could deal with their counterparts in a much more productive way to help them ease their countries towards a democratic form of government. I see. You have a very interesting section in your first volume that talks about the elevator speech, which sort of lists a series of things that you can convey to your military counterparts. Can you say a few words about that speech and sort of what's the key message and takeaway that you would like to convey to different militaries around the world? I think the main part of it is to, number one, in a few sentences, make them realize that their countries, their services, Army, Navy, Air Force, they personally would be better off in a democratic form of governance rather than in a dictatorship. And then sort of list the reasons why that's so. And try to get across the idea that the loyalty of a military officer in any country should be to the nation, not to some particular party, individual family, who would try, whoever happens to have their hands on the reins of power at the moment. And so the idea is that they're in that elevator speech to sort of encapsulate those ideas and why that's so in just a few words. Now, many times you're knocking on an open door when you talk to an officer in that situation, but you're not trained as somebody who grows up in a pretty stable civil military democratic environment to take that initiative, make that effort. You don't realize that those officers probably really want to talk about it. They are thinking about it a lot more than you are. So the elevator speech was to try to equip mid-grade senior military officers and defense officials with the fundamentals for even a chance encounter with the counterpart who appeared to be interested in thinking about these issues. Now you mentioned throughout the book, you sort of describe the book as a handbook. And so that seems to suggest that this is really a practical resource for both practitioners and scholars. So how do you envision its practical application in the hands of practitioners and scholars? You hit it right. I called it a handbook not a book because I wanted it to be something useful and I filled it with checklists and boxes and things that I hope I would find it marked up on people's desks and something that is actually in use because I think it is a very practical sort of a business that we're in. We're not writing papers to each other. It has to do with human contact and how you operate in that sense. Dead Side Manor accounts. You don't walk into another proud officer and shake your finger and say, you need to be like the United States. There are many forms that democracy has taken since the United States established its own over 200 years ago. And some of the heroes of democracy in recent years have names that are difficult for us to pronounce. They're Havel and Mandela and people in different countries who express these fundamental ideas that people ought to control their government rather than the other way around. So the idea there is to get this wider context across. Let me now transition to the topic of the so-called rebalance or pivot to Asia. You served as the combatant commander of Pacific Command which oversees US forces operating in the Western Pacific. There is little debate today about the strategic importance of this very vibrant region. Indeed, one of the signature foreign policy initiatives of the Obama administration is the so-called rebalance to Asia. Yet, over the last year or so, there's been a lot of debate, discussion and even some level of confusion about the so-called pivot or the rebalance here and abroad. So what does it mean? How would you characterize the rebalance to Asia? I'm sort of conflicted about that particular initiative, frankly, because my feeling is we never really left Asia. We never really took our eyes off the ball, at least those of us who were involved in the region. The fundamental economic and military importance of the region was long recognized by those of us who were working in it. If you look at the strategy documents dating back into the 90s at least, the importance of Asia, growing importance of Asia was clearly recognized. And the US armed forces in particular were not unmindful of that. We were watching the developments in military power in the region, particularly the growth of the People's Liberation Army. We were making adjustments in our own military posture. Much of it was qualitative, not quantitative. But many of the most advanced platforms of both the Navy and the Air Force, and it's an air maritime theater primarily, were in the Pacific, not elsewhere. So we were watching. In fact, my experience, it was interesting, during that time, was that although we had many of the preponderance of some of the greatest, most powerful Air Force and Navy platforms in the Pacific, we were sending them through to the Persian Gulf for Operation Northern Watch, Operation Southern Watch. And that pattern certainly seems to be the case today, doesn't it? Despite the rhetorical emphasis on the Asia Pacific region, its events in Syria, the confrontation with Iran, and so on that take attention and that have military planners having to do their part. So this tension between the economic importance of East Asia and the volatility of the Middle East has been with American policy for quite some time. And I think it's best to manage that and your explicit policy is we can do both. The United States is a superpower, can handle both of these. So to say that we're pivoting from one to the other I think sets up a bad story in the one that you have pivoted away from and it probably causes an over-reaction in the one you say you're pivoting to. And in fact, if you look under the hood, there's been quite a bit of consistency in that power. And I would rather have emphasized the consistency. I think in these matters, it's better to do things and not talk about them