 Welcome, everyone. It's my real privilege and honor to introduce General McConville, who is the 47th Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army. He is a graduate of West Point. He also did an MA in Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. He was a security fellow at Harvard in 2002. He served a couple of tours in Afghanistan, also in Iraq. Previous jobs in the Army have included being director of personnel. He also commanded the 101st and at Fort Campbell. So he's had a great deal of experience in the military. And he's agreed to have a conversation for about half an hour, and then we'll open up to your questions. When you ask questions, hopefully you will identify yourself and wait for the microphone. And also, General McConville can't address policy directly, obviously. So just wanted to make sure that everybody understands that. So General McConville, a personal question, which is, you have three children who are serving. And does that make other problems about having a military that is increasingly becoming kind of a hereditary occupation? And are there strengths in that? What are the pros and cons? Well, I think the strengths is we have a lot of senior officers who have children serving the military. So when we make decisions, that's certainly in the back of our minds. And we know that parents sent their most important assets to the Army and the military. And I think we always keep that back out of mind. This is someone's son or daughter that we're sending into combat. This is someone's son or daughter that we're sending off to do this mission. And we need to make sure we do that. Having said that, 79% of the people that come in the Army have a family member that served in the military. And we want to open that up. We don't want to become isolated. We have gated communities right now because of security. I think it's very, very important that we represent the total diversity of the United States and America. And we aim to do that. How do you keep the military, I mean, the experience of being in the military is not common anymore in a way that was not true 50 years ago. How do you ensure that your leaders are exposed to the civilian world and learning about the civilian world and are comfortable with working in that world? Because at a certain point, they're going to have to deal with that world. I think I had the opportunity to, we send many of our officers to graduate school, civilian graduate schools. We like to do that so they get a chance to go to school with the civilians. And I had a chance to go to Georgia Tech, which was a great opportunity, technical wise, and I had a chance to go to Harvard. And so we try to send our officers with the most potential to those type programs so they have a chance to interact with the civilian counterparts as we go forward. We also do a lot of things about education, inviting leaders to our posts, influence to our posts, teachers to our posts. They get an idea of why someone may want to serve in the military. It really is a great opportunity. And unless you have an opportunity to meet some of the people to serve, you'll never really get that opportunity to understand. I mean, there was a time when going off to graduate school as an Army officer might even have been a penalty on your career. Is that not the case anymore? Well, I look at the Chief Staff of the Army. He went off to Columbia for graduate school. I went to graduate school. So there's always certainly some tension between how much field time you get and how much education and we're trying to find that right balance as we go forward. So General Milley, the Chief of Staff of the Army and yourself have sort of set up this new futures command. Well, what is the purpose of that and why was it necessary? Sure, the old cliche is that no generals are always trying to fight the last war and quite frankly we're not, we're trying to win the next one and we're looking around in the world and we find ourselves at an inflection point. For the last 16 years, we've been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, primarily doing counterinsurgency, counterterrorism type operations and we just had a new national defense strategy come out and talk about great power competition and not necessarily that we're gonna go to war a great power competition, but we as a military, we need to be ready and so we need to change the way we do business, the civilian industry as far as when it comes to technology has moved very, very quickly so we need to adapt our industrial age processes so we can quickly modernize the military as we go forward. It's a matter of public record that some of the defense systems that you need to modernize are communications networks that work amid heavy jamming, better defenses against drones, next generation combat vehicles, including unmanned, I mean, can you say something about those systems? Sure, and as we look into the future, our priorities that we've laid out very relevant, long range precision fires, we wanna be able to out range and out gun any or future adversaries as we go forward. We've got the world's greatest tanks right now, but as we look into the future, we're gonna need a next generation combat vehicle that may be robotic, it may be autonomous, same thing as we look to our future vertical lift, we wanna mesh network that's gonna allow us to communicate in a contested environment. Air missile defense, we're very concerned about unmanned aerial systems and then for us, the thality of the soldier is also very important. You mentioned autonomous, I mean, how autonomous might these systems be? Because of course there's kind of a discussion about keeping humans in the loop. I think there's always gonna be a person in the loop. Yeah. There just may not be a person in the lead aircraft or lead vehicle as we go into harm's way, but I think the nature of war is such that it's always gonna be a battle of human wills, at least in the near future