[applause] good afternoon, everybody and thank you for that warm introduction, and thanks to the sponsors for pulling such Amazing Group of professionals together this afternoon. It is took an honor for me to share the stage with general joe votel. He was a fantastic colleague but also a wonderful role model of the sort of servant leader for all of us who were in government. Joe, you served as commander of u. S. Socom, as commander of Central Command during probably the busiest time ever for armed forces in the middle east. You are an avid and regular consumer of intelligence. I wonder given the conference and its theme in this audience if you start by just giving us a war fighters frank assessment of the intelligence support you received. How were we doing . What were the strengths, weaknesses, the gaps . Thanks michelle. Let me add my thanks to the insa leadership and all of you for being here. Michelle, thanks for joining us here today for this panel. Youre right, i do consider myself to be a consumer and the use of the products that come out of this great Intelligence Community we have. So i think from a perspective of qualities and strengths, certainly great people. There was extraordinary integration at both the commands, special at centcom with the intelligence agencies will integrate in the command. That paid off, paid a lot of benefits forth. The were routine relationships and very clear expectations there and that was very, very good. I benefited from being the centcom commander so the focus of a lot of our efforts was in scent, and as result that very Clear Mission focused really, really helped us and that was very evident to me throughout my time sort has occurred at centcom but at socom as well. There are some challenges out there. I would highlight if you think steve. I think as we got involved in our defeat isis activities i think we had a struggle. I think when a struggle and we addressed it but will continue to struggle with the challenge of open source and publicly available information, and how we leverage about to make it useful for our war fighter so they can understand. I i can recall the early days he of kind understanding foreign movement and how much we rely on or trying to understand social media, and affordable that was playing. I think thats important. We dont do anything by ourselves. We are partners with us so i think we continue to some extent be challenged by sharing authorities with our partners and with the systems that share information and intelligence with them. These are areas we have to continue to push in. Exploitation at the speed of the campaign is an important aspect. Im sure during the conference this week you will talk about the challenge of big data out here. Again, being a victim of my own experience, we picked up a lot of information on the battlefield and are back in syria from isis adversaries, but our ability to turn that and get that into usable format, i think its a challenge for us, continues to be a challenge for us. We have to look at how we exploit this. I think the last area i would highlight as a challenge is humid. I dont mean that to take a dig at the human community. They do exceptional work but i think we need more of it. For Combatant Commanders to understand what people are thinking, understanding how to looking at things, having those kinds of insights i think are extraordinarily valuable anything as we go forward i think human and be mitigated to having, having to have the requirement to large forces and large formations on the ground and they really can fill in the gaps. I think continued focus in the human area will be important for us. Thank you. Before i shift to the next question i wanted to let you all know, i can get your questions, assuming our Technology Works by ipad. At the end, we believe ive come in ten minutes for your question so please be thinking now and emailing those in so you can join the conversation as well. Its very clear to all of us we are experiencing a historic kind of shift of eras the return of Great Power Competition, the rise of the more ambitious, possibly revisionist china, the persistence of a week but troublesome russian. I would like to draw you out on how we should think about this notion of competition with china and with russia, and maybe we should deal with them separately. What are the practical steps for both the Intelligence Community and the Defense Community to really make that shift . Thats a quick question. At a very high level i think this competition is about influence, ideas and control technology, and perhaps the internet and some other things. At a very high level thats what the Great Power Competition really means. Certain at the military level we look at it as a competition for maintaining competitive advantage. When us a competitive advantage i just dont mean weapon systems, having systems that are better or faster or more effective and it also means other things like access basing overflight, involves influence, involves partnerships. Theres a lot to be said for the United States having had line privileges at the suez canal. Thats a result of a longterm relationship with egypt and maintaining the relationship. These things i think are really, really important. Thats kind of how i think about it, this big competition for influence and big ideas and old my investments and economic aspects but also maintaining the competitive advantage. With respect to this community, the Intelligence Community, i think there are some things that need to be focused on. For some foremost we need to strive to understand, well, i would just say this. I think the most important requirement will be preventing strategic surprise. In terms of preventing strategic surprise, we have to think about understanding the intent of our adversaries out there, other great power competitors. We have to understand what theyre doing with advanced