Association of the United States Army Day 1 press conference with Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy and Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. James McConville
Transcript
[Ryan McCarthy] Good morning!
[Journalists] Good morning.
[Ryan McCarthy] How are all of you?
[Kathy Turner] Okay, good morning, ladies and gentleman. I am Colonel Kathy Turner, the Chief of Media Relations Division for Army Public Affairs. We’ve got the honorable Ryan McCarthy, Secretary of the Army, and General James McConville, the Chief of Staff of the Army. Secretary McCarthy and General McConville will begin today’s press conference with brief opening remarks. We’ll then open it up for questions. Please wait for me to call on you. Let’s try to keep it to one follow up so we can get as many questions as possible in the time allotted. Also when asking your question, I ask that you please identify yourself and your news organization. Mr. Secretary, over to you.
Well I’ve been talking all morning, so I thought I’d let the Chief kick us off here. General McConville…
Well thank you, Mr. Secretary. And I think many have heard the Secretary’s comments this morning, and the one thing I’d just like to put in context is this notion of modernization, and where we are as far as far as modernization, modernizing the army. If you go back to the 1970’s and 1980’s, that was the last time we did a major modernization of the army. We’re coming out of the Vietnam War, and we realized that we were in a time of great power competition with the Soviet Union and that’s when we came up with new doctrine. We called it Air-Land Battle. We came up with some new units, Ranger Battalions, the 160th and some other special organizations that allowed us to operate in that environment. We developed our combat training centers, where we taught our troops how to fight in a high intensity environment in a joint readiness training center. And we came up with a big five systems which were the Abrams tank, the Bradley, the Apache Helicopter, the Black Hawk and the Patriot Missile System. And then as far as personnel, we came up with the all-volunteer force. And that fundamentally kinda set the stage for the army that we have been incrementally improving over the last about 40, 45 years. So, you say where are we today? Well today we find ourselves in a time of great power competition Great power competition does not necessarily mean great power conflict. But we are modernizing the army to do that. So we are coming up with a new concept called multi-domain operations. Very similar to Air-Land Battle, except that it sets us up for an environment where we will be contested in every single environment. We’re standing up new organizations. We start new organizations in the 70, 80’s and today we’re standing up organizations to multi-domain task force, which we’re reorganizing our cyber command so we can operate within the intelligence information, cyber electronic warfare and space regimes. We’ve set up security forces systems brigades that allow us to compete below the level of armed conflict and advise and assist our partners. And then as far as the training environment, we’re actually going to virtual reality so we’re doing a lot of programs that are associated with virtual reality. We’re standing up a set of training environments that can allow our soldiers to train in that environment. We’re setting up cyber combat training centers so we can train there. Our six modernization priorities, the Secretary talked about them with 31 signature platforms. Those are not changing. You’ve got new leadership here but we are committed to actually delivering those over the next years. And the last thing on the people side of the house, if you’ve heard me talk, people are our number one priority, which still, as far as how we get to readiness, how we get to modernization and how we get to reform, it’s people that are gonna do that. And we are standing up a 21st Century talent management system. We cannot be an industrial-age army in the information age, so, Secretary…
Thanks Chief.
Okay so we’ll start the questions. Lita, first question.
[Lolita Baldor] Lolita Baldor with the Associated Press. Mr. Secretary… Mr. Secretary, this is a Syria question, in case that may shock you. As the US is looking to at least pull some forces out, has the army been asked to develop either, bring in more troops or develop a way to pull out most of the other forces there safely and how long do you think something that like, could the army do something like that? And General McConville, as you look at what’s happening over the last several days, when you think of the safety of the US forces, particularly the Special Operations Forces that are actually there, can you– How much more risk are they facing right now? And does this have an impact on Special Operations Forces who are in other countries partnering with forces that now may not trust them as much?
Lita, to address your first question, we’ve adjusted the troop disposition in North East Syria. And the very complex, obviously, situation between two allies that we have been partnering with for many years, I’m not gonna comment specifically on follow on activities at this point. It’s a very fluid situation, but clearly this is something that will continue to unfold over the coming days.
The other thing I can add to that, though, is safety and security of our soldiers, the American soldiers and our partners there is a key consideration in every decision that’s being made.
[Lolita Baldor] And what about talking about the impact this has on others in other counties?
Well again, we are working very closely with our partners to make sure that the safety and security of their soldiers and our soldiers is a top priority.
[Tom Brook] Hi, Tom Vanden Brook with USA Today. My colleagues and I have spoken to soldiers over the past several days, who say that the decision to withdraw has been a profound betrayal of the Kurds. How do you explain to soldiers that that’s not so? Either one of you, please.
