He was born outside detroit, michigan and grew up in hot springs, arkansas. He was commissioned through the rotc program and has spent the majority of his career in operations and has deployed extensively long and other type of aircraft. Its great to have you. Lt. Gen. Slife thank you. Its good to be with you today and i appreciate the opportunity to offer a few remarks and i look forward to getting into the questions. As i think about the opportunities in front of us as we sit here in 2020, ive got to tell you, this is a really exciting time to be at the air force special Operations Command. I feel that way because as i look back on my career, im the first commander of the air force special Operations Command that has spent his entire career in an air force that has such a thing as the air force special Operations Command. I really kind of grew up and came of age during the formative years of the special Operations Forces. The 20 year period between 1980 in the failed Iranian Hostage Rescue Mission and the turnofthecentury, those were really the formative years for me and then the last 20 years have really been defined by the post 9 11 era. As i look back on the 30 years around the special Operations Forces, weve had a couple of Inflection Points. Point was clearly the catastrophe of desert one and what that sparked over the next 20 years for the Nation SpecialOperations Forces. During those 20 years we built the modern capability that we have today. And those capabilities were characterized by a couple of different things. One, we were geared towards andtterm prices Contingency Responses. When we went to war, it was typically for a very limited duration. Some action that was over in days or weeks and then we would come home and reset and get ready to do it again. The only thing that characterizes the first 20 years was it was largely a supporting force. We provided specialized niche capabilities to enable the joint force to succeed. After 9 11 i think 9 11 was really an Inflection Point for us. We had to change who we were and weve done that for the last 20 years. In a couple of ways. Number one, we had to regear ourselves to support sustained combat operations over months and years at a time instead of the short Crisis Response things we had previously been organized to do. The second thing is a largely discourse inpport those operations. I think that has changed the way we view ourselves and frankly has changed the ways others view as. So that has occurred really over the last 20 years of my career. As i sit here in 2020 and think about what the future looks like, of the future as described by the National Defense strategy and other strategic level documents that describe the future operating environment, one thing thats clear is the future doesnt look like the present. I think what we will need in the future is not the ad sock that we needed. Which is the one that we have today. 2020hallenge facing us in is how do we build the afsoc we need in the future in a flat or declining resourcing environment against the adversaries that have challenged the United States interest across the globe. Thats the major challenges for us and so thats why i say is an exciting time to be here. I feel like, although, we cant probably put a thumbtack on the on ndar like we did 9 11 2001 and say thats the day everything changed. I think its clear we are at an Inflection Point as significant as september 11 was. It is not marked by a singular event. It is clearly marked by a shifting security environment. It is an exciting time to be here and im happy to spend time with you today talking about where you are and where we are going and what that might look like for us. I look forward to your questions and those of your team, dr. Jones. Sl jones thank you, general ife. Let me start off before getting to a range of issues you outlined. Supporting supportive roles, i wanted to start off with a question about your background. Because you have an interesting mix of assignments and commander at multiple levels. But you also spent time as a secretary of defense corporate fellow at microsoft. Im wondering if you can briefly talk about some of the more important lessons you learned from some of these assignments that have enabled do and helped enabled you and helped you along the way, including your time at microsoft, which i am sure is kind of an interesting outside of the dod perspective on how Corporate America works. Lt. Gen. Slife i would be happy to. You, of course, are familiar with the special Operations Community from your own background. One of the things that characterizes many of our career paths, we tend to be narrow and dig deep. And deep. I am a little bit of a deviant from that model. I have a number of assignments outside the special Operations Community, certainly the year i spent at microsoft was formative. I spent a few years working with the secretary of defenses staff in the programming realm and in acquisitions and technology. I spent time at u. S. Central command and over in korea as the chief of staff for u. S. Forces korea. I think that helps me have a different view than might be more normal. One of the things i picked up at microsoft the first time was the value of diversity in whatever team we find ourselves in. I went to microsoft thinking that the observations i would have would all be i. T. Related. I thought i would go to and figure out how the professionals use sharepoint because i could never figure it out for myself. Instead what i found was an environment that viewed diversity as a business advantage, and so when i looked at my own upbringing, my own experiences in the air force, in many ways we tried to blend out diversity. We try to see everybody through the lens of you are just an airman. I do not