Coping with Surprise in Great Power Conflicts

mark can't see a Nasir adviser here at CSIS and leader of this study project I'll give a quick summary of the study first everything I touch on will be discussed in detail in the report itself so if you want to dig deeper you can look into the report then we'll have a panel discussion about the future of conflict vulnerabilities to surprise & Hedges and at the end we'll have a Q&A so if you have any questions hold them for the end but we'll have an opportunity for you to ask them and before we go further I need to make one administrative announcement which is in the unlikely event of an emergency I will tell you what to do will either stay here or go out the front door the back door so with that as a start let's see how we do I'm looking at my IT guys here let the left one right one I'm right again you went to drive him from the back this one right here okay different right one though all right there we go okay first the you talked about the overview of the project we focused on great powers because they're able to challenge the United States and all five war fighting domains particularly close to their own Shores and they can provide a challenge a level of risk that regional powers can't we divided surprise in the four category it's not just surprise attack which gets most attention but also technological doctrinal and diplomatic and the purpose of the project consistent with CSAs s mission as a think tank is to be helpful to policy makers and that's why we looked out just a few years to think about what we need to do now not what might be needed in the far future all right and well I think about surprise now well there are three reasons the first is the return of great power competition that's been building really since 2014 but is now enshrined in the national defense strategy and the second as the bullets indicate is the length of time since the last great power conflict and that has introduced two factors the first is that there is this notion built up that great power conflict is now obsolete and that is unlikely to occur and the second is that there are a lot of technologies and weapons that have not been tried out in a great power conflict so there's a result there's a lot of uncertainty and from that uncertainty is vulnerability to surprise and finally and finally there is hubris that has arisen from a generation of the United States obtaining easy victories over isolated and weak regional powers and becoming used to having global military superiority there's a debate in the community about surprise and preparing for surprise weather better foresight and better analysis can eliminate surprise or weather surprise is inevitable and the study came down clearly on the on the side that some surprise is inevitable you see the reasons up there I won't go through all of them I should note that having come to that conclusion we changed the name of the project from avoiding surprise to coping with surprise to allow for the fact that the some surprise is inevitable all right now rather than flick more power point on you I'm going to use our video to summarize this study we found out that videos can be a very powerful mechanism of communicating and a good complement to our written product products video runs about three minutes and Lintz surprise has been an element of war since the beginning of time but as warfare has evolved so too has the nature of surprise so what might surprise look like today it's not an academic question for the first time in a generation the United States faces great power rivals regional powers can also inflict surprise looking back at history can help us imagine what surprise might look like today a date which will live in infamy first there were the classic surprise attacks Pearl Harbor the Chinese intervention in Korea the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in each case the victim missed signals that were obvious in retrospect might we wake up one day to find the Russian army in the Baltic States or that the Chinese have neutralized US bases in the Pacific there are also technological surprises poison gas devastated Allied troops when first used in World War one my future adversaries poisoned our networks through cyberattacks or deploy some new weapon technological surprises can happen when our own weapons fail in world war two u.s. submarine torpedoes ran too deep and failed to detonate when they hit their targets it took two years for the Navy to acknowledge and fix the problems before our current weapons our doctrinal surprises were the use of existing capabilities in novel ways are also a threat during World War one the Germans instituted unrestricted submarine warfare breaking with a century of maritime practice today we're seeing countries again breaking longstanding taboos by using suicide bombers and chemical weapons maybe one day wake up to find that assassination teams have killed our political and military leadership there's also surprise when we get our own doctrine wrong a fortresses attack that completes our bombing run in World War two early US attempts to fly bomber formations deep into Germany failed what happens if today's stealth aircraft cannot penetrate an adversary's airspace finally does the surprise no one talks about diplomatic surprise when faced with the life-or-death decision about going to war countries can withdraw from alliances unexpectedly at the beginning of World War one Italy was allied with Germany and austria-hungary but it refused to help them in 1914 and switch sides in 1950 will some of our allies balked when the shooting starts in a future war some surprises inevitable because no one can predict the future but defeat is not inevitable we can prepare intellectually by exploring a wide range of possible futures we can boost our resiliency by training leaders and troops to operate under adversity we can counteract the effects of surprise through swift feedback from the field and rapid acquisition processes above all the United States needs a dose of humility despite what senior officials have said in the past we are not the best military in history we should remember what happened to the Prussians the military superpower of their time Napoleon crushed them in a single day in 1806 wiping out a century of military dominance there is no god-given right to victory we ignore the threat of surprise at our peril [Music] all right well we let our inner Tom Clancy loose to develop vignettes as illustrations of possible future surprise some are a bit wild but that's the nature of surprise here you see a listing of the vignettes we came up with and to give you a sense of what they're like let me describe one and the I'm looking to see which one it it is up there but one of them we have we look back on the history of the Cold War and note that the Soviets had thoroughly penetrated the u.s. security establishment and I puffeth eyes it in a future conflict an adversary may also have penetrated ours our establishment and be able to use the information they gather to attack key elements of the military structure in particular in this vid convoys reinforcing Europe the video touched on the recommendations I'm going to go through them quickly but I do want to give them a little more visibility first of all we are not are trying to make them useful to policymakers so we focused the recommendations and tried not to be too grand here you have some of the limitations you see some limitations we put on the recommendations just because some surprises inevitable doesn't mean that fatalism is warranted anticipation can better prepare us for the inevitable surprises that occur and the report I cite mark block a couple of times our block was a French University professor he fought in both world wars and after the French defeat in 1940 he wrote his soul-searching analysis about what happened and what it felt like to be surprised and to be rolled over by the blitzkrieg I'm not going to go through all the bullets the point here is not to predict the future but being aware of the many possible futures so that whatever happens is less surprising and therefore causes less dislocation resilience is being able to absorb the effects of surprise mental resilience is often overlooked but block here notes its importance and the universe the u.s. is vulnerable because of its long success and the hubris that has arisen from that success physical resilience is also important we note the value for example of a large toolbox so that when the unexpected occurs then appropriate a tool is available adaptation is countering the source of surprise during a conflict first there's a need for rapid and objective feedback and that can be a challenge because the different levels of command can filter feedback in the field and we saw that in the u.s. torpedo example in World War 2 then there's a need for flexible decision making and finally for rapid action which has received a lot of attention in the last number of years and arguably is a place where the United Sates has made great strides maybe the report in the video or now online we have hard copies here for you the executive summary and then the full report I asked you to take only one because the full report has the executive summary in it if you need the full report see one of the research assistants and they'll give you one and with that we can turn to our panel my short