Im myron belkein, the 2014 National PressClub President and a former correspondent and bureau chief for the Associated Press in england, india and japan and i now teach journalism and the importance of accuracy at George Washington school of media and public affairs. Before we get started, i want to remind our inhouse audience to please silence your phones if you havent already done so and for our viewing and listening audience please feel free to follow the program on twitter at npclive. And for our cspan and public radio audiences, please be aware that in the audience today are members of the general public, so any applause or reaction you hear is not necessarily from the working press. Before i introduce the head table, i want to recognize two very special tables on my right and your left in the audience which are comprised of members of the National Press clubs American Legion post 20, which was founded on november 11, 1919, one year after the signing of the armistice that ended the First World War and for many years was associated with general of the armys john j persene who was an associate member of the National Press club and who served as the tenth army chief of staff. Legionnaires led by post 20 commander and jim noon, please stand and be acknowledged. [applause] now id like to introduce our head table. Please stand when i call your name. And to the audience please hold your applause until all the head table members are introduced. On your right kevin wensing, retired u. S. Army captain and a member of the mpc head liners team that plans these events. Brendan mccarry, managing editor of military. Com. Lisa matt utes, Vice President at haguers sharp and cochair of the mpc Headliners Team. Ellen mitchell, defense reporter for the hill. Scott mscione, defense reporter for federal news radio. Yasman tajda, reporter for National Defense magazine. Josh rogen columnist for the public section of the washington post. Skipping over our speaker for a moment, eric meltser, a senior news production specialist for the Associated Press and the npc Headliners Team am he be who coordinated todays lunch. Thank you, eric. Jim michaels, military reporter for usa today and former marine infantry officer. Amanda matsias National Security reporter for cbs radio who comes from a military family. David majundar, defense editor for the national interest. And alfredo dias, retired army master sergeant, a veteran of vietnam, iraq and panama and the Vice Commander of American Legion post 20. [applause] id like to acknowledge press club members responsible for organizing todays event, betsy fishermartin, John Donnelly and laurie russo and Staff Members laura coker and lindsay underwood. With just over 1 million active duty and reservist soldiers, the army is the oldest and largest of Americas Armed services. Its fiscal 2018 budget request is about 166 billion, including proposed war spending. In the context of a roughly 639 billion total pentagon budget request. The army faces a host of challenges today and President Trump added a new challenge yesterday with his tweets barring transgender people serving in the military. In case you are not aware, we have some breaking news update on that story which is the news that a little while ago as we were preparing for this lunch marine general Joseph Dunford the chairman of the chief of staffs and who spoke at the National Press club a few weeks ago sent a note, wrote a message to the chiefs of the services and senior enlisted leaders that the military will continue to, quote, treat all of our personnel with respect, unquote. And the two key paragraphs i will read out, quote, i know there are questions about yesterdays announcement on the transgender policy by the president. There will be no modifications to the current policy until the president s direction has been received by the secretary of defense and the secretary has issued implementation guidance. In the meantime, we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect as importantly given the current fight and the challenges we face we will all remain focused on accomplishing our assigned missions. General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The armys ranks enlarged after 9 11 and they shrank after the iraq and afghanistan drawdowns and now they have begun to inch back up. The army wants to be sure, though, that if the units are larger that they are also properly trained and equipped. The army and other services have said their readiness, their preparedness to fight is not up to standard. To improve the situation the army wants more money, but everyone agrees it needs to be well spent. The army has had trouble in particular executing large weapons acquisitions and billions were spent on the crusader, co marchy and future combat systems programs, for example, with much less to show for than had originally been planned. The army is battle hardened today but it has mostly waged one particular type of war, counterinsurgency. While tomorrows fights might be markedly different in character, to stay ahead of the curve the army is focused on keeping pace with rapid technological change. General mark milley is keenly aware of all of these challenges and is in the midst of addressing them. General milley became the 39th army chief of staff in august 2015. Before that he led Army Forces Command at fort bragg in north carolina. He has had multiple staff and command positions in eight divisions and in Army Special Forces units throughout the last 35 years. He has deployed to multiple theaters of conflict. He graduated and received his commission through the rotc program from princeton university, he holds masters degree from Columbia University in International Relations and the u. S. Naval war college and National Security and strategic studies. He is the recipient of numerous military awards including the bronze star. They are too numerous to mention. Just look at his chest to see the wide range. General milley is a native of winchester, massachusetts. He and his wife have been married for more than 30 years and have two children. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a major big welcome from the National Press club to army chief of staff general mark milley. [applause] gen. Milley thank you. I love coming to the National Press club and getting Headline News as i sit right there coming out of my chairman. Thats great. I really appreciate you doing that. So thanks for the opportunity to be here and i dont know how many of you know it, but myron was also a veteran himself, served in vietnam as a young man, pfc bell kind, he was on general westmorelands staff in the early years of vietnam, 64, 1964, 1965, 1966 time frame. So thank you also for your service. Thank you. [applause] through the media. Not exclusively through the media but it is one of the mechanisms and i have an obligation to do that within the bounds of classification. I want to talk today about four topics. Have 20 minutes or so and then i want to open the rest of it up to cure and a. Rest of it up to q and a. If you have following questions, you have to do it. I want to give you my view of the security challenges that we the United States and is a witht are being challenged around the globe today. , what weou much army prepare for. Im to talk a little bit about the future and lastly to throw in a couple of myths about i do want toations reiterate one thing. The issue of the transgender news that came out the other day. Im to reiterate i want to reiterate which and for tougher the joint chiefs of staff the military is the military. To date, walking in here, i have yet to receive implementation guidance from the department of defense, general mattis. We grew up to learn to obey the chain command. We will work through the implementation guidance and we get it. Then we will move from their. Into my knowledge, secretary mattis is not received written directives. Theres a lot of churn out there about what was said. That is where we are. Receive at when we directive through the proper chain of command channels. Then we will you violate will be have an move from their. Move from there. The entire force, the entire chain of command will always have and always should greet every single sailor with dignity and respect for their service, bar none. That is where we stand as of today. I will be happy to field with ever questions field whatever questions. That is about all im going to say about it. Let me shift gears to other things. I want to talk about the strategic environment very briefly. As of right now, we do find some of the challenges globally. Ase a mnemonic mnemonic there are a lot of ways to describe skewed challenges. Challenges. Time there are other types of challenge, people to the economy , people say climate change, etc. Within the department of defense, broadly speaking and finding them. By a set of nationstates, for which we are talking about. One broader challenge which are nonstate actors, terrorists. It is based on the security challenges that we designed the force. Secretary defense matters is leading all of us secretary of defense mattis is leading us through a global Strategic Review and i would expect that we will complete that sometime in the fall. That may or may not change how we view the strategic challenges. At this point in time, i look at them through the lens of four nationstates and one group of nonstate actors. The nationstates are china, russia, north korea and iran and the nonstate actors are violent extremist organizations, al qaeda, the taliban, isis, alnusra front as a whole variety of like type groups that seek to do damage to u. S. National interest. The most capable of them is russia. The way i look at strategic challenges or threats is capability and will. That is a pretty conventional look, that is a standard look for people in the military. Capability and will. With russia it is clear that the Russian Military capability is significant and it is the only country on earth that represents an existential threat to the United States because they have the inherent capability of Nuclear Weapons that can strike and destroy the United States of american. By that definition they have extraordinary capabilities. Other countries have Nuclear Capability but only russia has the capability to destroy the United States. Their conventional capability has been modernized significantly in the last 510 years. Then you get into will, and that is a much more subjective, capability can do the math and added up but when you get into will or intent, that gets quite subjective. There you are dealing with a higher order of estimates and judgments. All we know for certain behavior is that russia has acted aggressively it certainly thats externally. They operate and try to undermine things like elections in European Countries and other countries. We know there is a variety of cyber activity that goes on and a variety of nonmilitary direct action pressures that go on. A very sort of aggressive state. Then you ask yourself why, why are they behaving