rather than to talk about them and then be asked, well, what have you done? And so I'm not sure that it was done in quite the right manner, but I think underlying it is a steady strain of American attention to East Asia, which I think is appropriate and I think has been done fairly consistently and fairly well over the years. Related to this, what is your assessment of China's rise in the past two decades and how do you think should be the United States' role in coping with managing or just anticipating China's rise? It's interesting, about five years ago, I did a co-chair at a study on what should US policy be towards China for the Council on Foreign Relations and we had a line at the beginning of that study that said anything that you assert about China is true and you can find plenty of evidence to support it. And as a China scholar, you know that you can find some statistics, some articles, some book, which supports the most bloody interpretation of China. They're bent on world domination. They're growing in order to be the neighbors. On the other hand, you can find evidence that says, oh, China has never employed force outside its borders. They're simply growing for defensive purposes. They will be a benevolent middle. So you can find that there. And I think all of the strains are there within China. I'm not one who believes that China is carrying out some thousand-year plan. I differ strongly from Henry Kissinger on this score, for instance, when he sort of ascribes this master planning long-range view to the China. I think Chinese leadership has been, this is since Mao, who certainly did have a strong ideological content, but from Deng Xiaoping on, I believe it has a very practical component to what it does. It looks at what its requirements are. It tries to figure out a way forward within the scope of what it deems possible. It tries it for a while. If it works, it does more of it. If it doesn't, it tries to change it. So I think that, but fundamentally will determine the future of China is how well it is able to handle the enormous economic and social adjustment problems, which are the preoccupation of its leaders. Good for China for pulling 300 million people out of poverty over the last 20 years. It's wonderful. Greatest anti-poverty program the world has ever known, but there are more people who are below the officially designated poverty line in China now than there were in 1979 when Deng Xiaoping started his reforms. And so they have a huge problem still to solve most of which is centered at home. They want to do that in a way that preserves stability and that keeps in check the social tensions that always come from economic development. So I think that the future of China will be determined by these questions. Now the external component is related. China has made a decision for many years that in order to develop internally with a lot of assistance from the rest of the world, investment, exports and so on, they needed a peaceful international environment, a fundamentally quiet place. It would not help their development if they were causing conflict or confrontation with their neighbors and the rest of the world. So despite various, some individual issues, they by and large maintain that policy. On the other hand, they've been quite successful in the last 20 years. They've overtaken Japan as the second largest economy in the world. They've been putting money into their armed forces over the last 15, 20 years or so at a 10% clip from a very low base. So they have pretty impressive forces now. And so now they're thinking, now wait a minute, we're pretty powerful. There should be a little more deference to China's wish is not that we want to start a war but we want our side of these various disputes around the world to be taken into more of a count by others. We want to have a say in making this system which has been largely an American dominated system. So it's time for us to get a little of the things going our way here. So that's what I think we're seeing in this grinding on many different issues in China. There are disputes, maritime disputes with neighbors and in other areas. Now the danger of course is that there's a thin line between sort of patriotic pride and xenophobic nationalism which then causes, can cause your country to do things that are ultimately against its fundamental interest just because of the, here's the moment. So that's I think the danger in this road that China is taking. For the United States, I think we simply, number one, we should stay heavily engaged with the Chinese at a broad range of activities from the economic, official government, military and cultural. I think we should be patient and persistent and asserting that there are international norms of behavior that countries simply have to follow whether they're big, powerful countries or whether they are very small countries with not a whole lot of military or economic power. Those rules can be somewhat adjusted but I don't think we can simply say that because you're powerful, therefore, you will get territorial concessions, you will get economic concessions, you will get other concessions. And I think that China will realize that it is in its interest to follow these international norms, maybe to alter them somewhat. There's no doubt that the United States is, gets a break on some issues because of its power, China will too. But it's within the bounds of generally accepted norms of behavior. And so I think the United States should simply pursue a patient support of world norms. And we have to keep our alliances strong, we have to keep our armed forces strong out in that part of the world so that there's not a temptation to use military force, use power politics to try to, for China to try to assert its prerogatives. You mentioned the word allies and I think that's an important issue here. Many of our friends and allies have exhibited