introductions won't do justice to our distinguished panel but let me give you at least an overview of their many accomplishments first we have dr. Tom Menken who is president and chief executive officer of the Center for Strategic and budgetary assessments he's also a research professor at the School of Advanced International Studies and has served over 20 years as an officer in the u.s. Navy Reserve with tours in Iraq and Kosovo his previous government career includes service as deputy assistant secretary defense for policy planning and in the Department of Defense's office of net assessment dr. Menken it's the author of several books on strategy technology and war tenet general Schmidt is a former Navy Marine aviator with 47 900 hours and technical fighters and a Distinguished Flying Cross he also holds a doctorate from Georgetown and has been published in the fields of moral philosophy social psychology and military history the general Schmidt al was director of the Marine Corps force development center and the first deputy director of Cybercom and the principal deputy director of cost analysis and program evaluation he's now a professor at Arizona State University and finally we have Christine warmoth who's director of the Adrienne Arsht Center for resilience at the Atlantic Council prior to joining the Atlantic Council she was under sect transfer policy at the UD and before that she served as senior director for defense at the National Security Council and before joining the Obama administration she spent five years here at CSIS as a senior fellow so we take full credit for all of her stuff between accomplishments so with that I'm going to ask our panelists to say a few words starting with dr. Mann cami great thank you Mark I know it's obligatory in these on these occasions to say it's it's great to be here but this actually has the virtue of being true in this case because this is a topic that I've I've spent a lot of time thinking about over the course of my of my career and the the report really is really is outstanding and rather than repeat it I thought I would try to embellish on the topic a couple of ways one is to give us a couple ways of thinking about surprised in us from a strategic context and then to take that as a launching point to explore a little more deeply why it is that we are surprised and I think each of those then points to some some ways forward to be hopefully less surprised in the future so first well you know why should we why should we care about surprise well one way to think about surprise is in that surprise suspends either for some period of time either in peacetime or in war it suspends interaction among competitors right so interaction is really fundamental to strategy in in peacetime and in to war and we care about surprised because surprise suspends interaction if we're surprised then we're if you will sort of a stationary immobile target for our competitors either because they've developed some new technology that now we have to figure out and we're busy figuring that out as opposed to competing with them or as as Mark alluded to in the case of the the Allies in in 1940 German combined arms armored doctrine surprised France surprised the allies and made them essentially an immobile target actually quoting mark blocks evocative words an immobile target for the German blitzkrieg so the benefits of surprise are are many now of course that suspension of interaction isn't forever it's not limitless and that thus that the road ahead to to greater resilience and greater adaptation but surprise offers the ability to suspend interaction seen that way surprise is the flip side of innovation right we innovate we seek military innovation whether technological whether doctrinal in order to inflict surprise on our adversaries so innovation as a process we know takes a long time those of us who have been part of the the sausage-making of innovation within the government realize that it often takes painfully long and can be extremely frustrating which leads to a puzzle right if innovation takes a long time produces all sorts of indicators on our side then how come it is that we are surprised by innovation among others go back to this example of blitzkrieg Germany's development of armored forces combined arms armored warfare spanned years in terms of doctrine had spanned decades and yet it was a surprise to Germany's adversaries China's development of anti-access area-denial capabilities similarly has spanned decades and yet the recognition the realization of this of this innovation took some time so that again leads to a puzzle why are we surprised well I think there are there are two categories of surprise one I'll call genuine surprises right where opponents surprised us through deception through denying us infor information and those those occur but I think more more commonly we surprise ourselves meaning information is available and we collect it and either we ignore it or we misinterpret it and I think we can you know do certain things to minimize the possibility of these genuine surprises of opponents surprising us through denial and deception but we're the greatest gains are to be made are in reducing the the chances of us surprising ourselves so it's worth then asking what are the circumstances under which we tend to surprise ourselves why is it that we fail to recognize the evidence of foreign military innovation whether its technological or doctrinal and I think I think there really are three basic reasons first we tend to when we look at military capabilities when we look at military forces both our own and others we tend to to nominate them a certain way we tend to pay attention to certain things and ignore others prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War right we denominated ground forces in terms of infantry in terms of armored personnel carriers in terms of tanks not so much in terms of anti-tank guided weapons for example we denominated airpower in terms of attack aircraft fighters not so much in terms of surface-to-air missiles and as a result we were surprised and and the Israelis were surprised by the effectiveness of that early generation of precision guided munitions so one source of surprise is the way we basket the way we denominator Terry power a second source of surprise and it's a it's a very human one I mean it's related to the way our our brains are wired is that we view the future through the lens of the past in a way we can't help but do that our brains are meant to to extrapolate an extrapolation often times serves us well but in situations where we face an innovative adversary extrapolation can lead to surprise so for example just as a brief anecdote in the early to mid 1990s when China was developing and deploying its first generation of precision guided conventional ballistic missiles opposite Taiwan I remember having a conversation with a newly retired and I will stipulate very well educated very operationally experienced Air Force general officer and we had a discussion about China's deployment of precision conventional ballistic missiles and the threat it would pose to Taiwan's air fields and the ability to shut down Taiwan's ability to operate in the air and the response I got from this again experienced educated officer for a newly retired officer was they can't do that I said yeah they can't actually they got precision guidance and you can lay down a pattern and you can shut down an airfield he said no they can't do that and we went around several times until I realized that not well what he when I was talking about conventional ballistic missiles what he had in his head were Iraqi scuds inaccurate Iraqi scuds and the insignificant threat that they that they posed to coalition airfields in the 1991 Gulf War because that had been his reality and he was extrapolating that reality out onto the future we do that all the time and that becomes a source of surprise for for British and French veterans of the trenches in World War one it was difficult to imagine what what unfolded in May of 1940 on the Western Front with with the so-called blitzkrieg third so we view the the future through the lens of the past third we view others developments through the lens of our own military culture again in a way we can't help but do that but but it's it's it's nonetheless pervasive so there before the 1991 Iraq war we missed Iraq's nuclear weapons program why did we miss it we missed it in part because the Iraqis were taking an approach to nuclear to a uranium enrichment was one that actually we had developed but we discarded because we knew it wasn't effective so we missed the signs that were there and as Mark points out in his report I think that the dangers of hubris actually grow over time when we know that our approach our military culture our way of doing things is right and I think we have in recent years displayed a real market lack of curiousness about what others are doing and the approaches that they may follow and if you want to think about the way the US military today views other wars and studying war experience it's a real it's a real market contrast to way to the way both the Russian and Chinese military's avidly study every military conflict that's out there ones that involve them and the ones that don't I think for the most part unfortunately on our side we sort of study the conflicts that we're involved with even