Reagan National Defense Forum Panel 5 - A New Axis: How Cooperation Between Malign Actors Impacts Military Planning and Operations

ANNOUNCER:  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Panel 5, “A New Axis:  How Cooperation Between Malign Actors Impacts Military Planning and Operations.”  Please welcome to the stage Mr. Oren Liebermann of CNN and our distinguished panelists.

OREN LIEBERMANN:  I will give everyone just another moment here to get comfortable, and then we’ll get going.

All right, I’ll do a quick intro for my panel here, not that they need any introduction; certainly not in the company we’re in here:  Secretary Robert Wilkie, former U.S. secretary of Veterans Affairs and leading the transition team for DOD and VA; Horacio Rozanski, CEO of Booz Allen; Congressman John Moolenaar, who heads our Select Committee on the CCP; Admiral Lisa  Franchetti, the CNO – Chief of Naval Operations – and way down at the far end of the stage –

ADMIRAL LISA FRANCHETTI:  Isn’t he lucky?  (Laughs.)

MR. LIEBERMANN:  – General Fenton, head of Special Operations Command.

General Fenton, I start my days every day in the Pentagon by talking to military officers, and this morning is going to be no different so you’re up first – way over there on the other end here.  You have talked about the convergence of U.S. adversaries.  The U.S. doesn’t face one bad guy at a time anymore.

When we’re focused on China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, they are signing agreements for long-term cooperation in multiple domains in the long-term future here, and we see the power that has brought:  Iranian drones, North Korean artillery and now troops, and Chinese systems have kept Russia in the fight now, for three years, something they almost certainly couldn’t have done on their own.

Given that, what is your – how do you see the global security environment right now – to get us started?

GENERAL BRYAN P. FENTON:  Yeah, Oren, thanks.  First of all, thanks for moderating this panel and bringing us all together – glad to be up here with my august colleagues as part of this panel.  Thank you.

I’d say, just a straight shot, it’s the most complicated or challenging I’ve seen in 37 years in the military.  And I say that – and the way you’ve heard me talk about convergence, but I’ll talk a little bit about them in isolation first, and then some convergence, and then probably one that needs mentioning – has been mentioned a couple of times – the changing character of where that – bringing that all together.  All that’s against a backdrop of global view as Special Operations Command of 7,000 teammates on any given day across 80 different countries – 24/7/365 – and also my own experience. 

I came in in 1987, and we had one threat, one foe to worry about – USSR.  That’s all we did, and I never heard anything about – at that time – China, didn’t hear anything about North Korea, didn’t hear anything about Iran.  And now, in 2024 with the NDS, four state adversaries, and a group of VEOs, all noted as threats and challenges for us. And if you go in isolation, two of them are nuclear-armed nations, two are pursuing some level of nuclear ambition.  All of them have militaries that are – the state actors – that are in some level of movement or with some capability, two of them – the Iranians and the Russians – already in action, and then all of them using other instruments of power to pursue their outcomes and desired objectives.

And terror has not gone away.  I think there are folks out there who see me each and every day, and say, hey, terror is over.  What are you doing?  My point is it’s absolutely not.  When you think about ISIS, al-Qaida, al-Shabaab, they absolutely still wish to conduct actions in the homeland and partners, and certainly capitals abroad, that are untoward.  And while we may have the semi-contained – as General Kurilla and many of us like to talk about with the actions in Syria and Iraq – the ideology, the caliphate, that is – the ideology is still running the internet, social media unconstrained, and aspiring folks to action.  And that’s in isolation and, you know, certainly a high-level concern in that.

I think when we talk about the convergence – or maybe a fusion of these, it gets even more certainly concerning.  And the vignette, through the eyes of the special operators that are out there across the globe, they point me to routinely is Ukraine.  And they said:  Sir, if Ukraine ever was just fighting Russia alone, that’s not the case now.  Now Ukraine is fighting Russia plus Iran, as we know – with material solutions – Shaheds – and certainly other material solutions they are providing the Russians, plus the North Koreans, who until a couple weeks ago were doing only material solutions, and now there’s humans, carbon life forms from North Korea working alongside the Russians.  And then when you get to the PRC, certainly material support – that type of fusion concerning.  We know it’s transactional in some way, but certainly concerning.

And they don’t stop there.  They say, well, take a look at Yemen, and when you think about what’s going on in the Red Sea and the challenges, certainly, General Kurilla and others are getting after; Houthis, ten years ago maybe by themselves, but not now; Houthis, supported by Iran, both material and certainly advisors, and probably making inroads – or at some level, a connection – with the Russians, and the same variety.

And just to kind of round that one out, I would throw in attempts by non-state actors and VEOs to also have some level of connection point.  A couple of weeks ago, I think it came out that the Houthis were looking to make inroads with al-Shabaab, whether it be for transfer of weapon systems that would be very concerning to us, or maybe communications, or for finance.  That type of converging across all three of those are just some examples that we’re seeing out there that are a bit of a challenge.

