 Thank Rolls-Royce International, which is so kind as to put together these events for us and help you to enjoy any coffee and other beverages you've had today. My name is Kathleen Hicks. I direct the International Security Program here at CSIS. And I have the distinct pleasure today of welcoming the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Christine Wormuth. Ms. Wormuth was confirmed as the Undersecretary about a year ago, June 19, 2014, and it's been quite a year from, I think everyone realizes, from Syria and Iraq, to Russia, to China, and right back to Afghanistan, where we've been for some time under Secretary Wormuth has been deeply engaged in all the major policy issues affecting the Department of Defense and surely the nation as a whole. Ms. Wormuth has previously served in a variety of positions in government to include at the National Security Staff, elsewhere in the Defense Department. And she is an alumnus of CSIS, so we're particularly pleased to have her back here today. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Ms. Wormuth. Okay. Can people hear me? So it's very nice to be back. And I think this is the second time since the new building came into existence that I've been here at CSIS, and I always marvel at what a terrific new facility this is. It's not all that new to CSIS. It's definitely new to me, and you all are very lucky to have such a super facility to do all the great things that CSIS does here. As Kath said, this is obviously an incredibly difficult security environment that we're facing, and some have said that it's even perhaps the most challenging security environment that the United States has faced in the last couple of decades. We have a lot of balls in the air. We are rebalancing to Asia. We are working to facilitate the rise of China while we're managing some of the competitive aspects of our relationship with China. We're continuing to build partner capacity in places like the Western Hemisphere and Africa. In Africa, there's a lot of focus in particular on counterterrorism efforts. We are working in Europe to harden our NATO allies and our partners against Russia's efforts to potentially coerce its neighbors. We're doing all of this while the state system in the Middle East seems to be collapsing to a significant degree. So there is a lot on the plate of the national security community. As some of you probably know, Secretary Carter, who's probably, I think, been at the department, I think now for about five months, has been very actively engaged in the national security debates, and he's made a couple of major trips this spring. He went out to Asia in conjunction with the Shangri-La Dialogue, and then more recently he was in Europe to participate in the NATO Defense Ministerial that we just had as well as to visit a handful of other countries, and he will be continuing to go to places around the world so that he can engage personally in a lot of the national security challenges that we're grappling with here in Washington. But I mentioned his trips because I think he's done a very good job of putting into context what we're trying to do in Asia and Europe in particular, and if you haven't had the opportunity, I would commend to you the speeches that he's given at places like the Shangri-La Dialogue or in Berlin when he was in Europe just recently, because I think he really has done a good job of framing how we're thinking about some of the major issues on our plate. And while I would say Russia and China represent very much some of the longer-term challenges that we're facing and some of the longer-term decision points that we're going to need to be thinking about, there's also no dearth of shorter-term or immediate crises that we're facing. And as the Under Secretary of Policy, I spend a lot of time trying to balance longer-term issues with near-term issues, and I've just come back from two trips back to back, one to Afghanistan and Jordan and then another to the Middle East. So I thought I would take the opportunity today to try to talk a little bit about what we're doing in Afghanistan and what we're doing in the counter-ISIL campaign and to share some of the observations that I had coming back from those two trips before I open up the floor to questions and to having a bit of a dialogue with Dr. Hicks. So I spent the last week in June primarily in Afghanistan. It was a really good trip and it was good, among other things, to be able to go out and see not just what the U.S. and Coalition personnel are doing as part of Operation Resolute Support, but also to see what the Afghan National Security Forces are doing. And they're really making a lot of progress in what you can see as a difficult environment with just today the attack outside of Camp Chapman in coast Afghanistan. So it's obviously a pretty challenging environment in which the ANSF is operating. I wanted to talk a little bit about the threat picture. While we don't see the Taliban at this point as presenting an existential threat to the Afghan government, it is clearly very much testing the Afghan security forces as the coalition draws down its footprint. And they have a particular emphasis on trying to launch high profile attacks, like the one we saw on coast, that are both aimed at harming innocent civilians and also, frankly, trying to undermine the credibility of the government and Kabul. But Afghanistan isn't just facing, unfortunately, the threat of the Taliban. It's also facing threats from al-Qaeda, from the Haqqani network, which we spend a lot of time talking to the Afghans and others about, as well as a variety of other extremist groups to include a branch of ISIL in Afghanistan. And I don't want to overplay that particular development, but it is something that's very much on our radar screen. This year's fighting season has proved to be a pretty tough one, which we predicted. Some estimates have put the casualty rates this year at 60 percent higher than what they were last year. And I heard a lot about that when I was in Afghanistan, as you might imagine, those high casualty rates are very much on the minds of President Ghani, CEO Abdullah, as well as the leaders of the Afghan security forces. And those casualty rates are up for a combination of reasons. One is the fact that the Afghan security forces have actually increased their operational tempo. They're out there doing more, taking the fight to the enemy. Our coalition footprint is obviously coming down, and the Taliban has launched a pretty aggressive insurgency. A few of the commanders that I talked to out there made the observation that the whole concept of a fighting season may not really have the same meaning that it used to, you know, that the periods of fighting are really not constrained to a point on the calendar as much as they once were. But a lot of the casualties that the Afghan security forces are taking happens when the Taliban goes after remote sort of sparsely manned checkpoints. And a lot of times these checkpoints are manned either by the Afghan national police or the Afghan local police. So part of what we're doing