Robert B. McKeon Endowed Series on Military Strategy and Leadership

The U.S. military service chiefs discuss the future of American defense strategy, military readiness, and emerging global challenges.

The Robert B. McKeon Endowed Series on Military Strategy and Leadership features prominent individuals from the military and intelligence communities.

TRANSCRIPT

FROMAN: Well, good evening, everybody, and welcome. It’s a great honor to have you all here today and to have our guests with us. This is the Robert B. McKeon Endowed Series on Military Strategy and Leadership with the US. service chiefs, a great tradition that the Council’s had for a number of years. We’re grateful to all the service chiefs for joining us.

In addition to this room, we have about 200 people on Zoom. And it’s made possible by a gift from Robert McKeon, who is chairman of Veritas Capital, and we appreciate his support and the support of his family.

Tonight we are honored to have with us General Randy George, chief of staff of the Army; General Eric Smith, commandant of the Marine Corps; Admiral James Kilby, acting chief of naval operations of the U.S. Navy; General David Allvin, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force; General B. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations of the U.S. Space Force; and Admiral Kevin Lunday, acting commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.

It’s really one of the highlights of the year and I want to thank them both for coming but also for their support of our Military Fellows Program. Every year we’ve had fellows from different service branches plus one from the intelligence community for a year of study and professional development. And, frankly, they have a lot of fun in New York City.

And so I want to ask our fellows who are here—

GEORGE: That’s not what—that’s not what they’re saying. (Laughter.)

FROMAN: —to stand. They’re all here in the front row. (Applause.) And our intelligence fellow, yeah.

This was established about fifty years ago. We’ve had a hundred and fifty fellows pass through the program including General George and General Allvin. So welcome back to the Council. I’m not sure this building was here in exactly the form it was when you were fellows but it’s great to have you back.

We have a slightly longer conversation tonight. I’m going to ask questions for forty-five minutes or so, maybe a little more than that, and then we’ll open it up to this audience and the Zoom audience. And just a reminder, tonight’s conversation is on the record.

So welcome to our version of the Tank. This is not Shark Tank but it is the Tank. The Tank, as many of you know as we understand, is the conference room deep in the Pentagon someplace where these service chiefs meet on a regular basis to deal with all sorts of different issues of force design, prioritization, force posture, what’s going on in the different areas of responsibility and various friction points, and we’re going to talk about a number of those issues today.

I’m going to ask each of them a question or two and then we’ll ask all of them one or two questions to ask as a whole. Let me, perhaps, start with General George.

You’ve just announced a major transformation plan for the Army. Now, this isn’t the first such plan, the first transformation that the Army has gone through. Why is this one different than all the other ones?

What do you expect to accomplish and how are you integrating in particular new technologies—I know this is something that’s been very important to you personally—new technologies into the hands of the warfighters as quickly as possible as part of this transformation?

GEORGE: Yeah. Thanks.

Well, I’ll let history be the judge of how different it is from everything else. But I think we have been watching what’s happening in the battlefield here with Ukraine, the Middle East, really, around the world and I think everybody, especially CFR, understands that, you know, the battlefield is changing as fast as the technology in your pocket and we know we have to change. We know that there’s a lot of things that we have to do to change.

I think what’s a little different about what we’re doing, we’ve been doing something called Transforming in Contact where we’re actually getting bottom-up innovation from our troops that are out there, and we always talk a lot about lessons that you have to change. You know, it’s not a lesson learned until you’ve actually done something to change how you train and operate. Drones you cannot hide anywhere on the modern battlefield. You are just going to have to change how you train and operate.

And all of us were in Iraq and Afghanistan. We weren’t looking up for those kinds of things. You know, it was Dave’s folks that we were seeing that were up there. We are changing how we’re organized. We’re getting ready to come out with the mobile brigade combat team, and I think the big thing is you have to change how you were—how you buy things, and we cannot continue to buy the things that we have purchased for many years, and it’s a very hard thing to do but we are canceling, you know, what we know we’re not going to be war-winning capabilities on the battlefield just so we can infuse that kind of technology.

We just had a brigade that was—that operated at one of our training centers. It was 300 percent more lethal, which is exactly what we want to do inside of our formations. And we’re also—I think our headquarters have grown too much. I mean, I do—this is something that we’ve been working on. You know, since I’ve been the chief we’re reducing those modern business technologies meaning that you can have data at your fingertips and we got to stop passing around Excel spreadsheets and doing the things that we have been doing.

So I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, and for us we talk a lot about continuous transformation because I think you have to have a mindset and our soldiers have a really good mindset for innovation. I think that the challenge is as you get closer here to this city where, you know, things are very hard.

Change is very hard to do and I think that that’s, you know, what we need to get through. I think that’ll be the hard part and that’s my job and that’s Secretary Driscoll’s job and that’s what we’re going to work very—our customer is the soldier and that’s what we’re focused on.

FROMAN: This issue of procurement I imagine is going to come up all the way down the line and it’s a problem that people have talked about for a long time as sort of an iron triangle between Congress and the bureaucracy and some of the major defense industrial base companies.

How confident are you that at this point we’re not just going to admire the problem but can actually deal with it? Is there political will to try and break through? Is it—and is that being driven because there’s so much innovation coming from the private sector?

GEORGE: I think so. I really do.

I think it’s a little bit different. I’m not a fan of—when anybody talks about program of record what that means is you’re going to buy something and keep it forever. You know, you’re just going to continue to buy it, and I think everything that we buy has to be modular, open system architecture. You know, we have to adapt these things.

We’re seeing the first brigades that we gave drones to and the brigade that I just saw last week down at our Joint Readiness Training Center they were completely different. The drones were different. They were more capable. They were cheaper.

And so I think we have to buy things differently and get—I think we can get better value for our money and I think that taxpayers should expect us to do that as well.

SMITH: We also have to own the tech data rights because I’m tired of, frankly, you know, when I go to an organization and I procure something and then I have to go back to them to get their permission to do additive manufacturing and 3-D printing for a part, for example, on an F-35 that I can—it cost me, you know, $50 to print it, and it’s not good for 5,000 hours but it’s good for 500 hours. I’m printing out a hard plastic or a soft metal, and I know that it’s a rivet. It’s just a rivet, and that’s what’s keeping an aircraft down, and that aircraft is forward.

So I have to order the part. I have to get the part shipped across the Pacific. I have to link it up with the aircraft. I have to have a maintainer who is already available, already ready to go, when I could have additive manufactured that part myself if I owned the tech data rights.

So, frankly, I would like us to own our own tech data rights as opposed to paying industry to source the part that I can make myself.

FROMAN: Well, General Smith, you’ve been involved—this is—you’re about halfway through a ten-year period of force redesign for the Marine Corps. You put a big emphasis on these littoral units—amphibious capabilities, assault capabilities—China being the pacing challenge.

Some of the critics have said, well, this is going to take away from other warfighting capabilities and we’re investing too much in the Indo-Pacific and too much around this kind of activity.

How important are these new capabilities to our ability both to deter and defend against China and how confident are you that the Marine Corps is going to be able to serve all the other purposes?

You have two-thirds, I think, of your active duty force in the Indo-Pacific. How confident are you that the Marine Corps can serve the other needs around the world?

SMITH: Oh, I’m a hundred percent confident. We’ve got tens of thousands of Marines in the Pacific and we’ve got tens of thousands of Marines off the East Coast at Camp Lejeune. So we’ve got the capacity. We just didn’t have the toolkit to go against a peer adversary, against a pacing threat, which we hadn’t faced since 1945.

And, again, I’m not interested in being out sticked by the adversary. You know, we had rocket-assisted projectiles artillery—you know, RAP round. You could shoot a RAP round, you know, at 40,000 yards.

Well, it’s a 155-millimeter shell. I mean, you know, for a hundred dollars I’ll let you shoot at me with a 155-millimeter shell. That’s sort of a joke, sort of not.

But that’s not going to do it when you’re shooting one RAP round at an equivalent full charge—you know, charge five red bag that burns out your tubes—when I can shoot out hundreds of miles and go after an adversary, and I can go after them at a larger scale, at an industrial scale.

So I’m, frankly, not interested in going back and fighting the last war. I’m looking forward—not looking forward but looking at fighting the next war, which is going to be about range and about detection. It’s a hider finder game and the advantage goes to he who can find the adversary.

That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in sensors like our big-wing drones or MQ-9s, because when I can sense and make sense of what’s going on I can deter it before it grows or I can strike it before it can strike me.

FROMAN: Admiral Kilby, for the Navy, obviously, the Indo-Pacific is front and center. We’ve had—we just had a trip—a CFR trip to INDOPACOM. Spent some time with Admiral Paparo and others out there. Incredibly impressive. Spent a day down in a submarine—a nuclear attack submarine—and learning the life of submariners, which is something to behold. It was really something.

We’re facing a China that has now a larger navy, at least by numbers, than we do and it’s all focused on one region of the world where we’re focused globally. How confident are you that our quality is sufficiently above China’s navy to make up for the fact they’re competitive quantitatively?

And then I want to get to shipbuilding—

KILBY: Sure.

FROMAN: —as well and how we’re going to possibly compete when China has, I think, 200 times the shipbuilding capacity the United States has.