technologies and where they are with the development of this. We have to understand how their changing traditional relationships that we have relied on in the past and how those can impact us in the future. I think we are seeing with the turkey, for example, an Interesting Development in terms of some other relationship they have with russia versus nato. This is an example what im saying. And, of course, they are reaching out to other traditional partners, not only in the airy area that i lead ry around the world, and when youd understand how those relationships are changing. I dont think we want to wake up someday and find out the relationships are no longer in existence. And finally i think we need the Intelligence Community, the broader National Security, needs to understand the relationship between russia and china, two of the great powers that we are concerned with. I recall secretary mattis making a comment to group of us one time about what can be the worst case situation here . Perhaps the worst case situation could be a stronger alignment between those two great power competitors to us and what that means to us. I think those are the areas from a very high strategic level we ought to be paying attention to. I spent a lot of time working on strategy in the pentagon. The fun and easy part of developing strategy setting priorities and where are you going to put your emphasis. The hard part is about deciding where, when you dont have unlimited resources are going to accept and manage some degree of risk. As the National Defense strategy shifts toward this greater focus on china and russia and Great Power Competition, where should, can this community afford to take risk . Is it in your old aor, the middle east . Is it in certain types of military operations . How do you think about accepting a managing a degree of risk tranthree i think this is of course is the real challenge here. The National Defense strategy, at least the current one, promulgated under secretary mattis was very clear in terms of where the focus was. It was focus on Great Power Competition and maintaining that Competitive Edge in that area. As the centcom command i agreed to that and testify to the fact when asked. But i think when you look at other areas i think we have to look very carefully at what interests are. One of the things that strikes me about an area like the middle east is when you think about the different interest that we have that are not just interest for today or tomorrow, but have been enduring interest, preventing this area from being a platform for terrorists to attack us. Maintaining our freedom of commerce and navigation the region, preventing instability from affecting operations, preventing proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and making a favorable balance power. I think as a look at other areas we have to look at how we address those interests, and i think what it requires is when it comes to military forces i think it requires the group out what is sustainable in these areas, what level of military presence is required and is sustainable for persistence over time. It will probably not be everything we want. Certainly wont be. But it needs to be enough so that we can ensure our interests are addressed. The other aspect of this is the National Defense strategy but to great focus on partnerships, and this becomes absolutely key. As i talked about humans, partnerships can be a medicaid as well. Making our partners are strong, making sure have the right investments within, providing them the right equipment and the right support i think can help offset all of this. And then of course all that has to be underscored by synchronization in our diplomatic, economic, informational and military realms. So we are very clear on what were trying to accomplish in each of these areas and everybody is synchronized with respect to that. Easier said than done as we both know. In addition to this profound geopolitical change were also seeing a period of profound technological disruption, whether its quantum computing, ai, machinery, robotics, atomic, hypertonic, electric weapons, the list goes on and on and many of the Wonderful Companies that are out out in all our representative at the cutting edge in these areas but in many of these areas the u. S. And the military rely on the drivers of our innovative ecosystem, primarily driven by private capital in places like Silicon Valley and route 128 and austin and so forth. If you look at how the chinese are approaching this disruption, they have a multibilliondollar, multiyear state directed Investment Program of Civil Military fusion doctrine that ensures that their private companies or Stateowned Enterprises are carrying water for the military and sharing the best of their innovations. I wanted to ask you, how do you see the challenge posed by this technological competition with china, and is at this community, our National SecurityCommunity Ready to compete effectively . I think thats an actual question. First and foremost with to make sure we take measures to protect ourselves and make sure that as we begin to address this necessary competition here we have to make sure we have absolutely minimize our vulnerabilities. The defense protective aspect of all this i think, protecting our technologies and capabilities i think are very important. Clearly i think what youre pointing to hear is stronger publicprivate partnerships to address these challenges that we have. Ours is a system that is driven from the private side to the public largely, and we need to learn how we leverage and it is through much more effective publicprivate partnerships and relationships on a very difficult issues. I guess i would finally add we have to make a commitment to prioritize and invest in the appropriate research and develop development on these cutting Edge Technologies to ensure that we are are