 Yeah good morning and welcome to this year's current strategy forum. I have a couple admin remarks before we get started and I was just told so I'm going to knock this out in the first place our air conditioner just came down so it might get a little warm they're working on it and hopefully we can get that fixed so we are aware of the problem and it is being worked on. So I'd like you to check your electronic devices and make sure that we have those in silent mode. Unlike in your seminars and the lectures that you've been in today's is on the record and we will be recording the event. Everyone should have picked up your programs you know within the program. We have the agenda for today and tomorrow and we also have the biographies for our guest. I'd like to point out two things on the program today. We have one break it's at ten o'clock and we need to be back in our seats by 10 15 for the CNO so I know that's quick but we'll get it taken care of. For the Q&A I know most of you know this most of the students know this but if you're selected for a question make sure you stand up identify yourself use the microphone that's in the seat in front of you and press and hold that button until you're finished speaking so we don't have to work on that during the time. I'd also give a shout out to those that are joining us online. We have probably a couple hundred that are joining us and I hope you enjoy the event as well. Let's see what that I forget. Okay and then finally to get us started I'd like to introduce you to the 57th president of our US Naval War College who are Admiral Shashana Chadfield. Good morning. Oh this is fantastic. Welcome to the 2022 Current Strategy Forum. Down here in the front row I would like to welcome our CNO International Distinguished Fellows. Thank you Admiral for being here and for your constant support of our program. Our chairman from the Naval War College Foundation Phil Bilden is here with some members of the Naval War College Foundation added to our attendees this morning. Thank you for being here. Our interim provost Jay Hickey thank you for being here and our many faculty members staff members and all of our delightful soon-to-be graduates of the Naval War College our students this year. Thank you for your attendance today. Last year we were still obliged to conduct the Current Strategy Forum remotely and there's just a little something special having this hybrid venue and having so many attendees in the room. You look awesome out there and I know this is going to be a very fruitful discussion. We also have quite a number of guest speakers so although you've had a full year to challenge all of your previously held ideas to formulate new frameworks and new ways of analyzing problems we hope that today our guest speakers will further spark a debate within your intellectual understanding of this material and I would like to always encourage you when you are the most sure about the thing you know to listen the most closely to disconfirming evidence. So I'd like to welcome Mary Serrati, Andrew Kropenevich, Admiral Mike Gilday who is going to be here remotely and tomorrow we have a great program with Lieutenant General Charles Hooper and Paul Kennedy and also remotely our chairman of the United States Marine Corps RCMC will dial in to us. Panelists today are Erin Friedberg, Emily Goldman, Toshiyoshi Harahara, Andrew May, Michael Beckley and Orianna Schuyler-Mastra. So just a word of thanks to the Naval War College Foundation. Many of the events that all of our students and faculty and staff attended throughout the year have been made richer through generous donations by the Naval War College Foundation. We are grateful. Our experience here has been enhanced and there have been a number of programs that we would not have been able to provide without those donations and just one round of applause please for this screen which was also a gift from the Naval War College Foundation. Awesome. And then I also want to give a shout out to our events, audio visual and public affairs and graphics teams who worked together to prepare for this event. There's a lot of moving parts. I hope that you don't notice them, but I hope that you notice the effort that has gone into organizing this event. And of course for Professor Mike Sherlock who gave the announcements this morning has been working on this for just about a year. I want to say thank you, Professor Sherlock. This is going to be a great day. So welcome to the 71st Current Strategy Forum. I'm honored and excited to kick this off from the podium in a room full of people. It's an important discussion that we're going to have about the strategy of the United States. For the past 71 years Current Strategy Forum has allowed our nation's public servants, scholars and senior military officers to join our college faculty and students in a discussion that encourages a wide range debate on national and international security. This year's theme is net assessment, great power competition. This topic is more relevant than ever. As in the last three months, we have witnessed the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as continued and heightened tensions with China. This year we will explore historical examples of the practical value of net assessment and how we can apply those lessons to current challenges with Russia and China, particularly in their desire to replace the current liberal international rules-based order that they believe advantages the United States and allies and disadvantages them. With both of these threats, maritime power will be essential to any strategy to counter aggression. As our nation faces new challenges, our students will shoulder greater responsibilities as the world around us changes. The United States and our allies continue to be confronted by threats from Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. Meanwhile, violent extremist non-state actors continue to threaten our security. Our alumni will be called on to lead organizations to discover opportunities and to solve problems to overcome those challenges. Here at the Naval War College, we are engaged in very important work of informing today's decision makers and educating tomorrow's leaders. We are preparing our students to overcome the challenges that they will face. The Joint Chiefs of Staff in a directive on talent management and officer education informed us that we can no longer rely on numerical superiority, no longer rely on technical superiority, that we're going to have to work harder to outthink our adversaries. And so here at the Naval War College, we hope that we have been successful in expanding the intellectual capacity of all of our students, our joint civilian and international military students to achieve a cognitive advantage in that space. Our objective, whether it's here within our historical buildings or whether it's at our sites globally, is to deliver excellence in education, research and outreach and to build enduring relationships with our alumni and our partners. We know that after a year here, you are prepared to think critically and to creatively apply military power to achieve the desired ends. My challenge to you today is to stay in the room. And I mean mentally because I know it's the end of the year here and I know that there's a lot of things competing for your attention. Maybe you're organizing your move, maybe you're thinking about the drive or the flight, maybe you're thinking about the next duty station. But I ask you to stay in the room and with all that you have known from your experience and all that you have learned here this year to think about the new concepts that are being presented so that you can, when you leave, integrate these concepts and innovate when you are thinking about the solutions that you'll employ. Thank you all for joining us for this current strategy forum. It's an honor to introduce to you our next speaker, Dr. Andy Krepitovich. Dr. Krepitovich is a West Point graduate. He's the recipient of their Distinguished Graduate Award. He had a distinguished career in the Army serving 21 years as an Air Defense officer and while on active duty, he graduated from the Naval War College and then attained his PhD from Harvard. He served on the personal staff of three Secretaries of Defense and served in the Office of Net Assessment for Andy Marshall. After his service, he served as the president of one of the EC's most prominent think tanks, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments for 23 years. He is now president of his own consulting firm, Solarium LLC. He serves on numerous boards and commissions including the chairman for the CNO Executive Panel. Dr. Krepitovich has published numerous books and articles including Army and Vietnam 7 Deadly Scenarios, The Last Warrior, and we're looking forward to his next award like no other. So please join in welcoming Dr. Andy Krepitovich. He said go Navy to me as he walked by. First of all, delighted to be here. Second, congratulations to all you graduates. As Michael said, having been here myself, I know it's not the easiest year intellectually, but it certainly is. So one of the most challenging and from my perspective, one of the most rewarding. And speaking of great power competition, I graduated so long ago that the Cold War was still going on. And the Army sent a small group of us. And I like to think it was some of the best and the brightest at the time. And in a sense it was. One of our, one of my colleagues that year who graduated less than three years later was the military assistant to the vice president of the United States. Another went back to head one of the academic departments at West Point and was such an acknowledged expert in his field that he actually taught an elective here as a student during our time. And then there was another guy who ended up being vice chief of staff of the Army. And of course, finally there was me eight years after graduating, I retired as a lieutenant colonel. So some of us got it and some of us didn't. Want to start with a quote from an Army guy that kind of echoes Admiral Chatfield's observation. We need reinforcements and you people are it. This is from President Eisenhower, who also had a military career, I understand, before becoming president. When you think about strategy and you think about operational planning, he ran war plans for General Marshall just before World War One began. The hardest kind of work from the finest available staff officers. That's what we need. That's what this military needs right now. Real hard work, sustained intellectual effort from some of our best officers and commanders. Not only staff officers but commanders. And that's what hopefully you're going to give us in the coming years because as I go through my presentation, I think you'll see why. So when I think of the War College, I think if you're talking about the arsenal of democracy, it's not just weapons. It's the intellectual arsenal that we bring to these problems. And again, it starts here to a great extent when you're talking about senior command, senior staff. In fact, this is going to be a very disappointing presentation. So let me set the standard right up front. I'm not going to give you the source code for net assessment. The source code, it's an open source sort of strategic planning methodology. So if you're planning on taking notes on that, good luck. And second, I'm going to give you more homework as you leave. I'm sure you're anxious for more homework. But as you can see, the person, Andrew Marshall, who led the Office of Net Assessment for over 40 years, he just talked about problems. Problems, problems, problems. So many problems I can touch on only a few of them. There's so many problems I'm going to try and share with you some of the problems I see, some of the problems that frustrate and vex me. And the hope that as you go forward into senior positions of command and staff, that you'll keep these problems in mind. Marshall is also, in a way, he was seconded by a fellow named Albert Einstein. Einstein said, if somebody, if there was a catastrophe and somebody had a problem I needed to solve, to save the world. For the first 55 minutes, I would work to define the problem and spend the last five minutes solving it. Marshall used to say, basically, how do we think about the problem? What are the key problems? It's sort of diagnosis. If you're a doctor, you want to get the right diagnosis. The prescription becomes a lot easier if you can come up with a correct diagnosis. So what are the problems that we have to focus on? And again, that's going to be the subject of a lot of what I have to say today. Dr. Sarat talked a lot about preparing for Europe. That's absolutely a problem. There's also, as I'm going to speak about primarily, the problem or the issue of China. Strategy is about making choices. It's about setting priorities. And she made her pitch for Europe. I'm going to make my pitch for Asia. In that assessment, and again, you have George Kennan here and George Marshall at the beginning of the last great power competition, the beginning of the Cold War. Here we are back again at the beginning, the early days of a new great power competition. Only this time we have two great powers, not one that we have to worry about. In that assessment, you'd say, well, how do we choose between the two? And a lot of times you use metrics, or you try to identify what are the factors that would determine which way you would go, which priority you would set. So I came up with four. Which revisionist power Russia or China has the greatest military potential in the near term or the long term? Because this is an open-ended competition. This is not some campaign that's going to be over in three months or six months. Which theater of operations do we lack strategic depth? Where is this problem the most severe? Where, if we got pushed out, would it be hard for us to get back in? Would it be the Balkans or would it be the first island change, for example? What theater of operations are great power frontline allies at risk? If you look at Asia, I would argue that Japan is a frontline ally. I don't want to be cruel. I don't want to be mean. But Japan carries a lot more weight than any ally we might temporarily lose in the forward states in Eastern Europe. And then finally, which theater of operations are US allies less capable of mounting an independent defense if the United States were not to put the bulk of its weight into that particular theater? And I come up with, it's almost like a slot machine. You come up with the cherries. I come up with the flag of China in every instance. Certainly, I think they have the greatest potential in the near term and long term. We talk about trying to get back into the first island chain. Japan, the Ryukyu islands, Taiwan, the Philippines, if we were to lose those islands, how to get back in relative to losing part of Eastern Europe and then having Central and Western Europe to base the counteroffensive. Great power frontline ally at risk. I mentioned Japan, allies least capable of mounting an independent defense. If you look at GDP, if you look at manpower, if you look at resources, and if you look at the fact that NATO is at least a coherent alliance, I think, again, the case is more difficult in Asia than in Europe. So perhaps the next current strategy form will be a debate between myself and Dr. Serrate, although I don't envy it because he's awfully persuasive. I was getting nervous. So here are four kinds of problems. Four kinds of problems I want you to think about. I want you to take with you. Problems in scale, problems in form, temporal problems, those relating to time, and then operational problems. So here's your homework. So scale. The means and the ends, right? Strategies about linking ends and means. The ones that are highlighted in red are ones I'm going to focus on a little bit. We also have issues in terms of manpower, technology, and allies, as Admiral Chatfield mentioned. So there's a little cartoon there. But what I really like you to look at is this slide here. If you look at GDP, which is only one measure of a country's military potential, you see that since we became an active world power, no great power rival, no combination of great power rivals has exceeded 40% of our GDP. China right now, 70.3%, according to the World Bank figures, this is currency exchange rates. It's not purchasing power parity because if you went that route, they'd actually have, by some accounts, a greater GDP than the United States. And if you add in Russia, and this is another argument for why it's China, not Russia, Russia economically, despite they punching well above their weight, if you look at their economic growth projections in China, again, the sort of the stone falls on the side of China. But again, you're looking at relative GDP twice as large as anything we faced in World War One, World War Two, or the Cold War. So the military potential that we could come up against is quite a bit more formidable, even historically speaking. And I would second Dr. Serrate's point about the need to study history for clues and lessons. Okay, so we've looked at the scale of the challenge that could be posed to us. What about us? Oops. Okay, the CBO just came out with its long term projections on May the 25th. I know you're all excited about it. You're rushed out to your mailbox or your email inbox and it was there. The projections are worrisome from our point of view. If you look at, for example, the fact that security challenges are growing in scale, the amount of resources, both absolutely and relatively, that we seem inclined to put against meeting that challenge are likely to decline. During the Cold War, we spent about seven and a half percent of GDP on average on defense. Now at 3.2, according to CBO, projection is we're going down to 2.7, which is about a third. So as the GDP of the threat doubles by historical standards, we're cutting by two thirds our investment in defense to meet that challenge. Again, one metric. And Paul Kennedy is going to be here tomorrow. He became famous by writing about the dangers of imperial overstretch. This is entitlement overstretch. We are not going to become economically insolvent because we're spending too much on defense, at least not according to these metrics in our Cold War experience. And if you look at net interest payments in 2015, the last year of the Obama administration, there were 230 billion. Now there are 400 billion projected to almost triple by the early 2030s. And then there are other ancillary problems such as state and local unfunded pension liabilities, $5 trillion. And then the Washington Post, by the way, checked their editorial section yesterday. They actually came out and said, why is no one talking about the Medicare Trust Fund and the Social Security Trust Fund? Their oversight boards just came out and I'd have to update these. They say now it's 2028 when Medicare becomes insolvent. I'm not sure. I think it may be more like 2024. And then Social Security, not terribly long after. So where do we make up the shortfall as these trust funds are exhausted? And that's going to put more downward pressure on defense. So if strategy is about linking ends and means, and we talk about these traditional ends that we've had to prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemonic power in the Eurasian landmass, then the means, we're going to have to think very, very artfully, very strategically about how we're going to accomplish this task. Form. The character of the problem, the military problem that we need to address, that's changing in form. And in two ways I would argue. One is China in particular has caught up to us in precision warfare. They talk about the reconnaissance strike complex in their own terms. The Russians invented sort of the concept. We've sort of applied it. But we no longer have this enormous lead that we once had. So how do we, they've been thinking about how to deal with a great power. The United States that has this capability for about 30 years now. While we've been distracted by a lot of other requirements and contingencies and campaigns and so on. So we have some catching up to do. How do we, how do we operate in a regime where our rivals can fight in a sense on par with the way we can fight, although with their own characteristics as the Chinese would say. Second, it seems that we may be confronting an overlapping emerging military revolution. What was that term? Disruptive equilibrium. But what, was that it? Okay, well see that I've actually learned something today. But military revolutions typically bring about a huge shift in what matters in warfare. And we know from our own experience here at the War College in the span of 20 years battleships were eclipsed by the aircraft carrier. You know there could be other major shifts. Artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, additive manufacturing, quantum computing, swarm, robotics and so on. And the, the two, the two little pictures here, there is as much time roughly between the Battle of Gettysburg and when German Panzers overran France as there is between the overrunning of France and today. And think about how different warfare was between 1863 and 1940. 