Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency talks about DIA

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Army Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley Jr., director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, talks about the DIA at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado, July 19, 2019.

Transcript

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to the ASPEN Security Forum. My name is Lori Scherer, I’m the Vice President of Intelligence Portfolios at The MITRE Corporation. It is my distinct honor and privilege to introduce our next session. A conversation with the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Robert Ashley. And serving as our moderator for the conversation this afternoon is Jim Sciutto, Chief National Security Correspondent for CNN. I can’t think of a better time to discuss the importance of intelligence and its critical role of informing decision-makers at all levels of the U.S. government. As Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Ashley leads more than 16,500 men and women worldwide who produce, analyze, and disseminate military intelligence information, excuse me, to combat and non-combat military operations. Lieutenant General Ashley is a career Army Military Intelligence Officer. He served as the Army Deputy Chief of Staff where he was a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of the Army and Army Chief of Staff for all intelligence, counterintelligence, and security matters. Some of his career highlights include, serving as the Director of Intelligence for U.S. Army Joint Special Operations Command, the Director of Intelligence for U.S. Central Command, the Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence International Security Assistance Force, and Director of Intelligence, U.S. Forces Afghanistan to name just a few. In addition to his distinguished military career, my own intel sources have let me know that Lieutenant General Ashley plays a mean electric guitar and is a huge fan of the Minnesota Vikings. And with that, I turn it over to Jim and Lieutenant General Ashley.

Let me begin by thanking you, General, for joining us today. In a year when there has been a dearth of administration officials willing to speak. I know I appreciate it and I’m sure many people in the audience appreciate you taking the time and taking the questions.

All right, thanks Jim, I appreciate it.

I wanna give you a chance, ’cause I think even in an environment like this, a lot of folks don’t know the details of the DIA’s role in an enormous intelligence infrastructure apparatus. The biggest in the world. Before I get there, as you know, there’s been some news hovering around the Persian Gulf, Iran, et cetera. And I know this is a British league. It’s British tankers, the other appears to be Liberian. So I’m not gonna put you on the spot in that sense, but you are, the DIA is the eyes and the ears of the U.S. military. Tells them what’s going on in the world and I imagine tries to fit those pieces together. So, can you help us understand how these Iranian activities that we’ve seen, from a drone shoot down to now these seizing of the tankers to these, it seems, attacks on tankers prior; how that range of activity fits together and if you have a sense of what the intention is from the Iranian side.

So let me put it into context of what DIA’s core mission is. I don’t think I can really get to the last one that you laid out. So, for us, the Defense Intelligence Agency, it’s a team sport. And what we do is we provide all-source intelligence. So, the two key things we do are foundational intelligence on foreign militaries and the operational environment, if you were to put it in two major buckets. Rough sports analogy is we provide the scouting report on the Vikings, we provide the scouting report, pick your team, and we also give you the environmentals of the city. So those are the major things that we do. We fuse all the information that comes out of the other intelligence organizations. So again, it’s a team sport. We’re the one DoD all-source intelligence agency. Now, in addition to fusing everything that we get from the other members of the intelligence community, we also have collection and stuff that we produce originally. All the defense attaches work for, I mean they work for the combatant commanders, but they’re a part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. We have science and technical capabilities that allow us to look at weapons development across major powers, we can look at space, counterspace. so there’s a heavy engineering STEM capability in science and technology; there’s the HUMINT side for the attaches; and then there’s that fusion of the all-source intelligence, which gets into a lot of what the panels talked about earlier in terms of how we leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, things like that. So, in the context of what’s evolving in Iran right now, what the combatant commander would do would be, come back to DIA and we have employees in every combatant command. So, the Joint Intel Ops Center, which is all the officers that are under the J-2s, the senior intelligence officers for all the combatant commands, about 80, 85% of those are DIA employees. So, we are in every combatant command. And so, what we provide, that foundational intelligence and that analysis is so that you can look at it and go okay, what are the capabilities of the fast attack aircraft or ships, the fast intercoastal ships; what’s the nature of the doctrine behind what’s taking place in the military districts; where are the surface to air missiles. So, all that order of battle, all that capability that exists inside a foreign military is what we update constantly. So, we’ve got a foundational database that has all that information. We don’t pick the targets, but what we do is we’re able to vet and tell you about pattern of life and what’s behind this.