And then I’ll just end with the changing character of war.  I think that’s a challenge and an opportunity that I make sure I never miss, and when I lay that down, I again point to Ukraine and really talk about if you look at the way Ukraine, with no navy, has imposed costs on the Russians with uncrewed systems, and doing that in the air, as well – at scale – that is a fundamental, maybe even a revolutionary change in the character of war.  And as I think about that, at scale, and certainly with a sprinkling of artificial intelligence and autonomy so that the systems can do it on their own with less humans – on top of that, maybe even adaptive manufacturing.  All of that, with even open source, is a fundamental, maybe even a revolutionary change.  That is a challenge matched up against those threats.  So extremely complex; more than I’ve seen in 37 years.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  We’re going to come back to –

GEN. FENTON:  Sorry to give you that grim news on a Saturday in California.  (Laughter.)

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Did somebody else want to chime in there?

I’ll ask two Syria follow-ups only because it’s the topic of the moment, and it feels like the Assad regime may fall before this panel is over.  And it’s a two-part question, the first part to our military officers at the end.  Does the collapse of Syria as a nation-state, as a semi-functioning country, affect how you think about the viability and wisdom of U.S. troops there?  And then the broader question, and how we look at our topic – and this may be for the congressman or for the secretary – what does it tell you that Syria, which relied for more than a decade on Putin, has been abandoned in the blink of an eye?  What does that tell you about the relationships between our adversaries?

ROBERT WILKIE:  Can I use politician’s privilege and interrupt –

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Yes, of course.

MR. WILKIE:  – before the experts talk? (Laughter.)

I want to say that I think, in a very strange way, the collapse of the Assad regime is heralding the apogee of Iranian power.  I think we see that they will be on an inevitable decline.  The props that they have used – the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, and now the murderous Assad regime – are being taken care of systematically by the Israelis.

And the last thing I’ll say – because I wasn’t supposed to answer this question, but I see Senator Shaheen here – she is one of the people who has been warning the nation – and I think she would agree that Senator Tillis has been there with her – that this is a symbiotic problem. Weakening the Iranians, weakening the Russians in Eastern Europe weakens China.  And the reason I point to her is that she has also been – and I should have her up here answering these questions – but she has also been arguing for a return to what I would call the mundane aspects of national security because Ukraine has shown us that the lessons of the 20th century’s barbarism are still with us, as well as the promise of high tech.  And that’s why we have to focus – and I think in the transition and right now I’m not speaking officially for DOD transition and Trump – but we will be focusing on producing artillery shells, producing precision-guided munitions, putting more hulls in the water, and making sure more ships and submarines are at sea, and more aircraft are in the air.

The killing fields of Ukraine are a warning to us all, and a warning that this is a multi-headed monster, that we have to prepare for multiple theaters. We’ll need industry.  But the good side is that I do believe that the collapse of the murderous Assad regime – not that the Islamists are going to be any better – but this is a blow at the heart of the ayatollah’s regime. And I think if sanctions and the return to American energy independence is achieved, that will – that will put them on the inevitable downslide into oblivion, which we would all welcome.

So I apologize for interrupting.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  No apology needed.  That was a fantastic answer to the second question.

Back to the first question:  Do you think differently because of the – frankly, the chaos in Syria about our own military footprint there?

GEN. FENTON:  Yeah, Oren, what I would say is I think it’s still too early to tell.  I wouldn’t want to speculate, you know, where this thing goes, and any thoughts on our own footprint, so lots of changes still to – I think, still to come and for us to absorb and understand.

But what won’t change and isn’t – that has not changed right now is, at least in SOCOM in support of General Kurilla, is our focus on disrupting, degrading ISIS and the global caliphate inside of Syria, and staying on that, and certainly imposing costs, and keeping that thing disrupted and disconnected.

The other thing we are staying focused on certainly is the force protection of our troops.  That absolutely – those two things that I’ve mentioned, they will not change.  I think it’s a little –

MR. LIEBERMANN:  The threats are still there.

GEN. FENTON:  – early for us to tell what’s going to happen –

MR. LIEBERMANN:  – Not more so.

GEN. FENTON:  – as this thing unfolds.

HORACIO ROZANSKI:  Can I make a point?

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Yes, and you have the next question, Horacio.

MR. ROZANSKI:  Well, just jumping on the point you were making, and General Fenton’s point about convergence, I had an opportunity over the last year to spend significant time in both Japan and Taiwan, with an effort to try and understand how they see the world.  And the thing that surprised me the most and was true in both places is how much detail they are absorbing about what’s happening around the world and translating it to their situations.

So in Taiwan – I was there shortly after October the 7th – and they – they were looking at how Israel has mobilized their population, and trying to understand what that meant for them and their ability to do so.  In Japan – you know, we think about Japan in the context of China, but their neighborhood includes Russia and North Korea as a potentially more immediate threat in the way they look at it, and so even everything that’s happening in the world is shaping everybody else’s policies, and I think the entire world is going to be looking at Syria very closely – to your point – to understand what does that mean for me, what does it mean for my allies, what does it mean for my enemies?

MR. LIEBERMANN:  And Horacio, this leads into my next question for you.  Our panel is officially called “A New Axis:  How Cooperation Between Malign Actors Impacts Military Planning and Operations,” but we’ve talked several times now, and you make the argument it is not an axis the way we think of that word; it is more a block of countries.

