Me. It had a huge effect on your life. Its helped us grow going into our college years. For past winners of the competition, the experience sparked their interest in documentary production. I currently attend Drake University in des moines, iowa, and i got to meet so many candidates. And because of cspan ive had the experience in the equipment and knowledge to be able to film some of them. Were asking middle school and High School Students to create a documentary answering the questions, what issue do you want most president ial candidates to address. Were awarding 100,000 in total cash prizes including a 5,000 grand prize. Be passionate about what youre discussing, to express your view no matter how large or small you think the audience will receive it to be. And know that in the greatest country in the history of the earth, your view does matter. For more information to help you get started, go to our website, studentcam. Org. Up next, retired general joseph otell sat down for an interview with defense secretary. They discussed Current Technology and intelligence. This is half an hour. [ applause ] good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for that warm introduction. And thanks to the sponsors for pulling such an Amazing Group of professionals together this afternoon. It is truly an honor for me to share the stage with general joe votel. Joe, you served as commander of u. S. Socom during the busiest time for our armed forces in the middle east. I wondered given the conference and its theme and this audience, if youd start by just giving us a war fighters frank assessment of the intelligence support you received. How are we doing . What were the strengths . What were the weaknesses . What were the gaps . Let me add my thanks to the insa leadership here. Michelle, thanks for joining us here today for this panel. So youre right, i do consider myself to be a consumer and user of the products that come out of this great Intelligence Community we have. So from i think from a perspective of, you know, qualities and strengths, certainly great people. There was extraordinary integration at both of the commands, especially at sincom with the intelligence agencies. There were very clear expectations there and that was very, very good. And i benefitted from being the commander. So the focus of a lot of our efforts was in centcom. There are some challenges out there. I would highlight a few things to you. As we got involved in our defeat isis activities, i think we had a struggle. I think we had a struggle and i think weve addressed it but we will continue to struggle with the challenge of open Source Information and how we leverage that to make it truly useful for war fighters so they can understand it. I can recall the early days here of trying to understand foreign Fighter Movement and how much we relied on trying to understand social media and the important roles that that was playing. I think thats important. We dont do anything by ourselves. We have partners with us. So i think we continue to some extent be challenged by sharing authorities with our partners and with the systems to share information and intelligence with them. And these are areas that we have to continue to push in. Exploitation at the speed of a campaign is an important aspect. Im sure during the conference this week, youll talk about the challenge of big data out here. Being a victim of my own experience, we picked up a lot of information off the battlefield in iraq and syria from our isis adversaries but our ability to turn that and get that into usable for the and mine that data, i think is a challenge for us and we have to look at how reexplowe exploit t. I think we need more of it, for combatant commanders, to understand what people are thinking, understand how theyre looking at things, having those kinds of insights are extraordinarily valuable and i think as we go forward here, i think it can be a mitt gator to having to have the requirement to have large forces and large formations on the ground. And they can fill in the gaps for us. Before i shift to the next question, i wanted to let you all know, i can get your questions, assuming our Technology Works via ipad. Well leave five, ten minutes for your questions. So please will thinking now and emailing those in so you can join the conversation as well. Its very clear to all of us that were experiencing a historic kind of shift of eras with the return of Great Power Competition, the rise of a more ambitious, possibility revisionist china. The persistence of a weak but troublesome russia. I would like to draw you out on how we should think about this notion of competition with china and russia and maybe we should deal with them separately and what are the practical steps for both the Intelligence Community and the Defense Community to really make that shift of focus . Thanks. Thats a great question. At a very high level, the competition is about influence, ideas and control of technology and perhaps the internet and some other things here. So at a very high level, i think thats what Great Power Competition really means. Certainly at the military level, we look at it as a competition for maintaining competitive advantage. And when i say competitive advantage, i just dont mean Weapons Systems that are better or faster or more effective, but it seems other things like access basing overflight. It involves influence, partnerships, theres a lot to be said for the United States having had privileges at the su su suez canal. These things are really, really important. Thats kind of how i think about this big competition for influence and big ideas. 