their sort of half-heartedly and we pay a little attention to to others experience and so it's not surprising in that in that environment that we become more and more sort of high bound in our way of doing things and ignore developments outside of our experience and in so doing I worry that we are creating we're planting the seeds for a future surprise so on that worrying note I'll I'll yield the stage and look forward to to your questions thank you thank thanks Tom and before the general starts I see a lot of people in the back there and would their chair is up here in front so come on down it's it's not Church you know where everybody stands in the back and the front pews are empty okay good morning so I think I'm gonna take a slightly different tack this morning and what we're talking about here and what I what I'd like to focus on here is I believe that the fundamental problem that we are grappling with here has to do with decision making it has to do with the way we as humans make decisions and and I'm reminded of of TE Lawrence in in the Seven Pillars of wisdom when Lawrence was was raging on about the world and the way warfare was one of the things that he said in area I found to be to be very very true he said that nine-tenths of tactics can be taught in schools but it's that last irrational tenth like the flash of a Kingfisher across the pond that is the test of generals and what I take away from that is that Lawrence had an understanding of the irrationality in warfare right so irrationality is in some ways a relative concept right what you consider to be rational I may consider to be irrational but but it forces us to think about things to think about sort of the unthinkable if you will it it forces us to believe something that we know in our hearts is it can't possibly be true and dr. Rankin just gave the classic example of the conversation they were having about ballistic missiles and and Araki scuds that couldn't possibly be true well it's it's our ability to to internalize that if you will and to accept the fact that could be the case you know mark mentioned earlier right my first job as a one-star I ran this thing called a futures Center Quantico Virginia right at the Marine Corps combat development community and I was supposed to look out into the future and try to see where the Marine Corps needed to position itself etcetera etcetera and we had a small in-house think tank of about a dozen folks about half of them were retired Marines the other half were civilians that kind of came in line so I gave them this problem and I said imagine that this is the front page of a newspaper article in 20:25 and it says in there that the Marines land in Indonesia to quell an insurgency and they land with to Muse and almost an entire met and within five days they have gone back to the ships because they've been tactically defeated in the jungles they've taken high casualties and they didn't accomplish the mission so tell me how that happened and what I was trying to do is to break them out of thinking about us about the fact that the Marine Corps prides itself on the fact that it's never been defeated on the field of battle etc etc and it it didn't prove to be a terribly positive experience we feel really good we couldn't get our heads wrapped around the fact that there could be an alternative future that was that very much different so but the so back to the to the the issue at hand again you know mark mentioned this thing about risk I think that maybe that there's another issue that has to do with risk and that is that when we think about the future we think about something that could surprise us if we believe that there is so much risk in that happening that I can't mitigate that with the resources that I have today then I tend to not think about it because you imagine if you will that you went to the Secretary of Defense and said look this I think is a very plausible scenario and we don't have any resources assigned to it we were building the wrong kind of military we're buying the wrong things what do you think's gonna happen so when we think about risk there's a there's another way in my mind to for us to to think about the the effect that risk has on our ability to be open to surprise this is all about the model that we use to kind of view the world right so one of the things that we mentioned mentioned in the report there was about the surprises that occur as warfare starts as the beginning of a war well maybe the model that we're using is maybe it's not a question of it's not a question of there were either in peace or in war but rather that we're in a constant state of conflict right and that war is simply an escalation of that level of conflict so you know you've all read I'm sure what's referred to as the gross month doctrine so whether or not he actually wrote it all whether it was written for him it was written for different reasons I understand all that but the interesting part about that is there's a sentence in there which talks about the fact that in the future Wars will not be declared they will simply be an increase in the level of violence the other interesting thing about that document is when we talked about doctrinal surprise that's the first time that we saw what you could refer to as a Russian doctrine that called for the integration of non kinetic means of warfare of information warfare of disinformation into the operational plan itself now we talk about that a lot in the US military we tend to applique it on at the end half the time but this was a point so if you want to look at a place where we could we could have been we might have been we were doctrinally surprised recently you could argue that perhaps Crimea and perhaps Ukraine are examples of that as we see this but again if you think about the model that they use the model being that we don't have to declare a war we simply are escalating the level of violence what that drives us to in thinking about surprise and why we get surprised if we're using a sort of Westphalian model if you will that there are sovereign states and sovereignty of a state is is based on the territory that that state occupies I would suggest that we are setting ourselves up for surprise and in that regard as well because I think that what we have seen with the advent of technologies especially in the last 10 to 15 years is the the deep deep territorial ization French philosopher named Gaston loose a lot though but what he's saying is that that technology now has caused territory space to become secondary in many cases to the way that we are behaving and acting in the world so so how do we how do we do this how do we kind of understand what could potentially be a surprise for us it's I think it's asking the right questions that's the most important thing and it's the hardest thing for us to do and I'll give you a couple of examples so one of the things the report mentioned was wargames so there's a problem with war games and and I've noticed looking out in the audience there's some of you out here that have had a great deal of experience in war games and in wargaming at the at the at the OSD level they're a couple of challenges with games as I see them one is that the way we currently do it today the model is that war games focus on episodes so here's an example something happens there's a reaction there's an action there's a reaction they tend we tend to look at them as discrete episodes you know the Russians enter the Baltics that something happens instead of looking at games to give us insight into tendencies over time okay and the fact that tendencies will will tend to give us I think a more informed view of some of these potentialities the other challenge with doing war games in general is and and dr. Megan mentioned at a second ago or worked it about cultures and service culture training so it's difficult to get a service to do something that in a war game that is not going to cause them to shine and in the brightest light that they can the there's something in the report that I would also I would actually take issue with him and that is I don't necessarily think that bigger budgets help as a matter of fact I think more money is almost a guarantee of more surprise because it tends to reinforce the things that we're buying the platforms that we're buying it reinforces our thoughts about the way we view the world and the way we see it coming in the future it's it's a it's a difficult thing you know we know from history that the greatest periods of innovation 20th century occurred during the times both in this country as well as in Europe when we didn't have any money blitzkrieg is an example of one of those the other thing that we now know about blitzkrieg with regard to decision making is that the use of stimulants drugs was rampant in the German army when they executed the blitzkrieg what that allowed them to do is it allowed their officers and their men to stay awake for sometimes as long as three days before they crashed and in those three days they were awake they were thinking they were conscious and they were way inside of everybody else's Italy so if you want to think about the future and about where the next surprise is gonna be it it may have already happen we just haven't fully internalized it yet the just and to sum this up of what I would what I would say is this is really it's all about the mindset that we have when we talk