What do you learn from that, and how does it affect your work with the planning and prep for the military – that it’s a bloc and not an axis?

MR. ROZANSKI:  So from our perspective, the thing that I – my only argument with the word axis is axis speaks of World War II, and to me, bloc speaks of Cold War, and that this is – and that what we are seeing is not just a formation of a military alliance, but also an economic bloc, which has the secondary advantage of allowing them to evade sanctions and do a number of very troubling things.  And I think that dimension is equally important.  Economic security – we’re in the Reagan Library – economic security and national security go hand in hand.

And then that speaks to the role of industry.  I think I’ve said this several times, the industry that I’m a part of, I think, has been a little timid in terms of leaning forward and bringing forward solutions and technologies, and taking some more risk to really meet the moment, to meet the needs for speed in this moment.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  I’m going to come back to that point in just a moment here, but I’m going to go to Admiral Franchetti for the next question.

We had vast – the U.S. had vast economic superiority over the Soviet Union, and when you look at the current environment, that’s simply no longer the case.  China is the world’s second largest economy.  It has allowed Iran and North Korea to keep their economies afloat and evade sanctions. 

When you look at that part of the competition, you don’t need me to tell you that their ships outnumber ours – although we have greater tonnage – for the navies.  How do you think about the economic part of military competition with the bloc of countries that are our adversaries?

ADM. FRANCHETTI:  Yeah, well, just to build on your point, you know, they are really intertwined.  I mean, when we think about the Navy’s job, you know, for many years, you know, our job, our Title 10 responsibility was really to provide for sustained combat operations incident to the sea. 

But in 2023, in the NDAA, Congress codified that we have a responsibility for the peacetime promotion of national security interests, as well, and that’s really about keeping the freedom of seas, enabling the global flow of commerce that is really the lifeblood of our economy.  You know, America is a maritime nation; 70 percent of the world is ocean.  If you think about, you know, all the trade that flows, you know, through that, it’s about 90 percent of trade goes through the seaborne.  We’ve got 95 percent of international communications going through undersea cables every day, about $10 trillion of financial transactions going through those cables.  So our job, and the job of kind of the navies all around the world, is to promote that freedom of the seas, standing up for that rules-based global security order that has provided for that prosperity.

So as I think about our Navy and where we need to be, and where we need to be postured, it’s that we need to be out there operating everywhere international law allows to make sure that we do have that freedom of the seas that promote the global economy, for our nation and for our partners around the world.

GEN. FENTON:  Maybe –

MR. LIEBERMANN:  A quick follow-up – oh.

GEN. FENTON:  Yeah, if I might –

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Yeah, of course.

GEN. FENTON:  – just to double down on this – on the perspective of the nations I get a chance to visit, certainly in this job – this idea that economic security is national security, doubling down on it.  You know, as we go across the globe, and we have an opportunity to engage chiefs of defense and minister of defense at all levels, very grateful for the military manifestation of commitment from the United States, in this case through the lines of Special Operations Command.  But more often than not, they ask, we’d really, you know, like to have that same economic relationship, because they understand, like we do, that those are both key parts of national security.  And what I’ve come to really think through is, at the end of the day, the military – your military, the U.S. military – along with our partners and allies, is really the most prominent – at some times visible – manifestation of national security.

But the economic side is actually the most potent, the one that, more often than not, folks are really, really interested in to co-join.  And we’re blessed because we live in a nation that’s – you know, we’re the envy of the world in the private markets and our economic engine.  And I think those are important points as we go forward; that not only from our perspective, as the CNO and Horacio just mentioned, but also through the view of the teammates I get a chance to engage with across the globe in my SOCOM commander duties.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Admiral, the quick follow-up I was going to ask there is we just saw, several weeks ago – maybe a couple of months ago – for the first time, Russian and Chinese bombers flying just off our ADIZ in Alaska – hadn’t seen that before.

Where do you expect that relationship to go?  I think they’ve basically signed a lifelong buddy-buddy relationship – and how do you prepare for it or counter it?

ADM. FRANCHETTI:  Yeah, well, you know, definitely they talk about that no-limits partnership, and it’s something that we watch with concern.

You know, I would say that since 2015 they’ve done about 23 exercises, engagements together, about five in this past year.  So the rate is increasing a little bit.  But when you step back and you look at what our military forces do – just in the Navy perspective, we did 120 exercises, engagements in the INDOPACOM region alone.  And so when you think about an exercise like RIMPAC and the month-long effort that we put together with, you know, many – 25 different nations, you know, 43 ships and submarines, 150 different aircraft, 15 land forces, you know, this is what we do. 

And, you know, people want to be part of that exercise.  We have international partners as commanders.  We do everything from humanitarian disaster relief to two live CINC exes in this last one.  So I think what we need to do is continue what we’ve always been doing, which is really drill down on those capabilities and the interoperability with our partners all over the world because that’s what we have to be able to do because, in the end, that’s peace through strength, that’s what deters our adversaries, and I think that’s really part of what we bring to the table every day as a joint force.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  If I had a nickel for every time the secretary said “allies and partners,” I would retire before the end of this panel.  (Laughter.)

