In afghanistan, military readiness, and the importance of emerging defense technologies. This is an hour. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. It is a sincere pleasure for me to welcome our featured an honored guest today, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff general mark milley, United States army. Since becoming the 20 the chairman of the joint chiefs in 2019 general milley has worked to realize the u. S. National Defense Strategy which prioritizes competition with china and russia, and American Defense plenty. Chairman milley has worked tirelessly with civilian and uniformed leadership towards developing the u. S. Armed forces into a truly modern armed force, capable of deterring and heading off the threats of all types that we may be facing today including those emanating from nearpeer competitors that have now really pronounced once again the idea of Great Power Competition. He has kept a close and careful eye on the perennial defense issues associated with iran and north korea, violent extremism in the middle east and elsewhere. In this way general milley tenure has coincided with by any standard could be considered a unique period in American Military history. We are in these threats are multifaceted, transnational and their multidomain. And given the realities of domestic politics, questions about preserving the apolitical character of the armed forces and so on, these are all open for intense debate and conversation. Being a great infantrymen, general milley has navigated the sometimes challenging terrain. Prior to his becoming the chairman, general milley was a 39th chief of staff of the great United States army and served in many of the storied divisions of the United States army including the second infantry division, tenth mountain division. You would be a a deputy commanr of the 101st Airborne Division aerosol picking rent the tenth mountain division, climb to glory, sir, would command the third core and be the commanding general of u. S. Army forces command. With one accomplishment that is not necessarily in his bio but i will mention it today, its one is very proud about and he is the proud son of a marine. The picture behind is on the Fourth Division going over the beach at iwo jima were i think his father was a participant. General, we are really proud of you and very for proud to haveu with us today. We know a very difficult dude is coming for you in the vergne future and that is for you to remain neutral at thisnd years army navy game. I know its tough. Well keep our eye on you for those of us from annapolis have Great Expectations for your neutrality but thank you for all youve done for our country. I mean that sincerely and all youve done for our allies around the world. I would like to turn over now to a dear friend, a fellow here at brookings senior fellow Michael Ohanlon who are Foreign Policy program whoho will kick off the conversation about the defense challenges you face in we face as a nation, then he will conclude with some questions and answers. Let me say that this session a friend much on the record today. If you have questions send them to events at brookings. Edu or on twitter at future of defense. With that, sir, god bless you. Thank you for being with us today. Over to you, mike. Thank you, john. Thank you, general milley at of want to add my personal gratitude not only for you joining us today and for all youve done for the country but for all the men and women in the military families and veterans who have worked so tirelessly and sacrifice a much on behalf of the k country that you are ad are proud too represent and lea. Thank you, sir. I thought the best way to begin our conversation today was to take stock of how the military is doing in broad perspective, in its readiness and estate the of its people and its families, here there have been a lot of stresses and strains, obviously covid inc. Only the latest so i would love any update you might have on our military is handling the covid crisis but also more generally center at this moment as 2020 winds down, its been four years since you finished up at princeton as an rotc and hockey player star back in the day, say watch the u. S. Military over four decades and you have been in. S leadership as the chairman position youre in a half and before that four previous years as the army chief. I just wonder how you would take stock of the condition of u. S. Military today and then we will get into talking more about what youre doing to prepare for the future. But again thank youu for being with us, and overdue. Michael, thanks of the opportunity i do want to thank general allen for those kind words. I think his picture was on the his shoulder was a painting that i noticed and he was the assault landing on iwo jima, and that beach looks to me like it was possibly the beach my dad might have landed on with the fourth marine division. General allen, i think was his fatherinlaw, may have been the chief of staff of the fourth marine division. Their 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 or40 years ago it was a much much different study, if i look back a little bit. We should be proud of 1979, washington rolled into afghanistan as part of an attempt to quell what they thought was a very unfortunate war abroadand weve got the iranian a revolution, the assaults on medina and saudi arabia. That happened in nigeria which was my senior year at princeton right before graduation. We in the military were not only committed in the middle of what we thought was almost a never ending cold war with the soviet union. A decade later ulthe wall would come down between the intergerman border but 79, 80 four years ago it was a fundamentally different political world because if you look at thingslike technology , 19 71 i think or 72, 73 