as we look forward, but we look to areas with artificial intelligence, machine learning as a situation that can help our soldiers in the battlefield and our adversaries are looking in those areas and we tend to look in the same area. The Chinese did a demonstration of more than 100 drones with all sort of operated with AI that seems pretty autonomous relatively recently. I mean, even if we keep somebody in the loop or want to keep somebody in the loop, it seems like our adversaries are moving past that. I mean, what's your sort of thinking on that? Well, we're certainly gonna be able to counter their advantages. We're very aware about what some of our adversaries may be doing in the science and technology area and that's why we're moving out very quickly. That's why we're establishing the future command. So we are much more agile and we are much quicker in getting after these technologies. You used to work at SOCOM and the futures command is sort of based on the SOCOM acquisition system. Give us a little bit more detail about how that's gonna work. Yeah, it's really about developing very quickly. As we look around, it's almost what we call develop and then operationalize, buy, try before we buy, get out with the industry and rather the way we operate right now is we'll spend three to five years trying to get the requirements for a future system exactly right. And by the time we get the requirements right and turn over to our acquisition core maybe five to seven years before we actually field the equipment. So now we're at 12, 15 years and we're trying to field the iPhone one and meanwhile industry has gone out and we've got the iPhone 10. So we know we have to be much, much quicker and as we go forward and that's what we're trying to do. The other thing we've learned is for innovation and we're looking for discipline and innovation is to bring industry and in all walks of industry not just the defense companies to say, hey, we got a problem. How can you help us solve the problem? Let them come back with ideas and prototypes and we'll get it out to soldiers and we'll try it and then we'll quickly downsize and down select and get that moving into a program or record. Another innovation is the security forces system brigades. What are those and why are they necessary? Yeah, we've been advising and assisting for the last 16 years but we never had a force to do that. And as we go into future, we look at that we basically want to give our allies the opportunities to secure themselves and in Afghanistan, we recognize that we were taking brigades of infantry and basically breaking them up so we could provide advises to go forward and we did that when I was command 101. So we decided to do is actually we would develop a force make that force focused on being advisors and then send them forward. We have our first security force assistance brigade in Afghanistan right now. And you served two tours in Afghanistan. What is your, what are your big takeaways? I mean, we were there, you know, we're 17 years later. What, you were there in 0809 and then 1314. What were the differences that you saw? Yeah, I would say when I was there in 2008, 2009 that we were doing most of the fighting. The Afghan security forces were just brand new developing. When my, when our successors came back they were partnered with the Afghan security forces. They were much better. When I came back a few years later the Afghan security forces were in a position to actually take the lead for security. And today they are taking the primary lead. They certainly are taking more casualties than they did before but they are responsible for the security of Afghanistan. What we're trying to do is give them the assistance they need so they can continue to progress with their forces so they take less casualties and we can get to some type of political solution. You also served in Iraq in a kind of urban environment. 90% of the world, up to 90% of the world will live in cities by the middle of the century. What implications does that have for what you do for what the army does and the future army? Well, I think, you know, we fought some pretty heavy battles in Baghdad, Sardis City, in Fallujah, in Najaf. And what we learned is we're not gonna bypass cities because that's where the people are. We're gonna have to be able to operate in dense urban terrain. And it brings a lot of challenges that we need to develop equipment to. We need to develop tactics and concepts. We can do that and that's part of the things that we're doing right now. You're also a master aviator and obviously in Mosul, it was a very dense urban environment. ISIS was dug in amongst civilians. I mean, what are the lessons learned from a situation like Mosul? Well, all cities are very difficult fights because we go in with a mindset that we're gonna do all we can to protect the civilian population there. And some of our adversaries don't. They actually use civilians as shields. They put them in harm's way. I've seen many of our soldiers in combat that put themselves in harm's way because they did not want to go after an enemy that was hiding behind civilians as we go forward. So we gotta work out the tactics, techniques and procedures to do that and we're doing that as we speak. What does that look like in terms of training for that? I mean, how do you train for that? What we've built is we have urban training device or urban training sites at all our combat training centers. It's hard to build a 15 million person city to do that, but we are training on the techniques. We're training. We have the capability to go underground and work those situations. But the other thing we're working forward to is what we're working on right now is with virtual reality. We can do a lot of things. It's amazing when you see, and that's how you get a little out of the box. You start dealing with civilian industry who's doing a whole bunch of stuff in the gaming industry. And we are going after