MR. WILKIE:  Well, let me add to what the admiral said.  I mean, we sometimes look at this situation as a one-off – the United States and China.  Remember, China is surrounded – and this chairman can speak to this at greater length than I can – China is surrounded by nations with thousand-year memories of Chinese aggression.  In my lifetime, they fought a war with Vietnam, which they lost.  A couple of years before I was born, they fought one of two wars against India. 

The center of our strategy in the Pacific has to be centered on our allies in Japan and South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and there have been great strides in that.  We have to take advantage – and I would argue that I think, in the Pacific, overall, we actually have a stronger allied base than we do in Europe – not in Eastern Europe or in the Scandinavian countries, but other sections of Europe.  And that is what we have to – we have to hone in on because China is a country with massive contradictions.  Nine hundred million of its own people live the way they did 2,000 years ago.  Xi has built an economy on playing cards.  It is incredibly fragile.  We can’t look at them the way we looked at the beginning of the Cold War at the Soviet Union, that these are ten-foot-tall people.  We have enormous advantages, but we have to be smarter, we have to embrace our allies even closer than we have, and I would argue – and this is not official from the Trump people; this is just me speaking – we have to eliminate the last of those Cold War barriers that prevent us from even more fully cooperating with the Japanese, the Australians, and the rest of our allies in the Pacific because China cannot compete in that part of the world if those strengths are enhanced by that cooperation.

ADM. FRANCHETTI:  Mr. Secretary, can I – and also build on, you know, we’re actually – we had seven different European nations participate in that RIMPAC and, you know, just this last fall the Italian carrier, with its F-35s, deployed into the Indo-Pacific; the French Charles de Gaulle is on her way now; the British is going to come a little bit later in the year.  We’ve also had multiple other nations like Germany, Australia, Canada, New Zealand doing Taiwan Straits transits; again, it’s all about getting everyone to stand up for that ability to operate wherever international law allows.  So I think bringing in Europe – also we see good partnerships between Japan and other partners, and a lot of different opportunity there to build on, I think, in the coming years.

GEN. FENTON:  Yeah, and I would offer that that’s going on across all the department, you know.  If you think of all the services, top of the CNO service and Air Force, the Army, the Marine Corps, Space Force, and certainly in Special Operations Command.  So when you add all that together, on top of those partners and allies that have been participants, you know, the outcomes and the consequences are phenomenal.  You know, they have placement and access in locations that we don’t have, we have that they don’t have.  You put that together, at some point the pie is a lot bigger in terms of solving these challenging problems that I laid out earlier.

Same thing with capabilities and/or capacity.  Some have capabilities we don’t.  We have much of what others don’t, and yeah, we put that together, again, across all the services and certainly SOCOM with partners and allies. 

You just have a sense now that there is a much better approach at being able to solve these challenges, either just in support of our own nation or in support of kind of the global community.  And that’s going on at scale across the department.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Chairman, do you have something you want to add –

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN MOOLENAAR (R-MI):  Yes, I would just –

MR. LIEBERMANN:  – and then the next question is coming to you, as well.

REP. MOOLENAAR:  I would just agree with a lot of what’s been said about the encouraging relationships.  You know, you see Japan and Korea building relationships.  You see, you know, what’s happening with Australia.  When you think of, as you mentioned, the history with Vietnam and China, there are a lot of very encouraging things.

But I would also just point out that it is complicated because you have China that’s a dominant economic player, and you have within these countries – you know, division within those countries.  And I think, you know, in the case of Korea, you have a situation where the president has been very strong partnering with us.  I’m not sure the parliament is quite in the same place.  Even in Taiwan, you have differences in terms of the executive branch and the parliament, and I think it really behooves us to continue to reach out, build those stronger relationships, look for ways to partner, but recognize – you know, Ronald Reagan was successful because he had a strong military, strong economy, and he also made the moral case for freedom.  And as you point out, the rules-based order that we’ve all benefitted from – I think we have a lot of work to do in that sense to win over these countries kind of across the board because I think China works very hard – you know, we saw with Taiwan during their elections, how active they  were trying to influence that election, and I think we’re going to see more and more of that, and we just have to be prepared.

Even in this country, when you look at the partnerships that the CCP has orchestrated; you know, different universities have partnerships with, you know, Chinese universities; research projects that are funded by the Department of Defense that, you know, involve a Chinese national and an American professor.  And I think we have to rethink this whole strategy of how we engage with China because they’ve really abused those relationships.

MR. WILKIE:  By the way, let me just add to what the chairman just said in my own life.  My son attended a science-specific school in Fairfax County, Virginia – Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which has traditionally been ranked the number-one public high school in the country.  I’m glad he became an engineer; he could stay away from law and politics – (laughter) – and contribute to society.

But we just had a story break in Northern Virginia where the governor and the attorney general are investigating Thomas Jefferson because the last two principals have been sending projects, like my son engaged on, on planetary mining, straight to Beijing.  Beijing has now taken plans given to them by public school officials in Fairfax County, and they’ve built 27 Thomas Jeffersons.  That’s the kind of thing that we have to be on guard for in this nation, that we’re not talking about because it hits us at every level.

So to reinforce, again, what the chairman said, that’s happening now, and it’s already down to the high-school level.