1940 to 2022. We have not seen a general great power war since World War II. And again when you layer in all these new technologies and so on it's, it's bound to be very different. And that raises a couple of issues. How different will it be? What are the characteristics that are going to define this? And you find, I was the president of the Naval War College in 1925. Testifying before Congress said the, we had zero built aircraft carriers at the time. We had one that we were goofing around with as a converted collier called Jupiter became the Langley. But here goes Admiral Sims down the Congress and he says the aircraft carrier is the capital ship of the future. That was his vision. You know warfare at sea is going to change, it's going to change dramatically. And here you had the president of the Naval War College, a member of the Navy's general board, you know the key senior strategist and policy makers in the Navy, arguing that the ship that we didn't even have was going to be the centerpiece of Naval Warfare of War at Sea. So what, what is our new vision? And when you think about it, if things are going to be very different to sort of add insult to injury, a lot of the capital stock, a lot of the stuff we have made depreciating value rapidly. Just as battleships depreciated rapidly in value, relative value in the years between the two world wars. So what assets do we have that we think are going to depreciate at an accelerated rate? And we're not going to get it right, we're not going to get it perfect, but we need to get it less wrong than our enemies. Some temporal issues. This is something in my interactions recently, you know, serving on commissions and boards and working on the CNO executive panel that really perplexes me. We don't seem to have a very good sense of the temporal aspects of the competition. And I'm going to focus on mobilization, but we need to think about, as we did during the Cold War, what would happen if we were in extended conflict? You know, when both sides have lots of nuclear weapons, you really can't, you know, dictate peace on the deck of the Missouri. You're not going to go and conquer Beijing, and Beijing's not going to come to Washington. So at some point it's going to be a limited war, it's going to be a negotiated peace. How do you wage that extended conflict? If it takes you five years to get an aircraft carrier built down at Newport News, how aggressively can you operate that carrier in trying to defend Taiwan? Knowing that if you lose it, and you failed it, of course you could also say, if I lose it and successfully defend Taiwan, that doesn't mean the Chinese would have to quit. They could keep fighting, and you just lost a carrier. So what is that commander of that carrier strike group? What is that, how does that commander balance these sorts of considerations? War termination, how would you, how would you end the war? Any war. General Sherman used to say he was for a hard war at a soft peace. How do you end the war in such a way that you're not setting up the conditions for another war? Or a war where you win the war but you lose the peace. The one I'd like to talk about though in terms of temporal planning factors is this issue of mobilization. I will shake the hand of anybody who can tell me what those contingencies mean. 24, 10, 14, 21, 30. Anybody out there? All right, I know something you don't. Three years, no excuse me, one year after I graduated I was assigned as a major as the military assistant to the secretary of defense for special projects. One project was to oversee the creation of what was called the posture statement, the annual report to congress. This thing was soup to nuts. It started out from a description of our interests, the threats to our interests, our deployments around the world, things like mobilization. It ran typically between 200 and 300 pages. After the Cold War that sort of went away. Now we have the national defense strategy and in 2018 the summary of the national defense strategy was about 15 pages. I will tell you that and Eisenhower also said this plans are nothing, planning is everything. And what he meant was that what I learned and being the editor-in-chief for this document was the thinking process that went into putting together the posture statement, this comprehensive statement that had to be mutually supporting in terms of the way it integrated everything from strategy and policy to the defense program, budget, manpower requirements and so on. That required a lot of hard thinking by people in the Pentagon. And now we're down to 15 pages. This chart was in the posture statement back in the late 80s. This is how we saw the military balance in terms of ground forces between us, NATO, and the Warsaw Pact. And there's a footnote here because a lot of factors went into it. Going back to the Marshall quote I showed you, there are a lot of factors that went into coming up with that. And so you have this range of sort of this band of in the dark sense of where we might be in terms of the overall balance and the lighter band that had to do with mobilization after a month's time to to gear up forces. I haven't seen anything like this for the western Pacific. I haven't seen anything like this for Europe. I don't know why. I will tell you that these studies had a material impact on our defense posture. I will also shake the hand of anybody who knows what pompous is. Okay, when we found, when we looked at these mobilization rates, there was a point where things, there was a sort of a spike that favored the Warsaw Pact. And the way we hammered down that spike was pompous. Preposition, overseas material configured to unit sets. A very long-winded way of saying we put entire divisions worth of equipment in western Europe. So all we would have to do is fly in the troops. And that way we could accelerate the mobilization process. So again, a lot of hard thinking here on temporal factors, mobilization, extended conflict, you know, we've already depleted significantly our war stocks in terms of the javelins and the stingers for the war in Ukraine. I think it's a good idea, but you have the the head of, for example, Lockheed Martin that makes javelins saying it's going to take three, four, five years before we can refill what we've just sent to Europe. So there are, again, strategies about making choices and setting priorities. But we have to figure out if we're going to be even a pale shadow of the arsenal of democracy, how we're going to make up the shortfall. So let's go on to operational issues, because this is one of my favorites. Save it for last. When you have this punctuated, it's punctuated equilibrium. It's not disruptive equilibrium. Right, Mike? Yeah, okay. When you have this punctuated, when things become very different, you know, when you're faced, we're faced with a very different geostrategic problem, a very different problem in terms of the scale of effort and problems of the form of conflict. You're going to have to think very differently about how you fight. And the hidden implication is you're going to have to think very differently about the defense program and what your defense program priorities are. Because it seems difficult for me to accept that the programs that we developed over the last 10, 15, before we actually said we were at a great power competition, actually from 1991 you could argue all the way up to the last four or five years, that somehow that program only slightly modified is just what we need for China or just what we need for Russia. Really hard to accept that. So you have war's character changing profoundly. A lot of uncertainty as to what's going to work or what isn't, what capital stock is going to survive and be valuable and which isn't. So whoever gets it right, whoever figures out what the new mix is, what the new way of fighting is, the squeeze out maximum effectiveness from the situation and the military capabilities that we can generate is going to be at a big advantage. And one of the problems I would like to see examined along these lines is how do the Chinese see themselves fighting? And how do we see ourselves fighting? What are operational concepts? How do we think we're going to wage these campaigns? And again, Dr. Surat helps to know history because in 1939 the Germans had come, the Germans never used the word Blitzkrieg but that's basically what we said they can't, mechanized air land operations and the French had come up with something called the methodical offensive. Two very different ways of fighting. It's very asymmetric. And if you were a commander or you were a staff officer you would say either they're both going to be really wrong or one of them is going to be really wrong because they both can't be right. They both can't be right that this is the best way we're going to fight. And if that's the case you better figure out what you're going to do if you're wrong. I mean this is a big bet. You're almost betting the security of your country and you're doing it under conditions of high uncertainty because everything's changing. Different problems, different technologies, different capabilities. So once we figure this out links how we fight. It sets up a whole new set of defense policy and budget priorities. You could also say it also sets up a new sense of our global posture. You know what are the important places to be? What are the important bases that need to be enhanced or perhaps divested? Because again, money's going to be scarce. So you have the Blitzkrieg example. This is a little map that shows what some of our maritime forces were thinking about and how they were thinking about fighting during the Cold War. The Marines, the maneuver warfare doctrine, they had actually pompous position in Norway. They were going to get in there. They were going to secure NATO's northern flank and you might be able to see in the map here. They were going to actually run some air patrols and support some submarine operations up beyond the Greenland, Iceland, UK gap. And here you have again the what the Navy calls the maritime strategy in the outer air battle. A very detailed sense of how we were going to fight. And we exercise that again and again and again to find out where the weak chinks were and the people who do that or did that back then were people who were sitting in your seats once upon a time. Okay. I'm not advancing. Hey, can you move up one? Here we go. Everybody says this is important. Secretary Mattis says this is important. Secretary Austin said this is really important. The commission I served on said this is really important. It's really important. But I don't see us making very much progress here. So it's a problem. Now we're up to joint old domain operations, I think. Somebody just tell me how we're going to defend the first island chain. We have alliance commitments. You know, we have a military situation there. We have contingencies we need to think about. So again, it's a problem we need to get to work on. If we're going to work on the problem, then this is just again touching the wave tops. What are some of the key planning assumptions we're going to make about how say a contingency either in Europe or the Western Pacific might play out. This is for the Western Pacific. So big assumptions. Is space going to be a war zone? Is cyber going to be decisive or not? We're going to have a war in Europe or we have a war in the Pacific? Once you make these assumptions, then you start to come up with your operational concept. But you also need to think about how are you going to hedge against the possibility that we could be wrong. Because if we're making these big bets in a sense, what happens if the big bets fail to play out? Ah, old maps of Europe seem to be in vogue this morning. So when we were working on the posture statement back in the Dark Ages and even before then with the rainbow plans, we had contingencies. Okay, how are you going to apply this operational concept? We're going to apply it to deal with these operational problems. And we looked at a number of contingencies. I already mentioned mobilization as being one that was kind of independent. There was the Hamburg grab. Anybody? Okay. That was a rapid incursion by the Soviets to seize Hamburg and then call for negotiations. The point of their operation, we thought, would be convince the Western European allies that in fact, we could not successfully defend them. Another one was the Austrian Gambit. There were forces down here in the Baltic and we thought they were going to go south toward Greece. But the possibility existed that they could have gone through neutral Austria and come up on NATO's southern flank. So we had to account for that. The Iranian diversion, once we had Iran become a theocratic state, we developed the rapid deployment task force that became SENTCOM and to quote Omar Bradley, there was a concern that if the Soviets invaded Iran to advance on the Persian Gulf that it would be the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time. That would be in fact the diversion. We would start to flow forces into the Persian Gulf and then they would hit us in Europe. So looking at all these contingencies and how well our forces would stand up, how well our operational concept would stand up, I mentioned protracted war. So again, what are our color plans for the Far East? I can tell you when I read a summer study a couple of years ago, we came up with several. One was plan, one plan called for the defense of Taiwan. Another one looked at the defense of the Philippines. Another one looked at blockade. Another one looked at counter blockade. Another one looked at sort of the misdirection play, war in the peninsula in Korea where the main attack would actually come out of the South China Sea. And we were trying to figure out, okay, how do we deal with each of these contingencies? Again, here a definition of operational challenges and concepts. Here is the operational challenge that we had for Europe in the Cold War. Fairly simple. And so I would say, what is our operational challenge for the Western Pacific or the Indo-Pacific and for Europe today? Here's one that we actually developed during the 2014 summer study which ended up being called archipelagic defense. It's something that Japanese became very keen interested in. Yeah, sure. They became keenly interested in. And I've had a lot of conversations with the Japanese about this. And I should not have because we should be, you should be doing a much better job than any summer study could have done in terms of developing something that they'd really want to talk about. Okay, an ultimate slide. Trying to put some things in perspective. I've had people tell me, whether it's archipelagic defense or mobilization, some of these other things. Yeah, we can't do this. Well, you're right. You can't do it right away. But remember, you're in an open-ended competition. We have no idea when we in Russia will resolve our differences, where we in the Chinese will resolve our differences. So we have to keep our guard up. Our defense is strong. And this is going to play out over time. But we've been in this situation before, to some extent. If you go back to 1947, we were in an open-ended competition with the Soviet Union. The American people, World War II, they were focused on domestic issues just as they are pretty much now. There was no NATO alliance. We don't have any grand alliance in the Western Pacific. A lot of our perspective allied partners were exhausted. Then it was the war. Now you could argue pandemic and some of the financial shocks that came out of it. A lot of people, a lot of perspective allies were uncertain over what our true intentions were. Were we going to retreat back into isolationism? Or were we going to remain an active global power? I've had one senior Japanese official say to me, when are you going to get your head in the game? What are your intentions? And then we had a small military footprint in Europe. We were pulling the troops out, bringing