Transcripts For CSPAN Gen. Mark Milley Discusses Defense Pri

CSPAN Gen. Mark Milley Discusses Defense Priorities July 11, 2024

Climb to glory and command the third corps and the commanding general of u. S. Army forces command. One accomplishment that is not in his bio and one he is very proud and he is a proud son of a marine and the picture is the Fourth Division going over the jima. At iwa general, we are proud to have you with us today. A difficult duty is coming up for you and remain neutral at this years armynavy game. We have Great Expectations for your neutrality. Thank you what you have done for our country and allies around the world. I would like to turn it around senior fell oove who will kick off the conversation about the defense challenges that you face and we face as a nation and hell conclude with questions and answers. The session is on the record today. If you have questions, send them. Edu. Nts ooth brookings over to you, mike. Mike thank you, john. And i add my personal gratitude not only for you joining us today and for the men and women in the military families and veterans who have sacrificed so much that i know you are broud to represent and lead. Thank you, sir. The best way to begin our conversation was to take stock of how the military is doing in Broad Perspective in its readiness and the state of its people and its families. There have been a lot of stresses and strains, covid being the latest and i would love any update how the military is handling the covid crisis and also as we are handling this moment and 40 years since you finished up at princeton as rotc and hockey player star and you watched the u. S. Military over four decades and before that, four previous years as the army chief. I wondered how you would take stock of the condition of the u. S. Military and get into talking about how you are preparing for the future. Thank you for being with us. I want to thank you and general holland for those kind words. I think his picture was on the screen and over his shoulder was a painting and it was the assault landing and on that beach, it was the beach that my dad would have landed on with the 4th division and his fatherinlaw was the chief. Their 0 marines gave lives in less than 30 days. Im hum bled. My dad has passed away but humbled to be a son of a world war ii veteran and my mother served as a nurse in seattle. You mentioned 40 years ago at princeton, i had no idea to make a career of military. And 40 years ago, the world is have much different place. E should be proud of 1979. Rolled into afghanistan as part an attempt to quell a breakaway portion. And assaults in saudi arabia and critical events, which is my senior year at princeton right before graduation. And we in and we, the military, were utterly committed in in the middle of what we thought was almost a neverending cold war with the soviet union. And literally, we know a decade later, the wall would come down or begin to come down in between the intergerman border. But the 19791980 time frame when i got commissioned 40 years ago is a fundamentally a different geopolitical world. If you look at things like technology, you know, 1971, i think, or the 19721973 time frame, early 70s, i think is your first email ever. I think if you go flash forward, call it 20 years, to the 1991 19901991 time frame, thats where you start getting the first websites, then coming forward another almost two decades to 2008, and you get the iphone comes out with steve jobs, so youve had an absolute explosion in Information Technology that did not really exist when i was commissioned. You had all kinds of different radio systems, different munitions, and so on and so forth, and you had a different geopolitical environment. So a lot has has changed, as you well know. As far as you mentioned, taking stock in the military today, the United States military is a very powerful military, and no one should ever mistake it for anything other than that. Adversaries, friends, foes, the United States military is extraordinarily capable. We are very, very powerful, were powerful in all domains, whether its the traditional domains of air, land, and sea, whether its space and cyber, but whats also important to know and recognize as a fact is the gaps between us and potential adversaries, say, china or russia, for example. Those have shortened and closed a little bit over the last 10, 15, 20 years. The United States has been heavily engaged in Counter Insurgency warfare in the middle east that were all very familiar with. At the same time, the chinese, for example, they took stock in our operations worldwide, and they decided they would modernize. And it goes back to Deng Xiaoping in 1979, another critical event from that fateful year, and he modernized his he decided to reform the society of china, modernized their economy, and they had a run of about 10 for quite a while of their gdp growth. And today, theyve slowed down to call it 6 , 7 , something in that range, but thats still extraordinary growth for an economy. So for 40 years now, 41, the chinese economy has really gone on a roll, extraordinarily powerful, and in its wake has come a modernized, reformed, very, very capable Chinese Military. So where the soviet military was the pacing threat, if you will, back in the 70s and 80s sort of thing, and when i became was when i was commissioned. Today, i would argue that the Chinese Military and the challenge from a rising china, if you will, that is really the pacing threat of today, so a lot of geostrategic changes, a lot of changes in the environment in terms of technology urbanization in terms of technology, urbanization is rapidly approaching. Almost 80 of the worlds population by midcentury. So theres a lot of change thats occurred at paces that are much more rapid than any time period weve ever seen in history, so theres been a lot of change, but thanks for the opportunity to comment on it. As far as our military goes, i dont want anybody to mistake, our military is very, very capable, and were ready for