MR. LIEBERMAN:  They have already figured out ways to do that, and we’re just catching up and responding.

Chairman, next question.  Your committee recently ran a table-top war game that looked at our defense industrial base versus China, and found two conclusions I thought were interesting.  First, China is on a war-time footing.  Second, it has degraded U.S. deterrence.  I don’t know if the conclusion was U.S. deterrence is lost, but given the results of that, how do you view restoring deterrence?  What is it you want to see – I don’t want to say different, but new – or in the next four years, what new approach would you like to see, and then what does it take to restore that and compete in the ways we are talking about here?

REP. MOOLENAAR:  Well, thank you.  You know, the exercise was really to look at, if there was an invasion of Taiwan, you know, how long – you know, what would that look like, how long would be sustained our military and industrial base, and what we found is, you know, we’re very strong to begin with, but as you think of the different conflicts going on around the world, we’re spread thin, and their capacity, just – you know, I feel like I’m speaking with experts on this – but, you know, 240 to 1 in terms of shipbuilding capacity, and when you consider the munitions that ran out after a week because so much is being used, the loss of life that would be. 

So I think the lesson for me was, you know, when we look at Ukraine, and you say, well, if we had gotten them more munitions earlier, would that have deterred that, because now we’re in a situation where we continue to support that.  But with respect to Taiwan, you know, we’ve got a year-long wait for some munitions.  We’ve got, you know, a desire to help them, but it seems like, you know, we don’t have the capacity right now to provide what they’ve already purchased, and in doing so, does that create a perception of weakness for Xi Jinping?

MR. LIEBERMANN:  I would normally never ask a yes or no question in this scenario, but I’m about to anyway.

I’m curious – and this is a question for all of you – would you like to see a U.S. and a legal environment that when it comes to the defense industrial base, allows us to purchase destroyers or some other warship from a South Korea, a Japan?  Would you like to see a scenario in which that becomes possible to expand not just the U.S. defense industrial base, but sort of our allies’ defense industrial base?

REP. MOOLENAAR:  Well, I would just say, you know, we visited Korea, we heard about their shipbuilding capabilities, their capacity, and some of their interests in partnering here in the United States.  And I think that makes a lot of sense to me.  I think we have to look at working with like-minded allies.  You know, I recognize there is a lot of, you know, considerations that go into it, but I’m not convinced we’re able to do it on our own.  I think we do need to partner with like-minded allies.

MR. WILKIE:  Well, let me put some meat on the chairman’s observation – and of course I yield to the chief of Naval Operations – but we have probably ten shipyards that are fully engaged in shipbuilding.  This is not the days of Franklin Roosevelt and the Liberty ships. 

The maintenance on our nuclear submarine fleet alone would take the full capacity of those shipyards for the next 30 years.  I think, given the scope and the breadth of the Chinese threat – and I mentioned this earlier about knocking down some old Cold War barriers to cooperation, and maybe the CNO can answer this – there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be in shipyards in Japan for repairs, looking to expand that capability, and even – let’s go to Europe, our friends in Sweden in particular – their ability to build ice breakers and cooperate with us to engage in the Arctic.  We don’t have that capability right now, and sadly – and I hope I’m not offending any of our friends in the true north, up above us in Canada.  Canada is no longer a three-ocean power – Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic.  In fact, I mean, when I was born, the Canadian army was the fourth largest in NATO; now it’s probably the size of the Alabama national guard, and their shipbuilding capacity has cratered.

So we do need to be more creative, given the scope of the Chinese threat, and I think that kind of cooperation with – I mentioned Sweden, Japan, the Koreans – I think we have to seriously look at that.  We can still protect assets we want to protect, but they have a latent capacity that right now we don’t have.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Admiral, any thoughts on that?

ADM. FRANCHETTI:  Well, I’d like to say my focus on getting more players on the field, you know.  I’ve talked about that a lot, you know.  It’s the ones we can build, it’s the ones we can get in and out of maintenance on time, and I think looking for creative solutions is really important, and it’s not just on the shipbuilding, but it’s also on weapons production; you know, where can we do some co-production and really accelerate what we need to do.

I think as you step back, though, and you look at, you know, the history of U.S. industry and how U.S. industry has really been able to rise to the occasion, you know, how do we really prime that pump, whether it’s, you know, sub-suppliers, suppliers, whether it’s working across departments – the Department of Labor, Department of Education – you know, how do we really get people enthused about blue collar trades, about getting out there and being part of this defense industrial base, weapons industrial base because that’s going to grow the capability that we need for the long term.  So I think some short-term actions as well as a long-term-growth mindset is really where we need to go to get that Navy that we need.

MR. WILKIE:  And the admiral is right.  We’ve lost 17,000 small and mid-sized defense companies in the last ten years, and with them goes that precise innovation, competitiveness, and that’s the kind of thing – and I think you will see that in some of the early transition programs – to incentive the return of some of those companies that can provide innovation, and move us into the second half – or the middle half of this century.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  See, just like I said – a yes-or-no question.  That was quick.  (Laughter.)