them home. We started building up again only after the invasion in Korea in 1950. So small military footprint, despite all the talk about rebalancing and pivoting and so on, still lack the kind of military forces I think we need to affect the stable military balance in the Western Pacific. And then strategy is not a some time thing. The national military strategy, the national defense, it's not something you do every four years. The environment is too dynamic. It's changing constantly. Strategy is not a some time thing. It's an all the time thing. You need to constantly be looking for new sources of advantage, constantly looking for advantages you have that are becoming wasting assets and looking what your adversary is doing and trying to identify ways that you can align your strengths against their weaknesses because that's the best strategy of all. When strength is applied against weakness. So how are we doing that? What is our strategy for doing that? Doesn't have to be unclassified, but it does have to be a strategy that's accomplished. So I'm going to end up here with my little friend and we have, I think, some time for questions if there are any. But again, thank you for your attention. Anybody? Yes, ma'am. Hi, good morning. Lieutenant Colonel Gelner, Air National Guard. So I don't think anyone in this room would disagree with the gravity of the situation and everything that you explained up here. I think our real issue is with our civ mill processes and convincing Congress and more to the point, the American people, that this is a real problem. So how do we really bridge that gap in a way that addresses the issues that you see here? Because you can go back in time. I mean, there are op-eds from Admiral Bradley Fisk at the beginning of the 1900s that talk about getting Congress on board with paying for a Navy which takes millions, well, at the time, hundreds of thousands of dollars and lots of time those issues are still going on. So how do we get, and it didn't get resolved until we were involved in a world war. So how do we solve that with the American people and get Congress on board to really deal with the entitlement issues and with all the defense spending we need? Thank you. We lack, thank you. We lack some of the advantages that folks had in the early days of the Cold War because then the American public was certainly attuned to the fact that there could be an existential threat to our security and if not our even, our survival. Americans have lived for a very long time in an environment where peace is almost assumed to be the norm. And so it's, you know, I think it was Jefferson that said, you know, the, no it wasn't Jefferson. If you want peace prepared for war, that was Plato. But there is in this sense and in fact I think you could argue the opposite that, hey, look at the last 20 years we spent all this money in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and, you know, and what did it get us? So that's a problem, I think that. And if you, Michael Howard and even before him Clauswitz talks about essentially the social dimension of strategy, the people being so important. Back in the late 40s, you had President Truman and I think it was Congressman Vandenberg, I think, from Michigan, a Republican. So he had Democratic President and Republican. And they basically agreed that the Truman Doctrine which started, you know, and triggered things like the Marshall Plan and joining NATO, forming NATO. Do we have the leadership in this country on both the political parties that accept that? And then how do you communicate it to the American people? And we had people like George Marshall, for example, the Marshall, an incredible amount of credibility with the American people. And we had, you know, soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines coming back from the war who understood, you know, the consequences of failing to preserve the peace. I think that if you look at, Sir Michael Howard talks about the four dimensions of strategy. I think all four dimensions are trending away from us. The logistical, the technological, the operational and the social. When we were convening in the, I was on the commission on the national defense strategy back in 2018, and we talked about these four dimensions and we said the dimension that we are most worried about is the social dimension. Because we are in an extremely, if you look at our assets, if you look at our system, if you look at our potential, you know, whether it's demographics or, you know, market economy, capitalism, if you look at Indigenous resources, if you look at Alliance portfolios, and we are in a, I would not trade our position for anyone. As Pogo said, you know, we're our own enemy. And so somebody, somehow before a catastrophe happens, needs to communicate that effectively to the American people. And I think that, I think that is our biggest challenge right now. That's an excellent question. Anybody else? Okay. Yep. I think we are. Well, thank you again very much. Appreciate it. And gang, good luck. Thank you, Andy. We probably could have used 10 or 15 minutes, but I do want to make sure there's plenty of break here. So back in the seats by 1015 for the CNO. Thank you. It is now my honor to introduce the 32nd Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Mike Gilde. Thanks so much for the intro, and thanks so much for inviting me to speak with you for a few minutes today. I thought what I'd do with this 45-minute segment is carve out about 20 minutes or so for remarks, and then dig into the Q&A where I think we'll get some of our best dialogue and hopefully insights for the audience. I understand that the central theme of this year's conference is net assessment of great power competition. And so what I thought I'd do is to give you maybe an understanding of how I view my roles at Chief of Naval Operations in both developing and employing the force. And I say that because I think both of those two aspects are important and they're very complimentary. And so I have two overarching roles. So as a service chief, as the Chief of Naval Operations, I'm responsible for developing as well as maintaining training and equipping the force. And so the force that I develop actually then gets employed under my Joint Chiefs of Staff hat. And so the development side is the C&O and then as a member of the Joint Chiefs, the employment side. So if we break that down into ways, means and ends, with respect to developing the force as the Chief of the Navy, the resources, of course, are the fiscal resources that I have to use. So that's really the means. The ways is really naval force design and the concepts that govern that. So for us who be distributed maritime operations in conjunction with the Marine Corps, EABO or Expeditionary Advanced Basing Operations, as well as their Loki Latour Operations in a contested environment. So those concepts help then shape the ends as a service chief and the ends are forces and capabilities. Those forces and capabilities, if I move over to the employment side as a Joint Chief, then become the means, right? The ways or the how is really campaigning. And that comes out of the new national defense strategy that I know that you'll be discussing this week. And then in terms of the ends, the ends of the force employment or the joint, the employment, the joint force come down to deterring strategically, deterring aggression conventionally, and then defending the homeland. So in other words, the force that I have to employ informs and how I'm going to employ it informs what we're actually going to design and build. And that's really important as we think about campaigning in the direction of the national defense strategy. The national defense strategy obviously very cited on China. And I believe that for me as a service chief, and actually I like to speak about not only the Navy, but the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard that really the maritime value proposition that I think about is that the United States is obviously a maritime nation whose vital interests are firmly tied to the sea. And so integrated all-domain naval power, leveraging the complementary authorities and the capabilities of the United States Navy, the United States Marine Corps, and the United States Coast Guard is America's most persistent and most versatile instrument of military influence. We're able to conduct rapid response and self-sustained operations globally as the naval services advance prosperity, security, and the promise of a free and open rules-based order. So that comes out of the tri-service maritime strategy as our maritime value proposition that we have in mind as the three service chiefs get together to decide the force that we're actually going to feel. If I could speak about distributed maritime operations just for a moment. So distributed maritime operations for the Navy, if I get back to that first columns of ways, means, and ends, and really is the ways or the how that informs the force we're going to build, distributed maritime operations is really a paradigm shift. That thinking began about five to seven years ago when we decided to shift away from massing forces to distributing forces across a wide area and then leveraging all five domains in terms of how we fight. An example of that is the Marine Corps' contribution to sea control and sea denial actually from the land. Over the course of the last five to seven years through large-scale exercises the most recent last summer across five fleets, tens of thousands of sailors and Marines, dozens of ships, live, virtual and constructive weaved into that. Fleet battle problems that we conducted on a monthly basis with strike groups and ARDS that are either going to deploy or returning from deployment as well as war games and analysis all help to shape that distributed maritime operations concept of how we're going to fight. The reason I talk about that for a moment is because how we're going to fight fundamentally needs to be linked to campaigning and the joint fight obviously but it's also going to inform what we're going to fight with. If you don't know how you're going to fight it's really difficult to put together a long-range plan to design a force that you're actually going to campaign and to fight with. So DMO we think as it's maturing is a sound operational concept that also nests in nicely into the joint warfighting concept which I know you've discussed up at the War College and that's really the overarching joint concept of how we're going to fight. When I think about now in terms of the force that we're going to design and the force that we're going to build I tend to think of it in terms of three time slots. So the first one and they actually are anchored to our budget cycle and so the first is the five-year defense plan that goes out from 2023 to 2028 and so that's kind of a here and now getting after key operational problems and then setting the table inside the next five years which would be 2029 to let's say 2034 or so that five years is what I would call the transition the transition period and then the longer range five years which is like out to the mid to late 2030s that would really be the force design time frame right so that's really the aim point of force design for both the Marine Corps for the Marine Corps the Navy and the Coast Guard in terms of a long range plan that we have to feel the force against first and foremost against against China but if you take a look at so you think boy it takes a long time to actually feel that force and it and it does in an evolutionary kind of way not a revolutionary kind of way but an evolutionary kind of way across that 15 year time period it takes a long time to design and put into place the kinds of aircraft and the ships that are extremely complex and then we need in a high end and fight so if I think about the the current national defense strategy that the secretary of defense just signed and that influence my thinking over the past year as we were involved and had actually had were consulted quite frequently as that is that defense strategy is being architected if I think about what the Navy is fielding over the next five years based on the budget that we proposed to Congress I tend to think of it across five different areas I tend to think about what we're fielding on the sea under the sea above the sea I tend to think about what we're fielding in the information space so information warfare and then I also think about the human weapon system people and our investments there so those are really the five almost lines of operation across the budget that run out the 15 years of this vision to ultimately get us to a hybrid fleet of man and unmanned vessels in that third five year block the most difficult block time block is that transition block that five year that middle five years that's the most difficult one in terms of fighting for resources in terms of keeping programs on track so that you actually get what you think you you need at the transition point into that last into that last five years so if I think about what we're investing in right now and just to kind of lay this out across those five areas really briefly so in terms of under the sea the Navy is investing in Virginia block four Virginia block five so Virginia block five submarines will actually have hypersonics on the third hull so around 2028 right in the cusp of that transition that transition that transition bit of will also in that transition bit of be transitioning to Virginia class block six submarines and that'll inform in the long term our investment in SSNX or the next generation of submarine in the mid-2030s or so is our aim point right now we actually have R&D money in the budget now that's informing the power plant for that particular submarine but again it's evolutionary we're learning from Virginia block four we're learning from Virginia block five that of course has a bigger payload section and we will learn more from from Virginia block six the Navy seals have also pivoted in the undersea from a principal role in counterterrorism to great power competition and so they found their frogman routes have transitioned back to those frogman routes and are working very closely with and the undersea domain with our with our submarine force I think seabed warfare and other areas where we can provide an unconventional approach against some high-end against some high-end high-end competitors we're also employing undersea autonomous vessels some of those are launched from submarines some of those are launched from surface vessels but their principal role is to will be a will be an offensive mining capability so we are continuing to evolve in the unmanned and I'm going to wait till the Q1A to talk more deeply about unmanned because I'm sure task force 59 is going to come up and I can talk about our approach with respect to a quick turn DevOps framework that we've set up with respect to unmanned on the surface we are fielding DDG flight threes now with a new radar our first one was just was just christen and so that program is proceeding at pace our new frigates FFG-62 on a European design with a US combat system attached is also underway being built up in Wisconsin the three Zumwalt DDG-1000 hulls that we have we're going to transition them to CPS so CPS is actually it's a hypersonic capability so they'll be our first ships with a hypersonic missile capability in around 2025-2026 we've shifted from a defensive standpoint with respect to missile systems to an offensive capabilities with maritime strike Tomahawk with more advanced Tomahawk missiles as well as with standard missile CPS-61 Bravo we're doing work with unmanned on the sea as well we've got about 10,000 hours of autonomous operation with unmanned vessels in the sea including transits from the Gulf Coast through the Panama Canal up the coast of California Port Waimimi we've done four of those transits the only portion of those transits that have actually not been autonomous is the time that they're transiting through the through the through the Panama Canal and so those transits have included AI software and ML capabilities that have allowed those vessels to navigate according to the rules of the road the international rules of the road as well as to avoid shipping and so we've been very successful in terms of learning a lot and using those vessels during those transits in the air we are investing in F-35s half of our air wings will be fourth, fifth gen integrated by 2025 more so at the end of the in that second transition phase of 2029 and 2034 we're also employing MQ-25 which is really our MQ-25 is an unmanned capability that allows us to to refuel right now it allows us to refuel our strike fighters as well as the other aircraft in the carrier air wing and so it frees up three or four of those strike fighters that would have been four been relegated to a refueling role so they're back into a tactical offensive role as they were designed to be MQ-25 also extends our battle space we're also investing in weapons of range and speed L-Rasm jazz and me are extended range and so that gives our our main battery which is our carrier strike wing a much greater punch at a much greater range MQ-25s importantly is really in that transition five years is really our path to the next generation air wing and think a hybrid air wing of man and unmanned that we will field in the 2030s so again if anything you take away from this approach that we have in terms of our move to the forces out of the future is that it is much less revolutionary and much more evolutionary we think that you actually have to deliberately go slow in order to go fast we've learned that through other shipbuilding and aircraft programs that we that we've had and try to move move ahead too quickly on and have been disappointed by and the human weapon system or with respect to people I'll talk about a couple of areas that we've really made big investments in one is ready relevant learning which moves from an exclusive brick and mortar schoolhouse to a more virtual to a more hybrid environment that includes virtual it's getting the right training to people at the right time so the Navy's framework over the years has been to front load the front load courses to sailors before they get to their ships let's say they spend a couple of years in school by the time they get to their ship they've forgotten half of what they've learned and so this is an effort to get them the right the right information at the right time tied in with on the job training live virtual constructive training this is a way of the future for