timeframe, early 70s is your first email ever. I think if you Flash Forward 20 years to 90, 91 timeframe, thats where you start getting your first website, and you des to 2008 get the iphone comes out. So we had an absolute explosion in Information Technology that did not really exist when i was in commission. You had all kinds of different radiosystems , different emissions and so forth and a different politicalenvironment so a lot has changed as you well know. As you mentioned taking stock , the military is a very powerful unit and no one should ever mistake it for anything other than that. Adversaries, friends, foes, the military is extraordinarily capable and we are powerful in all domains whether traditional domains or whether its state and cyber but whats also important to know is the gaps between us and potential adversaries, china and russia for example. They shorten or close a little bit in 20 years but the United States has been t heavily engaged in counterinsurgency warfare in the middle east and for some time the chinese for example took stock in our operations worldwide. And they decided they would modernize to do things in 79, another critical event that fateful year and we decided to come to the society of china and they were running about 10 percent for quite a while of their gdp growth so today slowed down to about sixpercent, seven percent, something in that range. So for 40 years now, 41, the chinese economy has really been on a roll. Its extraordinarily powerful ve and in its wake has come in reformed Chinese Military so the soviet military was the basin strategy back in the 70s and 80s and when i became , was commissioned today i would argue that the Chinese Military and thechallenge from a rising china , that is really whats facing us a lot of geostrategic changes, a lotof changes in the environment in terms of technology. Urbanization is rapidly approaching, almost 80 percent of the World Population by midcentury so theres a lot of changes that occurred at paces that are much more rapid than any time weve ever seen in history so theres been a lot of potential opportunities. As far as our military goes i dont want anybody tomistake, our military is capable and we are ready for whatever comes our way. Where determined to defend the constitution ofthe United States and protect the American People. If i can bear down a little bit on a couple of specific areas within that realm of water us military capability today, these are areas where sometimes those of us to our defense talks track the data and i know you do too on readiness, recruiting, retention , condition of the equipment, condition of military pay and benefits. I wondered if you had any broad observations on those sort of readiness trends. Some people have said todays force is of course very tired, its been doing so much for 20 years and other people say but divers are less than it used to be, we dont have any big deployments anymore and we put a statewide budget environments, the Trump Administration has with the congressional support of both parties manage to increase the budget andmaybe were in better shape now. I wonder if you could put some of these trends of readiness and perspective compared to the last few years, compared to where you would like them to be. Let me try to answer readiness is as you know is classified to let me answer it this way. This is an approximate comment about the army, navy, air force, marines, space force etc. About a third of the force is at the highest levels of readiness at any amoment in time and thats about right as we have a certain amount of force is in training. A certain amount of force is refitting previous employment and the third is ready to go. At a high level of readiness. Some organizations andunits are at a much higher level of readiness , others abroad. For others, and im talking about format we always say about the third and its factually correct. Some entire, some less and were doing well on recruiting. Theres someareas of concern. Some of the higher tech skills such as special are in high demand in civilsociety. Those are difficult to retain where retaining across the board on services is good. Discipline, thats one. More out. The forces tired and at work for 20 years, its true but to a certain extent most of your younger part of the force has not actually deployed and common theme that i get is trips around the world, they are would like to be deployed and its not that they deployed, they havent deployed at all and its all important work but they would actually like to have something similar and we do have forces that are in a wide variety of situations, some in congress and one of the things we started to do and i think this is important is a holistic review of our global holistic review of the disposition of the force and the forces worldwide. Theres a very strong argument to be made that we may have forces in places that they shouldnt be nand we may have forces that are needed that are not right now and we need to adjust our global difference, in some case theres troops overseas into many countries and theres a lot of implications to all of that but broadly speaking i would say that the normal conditional readiness indicator for readiness metrics is pretension and the standard classified data. I wonder if you could speak specifically before we move on to the future and you always mention china and the national Defense Strategy and innovation modernization but if you could add a word on covid and how the force is holding up at this late juncture late in 2020 almost a year of the pandemic. I know early in 2020 there were specific problems with certain naval forces, with kenny roosevelt, there had been concerned with i believe suspending training for a while back in the spring but overall it appeared to me through the