Floornoi and they discussed china russia and iran as well as intelligence. This is half an hour. [ applause ] good afternoon, everybody, and marcel, thank you for that warm introduction and thanks to the sponsors for pulling such an Amazing Group of professionals together this afternoon, and it is truly an honor for me to share the stage with the general and he was a fantastic colleague and a wonderful role model of this servant leader for all of us who were in government. You served as u. S. Socom and as commander of Central Command during probably the busiest time ever for our armed forces in the middle east. You were an avid and regular consumer of intelligence, and if youd start by giving us a war fighters frank assessment of the intelligence support you received. How were you doing . What were the strengths and the weaknesses and the gaps . Let me add my thanks to the leadership here and to all of you for being here and thanks for joining us here today for this panel. Youre right, i do consider myself to be a user and a panel that comes out of this great Intelligence Community that we have. I think from a perspective of, you know, qualities and strengths, i mean, certainly great people. There was extraordinary integration at both of the commands and especially at centcom with the intelligence agencies well integrated in the command and that paid a lot of benefit for us and there were routine relationships and there were very clear expectations there on that and that was very, very good and of course, i benefited from being the centcom commander. So the focus of a lot of our efforts was in centcom and had a clearmission focus really, really helped us and that was evident to me throughout our time and certainly at centcom and certainly at socom, as well and there are some challenges out there and i would highlight a few things and i think as we got involved in our defeat isis activities and i think we had a struggle, and i think we had a struggle and we addressed it and we will continue to struggle with the open source and publicly available information and how we leverage that to make it truly useful for war fighters so they can understand it. I can recall their early days here of trying to understand foreign Fighter Movement and how much we relied on and trying to happened social media and the Important Role that was playing. I think thats important. We dont do anything, by ourselves and 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 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. You know, im sure during a conference this week youll talk about the challenge of big data out here, and again, 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 and our ability to turn that and get that into usable tomorrow at and mine that data, i think is a challenge for us and continues to be a challenge for us and we have to look at how we exploit this and i think this was very, very important for us and the last area that i would highlight as a challenge is human, and i dont mean that to take a dig at the human community, they do exceptional work, and we need more of it. From combat and commanders and understanding what people are thinking and having those kinds of insights i think are extraordinarily here, i think it can be a mitigate or two having to have the requirement to have large formations on the ground and really they cant fill in the gaps for that. I think we need to focus in the human area is important for us. Thank you. Before i shoot to the next question, i want to let you all know that i can get your questions, assuming are technology works, via ipad, so at the end, we will leave five or ten minutes for your questions, so please be thinking now, and emailing those and so you can join the conversation as well. So, its very clear to all of us that we are experiencing a historic kind of shift of areas, with the return of Great Power Competition, the rise of a more ambitious, possibly revisionist china, the persistence of a week but troublesome russia. Id like to draw you out on how we should think about this notion of competition, with china and russia, maybe we should deal with them separately, and what are the practical priority steps for both the Intelligence Community and the Defence Community to really make that shift. Thank you. Thats a great question. I think, at a high level, i think this is the competition about influence, ideas, and control of technology, and perhaps the internet and some other things. So at a very high level, i think thats what the 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. Having weapon systems that are better, faster, more effective, but it also means other things, like access basing overflight, it involves influence, and involves partnerships, theres a lot to be said for the United States having headline privileges at the suez canal. Thats a result of a long term relationship with egypt and maintaining that relationship, so these things are really important, so thats how i think about this, a big competition for influence and big ideas. And ultimately, investment and economic aspects, but also maintaining the competitive advantage. With respect to this community, the Intelligence Community, i think there are things that need to be focused on. First and foremost, i think we need to strive to understand i would say this, i think the most important requirement would be preventing strategic surprises. And i think of in terms of that, i think understanding the intent of our adversaries out there, other great power competitors, we have to understand what they are doing with their advanced technologies, 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 mean, i think we are seeing, with turkey for example, an Interesting Development here in terms of some of the relationships they have with russia, versus nato. This is an example of what im saying. And they are reaching out to other traditional partners, not only in the area that i lead, but really around the world. And we need to understand how those relationships are changing. I dont think we are going to wake up someday and find out that the relationships that they are based on are no longer exist and. I think finally, 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 a group of us one time about what could be the worstcase situation here . And perhaps it could be a stronger alignment between those two great power competitors to us, 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. I spend a lot of time working on strategy in the pentagon, the fun and easy part of developing strategy is setting priorities, and where you are going to put your emphasis. The hard part is deciding where, when you dont have unlimited resources, you are going to accept and manage some degree of risk. So as the National Defence strategy shifts towards this greater focus on china and russia and Great Power Competition, where should, can, this community afford to take risks . Is it in your old ar in the middle east, is it in certain types of military operations, how do you think about accepting him and managing a degree of risk . This is the real challenge and the National Defence strategy, the current one propagated under secretary mattis is important to restore to focus on Great Power Competition and maintaining the Competitive Edge in that area and at the commander, i testify to that fact when asked. But i think when we look at other areas, i think we can look very carefully at one of the things that strikes me about an area like the middle east is that when you think about different interest that we have that are not just interest for today or tomorrow but i have been enduring interest in being a platform for terrorist attacks and maintaining our freedom of navigation and preventing instability from affecting our operations and many proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and maintaining a favorable balance. This is in the interest of us so i think when we look at other areas, we have to look at how we address those interests. I think what it requires when it comes to military force is figuring out what is sustainable in this area and what level of military presence is required and sustainable for persistence overtime. It will probably not be everything that we want and certainly wont be. But it needs to be enough so that we can make sure our interests are addressed. The other aspect of this i think is that the national sub defence strategy is focused on partnerships. This is become absolutely