is thinking about how to help them optimize their own force footprint so that they are not as vulnerable to some of those attacks on checkpoints. And we've actually seen that when the ANSF goes on the offensive, as they did earlier this spring in the Upper Sangin Valley or along the Zabel Ghazni seam, when they go on the offensive against the Taliban, they actually have much lower casualty rates. So part of what we're doing with the ANSF is working to advise and assist them and help them plan these more complex operations so that they can take the fight to the Taliban. And the news isn't all bad, even as the casualty rates for the ANSF have gone up, the casualty rates for the Taliban has very much gone up as well. They are definitely taking more hits than they did last year. They weren't able to achieve some of their strategic and operational goals that they outlined for 2014. And while they're claiming that they are fighting foreigners in Afghanistan, this claim is really starting to ring hollow as the Afghan security forces themselves are doing more and taking more responsibility for security in Afghanistan and as the actual coalition footprint gets smaller. And at the same time, another factor that's putting the pressure on the Taliban is the fact that Pakistan has undertaken its own counterterrorism campaign, which is causing the Taliban to not have the same sense of security in the sanctuaries that they used to have. And then finally, as I mentioned, the appearance of ISIL in Afghanistan is actually starting to put a little bit of pressure on the Taliban. ISIL in the Khorasan, which is what they've called themselves, has actually come out and is starting to actively question whether Mullah Omar is even alive. So they're essentially sort of questioning the legitimacy of the Taliban and are actively fighting with the Taliban in places like Nangarhar. So that's something that we're watching carefully. And against that whole backdrop and against that security environment, the President has taken what we would call a time-phased approach to looking at progress in Afghanistan. And by putting out a timeline, which is bringing our footprint in Afghanistan down to a normalized security, or excuse me, a normalized embassy footprint by the end of 2016, by putting out that time-phased approach and putting some timelines in place, we are focusing the security forces on what they need to do. And that's actually, I think, resulted in a lot of progress in the last year and has very much given us a sense of a roadmap of what we need to do in the year and a half that we have left. But we aren't just sort of mechanistically following marks on a calendar. We are looking very much at the progress that's happening in Afghanistan. One of the reasons that I went out there myself was to take a look at what's happening. And in particular, I wanted to look at some of the critical enabler gaps that the Afghan security forces have because we do want to assess how they're doing and where we think they're going to be over the next 18 months. And reflective of the fact that we're trying to assess what kind of progress we're making and where we may need to make adjustments, in March the President decided to go ahead and maintain the level of U.S. troops at about 9,800. We're a little bit over right now for some complicated reasons having to do with sort of NATO force levels. But essentially, he decided to extend that footprint of almost 10,000 U.S. troops to the end of 2015. And he did that because the President wanted to help President Ghani and CEO Abdullah get through this very critical first fighting season of the National Unity Government. And when I was in Afghanistan, I actually had the opportunity to talk to both President Ghani and Dr. Abdullah. And it's very clear to me from those conversations and from also seeing them when they were here for the Camp David Summit in March that they are trying very, very hard in a difficult environment to tackle a whole range of problems, not just taking the fight to the Taliban, working to reform the security ministries, working to help develop the capabilities of the NSF. But they're also looking at what they need to do for broader political and economic reforms, which are going to be critical for helping Afghanistan really be able to stand on its own two feet. As we go forward, we're going to be looking in the next year and a half at the strengths and weaknesses of our trained, advised, and assist efforts during the rest of this fighting season so that we can figure out what that path, from where we are now at the 9,800 level, from what that path needs to be to get to the end of 2016, when again we plan to go to a more normalized embassy presence. And in that intervening period, we're going to be working very closely with the Afghan National Army at the core level. We'll be doing ministerial, excuse me, core level advising. We're working very closely with the Afghan special forces and the Afghan special mission wing. I had the opportunity to visit with both of those organizations in Afghanistan and was very impressed with what they're doing. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of time to develop an air force, much less sort of a special operations wing. And they're making a lot of good progress there. And I also frankly was impressed and I've seen a whole number of different foreign militaries over the years. I was very impressed with the dedication, the enthusiasm and the professionalism of the Afghan soldiers that I saw. It really was striking. Even in the face of these high casualty rates, they are very focused on and committed to the mission that they have. Our plan right now is by the end of 2016, we will draw down to a normal embassy presence in Kabul, which will be about 1,000 to 1,500 U.S. personnel. And a big part of what that footprint will do is focus on security assistance development with the Afghans. We will still be overseeing the very large contribution that we make financially to the Afghan security forces. We're going to need to have a number of people to provide appropriate oversight of that function. But we're also going to be working with the Afghans at the ministerial level, particularly with the MOD and the Ministry of Interior, to try to help them develop their capabilities over the longer term to be able to sustain and operate the whole panoply of Afghan security forces. And then last but not least on the Afghan side before I turn to our counter-ISIL campaign, I just wanted to mention another important part, obviously, of what we're doing with the Afghans is the counterterrorism fight, and we have very much an interest in that as much as the Afghans do. And when President Ghani came to visit here in March, he and President Obama agreed to continue a dialogue on what our joint counterterrorism objectives should be, including the development of a joint counterterrorism strategy, both until the end of 2016, but also looking to what comes after 2016. We're very much in the middle of that dialogue with the Afghans right now. It's a very active discussion. The NSC