spring and summer at the force is holding up pretty well in the space of covid and mercifully there werent that many fatalities in the Us Armed Forces from covid either. Could you give us a snapshot as we near the end of the calendar year about how the military isholding up in the face of this terrible pandemic. Early on we took aggressive action in the military were waiting for a subset of society , but we have discipline, we knew some people so we took some pretty stringent measures early on to protect the force and the reason why we did that, we recognize that our task as the military is to protect the American People and we cant accomplish that task, we can protect them if we are all sick so we recognized the need to protect before squarely on and we did that. We pulled out our Global Pandemic r border, we kick it a little bit and we started doing emissions on our own force. We learned a lot of lessons from pr as it was known and we started doing isolation and screening prior to any closed operating environment like a bomber or multiple people in the crew so he onimposed a series of pretty stringent restrictions on ourselves that seems to have made some contributions but i think some of the biggest contributions to us military is fairly well and we have had troops that are sick, etc. But statistically speaking, relative to the whole, the deaths and sicknesses within the military and in the force have beenrelatively small. A contributing factor is our demographic. Our demographic is not the same as Civil Society. Our demographic to no ones surprise is young people who are highly sick and may tend to fare reasonably well if infected. So we accommodation of our demographics and control measures that we put on ourselves early on, we have done fairly well and i think we are at least equal to or better than any of the military who dealt with this virus. Second part of that is our contribution to helping the American People through the er crisis. We deployed 62,000 troops in support of covid, you saw the comfort and the mercy out there, hospitals being strung up in various cities, doctors andnurses the other day. So we still have today 50, 52,000 but today 20, 22,000 and many of these are Covid Operations around the country. We have these contributions to operation work speed is significant. Its one of the institutions, a great human being g and hes going to make sure that we distribute the covid vaccines nationwide here in very short order next week. They will start the distribution so the military has made a contribution to protecting society and also we protect ourselves in the process. I think weve done reasonably well as a military. I like to know for the future you all maybe he got some of the big issues mentioning china and the current and future Global Security environment. His secretary mattis wrote the national Defense Strategy, those initiatives that occurred in the latter obama years when you became army chief like the third offset as it was called, the army has had its operations to help create future demand and you are chief. I wonder if you would want to offer broad commentary on where we stand with this greater effort in terms of preparing for a Great Power Competition, hopefully not great power war but nonetheless reinvigoration of great power deterrence and where you see us at this juncture at the end of 2020. A couple of things, first i think the nes is a very good document and that would be one of the significant contributions that general mattis has made of the many hes made over the years and that document i think is rigorous, it was well thought out at the time. Many people contributed but it really was general l mattis who did that and a solid understanding of military history and geopolitics, is it perfect . Its not perfect, theres a few things that need to be to but mostly its pretty good. Its not a bad document at all although theres things that need to be modified for the next administration, i think we will do that but right now its ready good. One of the highlights in that document is a return to Great Power Competition and you could argue the word return, maybe we were all engaged in counterinsurgency warfare against violent extremists and we didnt necessarily recognize some of the changes that have been happening in the world but nonetheless Great Power Competition is a statement of fact about the International Condition as it exists today and i would say were in a multicolor work for sure. With china and russia and the United States, all three being very powerful at least the chinese and american economies are very powerful and then the eu for example, theres brazil and so were in a multicolor world. What does that mean . Whats the effect of that . The cold war is arguably a relatively stable situation even though itsnerveracking , it was relatively stable in part because it had two polls that others traveled around but in the International System there were two essential powers and they could establish procedures and policies and communications and sops with each other and overtime that acted as a stability or a stabilizing force or the environment. When you get into an f environment that automatically becomes more complex. 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 rapid emerging technology. That has really impacted i dont know, by 1970 or so. That towards the end of the year is the introduction of Decision Missions and the United States, very few countries have precision munitions and those are almost ubiquitous, most are significant powers in the yoworld have munitions so we can hit, most country can hit targets at great distance with great precision. Now in order to do that you also have to be able to see so what has happened say in the last 40 years but lets go back even more, today we can see and o