virtual reality. You basically can get inside a gaming type situation that's very realistic. So we can train our soldiers as they were actually in that city or in that place as we go forward without building that entire city, without transporting our soldiers there. So we see that environment as something that we're gonna get after in the future. My guess is the success of our organization to ISIS will also use these tools, perhaps, for their training, right, virtually. I mean, other adversaries will also use this. Absolutely, absolutely. And that's why we need to be quick. I mean, this gets back to future's command. We have to turn very, very quickly because our adversaries are doing the same. You said that for the past half century, the army was only contested on land. And now the army will be contested in every domain. What did you mean, and what does that mean for the military of the future? Yeah, it's, you know, I was just doing a little history and we got a great air force. And the last time an American soldier was killed by an enemy aircraft was April 15th, 1953. So we really haven't been contested in the air. The last time a Navy ship was sunk by another, or by an enemy was 1945. And so as we look at the world, we've been able to pretty much move our troops into countries we need to go, move our equipment into the countries by sea. We've certainly been contested on the land and somewhat in the air. But we look as we go in the future, we'll be contested in all domains. So we're certainly gonna be contested on the land. We need to, we're bringing back air defense such units because we think we'll be contested by enemy air or by drones or some type of aerial systems. And, you know, we're very concerned about cyber and we're very concerned about space because how dependent we become on those domains. And I mean, speaking of dependency, when information technology is ubiquitous in the force and somehow an adversary is able to interfere with that, I mean, how do you train people to not be dependent, overly dependent on GPS and other technologies? Well, it's, you know, I joke for, you know, I try to tell some of the younger officers and NCOs we used to have these paper things called maps. And we had things called compasses. And that's how we got to navigate. And now everyone has a phone. I mean, if you think about the agility that we get from GPS and move map displays, you know, no one has a map in their car anymore. You know, if you go some way, you just type it in, you quickly get there. And in combat, it works the same way. You know, the ability at night to maneuver forces to a target is just unbelievable. So what we have to do and what we're doing is building resilient systems that are gonna allow us to operate in that environment. We're also training our pilots and our ground crews that when they don't have that, those systems, how do you operate and we're building tactics, techniques and procedures to do that also? Women are increasingly moving into combat units. What, I mean, what's the scale of that? What does the future look like? How is this happening? Yeah, I'm really proud. I have a daughter that serves in the military. And I'm just really proud of what women are doing for the country. I want to put it in perspective. We have 170,000 women serving in the Army. 170,000, if you know that, that's almost the size of the Marine Corps and make an incredible contribution. You know, 70,000 in the active army. We have women, 10 women that graduated from range school, which is our toughest school and very, very impressive. We have ranges and we have women commanding company in the 82nd Airborne Division Infantry Company. We have women in every single infantry, armor, a chili battalion and every single brigade combat team in the Army right now as we speak. So it's very, very impressive. We have over 600 women that are in the infantry and the armor as we go forward. And I think, you know, where does this end up? I think when we stop keeping track of the percentages, then we'll probably hit the right point. And I think we're getting towards that thing. You have 180,000 Army personnel deployed around the world. That's a large number when only 15,000 roughly are serving in the war in Afghanistan. What is everybody else doing? And what does that mean about the future of the Army? They're just not hanging around. They're pretty busy. I mean, when you think about what an Army does, it really deters other folks' behavior. And so, you know, when I first came to the Army, we had 250,000 soldiers in Europe deter Russian aggression at the time of Soviet Union aggression. We still have soldiers in Europe and in a fairly good amount of soldiers deterring that type of aggression that may happen. And our partners want us there. We have soldiers in Korea that are deterring that type of aggression and they certainly want us there. We have soldiers all over the Middle East. And most of what our soldiers are doing is just reassuring our allies and partners that will be there with them and deterring situations before they get out of control. You mentioned Korea. I mean, obviously, without getting into the policy question, what is, if it did come to war, what would that look like, do you think? Well, you know, a lot of people just describe just how horrific that situation would be. If you've been to Korea, you know, 15, 20 million people, not that far from the border, a lot of artillery that could be used, those type of things. But I think that our adversaries need to understand that we have a very strong military that will do what it needs to do in those situations. And our military is ready to do what it needs to do. And hopefully a ready military will get folks into the table when they can let diplomacy take its path. A number of American adversaries, ISIS, Hezbollah, Russian proxies in Ukraine use sort of hybrid warfare, some combination of conventional terrorism, information operations. I mean, how do you