KILBY: Yeah. I have no doubt about the quality of our ships and no doubt about the way we employ them and train to them. You know, we have a world-class force generation process which produces either an amphibious readiness group or a strike group that I’ve not seen equaled. So we can talk about that.

But the process to create a group of sailors or Marines to go over the horizon and do whatever the nation asks it to do I have no at all regret or concern about that ability. So that’s a quality piece but you got at quantity and that is a concern for me. There’s been a concern in the Navy for a long time about the numbers of ships we have and our ability to produce them.

So I’m disappointed with our ability as an industrial base to react to that quickly. Virtually every one of our shipbuilding classes is behind schedule for a number of reasons. So we are looking to transition much the way General George talked about a new view, produce a hybrid fleet, and that includes traditional ships as well as unmanned ships, undersea, surface, and air vehicles to go do the things we need it to do because we can’t produce the numbers of ships that we need. We can’t afford it either.

So that mix, I think, is what I’m looking forward to, and what we’ve seen in the Ukraine, what we’ve seen in—frankly, in other areas that we’ve been experimenting is there’s great value there and using things differently in a different manner.

So I’m enthusiastic about that. It’s probably a different part of our industrial base that we could tap into so we won’t compete with the seven yards that produce our ships now or don’t have to anyway. So I see great promise.

Last week, I went out to San Diego and met with Admiral Paparo and Admiral Koehler, and they were doing some experimentation and rehearsing about what these things would do and how they would—how we would control them, how we controlled the data, all the things that General George talked about, and I see that is the future for us.

Initially, I’m focusing as the Navy on 2027. I want to produce my ships and my aircraft and my submarines at a readiness state that can satisfy Admiral Koehler and Admiral Paparo if needed.

That includes an element that’s unmanned as well, and as we move through this an increment, too, would be how do they integrate with a strike group at sea, how do they integrate with an undersea submarine force to do different things, and how do they integrate with our air wing on our aircraft carriers.

So, to me, that’s the great promise. There’s a connection that I haven’t seen, really, forever between the White House and Congress and OSD and the Navy and, really, the nation So that’s an opportunity for us to get after this in a different manner, and I see that we should run through that door because it’s wide open.

FROMAN: The president recently issued an executive order on regaining shipbuilding capacity in the United States. But how does that become reality? Is there money behind that?

KILBY: We’re starting to see some folks come over like the South Korean Hanwha invest in the Philadelphia shipyard. There’s a potential there. There’s potential to use some of our ships to do nontraditional work where Austal is now certified to produce parts for the submarine enterprise that’s Huntington Ingalls and Electric Boat. So, to me, there’s a lot of opportunity here.

To the additive manufacturing part, you know, my story is this hewla hanger (ph) bracket that was made in Danville, Virginia, and if we ordered that bracket it would have taken forty weeks because they had to print and the system it took nineteen days, and if you ordered it tomorrow it would take five days because we figured it out and we fitted it up and we have a template.

So, to me, I’m pressurizing our supply chief on how do we make that not the last option but a competitive option, moving forward? So that’s—the challenge is to just step into this breach and not say that’s not the way we’ve always done it.

FROMAN: And this is another theme that will cut across a number of the services but the balance between manned and unmanned. You’ve got these giant aircraft carriers with thousands of troops—with thousands of sailors on them.

Aren’t they sitting ducks? Can they be defended in a world of unmanned—

KILBY: My view is an aircraft carrier is the most survivable airfield in the world because it can move and all the other ones can’t. So—

FROMAN: It’s better than other airfields but—

KILBY: So there’s a great—well, I’m not diminishing what China’s trying to do and we have to be smart about that.

FROMAN: Hypersonics and ballistic missiles and the like.

KILBY: Absolutely. But there’s an operational art here and there’s a lot of things we can’t talk about in this forum that we’re doing to make the problem harder.

So, to me, there’s a component—one final component to this is we’ve got to get our industrial base to where it can support what we need it to do. It’s probably 11 percent of what should be 33 percent, and this place I went in Danville, Virginia, offers classes. Three sections a day, eight hours a day. They can produce 900 welders, nondestructive testers, additive manufacturers, CNCers, quality assurance folks, at a 90 percent placement in our defense industrial base when they’re fully up to speed.

We need a lot of places like that and they can serve the Air Force, they can serve the Army, they can serve the Navy, they can serve the Marine Corps—all our services. But I think that’s a tide that will raise all boats, literally.

SMITH: You hit on the hypersonics and on ships not being survivable.

I’m where Jim is. The aircraft carrier is the most survivable airfield in the world because it moves hundreds of miles a day, and you don’t have to miss it by much for the hypersonic. You just have to miss.

And so when we fuzz it up a little bit, when we cause a disruption in the targeting chain and it misses by, you know, a hundred meters, a miss is as good as a mile, and because I know it’s more survivable than a stationary airfield, just like an amphib is more survivable than something that’s standing still because you don’t have to miss by much.

FROMAN: Are there lessons? At CENTCOM the naval forces until recently have been taking fire from the Houthis virtually every day or every week. Are there lessons from that?

KILBY: Well, no, I’m glad you brought it up. There are huge lessons. So when I was—I think I see Admiral Pandolfe out there, so he’s senior to me—but when we were youngsters we would come back from a firing event and they’d take the data tapes off your ship and they’d go away for six months and they’d analyze the data, and they’d come back and tell you what happened, and you might not even be on the ship anymore.

Now it takes two days because we take that data, send it back to the United States, analyze it technically and tactically with tactical smart, you know, folks that are called warfare tactics instructors or weapons tactics instructors, and we look at it from a technical perspective, too.

Did that system perform as designed, yes or no? If it didn’t, why didn’t it? Now, it could be a flaw or it could be something environmentally that we didn’t know about that we have to adjust the software to.

What about the human? Did the human perform as he or she was trained to do? If not, where’s the gap in the training cycle and how do we address that immediately, especially that individual on that watch team so we can get feedback to them so they can be better the next time.

And it’s a fool’s errand to think that the adversary is just going to sit back and keep doing the same thing. They’re going to change their tactics so we need to watch that and be very thoughtful about what is different so we can prepare and be ready. And we’ve seen an increase in how the Houthis are acting. We’ve kind of—sometimes I hear people speak dismissively of them. They’re not China but they’re a threat and they’re hunting our ships. So understanding that and not being dismissive about that and being prepared is what we’re focused on.

You know, this last strike group that is now outchopping, Truman Strike Group, they engaged a hundred and sixty threats either to Israel or to them or defending shipping. They conducted 670 strikes. They launched the largest air strike in the history of the world—a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds from a single aircraft carrier—into Somalia.

So that single strike group worked for three different combatant commanders in the execution of that mission for five months. That’s flexibility.

FROMAN: Thank you.

General Allvin, you’ve called for more air force, more. You’ve got the B-21, the F-47 now identified, these exquisite manned aircraft. In a world where we’ve just heard unmanned aircraft and unmanned vessels are certainly part of the future how do you view the role of manned aircraft, going forward?

ALLVIN: Thanks, Ambassador.

So we’re now in testimony season so I’ll take you up. Let me fast forward to tomorrow when I’ll have my SAS testimony. I’ll bet you when you go around to every senator they’re always, hey, why don’t you buy more of these? Why don’t you buy more of these? So, hopefully, they’ll agree with me when I say more air force.

But I think that—you mentioned the B-21, you mentioned the F-47, but you didn’t mention the YFQ-42A, the YFQ-44A, which are collaborative combat aircraft which actually field as part of the next generation of air dominance family of systems and they’re the uncrewed platforms piece.

So this is really about—when we’re talking about more air force is we really aren’t just thinking about China. We’re thinking about building the force for the changing character of war. The changing character of war, to my mind, it privileges speed and agility and tempo and pace, and those are things that as an Air Force we really provide. We provide a lot more options.

So we need to get not only just more stuff, because it sounds—it’s a nice headline. Give me more air force. Well, if you mean just give me more of what we’ve been delivering that hasn’t necessarily—that may not manifest in time. We’ve got a defense industrial base that’s a product of—you know, you go back as far as the “Last Supper” in summer of 1993 when we, you know, reduced and brittled our defense industrial base and we started building things based on efficiency and best value rather than thinking about a surge capacity where we might have to get more rapidly.

So we went on this journey for a little while. When I think about more air force, though, it’s not just about more stuff but more is about more mass, and so when we think about the collaborative combat aircraft which, by the way, both the Anduril and the General Atomics versions are both going to be flying this summer, late this summer, and this is not that long ago when we just conceptualized them.

They are designed—integrated with mission systems that are designed to work with the F-47. So we talked about the manner in which we invested and we developed capabilities for our Air Force before. It was platform centric.

And, oh, by the way, we’re talking about owning the data rights, owning the intellectual property. That’s changed. We are—the B-21 was the start of this where we did better about setting the program up for being able to deliver and thus far it’s been delivering because we did some things discipline wise.

We held the requirements the same so we can move forward on this. We put together the next-generation air dominance family of systems where we own the agile mission systems and the government referenced architecture so more companies can now play and we can maybe expand that industrial base that has sort of shrunk as a result of what happened in the ’90s.