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. First and foremost, i think we need to strive to understand i would just say this, i think the most important requirement will be preventing strategic surprise here. And i think in terms of preventing strategic surprise, we have to think about understanding the intent of our adversaries out there. Our other great power competitors. We have to understand what theyre doing with their advanced technologies and where they are with the development of this. We have to understand how they are changing traditional relationships that we have relied on in the past and how those can impact us in the future. I think were seeing with turkey, for example, an Interesting Development here in terms of some of the relationship they have with russia versus nato. This is an example of what im saying. And of course, theyre reaching out to other traditional partners, not only in the area that i led, but really around the world. And we need to understand how those relationships are changing. I dont think we want to wake up someday and find out that the relationships are no longer existent. And i think the Intelligence Community needs to understand the relationship between russia and china, two of the great powers that we that were concerned with. I recall secretary mattis making a comment to a group of us one time about what could be the worst case situation here, and 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 that from a very high strategic level, we ought to be paying attention to. Great. So i spent a lot of time working on strategy in the pentagon. The fun and easy part of developing strategy is setting priorities and where youre going to put your emphasis. The hardest part is deciding where youre going to manage risk. As the Defense Strategy shifts towards this greater focus on china and russia and Great Power Competition, where, should, can this community afford to take risk . Is it in the middle east . Certain types of military operations . How do you think about accepting and managing a degree of risk . I think this is the real challenge here. And 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 focused on maintaining the Competitive Edge in that area. And i agreed with that and testified to that tact when asked. But i think when we look at other areas, i think we have to look very carefully at what our interest rat interests are. When you think about the different interests that we have that are not just interests for today or tomorrow, but have been enduring interests. Preventing this area from being a platform for terrorist to attack us. Maintaining the our freedom of commerce and navigation through the region. Preventing instability, preventing proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and maintaining a favorable balance of power. I think as we 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 figuring out what is sustainable in these areas, what level of military presence is required and sustainable for persistence over time . And it will probably not be everything we want, it certainly wont be. But it needs to be enough so that we can ensure our interests are addressed. The other aspect of this, i think, is the national Defense Strategy puts a great focus on partnerships and this becomes absolutely key. Just as we talked about as i talked about that, partnerships can be a mitigator as well. Were providing them the right equipment and support can help offset all of this. And of course all of that has to be underscored by, you know, synchronization in our informational military realms so were clear on what were trying to accomplish in each of these areas. And everybody is synchronized with respect to that. Easier said than done. In addition to this period of geopolitical change, were seeing a period of profound technological disruption, the list goes on and on, and many of the Wonderful Companies out in that hall are representative of the cuttingedge in these areas. But the u. S. And the military rely on the drivers of our innovative ecosystem in places like Silicon Valley and route 128 and austin and so forth. If you look at how the chinese are approaching this, they have a doctrine that ensure that is their private companies are carrying water for their military and sharing the best of their innovations. So i wanted to ask you, how do you see the challenge posed by this technological competition with china and is this company, our National SecurityCommunity Ready to compete effectively. I think thats an excellent question. First and foremost we have 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 that were we have absolutely minimized our vulnerabilities in this particular area. The defensive protective aspect of all of this, protecting our technologies and capabilities i think are very, very important. I think we ought to and, you know, clearly i think what youre pointing towards here is Stronger Public private 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 releverage that. And i think its much more effective Public Private partnerships and relationships on the very difficult issues. And i would add that we have to make a commitment to prioritize and invest in the appropriate research and development on these cuttingedge technologies to ensure that we are at the we are where we need to be in this. And this we cant rely solely on the private side. We certainly shouldnt rely on the government side to do this. It has to be a partnership. But there has to be significant investment in this. And this is what we see the chinese doing is really focusing in on that and driving their investments in that area and i think we need to do the same. You mentioned earlier the importance of leveraging commercially available tools, open source data and so forth and particularly with the just increasing exquisite ai applications, where we can characterize the behavior, the pattern of life on sea on the ocean, we can leverage ai to have improved facial and object recognition. All kinds of National Security applications. And, again, though, when you were at socom which is famous for being one of the moragele acquirers of new technologies, but i think its the exception that proves the rule. Theres still all kinds of obstacles that they face as small, innovative tech companies, whether its crossing the what i call the valley of death between the successful prototype and the program of record. 