want to know what your gender is. I do not want to know what color your skin is. You are just an airman. We are all just airman. It is almost a try to blend out the diversity in our organization was my experience up to that time. What i found at microsoft is that they not only celebrated the diversity of the workforce, but they actually recruited for diversity because it provided an advantage, not because it was the socially correct thing to do or to correct some injustice, but because this improves the bottom line for us to have a more diverse workforce. That made me revisit my own assumptions about what diversity and inclusion meant. This has been kind of a 15 year aha thing for me. To realize the value of diversity for the mission. That was something i would say being outside the soc community for a little while has helped me see. I am not unique in having this appreciation. But time working for the secretary of defenses staff really brings into sharp focus how important it is for us to maintain relationships across not only our own department but over on capitol hill, having communications with our legislature so they know what we are doing, and we can listen to what their concerns are. I have got a real appreciation for the value of relationships, particularly in and around washington as they pertain to our operations and resourcing and conditions. Those would be a couple of things i would highlight for you. Dr. Jones those are important ones, and ones i think any institution are dealing with. You mentioned in your opening remarks, let me switch gears to the budget environment. If one looks at the fiscal environment, including the deficit, if you look at the covid and potentially postcovid environment, there are a lot of questions about defense budgets. From your perspective, what does shrinking or flatlining budgets mean for afsoc . What does it mean about legacy . How does it impact how you think about experimentation and innovation, potentially failing quickly in this kind of environment . How does the budget the fact number of issues you have to deal with . Lt. Gen. Slife as i talk about the decisions that we will make and this kind of distinction between the afsoc we will need and the afsoc we needed, as i talk about that distinction, the thing that is clear to me is the afsoc we need in the future is different from the one we have today, if you accept that proposition and the fact that we will have flat or declining resourcing with which to work, the only conclusion we can come to is we have to stop doing some stuff. We have to divest to invest. We are not going to be able to transform ourselves if we do not stop doing some things that have been very dear to us for the last 20 years. They have been exactly what we needed to be doing for the last 20 years, but they may not be relevant to the future. If we were to open up the hood of the car and shine a light in, one of the things we might find under the hood is that there are things we have taken on inside of afsoc, i will not speak for others, that are perhaps commodity activities. We are not the unique providers of these capabilities. We are not the only people that do these things. But we have taken them on because maybe it is easier for us to do it for ourselves rather than rely on someone else to do them for us, or we do it faster than others might do it, or whatever the reason. I think we have to look hard and decide what are we doing that are commodity activities that we are not the unique providers of these capabilities for the joint force . Those are the things, no matter how dear they have been for the last 20 years, we will have to bring ourselves to the point where we can cut loose from some of those things in order to invest in the things we think might be more relevant in future operating environments. Whether we have a flat line budget or a reduction of some percentage, the calculus is the same. We have to look ruthlessly at what we have been doing and what we will be required to do and to make the traits necessary to position ourselves for the future. Dr. Jones as you look at the future, and you look at what types of capabilities, systems, platforms, even broadly speaking, you see in the future environment, what do you see as some of the more important items youve got to focus on . Lt. Gen. Slife i would say probably the one i am spending more time on now than anything else is i believe that the Service Component of socom are most effective when we are closest to our parent service. I think what socom needs from me is they need me to be closely connected to my parent service. If they needed more seals, they would go find more seals. They do not need me to produce air force seals. What i can uniquely provide is the connective tissue to my parent service. I have been focusing pretty hard on looking for those opportunities to draw the connective tissue back a little more closely together between saw and the United States air force. There are things the u. S. Air force will be wellpositioned to do to help accomplish special Operations Missions in the future, and i need to help bridge that gap. But the other thing that i need to do is there are places where saw can be very valuable to air force Component Commanders, in the future operating environment. Whether it is in conflict or in the competitive phase. There are things that will be really important to us in the future. When i described at the beginning that we shifted from being a support force to being a supportive force, i think we need to return to being a supporting force to the larger joint enterprise. For me, that means the United States air force. That has attracted more of my attention that anything else right now. What should afsoc and soft be doing to provide unique value to air