anxiety about China's rise and its recent behavior. What do you think should be our message to our friends and allies in the region and what should be our working relation? What's the nature of our working relationship with our friends and allies in Asia in that context? I think it's pretty well established, but we simply have to, it's under more stress than it was before. So the fundamentals of agreeing on a lot of the basics of the international trade system, the way the disputes are settled in peaceful ways, the underlying ability to defend territory and rights by military force if necessary by keeping your armed forces strong enough to do that are the foundation for that sort of relationship. And then I think that we do need to transition the relationship with some of our allies from a big American brother and little Asian ally simply providing base access and following the American lead in policy matters to more of an equal basis in which we actually talk about and share responsibility for some of these common objectives through more intense dialogue with them, bring in the Koreas and Japan and Australia's into the beginning part of discussions of international issues, not simply waiting till a crisis happens and then the United States making an internal decision and then going and selling it to allies and then deciding if they want to go along or not. I mean, I think if you, I tell my friends in Japan and Australia and other places that I would like our, not the fundamental nature of our alliance system, but the day-to-day workings of our alliance system to be more like it is in NATO in which it is more of an alliance among equals, even of different size and less of a US-centered alliance. I think in Asia because of the bilateral history of it because of the history of the Japanese alliance in particular it's more of an unequal alliance and so I think we need to sort of raise the other leg there and that, of course, having more of a say and it implies also putting more skin in the game in terms of military force, economic support and so on. So there would be a higher price the allies would have to pay in terms of more of the burden of their own defense but it would be a more equal partnership alliance with the United States and I think it would be good for both sides. Let me now transition to the topic of intelligence. You were the director of national intelligence under the Obama administration and these days, of course, the issue of intelligence hits the headlines virtually every day. Not a day goes by without some sort of a news about either our intelligence community in general or even some of our intelligence operations. So there's really been a lot of noise out there. Can you help us cut through that noise and get to sort of the bottom line and some of the key takeaways about what are the basic fundamental challenges that the intelligence community faces today? I think the Snowden revelations have really centered on two important topics. One is intelligence agencies collecting intelligence against Americans and the second one is intelligence agencies collecting information on allies, people that we work with. On the former, I think I know the facts of the matter are that intelligence agencies simply do not gather intelligence on Americans without the permission of a court. It is, in fact, a secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but it is a process of the intelligence community having to bring information that they have an articulable suspicion is the term that a foreign phone number is calling, making calls to the United States and the foreign phone number is associated with a terrorist group, extremist group, and it's the job of the intelligence agencies to find out which Americans are talking to that agency and sorting out the ones who are part of a plot from the ones who are not. And I think that's a very legitimate intelligence function that should be done. In fact, I would think most Americans would expect that that'd be done, especially against the background of 9-11 where this al-Qaeda group organized overseas came and lived in the United States, called back and forth to overseas, and we sort of learned that we have to be more careful. So that process does go on. I think where we fell short in the leadership of the intelligence community was not explaining in general, not specific terms, what was going on and making the American people understand what was actually being done to protect them and the limits that existed on it and the procedures that were in place in order to make sure that the law was being followed. Then I think had there been revelations like there were, it would have been against the background of understanding what the overall system was and there would have been less of this surprise and shock because it was done under a law that was passed back in 2007. There were lively debates within the Senate Intelligence Committee, within the House Intelligence Committee about just what this program should be. Votes were taken, it was passed and that's the, we follow. So I think Americans should be reassured that intelligence agencies are not misusing the enormous power that they have to listen to communications. It's in fact done under tight controls and for the right purposes. So that's one piece of it. The other piece, spying on allies, I think again, now that it is public, we should be more open about it. But the fact is that friends and allies do keep an eye on each other with intelligence means. Why? Because even a good ally will often surprise an ally and leaders would like to have a little warning of those surprises so that they can either try to talk the ally out of it or take preliminary measures and that's why leaders look to intelligence agencies to keep an eye on other countries. I can give you a recent example. The P5 organization was negotiating with Iran about a nuclear, Iran's