Transcripts For CSPAN3 Army Chief Of Staff Well Act When We

Live now to the National Press club where army chief of staff general mark milley will be todays speaker, he is the top uniformed official in the army assuming his duty as chief of staff back in 2015. Live coverage. Good afternoon and welcome to the National Press club the place where news happens. Im myron belkein the 2014 National Press Club 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 prok 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 introduced 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 11th, 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 jpersene 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. 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 45 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 ] 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, 65, 66 time frame. So thank you also for your service. Thank you. [ applause ] thanks all of you for being here. Im really here to talk about the new England Patriots and how they come back 283 or if we want to go red sox or we want to talk the bruins. Recent other news probably not a good topic right now, so just kidding. No, i realize that everyone here is keenly interested in that which goes on around us and im a soldier, a public figure, a chief of staff of the army. As you heard myron say, you know, significant budget, a lot of soldiers, a lot of young men and women of our nation and i feel an obligation to explain what we do, why we do it and answer questions for the American People and the American People oftentimes get their news get their view of us, the army or the military, through the media, its not exclusively through the media but its one of the mechanisms and i have an obligation as the chief of staff of the army to do that within bounds of classification i will be happy to do that. What i want to talk today about, really four topics. I have about i think 20 minutes or so and then we want to open the rest of it up to q a. I wont be able to talk in depth in 20 minutes on many of these topics but ill throw them out there and if you have follow on questions i will be happy to do it. I want to gi you my view, one mans view of the security challenges that we the United States and as a subset we the United States army are being challenged with around the globe today. Secondly i want to tell you a little bit about your army and the current state of readiness and what we prepare for. Thirdly i want to talk a little bit about the future and lastly i want to throw out a couple of myths about military operations that i think anyway are worthwhile discussing. But i do want to reiterate one thing up front, its this issue of the transgender news that came out the other day and i want to reiterate what general dunford the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff had said. I know theres lots of questions out there, but the military is the military, we operate off of certain processes and sets of orders, et cetera. So to date walking in here i have yet to receive implementation guidance. Implementation directives from the department of defense, general mattis and we grow up and learn to obey the chain of command and my chain of command secretary of army and the secretary of defense and the president. So we will work through the implementation guidance when we get it and then we will move from there. And to my knowledge the department of defense, secretary mattis, hasnt received written directives yet. So i know there is a lot of churn out there about what was said the other day, but thats where we are right now and general dunford is exactly right, we will act when we receive directives through the proper chain of command channels and then we will evaluate what we have and move out from there. In the meantime hes exactly right, and it should be no surprise to anyone, but the entire force, the entire chain of command will, always has, will today and will tomorrow and always should treat every single soldier, sailor, airman, marine, coast guard with dignity and respect for their service and the cloth of our nation, bar none. So thats where we stand as of today. I will be happy to field whatever questions may be on peoples minds later on it, but thats about all im going to say about it because thats kind of where im at right now on that. Okay. So but let me shift gears to some other i think so this. I want to talk about the strategic environment, the global strategic environment very briefly. As of right now we define some of the challenges globally, we use a pneumonic four plus one. There is a lot of ways to describe security challenges, you can talk about them functionally such as maritime challenges or cyber challenges. There are other types of challenges, people say the economy, others say climate change, et cetera. Within the department of defense at this time broadly speaking we are defining them and its not the only way to do it and we recognize it, but by a set of nation states, four of which were talking about, and then one broader challenge which are nonstate actors which are terrorists. And i will walk you through each one of those. And we do recognize theres other ways to define security challenges, but its those security challenges that today that we design the size of the force, man, train, equip the force, the joint force. I say all of this with a caveat because secretary of defense mattis is leading us, all of us, Senior Leaders of the department, through a detailed rigorous strategic review, a global strategic review, and i would expect that we will probably complete that perhaps sometime maybe in the fall and then that may or may not change how we view the strategic challenges, but at this point in time the way i look at them is through the lens of four nation states and one nonstate group of nonstate actors. The nation states are russia, china, north korea, iran and the nonstate actors are what i would call violent terrorist organizations, violent extremist organizations, but you know the groups, there is a whole potpourri of them, al qaeda, taliban, isis, al nusra front and a whole wide variety of other liketype groups that seek to do damage to u. S. National interest. Let me start with what is clearly the most capable of them which is russia. The way we or the way i look at challenges, strategic challenges or threats, is capability and will. And theres a lot of subsets and categories, but thats and thats a pretty conventional, by the way, look, thats a pretty normal standard look of people in the military of any country really. Its capability and will. And with russia it is clear that Russian Military capability is significant and in fact its the only country on earth that represents an existential threat to the United States because they have the inherent capability of Nuclear Weapons and we do, too, by the way, that can strike and destroy the United States of america, its government and people. So by definition they have extraordinary capability. Other countries have Nuclear Capability as well but only russia has the capable to destroy the United States. In addition to that there are conventional capability has been modernized significantly in the last call it five or ten years or so, maybe 15. Then you get into will and thats a much more subjective capability piece, you can do the math, add it up, figure it out, but when you get into will or intent that gets quite subjective and there youre dealing with a higher order of estimates and judgments. All we know for certain from behavior is that russia has acted aggressively externally to its boundaries in places like crimea and georgia and in regions of the ukraine and elsewhere. We also know they operate and try to undermine things like elections in European Countries and other countries. We know that theres a variety of cyber activity that goes on and a variety of other sorts of nonmilitary direct action pressures that are done. So a very assertive 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 then you have to try to figure out how to handle it. But i would argue, and this is me now, i would argue that russia is a the russian leadership is a purely rational actor, they operate off of traditional cost benefit as they perceive it and it is my belief that russian aggression, if you will, or further aggression can be deterred through the proper use of tools and that russia does undermine the United States interests in europe and elsewhere, but there are also areas of common interest and russia is a state because of its power in the system and it is a great power, russia is a state that the United States needs to carefully and cautiously with dell brat forethought work towards common objectives and then prevent undermining of our interests. Thats a delicate balance and we have done that before and we will have to continue to do that. And that will involve assuring our allies and partners in deterring further aggression, but i believe that with proper methods and leadership, et cetera, that that can be properly managed. China is a different strategic situation. China is a rising power, significant rising power, and i would argue that in chinas case youre looking at a country that since the reforms from 1979 and over the last 39 or 40 years china has advanced really significantly in terms of economic development, they were clicking off a 10 gdp growth a year, they slowed down to 7 the last couple years, but it is probably and this is open to argument, i suppose, but probably one of the most significant if not the most significant economic shift in Global Economic power in the last five centuries. Really since the rise of the west and the industrial revolution. The chinese Economic Growth over the last 40 years is really, really, really significant. What does that mean . Historically when economic power shifts so significantly, military power typically follows, and i believe that were seeing that today and were seeing a significant increase in the capabilities and capacity, the size and strength of Chinese Military capabilities. Then you get back to will and intent, whats their intent, whats their purpose, what are they trying to do. The chinese have been fairly transparent about that. They have a thing they call the china dream and their intent is to restore their historical 5,000yearold role to essentially be the significant the most significant power in asia and they want to be at least a global coequal with the United States and they want to achieve that by mid century. They are very transparent, they write books and put articles out about it. They would like to do that peacefully if they can and if they cant do it peacefully thats why theyre building that military. So stand by. China is not an