us in terms of integrated training for the United States Navy and we'd like to fold in allies and partners into this effort so LVC or live live virtual when we did our big exercise in the summer of 2021 it allowed us to tie in ships let's say as that if I could give you an example we took the battle space off of Norway and Denmark and we moved it actually off the coast of Virginia and North Carolina so conceptually we had that battle space and then we had live ships carrier strike group we had an ARG as well that were operating in that battle space constructively and virtually we moved an ARG from Fifthly so in the Middle East to actually operate in that battle space as well in a virtual environment we had aircraft that were simulating Chinese fighters and Chinese bombers so their emissions electronically the weapons that they carried all simulated and appeared to be those that belong to the adversary in terms of information warfare continued investments in cyber and space we now have maritime we now have maritime space officers we have just up a maritime space component at Fort Meade, Maryland we are investing in a first-ever information warfare task force in the Pacific under the commander of Pacific Fleet as a pilot and there's also another big program that we have underway called Project Overmatch or Operation Overmatch which is the Navy's contribution at Jed City too in terms of developing a system of systems software software controlled information architecture that will actually yield a Navy's operational architecture of the future actually a joint operational architecture of the future that allows us to send data from any system over any other system we're doing that right now in a series of spirals we'll go a spiral what I mean by spirals is experiments we'll go a strike group wide with the new Navy operational architecture in early 2023 and then we'll expand that the fleet fleet wide from there in the shore we have big investments going on in our shipyards which are an important part of our ecosystem in terms of keeping the fleet ready and so our public shipyards we have four of them and they service our nuclear powered vessels their dry docks are on average 97 years old so this is a once in a generation investment in them and so across those three timeframes this is an evolutionary approach to yield real combat power if you take a look at my navigation plan and I'll be putting out an update to it at the end of the month that navigation plan was intended to do two things one was to focus on key operational problems that we need to solve in this decade of urgency so some examples of that would be project overmatch as an example to yield a much more resilient and robust information framework or network framework so that we could tie in unmanned think about the ocean of things that we're doing at task force 59 to tie into that along with our man platforms as well without that we're not going to be able to move forward through that transition five years with unmanned in a robust kind of way there are a number of other efforts also in the NAB plan I would also mention our counter C5 ISRT effort which is classified but counter C5 ISRT is another way of giving us the ability to outmaneuver the adversary so in other words to interrupt his ability to target us and to put weapons on our platforms by interrupting his kill chain so in other words blinding the adversary particularly early in a fight to put our maritime forces in a position of advantage so with that framework laid out that I hope helps you have more informed discussions about the assessment of great power competition I'd like to just open it up to any questions that you might have Good morning Admiral Bob Grieve from ProTech I've got a question regarding you mentioned unmanned systems in the Navy's doubling down on unmanned systems in the future right now source ratings that are used for operations in the submarine force are ETs, STs in the SEAL teams the AGs and some frogmen what's the Navy's position on establishing a UUV type rating to support that effort and the growth and do you see that coming in the future near future or is there something that works now No, there's something in the works right now and so we're actually we're actually starting a new rating that'll be focused on unmanned operations we also are we already have established warrant officers in the aviation side for unmanned aviation platforms what we're doing right now with respect to unmanned is we decided that instead of approaching the unmanned problem like we would with ship or aircraft platform development like we've historically done in the Navy and that's typically right a 15 to 20 year effort right depending on depending on the platform we know we knew we needed to move fast in order to in order to to field to put unmanned capability in the hands of the warfighter now and so in the current five year fit up so we stood up at the DevOps kind of environment that's led by an unmanned task force here in the Pentagon we put we have tied together acquisition specialists requirement specialists or warfighters scientists from our research labs industry along with task force 59 at fifth late and that task force is allowing us to experiment quickly to get after key operational problems with respect to unmanned whether it's power systems on unmanned unmanned platforms or whether it's command and control and then make after we do spirals or after we do these experiments we just did a big the largest unmanned exercise in the world a few months ago where we had nearly a hundred platforms ten nations dozens of vendors that were involved and so the idea is to either fail fast or and learn from that and then if if the capability shows promise double down on that capability so that we can accelerate its its fielding it also lets us allows us to get after bigger challenges that we have with larger unmanned platforms and that transition fit up from 28 or 29 to 32 so that we can actually start fielding larger unmanned platforms with our battle groups the task force 59 effort is mostly focused around small unmanned and the idea there is to be able to field capability in this five years that we could deploy off nearly any vessel whether it's a submarine or a surface ship I'll pause there for any follow-ups Admiral John Simmons with the Roosevelt group as you say sailors are the most important weapon system in in the Navy here but why with some of the challenges with readiness morale mental health do they keep 3000 sailors tied to a ship going a complex overhaul instead of finding ways to either rotate those sailors where they're needed like in the Pacific or turn that over to the private sector my understanding from talking to a captain of an aircraft carrier you only need about 10% about 300 people there to be tied to that ship during that five-year period yeah so I would I take issue with the three with the with the with the 10% number so we're not giving up the ships right these are our ships and we own them and so part of readiness has to be that ownership piece that has to be part of our DNA so I'm not giving up the ships I'm not turning them over to anybody those are our responsibility and maintaining those ships are our responsibility overhauls are a really difficult period in a ship's life having been through several as many of you have I think that the leadership challenges that you have with the ship indeed maintenance are more difficult than the challenges that you have on a routine deployment I'm not talking about a combat deployment but a routine overseas deployment for a number for a number of reasons it's just not a pleasant environment to work in on a day-to-day basis now with respect to the George Washington which I think you're kind of indirectly referring to sir we've given people the opportunity to move off the ship those are not in the duty section day-to-day duty section but I'll be honest with you there's over a hundred people we we offered it to about three a little over 300 people over a hundred people said hey we don't want to move off the ship and we're fine so some of the stuff that you've seen in the press hasn't exactly been balanced in terms of the condition on GW again I don't want to say it's not a challenge on there I've been in the ship my assessment of the ship is that the is that the leadership team is very strong I actually found the crew to be upbeat and positive and I didn't do any pre-stage meetings with the crew I walked the deck plates myself and met with random sales so I would say the other thing I would say to your point though of concern is that I have launched an investigation into not only GW but more broadly into our plan for for longer maintenance availabilities to really get a better understanding of the manning piece of it the quality of life the quality of work piece of it as well so that we can so we can take a fresh look at what things that we need to adjust but I think going down to like 10% of the crew just to react to compartment alone you need you probably need at least that many people so I'm not I'm not to that end of the scale but I am open to taking a deeper look at it thank you sir a question from online will undersea warfare take over the next naval confrontation rather than warfare on the sea so submarines are most probably are most effective survivable strike platform and so right now we have overmatch against peer competitors in that domain my intent is to maintain that overmatch a good degree of our shipbuilding program is dedicated to undersea warfare and so those programs are very robust and if I would say compared to any other program in the department the entire department of defense it's a submarine program that has the greatest amount of predictability and stability going out to 2040 and so we know that we're in a cadence to produce one SSBN and at least two attack boats a year out into that time frame we could go to three a year if industry can support it but right now they're struggling to support two attack boats a year so that program is very robust it's my intention as long as I'm CNO to keep those programs well-resourced because I do believe that they give us an operational advantage over peer competitors whether it's Russia or China morning CNO Jeff Gage Navy veteran currently with Data Minor Corporation sir you described some ambitious and costly programs for your design and development and the predicate for which is our great power competition that we're describing here I'd like your assessment based on your circulation among our fellow citizens in the fleet your assessment of the American people's understanding of the strategic challenge and their willingness to pay the cost thanks yeah so I think that it's I think that it's improving and I think that Capitol Hill is a really good lens to take a look at that the discussions on Capitol Hill in the last couple of years have significantly been elevated with respect to China the trajectory that China is on I think is well understood the current a conflict between Russia and Ukraine has raised concerns as well people talk about Taiwan right looking at what we're learning with respect to Ukraine and how we can apply that to Taiwan so I do think that the visibility is improving again I think what I said just a moment ago about Russia-Ukraine has given the American people you know a lens through which to kind of self-assess where we are and where we could find ourselves in the future good morning sir my name is Lieutenant Commander Bobber I'm an international military student from Pakistan at NSC 2022 sir nationally flagged merchant vessels greatly enhance the capability of a Navy to help their sustainment in the time of need during our time here we have learned that United States has a less than required number of nationally flagged merchant vessels do you see this as a problem and if yes how do you think it should be mitigated thank you yeah we're beginning to take a look at the work with Congress your assessments correct that we don't have enough nationally flagged vessels to to fill all of our work fighting war fighting requirements we're working closely with the Congress and now to take a look at what options might be available with respect to legislation that would help us incentivize monetarily incentivize private companies to get more involved in that program so more work to be done but headed in the right direction I think in terms of what the Navy's doing to fill our portion of the gap is that we have turned to use sea lift and so we've taken a look at the market we've done some pretty robust analysis we just purchased our first two we'll probably purchase another four used vessels this year these are vessels that have let's say 20 years on them that probably still have another 20 to 25 to go we're buying them for anywhere from 25 to 30 million as compared to a new a new ship at 300 million or 400 million so in terms of economics we think it's a good path forward we actually we also put these ships in the shipyards for let's say another 10 million and give them a railroad capability that gives them a more robust military enabler kind of capability that we that we need to flee so I would tell you that we're not just standing back and you know and admiring the problem we are trying to get at it in some unconventional ways so you know we had another question online listening to your description of looking forward strategies can you talk about the current over the horizon anti-terrorism strategies of the current administration given transport time from remote bases or ships can this work yeah I think it's challenging right the time distance the time distance issue is is challenging and there's nothing like having a persistent presence right and so I think it's a challenge it's a challenge to do CT remotely I think that there's a lot of smart people taking a look at creative ways to get after that problem I don't think we're there yet with respect to that solution said it'll likely be a number of number of different solutions that are clues collusion together to give us the kind of capability that we need we're also trying to balance priorities or we're trying to we're trying to balance the force posture globally against different threats and so trying to do that at the same time I'm you're trying to manage some type of persistent persistent eye on a CT on a potential CT problem set is a challenge we're just not where we need you to be right now Sir Lieutenant Colonel John Culpeper US Army so you spoke highly of live virtual constructive training do you anticipate that the Navy is going to create a dedicated cadre of functional area officers that are trained in all live virtual constructive training like the Army's created in our career field I do and I so right now right now we're leveraging people particularly in the information worker community to help with that to help with that problem we're also leveraging technology that's already available in the gaming community centralized really in Orlando, Florida so we're not trying to build something you know new off the shelf we're trying to leverage gaming technology that's already out there and that we can integrate into into our systems the biggest challenge that we have really is integrating legacy platforms in a way that in a way that's truly integrated for the force whether it's submarines whether it's fighters and and the other piece of that is in a fighter as an example for them to actually have that virtual that that virtual display of those virtual forces just like they'd have in a simulator and so we're working through that again the information worker community right now is our edge and leaning forward to try and get after that problem but it's progressing very well Sir Lieutenant Colonel B.G. John U.S. Army Sir as a service chief what keeps you up at night what do you worry about the most? Yeah it's a day-to-day stuff right now in terms of you see what's going on with Ukraine and you know are we postured the right way against China it's keeping it's trying it's making sure that the force that we have today is man-training and equipped and ready to fight tonight and so I'm still a believer and pushing our forces forward we have to be forward that's the you know we can't we can't be there virtually the Navy the Navy has to be forward deployed all the time the challenge is having the right capabilities at the right place at the right time of course and you can't take your eye off any area that love and so the Middle East is an example and you know in this strategy in the new strategy some see CENTCOM as an economy of force theater but quite frankly it's a maritime theater for us at three very important jump points and so we can't take a right off the ball then again we can't cover all of this area ourselves and so leveraging the capabilities and the will of allies and partners is extremely important the use of unmanned in places like the Middle East and that's why Task Force 59 one of the first battle spaces they took a look at was the Red Sea so about the size of the state of California maybe on a day-to-day basis you have five coalition chips patrolling think about patrolling the state of California five police cars you know it's a it's a no way it's a no one situation so leveraging unmanned leveraging sail drones leveraging unmanned in the air over that battle space and tying that back into operational centers where we're leveraging my microprocessing at the tactical edge think applications like on your phone and make sense of the data that we collect has been revolutionary I think and as informing again the path around unmanned and where we need to move faster good morning Sir Lieutenant Colonel Ashley Gilner Air National Guard I was wondering since one of your areas is people if you could speak to some of the innovations or things that you see to better integrate our reserve forces and particularly the people who are dual military who may be served on active duty I served on active duty for about eight and a half years went to the reserve for a couple years as a traditional reservist then guard as traditional and how can we get people in and out of the active duty and into the reserve forces better and what are the joint chiefs doing about making that transition easier thank you yeah so that that's a really good point I can tell you what we're doing and try to leverage the reserves in a more powerful way and that is to develop like a LinkedIn system for reservists right so where you we have a much better understanding of the skills and talent base out there that we can tap into traditionally we've been tracking