Take you back live now to the conference on intelligence and National Security being held just outside of washington, d. C. This is a discussion about emerging and live coverage on cspan2. The intelligence champions council, emerging professionals and Intelligence Committee will be hosting the happy hour this evening. Year over year the senior most leaders in our community see summit as form to share strategic insight and critical partners, this has been no exception. We had allstar lineup to close out the program, to get us started please welcome to the state ken, Senior Vice President and general manager of perspective Intelligence Group, he will introduce our moderator. Ken, over to you. [applause] thank you. As suzanne mentioned im ken and im the Senior Vice President , general manager for the Intelligence Group at perspecta. We have been working with the Intelligence Community for almost 50 years and we are proud to be partnering afce at this years intel summit. Honored to introduce the moderator on strategic threats and National Selection priorities david, david is a prizewinning columnist and associate editor for the Washington Post. Twice weekly distributed column focuses on global politics, economics and international affairs. In his over 30 years with the Washington Post hes covered much of washington including the pentagon, the cia, capitol hill, Cyber Commands, turning experiences of the cia to 10 spy novels, david has been praised for understanding to have intelligence world, most recent hightech spy thriller the spy about covert race to build the first super computer. With that, please welcome david. [applause] thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I want to get right down to business and introduce our allstar panel, these are familiar faces to you but i will briefly introduce first general paul, director of the National Security agency and head of Cyber Command, dr. Christopher scalise, director of national organization, Lieutenant General robert ashley, director of Defense Intelligence agency, admiral robert sharp, director of the national spacial intelligence agented cri, agency. Mr. Paul, responsible for the bureaus personnel, budget, administration and infrastructure. Before we get started on our discussion, i was talking backstage with general who has a special few words hed like to share. David, thank you very much. As fall marks period of transition for many of us also period of transition for insa as we get ready to recognize distinguished career, president of insa but clear in army and clear as professional Service Member at staff member at the center of armed services, chuck is getting ready to retire and on behalf of all of us who either work with chuck, worked with chuck and had the pleasure of being around chuck, thank you for a marvelous career, chuck. [applause] well, with that opening congratulations, i want to ask each member of our panel the same baseline question and i want to pose it this way as we know we have a National Military strategy that has really tried to focus the United States, our intelligence and the Defense Systems on the new reality of power competition, at the same time we have as everyone in this audience knows rapidly advancing changes in technology, so i want to ask each of you to begin by telling a little bit about how those two challenges, great power competition, you know, rapid set of technology affecting your agency. David, i begin with an idea, whats the opportunity and whats the challenge and the environments you describe, i would use one word for both of them, talent. Our greatest opportunity is our greatest strength which is our talent, the National Security agency 67 years, workforce that has been recruited, that has been trained, that has been retained to look at a changing atmosphere and for us that has been our power, as we look, though, for this changing world, our challenges in a period of increasing change and period of increasing technological advantage, how do we make sure that we retain that force and more importantly in this world, how do we ensure that we are able to recruit, train and retain a force that is not only represented of our nation but one that we can continue to compete with many of you in this room and other members of our government and even the services to make sure that we have the worldclass talent. I would second the talent but i would also add as an Opportunity One of the things we have is our partnerships, Strong Partnerships among the organizations that are sitting up here in front of you but also all of the organizations that we deal with, the industry which is providing new technology, new capabilities, we can certain take advantage of to improve our resiliency, advance our technology, reduce our costs and allow us to stay ahead of those who are trying to get ahead of us at the same time we have new new capabilities and new partnerships to be formed with the u. S. Base command now, we have a great partner paying attention to space which is something that is becomes much more critical aspect of our defense and intelligence posture and working with them and developing partnerships Like NationalSpace Defense center is absolutely critical so i would add that in order to to stay ahead and to address those challenges that you mentioned, its talent and our partnerships that would really allow us to do that. General ashley. Let me add to what they said, the good thing is i absolutely agree. Problems are competition, we are not into it is a global problem. How do we harness the inside and aggregation of big data and apply analytics to be able to get that kind of indication and warning, indicate sights that you might not see and the information is disaggregated and the other