fight an enemy that's doing that? How do you prepare for that in the future? Yeah, the way we've appeared is we've got to be strong everywhere. So we're certainly watching what our potential adversaries are doing. We kind of look at, you know, best of breed, what type of capability do they have in each of these areas? And we want to get that type of overmatch as we go forward. So if they're using some type of drones, we want to make sure we can cut to those drones, not only we can cut them, we can cut them at a cost that's gonna cause them not to want to go down that road. If they're coming after us with cyber, we want to make sure we have the ability to impose a cost on them if they choose to come after us in that area. How do we, I mean, it seems that if you look historically, you're a graduate of West Point, I think 81, class of 81, right? Yes, yes. So, you know, the army, the military in general tends to want to fight the war that it's gonna win. So, you know, Saddam Hussein was perfect because he was in the desert and he had tanks and the battle lasted. But history keeps presenting things that don't Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. So, how do you prevent, how do you A, keep the lessons learned and B, not fall into this kind of default mode of, well, there'll be tank battles in some green field in Eastern Europe? Yeah, I think that's a good question. I think a lot of times we talk about the future, we're talking about technology and the type of systems we need and the material solutions. And to us, I think it's a lot more important to focus on the people. And I would argue that in the army, people are our most important asset. We're doing a lot in talent management. And a lot, you know, if you study, you know, if you study the Germans before World War II, you know, people talk about Blitzkrieg and the fact that they had radios and they had tanks, but it was really the leaders they had that they developed that were able to take that technology and apply it in a way that, you know, it initially made them very successful. And so, as we go in the future, we need leaders that can operate in different type environments and we have to develop those leaders and then we enable them with technology so they can be successful in the battlefield. I mean, for instance, the Security Forces System Brigade, it sounds, I know it's different from Green Berets Special Forces, but I mean, it sounds like is the army sort of moving more into this sort of, like, special force-ization model? Well, you know, first of all, they wear brown berets. Okay, yep. You know, ask that question. They're not wearing green berets. And, you know, it's really a share of the task in the battlefield. We have great special forces. They have done incredible things. If you go to Afghanistan, you just take a look at the commander forces that are special forces in our coalition partners developed. They are doing extremely well, but I would argue that what conventional forces and advice and assist capacity bring is they bring the capability to develop an institutional army, which you'd need if you're gonna be responsible and run a country. I mean, the Afghans know how to fight. We don't need to teach them how to fight. They've been doing it a long time and they know how to do it very, very well. What they haven't done in over the years is develop a professional army that is gonna be institutionalized. And that's what our advice and assist brigades are helping them do, is develop a professional conventional army that knows how to do logistics, that knows how to do artillery, that knows how to do medical evacuation in the battlefield. All those skillsets they need that are just not the fighting part. Is there a danger of sort of imposing in the American way of war on them? I mean, is there, how do you kind of adjust for local circumstances? Well, we have to be very, very careful about as we go forward. And that's why we do a lot of cultural training with the forces as they go forward. And the other thing is just that the notion of how we advise and assist as Americans, we tend to want to take the lead. And for some of our soldiers, we have to train them that you are really over the shoulder position to help, but let our coalition partners figure out the right way to do it. So the Iraqi counter-terrorism service and the Iraqi army writ large, I mean, what are the, obviously that went pretty well. What are the lessons learned from that and for the future? I think what I've learned in our advising and having watched the 82nd do it. In fact, one of the brigade commanders, one of my battalion commanders, Pat Work, who they did a very, very good job of capitalizing on the strengths of the force that they were advising. They didn't do it for them. There's a tendency to want to do things for the force that you're advising. What you really want to do is take a step back and use a cliche. You don't want to be a helicopter parent, like raising kids. You want to give them an opportunity to do it the way they want to do it. If they need help, you help them when they need it, but you give them the chance to do it themselves. You give them the enablers that allow them to win in the battlefield, and I think that's the best way ahead. Thank you, sir. We'll open it up to questions. If you have a question, wait for the mic and identify yourself. Thank you. Stunned into it. Wow, great. Testing? How about now? I think we can... Apologies. Once again, Chris Wolf from the BBC. You talked about the importance of the credibility of the deterrent for North Korea. I would ask one of the questions about credibility would be stabilization in a post-conflict world. Does the U.S. have the manpower? Can you get the allies to provide the manpower to credibly stabilize North Korea in a post-conflict world? Well, I think that's a good question. I think any time you go to war, you need to be ready for what happens afterwards, and from where we sit, what