Okay, without going, I don’t know if I have to say this but I will say it, without going into classified information, can you characterize what’s going on there and how severe it is, or just the range of activities that Iran is carrying out right now?

So let me put it more into strategic context in terms of just the specific events that are taking place today, and I had a chance to be interviewed and talk about this a couple weeks ago. One of the comments I made was I see Iran at an inflection point. And you had a chance through the panels earlier today to hear about the economic pressure and all the things that are taking place; now that gets into the policy side, that’s not my realm. So, what we do is we inform policy but that’s not an area that we get involved in. But as we do the analysis and we look what’s taking place, my comment about them being at an inflection point was really about how do you change the status quo. Now, you heard the economic breakdown in terms of the pressure that’s on the regime, where their GDP is going, the fact that their going into recession and the glide path that they’re on is more of the same. So, what is it they have to do to kind of change the status quo which was to ramp up the level of activity. We saw this coming a couple weeks out before it happened. So, we’re able to provide that information to senior leaders both in the Department of Defense and obviously they provide their best military advice to senior leaders on the Hill and within the White House. And for us, the other thing I wanted to mention that I didn’t talk about yet was, so who’s my boss? I have lots of bosses but I’ll give you the principal is the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Retired Vice Admiral Joe Kernan is my immediate boss and then it’s the Secretary of Defense. But you heard from Admiral Davidson yesterday, all the combatant commanders are my bosses because I serve all of them and also we service policy and the executive branch.

I can identify, I have a lot of bosses as well.

And then I’m sorry, and then my wife, Barbara—

Yeah, exactly.

Is at the top of the list.

I’m with ya on that. Iran at an inflection point, and again, I don’t wanna talk through the whole afternoon about Iran ’cause we wanna get to great power China, Russia, but Iran at an inflection point, feeling the pressure you’re in effect saying, they’re feeling the economic pressure and they’re striking out. They wanna change the status quo.

So, what you see is, in attempt to break that status quo, is to look to divide us with our European powers, to try to get the European powers to come back in, to have an economic impact. So, you kinda watch this across the dime. Now, my responsibility is to be very deep in the military part of the instruments of power but as you look at what takes place in the world, while I have a responsibility for the M, I cannot ignore the diplomatic, the informational, the economic, because all those come to bear on the military piece. In some cases it informs indications and warnings on where nations may be going, where they’re investing, equipment that they’re buying, where they open a new port. If we get back into great power, you talk about belt and road which is principally an economic endeavor from the Chinese but it has potential for long-term military implications, which we watch.

There are the actions we see and then the actions we don’t see; particularly in the environment of modern warfare that we have today. How hot is the cyber front of this conflict with Iran today?

So, let me put that, not just with Iran, but with cyber in general. And kudos to the panels that talked to you earlier this morning about all the things that are taking place in cyberspace. And that is very active. It’s very active for a number of nations without getting into specifics and part of what I would echo, you heard earlier this morning that gives me concern, is the reconnaissance that is ongoing. For the potentiality of something that you may want to do in the future. So, think about what you heard about SCADA systems, supervisory control and data acquisition, industry control systems, things like that, because the Internet of Things creates a degree of vulnerability in all the things that are hooked into that.

[Jim] Yeah.

And so cyber defense is absolutely critical. So, I was glad that we had the panel talking about that. But whether it’s in the military realm, whether it’s infrastructure, power grids, banking, the cyber net of things, or the Internet or Things, can reach into all kinds of areas. And when people ask me, so what keeps you up at night? That’s kind of the one that keeps me up at night because you look at the time it would take to move a carrier battle group, or time to move an air wing, but how long does it take to move ones and zeros globally? It’s near instantaneous. And the other thing is it’s not just state actors. You have non-state actors that could be empowered and then how do you go back against a non-state actor because you’re not going against something that’s territorial in nature. So, it’s a degree of complexity in future war.

I’ve had folks in the NSA tell me that they, for instance, in their homes, will not have internet connected appliances, or like an Alexa, because these are open invitations to be hacked.

Yeah, not to make light of it, but there are some great briefs that NSA will give you and you literally will throw your phone away on the way out.

Yeah. (audience chuckling) China and Russia, you said what keeps you up at night; whenever I ask that question of intel officials, they will always put China and Russia at the top of the list. Sometimes in reverse order, but it’s China and Russia. Are we today in the midst of a new great power competition?