is very involved in that. We in DOD are very involved in that. And as we proceed through that process, we're very mindful of the fact that the government in Afghanistan is very clear about wanting to be a counterterrorism partner with the United States for the long term. So that's very prominent in our minds. Let me turn from Afghanistan to what we're trying to do. You know, Afghanistan, in my view, doesn't get in the headlines as much, although I tried to underscore to the U.S. folks that I saw there how important what they're doing is and how important that mission is. The counter-ISIL campaign, obviously, is in the headlines almost every day. Whether it's looking at what we're doing in Iraq, to looking at what we're doing in Syria, to looking at what's happening with ISIL in Egypt, in Libya, and in other places as sort of various groups rebrand themselves and sort of set up franchises. I wanted to try to take the opportunity here to talk a little bit about the whole campaign that we have to try to combat ISIL. The military piece of that campaign tends to get the most attention, but it's very important, and I think to underscore, that we have a whole of government approach to trying to combat ISIL. It's really much more than just the military campaign. And ultimately, we won't be able to have a lasting defeat against ISIL if we don't leverage all of the different parts of the U.S. government, but also coalition governments around the world to try to bring the fight to ISIL in terms of countering its financing, in terms of defeating its messaging, in terms of stopping the flows of foreign fighters that are coming from countries all around the world. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about that. There are nine lines of effort in this strategy. The first one is probably the most important one and one of the hardest ones, and that is the effort to try to help the Iraqi government in particular develop an inclusive, multi-sectarian approach to governance. This is led by the State Department, but frankly, really almost everyone from President Obama to the Vice President to Secretary Carter to Secretary Kerry to John Allen, who's the special envoy for the coalition, to our ambassador in Iraq, everyone is very engaged at multiple levels with the Iraqi government and Baghdad to try to help them do everything they can to have a more inclusive approach compared to what we saw with the former prime minister, for example. And I think as you might know, the political environment in Iraq is complicated to say the least, and Prime Minister Badi has an incredibly difficult job trying to navigate that domestic landscape, his domestic political landscape, but also the international landscape that he's facing. So we're trying to work very closely with him to help him navigate that landscape astutely. The next two lines of effort are the ones that DOD is responsible for, and first it's denying ISIL safe haven in Iraq and Syria. This is essentially our air strikes, air campaign with the coalition, but we are obviously also very engaged in the third line of effort, which is building partner capacity on the ground in Iraq and Syria. And we have a number of training sites set up in Iraq in particular. That line of effort is facing some challenges, and I'll talk about that in a moment, but those two lines of effort are what we're focused on in DOD. The rest of the government, the National Counterterrorism Center is focused on enhancing intelligence collection against ISIL, obviously intelligence enables not just our military campaign, but what we're trying to do on countering their financing and foreign fighter flows. The fifth line of effort is going after ISIL's financing, and that is co-led by Treasury and the State Department. The sixth and seventh line of effort are both co-led by State and the National Counterterrorism Center, and those are focused on countering ISIL's message. This is trying to combat the incredibly effective social media messaging that they've been able to put forward, and then also disrupting the flow of foreign fighters, which is a very complex effort that in many cases draws on trying to help countries change their laws so that they can tighten up their border security, for example. And then the eighth line of effort is providing humanitarian support for all of the populations affected by ISIL and Iraq and Syria that's led by State and AID. And last but not least, the ninth line of effort is focused on protecting the United States against the threat posed by ISIL. So this is essentially focused on disrupting terrorist attacks, and this is led by the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and the Department of Justice. And this doesn't get as much attention and it's becoming increasingly challenging. I'm sure you've heard FBI Director Comey, probably Secretary Johnson from DHS, talk about the number of Americans who we believe have gone to Syria in particular to fight. And then there's the very difficult challenge of what I would call sort of the lone wolf attacks. So individuals in the United States who may have no previous sort of criminal record or no reason to be on the radar screens of our intelligence or law enforcement agencies, but who become motivated by, again, this very unfortunately attractive narrative that ISIL has out on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, all the other apps that I really don't know anything about except for through my daughters. But those are very effective and have galvanized individual attackers and that's a very difficult challenge for law enforcement, but it's something that we're very focused on. So that's kind of the whole campaign. And I just think it's worth laying that out there because, again, so much of the focus above the fold in the newspapers tends to be how many airstrikes have there been, what happened in Ramadi, what's gonna happen in Tikrit, when are you guys gonna go take back Mosul? And it's really much more than that and needs to be much more than that. So having said that, let me fall back to what DOD is doing and talk to you about what we're gonna do about Ramadi and what we're gonna do about Mosul. In all seriousness, just to sort of lay out some of the highlights of what DOD has been doing in its lines of effort, we and the coalition have launched more than 5,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. This campaign has definitely produced some tactical results. We have limited ISIL's freedom of movement. We have constrained its ability to reinforce its fighters and its supply lines and we've degraded its command and control. But obviously an air campaign on its own is not going to defeat ISIL. We need to have an accompanying ground campaign as well. And we've been working very hard, particularly in Iraq, to sort of get that going. I think everyone is well familiar now with retaking Mosul Dam, with the siege of Kobani, with freeing the Yazidis on Sinjar Mountain. So I wanted to just highlight a more recent development on the ground that people may not have heard of that I think is very important. And