 All right everyone, we're gonna get started. I am, hi everybody, we're gonna get started. I'm Anne-Marie Slaughter, I am the President and CEO of New America, and I really love this conference because there's no ambiguity about what is going to happen. My notes say you will begin at 8.20. You will speak for five minutes. You will not add lib, this is about the future of war and we try to do it with military precision. So I do wanna start though, first of all by saying this is the fourth time we've done this and it I think has really taken on a character of its own, a sense that we have senior leaders from all branches of our armed forces, but we also value this conference as a chance not just to listen and hear, but to engage and to ask tough questions, big questions, and to look into the future. It's also special for New America because of our partnership with Arizona State University. I am an Arizona State evangelist, an unabashed one. I think that Arizona State is reinventing what higher education looks like and they call themselves the New American University and we are New America. Our partnership around the future of war means we have a future of war center and classes and now actually a graduate degree in global security that integrates a lot of the material from this conference. The future of war project is led by Peter Bergen and Dan Rothenberg. They support our fellows Greg Barker, Josh Gelzer, Osmot Kahn, George Packer, Tom Ricks, Rosa Brooks, Dave Colcullen and Doug Alivant. That's a pretty great list. They are all future of war fellows and I'm about to introduce Jim O'Brien, but I have to thank Michael Crow, the visionary president of Arizona State. So we've got a long day ahead of us. We will be looking at specific areas, the Middle East and North Korea and broad issue areas like cybersecurity and international law all focused on the future of war. It's now my pleasure to introduce Jim O'Brien who makes things run at New America, at ASU and maybe at New America too. He's the senior vice president for university affairs at ASU and for his sins the chief of staff to Michael Crow. So Jim O'Brien. Thanks Ann Marie. I'm here today really on behalf of President Crow to welcome you and thank you for being here. What I'd like to highlight or reiterate from Ann Marie's comments are that this partnership between ASU and New America pairs the most innovative university and the largest public university in the United States with one of the leading think tanks in America. This is an experiment of a sort and that is can you take a university and can you blend it with a think tank in ways that we'll see today with this meeting, this conference and in the center on the future of war. And I think now in year four, I think the answer is yes and I think we can see the really very positive outcomes of that kind of experiment. One other thing I just wanted to focus on for a moment was the kind of the spirit of what we're doing here. And I think as many of you know Sir Lawrence Friedman recently brought forth his new book The Future of War appropriately titled for this conference. And in there he opens the book with the story in 1871, a fictional account is published of the German invasion of England and the successful German defeat of the English in 1871. But this fictional account took England by storm and it set in motion really a whole series of imaginings and discussions about war and the future of war. In that book, the main character thinks about the loss of the English to the Germans in this fictional account and says, we had plenty of warnings if we had only made use of them, the danger did not come on us unaware, it burst upon us suddenly to his true but its coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open our eyes if we had not been willfully blind. And it's this concept of being willfully blind that I think is sort of interesting today in this as we think about the future of war. And what I might add is at the university we're always trying to address this concept of being willfully blind. How do we not be willfully blind? How do we avoid that? What can we do? And so at ASU we've taken a number of steps to do that at the university and that is we form partnerships like the partnership with New America. How do we reach out beyond the university to others as opposed to being trapped in our own mindset, in our own culture. So we work closely with New America, we work with the Mayo Clinic, we work with Starbucks and so we try to find partnerships to help us avoid this problem of being willfully blind. The other thing that we do at the university which I think will be present in the conference today is we try to work on a transdisciplinary basis. How is it that as we create knowledge and transmit knowledge we do that in a way where we bring people together, we blend ideas together, we don't allow knowledge to be trapped in various silos. And so this blending of knowledge, this transdisciplinary basis is at the core of what ASU is up to and what I think this event today is about. And finally, this notion of the envisioning of the future. And so we make a special effort like the book published in 1871 using fiction as a means of envisioning the future. We have for example a center on the science and imagination at ASU. And we use that as a means of envisioning the future using fiction and completely different techniques. So more than anything today, ASU's participation in this conference is about how is it that we take those kind of techniques, we think about conflict and war and we do everything possible to avoid it but to also understand it. So appreciate you being here today. This is a wonderful opportunity for the university to be in DC and to be part of an event like this. And with that I'd like to welcome Peter Bergen and General McConville to the stage.