I just have to make reference to the chart right here in front of me.  This is from the Reagan survey.  It says 85 percent of people are concerned about malign cooperation among authoritarians.  The only question I have about that survey is who are the other 15 percent?  And let’s do a panel with them just to see what their answers are.

Horacio, a question for you as we look at this.  We are looking at three very different kinds of warfare going on right now.  We’re watching – we’re watching sort of historic trench warfare in Ukraine; we’re watching advanced drones, very often Iranian drones, both in Ukraine and in Lebanon, to a lesser extent in Gaza.  They are able to penetrate Israel’s air defense system, which is nothing to sneeze at.  And then you have China in the Indo-Pacific pushing the bounds on hyper sonics and what is technologically possible.

I don’t anybody here would say the U.S. has the resources to prepare for all of those kinds of warfare.  When you look at that, how do you drive the innovation at DOD to prioritize and help DOD in terms of where it needs to be focusing?

MR. ROZANSKI:  You know, this three timeframe problem that you are describing, it’s a little bit like the three-body problem in physics, which cannot be solved by conventional math.  This cannot be solved by conventional means.

If you start with the premise that more investment is needed, absolutely, but there is never going to be enough money to fully supply all of the needs across all of these investment timeframes.  So to me, the only plausible answer is we need to accelerate across everything.  We need to modernize faster, we need to put the new tools in place faster than we ever have.

There’s a good example for that.  If you go back to Operation Warp Speed, in 18 months the country built what would be 10 years’ worth of therapeutics and vaccines because we mobilized, because we were willing to take risks differently, because it was a public-private partnership, because a lot of the traditional rules had to either be suspended or revised, and that produced extraordinary results.  And, by the way, it was set up to where failures were expected.  Somebody in the department described it to me as when, you know, the Super Bowl ends, and they always have the T-shirt of the winner because they make both – (laughter) – and they know they are going to throw away half of them, but that’s not the point.

If you compare that to the system that we all live in, it’s almost the opposite.  Our system is not built for speed, both in the private and public sector.  The system is built to reduce and try to eliminate perceived risk at all costs, which makes everything more expensive when you say at all costs, and which frankly says it doesn’t matter how slow you go.  And so at some point, every time something becomes a perceived failure, new guardrails get added.  And at some point there is no more road; there’s only guardrails.  And that’s what we need to break through.  It’s the work of Congress and the work of the department to create different incentives for industry to drive acceleration, but it’s also the work of industry.

 We need to act differently.  We need to take a lot more risk.  We can’t be sitting around waiting. 

You know, to brag about Booz Allen for 30 seconds, we’re the number one provider of AI and cyber to the federal government because we started working on cyber in the ’90s when nobody cared about it, because we started working on AI in the mid-2010s where nobody cared about it.  Now I’m not here to talk to you about all the things we also worked on that never made it because those don’t matter.  What matters is ultimately you can deliver a solution, but you have to accept risk, you have to accept failure, and you have to go for it.  And I think both industry and the department, and with a lot of help from Congress, that, to me, is the only way we get through this.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  General Fenton, we’ve talked a bit about – over the last few days – you want to see an increased relationship and a driver of innovation between the military and what we’re seeing in Silicon Valley from the tech companies.

How do you get that relationship closer, and what do you, as a warfighter – especially as you look at the effectiveness of small drones in Ukraine and elsewhere – what is it you want to see come out of those relationships?

GEN. FENTON:  Yeah, thanks, Oren.  And I’ll double down on what – I think first it starts – and I have talked a lot about this, and it’s not just the Silicon Valley; it’s also manufacturing, and it can be – you know, across the United States it’s certainly hardware and software, and across the gamut.

And I think it starts with almost this chart that you just had – a common (error ?) of a common sight picture, a common theme.  But what we’re dealing with when we talk about the convergence of not only the state and non-state, but the changing character of war that makes it a challenge for us in the military, is as concerning, as we certainly see it.

So I think once we establish that, then I think the second thing is thickening up the coordination, communication channels.  There has got to be a better understanding first.  And we do try to do this quite a bit at SOCOM in a number of different varieties – show folks our modernization priorities – what are we in the hunt for – and not make it so opaque, not make it so challenging for folks.  We don’t want folks guessing; we want them to know.

And yet, at the same time, we may be wrestling with a problem that somebody else already has the answer to – getting teammates from industry downrange from industry downrange with us to see what we are dealing with has been certainly a winner when we’ve been able to do it, and we’ve done that for a while.  And I think at the end of the day, me reinforcing that – quite a bit of what SOCOM’s looking for is we think about the fundamental change of – maybe the revolution and the character of war.  Looks like we’re seeing it in the uncrewed system of any variety.  And when I talk to my team, I say, look, we need A-ttritable, A-symmetric, A-ffordable, A-plenty mass for lethality or kinetic and non-kinetic effects.  We need it.  We need cheaper things to go at some of the exquisite stuff of the adversary by the hundreds, by the thousands.  If I’m tracking my math right, I think Ukraine in the last year has produced a million drones to be used –

MR. LIEBERMANN:  I believe their goal is three million a year, if I know the number correctly.