women need to be in. We cant rely solely on the private side. We certainly shouldnt rely on n the public side to do this, the government side to do this. It has to be a partnership with the rest of the significant investment in this and this is what we see the chinese doing from the more civilized approaches focusing in on that and driving their investment inn the area, anything we need to do the same. You mentioned earlier the importance of leveraging commercial available tools, open source of data and so forth, and particularly with just increasing exquisite applications, for example, maritime domain awareness we can literally identify track, characterized the behavior, the pattern of life at sea come insubstantial ship on the surface of the ocean. We can leverage ai to have dramatically improved facial and object recognition. All kinds of National Security applications, and again you at so, which is famous for having one of the more agile acquirers of new technology at socom but its the exception that proves the rule. When you look at companies out in the hallways, the smaller ones who are bent on serving the National Security community, there are still kind of obstacles they face a small innovative commercial tech companies, whether its navigating the raft of contract vehicles, whether its crossing what i call the valley of death between the successful prototype in the program of record. So as you think about the importance of integrating those technologies for our success and ability to perform on the battlefield, what are the key obstacles we need to go after and remove, from your experience . Again, another quick question. I think the two things i learned as socom commander about this, theres really two things you to do. Theres many things yet to do but first of all you have to have a strategy or what you are doing technologically, how you are developing this, and the plan for how you are approaching that. As you mentioned i think we were blessed in socom with a group of people who were very good at doing that and having a plan for the two things will focus on that were important to the soft team. Having a strategy that identifies the developments and investments is really important aspect of this. On the soft side and from my experience of socom was keeping users close to the developers in this. And to me that was absolutely essential. Some of your probably had opportunity to visit softworks down in tampa, something that listed up by socom several years ago. This was focused on trying to provide an entrance, a doorway for people to come in, present their capabilities and look at how they can integrate, and then to users who could provide almost immediate feedback and leveraging the concepts like rapid prototyping. So not only are you testing the viability of it but you also looking at ways you can speed up the introduction of this to our fighters around the world. I think those two things really stand out for me. In an earlier life i had an opportunity to lead our ied effort, and there was nothing in my career as a ranger, as it entryman that prepared me for the victims on the Biggest Challenges ahead. What he can to recognize out of that because when we look at this we begin to look at, look at the challenge as a technical problem. We could solve this if we had a manhattan project, if we just have the right box can if we figured out the right tool we could solve that. What we can realize was made toa look at it much more comprehensively. We had to look not just at the Technology Aspect but at the United States aspic, look at the target aspect of it. My point here is that women look at these challenges we have out here, when we look at advanced weapons, a variety of different things, we really need to look at how were organized for this to attack the problem comprehensive lake. And address it that way. It does nothing to develop a good piece of technology if people are not trained on it. If, it does nothing to develop Good Technology if were not putting pressure on the inning at the same time were doing that to prevent him from responding to that. I think they keep peace is with organize and make sure we have a conference of approach to these challenges. I want to bring a question from the audience which pertains to leadership. It says as a former military commander howdy you ensure you remain open to intelligence assessments that did not comport with your view of the situation . Its really a question about different use in dissent. One of the things i started do at socom and they took it over to travel with me was every morning when you got the rebook, if you will, activity overnight intelligence and that thing, i got in the habit of bringing up, bring in an Intelligence Analyst who would come in and be with me when he went to that. Ultimately we had two of them in there as we develop the process. What that gave me an opportunity was look at the report and have conversation with somebody about what i was reading. That was very helpful in terms of my understanding and being able to challenge some of my interpretation of what was happening out there versus what our excellent analysts were seeing. To me that was a great process. The other thing i think that we did with things like deep dives. We had tried to do them on weekly basis, probably ended up being a couple times a month but it was an opportunity for the jade you many times in conjunction with chief of staff and others to direct the topics that we want to talk about and then for me to talk with analyst who present information to be, some which was contrary to what i thought. As a command i thought it was my responsibility to try to get a lot of different views into this thing come into the things we were doing. For me those were some of the practical aspects of it as well. And, of course, just like anybody else theres another layer of leadership out there in o