that stuff with spreadsheets or you know it's been highly ineffective and I think that's where we can make the most that's that's where we can make the biggest change the fastest at least I believe is how do you take the reserve force you have now and pivot them to a 21st century to a 21st century joint force right to have them contributing in ways just like the active where they can only they can they can they can be not just interoperable but really interchangeable with with an active force and you can't begin to do that unless you have an understanding of what they can bring to the fight so that's a current challenge that we're trying to deal with trying to get a better understanding of where those skill sets where those skills and talents lie and and then are those people available so that we can put them against key operational problems today not just exercises not just you know niche efforts like let's say the southwest border but put them against key operational problems in great power competition sir we've got about three minutes left and about 75% of our students in the room will be headed off to operational assignments or back to their organizations of origin what advice do you have for them in your concluding remarks sir yeah you've had you've had a great year to think read and write and I think you come out of the war college in some respects you learn as much outside of the outside of the classroom as you do inside the classroom from from from your fellow students and certainly from the faculty and those deep conversations that you're having I would I would I would encourage as you get back as you get back to the fleet or as you get back to get back to the army of the Air Force or the Marine Corps when you get back to your unit help your commander solve tough problems you guys have been thinking big thoughts you've been exposed to a lot of different ways to get after problems pick something you can help solve actually put your education to use don't underestimate yourself you can make big change and this is really a decade where we need to move faster and you know task force 59 I'll just give you an example task force 59 that's doing all of this DevOps real-world experimentation with unmanned was not dreamed of in the Pentagon it was dreamed about it was it was created in the fleet and in a number of months it went from a white paper to an actual task force and it's you know it was a Navy captain perhaps even a war college graduate who actually came up with that idea and transition it to reality so don't self-limit that would be my my my best advice to you don't self-limit and don't underestimate yourself thank you CNO on behalf of this robust community of scholars researchers operators practitioners we want to tell you thank you for your time today and wish you all the best sir thanks Mike and Grave for your graduates thank you thank you good morning everyone it is my good fortune to introduce the three speakers this morning on the panel we're very fortunate here at the college to have these three distinguished speakers all of whom are great scholars but also have used their scholarship to think about the problems of today they're very policy oriented in their orientation in trying to apply lessons of history disciplines of history and political science and international relations to look at the current problems that we face I'm John Maurer from the strategy and policy department here and let me introduce our three panelists first Aaron Friedberg who comes to us from Princeton University where he is a professor of politics and international relations at Princeton he serves as co-director of Princeton Center for International Security Studies he also serves as a counselor to the National Bureau of Asian Research and was recently appointed to the Congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission from 2003 to 2005 he served as deputy assistant for the national security affairs in the office of the vice president educated at Harvard he is an author of several major books on international relations Asian security and grand strategy in the shadow of the garrison state is one of the readings that we have in our senior level course he is also the author of an important book on the contest between China and the United States a contest for supremacy China America and the struggle for mastery in Asia he's also written on the air sea battle beyond the air sea battle the debate over U.S. military strategy in Asia and today I believe Aaron your latest book has just come out entitled Getting China Wrong the second speaker this morning is Emily Goldman Emily comes to us from U.S. cyber command where she is currently a strategist on cyber policy she was a cyber advisor to the director of policy planning at the department of state during 2018-2019 from 2014 to 2018 she directed the U.S. cyber command national security agency combined action group leading a team that wrote the 2018 U.S. cyber command vision achieve and maintain cyber space security educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University she served as professor of political science at the University of California Davis for two decades she is the author of several major studies on strategy and technology her first book was sunken treaties naval arms control between the wars two world wars she's also written the information revolution and military affairs in Asia the diffusion of military technology and ideas cyber analogies which we have used as a text in our course and her book most recent book that came out just last month cyber persistence redefining national security in cyber space she also served on the faculty of the naval war college as a secretary of the navy fellow finally the third speaker is Toshi Yoshihara Dr. Yoshihara comes to us from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment in Washington where he serves as a senior fellow educated at Georgetown School of Foreign Service the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy he previously served as the inaugural John A. Van Buren Chair of Asia Pacific Studies and a professor of strategy and policy here at the naval war college he's the author of several very important studies that look on maritime Asia naval warfare naval history and sea power seizing on weakness allied military strategy for competing with China's globalizing military is his most recent study he's also written drag it against the sun Chinese views of Japanese sea power a very important study that looks at the changing naval balance between China and Japan it's been translated and published in Japan we're at one a major award he is also co-author of Red Star over the Pacific China's rise and the challenge to US maritime strategy which is a core textbook in the strategy courses he has an important new book coming out that looks at the beginnings of the Chinese navy under the communist rule Mao's army goes to sea the island campaigns and the founding of China's navy which will be coming out later this year I'm going to now turn it over to Dr. Aaron Friedberg John thank you very much it's a real pleasure to be back here at the war college and it's an honor to be on a panel with such distinguished colleagues our topic is great power competition and net assessment and I'd like to focus on the US-China competition or rivalry which in my view is the most important and difficult that we face in the long run by any reasonable standard we're behind where we should be in this rivalry and I think we're scrambling to catch up to be blunt and the reason for that is it took a long time and really the better part of three decades for our top policymakers to acknowledge that we were even engaged in a rivalry whereas our Chinese counterparts were under no such illusion so this is a story of assessment failure at the grand strategic level and the question is why exactly did this happen and what are its consequences and that's really the topic of my book which is supposed to be out today but on Amazon it went from not available yesterday to sold out today which I think means they sold the five copies that they had but please go to Amazon and put in your orders so I want to talk briefly about US assessments and objectives and strategy with respect to China starting in the early 1990s then look at the other side of the equation because in the book I try to look at it from both sides the assessments and strategy of China's communist party rulers and then finally back looking at the US and coming to grips with this question of why it took us so long to figure out what was actually going on during the closing decades of the Cold War so in the 70s and 80s the United States actually sought to build up China as a counterweight to Soviet power and we encourage the particularly the development of China's economy and of its technological capabilities for that reason following the collapse of the Soviet Union that rationale went away and US policy shifted and over time over the course of the 1990s there emerged what I would describe as a two-part strategy consisting of two policies on the one hand engagement with China and particular economic engagement but also societal social scientific educational cultural engagement and on the other at the same time what I would describe as balancing and that was kind of the minor theme for most of this time the idea that we should continue even after the end of the Cold War to maintain capabilities in the region and to work with our allies so as to maintain a favorable balance of power even as China grew wealthier and more powerful as it was expected to do so the balancing part of the strategy was supposed to maintain stability and deter the possibility of aggression while engagement was given time to work its magic on China and in particular or more specifically the engagement part of the strategy had three broad objectives first there was the belief the expectation that by welcoming China into the global international system into the so-called liberal international order which the United States played the key role in building and sustaining from the end of the Second World War that by encouraging China to join we would induce its leaders to see their interests as lying in the maintenance of that system rather than in any attempt to change it or to overthrow it and the term of art in the Bush administration during which I briefly served was we want China to be a responsible stakeholder in the existing international order so that was objective number one objective number two and expectation number two was that over time as China opened its economy and became integrated into the global economic system it would be under irresistible pressure to proceed down a path towards greater and greater economic liberalization so that over time its economy would come more closely to resemble those of the other advanced industrial countries with the market playing the key role in determining the allocation of resources in the state pulling further and further back third and finally something which there's a little bit of retrospective rewriting of history some people who in fact believed this at the time now say that they never meant it there was an expectation that over time China would also pass through a process of political liberalization so that eventually it would emerge as a democracy in some form now there's been a tendency also retrospectively I think to regard all of this as a product of naivete or it's the result of greed and of course there was some of that but I think it's important to remember that that part of our strategy was underpinned by some widely held beliefs that were deeply rooted in liberal ideology the political ideology on which this country is founded backed up by some social science theories and reinforced by what appeared to be visible trends the belief was and you have to cast your mind back I think most of you are still old enough I find with my students I lose track of this but to the early post-cold war period and the idea that history had ended and that liberal democracy had proven its superiority to every other form of political and economic liberalization democracy and markets appeared to be spreading there was a belief also again a classical liberal belief that trade would promote not only growth but also peace between trading nations and that economic growth in particular would encourage political liberalization and that's a process that had unfolded in Europe in the 19th century and in Asia in the 20th century and some of it fairly recently including South Korea and Taiwan so American policymakers I think believed that the time had finally come to complete the construction of a truly global liberal international system and I would argue this was the third time in the 20th century that American leaders saw that as their goal the first time was after the end of the First World War with Wilson League of Nations and collective security and that didn't work out the second towards the end of the Second World War Franklin Roosevelt some of his advisors believed that it might be possible again to create a truly integrated liberal system and that fell apart and because the Soviets wanted no part of it and a cold war emerged and what we did in effect was to create a partial liberal international order in the west but not a truly global one and I think one way of looking at the situation as it emerged in the early 90s was to believe that now the Berlin Wall had fallen the barriers to the further spread of liberal democracy had been removed and we would encourage that process to extend all across Eurasia and to include China what's happened in the last decade or so is that it's become increasingly obvious that this strategy has failed to achieve its objectives China has become stronger and wealthier no doubt but it is also today more repressive politically than at any time arguably since the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s instead of moving progressively towards a liberal market economic system in fact it is more invested in statist mercantilist market distorting economic policies even then it might have appeared 20 years ago and increasingly I think it's become clear that the CCP leadership has revisionist inclinations it is not a responsible stakeholder it is not a satisfied status quo power but it wants to change important aspects of the existing international order and it feels entitled to do so and increasingly capable of doing so so then the question becomes what went wrong why did this strategy fail the simplest answer to that question is that the Chinese Communist Party devised what proved to be a more effective counter strategy for defeating our strategy we tend to think of this as typically we do as Americans as being all about us but we have to look at the other side and I think when we do that we can see that the CCP leadership in fact was quite clever and developed a way of extracting the benefits of engagement without succumbing to the processes of liberalization that it was supposed to set in motion the Chinese Communist Party's leaders always from the very beginning of this saw engagement as a trap they were determined to avoid what they referred to as peaceful evolution and here they were quoting John Foster Dulles who said our goal should be to promote peaceful evolution of communist countries he was referring primarily to Eastern Europe at the time so they saw us as intending to promote peaceful evolution and to encourage them to become as they would describe it a bourgeois democracy and of course they weren't wrong in that belief in order to counter that they pursued a flexible and continuously evolving mix of repression, co-optation and ideological indoctrination to enable themselves to maintain their exclusive grip on political power and this was accompanied by also flexible and adaptive economic policies that were designed to harness market forces and to promote growth while at the same time ensuring the continued control over the economy and over society of the party state I think that from the start so from the start of the post-Cold War period and really I would argue from the start of the People's Republic the Chinese Communist Party has had three broad goals first and foremost was to maintain the party's grip on political power at home and to make sure that nothing could challenge that secondly to build up all of the elements of what China's leaders and strategists refer to as its comprehensive national power economic, military, technological and so on and third with the passage of time as China's power grew to change the external environment so as to make the world safe for perpetual CCP rule and I think those objectives have been both regional where China seeks in my view to establish itself as the preponderant regional power displacing the United States and I think it's also become increasingly evident that China's leaders are thinking in global terms and now conceive of themselves as engaged in a competition with the United States out of which they hope eventually to emerge as the preponderant global power what's changed over time is the assertiveness with which they've pursued these goals and those changes in behavior in turn have been driven by an ongoing process of assessment of what soviets might have called the correlation of forces or what some Chinese analysts refer to and this is a translation of the term but as the propensity of things the direction of events and as they've grown more optimistic about their relative power in relation to the United States they've become more assertive so at the start in the early 90s after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 and the economic sanctions that followed that the first Gulf War in 1990-91 where the United States demonstrated this overwhelming military capacity and then followed in very short order by the collapse of the Soviet Empire and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union the general guidance that Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping gave to his colleagues at the time was that we should hide our capabilities and bide our time but this did begin to change over time in 2001 the combination of China's entry into the World Trade Organization and the 9-11 terrorist attacks opened what Chinese strategists saw as a 20-year period of strategic opportunity during which they expected the United States to be preoccupied with other problems and other parts of the world and they expected to be free themselves to build up their comprehensive power the 2008-2009 global financial crisis caused a shift and an increase in