So it can’t just be more of the same. We need more diversity in our platforms, more human-machine teaming. We had a conversation—I see Secretary Kendall in the audience there. We talked about when we first introduced the CCAs what do we think the field would think about it because these are now—they’re doing somewhat of a fighter mission.

I got to tell you what, our fighter pilots are adapting to it. They love it. They like competing with it. This unlocking the potential of the human-machine team to be able to advance our capabilities is something we’re really leaning into. It’s also about more focus on the mission. You know, we deploy and the way we project power right now is sort of the way we’ve been doing it for the last twenty, twenty-five years, and in putting together our expeditionary wings in the theater.

We’re not doing that anymore. We’re training units ready for the Indo-Pacific. So we have more focus on the threat. We’re also looking at more tooth and less tail. I’ve gotten more press than I thought I was going to get when I mentioned infrastructure. The fact of the matter is the United States Air Force is carrying 23 percent excess vertical and 60 percent excess horizontal infrastructure. That is money that we can be putting more towards, too.

So I’m trying to drive that as well to make sure we’re focusing on the lethality and the capabilities of an Air Force that’s billed as one Air Force, not several Air Forces that we try and stitch together at the end.

So we talk about we got the B-21. So the folks who focus on that are down in Barksdale thinking global strike. We’ve got the F-47. The folks at Langley are thinking about that. The KC-46 we want to get up to speed.

Those are three parts of our Air Force but we were building our Air Force in pieces. If you want more lethality out of the Air Force you want a single force design that puts those pieces together in mission threads rather than in platform focus.

So you get more lethality out of an Air Force that has a force design from the start. That’s where our integrated capabilities command is going to move forward in developing those things.

So more air force is not just about more stuff because I think the industrial base as it is may not produce the quantity and the quality in time if we just keep going along the way that we had before, which is—we’ve been on this journey for a little while but we’re starting to see the fruits of our labor pan out and I think that’s going to play out.

But we have to, to what my colleagues have said, develop capabilities differently. You know, the twentieth century there was a great bumper sticker that said, you know, Ford Motor Company—built to last.

That was a value proposition, but there was an assumption that underlied that value proposition and that assumption is that whatever you built was going to be relevant for as long as it lasted, and we have to be careful with that because otherwise you’re stuck with an albatross around your neck that still works so Congress doesn’t want you to get rid of it. But if it’s not relevant it just means it dies quicker.

So these are the sort of things when we think about building to adapt that’s why we need to have the intellectual property, to have the open systems architecture, have the modularity so we can adapt, and when the next disruptive technology comes in we can integrate that into the force and put more lethality in the force.

So more air force means more than just more stuff but sometimes it means more stuff as well. So—(laughter)—

FROMAN: One of the challenges, again, that cuts across a number of the services is the asymmetry between cheap offensive capabilities and expensive defensive capabilities—that we’re spending millions of dollars to shoot down a $50,000 drone.

How do we deal with that, going forward? We can’t make it up with the volume there. How do we change the models that we’re not spending so much more money on our defense to fight against which are now from Ukraine or elsewhere we’re seeing as cheap offensive weapons?

ALLVIN: I think we’ve been working on that for a bit, and I think that’s gone into our sort of evolving force design.

When you think about the way that the Air Force was built to fight back in the Cold War, right, what did we do? We would take our forces from a secure, you know, sanctuary of the homeland, and we’d—take Reforger. We turned our forces to Germany, we put them forward, and we would forward stage them with NATO and be ready to fight the Warsaw Pact on the central plains of Europe.

The war ends and suddenly something like Desert Storm comes along. We used the same model, except for we didn’t have mature bases; we just built them in the Middle East. But we still did this coming from sanctuary and bringing our Air Force just to the edge of the contested environment and so then we could take our exquisite platforms and we could drive down—we could degrade the IADS. We could gain and maintain air superiority, prep the battle space for an unfair combined arms fight. That’s what we did.

But the adversaries went to school on this so now with the depths and the density of the threat that’s coming out from the east coast of China it’s moving us further and further and further out. So in some ways it’s making our traditional ways of doing offense a little bit more cost prohibitive because before we know it if we’re going to try and go from sanctuary we’re going to be fighting from Topeka and that doesn’t work.

So in our force design we are looking also at some of those offensive capabilities that we might be able to do closer in that can still generate offensive effects that don’t degrade or don’t attrit our high-end sophisticated capabilities.

So we’re trying to buy down the cost of our expensive offense, but the point about having the expensive defense against their offense that’s a problem we all have to solve, but that becomes—this is more about having the resources available to put money into that that aren’t sunk into those things that we’ve been spending on the last twenty years because we have the capability. We have to have a change of mind but we also got to have a change of resourcing.

KILBY: If I could add. I think—don’t let good enough be the enemy of perfect. So for Ford Strike Group who is being prepared to deploy here in the not too distant future we’ve strapped on a bunch of systems—one of them is Coyote, which is another service’s weapon—to attrit unmanned air vehicles.

So that’s not the way we normally roll in Aegis, right? We develop exquisite system, we’d integrate it in the combat system. That costs a lot of money and time and effort. Now we’re just going to—it’s a standalone system and we’ll see if we can build that. But we want them to be better prepared to not shoot SM-2s, not shoot SM-6s, at those missiles.

I’ve told this story many times. I was the N-9 in one of my previous lives, which is the requirements officer for the Navy, and we were contemplating a directed-energy laser. And it might put that requirement at 500 kilowatts to one megawatt, because that’s what it takes to shoot down an anti-ship cruise missile at speed.

Boy, what if I had been a little more thoughtful and been able to predict what the Red Sea was like? Man, I would have done it a thousand times to have a 150-kilowatt laser that could knock down those unmanned air vehicles.

So instead of treating everything like a lesser included offense let’s walk our way in that target a little iteratively. So we’re trying to do things differently.

FROMAN: General Saltzman, speaking of shooting down missiles let’s talk about Golden Dome and the administration’s proposal to learn from the Iron Dome in Israel and its success to build our own air defense. I assume Space Force is going to be a big piece of that or have a central role to play in that along with the other services.

First of all, is it a good expenditure of money? I’m old enough to remember SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative under President Reagan, which was credited in part in bankrupting or threatening to bankrupt the Soviet Union and that was one of the factors leading to the downfall of the Soviet Union.

Is this going to bankrupt us? Isn’t deterrence enough and how does it differ from what we already have in terms of defense against missiles, unmanned vehicles, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and the like?

SALTZMAN: Well, I think there’s two parts to that.

One, first, how do you put a price tag on keeping the homeland safe? And I think what you’re hearing and what we’re seeing is certainly an increase in threats directly to the homeland, maybe in a way we haven’t faced in a generation, and it’s our job to think about the worst day that the United States would face where the adversaries use these exquisite weapons and start to target the homeland.

And so it’s hard to put a price and say, yeah, that’s too expensive so we’re not—we’re going to take risk in the homeland. I’m not comfortable with that. I don’t think you’re going to hear people on stage saying they’re comfortable—

FROMAN: But they make those judgments every day, right?

SALTZMAN: Well, we—

FROMAN: Every budget is a decision about how much we’re willing to spend for security.

SALTZMAN: Of course. Of course.

But so what we’re doing is we’re phrasing it in terms of, yes, we would love to deter an attack—how do you do that? You do that with a credible force that can deny benefits and create consequences for an adversary that would choose to attack us.

But that takes a credible force. It’s not just talk. It’s not bluster. You have to actually be able to do something. You have to be able to impose penalties and deny those benefits.

And so I think that by looking and investing in the system of systems. So let’s make no mistake about this. You know, Golden Dome is not one big umbrella we buy that protects the homeland from a number of threats. It’s a system of systems.

We’re already invested in a number of these systems that will contribute in terms of sensors, in terms of the C2 data infrastructures to move the data around, in terms of kinetic effectors that are going to try to take out some of these capabilities.

And I think what Golden Dome is doing is allowing us to do a more holistic mission analysis that says where are the gaps? Where are the issues? Where can we be more credible in our defense of the homeland to achieve that condition of deterrence, because that is the ultimate goal. But it’s got to be a credible force to do it.

FROMAN: Conceivably, the kinds of missiles that are going to be coming at us are different than what’s been coming at Israel nearby—cruise missiles, drones, some ballistic missiles. You were talking about intercontinental ballistic missiles, maybe nuclear missiles.

I mean, once upon a time the mutually assured destruction was viewed as a key part of our defense. That was our nuclear doctrine. Are we changing that now?

SALTZMAN: No. I think nuclear deterrence is still nuclear deterrence. Our nuclear capabilities deter an adversary from launching a nuclear attack against the United States. The problem is the number of threats that can put the homeland at risk and the citizens of the United States at risk has grown.

Hypersonic threats, threats from space, non-kinetic effects, cyberattacks. The threat vectors that we face—land, air, sea, space, undersea—all of that has now created a far more complex threat environment. This is not simply trying to prevent one nation from launching a nuclear attack against the United States. We have to defend against all those threats to protect the homeland.

And so, again, this is about a concept, a system of systems, that starts to try to address that full tapestry of threats that are being brought against us.