that is what the combination of Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces have done recently on the northern border in Syria. These groups together retook the key border town of Talabiad, which was a key supply point for ISIL, where really they were moving in a tremendous amount of materials, particularly materials to build these IEDs that have been such an important part of their campaigns in many operations. So that combination of fighters managed to cut ISIL off, retake that border town, and in so doing put a lot of pressure on Raqqa, which is really ISIL's stronghold in Syria. And events like this I think demonstrate that when we can find credible forces on the ground and pair them with coalition air power and work in a coordinated way, we can actually really put the hurt to ISIL. And that is more and more what we're going to be looking to doing. And enabling forces on the ground really is a central part of our strategy. We have to have local forces who can fight ISIL. If you look at our experience in the region, if we put just U.S. combat troops on the ground as a substitute for local forces, you don't get a lasting result. And that's really a key part of our strategy. And that's what leads to the importance of the third line of effort, which is building capacity of the Iraqi security forces in Iraq to try to fight ISIL. And then also trying to build a program to train opposition fighters in Syria. In Iraq, we have a pretty good program going to build partner capacity. We have about 3,500 American personnel running six different sites in Iraq to train Iraqi security forces. One of the challenges, as you may have heard, Secretary Carter has testified about this and has spoken about this, is that frankly we haven't always gotten as many trainees from the Iraqi population as we would like. The Iraqi government is under a lot of budgetary personnel, or budgetary pressure, excuse me, they're worried in some cases about whether they're going to have the resources to pay fighters. But for a variety of reasons, we haven't always had the throughput coming into the training sites that we want. But we are talking and we are working intensely and closely with the government and Baghdad to try to bring more recruits into those training centers. As of June 30th, we had put about 8,800 Iraqi army soldiers and Peshmerga fighters through the training program. We also trained about 2,000 counterterrorism service personnel, which is really sort of the more elite forces in Iraq. We now have, coming through the pipeline, another 4,000 soldiers, 600 of those are counterterrorism service personnel. So we're starting to see the flows come through a little bit more. And we've talked to Iraqi leaders, both Secretary Carter and I, about how important it is to really see us ramp up the recruits coming into that pipeline. I also just wanted to talk a little bit about another very important part of our building partner capacity effort, and that's bringing Sunni tribal fighters into the fight. It's not enough to just have the Iraqi army as some of you may know, the Iraqi army from a sectarian perspective is overwhelmingly Shia, and we need to have a more balanced approach in the security forces. So a big part of what we're trying to do is engage the Sunni tribes in the fight. And that's one of the reasons that the President authorized another 450 U.S. personnel to go out to Tkotem Air Base in Eastern Anbar to start and advise and assist platform there to try to reach out to Sunni tribes in that region and be able to reach a population that we hadn't been able to reach before. By virtue of what we're doing at Tkotem, the Iraqi government had already brought in 800 Sunni tribal fighters. We have now brought in another 500 who've gone through the training program there, and we have another 500 who are waiting to be trained and equipped. So we are starting to see more Sunni tribal fighters get engaged, and we think that'll be a very important part of the fight. Before wrapping up, I wanted to talk briefly about Syria. In particular, I know even though I was away, I saw the headlines that when Secretary Carter went up to the Hill last week, it was very much in the news that we only have 60 fighters in our train and equip program, which is obviously far fewer than we'd hoped to see at this point in time. And while the program is experiencing some real challenges, I did want to just try and provide a little bit of context for that program that I don't see always getting out there in the public domain. First, I think it's important to understand that we actually stood this program up very, very quickly. We did not get the authority from Congress or the resources from Congress to even conduct this train and equip program until last December. So that was seven months ago. And then in the span of those seven months, we first had to find partner coalition countries who were willing to be part of the program to either provide training sites, which four countries have done, or to provide trainers in the program. We had to get all of the sort of MOUs and MOAs in place for that. We had to actually start construction at a couple of the training sites to make them operational. Then we had to go ahead and find the right people in our military to be able to conduct the training. And then we had to set up a very rigorous recruiting program, first of all. In many cases, we've had to rely heavily on our coalition partners who know these tribal populations in Syria much better than we do. But then we also had to design a screening program that would give us the confidence that we need, that we are not going to be bringing people into this program who are then going to launch attacks against our own personnel. So we've done all of that in seven months, which I think is actually a pretty good effort for given sort of the magnitude of the task. We started bringing our first recruits to the training sites in May. A number of them did not meet our very vigorous screening standards. And I would argue again that that's good. Given what we need these people to do and given the safety of our personnel and given the fact that we're giving these people U.S. equipment, we need to be able to have confidence that we can hold them accountable to use that equipment properly. The fact that many of them didn't get through the screening program I think is actually a testament to how strong the screening program is. We also, a good number of the recruits that we had dropped out, frankly, when they realized that we were serious about having this program focus on fighting ISIL as opposed to fighting the Assad regime. It's much easier, frankly, to find people in Syria who want to fight the regime than who want to fight ISIL. We knew that when we designed this program. So it wasn't ultimately that surprising that a number of people dropped out when they realized that we were serious about fighting ISIL. But given all of that, we now have 7,000 volunteers who have come forward to the program who now fully understand that the point of the program is to combat ISIL. And I think that