So we are and it’s really what’s emerging over the course of probably since ’91. Since the Russians have recovered from the period of the Soviet Union but it’s the character of that conflict that is very interesting because of the diffusion of weapons and technology. So, think about the nature of war. I get to channel my inner General Mattis here for a second. One of the things that General Mattis as Secretary, did a great job in testimony and help educating in that testimony, was to talk about the nature and the character of war. And what he said is if you go back to the time with Thucydides and as you read about the Peloponnesian wars the nature of war is fear, honor, and interest. That is immutable, that has not changed, but what has changed is the character of war and the character of war is via the technology. So if you look at all the different things that have come out in the ability to be competitive in that space, ’cause one of the things that we have responsibility to do is look at weapons development globally and it used to be that was kind of a binary in the bipolar time that we had with the Soviet Union. You’re watching missile tests and everything that’s going on with the Soviet Union. Now, you have the diffusion of that technology, China selling ballistic missiles, and so our ability to watch that is now becoming much more global as you see lots of different people are getting that technology and China is absolutely prolific in their sales of ballistic missiles and weaponized drones.

As you know, a pet issue for me, I wrote a book about this, the expansion and the use of technology, the multiple fronts of the war, just below the threshold of what we think of in historical terms as a shooting war, and there are a lot of fronts. Space, let’s talk about space. China and Russia have both deployed space weapons. They’re floating around, they have capabilities in each earth orbit. Is the U.S. behind in that conflict?

Yeah, so I can’t tell ya who’s in front, who’s behind, but let me just talk to you a little about the context of what’s being developed. And the good thing is we’re able to get a lot of this out in the public domain. We were asked last year, can you get something out that’s unclassified to talk about developments from the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, and the Koreans as it pertains to challenges in counterspace. And so we thought, pretty sensitive area, it’s probably gonna be a tri fold. There’s probably not a lot we could get out on that and as we dug into it, what we were able to share, there is a 30-page unclassified booklet called “Challenges in Space” and we profiled the capabilities of those four nations. That is available. Matter of fact, it’s kind of interesting and there’s some enterprising entrepreneur out there, if you go to Amazon, and you put that title in there, someone is actually selling it for about $25 dollars. We probably could get you a copy for free, Jim.

I’ll take it.

But what we’re able to profile there is that space is contested. Now, if you go back to the counterterrorism fight, what we’ve been involved in the last 16 years between the different domains, and we talk about maritime, land, air, space, and cyber, the only domain that was truly contested was the ground domain. You saw that in IEDs and attacks against our ground forces. Even going back to Desert Shield/Desert Storm, it was a very limited time before we actually really had air supremacy and our pilots were no longer at risk. But what we’re able to provide in this booklet was to talk about direct energy weapons, which are being developed by both the Russians and the Chinese. The fact that they have direct decent, ASAT weapons, that really can go up and target a satellite and unfortunately create a lot of debris; the ability to have co-orbital satellites. So just think you have a satellite extensively and the way you portray it is, it’s got an arm on it that it can do maintenance, but if that satellite nestles up against yours, then you have the ability to damage a sensor, you could cut lines, you, in fact, could disable that with a co-orbital satellite.

The Space Command likes to talk about kamikaze satellites, kidnapper satellites, and both China and Russia have demonstrated that capability.

There’s electronic warfare, the ability to jam synthetic-aperture radars, other kinds of satellites, both from the ground and from in space. We’re seeing a period of great competition that is moving its way into space and the risks there obviously from a warfighting standpoint is precision, navigation, and timing, we have grave dependence on that, what you depend on when you don’t have to read a map ’cause you just plug it into your phone and you know where you want to go, things along those lines. Meteorological data, so you know what the weather is gonna be tomorrow, satellite early warning or, excuse me, missile early warning systems. There’s a multitude of things that are potentially at risk. What I can’t talk about is what we’re doing to ensure that we have resilience and redundancy and that is being addressed.

I’ll reserve questions about the X-37B.

Okay.

Hypersonic weapons. Has the age of the hypersonic, are hypersonic weapons already a threat to U.S. forces?