FROMAN: Admiral Lunday, the president’s focus on Greenland has raised the issue of Arctic security to everyone’s attention. You’ve got one icebreaker, as I understand it, in the Coast Guard. When—

LUNDAY: We now have three invested.

FROMAN: Three. OK. Excellent. (Laughter.)

LUNDAY: Building more.

FROMAN: Building more. It goes back a little bit to the question for Admiral Kilby about shipbuilding. How are we going to get the kind of force we need to deal with the kinds of challenges in the Arctic as polar ice caps melts, it becomes more of a trade route, we see Russia and China operating up there.

How confident are you we’re going to be able to rebuild our icebreakers ourselves versus rely on allies and partners to buy them or use them from them?

LUNDAY: Well, thanks, Ambassador.

So, of course, the U.S. is an Arctic nation and because of our territory north of the Arctic Circle that makes us one of the Arctic nations, and so our ability to ensure our sovereignty and control, secure, and defend our border in the Arctic and the maritime approaches in the increasingly navigable Arctic Ocean is critically important.

The U.S. Coast Guard operates the nation’s fleet of icebreakers, and they are aging but they are still very capable. The heavy icebreaker Polar Star is fifty years old. Our medium icebreaker Healy, which goes into the Arctic each year, was built in the ’90s. We recently acquired as a bridging capability a commercially available polar icebreaker which will be named Storis. We purchased it into in December. It’ll get underway in June from the Gulf Coast and this summer it will be operating in the Gulf of Alaska ensuring U.S. sovereignty and presence.

And so the Coast Guard is building that capability. In the same time, we are building the next generation of heavy icebreakers with the Polar Security Cutter. The first of three was just approved by the Department of Homeland Security at the end of last month for full production.

And so we have a strong shipbuilder, Bollinger Mississippi, that is building that ship and a way forward. And then, clearly, we have a direction from the president to build out the fleet of icebreakers for the nation, which in the U.S. Coast Guard makes us very excited because we operate those icebreakers.

FROMAN: You’ve been called upon to do a lot of work around the southern border by this administration—a lot of work on migration, drugs, et cetera. How are you able to manage that and the other challenges of the Arctic, the Indo-Pacific, otherwise? How stretched are your resources?

LUNDAY: Well, thank you, Ambassador.

First of all, we are a border control agency. The Coast Guard was created in 1790 to control our border and defend the young nation by sea in this period of, perhaps, strategic shortsightedness where for a few years we didn’t have a U.S. Navy. And so that was our role until the—and then when the U.S. Navy was created, of course, our role expanded since 1790 as additional functions were created onto the Coast Guard.

So following the president taking office and declaring a national emergency at the southern border the Coast Guard tripled its assets there to control, secure, and defend our border and maritime approaches, which is a mission we always do but we, certainly, focused increasingly in response to that national emergency.

But beyond that southern border we have a northern border and we have U.S. borders and approaches around Alaska, Hawaii, our three territories in the Pacific and two in the Caribbean, and so we are increasing our efforts to control and secure that border from the range of threats from illegal migration to drug smuggling to other threats that we need to protect the homeland.

And so we are stretched thin now. You know, I would tell you that the Coast Guard today is at the lowest point of readiness than at any other time since the end of World War II eighty years ago.

Now, that didn’t just happen. That readiness crisis has been decades in the making. It’s been caused by chronic underfunding in the face of increased mission demand across our range of missions and services we provide to the American people.

And so today we are short in readiness in our people and our assets. So to give an example, up until recently we were short 10 percent of our enlisted workforce, the backbone of our force. On the assets side, we are facing increasing challenges for sustaining our fleet.

We can only fund about 50 percent of the required maintenance and so that’s like running your car until it just breaks and then deciding to fix it when you still don’t have the money, and we can’t bring on the new assets fast enough. And so that’s caused the situation we’re in, which has made the Coast Guard extremely brittle.

Now, as the president came in among his top priorities are to rebuild the military and secure our border. At the same time, as Secretary Noem, our secretary of homeland security, testified last week the president has said that we are going to reinvigorate the Coast Guard in order to avoid strategic failure.

And so as a result of that the secretary under her leadership has directed Force Design 2028, which is a bold blueprint to renew the Coast Guard and make us an agile, capable, and ready force that will be ready not only for today but in the future for the challenges ahead.

There are four lines of effort: people, organization, contracting and acquisition, and then technology. And so through that we are going to improve the force structure and the operating concepts of the Coast Guard, increasing the delivery and speed of capabilities needed to get the mission done, and putting the Coast Guard at the forefront of adapting and employing technology in ways that we have not before.

And so that will ensure the Coast Guard is ready—semper paratus, “always ready”—for the future challenges.

FROMAN: Let me build on one of your comments, Admiral, and ask all of you to comment on the people issue.

Recruitment appears to be up from even—I think last year we talked a little bit about this, and maybe with the exception of the Marine Corps the others were all having some difficulty with recruitment. Not the Space Force—excuse me.

LUNDAY: Well, actually, we’re in really good shape. I would tell you we’ve already gone 108 percent over this fiscal year. And even in this calendar year alone the energy and drive of people that want to join the military services and the Coast Guard, we’re going to be on track to almost completely come out by the end of next year of our 10 percent shortage and then grow from there.

FROMAN: Let me ask each of you, what do you think is working when it comes to recruitment and retention? What more could be done to improve the quality of life of the soldiers, sailors, Marines, Guardians? And let’s start with that. What can be done to improve their quality of life?

And let me just ask a third question: On morale, how is morale? This is the first time—last year we had two women up here. How is morale for women in the forces and women that you’re seeking to recruit?

GEORGE: I’ll start. I think morale is really good, and part of what we’re trying to do with change, I mean, the—again, our soldiers and I think across all of our services understand how the world is changing and they want us to rapidly change.

We’re probably going to meet our—by the end of this week for the whole year for enlistment. We’re close to 60,000. I think on my dashboard this morning we were at 59,000 so we’re very close.

We’re up across, really, you know, everywhere. I mean, we’re seeing people come in. So I don’t think that that’s the issue, and I would—you know, what we always look at that I think when you get back to are they enjoying what they’re doing I look at retention.

I came in, enlisted in the Army right out of high school. You know, what keeps you in is sense of purpose, doing tough things—I mean, those kinds of things and our—right now our retention we hit at the six-month mark for people staying in.

So, you know, I’m very pleased with where we’re at right now. We can’t take any of that for granted. We have to constantly be, you know, evaluating that and looking at it.

FROMAN: Anything on the quality of life question?

GEORGE: I mean, I think—I’ll mention one thing that we’re trying to do in the Army and that is—and, again, this is we’re working through—you know, I think we’re challenged with two things. I always tell everybody I would never walk a mile and a half to go to a mess hall. Nobody in here walks a mile and a half to lunch, you know. So we’re very, you know, focused on fixing that.

A lot of that is the rules we could—you know, I always say the U.S. Army buys more damn chicken than anybody else. We also spend more on it and there’s a lot of reasons back here for different laws and things like that that we have to. So I think we could change that, and it’s the same thing for MILCON where I think we spend—we overpay in the federal government for buildings and doing those things.

So, again, I think we can make better—get better value out of our money and we’re really focused on doing that. And then, obviously, we need to train our people. They came in to do a job. What they—what people hate and what I always hated was—I didn’t mind doing tough things and doing my job. I hated all the—if there was anything bullshit I didn’t like that. So we also have to eliminate, you know, those kinds of things.

FROMAN: General Smith?

SMITH: I didn’t know we were allowed to say bullshit in here so I’m—(laughter).

So, Randy—

GEORGE: I took a risk. (Laughter.)

SMITH: Randy took a risk. Randy broke the ice.

GEORGE: I’ve been at CFR before. I’ve heard worse things in here than that.

FROMAN: We have Frank Luntz in the audience someplace and he did a program here and dropped the F-bomb. So you’re really welcome to do any—(laughter)—

GEORGE: I’ve heard it here before, so.

SMITH: Thanks for breaking the ice.

GEORGE: That’s where I learned that word, here. (Laughter.)

SMITH: You know, what I would say, you know, our quality of life—starting there—is really important to us. Marines don’t ask for much. They trained, they joined to do hard things, to do difficult things. All they’re asking for is a decent, quiet, clean place to lay their head down at night, hopefully with climate control.

We’ve got barracks that are forty, forty-five years old that just need to be torn down. But you have to have a place to put your Marines. You have to build new—and, unfortunately, we’re competing with the civilian market now in coastal North Carolina and in southern California. Very, very high cost of living areas, you know. Because we’re waterborne. We live on the coast and everything’s expensive there.

So I am concerned about our ability to modernize our barracks because you can’t just keep putting lipstick on the pig. At some point it’s just a pig. We have to build new barracks. We have to do high quality of life.

But a lot of it has to do with our chow halls, like Randy was talking about. You know, you show up in a chow hall and you either go left to get the junk food line—the burgers—or you go right to get whatever they’re serving, and there’s ten people standing behind the line serving up your chow.

Well, you can serve yourself. I mean, we’ve all been to Golden Corral. You can serve yourself. You can have a variety of foods as long as they’re healthy. And you’re not telling Marines what to eat; you’re giving them options to how to eat.