the optimism of the CCP leadership a belief that in fact their system might be superior to the system of the West and in any event the power of the West the United States was now declining rapidly and China's was growing Xi Jinping came to power and believed I think that the United States was in the process of redoubling its efforts to contain China looking at the so-called pivot under the Obama administration and that the only reasonable response to that was for China to redouble its efforts and there have been a number of other points along the way 2017 after the elections in Britain and the United States Chinese strategists start to talk about populism and political polarization in the West and in 2020 the pandemic I think also encouraged the view that at least initially it looked like China's system had proven itself superior to that of the West and now you hear Chinese leaders Xi Jinping in particular saying explicitly the East is rising and the West by which he means especially the United States is declining just briefly regarding the U.S. response it's not that the United States was totally asleep at the switch during all of this there were always some skeptics and critics about the prevailing policy their numbers grew with the passage of time and they did gain a wider hearing at certain points but I would say overall until fairly recently those people were not able to achieve a decisive shift in collective assessments and therefore in U.S. strategy so why did it take so long there are a variety of reasons let me just tick off five in closing one the power of these prevailing ideas and beliefs those have taken a long time to dissipate and there are some people who still believe if we just stick with it eventually China will be transformed in the way that we would like to see over time especially after the real expansion of trade and investment with China you begin to get developing in the United States and in the West powerful commercial interests individuals and companies and whole sectors that have a strong interest in maintaining the stability of relations because of the expectation that they will earn profits by selling to China by setting up production facilities in China and so on there's a certain amount of inertia in all of this I think an X factor in this story that I believe to be important but is very difficult to assess is the effectiveness of Chinese influence operations targeted at our elites and affecting their perceptions and persuading them that engagement was working or and or that there was no real alternative and the last factor which is important to recall is distraction every time we started to shift our attention towards a greater focus on China other things happened that deflected us from it 9-11 the turn of the 21st century I think but for 9-11 we would have been much more focused the Defense Department certainly would have been much more focused on the China challenge 2008 2009 there was a beginning of a turn back to addressing the so-called anti-access area denial problem the financial crisis knocked that off course 2011 the pivot happens to coincide with other events the Arab Spring in particular and then of course in 2014 you have the first Ukraine war and so the question now I think is whether this pattern is going to be repeated whether we have now reached a sort of critical mass where there's a consensus on the necessity of focusing on this challenge or whether we are going to be knocked off course and have our attention drawn away from it again thank you thank you thank you Erin Dr. Goldman next thank you it is for inviting me back John it's terrific to be here I want to start just with a disclaimer that my the views I'm presenting are my own and they don't represent the official position at any U.S. government agency I'm sandwiched here between two China experts so you're going to get a little technology cyber hiatus in between the two China bookends we have here so what I hope to do is to give you another way or another dimension of the great power competition that we're seeing today and talk about what is distinctive about it and what this means for strategic net assessment the bottom line up front is that what is different about great power competition today is that it's playing out across three strategic environments each of them has their own distinct security logic which flows from the underlying technology the U.S. must master all three of these environments or it will lose its relative power position two of these strategic environments were very familiar with we've spent decades in some cases centuries studying assessing strategizing about them operating in them one is new and our adversaries were the first to recognize it to understand it and to act in it so as a result we have the United States has experienced strategic loss and must regain the initiative so I'm going to sort of take a lead from Dr. Krepit Nevich and really this is about diagnosis of a problem this is how to think about of the problem that we're facing today the outline of my talk I'm going to first describe what I mean by a strategic environment next what great power competitors are doing and conclude with implications for strategic net assessments am I going to do this right oh wait okay hello oh there we go bingo all right most of you are familiar with how our national security establishments think about technologies a variety of different kind of framings that we use we often talk about capabilities which is the technology that is coupled with tactics and operating concepts and their impact on warfare another way is in terms of domains and their five air land sea space and cyberspace and that helps to segment the war fighting spaces that we think about another construct which you'll often see is the operational environment which facilitates operations planning it includes the physical domains but also the information environment the electromagnetic spectrum space and how all of these capabilities interact and affect how commanders plan organize for and conduct joint operations I'm going to introduce you to a concept of a strategic environment and what I mean by that is it is an environment that is distinguished by a technology or a composite of technologies that can independently maintain or alter the international distribution of power and there are three of them conventional nuclear and cyber and they each have their own distinct security logic the conventional strategic environment is one probably we're most familiar with and it reflects the shifting range of offense defense advantage that flows from the underlying conventional weapons technologies and states organized to fight and protect which means leveraging those capabilities as well as non-military capabilities the security in the conventional strategic environment relies on the logic of brute force basically it's fighting and winning wars that is what the defense department does we fight and win the nation's wars through the application of lethal kinetic force to defeat an opponent and this is the strategic objective that is prioritized by combatant commanders that's probably the one we're almost familiar with a second strategic environment is the nuclear strategic environment and the technology underlying that is distinct it is the ultimate offense dominant environment what that means is that defense is not possible so security rests not in your own hands but in the mind of the adversary security in the nuclear strategic environment depends on the logic of coercion the threat to employ lethal force to influence the decision calculus of the opponent to convince them at the cost of aggression significantly outweigh the benefits so in this case I'd say that security in this environment lies not in winning war but in the absence of war of avoiding war I would argue that cyberspace has introduced a third distinct strategic environment that flows from the technologies associated with global network computing it's globally interconnected contact in this environment is constant it is not imminent it is not potential it is not episodic it is continuous it is ongoing the terrain is continuously being constructed capabilities are continuously dynamically regenerating attribution is more difficult anonymity is easier the borders are contested so it's not really clear what sovereignty means in a cyberspace environment if part of your infrastructure lies in another country does that mean that it's their sovereign territory or does your sovereignty go with that infrastructure it is pervasively vulnerable micro vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit or with a determined adversary yet it's macro resilient so it's robust at a macro level and finally there is no sanctuary and there is no operational pause this is the dynamic environment that cyberspace operators are operating every day so how is this different from the conventional and nuclear defense is possible in cyberspace but it's always at risk and that's because there's vulnerability that is inherent in the very fabric of cyberspace the exploitation of these vulnerabilities in continuous campaigns of nonviolent operations below the threshold of armed conflict allows states to gain strategic advantage I would argue to alter the distribution of power without the use of force and without the threat of force or coercion so as we argue in our book my co-authors and I security in this environment relies on the logic of exploitation employing non-lethal force below armed conflict to exploit the vulnerabilities of your opponent for cumulative strategic gain any particular cyber attack doesn't seem to be strategically consequential but the cumulative impact over time of those activities have led to shifts in the distribution of power that in the past really were only achieved by war so I would argue that security in this environment lies in an alternative to war it's a different way to compete with your competitor now states do not need to align their strategies with the logics of the environments they may choose not to they may not be able to and even if they do success might not be assured your opponent might be better at fighting better at competing but if you don't align to the structural imperatives of the strategic environment most certainly you will experience strategic loss okay so you have to understand that environment derive your strategic approach from that you cannot impose an approach on an environment all three of these coexist and U.S. strategists and planners and policy makers must understand how global how great power competition is playing out across all three of these and it's important as I said to understand that your approach has to align to the underlying logic that the technology demands so in the nuclear environment security calls for a strategy of deterrence all right essentially the absence of action preventing war because it's not able to defend against it and it's not possible to win it in the conventional environment security depends on episodic action in militarized crisis and armed conflict being able to respond being able to adapt being able to fight being able to win I would argue that in the cyber environment security depends on continuous action or persistence continuously exploiting the adversary's vulnerabilities while precluding them from exploiting your vulnerabilities getting it wrong matters okay so in you know in I'm trying to think what would be an example what we've seen in the United States is that in the in the emergence of cyberspace we tended to apply the strategies and logic of deterrence which we emerged with the nuclear strategic environment on cyberspace and we believe that we could in essence threaten to respond and deter that behavior in fact that has not succeeded that has failed that's an example of taking a dominant logic which is one that I that I would argue deterrence has become synonymous with security and synonymous with strategy but it really was an approach that was designed for a very specific type of strategic environment we need to understand that and understand how cyberspace is different from that why is this significant all right our adversaries were the first to recognize and the first to act I would argue that U.S. adversaries today seek to level U.S. power without provoking a conventional military response so what are they doing they're employing IP theft at scale to undermine U.S. economic power and competitiveness launching sophisticated information campaigns disinformation and propaganda manipulating social media to erode social cohesion and destabilize U.S. society from within they're interfering in election oh I went too far oh that's my favorite slide here that was my favorite slide but but you have to stay here okay the interfering in elections to weaken the political legitimacy of democratic institutions they're proliferating surveillance technologies to undermine privacy and democratic values and stealing military R&D in order to disrupt supply chains and to degrade military power so this is an incontestable behavioral fact of continuous action in cyberspace to exploit cyber vulnerabilities for advantage that represents an alternative to war and an alternative to coercion that's what our adversaries have been doing that's what they have been doing for the past decade what was the U.S. doing by contrast developing exquisite cyber capabilities and accesses to support an off-the-shelf response in what the 2015 DOD cyber strategy called a doctrine of restraint to apply the least force or action necessary to deal with cyberspace problems and to really keep cyberspace as sort of this exquisite unique technology that would only be employed in the most narrowest of circumstances and that really kind of aligned to the Cold War nuclear approach to deterring strategic action and there is much there is still much talk about cyber deterrence the metric of success was the absence of a significant cyber incident a catastrophic attack or what I might say is an armed attack equivalent and I would argue we have not seen that but that's because our nuclear deterrent works to dissuade adversaries from doing something like attacking the entire western or eastern power grid and taking that down but adversaries don't need to do that they can basically operate well below that threshold and achieve strategic gains key point about this slide is that the Arab Spring in 2011 was a critical turning point because what it did was it demonstrated that the internet could facilitate uprisings and coups that would topple regimes it posed an existential threat to the political power of authoritarian regimes so in 2013 we began to see much more capable cyber adversaries operating against corporate and government systems the scope the frequency the scale was increasing over time and what was interesting is that and I would still say today adversaries were operating continuously and they were experimenting with new disruptive technologies adapting trying to figure it out much in the way in the 1920s navies experimented with air power to try to figure out how it aligned with their strategic objectives and what the technology could provide for them so initially we saw disruptive attacks think of the disruptive attacks in 2012 against our financial sector destructive attacks think the Sony destructive attack where you had a nation state direct its power at a private company creating destruction and we did nothing except a few indictments about five years later and then corrosive attacks essentially the quintessential were the Russian attacks to influence attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election I would argue that U.S. restraint actually emboldened this type of adventurism and many argue we just simply were not deterring we weren't doing it right but I think what they failed to see is what this activity represented it was a recognition by our adversaries of a new strategic environment where gains could be realized cumulatively from continuous activity below the threshold at which deterrence functions now my favorite slide where is it there we go okay so historically to undermine a state's power has required territorially focused armed attacker or physical invasion and much of our conversation today has really focused on that and that that is appropriate I would argue that kinetic war fighting has not lost its efficacy obviously but it's that technology has opened up new means by which states can achieve strategic advantage can alter the global distribution of power in a way that does not require warfare so North Korea has learned that it can circumvent extraordinary international sanctions through cyber exploitation and through the manipulation of financial infrastructure and transactions they funded their nuclear weapons of ballistic missile programs now they have ballistic missiles that can target most locations in the continental U.S. so they figured out a way to leverage cyberspace for their strategic advantage China I would argue is a geo economic strategic competitor who seeks to build and control all aspects of the information environment they conduct IP theft against the U.S. defense industrial base they target investment and predatory acquisition into emerging tech companies they're engaged in data harvesting and ubiquitous surveillance which has been a key factor in the level of overmatch or at least comparability and military capability that they have been able to achieve against the United States they I would argue threaten the logic is if they can erode U.S. power they can degrade it such to the point where kinetic war is a feta comply and I would even argue that China is well down the path of effectively denying the U.S. Navy freedom of navigation and maneuver by leveraging cyberspace so consider the fact that the Belt and Road Initiative and the Digital Silk Road includes owning and operating over 100 ports in 63 countries many of which are key ally ports in France, Belgium, Spain and Italy U.S. warships or support vessels that pull into the ports that are under control by China risking the victim of electronic surveillance penetration or even sabotage and one could argue that those ports could be denied entry by U.S. warships at the request of China China has also leveraged its control over the manufacturer of critical infrastructure such as maritime port cranes to extend their digital surveillance into U.S. ports so American sea power is now the subject of near ubiquitous monitoring and surveillance Russia for its part I would describe as a geostrategic agitator that's employing disruptive campaigns to delegitimize