key. Just as we talked about and humans being a bit a gated to this they are part of it as well. So making our partner strong, making sure that we have the right investments with them and providing the right moment in the right support can help offset offset all of this. All of that has to be under sworn by the diplomatic and economic information and military realms so are very clear in terms of what were trying to accomplish and each of these areas and everyone is synchronize in respect to that. Easier said tendon. In addition to this period of profound political change. Were also seeing a profound technological disruption when its hitting ai and Machine Learning and autonomy and genetic engineering and the list goes on. Many of the Wonderful Companies that are up in that hall a representative of the cutting edge in these areas. And many of these areas, in the military they rely on the drivers of our ecosystem and whether its primarily driven by capital and places like Silicon Valley and austin and so forth. If you look at how the chinese are approaching this period of disruption, they have a multi billion dollar state direct investment program. Civil military fusion doctorate touch a shares there companies are carrying further military and sharing the best of their innovations. I wanted to ask you, how do you see the challenges by this technological competition with china . Is this community, our National Security really ready to compete effectively . I think thats an excellent question. First and foremost, we have to make sure that we take measures to protect ourselves. We have to make sure that as we have this necessary competition here, we have to make sure that we are absolutely missing minimizing are problems in these particular areas. The defensive protection aspect of protecting our technologies capability is very important. I think that we ought to clearly i think what youre pointing towards is are stronger public, private partnership to address these challenges that we have. Ours is a system that is driven from the private side to the public and we need to learn how we leverage that. Its much more effective public and private partnerships and relationships on a very difficult issue. I guess i would finally add that we have to make a commitment to prioritize and invest in the appropriate research and development on these huge technologies and to ensure that we are at we are where we need to be. But we cant rely solely on the private side and we cant rely on the public side and the government side to do this and. Has to be a partnership and has to be significant investment on this and thats where i think the chinese are doing from their more civilized approach is focusing in on that. Driving their investments in that area. I think we need to do the same. You mentioned earlier, the importance of leveraging commercially available tools, open source data, and so forth. Particularly with just increasingly exquisite ai applications for, for example, maritime domain awareness where we could literally identify track, characterize the behavior, the pattern of life at sea of any substantial service we can now leverage ai to have dramatically improved facial and object recognition. So all kinds of National Security applications. And again, you were at so calm, which is famous for having one of the more agile acquirers of new technologies and its the exception that proves the rule, when you look at the companies that are out on that hallway, the smaller ones who are bent on serving the National Security community, there is all kinds of obstacles they space as small, innovative tech companies, whether its navigating the morass of contract vehicles, whether its crossing what i call the valley of death between a successful prototype and the program of record so when you think about the importance of integrating those technologies, for our success and our ability to perform on the battlefield, what are the key obstacles that we need to go after and removed from your experience, in so socom in particular . The two things i learned as a socom commander about this is, theres really two things you had to do. Theres many things you have to do, but you have to have a strategy for what you are doing, technologically. How you are developing this. And a plan for how you are approaching that, and as you mentioned, i think we were blessed at socom with a group of people who were very good at doing that and having a plan for the key things that we are focused on that were important to the soft team out there, so having a strategy that identifies the investments is a very important aspect of this, i think the other key on the soft side is 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, some of those stood up by socom several years ago, this is focused on trying to provide an entrance, a doorway for people to kind of come in, present their capabilities, and look at how they integrate, and then to have users there who could provide almost immediate feedback. And leveraging concepts like rapid prototypeing. So not only are you testing the viability of it, but you are also looking at ways that you can speed up the introduction of this to our fighters on around the world. So i think those two things really stand out for me. In an earlier life, i had an opportunity to lead our idea there was nothing in my career as a ranger that were fairly for that, it was one of the single Biggest Challenges i ever had, but when i recognized that, when we look at this, we looked at the ied challenge as a technical problem. That we could solve this, if we had a Manhattan Project and we just had the right box and we figured out the right tools, we could solve that. But what we came to realize was that we had to look at it much more comprehensively, so we had to look at not just the Technology Aspect but we have to look at the training aspect, we have to look at the targeting aspect of it, and so my point here is that when we look at these challenges, that we have out here, whether any of the things, a, advanced weapons, automation, a variety of Different Things out here, we really need to look at how we are organized for this to attack the problem, 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 good technology, if were not putting pressure on the enemy at the same time, we are doing that to prevent them from responding to that, so i think the key piece is we have to organize and make sure we have a comprehensive approach to these challenges. I want to bring in a question from the audience what i think pertains to leadership. As a former military commander, how do you assure that you remain open to intelligence assessments that do not comport with your view of the situation. Its a question about different views . One of the things i started to do at socom, when you had the read book that gave you the overnight intelligence and i got in the habit of bringing up an Intelligence Analyst who had come in and be with me and ultimately had two of them there as we develop the process and that gave me an opportunity to look at the report and have a conversation on what i was reading here and that was a very helpful in terms of my understanding and the opinion of the challenge from my interpretation of what was happening out there as to what our excellent analysts were saying and that was a great process. The other thing that we did which was deep dives. We tried to do them on a weekly basis or a couple of times a month. It was an opportunity to direct the corruption of the chief of staff was to direct the topics i want to talk about and to talk about a variety of analysts and some of which was contrary to what i thought so as a commander i thought it was my responsibility to get a lot of different views on this and the things that we were doing and for me those were some of the practical aspects as well and of course, just like anybody else, there is another layer of leadership out there and the commanders at different assessments. One of the most important things you do as a commander is make sure that you set the environment so you get the dialog and the discussion about whats happening and how they were assessed and interpreted about whats happening and thats or the most important leadership things that people can do especially as we navigate through this complex environment. Could not agree more. Another great question from the audience about russian influence operation. How much concern do you have with russian influence operations