about coping with surprise and that creating a structure to deal with surprise the surprise mitigation office I know I mean that they could be an oxymoron you know for years when I was running on marine aviation I would walk by this office that said the air-sea battle office and I often wonder what the heck went on in there but surprise I don't think you can teach an organization or can get an organization to think creatively by applying structure to it there's so much more to it than that so you know we tend sometimes to stand up an organization the stand up in office and if we put a general in charge of it now we've got to have an aide in a car and staff and holy cow you know so there's there's downsides to doing things like that that we just need to that we just need to be aware of and and what happens is we confuse a sort of a rational technical process of standing up in office thinking about the future these are potential courses of action with what you really need which is a flexible mindset the ability to see and hold different completely different ideas in your brain at the same time and the last thing is that I would suggest is that this this coping with surprise is not about the and excuse the worrier the epistemology of the process it's not about the the individual episodes or things that's happened it's about the way we look at those things the way we interpret those things the way we allow ourselves to believe what we just know in our gut can't possibly be true and there are just thousands of examples throughout history where people have done this and you always ask the question why why did they make that decision and I would suggest a lot of it is due to the fact that the irrationality in warfare the irrationality and decision making is something that we would be would be well-served to spend more time focused on Thanks Thank You Christine so I got this microphone on and I think I'm gonna use it and rather than go to the podium I'm just gonna speak directly from my feet especially since I'm batting cleanup first I just want to say I think it's terrific that CSIS has undertaken a report to think about how to cope with surprise you know it's very cliched to say we're at an inflection point yada-yada-yada it's the most dangerous time since the end of the Cold War and and whether you fully subscribe to that it clearly is a very challenging time and I think when we have the the new national security strategy and the new national defense strategy coming out with the emphasis that both documents have on strategic competition with China and Russia it's particularly timely timely to have some thoughtful and rigorous work released sort of thinking about how does a big bulky bureaucracy like the Department of Defense think a little bit more nimbly about surprise and I I approach this with a lot of humility because I was in the Obama administration for almost the full eight years and and I can think of at least two what I would call strategic surprises I think that's the term the report uses that happened during the time I was there the first was the Russians annexation of Crimea and their intervention in Ukraine which definitely took us by surprise sadly I mean I remember at that time I was a sort of the official herder of cats for the quadrennial defense review 2014 and we had to sort of rather hurriedly change some of our language and the report right as it was going to press because we were going to press and early March of I recall and then of course the other pretty big surprise I think that again I think goes to I think it was Tom who made the point about sometimes we just don't see what we should be able to see and maybe this event falls into that category but but the the march of ISIL through northern Iraq you know almost to Baghdad in the summer of 2014 was was also pretty surprising as was the the accompanying collapse of the Iraqi army and so you know I think it's not just you don't have to look all the way back to World War one and World War two to find examples of surprise it's been pretty recent and I think there's a lot of reason to think there's going to be more surprise coming so I just thought I'd offer a couple of observations on some of the ideas and the report and the recommendations and the report and I would agree with everything that Tom said in particular about how we tend to think linearly we tend to extrapolate we look at the past to project the future we have a hard time kind of getting out of our own way and thinking creatively I would also underscore that and I think both general Schmidt will and dr. Mann can talked about this a little bit but we really need to think about much more deeply I think about how other countries see their interests and see their cost-benefit analysis we you know we tend to mirror image I think still even though there's a lot of literature that talks about the pitfalls of mirror imaging your adversaries it's still a very easy trap to get caught into and I think we we don't always understand how other countries see what is at stake for them and when I look at what Russia did in 2014 in you looking back of course hindsight is 20/20 but I think you know Russia very much wants to have a buffer wants to recreate its near periphery wants to drive wedges wherever it can didn't excuse me into the NATO alliance and I think when you and when you look at what they did in Georgia in 2008 you know they I think were probably I mean that what they saw at stake potentially happening in Ukraine was very significant to them perhaps more significant than we understood I also think we didn't we didn't understand the level of risk that Russia was willing to take on you know there were international norms the the respect for territorial sovereignty is a very well established norm I think most policymakers in most Western countries walked around thinking that that was probably not something that was going to be violated we probably assumed that Russia would have thought through the kinds of actions the international community might have taken and might have been deterred by the potential consequences things like economic sanctions when in fact I think Russia you know showed that they were willing to both break a pretty substantial international norm they were pretty impervious to the naming and shaming that the international community eventually got around to and I remember being at the Munich Security Conference I think in 2015 and and and foreign minister Lavrov said some remarkable things from from a stage like this to an audience that was basically groaning in his face but that kind of imperviousness to the international community's reaction I think has been I think we underestimated that so so I think it's very important for us to do a better job of understanding how other countries see what is at stake for them and part of what we need to be able to do that more effectively I think we have to have a better understanding of a lot of the cultures of these other countries that we're dealing with we need to think a lot harder about how other countries think about again their interests from the perspective of their own kind of cultural milieu I also think it's pretty important particularly when you look at countries like Russia and China but there are certainly others nor Korea as well it's not just the broader culture of the country the broader culture of the elites it's the individual leaders themselves in some of these countries where you have more authoritarian governments it's often one individual who is making a lot of decisions and I think digging deeply to really understand what do we think Vladimir Putin thinks what is his risk calculus what is Xi Jinping's thinking about this how does he compare to previous leaders of China is he more of a risk-taker I think that it's fair to say it looks like he is young Pok who is a former CIA analyst who's now at the Brookings Institution wrote a really interesting article recently looking at Kim jong-un and it was one of the deeper dives looking into him personally as an individual how was he raised what were his influences what do we know about him what do we not know about him and we know a lot less about him than what we know but I think that kind of understanding and spending time on that and disseminating that information broadly in the policy community would would help us do a better job of coping with surprise and being able to think about what we might expect on the recommendations or that were in the report I wanted to compliment the the authors for putting out the the four knows that you put out and kind of dispatched very quickly I think it's terrific that you aren't suggesting creation of a new office or establishment of a new organization or reorganization or throw a lot more money at the problem because none of that's going to happen so so good on you for for highlighting that and I think a lot of the recommendations you all have put forward in terms of wargames and experimentation are good ones I would note they they're not a silver bullet as general Schmidt all pointed to we already are doing wargames and experimentation and and I think that's a good thing the challenge in my experience as a policy maker is there are there are a couple of them one is connecting the insights that come out of those good simulations good wargames I mean not all war games and experiments are equally valuable but there