We’ll see those fielded in the next couple of years. We’re watching those developments, we’re actually watching and trying to learn from the systems that we’re developing. Part of that technical collection is we’re making sure that we get a sense of what the parameters are of those hypersonic weapons, how they perform, how they operate because the trajectory is, literally Mach 5 and beyond defines hypersonic, is they have the ability to move. And so when you think about ballistic missiles which have some ability to turn or, the geometry’s kind of predictable, so it allows you to go in and have the ability to potentially kill it en route. So think about a hypersonic’s and the decision time, the decision space you have with something that’s low hugging the earth and has the ability to turn. So part of what we have to develop, and this gets into artificial intelligence, algorithms, advanced analytics, is can you be predictive in nature and how that vehicle is gonna operate. So we have to gather a lot of data structure and algorithms, and see how we can do that. But your defeat mechanism starts all the way from when the missile is actually launched, all the way back to susceptibility before it even leaves the launch patch. Which gets back to the Internet of Things, so you have to think about the entire, what we would call kill chain analysis of how you defeat a weapon system. So one of the keys things the Defense Intelligence Agency does, is we’re a big part of having the engineers, and you’ve been to the Missile and Space Intel Center down in Alabama, MISC, which is one of our organizations, that they actually kind of disable, they take those weapon systems apart so that we can understand how they operate and how we can work to defeat ’em.

Yeah, they wouldn’t tell me how they got all those missiles around the world, but they find a way to get ’em and reverse engineer ’em and figure out what to do about ’em.

Yep.

Yeah. Artificial intelligence, there’s a quote, that I’ll often read to people in speeches and it talks about the potential for AI, both in commercial applications, military, government applications. And I’ll often ask the crowd, who do you think said that? They’ll say Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but in fact it’s Vladimir Putin. Russia and China, very interested in that space. What capabilities do they have today and how quickly does AI factor into military planning, right?

So really, developing artificial intelligence is solving problems. It is creating decision space. It is allowing analysts to spend time doing analysis and not having to do a lot of just rigorous kinds of work. It also gives you insights that you may never see because of its ability to aggregate information together. And so that gets into us, it’s looking at big data and how we apply that. So artificial intelligence, machine learning are integral to what we do from an analytic standpoint. One of the programs that we’re looking to build over the next couple years is the Machine-Assisted Analytic Rapid Repository System, MARRS. Somebody actually got probably a promotion or cash bonus for coming up with the name though. (Jim laughs) But what it’s meant to do is to replace the Modern Integrated Database, MIDB, which is where all that foundational intelligence is. That database is 1996. It is not AI ready, it’s not machine-learning ready, and it does not scale to really create an information environment to allow us to not only archive all that information about those foreign militaries and the operational environment, but by applying artificial intelligence, computer vision, we can have a much richer information environment with all that data in there and, really, it updates itself and you take the human out of the loop. For example, if I were to say part of that foundational intelligence I need to know where all the hospitals are. Okay, well for a person to do that, look at imagery, go through that, you might be able to do thousands of images in the period of a year. By applying computer vision, what we’re doing right now, we go through millions of images. But we’ve applied tradecraft, analytic tradecraft so that I can say, I have a high probability that that’s a hospital because we went back, we trained it on a series of images that said that’s a high probability that it’s a hospital ’cause it actually is. So when you get that information, you go through millions of images and you have an incredibly rich database that you know that you’ve applied tradecraft against but you didn’t necessarily have to have a person in the loop. So that’s the kind of scaling that these tools are gonna bring to us.

For the purposes of my book, I asked some Marine commanders, I asked folks in the NSA, folks in Space Command, pilots flying surveillance aircraft missions. The question, when you look at Russia and China, but even Iranian and North Korean capabilities in all these realms, all these fronts of this kind of new hybrid warfare, does the U.S. still maintain the lead? And the uniform answer was yes, but shrinking, and if we don’t make big changes, we’re gonna lose that lead and I wonder if you agree with that. In particular with respect to Russia and China.

So if you go back and read the National Defense Strategy, it says the central problem that we have to solve is that our military advantage is eroding. Now, you can break that down into a bunch of categories. In some cases, we’re in parity, in some cases we’re a little bit behind, some cases we’re ahead but in the aggregate, we’re in a good place.

[Jim] Where are we behind?

I can’t give you the specifics of where we’re behind. What I’m not gonna talk about is a vulnerability. I don’t wanna share with, because I’m sure that camera is being watched by some folks that may be sitting in Moscow and Beijing. I will wave at you. But I’m not gonna tell you—

They’re waving back right now.