we want to do is the best way to deter a war is to be prepared for war, and we are prepared to do those type things. And the other thing is you've got to take a look at South. South Korea is a very modern country with a lot of capability, and it's their country as we go forward, and we'll certainly be prepared to assist them. The military has a lot of experience now in phase four operations, right? Arguably more than a decade and a half. I mean, what are the big lessons of those operations? Yeah, I think one of the critical things that has to happen after any type of conflict is to establish security first. You have to get security, and really you have to establish security by the local, you know, local people have to be responsible for this security, and if quickly we do that, and if we don't have an idea of how that's gonna be established or how that's gonna happen, then we need to think our way through that, but that's, you know, to get everything else going. If you don't have security, you're gonna have problems all the way through, so somehow you gotta establish security first, you gotta have some type of army to protect the country, you gotta have a police force, you gotta get those things going, then you actually need a bureaucracy. You know, we always, you know, kind of joke about, you know, bureaucracies, but you need one, and some of these countries don't have good government bureaucracies, and you need to get one going so you can actually start doing the things that people want you to do, because I mean, all people the same, that, you know, they want their kids to go to school, they wanna have good jobs, and they wanna have an opportunity for prosperity, and what we have to do is to set the conditions for that to happen. I mean, does it, at an army war college now, are you being taught that you might have to be effectively the district governor or it was? Well, we do, you know, and again, you know, we wanna hand that over as soon as possible, but part of talent management is how we use the forces we have, and you know, if you take a look at our reserve and guard forces, we have tremendous talent inside those organizations, and what we wanna do is make sure we can get after, so we're actually changing our personnel system to a talent management system. Give an example, when I was, when we were in Afghanistan in 2008, 2009, you know, we were trying to develop the economy and we were trying to do all those type of things, and so we asked our guard and reserve forces what they actually did in real life, you know, I mean, they're all soldiers, but what do you do? Well, you know, we found out we had the head of the Texas Highway Department, so that person certainly could help us build roads. A lot of Afghanistan is agriculture, and you know, I'm a kid from Boston, I've seen pictures of farms, so I have no idea, you know, how that actually works, but we had people from, you know, states that were professional farmers, and so we could help them, you know, but you know, the assist, the help, what we don't wanna do is do it for people, you know, if you study any histories of insurgency, those type of things, if we end up doing it for the people of the country, we're never gonna get, they'll let us do it. You know, if I'm willing to mow your lawn every weekend, you'll let me do it right now, so not these people have lawns, but if they did, we got on that way, so that's what I think the future is, is how we get them back in charge, give them the security, and let them move forward as we go as soon as we can. Jen Easterly. Jen, Easterly, thanks for your remarks, General, and for your service. You talked a lot about people and talent management, but then, to your point, about 79% are folks that have relatives that are in the Army, I guess two questions. First, what are you doing about the recruiting piece to sort of widen that tent specifically? And then secondly, you also talked about the importance of forging relationships with industry and with the private sector, so what are you thinking about in terms of opportunities and personnel policies that allow people to go back and forth more easily than we have now, because working in the cyber business, I think it would be fantastic if we were able to enable people doing cyber in the Army to come and do a critical infrastructure type entity and then go back again. No, that's a great question, and that's really precisely what we're trying to do. We're actually putting in a system that's an integrated personnel basis, but right now we have an industry-based type system, so we manage people by really two variables. You're a captain of infantry or you're a sergeant of engineers, and we have three different personnel systems for our National Guard, for our reserve, and for our active, so it doesn't really allow you to go back and forth the way we wanna do, so we recognize that, and as we go in future, we want a system that is gonna manage each person's individual talent, so rather you being defined by maybe two variables, we're gonna define you by 25 variables, and we're gonna credential you in a way that you're a person of cyber that has this skill level. We can bring you into the Army, we can allow you to serve, we can promote you based on that skill level, and not necessarily how many combat tours you have or how many live, fire events you've done, because we recognize the future, we're gonna need different types of people in the Army, and the thing on the coming after civilian, what we're really trying to do is expose, we need to expose the Army more to people. There's a reason why kids of military officers and NCOs go in the Army, because they know it, but I grew up in Boston, there's very little military around, if we have few kids in the neighborhood going to service, mainly because their dads were enlisted during the Korean War or during World War II, and if you don't have that anymore, then how will people know what's going on as we go forward, so