are some that are valuable the challenge in my experience is taking those insights and getting them up to the level of decision makers that can actually act on them there's often a bit a lot of times the senior people don't even really know what's going on in all these great board games so so I think figuring out how to do that more effectively and sometimes frankly you have senior leaders who just by by personality are not particularly interested in that it sort of feels like this academic sort of thing that isn't pressing that maybe you can get to later and and frankly all senior leaders in my experience eat whether they're super interested in this kind of thing or whether they're not interested they're all overwhelmed by the press of daily events and managing crises and dealing with Congress and so it's just difficult but I think something that you all could do that would be a contribution would be to think practically about how can you get the lessons learned and insights and connect them to the real decision-makers I think fiction can be a really good way to get some of this experimentation and ideas out I think you know probably most of you in the room have read ghost fleet by Peter Singer in August Cole great book if you haven't read it but but you know that was a really great way to force the Pentagon to think about how technological surprise doctrinal surprise could really manifest in the real world and I think that did push the building and a lot of constructive ways to really start grappling with a lot of the developments that were underway in terms of a2/ad stuff I think doing more of that reaching out to you know I think general seminoles right a lot of times you can't raise you know you can't train innovators necessarily you can't train creative thinkers some people or in my experience just more able to think creatively more able to think out of the box so the trick is how do you find those people and put them together and harness their energy and creativity and I think you know people like Max Brooks he's he is the guy who wrote World War Z he's Mel Brooks's son super creative innovative thinker and is very interested for whatever reasons in of military issues but finding people like him and finding people in the services who are a Kanna class who are willing to push the envelope and those people are usually not the services favorite people because they ask the unpleasant questions but they're exactly the people we should be putting together to help us think through what should we be trying to anticipate so so I'll just stop there and I think we should be using those same people to start helping us think about how can we surprise our competitors not just how can we try to anticipate how they might surprise us but where are their Achilles heels where are their vulnerabilities and what do we do about it the last thing I would just say as the as the director of the Adrienne arch Center for resilience of the Atlantic Council which is a new center it's a mouthful I thought it was great to see an emphasis on resilience in your report recommendations we think about the report talks all about physical and mental resilience which is sort of a little bit about you know individuals and how do you survive hardship we we at the Atlantic Council have tried to think about it as there there's a lot of research that shows whether you're looking at natural systems or organizations organizations that are resilient against disruptions of various flavors tend to have some common traits they tend to be resourceful they tend to be robust they're designed to be able to be pretty durable they are learning organizations they have resourcefulness and I think some of the ideas that you put out there in terms of the reach back capability you know that's an that's a way of making your military more robust in the face of crises the idea of providing senior mentors to provide additional advice to field commanders is sort of a diversity redundancy trait of resilience so I thought it was really interesting that you all brought that forward and I would I would encourage you to continue to think about that because I think but but I also think resilience encompasses encompasses adaptation which is really about learning and being flexible and being resourceful in a crisis so it was interesting to me to see that kind of point of commonality but but I think really really good work and a really important series topic great thank you well let me use my moderators prerogative to ask the first question and I'm going to ask the one that we wrestled with that as we the study team and the working group which is how do you change the culture that you know we've had almost 30 years of this global military superiority the senior leadership is saying the right thing secretary mattis is the one who said you know we have no dog given right to victory this service Chiefs are talking about how difficult a great power conflict would be how do you get that down into the organizations that have been told for well for many years that they are the best in the world if not the best in history oh I'll leap out there you know I think one of the things we have to do is allow failure we you know our military and it's not just the military it's the I would say the whole DoD enterprise civilians and military you know we are I think rightly proud of the incredible competence of the US military but and it's a can-do mission oriented institution and so failure is really frowned upon and admitting that maybe we can't do something is very much frowned upon and I think I think it was general Schmitt all who said you know sometimes if there's a situation that we just can't deal with but when the risk is so high and we know we don't have the resources to deal with it we tend to sort of just look the other way I think part of what we need to do is be much more to encourage frankly the allowance of failure at much lower levels I I can remember one of my responsibilities as an assistant secretary at one point was overseeing the the war plans that were presented to the Secretary of Defense and there was a plan that was relatively new that was coming up that was very very difficult and in my view it was not a very compelling plan it was not very well thought through it didn't address the mayor the very significant operational challenges which were very very real and when I pointed this out to the combatant commanders and the two and three star general officers and flag officers who were helping build this plan they did not want to hear it they did not want to hear it you know they wanted to bring the plan forward to the secretary to have everyone kind of say yep looks good and to not really grapple with the really hard problems and I think part of its not because they didn't want to solve the problem it was a really hard problem but I think we have to allow our officers at much lower levels to experiment and sometimes fail and to talk through with them okay what are some other options but but that culture is that that runs very much against the grain of what we have in the Department of Defense right now and so I think that's something and that can only be that tolerance for failure and experimentation and risk can only be set from the very top and I think right now we're starting to hear perhaps more tolerance of that but I think it's going to take much more communication and much more you know actions speak louder than words to really have it stick and permeate down so so I kind of live this dream years ago we stood up the Marine Corps warfighting Laboratory in the 90s and Commandant crew likes that I want you to go out and do great things I want you to push the envelope I want you to try new and different things it was extremely painful and and since those days even when after a general cruel act long since retired every time I would get promoted he would call me and he'd say my god there's somebody left standing and it's because the organization's don't necessarily privilege people that are asking those really hard questions in in Christine's case I I can she was telling his story in my mind's eye I can absolutely picture what happened you've got a room full of type-a general officers that have been driven to salute their entire career they've been working around people that are like them and now they got this young female that's telling them wait a minute wait I don't think you got that right who's not served it I mean you feature this Batman that doesn't work and so the immediate reaction is to begin to push back you can't tell me that this we've thought this all through they have with the models the mental models they had they thought that through and this is again the the comment that I made about Lawrence before about TE Lawrence so Lawrence was in Arabia and he was fighting the Turks with Arabs he was leading Arabs against the regular Turkish army in a much different way than his contemporaries were on the Western Front in France why because he was an oxford-educated archaeologist who by the way happened to be a homosexual died in a motorcycle crash I mean what could be more enactment of the American military than that but yet we held him up for years as an example of how to do counterinsurgency if you so an answer to your question there has to be an incentive ization at all levels of an organization in order to get that the other thing that I think