speaks to the fact that we still have a lot of potential for this program. And when we do put the first class of fighters back on the battlefield in Syria, I think they will actually be our best recruiters because they will have gotten very high quality training, very high quality equipment. And I think if they have confidence that they've gone through a good program, they're going to be able to go out and help us find additional recruits. So while I certainly wish that we had more fighters coming out of this program now, I would say that it is still pretty early in our effort and we need to keep going because frankly, if nothing else, this is the game in town. We have to build a force on the ground in Syria and this train and equip program is the way that the Department of Defense can do that. I also would note I spent more than three hours with our task force out in the region who are responsible for running this program, for recruiting the trainees, for administering the trainee program. And we have an incredibly creative, dedicated, innovative group of special forces people who are doing this. And I had a lot of confidence in them coming away from that meeting. So why don't I wrap up here? I would say, you know, we're facing an incredibly complex challenge with ISIL. We're not going to win it simply with the military instrument. It has to be a whole of government approach. And it's not going to happen quickly. The problem of ISIL and the problem that it's posing and the fact that it is spreading in certain areas, speaks I think to the complexity of the challenge. We are not going to be able to defeat that challenge overnight. I think the President has been clear that this is going to be a long-term challenge and ultimately it's going to have to be a political, diplomatic, and military solution for it to be able to work. The last thing I wanted to end on is just to say that as I said at the outset of my remarks, the United States is facing both a set of long-term challenges and a set of short-term challenges. And in light of the national security interests we have and the role I believe most Americans want the United States to play in the world, we don't have the luxury on just focusing narrowly on one set of problems. As I say to my own staff, we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. And to do that we have to have sufficient resources to execute the ambitious national security strategy that this country has. And that's why it's critical and Secretary Carter has spoken at length about this as has Deputy Secretary Work, that's why it's critical that we find a solution to sequestration and as we're moving sort of into the conference period for the NDAA and we're moving farther into the appropriations process in Congress, we have got to find an alternative to the approach that some in Congress have argued for to transfer funds from our base budget into the OCO account. We are, that is not going to take us anywhere and we have to find a different approach, something along the lines of the Ryan Murray deal that we had a year ago. From where I sit, and I was reflecting on the fact, the last time I was here at CSIS was when we were rolling out the QDR shortly after we were rolling out the QDR in 2014. I'm very aware that both our friends around the world but also our foes around the world are watching how the United States of America handles this budget problem. And if we don't find a way out of the thicket, if we don't find sort of a place of high ground to give ourselves budget stability, it really could give a misleadingly diminished picture of our resolve and strength as a country. And I think that would be very unhealthy for us as a nation. So we're working very hard inside the administration and working very hard with Congress to try to find a solution that makes sense given what we're trying to do as a country on the world stage. Thank you so much and I look forward to taking your questions. Under Secretary Warman, thank you for really an incredibly compelling set of remarks. I wrote down so many questions that I'll have to greatly trim them in order to make sure the audience has its turn to ask questions. But let me try to touch on sort of three areas that came up in your remarks. The world, if you will, of Afghanistan, the world of the Middle East and the broader defense world that you have to cover. So starting with Afghanistan, it really is remarkable to think as you started with your remarks saying how hard it is to keep it in the mind's eye for the public, certainly for the media. And so my question to you is how hard is it in the national security community to keep Afghanistan front and center? Obviously we have troops there, NATO forces are there as well alongside us. And how much has the experience of Iraq and what's happened in Iraq altered, colored, how we're proceeding with Afghanistan? Well, I think actually people might be surprised at how much time and attention is spent on the Afghanistan set of issues. Again, it's not necessarily in the headlines every day, but we have a very active national security council agenda that looks at Afghanistan. And I think going, I've been in this position for just a little over a year now and whether it was coming through the Afghan elections and then trying to work to firm up the unity government in Afghanistan, there was just considerable very high level attention that was devoted to that. There's been a lot of attention trying to help the unity government stay on firm footing. Then we had President Ghani and CEO Abdullah come here for the Camp David Summit. And now we're in this counter-terrorism dialogue with the Jiroa. So from a national security kind of community agenda, I think it gets a tremendous amount of attention. I do think that the rise of ISIL in Iraq in particular has certainly cast a particular light on what we're looking at in Afghanistan. And while I think I would certainly say Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same, there are many, many differences. And I've heard other administration officials make that point. There are some similarities. And I do think that as we look to the next year and a half in Afghanistan and beyond, we are looking at our experience in Iraq both in the prior 10 years, but also what's happening now. And I think consciously trying to do some things differently going forward. Because I think again, both situations speak to the challenges and the need to develop local security forces. Both cases have extremely complex security environments. So there are a lot of, I think, lessons that can be learned. And we are, I think, trying to leverage those experiences without taking just sort of a mechanistic cut and paste kind of approach. Because there are a lot of important differences as well. And that actually brings me to your comments on the seven month timeline, if you will, on the serious side. But as you say, this is a problem the United States and other countries have faced for generations practically at this point, which is building security forces. What does it say about our strategy, if you