So a lot of quality of life has to do with the barracks that they live in, has to do with the payment that we make for basic allowance for housing, basic allowance for subsistence, so that Marines are able to procure the food that they need and, frankly, so they’re able to go out and have the clothes that they want and to do the things they want to do. Because, again, they joined to do hard things but when they’re off duty they joined to have a decent quality of life, a decent standard.

We already gave them a skill set—F-35 mechanic, crash-fire-rescue, infantry Marine. You know, they joined and we fulfilled that promise to them but we have to continue to fulfill that promise to them with a basic quality of life.

FROMAN: Admiral?

KILBY: A couple comments. One, I’ll try to hit all your points.

We saw a turnaround start around July of 2024 because we were focusing on the problem differently. We broke the problem down. We figured out what eight things make a recruiter productive and we went after it. We’re going to meet our goal and, I think, exceed our goal and fill up our delayed entry program pool to where it needs to be.

So but I’m scared about 2026 and beyond because the demographics are not in our favor. The propensity to serve is low in our country so we’ve got to address that. We’ve got to make it OK. Part of that is the quality of life connection that you alluded to and making sure we have barracks, wi-fi, good food options, all those things.

And parking is a big deal, and I just want to highlight on one area which has been particularly confounding to the Navy for over fifty years and it’s Newport News, Virginia. That’s where we build our submarines and our aircraft carriers.

Not in a great part of town. Parking stinks—it’s renegotiated every time you do an availability—and we had crappy housing there and no food options.

So it would really give you pause if you looked at that problem set, and we live with it. A couple of years ago we had four suicides on the George Washington in close proximity, and when we did our—look at those four things there was no connection that we could see between those individual calamities—tragedies, really.

But when we looked at it in aggregation we found that we were making our sailors walk a ridiculous amount of time—a ridiculous distance to get into the shipyard. There was no place for them to stay. They had to drive to Virginia Beach to take a bus because there’s no parking. You know, all those things are out of order.

And so there’s a woman, and I won’t mention her name here because I don’t have her permission but she’s a fantastic officer and her job is to make sure we take care of all our carriers and submarines in Newport News.

And she went on this task to build a sense of place, and present to the Navy with Admiral Caudle and others a way to get after this program. And I’m pleased to say that we’ve got that in the budget now. We’ve got set parking where it’s not renegotiated every time. We’re going to build a privatized structure for 1,500 sailors that has a gym in it and health care, and that’s the way it should be.

So we want those sailors to come in and say, oh, I feel like I’m taken care of. I feel like I belong. I feel like I belong in an organization that cares about me. You know, I’d take a page out of the Army’s book where they have a fitness course and an academic course at their entry source if soldiers are struggling there. We do it at Great Lakes now.

And when you talk to those sailors they’re like, man, someone cares about me. My ASVAB went from twenty-four to forty-four. Now I qualify for all these ratings. One of those sailors graduated at the top of his class and now is a corpsman, one of the difficult—most difficult ratings to get into. And there’s other folks that were over body fat and had a trainer focused on them and their well-being. They feel invested.

So we’ve just got to be more thoughtful and not treat our people like they’re disposable.

ALLVIN: So the problem is when you’re number four and all the good stuff’s been said, so—

FROMAN: You can just focus on anything you’d like to add. You don’t—

ALLVIN: So feel sorry for you guys.

KILBY: Just say what Randy said. What Randy said.

ALLVIN: Yeah, what Randy said. But, so, on our recruiting, again, we’re going gangbusters, and we—similar to the others, ’23 was the only year that we didn’t make our numbers. Focused on it specifically. Those remedies have worked very well.

But I’m going to tell a side story here because, again, ’24 made our numbers really not any problem, ’25 going gangbusters. And then a yearlong CR hit and within this yearlong CR there was difference. It wasn’t the same as all the other CRs is that they actually had marks and directed spending, which is normally not what happens.

But they marked our MILPERS account for almost a half a billion dollars. So because of that we have 3,000 Americans who wanted to join our Air Force who we can’t bring in. So we’re going to easily make our numbers. We were going to exceed our numbers to make up for some of that deficit that had gone for a few years before.

Couldn’t do it because half a billion dollars was taken out because of the yearlong CR. A little bitter? Yeah, a little bit. (Laughter.) But—so that’s one of the challenges. But so on that front doing very well.

On the retention the same thing. Across the board, in the aggregate we had higher retention this year than last year. I think it’s in the ninety—it’s almost to the point where—when you get into ninety-three, ninety-four, ninety-five, you’re almost at too much. You need a little bit of turnover. Very healthy on the retention.

Now, there’s always those chronic areas, those critically manned areas—the pilot career field and a couple others—that we always have to watch throughout the Air Force. But that’s very healthy.

I would say with respect to the quality of life barometer—because everything the team said so far is exactly right—I’m going to say something that’s—it might sound on the surface a little heretical but I know I have a very erudite crowd here so you understand the spirit in which I’m making it. Is that I do believe there’s a couple things here.

It’s not just about—it comes to quality of life. It comes to, you know, unhealthy behavior—sexual assault, sexual harassment, suicide, all these other things. To me, I think there’s something else that we can do beyond just look for the helping agencies.

Yes, we need to have, you know, prevention workforce and all these other things. But when people have adversity, when Americans come into our Air Force and become airmen and they have adversity I don’t want them to just look up and go, what’s the system doing for me? Because that is necessary but it’s not sufficient.

So having the airmen be able to look left and right and have that horizontal accountability and feel more about a part of the team than I’m just an airman coming in and I’m maximizing my individuality. So giving that sort of sense of unit, sense of purpose of the team, my value is what I offer to the team, not the individualism that I bring to the group.

There’s a difference there and we’re starting to see that in the way we’re doing more of this unit training as we’re putting together combat wings and training together as units. You have that shared experience rather than, hey, I’m at the installation. I got tapped to go deploy. I got tapped to go deploy with airmen from ninety other installations—not an exaggeration—to go and be part of an air expeditionary wing.

And then you come back and it’s, like, hey, what did you do on your summer vacation? It’s a—you sort of feel like the installation is the thing and the mission is the thing where you aren’t really cohered as a unit. That’s backwards.

And so as we shift this we’re getting some of the returns back and our airmen are starting to find to what the gentlemen here have already said, the sense of purpose. I came here to do hard things—a mission, something that proves it’s something important to the nation, important to me, and also important to my airmen left and right of me.

So I think we’re starting to see some early returns on that that is beyond just what the helping agencies can provide, which is absolutely necessary. But I think there’s more to it, and when they have a sense of purpose and a sense of mission that they can share together I think that helps and we’re making progress there.

SALTZMAN: Can I add one thing?

The Space Force is small. We benefit by that. Obviously, we don’t have some of the same numbers problems.

But it’s not lost on us—and I’ll give credit to the chief master sergeant of Space Force Chief Bentivegna, who kind of coined the Guardian experience, that ideal, and the thought is, you know, about 3,000 of our 9,500 are still in their first assignment and what we hear over and over again—and this is exit interviews more than anything else—but the thing that most influences somebody getting out of the service after that first assignment is the quality of their local leadership—that supervisor.

The leaders, and so at the flight level—the flight commander level, company level—that leadership that the first assignment people are dealing with on a day in and day out basis if they have high-quality leadership they tend to stick around for that second tour, that second assignment.

And then the chiefs have to get involved because we got to make sure the chow halls are good. We have to make sure the macroeconomics are accounted for when they get to that second one. But we lose a lot after that first tour, and so we’re really spending a lot of time and energy on are we training the supervisors to be effective? Are we selecting quality leadership in a way that’s modern? That the people coming into the military that have decided to raise their hand and join what is it that interests them?

Are they trained to be able to deal with them and be effective leaders of that group? And so we’re putting a lot of emphasis there to try to increase that retention.

LUNDAY: Ambassador, you asked, I think, probably is what’s going to be the most important question of the evening, which is why we’re spending the appropriate amount of time on it, and I would just say, you know, taking care of your people is not—it’s Leadership 101 because it’s the right thing to do.

It’s also about force readiness. The readiness of the entire joint force starts with the readiness of every individual, man and woman, and their families and on that cornerstone the readiness of the service, of the entire joint force, is built. And so the assets—the weapon systems, the advanced technology—are critically important.

What will enable the joint force to prevail against an adversary is not that we’re just matching the technology or exceeding that of the adversary. It’s what happens here, here, and here in our joint fighting force. That makes the difference and that’s all about readiness.

So thanks.

FROMAN: Last question before we open it up and I’ll ask you for just brief answers. You can rank-choice some of your responses.

As warfighters what are your priorities in terms of fixing the defense industrial procurement process? Is it multiyear funding? Is it greater authorities or more flexible authorities? Is it the ability to cancel programs that have strong political support on Capitol Hill? Could be a few other things.

What are your priorities if you had your wish list that you’d like to see as a warfighter get done?

GEORGE: Yes on all those so you just—

FROMAN: Anything missing?

GEORGE: I think it’s a combination. That’s what we’re doing, canceling things. I think we need agile funding. We need to buy capabilities. So, like, if you’re talking drones, counter UAS, EW, those things are changing so rapidly you can’t buy a system. You need flexibility in your funding and it should be a portfolio capability funding that you’re doing.