that we need to consider is that there's a very distinct difference in my mind between tactical innovation and tactical surprise and strategic innovation and we can't assume that just because somebody is a good tactician and he's now a general or she is an admiral that they are suddenly going to have this worldview that is going to be broad and strategic and informed by reading everything that Lawrence Friedman's ever written about strategy in history so you just can't make that assumption and and I think that it's it's great the Secretary of madison's pushing us I remember when we started the wargaming thing that deputy secretary Bob work was intimately involved in trying to push this down and get the services energized but again it's got to happen at all of those levels in order for that to change so I mean there are a number of ways to make things better I mean one is through personnel policies and motion policies and you know we and and I would agree with what's been said before I think to the extent the the incentives are there the incentives that exist or 180 degrees out from perhaps what they should be and so the so now you know if you if you're a combat veteran you know your chances of getting promoted are are greater than those who aren't and there's a certain justification certain rationale for that but to say a combat veteran you know leading troops in combat means you have deep searing personal experiences with a certain type of warfare and certain let your drawing certain lessons that may be at best only partially applicable to the conditions of the future and we tend to privilege that experience and again there's there's there's some justification for that but that also creates by and large you know a cohort that is invested in a particular experience a particular view of war and all I would say is that didn't serve the British and French military's very well in the 1920s and 30s and I didn't serve them well in the initial part of World War two so but there are individuals who can who can adapt think of somebody like John Pershing who started off his his career fighting the Indian Wars went you know the moro insurgency the punitive expedition against Pancho Villa and leads the AEF in World War one there was an individual who could X you know Excel and a whole bunch of different settings so how do you identify those you know those individuals and then how do you make how do you it's not just about failure but how do you make very concrete very tangible very painful the operational challenges that we face today and will face in the future particularly those that differ from the personal experience of leaders so you know we've we've done that in the past things like things like Top Gun things like red flag where you're actually you know you're actually in as close to combat as you can get against a top-flight adversary there are probably some applications of wargaming and so forth but to make it very you know as close to real as you can reality will always trump but but but as close to real as you can the very different challenges that we face today and will face in the future and force force responses let me build on that for one last question before we open it up which is I don't want to imply that the Department of Defense US government is doing everything wrong what would you say is something we've done well to prepare for a surprise and that may be something where we need to do better and you've all sort of touched on that you mentioned red flag for example in Top Gun so we'll start with with you talk something you we've done anything else that maybe we've done well and maybe something you would particularly want to focus on yeah no I think you know looking at the way we've done in the past I mean I think particularly these these these setups for very intense very realistic training whether it's you know in the air domain or other domains where there are really there are there are winners and losers and no kidding you know this is you treat this as real as possible yeah I think that has been a successful success and also worth putting this into context which is all of the pathologies that I described and that we've described here mirror imaging ethnocentrism those are those are human pathologies so they affect us but they affect others as well so on the you know the grasso Mob doctrine or so call or next a new generation warfare well what is it it's it's Russia's response to what they believe we are doing to them right so they they're misperceiving all sorts of things as well so I think it's it's you know as desirable as it is we're never going to be able to break out of this but can we break out of it marginally better than our adversaries yeah and so I think realistic you know realistic training has been an area where the US military has historically excelled unfortunately I think it's kind of abdun flowed you know with other priorities in in recent years and the the thing I would I would would caution us all about though is conflating again tactical training and our ability to to mitigate surprise so if we go back to Top Gun Top Gun was created because in early 1967 we realized that we were had only a two to one kill ratio over the MiGs that were coming out of North Vietnam and that was considered to be completely unsatisfactory it was due to a number of reasons one of them was the model that they used when we designed those airplanes in the late 1950s was that the future of warfare was going to be long-range missiles so we bet on we bet on that we equipped these airplanes with missiles that could shoot beyond visual range many many miles two problems with that one is the rules of engagement that were created did not allow them to shoot beyond visual range a until we got some electronic stuff later in a war but for the time being in 1967 the second problem was they were unreliable the technology was awesome but it didn't work with any sort of a liability top gun was created to allow pilots to fly against some of those airplanes that have since been Declassified that we got from the Israelis because they had captured them during the 67 war and we put American pilots in flew and we flew him against American pilots so by that time you went to Vietnam 1969 70 71 72 especially in 72 with the big air war with the linebacker series of things you had already flown if you were a fighter pilot flying in the Air Force or the Navy of the Marine Corps you'd flown against those airplanes already you already knew what they could do and you knew what your airplane could do and you knew how maneuvered its weakness so that was an example but that didn't come about we didn't just think that up and say this is a good idea it happened because the kill ratio was so bad the kill ratio by the end of the war got up to about ten to one so there's there's there's a way to think about that the big question in my mind is how do you incentivize an organization to innovate and to think this way creatively when there's no pressure immediate pressure on you to do such a thing and and I think in that case we have done some things right and we have there's a lot of the wargaming that I have been involved with that has been done with a very diverse and eclectic group of people I think to some there's been some very good things that have come out of that when we stood up US Cyber Command which I when I was a deputy up there we had access to do and think a lot of things that people thought were just kind of wild and crazy ideas we didn't get a chance we didn't we weren't able to implement a lot of them but there was an atmosphere there at the time that wasn't I was able to use to encourage people to create and to do things and to think about warfare in a very very different way than we had in the past because it was so new so again it just comes down to creating those little pockets you know a lot of the things we did in the war fighting lab in the late 90s I was famously told one day you know I had this command system command and control system right it was all about decision-making and we had embedded algorithmic learning agents that were actually helping us make decisions they were broadcasting things was fascinating and I had a two-star general come in there one day and look at all this and I was real proud of it and he said we're wasting our money on this we command and control better than anybody in the world and I wanted to find the nearest wall of get my head into and so we dropped the entire thing and it wasn't and the tactics we used were dispersed tactics small units of Marines think 15 to 20 people operating way beyond visual range without platoon commanders the whole bit the Marine Corps didn't want to hear didn't want to hear about it until 2007 when we found ourselves up to our neck and in this insurgency in Iraq 2006 10 years after we done all this and all of a sudden now it came back so there is actually some hope I mean things will happen we will be surprised but hopefully we've encouraged little pockets of resistance of people sort of raging against the machine inside of the machine itself but I don't have any great examples I mean I think there are things underway and Bob work for example put a lot of emphasis on on these kinds of activities and on this strategic problem of how do we think about surprise how do we deal with strategic competitors so I think there is some good work underway and I think