will, if we are reliant on an approach that builds host nation forces for good reasons, right? What does it say that we really don't have a fast system to get that moving and it feels like we rebuild the wheel every time? What is your sense of how well we are adapting as a country to this building partnership capacity necessity? Yeah, I think that's a great question, certainly one I've thought about. I think one lesson that we learned in the previous experience in Iraq is that, as I said in my remarks, trying to do it for a country does not work. It doesn't produce lasting impacts. And so that brings you to helping a country do it for themselves. But what comes with that is by definition you are not directly in control. You are trying to work by with and through another government, another population, another society. And I think that inherently brings challenges. But I do think the administration's view is that we needed to take a different approach in Iraq in particular this time around. And as challenging as it can be sometimes to work with the government and Baghdad and as frustrating as it can be sometimes to see what's happening in the Iraqi security forces, we have to keep working with them. I don't think there's sort of an easy answer. I do think we've gotten smarter and more. You think we're learning. I think we're learning, exactly. And I do think, for example, on the Syria train and equip side, we've already, and this became much more clear to me talking to the task force people, is pretty quickly as they started going through the vetting process and working with the intelligence community, they started making changes to our process to try to bring people into the pipeline more quickly and not doing more things in parallel as opposed to doing them sequentially. So I do think we're learning, but I also think it's an inherently difficult task. But the alternative is to be the world's policemen. And I think most of us would agree that's not what we wanna do and it's frankly not what we have the resources to do. Just jumping back on Afghanistan, one player that didn't come up in your remarks but sort of looms large as Pakistan and the United States and Pakistan have been through some rocky periods. Afghanistan and Pakistan have been through some rocky periods. I wonder if you could just comment on the US-Pakistan relationship vis-a-vis Afghanistan and more broadly on counter-terrorism and then any comments you might have on the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship. Yes, thank you. One of the things I think that's different frankly, right now with Afghanistan is, and with the Ghani Abdullah government, there really is an opening, if you will, or much more of a rapprochement with Pakistan. And I think that is, I don't wanna go so far as to say it's a game changer, but it is definitely something that Ghani and his team are trying to seize on. And I think Pakistan genuinely does want to cooperate more closely with Afghanistan. I have, we do, as an undersecretary, I have security dialogues every year with a number of countries, one of which is Pakistan. And tragically, this year, just a week, I would say after the Pakistanis were here for that set of talks, there was the attack on the school in Peshawar. And I think that was really a watershed moment for Pakistan. I think Pakistan's outlook about its own counter-terrorism fight changed and I think Pakistan's view about talking with Afghanistan changed as well. So I think President Ghani and, you know, obviously there have been a lot of Ghani has focused a tremendous amount of energy on the trying to get reconciliation talks going with the Taliban and Pakistan has been very active in that and supportive of that. So, you know, I think there's a real opportunity here, but obviously there are still frustrations. We have very much encouraged the cooperation between Pakistan and Afghanistan. We have, I think, you know, our relationship with Pakistan, the United States' relation with Pakistan is much better than it was, obviously, a few years ago. They have launched their own very aggressive counter-terrorism campaign and we have been trying to be very supportive of that. That's not to say that we don't still have tensions and there isn't still more that we'd like to see Pakistan do. But I do think that the Afghanistan-Pakistan dynamic right now is a generally positive one and is a very significant sort of difference than what we've seen in the last few years. As I said, I have about 15 more questions, but in the words of our former, mutual former boss, Michelle Florener, I will ruthlessly prioritize them to get two more in. One is General Dunford had his confirmation hearings last week and one of the most reported pieces of that, of course, was his comments regarding Russia. So I have to ask, as you talk about balancing the near-term and the long-term, Russia sort of is both. It's an everyday issue for military forces, but also a potential long-term challenge. China is something that many people in Washington in particular worry about routinely. What to you are the big challenges that we should be spending more time focused on that are maybe beyond the inbox? Well, I definitely think Russia and China are two very important relationships that are longer-term relationships for us to deal with. I don't think you necessarily, in this complicated security environment, I don't think you necessarily need to or that it's necessarily beneficial to sort of prioritize threats in a one-to-end list, but I do think we need to be very focused on, as I said, thinking about how do we counter Russia's efforts to coerce its neighbors? How do we harden our NATO allies and partners so that they're not presenting potentially vulnerable targets? The relationship with China, again, there are many areas where we cooperate with China. We have, you know, they have done a lot in terms of counter piracy. They've actually been helpful in terms of working on some of the issues with Afghanistan, but obviously we have challenges there as well in the South China Sea and in the cyber domain. So I think those two relationships are very important. I think looking beyond just Russia and China for sort of things outside of the inbox, thinking about US capabilities in space I think is another issue that very much deserves attention and frankly that's been something, cyber had already, you know, even when Ash Carter had been the deputy secretary of defense, he was very focused on cyber issues and the department I think has very much taken notice for a few years now of the challenges there and the need to do much more there and we still have more work to do, but space I think we're having a similar, a similar... Aha moment. Awakening certainly to what more we need to be doing in space given some of our adversaries advances in the space domain and I think that's something that is and needs to be receiving a lot of priority attention. Last question from me and then we'll turn it over to the audience. It's a rock in a hard place question. You closed by talking about the pressures on the defense budget. So I want you to answer this in sort of two hats. One is your cheap strategist hat for DOD, what kind of reductions do you need, do you believe to execute the strategy in terms of efficiencies, headquarters, et cetera, and then putting on your hat as somebody who has to run an organization that's considered headquarters and is under incredible pressure to reduce manpower. How do you manage the challenges before us without the staff that you need to do it? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, first of all, the department, I went back before coming to give these remarks and looked at Secretary Carter's opening statement to the Senate Appropriations Committee, which I think of us as last of the big budget hearings. And we have got to, got to, got to get permission from Congress to do the various reforms that we've been asking for on compensation, on BRAC. You name it, there are things that the department, that we know we need to do, that we know we can do, that would make us more efficient. And unfortunately right now we are handcuffed by Congress and we have just got to get authority to be able to move forward on those things if we're gonna be efficient. I think in terms, how do we do things with a staff that's, you know, undermanned, which it definitely is. One, we've tried to borrow Michelle Flournoy's phrase, we've tried to ruthlessly prioritize. We, in my policy organization, which has about 500 people plus three defense agencies now, we looked very much at the whole menu of responsibilities that we've had and we basically did sort of a right-sizing exercise where we moved people from tasks that we deemed or functions that we deemed to be lower priority to higher priority things, to try to make sure that we're putting the bulk of our person power against the most important challenges. But I will tell you, it's still not enough and our organization has been under a hiring freeze for the last three years or so and I actually am going to, I think, be going to Secretary Carter and asking for more resources because it's becoming increasingly clear to me that as the world gets more complex, we can't provide the kind of support to him and by extension to the president if we don't have enough people. And what we have, as you unfortunately know all too well, is we have a lot of high-quality people who are working incredibly hard and there's, you know, only so high they can move up in our organization and eventually many of them want to go on and look for new things and we don't have an inflow of new talent coming behind it, so it's a big challenge. And not one, frankly, I would say that's falling on sympathetic years. Chairman McCain has actually mandated in his version of the authorization bill that there should be, I think, another 7.5% cuts to the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the next five years on top of the 20% reduction that we've already taken or in the process of taking. So it's definitely a perfect storm in the wrong direction. Very good, okay, we're gonna open it up. We're gonna have a mic that goes around. I need you to tell us who you are, what's your affiliation if you have one and a short question that ends with a question mark. So let's see, right here, and I've got a mic coming your way. Good afternoon, I'm Scott Massione with Inside Defense. Congress has kind of been bantering around the idea of a year-long continuing resolution. What kind of impact would that have on defense policy? Well, happily I'm not in a position now that deals every day with the ins and out of budgets, but a CR for us, I think, would be pretty difficult. I mean, it'll put us at a lower, certainly a lower resource level than what we have asked for and what we've asked for in the President's budget. It also doesn't give us, it puts a freeze on any new starts, any new programs we would try to put forward to deal with new challenges and it doesn't allow us to move money around as easily. So it will be a CR on the upside. Unfortunately, the department has been operating for a few years now with CRs coming and going and we know how to do that, but it isn't good. Our services aren't able to plan. Like I said, we're not able to start new programs. So it's very much not the outcome that we would like to see. We really would strongly prefer to find a longer term solution to sequestration than a CR. Okay, let's see, I've got, let's see, let's go. We've got one right there, yeah, and then I'll come to you. I don't know who has the mic for that area. They're coming in all directions to you now. Hi, I'm Chen Weihua, China Daily. I want to continue on that general Dunford comment. The State Department, including Secretary Kerry, had a statement saying they disagree with his characterization, naming Russia and China as the biggest threat for US existence, existential threat. So could you talk about do you agree with State Department or General Dunford? Thank you. Well, as I said, in this kind of complex security environment, the benefit of sort of doing a one-to-end list of threats as priorities, I'm not sure how necessary that is. I mean, in many cases, even in the wake of the Cold War, we certainly saw problems arise that we didn't even envision. Al Qaeda wasn't really on anybody's radar screen, except maybe Steve Simons in the early 2000s or in the late 90s. That said, I certainly think that Russia is a serious issue for us right now. It has an extremely large nuclear arsenal. It's been modernizing its conventional military in a very robust way. It's been developing a number of asymmetric capabilities and the behavior that we've seen in Ukraine is indicative of the fact that we have a serious set of issues with Russia and we need to be focused on, again, countering their efforts to be coercive and to hardening our NATO allies. With China, again, we have their aspects of our relationship that are very cooperative and their aspects of our relationship that are more competitive. And our goal, though, is very much to see China rise and to join the international community in a positive way. We just had one of the largest sort of policy dialogues with China a couple weeks ago. A very large Chinese delegation was in town for the strategic and economic dialogue. Yeah, I think it is strategic and economic dialogue and there's a one-day precursor that's the security dialogue and I was a part of both of those sets of talks and it's a great opportunity to talk very frankly to very senior Chinese officials about areas where we're able to work together and then also to talk in a frank and candid way about some of the challenges that we face. So there are issues, I think, with Russia and there are some challenges to manage with China but we also need, I think, we're very, very focused on and rightly so, I think, ISIL. We cannot afford to have Iraq and Syria become a long-term safe haven for ISIL. We can't allow ISIL to spread and metastasize the way that it clearly seeks to do. So I think there's, unfortunately, a range of challenges that we have to keep our eye on and I think we have to be able to walk in Chugam. Very