like that and you will get all kinds of debate on all kinds of arguments and you can try to figure out how to handle it. I would argue that russia is a, the russian leadership is a purely rational actor, they operate off of traditional costbenefit as they see it. Russian aggression or further aggression can be deterred through the proper use of tools and russia does undermine the United States interests in europe and elsewhere but there are also areas of common interest. Russia is a state, because it is a great power, the russian state and the United States need to move carefully and possibly with h deliberate forethought that will assure our allies and partners and its her further and partners and deterring further aggression. China is a different situation. China is a rising power and in chinas case were looking at a country since the reforms of 1979 and over the last 3940 years, china has advanced significantly in terms of economic development. 10 gdp growth per year, they slow down in the last couple of years. They are probably one of the most significant if not the most significant economic ship and economic global power since the rise of the west in the industrial revolution. The chinese Economic Growth over the last 40 years is really significant. What does that mean . Historically when economic power shift so successfully, military power follows. We are seeing a significant increase in the capabilities and capacity and the size and strength of Chinese Military capabilities. Then you get back to will and intent. What is their purpose . The chinese have been transparent about that. They have a thing that they call the china dream and their intent restore their historical 5000 year role, they want to be a global coequal with the United States and they want to achieve that by midcentury. They would like to do that easily if they can and if they cannot give up easily, that is why their building that military. China is not the enemy and neither is russia. For people like me in uniform enemy has a specific definition and that is a group of people or nationstates who we are currently engaged with Armed Conflict in. That word gets used loosely. Competition is one thing, even if it is adversarial, even if there are things that happen that are not savory but there is a big difference between open conflict and the activities below open conflict. Competition without conflict is probably a desirable goal especially with those two countries given the size and capacity and capability of this country. That is where we are at. China is a very rational actor, perhaps one of the best rational actors and i believe through proper engagement and deterrence and assurance measures that we can work our way into the future without significant Armed Conflict. But these are Unanswered Questions and we will not know until we get there. That is my estimation of his point. When you get to iran, their their desire for Nuclear Weapons has been put on pause. Even if it is, we can say with certainty that iran consciously tries to undermine u. S. Interest in the middle east. Baby that are asymmetric means and support terrorism and terrorist groups. We are in a posture relative to iran to support our friends and allies in the region and be very wary of iran. In the fourth country is in the and that is the threat of north korea. I dont want to go into a tremendous amount of detail on it. Much of it is classified. But it is clear that north korea has advanced significantly, quicker than many had expected, their intercontinental look significant ability that could hit the United States. North korea is a significant threat. The United States policy for many decades now have been the has been the objective that north korea will not thats Nuclear Weapons and they will not thats Nuclear Weapons that will strike the United States not possess Nuclear Weapons and they will not possess Nuclear Weapons that will strike the United States. We are fully in order of the secretary of state and department of state in the efforts to bring this to a resolution. Time is running out a bit. North korea is extremely dangerous and gets more dangerous as the weeks go by. We will see on that one. The last one is the violent extremists or terrorists organizations. You have a situation in afghanistan, iraq, area, west africa, libya, each had different factors and analysis. You cannot group all of these things at once. We are in a very long struggle against violent extremist organizations, terrorist organizations that have a radically different view of the world than we do and they consciously want to kill americans, undermine american interests and also kill all their friends and partners in the middle east and elsewhere. We in the military are committed to help in that effort. Our basic approach is to work with our friends and partners in the region and increase their capability to reduce terrorist threats so local Intelligence Forces can manage to those on a local level. You see what is playing out against isis which has been quite successful to date. We will destroy the organizational entity called isis, that organizational structure is going to be destroyed in the near future. They will disperse. All these organizations can morph into different forms and they are dependent on a very radical ideology. It is mostly for the peoples of the region to destroy that ideology. That is the world in a nutshell as fast as i can do. Let me shifted gears to army readiness, you heard us talk about the army, we do not have a sma