part, you know, everything that we do is providing to decision leaders, understanding the aggregation of the information, applying the analytics that help you get the insights, thats one of the opportunities, the other part of that is you really have to layer that with classified collection, thats the secret sauce, theres big Data Information and then that is kind of integrated with the pristine collection that you get from the Intelligence Community and then the other part in terms of thinking, you know, here is the challenge, the challenge is understanding whats behind the analytics, great things that we do when we talk about talent and workforce is analysis, so if the Defense Intelligence agency it is all sorts analysis, im a huge advocate of everybody sitting up here getting well funded because they feed the Intelligence Agency but its important that i know whats behind that analysis, so some of the work that we do now with algorithms, machine learning, we have to be able to keep the trust that we built in our Senior Leaders by being able to help them understand what underpins that information and what we are doing right now is we are applying the normal trade that analysts would use in writing a piece of analysis to how looking at machine learning, for us to keep that trust and leverage Big Data Analytics we have to understand whats inside the machine and puts back together and built in such way that we are leveraging trade craft. Let me continue to build on the kind of the theme and the thread coming through here, one thing id tell you is although this is new, this isnt new for us. I spoke last month at dinner event, i started off by saying, let me frame the problem for you, great power competition, we have competitors that are design ing weapon systems, design to do us harm, defeat our ability, to know where and how they operate, defeat our ability to defend against them at the same time we are facing this this new source of i was that are coming at us, we need reimagine our work flows, we need to rethink how we are doing our it modernization, our infrastructure, we need to think through what are the skill sets that we have, all things that a guy name ray was dealing with back in 1984 as he was becoming director of the National PhotographicInterpretation Center and we found ourselves in this transition period from going of what film processing, space film processing, technology coming online. You know, which was bringing new source of data and what i told the group there and what we are dealing with now is opportunity for us, you know, challenge for us and an opportunity for us. And the way we were successful back in the 80s when we were in that sort of competition, faced with the new technology, the way we were successful goes back to what was being highlighted here. It was because we had the best people and the best partners and we empowered those individuals, we told them here is the challenge we were facing, we dont know how we are going to get there but we need to get there and we gave them resources, stayed out of their way, we were successful. So i think we are in those inflection points right now which is why you see us all emphasizing the strength of us being our people and partnerships, those partnerships really broadly defined, you know, only a limited by imaginations and willingness to go out and create meaningful connections which is why forums like this are really so fortunate us and so important to the nation. Im going further double down on whats already been said, the people and the partnerships but to bring greater focus to it, its really the inner world and fabric of our all of our organizations and the way we Work Together which goes back to the people and the partnerships, you know, we in the fbi have incredibly talented creative, ambitious, missiondriven workforce, true patriots with passion for protecting our great country and the American People and thats what we all have across all of these great organizations and we get to see it coming together each and every day at the National Level and across the field and around the world as well, literally we are working side by side our people are better than ever, closer than ever to address the threats that are coming at us and leverage that technology can meet those challenges as we move forward, i will leave it at that. So i want to bring this discussion down from the 30,000foot level to the kinds of problems in which you all engaged and i want to start with you, each member of the panel talked about partnerships, we so often hear discussions of government approaches, almost mantra but you lived through a pretty interesting experience with that in trying to safeguard the 2018 midterm elections both in your nsa Cyber Command partnership and also working with the fbi and other agencies. Walk the audience through the basics of how that worked, how inner agency process, we would love to celebrate but it often is an obstacle to that kind of cooperation and not facilitator . So we thought about the elections for 2018, last summer one to have things we immediately did we went back and looked at 2016 and fairly understood our adversary and whether or not that was on the National Security agency side or u. S. Cyber com side, what we knew coming out of that we had to do something different. What was the different thing that we did . It was really 3 parts, first of all, we said, we will make sure that any adversary has no opportunity to get to our election infrastructure and so working very, very closely through the department of homeland, share as much intelligence as we had with regards to what our adversary might do, the second thing we said, we know that influence operations can very harmful and adversaries