You have to take the time to explain to your soldiers about the complexity of the situation. That we have had partners, we’re partnered with both nations that have had tense, both of these partners, the Kurds and the Turks, conducting complex combat operations. You have to explain to them that they, obviously, the equities between of how we conduct the operations against ISIS are very much aligned. But where the challenges that they’ve had historically between the Kurds and the Turks, that’s an issue that’s been going on for years. So, when the partners have different equities, you have to take the time to explain the differences between the soldiers and the choices that we have to make at the national level.
[Tom Brook] Just one follow up, okay, one follow-up? How does this decision to withdraw make, improve America’s national security interests?
We’re trying to make sure we don’t have a challenge with a NATO ally. So there’s a lot of work that has to be done between us and the Turkish counterpart. Sectary Esper and General Milley are working very hard at their level with partners that continue to communicate and try to create that buffer zone, try to prevent the hostilities.
[Kathy Turner] Sydney.
[Sydney] To ask about something you probably actually are allowed to talk about. So that if you were breaking defense. You know, listening to your speech this morning, I heard, obviously, a lot of familiar things but also some things that you stressed I think more than in the past. Like rapid deployment to Europe. Like information warfare. Obviously, you guys have been on the team for a long, for years now. There’s a lot of continuity, but if you don’t learn new stuff you’re probably dead. So, what are the the changes and emphasis that we’re seeing within the context of a consistent big six and existent shift of great power competition? Like deployability, like information warfare, for example.
I’ll go first and I think the Chief should definitely come in here too. If you look at home station training and CTC’s, that’s, to use a sports metaphor, it’s like a individual reps where you’re hitting the sled and you’re playing catch but then to get to a point where you’re deploying at brigade division size elements under war-time like conditions, that’s where you’re really getting those pre-season games, you’re really getting ready to do the business of combat operation, so it takes a lot more effort, a lot more sophistication to have that global projection and those are, the way I described it, the muscles that we hadn’t been training on for a long time. But left over the last several years, we’ve been really hitting hard with that and doing it with a real-life conditions, where emergency deployment readiness exercises and you’re moving out within a couple days for heavy units. And doing it all over the world under conditions that we have not been having. And many, many years of sending units to places like Palau and Thailand where we had not had the, really the robust training for exercises that we’ve had for many, many years. Chief? I think over the last two or three years, General Milley, my predecessor, did a fantastic job of taking our units and getting them ready for whatever mission that they needed. (mumbles) And I term that tactical readiness, that the brigades, the battalions, they can do their mission and they’re ready to do them. And on line with what the Secretary was saying is, we’re looking at strategic readiness. It’s one thing to have a unit ready, the second piece of that is making sure you can get that unit to the place it needs to be. We use the term for them, the National Defense Strategy of Dynamic Force Employment. And so we want to be able to do that. We wanna make sure that we can mobilize them, we can deploy them, we have the strategic lift to make that happen, the ports are there to receive them, and then we can employ them in whatever area they need to be employed. And we see that as a deterrence factor for those who may be taking a look at what capabilities the United States Army has. And as the Secretary said, we anticipate a very large exercise in the EUCOM theater. We’re calling it Defender 20. And then we’ll follow up with a small exercise in specific and then maybe a larger exercise next year.
[Matthew Beinart] Hi, Matt Beinart, Defense Daily. You’ve both mentioned the priority to sticking to the six priorities. I was wondering if, do you believe that there’s the flexibility built into, be able to handle adjustments that might come from the affects of a CR, potential declining budgets, adjustments to competition, like potential with OMFE, that moving forward in terms of there potentially only being one competitor. Is that level of flexibility built in for the third-year SOAP programs under the six priorities?
Continued resolutions, there’s no flexibility. You lose buying power immediately. We could lose potentially upwards of $7 billion worth of buying power for our research development acquisition accounts. Just that alone, because of continued resolutions. From a readiness standpoint, commanders can’t buy parts. They reduce training events. The whole machine starts to slow down. So there is one out there, I don’t know what it is. So we have to get a budget deal. It’s on the table. We need to work hard with Congress to get this done, which will give us four years in a row of discipline focused investment. We have prototypes landing all over those six portfolios and they’re showing results. So that will be an exciting time for us to make some hard decisions and start to scale them across the formations. We gotta get a budget deal through.
Yeah we have to modernize the army. We can’t do it without the resources. And if the resources come slow, it’s gonna just slow us down. And we need to field this equipment at the speed of relevance.
[Kathy Turner] Okay. Ryan.