I think we have to buy things that are modular and open system architecture so that you can put active protection system and change things out. So, I mean, it’s—I think fundamentally we’re at a spot right now. We just really have to change how we’re doing business.

And the last thing I’ll—is that we have to—what we have done is, going to something rather than requirements, is talk about characterization of need where we actually let the engineers—and there’s a lot of really brilliant people across our country. We tell them the problem we’re trying to solve. They’re really good at solving it. I mean, that’s—we are leaders in the tech world for a reason and I think we just have to invite them into our formations.

FROMAN: General Smith?

SMITH: Yeah, all of the above. Again, I go back to tech data rights. And I don’t want to be into firm, fixed-price contracting. Well, I want to be into firm, fixed-price contracting meaning I want this many at this price and then if I want to go beyond that then we’ll renegotiate.

But when it’s, you know, a modified contract, well, this costs a little bit more. Well, that’s a you problem. You know, the me problem was I signed the dotted line. You know, USMC stands for you signed the blanking contract—(laughter)—and so I’m interested in getting a good deal for the American taxpayer.

I’m interested in, you know, all my major defense industry partners making money but I’m more interested in my son coming home from the next fight and him having what he needs.

And so, again, I’m not interested in your cost overruns or your cost delays. You signed the contract. I built a contract with you, we have an agreement, and there you go. It’s a firm, fixed price—firm, fixed price.

FROMAN: Admiral?

KILBY: Yeah, I guess my—maybe a little bit of a different thought here because having been in this space for a while there are three things: cost, schedule, performance. I typically lock down two of them, which is schedule and performance. Therefore, cost goes up.

So if I am a little bit more thoughtful about those variables maybe I could come up with a different outcome because time matters. Time matters. That’s a variable we typically don’t think about and should think about with China. So 2027. Time matters.

Contracting matters. What is the incentivization to get out on time? I can get upside down in the contract where it’s more beneficial for the contractor just to keep your ship in the yard because the cashier is ringing it in. So I’ve got to figure out a way to make that a penalty.

FROMAN: Incentives.

KILBY: Yes.

FROMAN: Got it.

General?

ALLVIN: These guys really hit it. Funding flexibility.

Two examples really quick. Our collaborative combat aircraft, both sets are moving so fast they’ve cleared all their milestones. They’ve burned through the money so they can go faster.

We had a harder time than we should have to be able to get more money into that because it wasn’t in the right bucket. So well performing gets punished and gets slowed down. So more funding flexibility. That’s one thing.

And the other—and plus the above threshold reprogramming to below 15 million (dollars) is ridiculous. We need more on that. And then the other one is just in general. This is for all of us, to have a different relationship with industry rather than to be—have the hubris to say I know exactly what the requirement is.

That starts off as a requirement. It looks more like a specification. The industry will build whatever you tell them to build. If we have something that privileges more saying what are the ideas to solve the problems that I have and rewards that I think we can go a lot faster.

FROMAN: Procure by mission really.

General?

SALTZMAN: There’s no silver bullets here. It’s a complicated process.

But if we have the highest levels of tech readiness, if we have fixed requirements that don’t shift over time, if we have stable funding from Congress, and we have experts in acquisitions that stick around long enough to see their programs through it’s no problem. Acquisition is easy.

The problem, of course, is there’s a lot of incentives that work against those. Industry doesn’t want to spend a lot of money on developing technologies that they don’t have a market for so you have to figure out how to create those incentives where they spend their own money to develop the tech readiness.

Requirements shift all the time because the threat’s changing so how do we keep the requirements as fixed as possible? Congress doesn’t want to give us a lot of latitude because that reduces their oversight responsibilities in the funding.

CRs—there’s a lot of power on the congressional side using CRs to their advantage for political purposes. So CRs have value. They just don’t help us at all. So stable funding becomes problematic.

And then if all of those are problems it’s really hard to keep experts in acquisition in the system, in the government, because they find other places to go do contracting or go do work. And so there’s just a natural tension on those key things. We know what’s required for good acquisitions; it’s just hard to put all those pieces together in a time and place.

FROMAN: Admiral, when we gather back here in five years, are we going to still be talking about the same problems or do you think they’ll be fixed?

LUNDAY: I think we will have seen a substantial progress if we stay on the path we’re on to drive some of the change that we’ve heard regarding contract acquisition and rebuilding the industrial base of the United States, not only in the commercial sector but in our public facilities or public shipyards as well, including the Coast Guard yard. So we need to keep on this track and we need to accelerate.

One of my challenges or concerns, just to add it, is a lot of the process in law and regulation that were built in is intended to reduce the risk in the acquisition—in the programs. But the problem is we’re reducing the risk in one area but we’re not actually reducing the risk; we just think we are. And what we’re doing is slowing down cost, schedule, and performance at the same time, and creating a strategic disadvantage about the capabilities and systems we need to be competitive strategically.

FROMAN: All right.

Let’s open it up to the audience here and on Zoom. Barbara?

Q: Thanks very much, Mike. I’m Barbara Slavin from the Stimson Center.

And I came last year and there were two women, as Mike mentioned, on the podium; now there are all White men. Be honest: What do you think the removal of women from high-profile positions in the military, in the Pentagon, has done to the morale of women, who make up a substantial percentage of our armed forces? What kind of incentive is there for women to join and to stick with it when they see what looks like reverse discrimination going on? Thank you.

FROMAN: Who would like to take that?

SMITH: Yeah, I’ll jump in. I think for Marines they look at Roberta Shea, who’s the commander of Marine Corps Forces Command. I think they look at Lorna Mahlock, who is the deputy at MARFOR Cyber—or at CYBERCOM. They’re looking at Marines. And we have plenty of Marines. They’re looking at Maura Hennigan. We have a lot of Marine female general officers who, frankly, we just look at them as Marine general officers. Male, female, Black, White, gay, straight, we don’t care; just do you job. And so I think for the Marines they’re looking internally, and that’s what I can tell you about Marines. They look at Marines and they look at us.

KILBY: I will add onto this. I left out part of this story because I had a balding moment, but when that captain asked me—I mentioned that captain down in Newport News. She asked me in an open forum. She said, hey, I acknowledge that Admiral Franchetti’s been relieved; what do you have to say to me, Kilby? And I said: I value you. And I think that’s the obligation of all of us, to make them feel valued and to value them. That’s the obligation.

And I think you talked a little bit about that, but we’ve got to do that. We need every single person who’s qualified and a great performer in our military to stay in. So we’ve got an obligation to do that.

FROMAN: Frank Luntz, who promises not to drop the F-bomb this year. (Laughter.)

Q: In my entire life, I’ve never been in a room like this with people who I’m so proud to be an American, so I want to thank you all for your service. That was supposed to be an applause line, y’all. (Laughter, applause.)

I need to ask you a question. I’ve been doing this at West Point. I started at the Naval Academy. There will be a trip across America in July to introduce the country to the academy cadets and midshipmen, the same thing in Washington in September and October, but it should not be a single service; it should be all of you. Will Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard provide cadets and midshipmen so that the people in Washington can learn that they need to get along and the people in America be so impressed with the young people who are serving in your academies right now? Gentlemen, I ask you, will you supply cadets for July and September/October? (Laughter.)

GEORGE: Obviously, I got asked earlier and I already said yes, so put I you guys in a crappy position here. (Laughter.)

KILBY: I guess we’re on the hook. But I definitely want our nation to see our midshipmen, whether they’re in ROTC or the Naval Academy or OCS. I stand with General George that we will—we will commit to that.

Q: We leave July 2, so you know. (Laughter.)

KILBY: July 2.

FROMAN: All right. That was great. I think there will be some—

KILBY: You need to give us some information here.

ALLVIN: Yeah, because our—yeah, because our cadets are going to have to be—

FROMAN: Elise?

ALLVIN: You thought you were going on one summer program; you’re actually now going on another. (Laughter.)

FROMAN: Elise?

Q: Thank you. And I echo: Thank you for your service. And I’m Elise Labott. I’m the Edward R. Murrow press fellow here at the Council, and I’ve been honored to serve with the cohort of military fellows here I’ve learned so much from.

We talked so much today, and generally when we talk about threats to America and the—and the potential wars coming about China. And, obviously, it’s a resource and an assets issue, but you know, I think a lot of people think, well, the last time we saw China as a fighting force was in 1979 during the Sino-Vietnamese War. And I’m wondering, what do you think of the—if you could just expand a little more on the threat from China. Because when we look at our fighting force just in terms of military personnel it seems like there wouldn’t be a comparison because we don’t really know. Thank you.

SALTZMAN: Well, I’ll start. You mind?

ALLVIN: Go ahead.

SALTZMAN: Just because this is one of the formative purposes of the Space Force, is a recognition of what’s happening in the Western Pacific from a threat perspective. And two things make me extremely angry.

One, we’ve spent a lot of treasure putting a lot of capabilities in space that have enabled all of these services—satellite communications; and weather; and ISR capabilities; positioning, navigation, and timing—and then our adversaries have decided to build systems to expressly take them out to deny us the ability to use those systems. That makes me mad.