good, and I promised this gentleman here the next question. Dmitry Filipov, Center for International Maritime Security. How do you assess the extent of Iran's influence in Iraq's security institutions, the scope of their own advise and assist effort and the implications this has for trying to build a multi-sixterian model of governance in Iraq? Thank you. Thank you. Well, you know, to state the obvious, Iran is Iraq's neighbor. They have a very long history together. It's not surprising, I think, to see a dynamic between Baghdad and Tehran. And we have been very clear with Tehran and also with Baghdad that as long as Tehran is respecting Iraq's sovereignty and its own choices and where it wants to go as a nation, their relationship doesn't have to be problematic. That said, I think within the popular mobilization forces, which is a very large, not homogenous force, there are definitely groups. There are definitely Shia militias, some with very close ties to Tehran that are very concerning to us. And we have made it very clear to Prime Minister Abadi that for us to support operations in Iraq, we need to have confidence that we know what forces are a part of that and that we can't have very hardline Shia militias be a part of that. So I would say we are certainly concerned about what I would say is the arising influence of Iran in Iraq, but we have a very good ongoing dialogue and have set out, again, I would say a set of conditions that we feel, that if met, we feel comfortable with. Good, okay, I'm gonna turn my head this way because I haven't done so. Right here. Thank you. I'm Stephen Alt, consultant in public health. Recently there was a media reporter comment about the threat that ISIL may try to realize by cutting off water supply to a city in Iraq. I believe that was the context. So the question I have is in the policy work that you do in the Defense Department, how do you include issues such as access to key, supplies, water, food supply, et cetera. How does that fit into building your defense policy work? Thank you, that's a good question. I would say primarily where that kind of thinking gets done and it's very important work that needs to get done is in the, I think it's in line eight of our strategy, which is the stabilization efforts. We, as John Allen would say, after we clear and hold territory on the ground, we need to have an important part of the hold effort is having a suite of reconstruction activities be able to come in so that the populations that are there are able to reconnect to essential services like electricity, like water, like food supply. And AID has been working very intensively with the whole coalition, which now I think it's more than 63 countries to try and pull all of that together, also working with the UN. So that is sort of how that comes in. For DOD in particular, we take that into account in our planning efforts in support of the Iraqi government and in support of the Iraqi security forces that as they build their campaign plan to, for example, retake Ramadi and ultimately retake Mosul, that part of that plan needs to include being able to protect existing food and water sources and also, again, be able to bring in essential services. We've also done a lot of work, frankly, looking at the Mosul Dam. The Mosul Dam is a very, well, I shouldn't say very, I'm not an engineer, but it's a kind of special dam that its own sort of structural integrity has been in question for many, many, many years because of the way it's designed. And so something that we've been working closely with the Iraqi government on is trying to make sure that we can reinforce the structural integrity of the dam so that we don't have some sort of a calamitous collapse which would cause flooding and all sorts of problems. So that's, you'd be surprised at how much time we've spent thinking about that problem in particular. Very good, okay, we have time for one more question. I'm gonna go all the way back there. Hans Benendijk from Science, I'm Christine. I'd like to ask about Afghanistan and your trip there and your work there. And ask you to reflect on the potential risks inherent in a premature withdrawal of American ground forces from there. What we have is a plan, but not necessarily a final decision to do that, so I understand it. So if you could talk about the risks and perhaps the criteria that we might use to make that decision in terms of withdrawal of all ground forces by the end of next year. Yeah, that's certainly a good question. I mean, again, I think right now I would describe our approach as being, you know, we have a time-phased approach. We think one of the values of that approach is that it has focused our mind and also focused the minds of the Afghans, on what they need to do. And it has really brought them forward, I think, in terms of taking more responsibility for their own security and really energetically investing in the kind of development work that they needed to do in their security forces. At the same time, clearly the environment in Afghanistan is still a challenging one and the Taliban is not lying down. If anything, I mean, there are many who would argue that the Taliban is trying to wait the coalition out so that they can just sweep in after we leave and we have to look at that carefully. We have a lot invested in Afghanistan as a nation. This is my senses from having been there and having talked to President Ghani and Dr. Abdullah. We have a real opportunity in this unity government to have a good partner. So, you know, I think we want to take conditions on the ground into consideration. We want to take what we're hearing from President Ghani and Dr. Abdullah, take their concerns into consideration, but also being mindful of the fact that, again, you know, eventually Afghanistan will have to be able to stand on its own. So trying to sort of weigh that, I think, we're trying to look at all of the factors that are a part of that. And then the counter-terrorism mission is another part of it. I mean, on the one hand, our combat mission has ended. We're trying, again, to obviously help Ghani in his efforts with the Afghan security forces to fight the Taliban. We also, though, have our own counter-terrorism concerns just as the Afghans have their terrorism concerns and thinking through over the long term what that partnership is going to look like, I think, is an important part of our business. And Afghanistan is a very strategically located country that offers a lot of opportunity. So I think that's what we're trying to work through right now in that counter-terrorism dialogue. Well, under Secretary Rometh, you have a grueling schedule. As you mentioned, you've been on travel extensively in the last week or so, probably two weeks. And I know you probably had to hit a lot of paperwork when you returned today. So we are very grateful that you took time to share with us your insights into how the administration is thinking about these challenges, how you personally are thinking about these challenges. And I just want everyone to join me in a round of applause in appreciation. Thank you.