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 that we need to go after and remove from your experience. I think the two things i learned as a socom commander about this, theres two things you have to do. Theres many things you have to do, but i think first of all you have to have a strategy for what youre doing, how youre developing this and a plan for how having a plan for the key things that we were focused on that were important to the soft team out there. Having a strategy that identifies the development, the investments is a really important aspect of this. I think the other key on the soft side and from my experience was keeping the users close to the developers in this. And to me, that was absolutely essential. Some of you have probably had the opportunity to visit soft works down in tampa, something that was stood up by socom several years ago. But this was trying to find a doorway for people to come in, present their capabilities and to have users who can provide immediate feedback and leveraging concepts like rapid prototyping. Not only are you testing the viability of it, but youre looking at ways you can speed up the introduction to our fighters on the around the world. I think those two things really stand out for me. In an earlier life i had an opportunity to lead our i. D. Efforts. There was nothing in my career as a ranger that prepared me for that. It was one of the single Biggest Challenges i ever had. What i came to recognize out of that because when we looked at this, we began to look at the i. D. Challenge as a technical problem. And we could solve this if we had a Manhattan Project and we just had the right box. Figured out the right tool, we could solve that. So we had to look not just at the technology aspect, but we had to look at the targeting and training aspect of it. My point here is that when we look at the challenges we have here today, whether its any of the things, a. I. , advanced weapons, automation, we need to look at how were organized to attack the problem comprehens e comprehensively. And address it that way. It does nothing to develop a good piece of technology if people arent trained on it. And if it does nothing to develop technology, if we arent putting pressure on the enemy at the same time, were doing that to prevent him from responding to that. So i think the key pieces, youve got to organize and make sure we have a comprehensive approach to these challenges. I want to bring in a question from the audience, which pertains to leadership. As a former military commander, how did you insure you remained open to intelligence assessments that did not comport with your view of a situation . Really a question about different views in dissent. Yeah, so one of the things i started to do at socom was every morning when you got the read book, if you will, that gave you the overnight intelligence, i got in the habit of bringing in an Intelligence Analyst who would come in and be with me when i went through that. We had two in there as we kind of developed the process. What that gave me an opportunity to do was to look at the report and have a 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 very excellent analysts were seeing. That was a great process. The other thing i think that we did were things like deep dives. We had tried to do them on weekly basis probably being a couple times a month. But it was an opportunity for the j 2 many times in conjunction with chief of staff and others to direct the topics we wanted to talk about. Then for me to talk have a variety of analysts who presented information to me. Some of which was contrary to what i thought. So, you know, as a commander, i thought it was my responsibility to try to get a lot of different views into this thing. Into the things that we were doing. And for me, those were some of the practical aspects of it as well. And, of course, you know, just like anybody else, theres another layer of leadership out there in our Component Commanders and jtf commanders who have a different assessment. One of the most important things you do as a commander is make sure you set the environments so there can be a dialogue, a discussion about whats happening out here and how were interpreting whats happening. I think that was perhaps the most important leadership things that people can do to especially as we kind of navigate this complex environment. I could not agree more. Another great question from the audience about russian influence operations. Sove how much concern do you have with russian offensive influence operations generally, but in particular those that might be directed at u. S. Troops . I think we should be very concerned about what russia is doing with these capabilities. Both in the information environment and the electronic environment that can impact our weapons. We should not make any assumptions that our objectives are aligned in these particular areas here. So i remain very c