[Ryan Brown] Thank you. Ryan Brown with CNN. I just have a follow up on one of the earlier questions. It is unusual to hear US service members, particularly soft personnel, speak so openly with the media about how they’re feeling. Feelings of betrayal, feelings of disappointment, damage to future partnerships. Are you worried about the impact that this is having on morale of US personnel, given this unprecedented level of open conversation about this issue?
You know, I think to say that that’s new is probably, I don’t think that, I wouldn’t characterize that personally. I think more and more soldiers are very candid about how they feel. And I like candor. It’s important to have that. You, obviously, don’t want to have a disobedience, but it’s definitely, they have to have opinions. Everybody has opinions in a war of ideas, but ultimately when national policy decisions are made, we salute and move out.
Yeah I’m very proud of what our special forces and soldiers were doing, working shoulder to shoulder. And they’ve done an incredible mission over there, and we should be extremely proud of what they have done. And there are higher level strategic politics involved, but as far as what our soldiers have done, what our special forces have done, they’ve done an incredible job over there and I’ve been very, very proud of it.
[Ryan Brown] Thank you.
[Justice Bennet] Hello, Justice Bennet with the Defense Systems Journal. I’m sort of wondering about what the backup plan might be or what happens if that funding isn’t there in the future years. Is it gonna be a more intensive sort of night course look at prioritizing things? Is it maybe putting certain prioritization on the back burner? What does that look like?
We will have nothing but hard choices in front of us. When 60% of global demand is filled by the US army, readiness has to be number one. We have to continue to grow the force. As the Chief will tell you, the bogged well ratio’s gotta get better. So from a readiness standpoint, you’re very fixed with your balance sheet. Over half of it is tied up in people and operations and maintenance. So when you hear us use words like ruthless and aggressive, we have to be within the research, development and acquisition accounts. ‘Cause you’re very fixed with what you have. And every investment program has divestiture. So we’re gonna make hard calls on weapon systems that mature enough fast enough, and that we can pull through that monetization knothole. So I see more of that coming in the future.
I mean if you take a look at the (mumbles) back to the 70’s and 80’s, there was some senior leadership with the support of Congress and the Administration that made some very important decisions. And because of that we are a modernized forced today. But if you go back, you start doing the math, that’s like 40 to 50 years ago. And we’ve incrementally improved our army over the last 40, 45 years. We feel strongly that we must do the same for those that come after us. I don’t want troops or leaders sitting up here, to your folks, that your successes 40, 45 years from, and we’re on the Z-model Abrams, or we have not modernized the army. We have a unique opportunity to do it right now. We’ve had two good years of budgets, we need two more. And I would ask that those who make those type decisions recognize the importance of this and make it happen.
[Joseph LaFave] Hey, Joseph LaFave, National Guard Magazine. Speaking of readiness and exercises like Defender 20 and Defender Pacific, can you talk about what role the National guard is gonna have in these large exercises? And maybe what a Battalion or a company commander in the guard could expect in the next two years as far as OPTEMPO goes?
Yeah I think, two things: first of all, the National Guard is extremely important part of everything we do. So as I talk about Dynamic Force Employment, the term I used first was mobilization. And you know exactly what that means. Our National Guard is, in our reserves, more than 53% of the force when you think about it. So we go somewhere, we’re not going without the National Guard, we’re not going without reserves. So we have to practice that piece too. About mobilizing them, deploying them, and we anticipate on these exercises the unit that’s involved in the rotation will actually do that. They’ll get a chance to get mobilized, they’ll deploy, they’ll participate in the exercise and they’ll come back. And then second thing on the OPTEMPO, we are concerned about the OPTEMPO on some of our guard and reserve units. And I’m working with the director of the Army National Guard to see where we can find opportunities to reduce that OPTEMPO. They’ve been going about one to four, we think one to five, I’m not gonna promise them one to five, but that’s what we think is the sweet spot for deployments for the National Guard. (journalist speaking quietly)
[Jack] Secretary McCarthy, with the changes to the troop to disposition on the ground over there in Syria, can you tell us, have the force protection conditions changed? And does the US army, that’s still there, have secure lines of exfiltration and resupply?
You wanna take that?
Yeah I’ll take that. Again, I’m not gonna get into the specific how we’re actually conducting those type of operations, but what I will tell you, having talked to the Chairman and been involved in meetings is that the security and safety of our troops on the ground is the priority as this operation continues.
[Journalist] Have conditions changed at all?
Have conditions changed? So that’s what we’re watching, we’re reacting. What the force is doing on the ground, and they’re very, very capable forces, is they are reacting to the changing situation on the ground.
[Kathy Turner] Okay. Next question. Up in back.