we've gotta do that. The other thing on recruiting is only 29% of American youth are qualified to come into military. Because that too overweight? It's a whole bunch of reasons, but you think about that, to enlist in the United States Army today, only 29% of youth are qualified, and we're competing for those extraordinary young men and women like everyone else is, and so we're trying to open up the aperture. We don't wanna be just a family business or a military business, we wanna give everyone the opportunity to serve, because someday, somewhere someone's gonna ask them what they did after a country was attacked, and you look at veterans, take a look at veterans where they go, when they're older, they come back and very, very proud of the service. We wanna give everyone an opportunity to be proud of the service. Just to follow up on Jen's question, so this cyber expert who's promoted on his or her expertise in cyber, could he or she then take two years of Morgan Stanley to work with Jen, and that would not be penalized, the matter that would penalize their career and then come back? Yeah, we do have some programs that do that, we send, but we need to do a better job, so we do, what we have is internships with training with industry, so we can send you over to training with industry, we can bring you back. We do have National Guard and reservists who work traditional on weekends, they're in, but what we need is a better system to allow us to bring the whole team together and do it in more of a seamless way as we go forward, so that's what we intend to do over the next couple of years. This gentleman here, Thad Rowe. General Chris Miller from the Air Force Academy. Do you see a common vision among the services and do you see a willingness in the Congress to modify law and policy to do the kinds of things you just described? Well, I think we're seeing a common vision, I mean we talk about multi-domain operations and multi-domain battles, so each of the services are looking from their perspective and they see a lot of mutual interest in moving forward in this thing, so I think that is happening. There is concerns about how fast we go because there's a lot of interest when you change the acquisition system and I would say we've disrupted it right now in the Army and there's certainly a lot of concerns about how we're gonna do this, but I think we have to, we've got to show success, we've got to show that we're being good stewards of the money that we're getting from Congress and I think once we show that and prove that and put the right controls in place, we're gonna have a better opportunity to move forward on this. Yeah, yeah, it does. I think, you know, we're always working very close with the Congress, I mean they wanna do the same thing we wanna do, they wanna feel the best force and there's always, if they're gonna put legislation in place, what they want us to do is take a look at the legislation we have right now and we are an upper out military, there's a reason why we do that, some people complain about that, but it goes back to before World War II when we were not and the big joke was that there was so much dead wood around the War Department, it was a fire hazard, so we changed the system. Now the fact it's upper out, what we wanna do is get people to perform and stay too with the right skill sets and the right talents and it's the nuance of how we do that as we go forward with, again I argue we've got industrial age processes both for talent management, it's really personnel management, it's industrial age and I think we've got industrial age processes for acquisition, I think we need to change both, that's what we're trying to do. Joel Garra from ASU. Joel Garra, Webinized Narrative Initiative, Arizona State. You mentioned operating in the cyber domain and you talked about imposing a cost against anybody, how would you envision doing that? I got a whole bunch of ways I can envision. Well, you're talking about, I'm not gonna get into actually methods, but here's the deal, if someone does something to us, they should be deterred by what may happen back to them and if they think they can do anything they want and never pay a cost, they will continue to do those type things and we will see some of the most horrific things that happen as we go forward, we'll see people using chemical weapons, we'll see a lot of people doing things that quite frankly are immoral, unethical and illegal and I don't think we should let them do it. Well, again, I'm not gonna get into the policy things. My job is really to provide best military advice and that's what we intend to do as we go forward, but it is developing capabilities and there's a lot of competition if you wanna call it below the level of war going on and we need to be highly competitive in these areas and so some of the technologies we're looking at and some of the capabilities we have is certainly very competitive with our adversaries and what we wanna do is continue the overmatch so we get to the level of deterrence that we need to have. My understanding is West Point started sort of as an engineering school to a large degree. It did, yeah. So should it be reconceptualized as sort of a cyber warfare, cyber information? I mean, maybe that's already happening, but. Well it is, I mean, it's interesting to watch even how we send people to school. You know, when I was going to graduate school you had to go into hard science so I went into aerospace engineering, I really wanted an MBA, but they said that's not gonna happen. Even being an economics undergrad, they said you're still going aerospace engineering and that was exciting at Georgia Tech, but what we wanna do, and then we started sending people for some of the soft type sciences. What we're seeing right now is young men and women are very interested in going cyber so our branches are competitive so some branches are very, very competitive and our top students coming out of West Point