nuclear program. This was the first round of negotiations and on about two days before the agreement was to be concluded, the French foreign minister said publicly that he couldn't go along with the agreement. It was a bad deal and France was pulling out. Well, I think that the leaders of the other countries who were involved would have liked to have had eight hours, 12 hours, 24, 40 hours notice of that going on to try to work with the French some more on it, to have their own press releases ready and they would naturally have turned to their intelligence services to keep other friends gonna come up with some surprise. So allies do surprise us. We try to find out. So yes, we do keep an eye on countries but two points I think ought to be made also. Number one, if you look at countries like France, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, the amount of intelligence work we do with them against common enemies is about 90% of the effort. The amount that we do against them is five or 10%. It's a very small amount. Number two, I think that relationships with allies should be judged by actions, not by whether or not one is collecting intelligence against the other. And the action of US relationships with Mexico's, with France, with Germany, with Brazil has been very much common interests and doing things together on each other's favors. Whether or not we knew a little bit more, a little bit less based on intelligence, I think is irrelevant to the foundations of the relationship which ought to be based on actions. So I would hope that would put this in perspective. And this is not one of the things that is or should be talked about publicly when there have been, usually, when two countries that get along well are, if one of them finds that the other is spying on it, it's taken care of privately so as not to affect the overall relationship. Sometimes it doesn't. And the big example that everybody knows about was when Jonathan Pollard, an intelligence analyst, was found to be spying for Israel for many years and passing huge amounts of very classified material out. And he was caught by US counterintelligence services, put in jail, where he's just to this day. The Israeli government has tried on numerous occasions to have Pollard freed from jail and sent back to Israel. The United States has refused and it's a sore point in the relationship but the relationship goes on. That's kind of what happens in an extreme case. But between allies, so it's best handled quietly. It shouldn't affect the overall relationship and I think we'll go back to some sort of semblance of that perhaps with some rhetorical changes in it in future. So I think those were the two big issues that have come out of them recently and both of them, I think, things were done generally right and will be done roughly the same in the future. Now thinking in terms of the role of intelligence and longer term US strategy, do you think that the US intelligence community is up to the task in tackling a whole host of emerging uncertainties or existing uncertainties, including the rise of China, the rise of India, turmoil in the Middle East, uncertainty about Russian intentions in the future? To what extent is the intelligence community well equipped to cope with these sort of longer term strategic challenges? The major changes I think need to be made which I tried to implement as director of national intelligence and had some success was getting away from the industrial model of intelligence to the more modern adaptive form of intelligence. When we faced a single enemy, the Soviet Union, we set up a very siloed formal system in which requirements would be sent down to the collection side, the people who gather intelligence. They would go out, whether it be spying by the CIA or signals intelligence by the NSA or geospatial intelligence from the national geospatial agency, collect information, write a report, send it back up. The report would be distributed to analysts. They would get all the reports together, pull it together, write an answer to a question that they were given, what is the latest Soviet bomber going to do, what will happen in the 17th Presidium of the party? And it was a very sort of, as I said, rigid model with the complexity and the changing number of concerns that we face these days. We need a much tighter matrix model in which we put together in teams both the analysts and the collection managers of who are interested in a particular, or have expertise in a particular issue. And they work together in a tight group in which the intelligence flows freely among the different analysts in which collectors are tasked directly and not through some big long system and in which these task forces are given the very specific questions to answer. And we do that well in some areas. For instance, the legislation that established the Director of National Intelligence, the IRTPAs, it's called legislation of 2000, 2005, established centers for North Korea and for Iran, two of the adversarial countries that we know we're having to deal with. And they've been very effective in pulling together that synergistic combination of collectors and analysts and outside experts. We need to spread that more widely within the system. We're not quite there yet. So I think if we can complete the transition to this matrix mission-based task force type intelligence, we can handle this complexity of threats that we have because we're not gonna be able to out-guess the future world and say, oh yes, we need exactly 80 Azerbaijani linguists and we need exactly 40 experts on the southern provinces of Afghanistan. It's going to develop in many ways. We need the flexibility to be able to bring together the right people, including many people from outside the intelligence community who have expertise in order to answer the questions. And we're fundamentally in intelligence business here