GEN. FENTON:  Exactly, to impose cost on, you know, the Russians, with, again, Ukraine, with no navy, putting warships down at the bottom of the Black Sea, doing the same thing in the air, doing it in a way that this type of warfare has really come to be.  So I think there is – education on the common narrative really is followed by the education between us, and in some clever ways to get over the various bridges, and I’m not talking about the proverbial discussion on the Valley of Death for a program; I’m talking about the value of communication between all of us, and then really going at not only the department, but at Congress in ways that we can be more flexible, more agile, even as proofs of concept.  And I think all of that fits SOCOM’s DNA – I would – you know, bragging on SOCOM a little bit here – SOCOM’s DNA, and we’re a bit – you know, we’re a bit – you know, we’re edgy, we’re a startup, we’re an innovator in many ways.  We’ve been around only 37 years; that’s not a long time in the history of the department, and we still keep, I think, our edge to path-find and trailblaze for the department, and I think that’s where we’ve been trying to go.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  What we’re talking about here is essentially how the Pentagon purchases, what it acquires, how it innovates, how it works, but the Pentagon – and you all know this very well – is an organization with enormous inertia.  Getting it to do something differently requires nothing short of an act of God.

We can sit here and talk all we want about the small, cheap stuff – if we want to use the fancy words, the non-exquisite, attritable systems. Do you see – what would it take to change that mindset within the Pentagon to place a value on that instead of the expensive, sort of exquisite, high-end items.  Both are necessary, but how do you shift the priority – how do you get the Pentagon to shift the priority to the smaller stuff?  Is it – can the system be reformed or does it need to be in some way broken?

MR. WILKIE:  Well, let’s go back to Operation Warp Speed.  That was the Defense Production Act used for a purpose it was not necessarily set up for, and you had leadership in the White House – and I was part of the task force – directing, using the emergency powers of the executive, industry, to produce these things – the response to COVID.

Now play that out on a broader scale.  We need a couple of things before we go down that line.  First of all, we need to have the Congress and the executive go to the American people, as Harry Truman did and Dwight Eisenhower did, and say, this is the world we are living in, these are the threats we confront.  This is something important for all of us, for our quality of life, and for the sustainment of liberty on the planet.  That’s the rhetorical flourish.

And then there has to be that direction, I think, starting from the White House – industry, we are going to demand of you better processes.  We are not going to stand for cost overruns.  I can give you one $16 billion example – but I won’t – that is going on right now that we can no longer afford.  That is what – that is where we have to be, and again, I’ll go back to what I said at the beginning about Ukraine.  Ukraine has shown us the way, both on the conventional side but also on the high-tech side.

 And if you want to play that out in Eastern Europe, you can.  Let’s use Taiwan as an example in the Pacific.  The kinds of technologies that the Ukrainians are using developed on a shoestring, just think of what we could do with Taiwan if industry gets behind.  We could turn that place into a hedgehog – not high-end capital ships, but making sure the Taiwanese have enough aerial drones, undersea drones, conventional sea drones, precision-guided munitions, air defense systems to make coming across 120 miles of the Taiwan Strait prohibitive.

We have been down this road before.  We’ve been down this road in the 1930s.  I know because, in my hometown, you can still see the warehouses – in New Orleans – that were owned by a fellow name Andrew Jackson Higgins, who built supply boats for oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and the bayous of Louisiana.  And because people like George Marshall had interesting ideas, he went to Mr. Higgins and said, can you take those supply boats and help me land an army in North Africa?  And we did.

So I don’t mean to wax poetic, but we can do these things, but we need a consensus – but we need a consensus based on the American people understanding the threat, and we haven’t had that.

GEN. FENTON:  Hey, Oren, I would, you know, just add – you know, there’s – as we talk to our international teammates, many of them say that this era feels eerily familiar to other eras, you know, and they pick different ways to say it.  You know, if you think about – as President Kennedy, I think it was in 1961, said something akin to, you know, we are a nuclear-armed world, but we are not at nuclear war. 

But we are at lots of low-intensity conflicts around the globe that are pulling for the cognitive space of humankind – either toward communism or away from communism, a Western-based approach.  And this articulation, in that sense, really makes me think a little bit about today, and then how we approach it after that, you know, call to arms, so to speak – in many ways, from going to the Moon, things we built in this country.  Even for us, part of that was President Kennedy saying, and I need a different type of force; I need a special operations force that is able to go out and do irregular, unconventional, a lower threshold of conflict, languages, partners and allies, and the like.  And I think much of that is, in some ways, back again today – this whole of nation approach, whether it be here as defense industrial base, and a national industrial base, and the clever ideas that we all have to get after it; or the way we think about the  other – the adversary is using elements of their power well before they go to military, though some have, and how we approach with all of that is certainly, you know, in my mind, the challenge for SOCOM as we think about the next ten years in the decisive decade.

ADM. FRANCHETTI:  I think it’s a little bit about the yes and the yes.  You know, we need to have that conventionally manned power, and we need to bring in these innovative systems, as well.  And I think if you look at our experience down in the Bab al-Mandab, you know, trying to again keep this freedom of the seas, the commerce going alongside allies and partners, it’s about a ten years’ worth of investment that has really paid off in our conventional weapon systems – you know, all the standard missile that we’ve been able to use.