whatever comes our way. Were determined to defend the constitution of the United States, and we will protect the American People in our way of life. No one should doubt that. So if i could bear down a little bit on a couple of specific areas within that realm of broader u. S military capability today, and these are areas where sometimes those of us who are defense wonks track the data, and i know you do, too, on readiness, recruiting, retention, condition of equipment, condition of military pay and benefits. I wondered if you had any broad observations on those sorts of readiness trends in todays force. I mean, some people have said todays force is of, course, is, of course, very tired. Its been doing so much for 20 years in the broader middle east. Other people say, well, but the burdens less than it used to be, we dont have any big deployments in iraq or afghanistan anymore, and we sort of stabilized the budget environment, the Trump Administration has, with the congressional support of both parties, managed to increase the budget a bit, and maybe were in better shape now. I just wondered if you could put some of these, you know, trends of readiness in perspective, compared to the last few years and compared to where you would like them to be. Answer that. To the me try to answer it this way. , the marine, the navy, the air force, etc. , about a third of the forces at the highest levels of readiness at a moment and done. And that is about right, because we would have a certain amount in force and training training, refitting from previous deployment, and about a third of the forces ready to go at a moments notice at a high level of readiness. Some organizations and units are at a higher level of readiness, others not so much. But the broad metric for you and unclassified format i would say about a third. Its factually correct. Some units higher, some units less. In terms of recruiting, we are doing pretty well. There are some areas of concern. Pilots and higher tech skills, such a cyber specialists that are in high demand and Civil Society. Those are very difficult to retain. But recruiting and retention across the board is pretty good. Discipline, excellent. Morel, theres always comments about the force as tired. At war for 20 years. Thats true, but to a certain extent thats true. But most of your younger part of the force has not actually deployed. And if there is one common same that i get as i talked to troops around the world is they would like to deploy. And its not that they are deploying too much. Its that they have not at all. They are training, and its allimportant work, but they would actually like to deploy somewhere. And we do have forces that are deployed in a wide variety of situations. One of the things that we is a holistic review of our global foot rent and a holistic review of the disposition of the force and the tasks and purposes of all of the forces worldwide. Theres a very strong argument to be made that we may have forces in places that they shouldnt be and we may have forces that are needed in places that theyre not right now and that we need to adjust our global footprint in some cases global footprint. In some cases theres an argument we have too many troops overseas and into many countries. Broadly speaking, i would say the normal traditional readiness indicators of recruiting, retention, standard classified data, etc. , we are in good shape. I wonder if you could speak specifically to the future. You already have mentioned china and the National Defense strategy and innovation and modernization. But before we get to that, if you could add a word on covid and how the force is holding up at this late juncture late in 2020 after almost a year of the pandemic. I know that early in 2020 there were specific problems with certain naval forces that Teddy Roosevelt there had been concerns there were there was a need i believe to suspend basic training for a while back in the spring. But overall it appeared to me through the spring and summer that the force was holding up pretty well in the face of covid and mercifully there werent that many fatalities within the u. S armed forces from covid either. Could you give us a snapshot here as we near the end of the calendar year about how the military is holding up in the face of this terrible pandemic . We are unique, but we have a hierarchal structure. We have discipline. We issue orders and people follow them. We took some pretty stringent measures early on to protect the force. The reason we wanted to do that, we recognize that our job as a military is to protect the American People. Taske cant compass that and protect the American People and the constitution if we are all sick. We recognize the need to protect the force early on. And we did that. We pulled off the shell for our Global Pandemic op order that has been in existence. We tweaked it a little bit and we started doing certain conditions on our own force. We learned a lot of lessons from the tr as was known and we doing isolation and screening prior to getting on ships or any closed operating environment, like bomber or a fighter jet. So we imposed a whole series of pretty stringent restrictions on ourselves that seems to have made some contribution but i think one of the biggest contributions to why the u. S military has fared fairly well and not perfect, we have had deaths, and those are tragic, we have had troops that are sick, etc. , but relative to the whole, the number of deaths and sicknesses within the military and the force has been relatively small. Probably the biggest contributing factor to that is our demographic. Our demographic is not the same as it Civil Society. Our demographic to no ones surprise is mostly young people who are highly fit and and they tend to fare reasonably well if infected. Through a combination of our demographic and the control measures that we put on ourselves early on we have done fairly well overall and i think we are at least equal to or better than any of the militaries in the world as it dealt with this