in engineering and going to cyber are top students coming out of ROTC or going to cyber and we're doing something, we have some authorities within cyber where you can come directly into the military just like our medical and legal folks and we're working that as we go forward. The Secretary of the Army and we have stood up a talent management task force and the person that's actually gonna run it is J.P. McGee and he's coming from cyber, he's an operator but he's coming out of cyber command and that's why we're having that type of person so we can be a little more innovative as we bring people like cyber into the force. Any other questions? This gentleman here. Tim Slice, the Higgs Center for Strategic Studies. I was wondering whether you could elaborate a little on your vision for the future of the Army in let's say 2025 in terms of the integration of unmanned. We know of some countries that have announced their ambition to have by 2025, 30% of their unmanned forces of their force to be unmanned platforms. This very week in the Netherlands where I come from I shook the hand of the first commander of the first RAS unit, Robotics and Unmanned Systems. His unit only consists of two, him and one robot. But I mean, it gives him. So I was wondering about your vision for it. No, I think we first start experiment with man unmanned teaming in Iraq and when you're flying over cities, at least you personally learn that it's much better to have an unmanned aerial system up there getting shot up than having a man system. So we've done a lot of work on unmanned systems on the aerial side. We have some type of robotics in the ground side but I think as you look in the future at least our vision is we're not gonna put man vehicles or man aircraft in the situations at the tip of the spare where the enemy threat is the largest. So we're looking very much at that. If you think about the spectrum, you got manned, you kind of have semi-autonomous or remote and then you have autonomous. Basically completely unmanned with the system kind of flies itself. We used to all be over here and we're slowly moving to where we have remote systems that especially on the aerial side they are pretty much not flown. They're almost computer aided. When we first started flying unmanned aerial systems there was a pilot in the ground basically flying it just like you would in aircraft. Well with the IT capability we have right now it's more like operating computer as we go forward and once we get into more of the machine learning and artificial intelligence then we're gonna have the capability to do a lot different type things but you're gonna see a lot more of the unmanned, even unmanned teaming as we go forward both on the air and the ground and that's where our technology is going by. I still believe they'll always be a person to loop. They just may not be in the lead aircraft or the lead vehicle. George Nicholson. Sir George Nicholson, the Global Special Operations Forces Foundation. Years and years ago when I'm dating myself General Gorman when he was a Southcom commander said we've got a great propensity of hanging the millstone of technology around our partners necks. Things they can't afford to buy. They can't afford to maintain. They can't afford to operate. Remember talking to the J3 in Honduras? He said I don't need 47 Echoes. I don't need terrain following terrain forward in this radar. I've got pilots who've got 20,000 flying hours. They know this area like the back of their hands. What are you looking at in terms of working with our partners out there, getting them something that they can afford to maintain, operate and. That's a great point. I learned that as a young officer in Central and South America. Where just like you said, we'd come in and there's a tendency to say, hey, we need to give folks the best equipment. What you want to do is give them the equipment that they can actually use and they can maintain and they can train on and they can afford. And quite frankly, we're doing the same thing at our level. We want to make sure that the equipment we buy is not exquisite. It's something that we can afford as we get on in the future. Because there is a tendency, you talked about where we got one person, one robot. If you buy in a quizzes system, you may only have one robot. And mass matters on the army. And so as we look into the future, we can't rely on technology because someone's going to take it away from you. So simple systems that are inexpensive is kind of our approach as we go forward. This gentleman here. Thank you, thank you, General. First, I would like to thank you and congratulate you for the great job you are doing, the United States is doing in leading and operating the coalition in Iraq. My question is that while the operation inherent resolve reaches its final stages, at least the major operations, and moving to a stabilizing stage, what should we do to avoid repeating the previous scenarios where the U.S. did a great job and eliminated al-Qaeda. And then we had another terror group resurfaced, especially when it comes to the borders. And how can the U.S. help Iraq in securing its borders with Syria, for example, where Iraq had always the problem of terrorist and armed groups crossing the borders to the country. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think as everywhere else, we want Iraq to be able to secure its own borders and secure its own country. And I think that's the discussion that's going on right now, how this will be stabilized, what forces will stay, what will not. I'm sure that General Votel and will make a recommendation to the Joint Chiefs and Secretary Mattis and they will come up with a plan and will actually figure out how we're going to do this. Well, I want to thank General McConville for a very illuminating set of remarks very much. And thank you, you're a very busy man and we're grateful that you came. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me.