What our vulnerabilities are but there’s a host of things out there that exist. So I’ll give just a couple of categories which we have to watch closely. Quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum communications are all integral to the way ahead and kinda the way that I look at this is, one thing, it’s developing the technology, so if somebody comes in and says the Chinese are now ahead, just opining, the Chinese are now ahead, they have the fastest computer. Okay, what’s the context of that? What are the problems that they are trying to solve ’cause just having the fastest computer sitting in a lab doesn’t tell me that they’re getting great insights on what’s the problem they’re trying to solve. So as you look at quantum encryption which the Chinese are making huge investments in and very good at, but quantum computing, these are things that are gonna come to maturation over the next 10 years. There’s a good book by Michael O’Hanlon entitled “Modern Warfare” and if you ever read anything by Peter Singer, he’s a futurist. I’ve asked both of them in different panels and say, what is that one disruptive piece of technology that has you most concerned? And both of them kind of said the technology is only gonna make you good at something you’re already good at doing. So look at that in the context of warfighting. If you understand the complexity of integrating all those domains of fires, air, ground maneuver, cyber, space, that’s PhD work. And that’s something that we didn’t have to do during the CT years which, oh, by the way, are still going. And so that’s something that the Chinese and the Russians watched us dismantle Saddam’s Army twice and took note of it and were very, very concerned. So it led to them to mirror how we’ve organized in the terms of putting in joint commands, joint capabilities, focused on brigade and division fight, but we have a lot more experience, a lot more expertise at taking those capabilities and operationally putting them in place. However, we’re seeing a level of rigor in the Chinese and the Russian training that we have not seen in the past ’cause a lot of times, it was kind of a road exercise, kind of went through the motions and now we’re seeing that it really is rigorous in how they’re going through and doing their training.

If you read David Ignatius’s book “The Quantum” which is a novel, but it sounds like it was a very well-briefed novel, you get the impression that on that front, China may have the lead. But I won’t press you ’cause I know the Chinese are watching here. And the Russians. When you look at China and Russia, who’s the bigger threat today?

So there’s the temporal piece of that. I would tell you that the near-term is Russia, and I don’t know if Dr. Anai’s still with us, so Dr. Anai wrote a great piece talking about Vladimir Putin and the Russians, as a spoiler in the panel yesterday, he made great points in terms of when you have somebody that’s kind of backed into a corner, how they lash out in some cases may not always be predictable. The other part is at the end of the day, when you have several thousand nuclear weapons, then you are an existential threat. The Chinese are leading economically and that is the long-term. And what you see with Xi Jinping is that they want to have a modernized military by 2035 and they want to be a peer with us by the middle of the century, by 2050.

The way you describe Russia there as being more dangerous in the near term because it is backed into a corner would also, it strikes me, describe where Iran is today.

There’s always the possibility of miscalculation. And so one of the things that we have to do from the intelligence community as we advise senior leaders, is as best we can understand intent and decision-making inside those capitals. In some cases, you may have some pretty good insights on that, at the classified level, and some cases you may not. But you can never take a Western perspective and go, well, this is how I would look at it. What you really gotta do is, if I were sitting in Moscow, and I’m watching this, how do I see it? What does it look like? If I’m sitting in Beijing and I’m looking at this, what are my assessments? And so we’ve gotta be able to put ourselves in the positions of those leaders to understand how they see risk, what do they see as the red lines, what do they see as our red lines ’cause in some cases, there may be a misperception of what those are. And so that’s absolutely critical about how you advise senior leaders to understand because when you think about a threat, threat is a formula, there’s capability plus intent, that gives you a threat. And the hard part, you can see capabilities all day, there’s so many observables, but sometimes the hard part to really understand is decision calculus, risk, and intent.

Put yourself in Tehran then, today, for a moment.

Okay.

Unclass.

At the unclassified level?

Yup.

Then I’m probably gonna go visit a mosque or something else like that.

Okay. (audience chuckles) Does Iran—

Does Iran want war?

No. Iran doesn’t want war. China doesn’t want war. Russia doesn’t want war. I think everybody has a good rationalization that. and I can’t remember who said it in one of the panels this morning, it might have been Wendy Sherman that the outcome would be horrific for all. There’s a great quote from President Eisenhower, and he said, “The best way to win World War III, is to prevent it.”