democratic institutions to sow discord within democratic societies and to undermine alliance cohesion so Russia is not focused on circumventing or competing but on continuously stress testing democratic institutions to undermine the essential trust that is required for the U.S. to operate as a great power left uncontested trust in democracy will erode all of this I would argue represents strategic cyber behavior states are employing cyber means that are tailored to their specific strategic objectives tied to their relative power position in the distribution of global power relative to the United States and their approaches differ but they all view cyber as an opportunity to gain advantage without risking conflict or territorial aggression so my final slide here is what is the impact or the consequence for strategic net assessment I would argue that strategic net assessments need to capture dynamics across all three of these strategic environments the traditional focus and we've talked a lot about it today has been what I call the high end right the warfare areas and theaters the impact of IT and new technologies on conventional warfare on brute force and coercion and very interesting on strategic interaction between us and our adversaries in cyberspace what we see it's it's not so much strategic interaction but it's independent cumulative actions that lead to strategic gain so this aligns very comfortably with the depiction of the competition continuum which I'm sure you've all been exposed to that's linear okay and it proceeds from competition to crisis and then to conflict and as we move along that continuum risk increases the greatest risk from strategic loss is going to be the high and right from warfare and therefore everything that we do in competition is weighted against the likelihood that we will lead to escalation in war and it depends on how it postures and prepares us for war I would argue that this slide revises that conception because competition is the yellow band that stretches diagonally from the lower right to the upper left crisis and conflict are in the upper right corners and in least in terms of cyberspace many of the activities that the U.S. has engaged in are in blue and they go from the lower left to the top right the lower far right is what I would call the uncontested quadrant this is where our adversaries are extremely active okay and as you'll see here even though intensity is low strategic risk is very high and this area is significant strategic not because it's a step toward warfare because it's an alternative to warfare so we need to think about how actions in competition can secure victory before ever approaching the war fight so we cannot only focus on winning wars or avoiding them we have to understand the non-conflict space as an alternative to war and our strategic net assessments going forward must be informed by this environment as well thank you thank you Emily for that now Dr. Yashahara thank you John it's a real pleasure for me to be here today I want to thank the naval war college for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you today what I'd like to do is to offer a preview of my forthcoming book Mao's army goes to sea and I'm going to make the case that the combat history of our adversary in our adversary's understanding of that combat history will help us better assess the adversary so the book tells a little known origin story of Chinese sea power it recounts the Chinese navy's founding in the earliest naval engagements and amphibious operations by Mao Zedong's forces to secure China's maritime periphery it details how Mao's lieutenants struggled to establish a new naval service and to fight at sea even as the larger Chinese civil war wound down to its bitter end what I'd like to do is start with a vignette about the humble beginnings of the naval project and I'd like for all of you to engage in a collective imaginary exercise and I'd like to ask all of you to teleport yourselves in space and time back to April of 1949 at the tail end of the Chinese civil war and I'd like you all to imagine that you're a 40-something army officer you've just returned to duty after an extended convolescence from serious injuries suffered in an accident and you've been called back to headquarters to accept what you think will be a command position to lead units in an upcoming campaign that will be crucial to the overall war effort you've been itching to get back into action after such a long absence you meet your superior who's basically the theater commander and your superior springs a surprise on you instead of taking operational command of a major unit you're going to set up shop to establish a navy out of thin air you're shocked and you politely push back you say I'm not ready for this task I don't have the technical background I don't have any naval knowledge I can't even swim that was literally the answer that was given the superior responds that you've actually been chosen for your organizational skills and more importantly the supreme leader up there Mao had already blessed the appointment so you have no choice but to accept but as you're walking out of the office you realize that you have no headquarters no staff no budget no ships and you know that you're going to have to either borrow or steal from the field army that you're attached to oh and by the way your task is to get this navy ready in shape to conduct a major sea crossing to seize an island garrison a hundred miles offshore Taiwan that was essentially the situation that Zhang Aiping considered the earliest founding member of the Chinese navy faced in April of 1949 and when I read accounts of that encounter I have to say I really felt for the guy you know this is a very bad situation and I think this is one of the themes of of the book which is how do you start something brand new under crushing resource constraints now with that vignette let me circle back to sort of why this book is relevant to this conference the premise of the book is this a newly established organization's formative experiences frequently leave a lasting mark on its values and outlook the moment of creation if you will in the circumstances surrounding that moment can impart enduring lessons deeply held beliefs habits of thought that define an institution's identity and that institutional identity in turn can find expression invisible preferences and patterns of behavior that can be traced to this very day so what I'm arguing in this book is that understanding the Chinese navy's own moment of creation can help us better understand the present and future of Chinese sea power so I would ask you to you know think about your own services founding history and mythologies right and how those how that founding history and how that mythology continues to influence your service to this very day so let me very quickly summarize the story which has two parallel narratives the first is the institutional founding of the navy and the second are the series of operations at sea so the story begins in April of 1949 six months before Mao climbs up to Tiananmen to declare the establishment of the People's Republic that was when Chinese communist forces crossed the Yangtze River the last major obstacle to the conquest of mainland China and as the People's Liberation Army the PLA swept to victory across South China amid collapsing nationalist resistance Mao's army essentially ran into the long coastline that faced the east and south China seas after reaching the seas they found that they had exchanged essentially one set of problems on land for another kind for a radically different kind and that was the nationalist threat at sea to dislodge the nationalist defenders dug in on these islands some of them no more than a few miles offshore communist forces had to learn to operate in an entirely new environment over the course of 18 months from April of 49 to October of 1950 the period covered in my book Mao subordinates scrambled to stand up a new navy from scratch while launching improvised amphibious operations to drive the nationalist from offshore islands and ultimately from Taiwan I'm obviously biased to me it's a pretty remarkable story what we're looking at is a revolutionary agrarian based army that's a complete stranger to seapower that had to adapt to radically new circumstances lifelong army officers had to have a crash course on nautical affairs while combat hardened soldiers many of whom who had never even seen the oceans had to retrain for sea crossings and beach landings Mao and his senior army commanders had to puzzle through the unique requirements of building a new navy and they learned that the buildup is not just about things material things it's also about building up human capital the PLA moreover confronted an adversary that still commanded the air and commanded the sea while communist forces had no navy and no air forces speak of and yet in less than two years Mao and his commanders knocked some significant successes even as they suffered one of the most disastrous defeats in the civil war so let me first start with the institution process the establishment of the east china regional navy the predecessor to the eastern theater navy that we know today was basically the institutional laboratory for constructing the national navy what we now know as the people's liberation army navy the plan in fact the founding navy of the east china navy on april 21 1949 is the founding day for the chinese navy itself so to go to sea the communists had to build a makeshift navy they recruited interestingly enough from former nationalist officers and sailors most of whom had surrendered defected or had gone into hiding the communists used amnesty to bring senior leaders out of hiding and then they brought the senior leaders into leadership and advisory positions pretty remarkable given the the chasm in sort of in their beliefs about you know the nationalist being ideologically incorrect the communists also drew heavily from the civilian sector including its fishermen merchant men and their boats in fact they retrofitted army weaponry on civilian vessels as stopgap measures by the fall of 1950 the chinese navy had developed a long-term build-up plan but the korean war and Mao's decision to intervene in that conflict changed Beijing's priorities and basically the naval program was curtailed substantially now running parallel to the chinese navy's institutional build-up were a series of amphibious operations by Mao's forces to capture various offshore islands captured by occupy by the nationalists the PLA conducted a remarkably diverse set of island seizing campaigns the objectives the scale of the landings the physical terrain varied widely and the strategic consequences of those battles were equally diverse in fact i would argue that this was arguably the most combat intensive period in the chinese navy's history so we must in my view understand this history to understand the chinese views of their sort of operational style if you will the field armies that had conquered large swaths in the mainland launched these cross-sea landings along china southeastern and southern coast the third field army was responsible for the islands across from zhejiang and fujian while the fourth field army was responsible for taking islands off of guandong now interestingly enough the field armies depended on local fishermen and their junks to conduct their major sea crossings they sometimes had to scrounge for boats and boatmen but interestingly enough in in this case they brought into play their mass mobilization skills that they had perfected during the civil war so let me give you two two quick battles in october of 1949 the third field army failed abysmally to seize jingmen a small island garrison just off the coast of fujian this disaster derailed mao's original invasion plans against taiwan marking the beginning of the cross-strait stalemate that persists to this day so they look at so when they look at jingmen they think of the division that continues to this very day the calamitous campaign that saw three three regiments numbering about 9 000 troops completely wiped out within days deeply shook mao in the high command the defeat awakened the communists to the unforgiving realities of naval combat and amphibious operations the jingmen catastrophe also served as a cautionary tale from which other theater commanders would draw important lessons and in fact that operation resonates deeply to this day it is a classic case study in the PLA's historiography and professional military professional military education so if we are to learn what the what the PLA is learning we have to understand this past and chinese scholars and strategists continue to argue over the causes of that defeat and its implications for a future war against taiwan very very of course timely in early 1950 the fourth fuel army launched the PLA's first large-scale amphibious operation against hainan an island comparable in size to taiwan or in u.s. terms comparable in size to mariland in the assault against hainan the communists landed some 45 000 troops in one go making the campaign one of the largest in post-war history before the main assault the field army smuggled troops across the strait separating the mainland and hainan in a series of clandestine transits these troops which numbered about 8 000 linked up with local insurgents to harass and tie down nationalist defenders i thought this was pretty creative and in fact it turned out to be pretty effective and to fast forward to today think about PLA fifth column forces operating in taiwan so there is in fact a tradition of doing these kinds of things now before i turn to the relevance of the study to policymakers and strategists i'd like to say a few words about the book's contribution to the field i think the book serves as a corrective to the prevailing conventional wisdom that the chinese communists were basically automatons who borrowed unthinkingly from the soviets on all naval affairs i show in the book that the communists had far more agency and tailored their strategies based on their own fine traditions and china's unique local circumstances for years western observers contended that the chinese navy in its infancy was merely an army disguised as a naval service they deprecated the role of founding leaders depicting them as merely ground pounders selected for their loyalty to mao and to the party this study shows that that portrayal is way too sweeping mao's army went to sea through the crucible of combat gained harm during experiences developed its own doctrine and applied the PLA's unique operational style to the maritime domain so it climbed a steep learning curve during a remarkably productive successful period so what are some of the legacies and implications for today well first of all these past island campaigns continue to cast a shadow over the PLA's thinking about a possible war against taiwan and i think it's important to note that they have their own history to study and that we need to understand that history the PLA clearly wishes to avoid repeating the jingmen fiasco even as it hopes to reprise the success at hainan the chinese writings identify material readiness mass and overwhelming firepower as particularly important ingredients for an effective campaign against taiwan they also emphasize the importance of intelligence and assessment including realistic appraisals of the adversary that avoid underestimating the enemy as a precondition for success i think another legacy is the continuity in the civil military nexus i show in the report that the chinese have a very high degree of comfort in conscripting and integrating civilian assets for military purposes we can see those parallels today to the PLA's comfort in the use of dual-use facilities access along the indian ocean latoros in order to support china's global operations or as very well documented by publications through cmsi the PLA's pension or a comfort in using civilian transports to to support amphibious operations against taiwan the third is the continuity in values and ethos i believe that these first 18 months of the founding of the chinese navy really formed some core beliefs after all they beat the enemy against the odds in that period and so here are some sort of core beliefs and values first fighting and winning from a position of relative weakness that they believe that they can still pull this off the importance of the moral factor the importance of the fighting spirit over material things the importance of nimbleness the importance of the offensive spirit the importance of surprise and deception and the small ship ethos that had defined chinese force structure for decades and so the question going forward is how will and how well will these values translate as china becomes a global military power so in conclusion china's earliest performance at sea must be judged against the enormous challenges that the communists face and the crushing resource constraints on the PLA and by those standards the PLA itself certainly believes that it has much that it can be proud of from that history and it looks to this past to inform its thinking in other words this is a confident organization that believes that it has a past successes that it can draw from and i think we would do well to understand this past as we assess the coming chinese naval challenge thank you thank you toshi for that presentation we have time now to take questions and have discussion with the audience so please your questions and comments yes right there good morning and thank you to all three panelists for meeting today my question is for dr freedberg the seno talked about a three phase approach to force it out in structure to take on the chinese threat how would you respond to the argument that this three phase approach is an example of a strategic deficit a kind of a reverse engineered strategy that we're forced to pursue because we kind of are time late and coming to this realization that China is a threat yeah go ahead i agree with that i think as i said at the beginning we're in a hole we see that in various domains including the naval domain and the reason for that is we were not doing enough to stay ahead of where china was going and that was evident if we had been paying more attention as early as 20 25 years ago so now we're in this position of scrambling i thought where you were going with this question was slightly different i'll pose it i don't have a good answer to it are we focusing too much on a longer term threat when in fact we face a much shorter term threat and are we devoting our