in the business of answering questions. And if you're good, you're in the business event anticipating, providing heads up to policy makers that something is going to develop here that will affect American interests and you ought to be paying attention to it. So I think that if the processes that were started by this set of reforms after 9-11, the establishment of the DNI has continued, then I think we will be up to it. I've got to tell you that the signs are mixed right now. This is sort of an inside game, not a lot of people understand it. And I think we've been treading water here for a while, but we need to get back on track. Let me now transition to the last segment of the interview, which is to talk a little bit about sea power, in particular, American sea power. As you might know, there are a lot of pundits out there these days opining about America's apparent sea blindness, this notion that the United States public, but also the American government seem to have lost sight of the strategic importance of sea power in underwriting American strategy and American grand strategy. At the very least, many of them are concerned about the apparent strategy resource mismatch. In other words, we have a whole host of global commitments and yet we're faced with these much more constrained resource environment. What is your assessment of these criticisms about America's sea blindness or the potential for an emerging strategy resource mismatch? I think people are right to be concerned, but I don't think that we're short of capability yet or in the near-term future. Although there's an element of pure sea power thinking that ought to underline our strategic considerations and we're still organized in services with armies, navies, and air forces and all, I found that it's more profitable to think regionally than it is to think functionally in terms of the power. And I think that the primary standard by which you should judge the adequacy of maritime forces really lies in East Asia as we discussed and the standard by which you would judge the U.S. Navy should be that if it came down to a raw test of military power could the United States keep access to its allies and the use of the seas against Chinese attempts to interdict them? And as long as that answer is yes, then I think you have enough sea power. I think if you have enough for that contingency, the other trouble spot, the Middle East, can be covered adequately because although there is a Persian Gulf Strait of Hormuz element in which oil has to move and other products have to move, it's a relatively thin copy of a potential PLAN threat and all the rest of the PLAN threat in Asia. So we can handle one, we can pretty well handle the other. So I would judge the Navy's adequacy in the East Asian context and I would say that that is somewhat independent of what happens in Taiwan. I would very much hope that Taiwan and China could come to some sort of an agreement that would satisfy the sovereignty issues between them. I don't think that would change the chores of the U.S. Navy in that part of the world. So I think that can provide a pretty good basis for it. And I think most people understand that as although as we discussed earlier in this interview chances are, I think that the United States and China will be able to find these stages big enough for the both of them. That's only based on China making a decision that military power would not be useful to bring into play that they would ultimately come out worse off if they were to either threaten use of power much less, actually use it. So I think that that's the way I think about sea power. And I think that takes you away from platform discussions into system discussions and into geographic and alliance discussions, which are pretty important. Now I think part of the reason that some of these analysts and strategists worry about this apparent sea blindness is this concern that the role of sea power has sort of slipped out of the American public consciousness or that the American Congress seems to have forgotten how important sea power is. What would be sort of your message to the American public in terms of describing and characterizing the importance of sea power for the future of U.S. security and for the future of the U.S. position on the world stage? I think that you don't have to go back to my hand to try to convince the, I mean, rest his soul, here we are in Newport and all good for him. But I think that you can make the fundamental argument that in order to keep Asia a place where the United States and China can compete peacefully and can share the use of the maritime air and space and cyberspace is the United States simply has to maintain the edge that it has had in the ever since World War II to be able to enforce a peaceful region to make the use of military power by other countries unattractive and have them turn to more peaceful means of competition to express their interests. And in a region like that connected by water with countries accessible by water, with trade routes by water, the Navy has got to play a foundational role. I think I very much agree with the general American sentiment that I guess Secretary Gates, departing Secretary Gates expressed most eloquently when he said any Secretary of Defense who recommends to the President the undertake another land war in Asia ought to have his head examined. But I think any Secretary of Defense who does not recommend to his President that the United States remain strong at sea and in the air in that region of the world also ought to have his head examined. And I think most groups that I talked to have informed Americans pretty well understand that. Admiral, thank you very much for taking the time to sit here with us for this interview. And thank you very much for sharing your insights about the future of the United States on the world stage. I enjoyed it. Thanks very much.