particular virus. Second part of that though is our contribution to the american to helping the American People through the covid crisis. And we deployed at the peak about 60,000 troops in support of covid to support troop ships. The mercy. You saw hospitals sprung up in various cities. Today about 23,000 committed to the covert operations across the country. We continue to do that. And then our contributions to operation warp speed is significant. General gus perna is one of the senior logisticians a great human being. Hes out there banging away and hes going to make sure that we distribute the covid vaccines nationwide here in a very short order. I think next week or two or three they will start the distribution of those. So the militarys made a contribution to protecting the society and also weve protected ourselves in the process. I think weve done reasonably well as a military. Id like to now turn to the future and youve already teed up some of the big issues in mentioning china and the current and future Global Security environment. Its been almost three years since secretary mattis with you and others as part of the team wrote the National Defense strategy under President Trump that built on initiatives that occurred in the latter obama years when you first became army chief, like the third offset as it was called. The armies had its multidomain operations you helped create the futures command when you were chief. I wondered if you would want to offer some broad commentary on where we stand with this greater effort in terms of preparing for Great Power Competition hopefully not great power war but nonetheless reinvigoration of great power deterrence and just where you see us at this juncture at the end of 2020. A couple of things. Its a very good document. That will be one of the significant contribution is that general mattis has made over the years. That document i think is rigorous. It was well thought out at the time. Many people contributed to it that it really was the pen of general mattis who did that. And thats based in a solid understanding of military history, geopolitics. Is it perfect . No. Theres a few things that need to between. But its pretty good. Its not a bad document at all. And and i think its with stood the test of time here in the last three to four years. Are there things that need to be modified for the Nice Administration . Yes. I think they will do that. One of the highlights in that document talks about a return to Great Power Competition. You could argue the word return. Maybe weve always been in a Great Power Competition but we were engaged in counterinsurgency warfare against violent extremists and terrorist around the world. And we didnt necessarily recognize some of the changes that might have been happening in the world. We are in a multiple world for sure. With china and russia and the u. S. All three being exceptionally powerful militaries. With very powerful economies. Then theres other polls. The eu, india, brazil. We are in a multiple world. What does that mean . Multipolar world. What does that mean . The cold war was arguably a relatively stable geo strategic situation even though it was nerveracking. It was relatively stable in part because you had two poles that others gathered around but in the International System there were two essential powers and they could establish procedures and policies and communications sops with each other and over time that acted as a stability or stabilizing force within the environment. When you get into an environment that has multiple poles, it automatically becomes more complex almost by definition and more dynamic. Thats one condition that we are in for sure and likely to remain in for a considerable length of time. Another condition is this rapid emerging technology that that that has really occurred. 1970ish orback to so, towards the end of the vietnam war is the introduction of precision munitions. Very few countries have precision munitions in those days. Precision munitions today are our most ubiquitous. Most of your significant powers in the world that precision munitions. Most countries can hit targets at great distance with great precision. And then in order to do that you also have to be able to see. So what has happened say in the last you mentioned 40 years but back a little bit further. Today we concealed the last 50 years we have had this information explosion. Say globally better than at any time in human history. So right now, ive got a fit it on. Fitbit on. A gps watch on. This probably iphones in this room. Theres 22 Electronic Devices here. I would imagine the chinese the russians and a lot of other people listening in. So you can actually pinpoint people through Electronic Devices very quickly. We have an ability to image we have an ability to see and hear we have commercially available google earth that was only available to very sophisticated militaries and now its available almost everywhere and everyone. So youve got an ability to see and an ability to hit at range that has never existed before in human history. Those two facts alone indicate that we are having a fundamental change in the character of war. The nature of war doesnt change. The nature of war doesnt change. It has to do with the politics and imposing your will and friction and the human functions of war. Has sometimes and do most with technology. There are other conditions that political conditions, demographic conditions, etc. Technology drives oftentimes throughout history change in the character of war how we fight, the doctrine we fight, with the organizations we fight. I mentioned to wars and have been going on for 30, 40 years or so. But add to that some technologies that are emerging and are coming very very fast robotics for example. Its already widely available in the commercial sector for a lot of different uses. We use it to a limited extent in military operations. You see explosive Ordnance Disposal teams use them in small penny pac

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