Yeah. Joe Biden will often say, and just repeat the warning about the war that you don’t want, right? Is that not a primary concern with Russia and China in great power because you have increasingly capable weaponry deployed in closer proximity. Often now, if you look at for instance, Russian operations in Amed, right? Or U.S. and Russian subs up in the Arctic, China’s got a base in Sri Lanka, but also now the situation in the Persian Gulf. I mean that’s lot of stuff in very close proximity. We saw in Syria, for instance, when you have U.S. and Russian forces close to each other, sometimes people die.

So there’s gotta be a level of deconfliction. There’s gotta be dialogue at the military level and we work hard to make sure that those communications are in place as best we can.

Understood. I always wanna get to the audience because I know there are a lot of smart people here. So why don’t we get some questions from you guys. Begin right here, and I imagine they’ll bring a microphone your way.

[Audience Member] Thank you very much, General, for sharing your insights with us. I’m with ZDF German TV. I’m wondering, the Strait of Hormuz probably is one of the most watched, surveyed, and recorded, taped waterway in the entire world. So I was wondering what happened a couple weeks ago when we had this incident with the limpet mines and the dispute about it, that in the end first there were some pictures released then by the U.S. military, by the Navy that didn’t seem to satisfy some people so then they had a second release that didn’t sway some people either. And also within the last couple of days, there was another incident with an oil tanker last weekend. We learned about it from the IRGC yesterday, now, there’s a new incident today, and there seems to be a dispute on this drone thing also going on. So I was wondering, do you have much more than you have shown us, number one, and I guess so, you have. But why not put out a little more to make sure once and for all that Iran doesn’t get away in the propaganda again?

Yeah, so thanks for the question. The decision to do that is not mine, really, that’s kind of at the policy level of what they want to disclose and there’s an intel gain loss piece of that, so you have to balance, depending on what you have in information, you may compromise a source, an access. So you have to balance that with the larger strategic impact of maybe compromising a source. That’s probably not the best example, I know, ’cause those were tactical events that we could see. You’re right, there are assets that are operating in that region. It’s interesting that, you know, people are gonna spin the narratives in different ways in terms of the level of convincing and you’re gonna get a different narrative from the Iranians, interestingly enough, not bound by the truth as they put that information out. But a lot of times, depending on how sensitive the information is, within the intelligence community, there is this intel gain loss, and this is, bear with me, kind of an educational piece, for the public as a consumer, the intel gain loss of, okay, how important is it to just have ironclad, you know, showing information, that this in fact can be attributable, or maybe you provide a little bit of information, but you may lose access to some information in the long-term that may be strategically more important down the road. So that’s kinda the decisions you have to make and in some cases decisions are made to be more forthcoming, but there’s no intent to hide things from the American public, it’s making sure we look at sources and means and then how much is a prudent force to ensure that we can get attribution help.

Just a brief follow-up to that question, and you’re gonna hate me for this question, by the way, but I’ll ask it anyway. There is dispute over intelligence in the international realm but, as you know, there’s dispute over the intelligence in the country. There are concerns about it being politicized or certain intelligence being released to suit one agenda or another agenda. I just wanna ask you, as an intelligence professional, who works his darndest with your team and the thousands of folks who work for you everyday, to get it right and send it up the chain. Does that phenomenon worry you?

I won’t say whether is worries me, what I’d like to do is talk to the point of the information that we put together. You know, we put information in decision-makers hands, we’re not the decision-maker in that context. What I’d like to really have everybody walk away from is it’s your neighbors, it’s your sons, your daughters, your friends, that are coming in everyday with the task of being apolitical, agnostic, and the intel is the intel, the assessment is the assessment. Now, senior leaders will weight that with other empirical data that they have. I’ll give you an example. When I was a two at CENTCOM, we had assessments that we would give to General Mattis sometimes in the morning update, and we’d have a young analyst that we’d prepare then we’d murder board ’em and they get up and say here’s where we are as a J-2 and Secretary Mattis, who is just the quintessential engager with our young analyst and with our two shop, he goes, I don’t exactly see it that way and then he would make his point. So, decision-makers are always gonna take information that they have and sometimes they may have some insights that are just based on relationships. But I am very confident in the information and the rigor and the apolitical nature of what the IC does on a daily basis. And I give you that based on 35 years of doing this, and could not be more proud of all the guys and gals that I work with not only at the Defense Intelligence Agency, but across all the IC. And if I could, just bear with me, it’s kind of the why. If you ever read Simon Sinek’s book, “Start With Why,” ’cause people don’t care how or what you do, they wanna know why you do it; and for me, my why starts with my kids. Every morning, when I get up, it’s about what can I do to make sure that the next generation, as Reagan said, gets to enjoy what we enjoyed. And everybody in the IC, I tell ya, they are rowing hard to do that for you every single day. And so their why is your hopes and dreams. So that you can go to a ball game and not worry about somebody flying a drone over or an airplane into it and that’s a great reason to get out of bed every morning.