But more importantly, the men and women that are in these services have volunteered to put themselves in harm’s way should we be in a crisis or conflict in the Western Pacific, and the PRC has built a space-enabled targeting system to attack them at range with great precision. That’s a Space Force responsibility to try to disrupt and degrade that capability. It makes me mad that I don’t have the tools yet to be able to protect this joint force from that fight, and I think we have to address that particular threat if we’re going to have a deterrent posture in the Western Pacific.

ALLVIN: I would say that with respect to, you know, will it be a—will it be an even fight, that sort of stuff, I think we see a—we see a nation with an ambition—a stated ambition, a doctrine that about—so the path is there for expansion and coercion. And then we see them heavily funding in the capabilities.

Now, I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t go up against any of us. However, I want them to make sure that they don’t have that thought either. They are certainly putting a lot of resources into the capabilities. Will they fight well? I don’t want to find out, but where they’re putting the tools and they got a leader who has an ambition that’s something we need to take very seriously.

SMITH: I would say that, you know, not spewing false bravado, but you know, again, I’ve said this before publicly: Our last fight was captured on somebody’s iPhone 14 and their last fight was captured on oil and canvas. And so they ought not forget that, that we know what we’re doing. We know how to warfight. We know how to be a joint force. I think they’re still putting the pieces together on being a, quote, “joint force.” They’re joint in that they all, you know, bow down to Xi Jinping, but we’re a joint force. And again, we’ve got combat experience, and combat experience matters, because the first time you hear a shot fired in anger shouldn’t be the first time you hear a shot fired in anger.

FROMAN: Ken Oye.

Q: Hi. My name is Ken Oye. I’m a professor at MIT.

And I want to thank all of you for the sustained attention to technology, and changes in technology, and their significance. But something that we haven’t talked about is another set of changes. For years during the Cold War and after the Cold War we’ve taken a stable system of alliances and an open international economic order as basic assumptions for our strategy and our planning. Those assumptions have come under some pressure of late. Mike’s previous position at USTR puts him in an interesting position to comment. But even apart from tariffs, lots and lots of the elements that we’ve assumed to be in place are under pressure. And my question is on whether your work on strategy and planning has taken those changes into account in terms of alliance relations—NATO, MST (ph), and others—but also in terms of let’s call it an integrated economic order and self-reliance when it comes to defense procurement. And to what extent do our allies in the West and in East Asia—are they altering their strategy and planning in response to the changes that they have observed?

FROMAN: Good question.

ALLVIN: Can I ask you a clarification on that, by the way? On what time epoch are you talking about the changes? Because there’s been changes that have gone on for the last six years—

Q: Yeah.

ALLVIN: —and there’s changes that have gone on in the last four months.

Q: Right.

ALLVIN: Which of those are you asking to—the change?

Q: So both are entirely fair to discuss.

ALLVIN: OK. I—

Q: Changes didn’t begin, you know, this year. But the changes do appear to have accelerated significantly in terms of pressure on the alliance system, pressure on the dollar, and pressure on the trade system.

ALLVIN: So I’ll just say real quick from my perspective. So there’s a lot of things that have happened recently, and those are changes in administration approach, et cetera. I don’t feel confident to comment on what’s the last four months; it’s just too short of a time epoch to really—to meter out any changes that I’ve made. I talk to my air chiefs when we start thinking about how we’re going to train together, operational readiness together; that really hasn’t changed much.

But, however, over the period of the last several years within that, I think there’s been a couple of things in play that haven’t actually brought us further apart but closer together, especially with our closer allies and partners when we think about we have economic constraints that we have that can actually be ameliorated with better working with our allies and partners in coproduction, co-development. And some of those things are starting to play out in a way that we look at developing our capabilities. But the assumption that if we’re going to fight we’re going to fight together, I think that’s—beyond that, the geopolitical, strategic, economic piece is not sort of my bailiwick. But I think our part is to look at how we would anticipate fighting with those allies and partners, and in ways that—how can we better have our collective readiness?

So to me, that hasn’t changed much, other than to understand opportunities for the investment to happen that we can do co-development, co-production, and we can start having the interoperability that my predecessor, C.Q. Brown, as the chief who start talking about integrated by design. That’s a good thing to think about it. So to me when you do that it’s a recognition of the fact that we are going to fight with our allies. And if we integrate by design, we’re going to be able going to be able to fight integrated more naturally, rather than having to stitch it together. That’s just my perspective.

GEORGE: I will—I just wanted to jump in there. On a mill-to-mill level, I will tell you that I have not seen—you know, we are operating with them. You know, we are doing the same exercise we’re doing with them. We’re getting ready to do a big counter-UAS exercise in Europe in June and July with our partners. We just finished a large joint exercise out in the INDOPACOM AOR with our partners and allies. We just had, like, twenty chiefs of Army that were out for LANPAC. And I think that we’re continuing to do that. So I have not noticed, you know, like Dave said, I think, some of these policy decisions. But as far as the relationships that I have, and I’ve got people that are getting ready to come here that’ll be here in another week. I’ve seen a lot of CHODs and chiefs of Army. That’s still been very strong.

KILBY: If I could just add one thing. I think the rate of watching our adversaries operate compared to our relationship with our allies is important. So China and Russia are starting to do things together. They did five exercises in the last year together in the Pacific. By contrast, we did ten times that. So that’s not to say we’re better, but we should look at the rate of change and see how that is being received. You know, things like AUKUS are important beyond just a mil-to-mil thing, but an industrial thing, and taking workers and putting them—in Australian workers and putting them into Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, that’s important. Taking our submarines and maintaining them in Stirling, that’s important. So I think there’s a lot of—there’s a lot to what you say. And I think we just have to really look at that holistically.

FROMAN: Let’s go to our online audience for a question.

OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Nili Gilbert.

Q: Hi. I’m Nili Gilbert, the vice chairwoman of Carbon Direct. And I want to add my thanks for your extraordinary service.

At Carbon Direct, we’re focused on investing and advising in new energy and fuel sources, among other things. So I really appreciated that you began this conversation at the intersection of innovation and procurement. All across the DOD you’ve been making investments in energy alternatives in support of national security. You’ve completed successful demonstrations across land, air, and sea with synthetic fuels, with companies like Air Company and Twelve. And these are technologies that have been developed at home and which can be produced here in the U.S., as well as across our bases globally. So I’d love to ask how you all are thinking about diversification of energy sources for your operations to support our security, and how does this center in your focus on innovation and procurement? Thanks again.

GEORGE: I’ll mention something. I mean, one of the things—and I don’t know if this is different sources—kind of what we said up front, if you can be seen, you can be targeted. Obviously doing resupply, all those things. So we are all about—we just fielded vehicles diesel hybrid electric, because they need a lot less fuel. And we’re looking at the same thing for battery technology and what you could have to reduce the soldiers’ load. And when you have hybrid electric you also have silent watch, silent approach, and using smaller systems. So I think we’re looking at it holistically as far as increasing our combat capability. And on our installations, I think the big thing that we’re looking for there is resiliency. We want to have—everywhere that we’re at, you want to make sure that you have resiliency. So those are the two areas we’re looking at it in the Army.

ALLVIN: Same here, for the Air Force. And on the resiliency side, up in Alaska doing, you know, a nuclear microreactor. Different ways to have different types of energy that are more resilient at the basing level. You know, when I was—when, you know, dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was a test pilot, we put together—you know, flew a C-17. And we thought we had some level of being able to get the maximum range out of it. Technology, has advanced, micro veins, little things that actually they not only help, you know, save money because you’re able to get more out of the—a tank of gas, if you will, but also the Indo-Pacific, it’s all about range, the tyranny of distance. And so there’s an operational effect of that too.

So we continue to knock on, even if it’s just little things here there. Those little pieces of innovation are helping to keep us relevant moving forward. And so it doesn’t have to be a big bang, discovering cold fusion. There are some things that are very on the technological feasibility. We just need to find the adaptability to insulation resilience as far as capabilities at home as well as on the operational side.

FROMAN: Right. Dov Zakheim.

Q: I’m Dov Zakheim with CSIS. And I used to pay all your bills. (Laughter.) Or not.

You talked a lot about technology, and to some extent about risk. But, you know, you look at the Ukrainians and how quickly they’re adapting, and you look at us. And, yeah, we’re adapting, but not very quickly. And my question is, how do you award risk when you’re doing OERs for your officers? Because—

FROMAN: OER?

Q: (Laughs.) Officer something report. I’m an old man. I don’t remember. Efficiency report. The point is that if risk isn’t rewarded, if somebody doesn’t think that he needs, or she needs, to take a risk to get promoted to SES, or general officer, or flag officer, they’re not going to take the risks. What are you doing about that?

SMITH: Yeah, I’ll jump in. So we do reward risktakers in the Marine Corps. We’re looking for people who are being innovative, who are being creative, who want to fail fast and then learn from it. But the key is you got to learn from it. If you go a different direction and you run into a brick wall, we don’t expect you to run into the brick wall repeatedly. We expect you to adjust. So we do reward risktakers. And, you know, the fitness report system that we have, there’s places in there for you to talk about innovation, for you to talk about taking risk, as long as it leads somewhere. And it’s not just risk for risk-taking’s sake. We don’t want to be risk averse, but we also don’t want to be cavalier with the American taxpayer’s dollars or with the lives of our young Marines.