it's carrying on but again I think the challenge is how do you bring it out of those pockets and bring it into the light how do you incentivize it I also would often remarked and I was just thinking to myself about sort of history I do think as a democracy we are slightly disadvantaged right now at this moment in time relative to countries like Russia and China for example because and you know when I was thinking about well you know France and Britain were democracies in between World War one and World War two of course and you know they did some innovation but but there's also just the the the incredible you know explosion of the of information technology of the internet all of that just 24/7 news everywhere the the level of scrutiny I think that our democracy operates under is extremely high in a way that didn't exist obviously in the in the 1940s and so I do think it makes it harder to be innovative our decision-making isn't as fast the level of scrutiny that we have which you know in many ways sunlight obviously is a wonderful thing but it's it's it's hard sometimes to be able to do that creative thinking when so much of it has to be spoken to in the public and and frankly some of our you know the the challenges we've had with the DoD budget and Congress I think has made it very difficult so so while I don't I wouldn't give us an A for doing you know having a lot of great projects to point to I do think it's worth noting that our enterprise is laboring under some pretty significant constraints but still is trying really hard I think to to think more creatively and be more innovative thank you well we have a some time here to ask some questions and we have a microphones in the back there but go ahead Thank You Sandra everyone with the space news I wanted to bring up the surprise that everyone in the space community talks about which is the satellite being blown out by China that was like over at you know 11 years ago so I wonder I wondered if you guys have any thoughts on what might be the next surprise from the space side of things and I know there's some war games and tabletop exercises that the Air Force does with Space Command are they thinking of the threats in the right way in your opinion and Christine mentioned resilience and that's also in a word that's used a lot in space so are they thinking of resilience in the right way Thanks so I think thinking about the surprise in space actually is that's that's a great a great example of some of the challenges that exist in avoiding surprise right because the nature although space is becoming you know more transparent it is more you know crowded contested use all the all the see words that we use to describe space today but it still is to to most right it is an abstraction and it's an area where all sorts of activity goes on some percentage of which we understand right and even if the those in the space community or those in the national security community understand it or some fraction of them understand it there that sort of disconnected from the general discussion so you talked about the January 2007 Chinese ASAT test I think that was a marker because it was it became public and and and it led to a broader debate discussion set of set of diplomatic actions so one can imagine any number of of developments in space whether it's you know another type of a Sat test you know there's there's space has been a an arena for the whole competition in quantum computing right with a Chinese talking about quantum communication satellites so I think it's you know you can imagine any any number of developments there that would you know be a surprise to us Meanor a shock to us even if those in the space community were quite aware of these developments for some time but it's sort of the you know yeah to take another historic example it's it's the Sputnik moment although maybe this is Sputnik getting blown up as opposed to getting launched that really changes perceptions not the fact you know not the fact of but the revelation of this activity you know if I could just say so when you think about space if you think about that domain by itself you are almost guaranteed to be surprised and in a very bad way so you know the the comment about Sputnik what made that such an event was I mean the fact that they had this thing in space yeah but the fact that you could actually stand out in your backyard and watch it come back around again and again and again it was the horizontal integration with the way that we lived here on earth as opposed to the vertical integration of age-specific domain so if you fast forward and think about where we are today with for instance the Chinese a set right so that came from the ground into space is it feasible you could have done it some other way sure I somebody thinking about that probably so so if you think about that particular domain space and you think about how it is or could be horizontally vice vertically integrated with cyber with geography with things here on earth with with all of that stuff together now you I think will begin to at least open up your range of possibilities right and that's really all we can ever expect to do to do whatever we can to cope with surprise is to have the largest sort of range of future possibilities that we can choose from that we are comfortable with or that we are have some some knowledge over and and the last thing I would mention to you with regard to this integration piece again is remember that knowledge in some vertical cylinder of excellence knowledge is what we know what we make decisions aren't is what we don't know and that's what we are not sure of and yet the decisions that we've made and what we've been talking about all morning and what the report is all about in my mind these are all about humans making decisions about whether to accept that possible future or not and so as we think about what we can do with ourselves in order to be able to make those kinds of hard choices and to be able to accept the fact that there is an alternate or a possible future that not only do we not like but we don't even think it's feasible but the only thing I would add on the resilience point you know I do think there's much more of an appreciation in the last couple of years for the need to build in resilience into the various systems that we have in space and we you know we've had for so many years these very exquisite satellites on which we are heavily dependent for any number of different functions and capabilities and that moving to an architecture that is perhaps you know many more satellites that are much less expensive that are doing maybe more you know single functions is a different way to think about it and a way to try to account for again creating more resilience more robustness more redundancy frankly in our system that we really need one thing I would add and I'm not a space expert but I've observed that periodically there is a conference and exercise a day without space but but the the focus seems to be to emphasize how dependent we are on space rather than what we would do without space and I know that there has been a lot as Christine says there has been a lot of thinking about that I think that maybe that needs to go a bit deeper next question hi Ashley hi Ashley Roky with Shepherd media as you're looking at surprises coming forward could you chat a little bit more about technology and acquisition moving forward there's a lot of innovative approaches going on right now trying to wrap at least be technologies and to development or to the field di UX examples like that and working with industry and a quicker way to field technologies could you give us some more input of what you'd like to see moving forward Thompson she's written a book on the subject registry No so so look so one way to think about our innovation is in terms of opportunities to inflict surprise on others and a way as a way of you know regaining some lost momentum in a series of competitions that we've been undergoing for some time with with competitors and you know I think it's worthwhile noting that the rest of the world whatever whatever flaws we see in our own system and whatever you know high-bound acquisition system we have too much of the rest of the world we seem to have sort of magical powers we're doing we can do all sorts of things and I think you know I think that's to the good I think we have opportunities to inflict surprise on others historically you know the American Way of war has has relied on a technological superiority and I think we should try to preserve and enhance that now it's not just about technology ultimately it is about people it's about concepts it's about marrying all that together but I think that speeding technology forward is an important part of it particularly in an era where we find ourselves in in too many cases on the bad side of cost exchange ratios whether it's in missile defense whether it's any other areas where others are investing in capabilities we're investing whatever five acts in capabilities to defeat it we need to be looking for opportunities to turn turn the tables and there are a number of areas where we could do that but we do need to do that and one way to think about that is what are opportunities for us to inflict surprise on our competitors both in peacetime but also prospectively and in wartime so it in some ways there's I think there's actually a cause