Yeah, I might add just in my own experience the access that I’ve been provided in the intel agencies, that is the answer I get, and I certainly hear that and I think it’s backed up by practice. Other folks in the audience here. Gentleman here in the white shirt.

[Audience Member] Thank you, General Ashley. In your assets and the work and the material and everything that you have, what do you do if you find some commercial or private sector hacking? Do you coordinate with anybody? I’m talking about Microsoft, Marriott, Visa, you have the capacity to find some of those things, is there a reporting mechanism? Does somebody run the, that occurs between the military and the private sector?

Sir, you said if we find hacking or some—

[Audience Member] Yeah, correct.

Let me expand that a little bit because the short answer is yes. Really, General Nakasone and the National Security Agency has a huge part of that. One of the things we do for the Defense Intelligence Agency, is we’re involved in the Committee-Owned Foreign Investment in the U.S., the CFIUS process, and we also have a very rigorous effort that looks at supply chain risk management. And so if it turns out Ashley Software does a subcontract to Jim’s company and he turns out that he’s got a relationship with Huawei, we look for those relationships, and whether it may be buried two or three tiers down or an individual. So, we get a chance to look at what’s on the public domain and we get a chance to look at classified traffic so that we look for those relationships. If there is a nefarious actor, if somebody had a subcontract, Kaspersky labs to do the industrial control system software. So we look for all of that, and then we report all that back up to our leadership so that if it’s necessary, a company comes off the General Services Administration list, they don’t do business with anymore and they report and they bar ’em, or if it’s a major corporation, then through our leadership, they will go back to that company and go, hey, we found the following. So we’re always looking for those vulnerabilities from a counterintelligence standpoint, supply chain risk management, investments in the U.S. That is a constant drumbeat for us, and it’s only growing.

Oftentimes, you see that the line between commercial and national security is blurry because commercial entities supplying key national security interest and products. Julian.

[Julian] Thank you very much. Julian Barnes, New York Times. I wanted to follow up on Jim’s space question to you and I wanted to see if you could talk a little bit more about that and what you see the threat picture from China, Russia, other potential adversaries. Is this only in the context of a actual conflict between the United States and another adversary or could this threat emerge in this gray zone, the hybrid zone, in a sort of set of tension short of a military conflict? In what scenarios are our space assets in danger?

So you could have something that’s non-kinetic. You have the ability to take a laser from the ground, that could go after an electro-optical sensor and just blind it when it was making a pass over a given geographic area. You’re not permanently damaging it, but there’s ways to do things along those lines. So that kind of activity could take place. On the kinetic side, and one of the things I wanted to allude to, and Jim puts this in his book, which is a great read by the way, I made sure I had a chance to read it before we sat down and had a chat. Which he talks about the risk of the debris that you create in space and it’s not just for utilization in the low-earth orbit or the geo belt, but just further exploration getting out past that. One of the things that we put in the “Challenges in Space” was the highlight that right now, I think it’s across the main nations, there’s nine different nations that can launch satellites and they can launch satellites for other people. But of those nine nations, there’s about 1800 spacecraft that are up there floating around, and there are some decommissioned aircraft that are floating around. But at the size of 10 centimeters or larger, debris that we track, there are 21,000 pieces of stuff that’s at least 10 centimeters or larger, that’s floating around the earth. Matter of fact, I think it was the space station we were talking about, over a period about a 20-year period, they’ve actually had to get out of the way about 25 times.