resources appropriately to dealing with that threat i think that's the problem we have now again in part because we weren't paying enough attention if i could just one illustration of this in 2001 the second qer actually contained a pretty lengthy discussion of the anti-access problem or what came to be referred to the anti as the anti-access problem and identified a number of lines of efforts that would have to be pursued in order to address it that document was scheduled to come out right around September 11th it was pulled back was altered to include references to terrorism which hadn't been there before this discussion of the of the anti-access challenge remained but as i indicated the focus of the department shifted and the services shifted dramatically towards other kinds of conflict one never knows but i think if not for 9 11 donald rumsfeld came back to the defense department because he thought he was going to transform it by which i think he meant skipping over a generation of systems that were in the pipeline coming out of the end of the cold war in order to stay ahead of where china was headed but he wasn't able to do that and we are where we are other questions and comments right down here in front morning lieutenant casady foreign area officer my question is for dr goldman in reference to china's supply line control you mentioned cranes but also their near preeminent control of shipping and container production what do you see the u.s response to that being i assume it's not a government-led like u.s acquisition of in similar proportion to china and more a u.s encouragement of the private sector but how do you see that progressing yeah thank you so you touched on a really important point the u.s government is not going to solve all these problems themselves it's really going to require the private sector but i think you know kind of sort of in line with what erin is saying first is really recognizing the problem and i just don't see enough i think that and this was actually i think andy one of your slides kind of raised this it's looks at sort of the whole cyber challenge and say well this is not decisive in warfare right so it's not that important but that's just like not the right way i don't think to look to look at it because as we see it's really this question of leveling power it's the idea that you know we in the united states as well tend to look at information as a better way to make decisions and we want to get more information china views it as a strategic resource to harvest as much as possible and they are doing that on a massive scale and using that to apply pressure and to exploit in a whole variety of ways so yes i think that you know that there is going to have to be what i would say like a whole of nation plus right because it's going to require our allies as well but i think the first thing is is and i and i think that with the i think that sort of we get this shift between like a few years ago we recognized this whole idea of strategic competition was important in its own right now it's really kind of moved back toward the war fighting right and the do d needs to figure out how to understand that that both of these things are strategically consequential so i would go back to the recognition of the problem first and it's really an uphill battle trying to raise awareness let alone action because these things don't fit within the processes of the department very well other questions and comments yes right there a question for dr freeberg doctor uh is the leader of china going to the last leader in in life leader for life for life yeah uh well we don't know yet uh we may know a little more this fall after the party congress uh as you are aware he's effectively done away with some rather loose norms that had grown up after mal of chairman of the party and president of the state not serving more than two five-year terms and the question is whether he will do that again with respect to the really important position which is general secretary's head of the party everyone i know who knows more about chinese politics than i do expects that that will happen then the question is well how long does that go on one of the things that the the scholars of totalitarianism used to say during the cold war was that such systems had a particular problem in passing off power from one leader to the next and the belief regarding china among the china scholars in recent years has been that china had solved that problem they had sort of routinized this process and they had the means to enable a peaceful transition of of power i don't know whether that's really true anymore Xi Jinping may be in a position where he will be afraid to retire because he's made a lot of enemies and executed a lot of people and thrown a lot of people in jail he doesn't seem to have done anything to cultivate an obvious successor which is often what dictators do because they don't want someone waiting in the wings so he may have created for himself this or recreated this problem that people thought china no longer faced what that probably means is the next transition will be one way or another will be a duel to the death among the competitors and it could be quite destabilizing i don't know when that's going to come if i could add that you know there's a really interesting debate about Xi's role in ccp politics and i think there there are some who would argue that Xi is the problem and i think that deprecates the role of not only the ccp but the continuity of the ccp's policy certainly since the dung period and so to to think that if we got rid of Xi that somehow all of these problems would go away i think is a false choice that we have to really understand that this is a um a a a ccp driven strategy that is a great deal of continuity um and and that simply by getting rid of one person will not resolve the underlying challenge that ccp represents to the united states and to its allies i i really want to agree with that i think it's extremely important because people who um denied this the evidence of this problem uh for a while then transitioned to saying it's all the fault of one man of Xi Jinping everything was headed in a pretty good direction and then this guy came from out of nowhere and yanked the wheel sharply in the wrong direction and the implication of that is of course if we just sort of wait him out uh there will be somebody waiting in the wings who will take things in a different direction i think that's completely false uh and that in fact the major changes in chinese policy some of which i referred to uh towards a more aggressive posture across all domains uh begin to emerge under hujintao and i think Xi Jinping was a consensus candidate who was chosen because it was believed that he had answers to the emerging strategic challenges that china faced other questions and comments yes right up here ashley hey thanks john um so on that note is is there an alternative to the ccp or do we need to develop a strategy that incorporates the ccp from from now until infinity there certainly is no no present alternative to the ccp and the ccp makes it its first order of business to ensure that that is the case uh so there are no no challengers no rivals no no threats i guess and i think maybe this is where you're going with your question um can we live comfortably in a world where a powerful china continues to be ruled by the party that now rules it with the outlook that it has uh i think the answer to that is no uh now that doesn't mean we can solve the problem by getting rid of this regime we don't have the capacity to do it i think we're going to have to deal with it i think the belief of people in this country and elsewhere in the west as i mentioned going back a decade two and three decades was this was a transitory problem because the party was going to be transformed and then replaced well now we have to reckon with the fact that we're dealing with this powerful state that has this very hostile regime with a very dark view of the world and of us um and that has implications for our strategy maybe that's another thing to discuss but just the final point um what follows from that and in my view what follows from that is that the long-term goal of our strategy has to be to paraphrase george kennan in the long telegram in 1947 talking about the soya union uh we have to await the gradual mellowing or eventual breakup of ccp power that doesn't mean that we have active means of doing that or we're pursuing a policy of regime change but i think we have to be candid about that although that's i can say that i have no responsibilities and no one can hold me to account uh i don't expect that to appear in a u.s government document um you know i think one of the things about this competition is that we do need to bring the ideological component of the competition center stage uh that the the trends in my view have been going in the right direction since the trump administration when senior officials began to call the regime out as the chinese communist party it's a good reminder to everybody who's actually in power it's not uh the president of china but it's the general secretary of the ccp that's running things uh and it's the secretary general of the ccp who's also happens to be the chairman of the central military commission that will be making critical decisions on war and peace we ought to remember again that the ccp is very much still a marxist leninist Maoist regime and it organizes its worldview around core beliefs that are deeply embedded and through that ideological lens if you read their you know authoritative writings uh the ccp sees the united states and its allies in the liberal order as a threat as an existential threat as an enemy not because of what we do per se but it's also who we are that our very existence the beliefs that we hold represents an existential threat to the regime so i think there's a i think we ought to you know if we have that recognition in mind then i think we uh could at least sort of guide our policy in terms of thinking about how there's a real limit to reassurance no matter how much we profess that you know we do you know we mean no harm to the regime they will always be convinced right that the west led by the united states represents an ideological existential threat i think putting it in that ideological context will help us um and and help our competitive position other questions or comments yes right there i was just wondering what effect did the russian invasion on the ukraine have on china's strategic calculus vis-a-vis taiwan would you say yeah i um i recently co-wrote an article about uh precisely this this question you know i think there was for a time at least that because of russian failures that people assume therefore that this would be a kind of a chastening moment for the pla and for the ccp that this is after all a very hard thing and so therefore it might actually further uh enhance deterrence and dissuade the pla from acting uh we took a very different approach we actually believe that in in in looking at the mistakes that the russians have committed particularly uh russia's piecemeal approach initially uh that it would actually convince this the ccp in the pla to double down on its existing strategy which calls for essentially an overwhelming force to dislocate the adversary so you know don't hold anything back i think would be one of the key lessons another lesson is they observe very closely putin's nuclear threats and how the west quickly back down in different symbolic ways that might encourage for example the the pla to double down on its nuclear signaling and in fact if you read their nuclear doctrine they talk about the importance of the use of nuclear weapons as a form of theater right demonstrations of force in order to demonstrate your your resolve in order to get the adversary to back down and so it's it's possible that the pla might actually learn that it's better to rattle the nuclear saber even much earlier than we expect in order to knock us off balance another element is uh um blockade uh ukraine of course is a very different theater because it's surrounded by land borders resupply is far easier taiwan of course is an island and so that might encourage the pla to also double down on an effective blockade strategy that would prevent resupply to the island to basically starve out the island from supplies as quickly as possible and then the the the last element is um zelensky i think the pla and the ccp clearly learned that you don't want someone charismatic somebody who can galvanize both domestic and international public opinion to uh to your side that might encourage the pla to double down on an existing doctrine of decapitation that chinese doctrine frequently talk about the need to go after important political leaders and also important political symbolic areas and sites in order to uh you know cut off the head um at the um at the adversary so again if you combine all those three elements early nuclear saber rattling earlier blockade efforts than expected and a very quick uh decapitation effort if those three things were to happen simultaneously and and and that it takes place much earlier than we anticipate how might we be able to respond i think that's a potential challenge the other thing that i would add to that is uh at the level of uh economic sanctions there's a tendency always i think in our system maybe this is the culture of hot takes you know for people to reach these conclusions very quickly but the jury is out so there's been a certain amount of self congratulation about the speed with which the western countries imposed economic sanctions on russia and it was impressive but uh sitting in beijing and looking at that i think you you might draw some different conclusions first of all um it's not clear that the western powers will stay united and continue to impose these sanctions especially as the costs that they impose on their own populations rise secondly the sanctions even as they are now are by no means complete uh for similar reasons the western west european countries particularly the germans continue to import a good deal of energy from russia because again they don't want to force their population to wear two sweaters uh over the over the winter so they're still pumping billions of dollars into putin's war machine um from a chinese perspective i i suspect looking at this uh one might be drawn to the conclusion that russia uh was in a far weaker position than china is today because it really only had one thing or one category of things on which the western countries depended namely these natural resources whereas china is so deeply embedded in uh supply chains for the production of all kinds of goods uh that the ccp might suspect that the western powers would hesitate to impose sanctions on them even if they were to do what tochi describes to taiwan and their past experience with this i i'm afraid probably reinforces that perception when they think back to what happened after tian and men yes there was denunciation china was isolated the western powers imposed sanctions but that didn't last very long uh 18 months two years uh and china was back back in and back to business and of course in those days their economy was much smaller and they were much less important to us than they are today so i would hesitate in drawing any overly optimistic conclusions about the lessons that the ccp leadership is drawing from the war in ukraine uh we have time for one more uh question or comment uh i'm seeing someone point where wherever stand up and ask the question oh i see now thank you good afternoon my name is christ joseph and i work at us cybercom my question is for all the panelists but in response to the last question and the response earlier from uh dr freeberg from the gentleman's question are we underestimating china the both the threat and the problem in the near term too much given that the chinese have certain goals as you mentioned particularly on taiwan but not including including but not limited taiwan but also the regime seems to think that there may be or at least the there's the appearance that the regime wants to make these goals but there could be threats that sort of the gene not making those goals in the long term or be more difficult to achieve those goals given the environment that we're presented with in a post-covid-19 pandemic and post-ukranian conflict dynamic thank you short term danger yes i think i think there is um in part ironically because we are beginning to respond more vigorously to what china has been doing for quite a long time and that's one of the the problems unfortunately with having waited so long to respond uh we may create a situation in which from the ccp's perspective a window is beginning to close so instead of staying well ahead of them we're now running to catch up and strengthen our position so i i do worry about that uh there's a good reason to be concerned about that given the momentum and the scope of china's military buildup that said um it does seem to me that contemplating the initiation of a war over taiwan with all of the risks that would be associated with that would be an enormous role of the dice uh no matter how you slice it no matter how the ccp calculates their assesses the balance of power in the theater uh the consequences could well be enormous and and very damaging uh therefore my my instinct is to say the likelihood of their doing that except in a situation where somehow they feel they're faced with the prospective immediate losses is pretty low but then again i probably would have said that about putin invading all of ukraine yeah you know i mean i think one of the things to think about is you know because of all of the cost and risks uh you know how how does the ccp in the pla plan to win without fighting you know i think it's about you know many of china's actions in the south pacific recently and within the western pacific is designed to increase cost and risks to such an extent uh that we might be deterred from uh intervening in the first place so how does the trend lines uh going forward actually further increase their ability to deter us and dissuade us from from acting uh it is my unenviable duty to play the heavy and bring an end uh to this discussion first i want to thank you all in the audience for the wonderful comments and questions that you gave to our panelists and then second will you join me uh in giving a round of applause to our panelists who did an outstanding job okay thank you john and the panel uh so we adjourn for today and back in the seats tomorrow at 0 8 30 thank you