GEORGE: I think that you got to start—you have to model whatever behavior it is. You have to be willing to take some risk. And you have to show your people that you’re willing to take some risk. One of the things that—we have a lot of discussions about this. So I agree with you 100 percent. And, you know, this is about talking to your people about it. I go out to every one of our pre-command courses and talk about this because, you know, personal courage is different, you know, as you move up, to be able to do those kinds of things.

And then I think the second aspect of this is, you know, we have a bevy of rules and regulations. And so what we have been trying to really knock down is cutting all of that out. I mean, we went this big require—you know, what we had, that everybody—you know, everybody had to perform for training. And we cut it down to four tasks. And we basically say, you have to shoot, move, communicate, and then we want you to do driver’s training, you know, the your—whatever system it is. So I think that you have to take risk at every level, and then you have to counsel people and talk about it. I think that’s a constant. We do pretty good at that, in my experience, we did when we were in Iraq and Afghanistan, because we had to. It’s a little harder, you know, back here. And I think you have to be very deliberate about how you approach that.

SALTZMAN: And I think the risk taking—we have to define our terms a little bit. I’m not so enamored with risk takers. I really like effective risk managers. And then I think, you know, the ability to make a decision, maybe there’s risk. But if you’ve managed it properly, I need somebody to make a decision. If the inability to make a decision, you’re not—it’s not whether you’re taking a risk or not taking risk, you’re just not making a decision. And we need people to make decisions. We just got to define our terms a little better and then hold people accountable for where they are in the authority chain. You know, I don’t want somebody that stays up all night, pulling a mid-shift and then drives twelve hours to go on leave. That’s a risk taker. I don’t have any place for them. That’s not effective, right? But risk management is.

KILBY: I’d just add one thing, in addition to what we said. You know, in the Navy we were all challenged in the military to get to 80 percent up jets in 2018. We got there in F-18s. And we’ve tried to spread that across all our platforms. Those behaviors—we’ve been on this journey for about three years. Two years ago we put it in flag FITREPs and this year we put in O-5 and O-6 FITREPs, so specific things we’re looking at. And it matches up with a precept and a convening order, and it makes it a little easier for the board to look for those qualities.

FROMAN: Let’s go right there in the back.

Q: Hi. Missy, Ryan with the Atlantic.

I’d like to follow up on Barbara’s question. I’d love to know more about the feedback that you all are receiving from the troops in your organizations about the messages that we’re hearing, that are very clear and have been repeated from Secretary Hegseth and those around him, about DEI is dead, diversity is our strength is the stupidest sentence that you can utter. What are you hearing from the troops that you’re talking to, the reporting chains, and from your networks—about how is that message landing with people in your organizations? Thank you.

SMITH: Yeah, what I’m hearing is aye-aye, sir. You know, which stands for: I understand and I will comply. We follow lawful orders. That’s who we are. And so I’m not hearing grousing. I’m not hearing complaining. I’m hearing, aye-aye, sir. And they’re stepping off because they’re focused on warfighting. They’re focused on being prepared to fight and win against the PRC or against any other threat that we have. But I’m hearing, aye-aye.

FROMAN: Do you see any fall off in recruitment of women?

SMITH: No. In fact, we’ve got an uptick in recruitment of women.

GEORGE: We’ve gone up—we’ve gone up too. I will tell you, when we do go out there, Missy, this topic never comes up. What they normally say is, how come we’re not changing faster? You know, what are we going to do with this new drone technology? I mean, they may talk about, you know, something with their barracks. But I’m out with people all the time. I talk to all the inbound commanders with just, you know, 300 of them just last week. And this topic never came up, not once. And, I mean, I spent two and a half hours with them, taking their questions.

FROMAN: Hmm. Yes, gentleman right there.

Q: Hi. Doug Ollivant with FPRI.

First, an aside. My nominee tonight for best deployment of a talking point goes to Admiral Lunday, for instructing us all that the Coast Guard predates the U.S. Navy, which I did not know. So very well played, sir. (Laughter.)

FROMAN: Very subtle, I thought.

Q: Very well played.

FROMAN: Very subtle competition here.

LUNDAY: I think Admiral Kilby is going to have a conversation with me after.

Q: I’m sure. I’m sure. I wouldn’t want to watch that one.

But my question goes to General George, following up on General Saltzman’s comments on leadership. The Army had a minor scandal last year when a four-star general interfered in what’s supposed to be a firewalled command selection process, in which he promoted his protege who had been judged to be not qualified to command. You or your office then inserted her at a fairly high level on the command list, which ensured she would be given command. That was all eventually rectified. The Army did correct itself. That officer was removed. The four-star was relieved. I don’t want to relitigate it. I’m interested in what did you learn from this? What did you learn about leader selection? And what did you learn about management of your fellow four-stars?

GEORGE: Yeah. Well, first, you know to the process that you’re talking about in CAP, the Commander’s Assessment Program, I’m a big believer in that. And obviously, we had studied that, and looked at that, and make sure that we are continuing, you know, to modify from that. I learned a couple of things with that. And it’s not exactly, as the facts that you laid out, is exactly what happened. So that—but at the time I was the vice and the chief. And, you know, people will do things at a certain level, whether or not you—you know will act on things whether or not they’ve spoken with you or not. They will do things because they think it’s your intent to do things. And so I always tell people when I go out and talk to commanders that you have to be very clear on your expectations. You have to be very clear about what information and what decisions are yours. And be very specific in those situations.

SMITH: Yeah, I would—I would jump on what Randy said. I’m not in that situation, but just in general. You know, if I say it’s hot then what gets translated down is the commandant’s pissed that his air conditioner’s broken. I’m, like, I just said “it’s hot.” I just made a comment about the weather. The next thing I know, I got four repairmen in my office fixing the air conditioner. It’s like, well, the commandant, you know, has his office frosty cold, you know, and the rest of the Pentagon sweating. I just said it was hot. Just made a comment about the weather. So you do have to watch out for people taking your intent and running with it because, like, if I want you to do something, I’ll tell you.

FROMAN: All right. Last question. Why don’t we take here at the end?

Q: Thank you. My name is Meghan Vernier. I’m on Joint Staff.

My question is, as we move forward with rethinking the Unified Command Plan, are there areas or spaces where the services could fill gaps, or take on a role, or share the role of global integrator?

FROMAN: So—I’m sorry, the last word was?

Q: To share some of the load of global integration.

ALLVIN: It’s an interesting thought. I will tell you, this is—so a quick anecdote about the Unified Command Plan. My first job on the Joint Staff was back in 2004. And I was told I was going to be the guy in the organizational branch that did the Unified Command Plan. I had no idea what it was. And Admiral Fallon and General Brown, at the time, almost got into a fistfight about a single word in the UCP. And the sentence went like this, it was, “the commander of Special Operations Command is responsible for,” fill in the blank, “operations for the global war on terrorism.” Admiral Fallon wanted “coordinate” and General Brown wanted “synchronize.” And I thought—I’d just come from National War College. And I thought, man, come on, I’m a strategy—this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. Until I heard General Brown say to his team—he said, hey, listen, “coordinate” means I can call meetings. “Synchronize” means I can, by God, get shit done. Sorry, I said shit. (Laughter.) But I was quoting someone else.

So, again, the UCP is—it’s a very interesting document when it talks about the responsibilities, et cetera. I think it becomes interesting when you start inserting the services’ responsibility. There’s a tension here that pisses us off sometimes. But it’s a healthy tension between, you know, the combatant commands are using up all my stuff, I need to preserve it for the—so I think there’s a—it’d be an interesting conversation to figure what role that might be, where that might be headed with respect to who should work to support the global integration thing. I think we’re always good serving as joint chiefs to be able to do that, but to make it a formalized role in the unified command plan with respect to that, as opposed to our roles as the Title 10 organize, train, and equip we provide, I think could offer maybe more friction than help. That’s just my opinion.

SALTZMAN: There’s a—if you break up the UCP, there’s the upfront matter, which talks about all the things that are common across all the combatant commands. And that’s code for, these are the things they don’t generally fight about. And then there’s the back half of the UCP, which is intended to differentiate each combatant command from the next combatant command. So another way of saying, it’s intentionally creating the seams between the combatant commands, intentionally. That doesn’t work for global integration when you’re focused on where are the seams in the structure. And so it’s one of the common discussions that we have in the tank, is how do we pull this together? How do we make trades from one combatant command to the next? How do we manage risk across the entire global enterprise, rather than regional area by regional area?

And in some ways, the UCP is just counter to that and it requires a wholesale revisit. But I think if we were to start to look at the upfront matter and really start to take more advantage of the things that are common authorities, and less specific instances where we’re dividing those seams up, it might be a step in the right direction. But it’s probably going to take the Joint Staff to come across and say, this is what has to be managed across the seams.

FROMAN: We are so fortunate to have the finest military in the world, and so grateful to the men and women who make up that military. And grateful to their leaders, who are with us today, who have laid out a vision and have an ambitious plan, and have a hell of a lot of work to do. And we wish you all best of luck. And thank you for joining us today. (Applause.)

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