Yeah. I remember that, and I was not a physics student, but one thing that fascinated me was you take a nut, say, a loose nut around in space at 17 and a half thousand miles an hour, is the equivalent of an SUV hitting you. So the destructive impact of even very small pieces of debris, and then you render those orbits useless for many years.

Yeah, and not all that stuff is deorbiting obviously as quickly as we would like. The Indians, it was earlier this year, launched a mini sat, hit a spacecraft. I’ll have to check but I don’t think all of that has deorbited. So we’ve gotta be really responsible in that space, no pun intended.

We got five minutes to go. Love to squeeze in a couple quick ones if we can. Gentlemen in the back here, blue shirt will speak and then over to you here. In fact, what we could do in the interest of time, if you don’t mind giving a quick question, and then you, and I’ll ask the General to answer them in succession.

Sure, General Ashley, I wanted to ask you about the story that broke this morning from the FT that NSO, the Israeli intel company, is now selling a service that can effectively steal all the cloud data held by users. They already offer a service called Pegasus which can hack your iPhone. A lot of these technologies are being developed by U.S. personnel using ex-IC people, using ex-U.S. technology, housed in some of our allied countries. Should the U.S., is it in our interest that private companies are selling effectively taxpayer-created technology, know-how, and do we need more export controls to make sure this technology and ex-official knowledge is going oversees?

Tell ya what, there’s a lot in that, why don’t you answer it, and then we’ll come to you, just so it doesn’t get all lost in the mix.

Well while you’re looking for the next guy, real quick, I mean I can’t unpack that in detail, obviously the senior policymaker, there are decisions to be made to what degree of risk we’re willing to absorb but you bring up a good point to understand that that is in fact happening, so senior decision-makers need to embrace that and have a policy determination on the way ahead.

Over here.

Hi, I’m Colleen Bell, I’m a former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary and my question for you is how do we balance the need to share intelligence with our allies with, unfortunately, some kind of maligned influence from some of our adversaries within those countries. How do we best balance that threat?

So ma’am, thanks for the question and that’s a good one ’cause I haven’t really talked about the relationships with partners. So if you go to the National Defense Strategy where there’s three major lines of effort. Secretary Mattis talked about being more lethal, fixing our business practices, become more efficient, and one was we have to expand the space for allies and partners beyond really the traditional. And the Defense Intelligence Agency has done that in a lot of ways with nontraditional bilateral relationships, they get into intelligence operations and sharing. What we have to do in every one of those situations, is understand what is the risk, what is the counterintelligence risk to the information that we’re sharing, irrespective of whatever that country is. So we do our homework and in many cases reciprocating the sharing of information is that they have to demonstrate to us their ability to secure it. And then you can have a degree of reciprocity and then depending on the ability to secure it, how we assess the counterintelligence threat gets into the level of sensitivity of information that we can share with them.

I think we actually have time for one more quick one. I don’t wanna waste any time, anybody. Ambassador Albright?

And those decisions are national policy.

This gentleman right here.

What’s your thoughts, as we’re getting ready to deploy an excess of 10,000 LEO comm satellites with SpaceX and everybody else running behind them, could be 20,000. What’s your thought about all that floating around.

It’s gonna be very busy. (crowd laughs) So one of the things, and this is a capability that I think collectively across great powers, great nations, and our scientists, we need to figure out how do we police up that debris. You know, that’s not a Wiki problem, it’s a math problem. So as it gets more, the small CubeSats and everything that goes up there. Part of that is behind a strategy of having resiliency and redundancy in addition to what NRO does to be able to have a capability in the commercial space, but it is not impossible. It will be something that I’m sure we can solve but we have to dedicate assets and resources to figure out how we actually go up and start policing up those 21,000 various pieces of debris that exist.

[Man] What’s that?

[Audience Member] Go ahead, hello, okay. So there was an article about this six, eight years ago highlighting that there should be a destruction in the sense of non-kinetic but putting them back into the atmosphere to force them to put that onto those birds so that they can decommission them and move ’em out of space. Never happened.

Yeah. I mean, again, there’s logical ways to iterate that clutter and the decommission in the deorbit.

All right, well I think that just leaves the guitar solo. I think. If, can we squeeze that in? (crowd laughing) No, with sincerity, thank you, because you’re taking an undo burden here because we’re kinda throwing all policy and news questions on your shoulders, but thanks for taking the time and thanks for taking the questions.

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