for some optimism here because one of the things that for instance that I am involved with out at Arizona State University is trying to connect some of the research and issues they've got out there with things that are relevant to national security and creating startups and accelerators and incubators and trying to get dual use kinds of technologies because a lot of the as we know you know a lot of the thinking that's going on a lot of the R&D work is going on in a commercial sector so as we think about how we leverage some of those technologies that are being developed I think that there there actually are some opportunities because you know we're doing things I mean DARPA has doing some interesting things ir+ doing some interesting things so there there are programs inside the government itself but I think that the closer that they stay connected into the world of what used to just be the world of academia but what is now more more the commercial sector and trying to thread that needle I think we're gonna find that there's some there's there's some interesting areas for exploration and I'll just give you one last example a couple of the folks that I work with - computer scientists were just given a grant to create an autonomous anti-hacking agent kind of cool don't know exactly what it is yet but I'm gonna find out next week when I go out and meet with them but there's something that may have some applicability in both the commercial sector as well as in the defense and I don't know what I don't know but any rate I would just take a question you've got lots of questions ok the one thing I would I would add is the Unites States has done a lot of work with rapid acquisition processes as a result of the very painful experience of the last 15 years and as as many shortcomings as we have we're likely ahead of most of our competitors in that regard because of this experience ok another question there all right in the back there hi Paul Wong reporter for The Epoch Times question for mark in your for rapport I find one place was very interesting the neck under the current vulnerabilities you listed you came out with two hypothetical scenarios one was a cruise missile Chinese submarine cruise missile attack on US west coast and another one assassination of US leadership prior to an invasion of Taiwan never heard people coming up is the such scenario and I wonder if this is something that it's just strictly hypothetical that you just imagined an elf of the blue or maybe you came across information reports prior to this that issue indicate that China has such plan thank you no it's hypothetical you know it's not based on any you know inside information about whether they might be planning such a thing we try to open the aperture to possible you know future surprises each one of the vignettes is linked to an historical example though to give them what some concreteness so for example the the notion of a Chinese submarine launch and cruise missiles at the west coast it's based on the Doolittle raid of 1942 because that raid surprised that Japanese it did not do very much damage but it induced them to do two things first a pole forces back to the homeland at a time when they were deeply engaged forward it also induced them to conduct some operations in China which turned out to be you know very counterproductive and the purpose of a scenario or the vignette is to think about okay what would be our reaction would the governors of the West Coast demand that their National Guard be pulled back to protect them even though you know this attack might not do a lot of damage the same thing with these assassinations you look at you know some countries have used assassination as a tool of state that mean the Iranians for example went out and tried to assassinate the Shahs family and succeeded in a couple of instances so we just wanted to put forward the idea that you know this is still a tool that is used by some adverted adversaries okay over there I thank you nicholas romero my question is is there a way to think of strategic surprise or is there difference in a way of looking at strategic surprise between say US combatant commands and US military services do should they be looking at strategic surprise in a different way maybe geographic combatant commands or functional combatant commands looking more near term whereas services looking more long-term or do you not see a difference between us i mean so your question is a very very good one because you obviously sense the tension between what a combatant commander needs today to fight a war as opposed to and his event horizon is the length of time he's going to be there so it could be two to three years generally a service chief on the other hand has got to create programs that are gonna look out 5 10 15 sometimes 20 years out from where he is so having some commonality in those viewpoints you would think would be a good thing although i can tell you that there is a great deal of inherent tension in those two viewpoints because a combatant commander maybe you want a particular platform or a particular capability today because he has a challenge today that he needs to deal with and to buy down some risk in that in his a awara as opposed to a chief who is providing forces to not just that combatant commander today but his successor two or three times removed and ten years down the road so necessarily the event horizon for that strategic surprise will be different I think it's probably a pretty good way to look at it though actually you probably would have different visions of what strategic surprise would be to a cocom as opposed to a service chief at least I would think you should and it's it's a good insight she read a paper on that are you good are you in school this year okay well you worried would that be a great great thing dig into just a footnote on that and I I completely agree with what general Schmidt said and that's certainly what I saw happening between the service staffs and the COCOMs I did see however more depth in the co comes usually about cultural issues you know there was a greater I mean as you might expect there out there in the region's they're interacting much more regularly with through defense diplomacy with counterparts and things like that so I generally felt they brought a greater appreciation and understanding to the table than than what you had in the service staffs where they generally would kind of reach back to their g2 or to the broader IC I would agree with everything that's been said but would also say you know from a you know from an education standpoint from a training standpoint from a conceptual standpoint the phenomenon that we're talking about here is is a universal one and so whether you're talking about you know a service trying to deal with technological surprise in a competitor or you know a combatant command dealing with you know a surprise a surprise attack or the prospect of it the for not the underlying phenomenon is the same and the things that you need to do on an individual basis and a group basis to deal with it I think our are the same I think we have time for one more okay right there Bobby test Ron u.s. citizen our current president is nothing if not a surprise and can you reflect on his impact in on the current military and its preparation for the kinds of issues that you're discussing here if any if you take your initial assumption that it was a surprise then it's just surprise to a lot of other people in the world and so think of it that way there's never one side of an issue with surprise I do want to emphasize you know that that the problems we identify our systemic and not not particularly to a administration we were trying to get at the systemic issues rather than the peculiarities of the president of course and you know as tweets can be very surprising sometimes but it's a longer-term broader problem if I just one more quick point we're back to the COCOMs thing again I think that if I could leave you with just one thought on all this this is not just a military issue we tend to focus on military surprises you know Pearl Harbor or that take we do that because we can put that in a nice little box we can make an episode out of it but but there is a that there is something that is very necessary to this entire discussion that comes from the interaction between the civilian and the uniformed side of this this problem and and we need to we just need to look at it that way in my opinion to avoid the kinds of things that Christine mentioned a minute ago with the Co comms and their and their particular plans that have been done in their little world in many cases without an understanding of the rest of the implications and you can't just say well that's the politics side of it it isn't I mean if anybody is if they'd actually read Clausewitz they'd know the two of them are absolutely interlinked and they have to be from the beginning we have to understand that so many men just the way it is okay I think that exhausts our time I'll reiterate that if you want a copy of the full report see one of the research assistants and back and please join me in thanking our panelists for coming out this way [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 5,157

Keywords: csis, international, politics, diplomacy, washington

Id: AnlNzzAghrY

Length: 87min 10sec (5230 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018