[Ken Kratzer] Morning, Ken Kratzer, Sons of the American Legion Radio. There were several billion taken out of the federal budget for military bases improvements. West Point had four projects that were put under deferment. How long does it take for those projects to come back into the budget so that they can be sorted out? What do you think?
Are you referring specifically to the National Emergency to finance initiatives on the border?
[Ken Kratzer] Yes sir.
Okay. It can come back in a variety of mechanisms. There was discussion about potentially back fueling them with an amendment to the 2021 deal. I don’t know where that stands. We could also look at that in the FY21 budget and 22 budget, but they’re all very important projects, they’ve been deferred and we’re gonna look at a variety of different ways to refuel those.
[Lauren Williams] Hi, Lauren Williams with Federal Computer Week. You mentioned $700 million in investment in cloud data, AI. What’s the contingency plan should the money not come through? Also, should JEDI get delayed?
That strikes to heart of our concern about not getting a budget deal. Those are new STAR dollars to address this extremely important architecture that we have to lay in so that we can move our data from weapon systems to make faster decisions on the battle field as well as making much more informed decisions from business standpoint in places like the Pentagon. Without a budget, it’s a new STAR program, so it will sit, and we will wait.
[Kathy Turner] Can I get any other questions? Okay. (McCarthy laughs) My regrets (mumbles) go ahead.
[Journalist] I just wanted to ask a recruiting question. Last year, this year you, this last year you made the recruiting numbers by a small amount. Can you just give us a sense of what you’re doing now to beef up the recruiting and anything new on marketing and bonuses. Do you have any money in the budget to do any of that, particularly concerning the budget issues?
I think we should both come in here. First, really, salute Major General Frank Muth and Sergeant Major Tabitha Gavia, the leadership of army recruiting command. To perform and hit a target in the active force in this economy with 3.6% unemployment, we don’t have a benchmark like this since 1969, when it was an all draftee force. So, remarkable performance by them. When you talk about specifically the challenges we face, we readdressed our strategy to focus on 22 cities in the country. Obviously you have a much more comprehensive and diverse group in our cohorts each year of men and women from all over the country, all ethnicities. But also, we needed larger sample sizes, quite frankly. We needed more people to have the target market. But with that you need much stronger and more sophisticated marketing capabilities. We’ve hired a new advertising firm. We’ve reorganized the marketing organization. But some of that is we have to rebuild the trust with the communities of jurisdiction in Congress, who withheld some of those marketing dollars from us in the last cycle. We’re working very hard at that. Have much better management processes in place, and investments that we’ve made around the country. All the army senior leaders in the martial court or they were all over the country, meeting with mayors and superintendents of schools to try to get civic leaders at the local level to help become enablers for us on the ground. So it was a lot of much more leadership, if you will, but also changing their entire business model. And it really was that leadership of people like Frank Muth and others, their energy, tireless energy that’s improved our posture. But it’s gonna be harder. The economy’s still going well and we’re in fight for talent around the country. Chief?
I just, kind of follow up is, we are in a competition for talent, but when we take a look at the army, we look at why would people wanna join the army. And what young people want is, they want purpose, they wanna be a part of something bigger than themselves and I think we offer that. They want belonging, they wanna be on a team, and I think we provide that. And their parents want them a pathway to success. And what we’re finding is, in a lot of ways, we’ve been too much of a family business. I have three kids that serve and I appreciate the army sending them to college and doing all those wonderful things. And I would like to give everyone else the opportunity for us to give them a pathway to success. But summer is exposure, and as the Secretary said, the 22 cities, you know that’s where a lot of young Americans live and we’ve gotta expose them to the army and the military and make sure they have a sense of what that all means. We live in gated communities now where it’s, with the security factors, a lot of young men and women don’t get to see what the army does. 79% of our recruits come from military families and some people say that’s good, but what we really like to do is give every American an opportunity to serve their country and a pathway to success.
[Haley Britzky] Haley Britzky with Task and Purpose. So with the ACFT sort of being fielded more and more, some of the preliminary scores that were leaked, I’m sure you both saw the few Battalions who had started to testing it, which spurred a lot of concern of specifically with the fail rate women were seeing on the preliminary scores. What is your message to people who are worried that the ACFT is going to kind of start pushing women out of the service.
You wanna take that?