tried to play both sides of an issue, you know, very great timing here and federal bureau of investigation and the department of justice stood up the task force so working with the Foreign Influence Task force, again, sharing all of the information that we had, we said, this is what our adversaries might do and fbi was powerful in working with social Media Companies to alert them to the trade craft, the tactics, procedures that our adversaries were able to do before. The final thing is if theres adversary that are attempting to influence or interfere the elections, we will take them on, we will post cost to adversary, deploy teams to find those adversaries malware, we work with and through the government and we were able in 2018 in this whole of government effort i would say to deliver a safe and secure election, one that i would say is reflective of the power of all of our agencies but very, very reflective of really the talent. Well, recently about this effort and one of the things i noted with interest was that as you deployed your forward teams in this runup to 2018 elections, you were able to gather samples of russian malware in ukraine, other places and then post them publicly on a website so the community of cybersecurity professionals could take them down. I want to ask because you were in a sense on the other side of the partnership on whats its been like working with the fbi, working with state and local authorities in our country famously elections are matter for localities, how is that going in terms of easily interface with the authorities that actually have to run elections . The positive thing here is weve learned a lot from our mistakes back in 2016. Weve come together as a general state across government and all levels, federal, state, local and with the private sector importantly as well in way that is we probably couldnt have imagined even, you know, 2 or 3 years ago. Its working really well, the level of information, intelligent sharing with state, local officials, staying ahead of the threat, not after something has occurred has been incredible shifting to left of the threat and get as much intelligence out there to inform them and put them in the best position to protect themselves and the election infrastructure and then whats very encouraging is the gap weve closed significantly with, again, as the general mentioned, private sector social Media Companies, the level of sharing thats occurring now and has most recently 2018 is incredible, really, really and goes both way, we are putting intelligence information out to companies to help them spot bad actors on their platforms and remove them and theyre giving information back to us to inform our efforts so, again, as the general mentioned, we can take action against them and cut them off at the knees. So i want to ask general ashley to address in a little bit more the nature of the nearpeer competitor that we are now focusing on and thats china. Ive heard it said that the United States really has never faced an adversary quite like china, potential adversary and that this is economically powerful, technologically advanced and genuine competitor at all levels and i want to ask you from your perspective at dia, looking at all the material that you do, how would you characterize china, chinas buildup, what aspects of its Technological Development particularly concern you from your vantage . Your ability to project militarily and economic interests. I want to ask doctor scullys whose agency is so focused on overhead collection, about the new world we are all trying to figure out, the world in which there is Space Command, that even with other parts of the dod, not entirely there yet but i want to ask you if you would address the challenge of space and potential problems with so many people now wanting to focus on it. Its something people have begun to write about that our ability to project power around the world is entirely dependent today i think still, our ability to fuse spacebased assets, we increasingly understand we are vulnerable. Maybe you could speak about a new world of Space Command space force. How you will deal with it and how your life will be different, if at all. We are already working closely with these commands as it becomes what it will be for the nation so our workforce, national geo space agency, about half of our workforce works from here in virginia. 25 in st. Louis and the other 25 is globally dispersed. We have members embedded in our departments and agencies in all the commands and combat zones and its a strength of our agency that is very connective and collaborative by nature. Imagine this because we already stood out a support team for space from where we are establishing location with them so the other command we can be in the battleground meetings and here for the commanders requirements are and we can make sure we are meeting as part of our approach. Back to your question on spacebased, we dont solely rely on space to do our job, theres a whole big foundational aspect of knowing the earth and understanding the world that comes from all kinds of different ways of bringing in sources of data. We do certainly benefit from great capabilities in space, some of them for u. S. Government designed, owned and operated. Some of those increasingly are commercial capabilities, some are increasingly also investments that are International Partners are making or are making or anticipating making and we view that as an opportunity, as additional sources second answer the myriad of questions we get from senior policy makers to pentagon decisionmakers to the operational tactical levels. One of the things we were dealing with the today was the dorian and how we can get into the capabilities out ther