There’s been 180 maritime attacks in the Red Sea.  We’ve had three carrier strike groups there, two amphibious readiness groups, and ARG/MEUs, you know, there – so a lot of time in there. 

And the most amazing thing is that – thanks to industry, and our engineers, and our weapons in warfare development centers, you know, we’ve been able to really understand what the Houthis are doing – of course informed by many other partners – and be able to adapt our tactics, techniques and procedures to stay ahead of them, and again, be able to defeat these attacks, save mariner lives, protect that flow of commerce, protect regional partners, and really stand up again for that global security order.

So some of it is being able to just take a page from, you know, all of the innovative people out there – the Ukrainians, take what you have, use it differently, and get it work in the battle as you need.  We had a petty officer who was a gun weapon systems operator.  He saw how he could use the gun differently against a UAS.  He sent that procedure back, it got validated by the engineers, then we work with industry to update that tactic, the technique and the procedures; in other cases, modify some of our other equipment to address the threat in that particular environment.  And those skills that we are learning now are going to be able to replicated and used in any type of warfare anywhere in the world.

So, you know, we are really improving our lethality in that conventional space, and then you take a look at all the drones, and all the work done across all of the services to get after that.  The counter-UAS technology is really scaling rapidly.

So how do we get that, and how do we get that out in the hands of the warfighters so we can improve at a very lightning speed?

MR. LIEBERMANN:  I’m going to make a very quick point, and then somehow we’re going to ask a question that everyone has to answer.

Part of the challenge there is you are on the wrong side of the economic curve.  An SM-6 is just too expensive of a system to use to shoot down a drone, and that gets at the challenges we’re trying to address here, which leads to my final question, and I’m just going to go down the row.  Secretary, you’re up first.

NDS, NSS – we’re expecting them here in a couple of years.  What is the one new idea or change you want to see in a national defense strategy or national security strategy?

MR. WILKIE:  Well, it really is how the Pentagon operates, and the way forward is the special operations community.  General Fenton has got the ability to go to industry and take anything he needs off the shelf.

We have to return the Pentagon to its sense of innovation, and by doing that, bringing back those 17,000 companies that I said have gone away in the last ten years.  I mean, you heard it earlier from Mr. Karp.  The Pentagon’s budget process was put in place before I was born.  It is Henry Ford’s vision through the eyes of Robert Strange McNamara in 1961.  It’s a Ford Motor Company assembly line.  And we have to be more cooperative with industry to break through the ossified bureaucracy of the Pentagon.

The last thing I’ll say – at VA, I was able to dismiss 8,000 people who were not doing a job – or their vision of serving veterans was not in line with what we needed to do.  We have to return accountability and blast through that bureaucracy that is holding up the kinds of innovations that we need.  We’ve done it before.  George Marshall did it; we can do it again.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Horacio?

MR. ROZANSKI:  Real briefly, artificial intelligence is a defining technology of the 21st century – period, full stop.  Over the next fifty years, it will be the defining technology in our national security, and we’re beginning to see it.

I would love to see an Operation Warp Speed focus on AI.  For the Trekkies out there, we can call it Operation Warp Drive, but at the end of the day we need to get done in the next two years what would naturally, in their current processes, take 10.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Chairman?

REP. MOOLENAAR:  I would like to see what we’ve talked about, this all-of-America strategy that would inspire.  You know, you think of Sputnik and what that marshalled in terms of resources, people wanting to be part of an exciting vision, and I think it needs to be with young people who want to serve our country.  I think it’s got to be with the private sector seeing a place for innovation that could be used to serve our national defense.

And so to me, that’s going to be very important because I don’t think people understand the threat, especially from China, because I think we’re still in this mindset of we’re intertwined economically, and I don’t think people realize the significant military threat.  And I think we need to express urgency in a positive way that brings people in.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Admiral?

ADM. FRANCHETTI:  I don’t want to speculate on the policy decisions that will be coming from the new administration –

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Fair.

ADM. FRANCHETTI:  – but as a service chief, what I would really like to see is really an unpacking of this complex global security environment.  What are – what are the priorities going to be?  What is our area of emphasis?  Where can we take a little bit of risk?  And then, again, what size force do we need to get after all of those challenges that lie ahead of us, and how are we going to get after it, working as a partner with the industrial base, and our allies and partners?

MR. LIEBERMANN:  General, you’re the only thing standing between us and lunch – no pressure.  (Laughter.)

GEN. FENTON:  Oh, no pressure.

 

So two things – sorry about that, folks – so I think the first one I’d like to see maintained is the value of Special Operations that has been articulated in there – 3 percent of the DOD population, less than 2 percent of budget.  My sense – conflict of interest here, for sure – guilty as charged – significant return on investment and outsized impact, and providing options – either irregular warfare, crisis response, counterterrorism in support of our COCOMs and the department, and challenges and dilemmas for the adversaries.

Second would be that all of this that we’ve just chatted here is articulated in the fusion we’ve mentioned – adversaries – and then what that spawns off as an articulation that then unlocks the national and industrial base, and defense industrial base – more cleverness.

MR. LIEBERMANN:  Our time here is up.  Thank you to our panel and thank you to our audience.