Yeah let me touch, some of you may be familiar with the Occupational Physical Assessment Test. Have you heard about that? Okay, that is a test that we actually give to soldiers when they come into a recruiting station to make sure that they’re fit before they go to individual military training. When we first did that, we did the same thing. We put it out there and we tested soldiers that were actually in the army. They already made it in the army, and the results were abysmal. They were terrible. And we were really, quite frankly, behind the scenes we were concerned because we had this dilemma. We want people to be able to succeed in the military and if we get them in shape before they go to initial military training, we knew we’d reduce injuries and we’d have better recruits. What we found was, once we made a requirement, the results completely changed. It was a female soldier, 97% passed that. 98 to 99% passed that test. So what we’re doing for the Army Combat Fitness Test is we’re putting, first of all we’re getting equipment into the units. It’s gonna take some time. We’re putting strength coaches, dieticians, physical therapists and giving the units all the tools they need to get people into shape so they got to do it. And we’re seeing, and I talk to a lot of my female soldiers and I have a, I like to have a female captain and kinda my daughter, and they’re actually doing those repetitions. And we think it’s a much better test that’s gonna facilitate them being better soldiers. So we got some time. We just started. This is the first year, really diagnostic, that units have it. But we believe it’s gonna fundamentally change the culture in the United States army. A culture of deployability and fitness that we wanna have. So we want people to be, to live a health active lifestyle. And this is gonna help them do it. I would argue that we’re the world’s greatest health club. We pay people five days a week to work out, and we wanna give them that opportunity to do that. And this is good training. And the young people that are coming in, they’re all into cross-fit and functional fitness, so for them this is very, very normal. Some of the older of us, I’ve been through about three different physical fitness tests and I think this is really gonna help the force.
[Kathy Turner] Okay so we have time for one more question. In the back.
[Jared Serbu] Hi, Jared Serbu from Federal News Network. So two cyber questions. One is, you alluded to this General McConville. Have you signed off on General Fogarty’s proposal to create an information warfare command out of ARCYBER? And then you also mentioned the cyber CTC’s. Are those for cyber forces specifically or larger formations, what’s gonna happen there?
We’re looking very hard at that proposal. I think it makes a lot of sense because if you see the way the other services are organized in particular, they have the unique task organization of similar to what he’s proposed. But some of it is, we’ve just gotta put a lot of rigor and due diligence against it because it will ultimately change the authorities of his command. So that’s something we’re gonna tee up here and take a hard look at this fall.
Yeah on the cyber side, it’s really recognizing how we’re operating below the level of armed conflict that’s happening right now around the world. And so we recognize the importance of cyber, certainly. We recognize the importance of information operations. We recognize important electronic warfare, and then even space. So we are developing organization. We don’t have them completely right yet, but we’re not waiting to get them right. We’re waiting to get them out in the field, we’re experimenting, we’re doing simulation. We’ve seen people question us, well you don’t have all the people right. We’re not gonna have it all right. These are prototypes. Just like we do with equipment, some of these organizations are getting prototyped. Some we’re bringing it in and we’re not waiting to get it perfectly right, and all the pencil lineup exactly right before we’re rolling them out because we know we gotta be there. This has happened very, very quick. And we’re doing the same thing on these cyber, and eventually, we call it I2CEWS, organizations that we’re developing.
[Kathy Turner] Alright Mr. Secretary, Chief, we turn over to you for any closing comments.
I hope you get down to the floor this week. It’s more than just iron that you’re gonna see. It’s really amazing how much of this is, a point that General McConville made in his opening comments of just how we’re changing our doctrine, how we’re gonna basically, our people, we’re change who they are and how they conduct themselves in the fights. So you can learn a lot about these massive changes because it is more than just buying material. It’s how all of these pieces come together. I am gonna get to walk the floor three times this week. Pretty excited about that. What did I say earlier today? The shackles of PowerPoint slides. So this is a pretty exciting week for me. And I think we’ll get to see a lot of you down on the floor as well. I know that General Hannah has made some arrangements so that the media can have a cutout stand on the floor so you can interview leaders as they’re walking through and getting impressions throughout the course of the week. And again, thanks for coming. Chief?
I’ll just close with, we got a lot of great initiatives that are going on, it’s really our job delivering them. We’re in a new uniform. It takes, we’re a large organization and people ask well what’s changing. You got the Undersecretary and the Vice Chief and now the Secretary and the Chief. So what I see is, this is continuity. It’s continuity that’s gonna allow us to deliver the priorities that we actually have been talking about for quite some time. It takes four to six years to get irreversible metham that we do not wanna lose, and that’s why we are really concerned about our continuing resolution. Especially a continuing resolution that goes for a significant amount of time. We have the metham on our side right now, we must modernize the army, and we need the resources to do it. Thank you very much.
[Kathy Turner] All right ladies and gentleman, if you (mumbles) be seated while the Chief and Secretary depart and then just to remind you, if you have any follow ups, just hit up my team and the Media Relations Division will do our best that we can to get you those answers. Thank you.