Component Commanders . Dr. Jones one of the issues that has evolved over the past couple of years is the broader Threat Landscape for the United States. It is probably most clearly written in the 2018 National Defense strategy under secretary of defense jim mattis. Part of the question is the u. S. Is moving in a direction where counterterrorism and efforts against violent extremist organizations is shifting, and it is shifting towards competition with states like china, russia, and even in the middle east, to some degree, iran. So from your perspective, what are some of the most significant challenges or opportunities you see from an afsoc perspective in competing with these state adversaries . When you look at their capabilities, we have even seen in the fighting the use of lethal Unmanned Aerial Systems as part of the campaign with turkish support. What do you see as impact of the shift to competition with state adversaries . How is that impacting how you are thinking and planning for the future for afsoc . Lt. Gen. Slife you have accurately described the moment in time we are looking in living in where we are looking at the future and saying this does not look like the last 20 years. We have to continue to maintain pressure on those violent extremist organizations that would do us harm. Apart from that, where is it that afsoc has a role to play . I think the answer is clearly war and found in the irregular our national to defense strategy. A lot of people conflate Counterterrorism Operations with soft and soft with regular warfare. In these three things get lumped together, but they are actually very different. Our Counter Terrorism operations, that is a particular target set that we have a particular set of tactics, techniques, and procedures that we deploy. We employ to be effective in that environment. But irregular warfare is much broader than that and involves the whole of the joint forces. It is how we compete below the threshold of Armed Conflict with state adversaries. There are portions of that that are clearly geared towards the types of capabilities that the special Operations Forces bring to bear. As i look at russia, china, and iran and the broader security environment as you described it, i think there is a lot of running room for sof, the air force special Operations Command specifically, to focus on irregular warfare operations as part of the joint force. Dr. Jones one issue that comes up along these lines is there has been talk about the evolution from specialized crisis and Contingency Response and afsoc being involved in a Contingency Response force optimized for theater engagement during what we often call the global war on terrorism. How do you see that evolving as a theater level whether it is dealing with violent extremist organizations or some of these state adversaries . Lt. Gen. Slife i think one of the things that sof has been has developed some expertise in over the last couple of decades is what i would describe as campaigning activity, linking together individual operations, activities, investments that we might be making, linking them together over time in a temporal puzzle to achieve theater wide objectives. It is not necessarily about an individual operation or mission we might plan, but it is how we link those together for longerterm objectives. The heart of the strategy is how we conduct campaigning. One opportunity we have to partner with the rest of the joint forces is helping to develop campaigns for theater wide engagement below the threshold of Armed Conflict. This is the place where we have found some success early on with some of our theater engagements around the globe. Dr. Jones i wanted to turn briefly to, and we sort of talked around this when we talked about the shift to state competitors, but this is probably just as true in dealing with violent extremist organizations. There is a component of it in various forms, but it really gets to assisting partners and Partner Forces. As the u. S. Competes with the russians and the chinese and the iranians, talking about broad areas in asia, the middle east, how are you thinking about assistance to Partner Forces in those areas . What capabilities do you assess are important for afsoc in training, advising, assisting and other help for these partner nations . Lt. Gen. Slife i think this is a question of means and ends. Assisting partner militaries, whether we are under the rubric of Security Force assistance or foreign internal defense, we have to be clear about whether that is a means or ends. I would suggest that is a means. We should not be engaged in those types of activities because that is the valuable end of itself. It should be for a purpose. If there is a partner in a particular part of the world that needs our assistance in order to resist the overtures from a global competitor, for example, i think that is a place where we ought to deploy the full spectrum of our advisory capabilities to help those partners push back. It helps the United States compete in terms of access and influence. I think that should motivate our Security Force assistance action and not just doing the things we always do because it is what we always do. If a particular partner, potential partner nation were to ask for u. S. Assistance in building specialized airpower capability, i would ask why . What is it that is of value to the United States in taking on an engagement like that . I would tell you that i think the key question we need to ask ourselves is to what end . The ends ought to always be framed against our National Defense strategy. Seth i think that makes sense. It is important to put it in that context. Working with partner nations is not an end in itself. If it occurs, it occurs to meet a bigger, more important, more strateg