Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hosts a luncheon at the Sea-Air-Space Global Maritime Exposition, Washington.

Transcript

mhm. Mhm. Oh, mm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. Mm. Mhm. Right. Mm. Right. Uh huh. Yeah. Mhm. Where are? Mm hmm, mm. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. Uh huh. Yeah. Right. Yeah, retire the colors. Oh part ladies and gentlemen. The 2021 Thomas parr ham award winner. Lieutenant Commander Adrian Benton will now offer our invocation. Let us pray God. Oh today we have come from near and far to gather together at the largest maritime exposition in the United States. We thank you for the visionary leadership of the Navy League that continues to preserve and provide the invaluable innovative extension of leaders in ways that impact our forces deliberately, intentionally and resiliently. As we dine. May we be strengthened in our sense of devotion and dedication to expand our military advantage at sea. May we be strengthened as you propel our persistence and patience to strategically impact the 24 7 readiness of our forces and families. And today may we seek to be strengthened by the indispensable communication of our current interrogated integrated concepts components and emergent capability. So God, as we invoke your peace and prosperity right here and right now to abide abundantly and to flow quietly and decisively through this room, we pray that you will bless the food that we eat to nourish us. Keep our hearts in good faith and May the words that we speak and the thoughts that we think may, the words that we hear and the thoughts that we each will share be acceptable in your sight. Keep us true to our heritage and selfless in our freedom. May God bless our deliberate intentional resilience and interrogated naval power and may God bless the USA in your mighty name. We do pray Amen. It’s now my pleasure to introduce today’s esteemed keynote speaker General Mark A Milley is the 20th chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the nation’s nation’s highest ranking military officer and the principal military adviser to the president, the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council. Prior to becoming the chairman on October one of 2019, General Milley served As the 39th Chief of Staff of the United States Army General Milley has had multiple command and staff positions in eight divisions and special forces throughout the last 39 years to include Command of the 1st Battalion, 5 6 Infantry, 2nd Infantry Division, 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, Deputy Commanding General 101st Airborne Air Assault, Commanding General, 10th Mountain Division, Commanding General, 3rd Corps and Commanding General U. S. Army Forces Command. While serving as the commanding general. Third Corps General Milley deployed as the Commanding General, International Security Assistance Force, Joint Command and Deputy Commanding General U. S. Forces Afghanistan. General Millie’s joint assignments also include the Joint Staff Operations directorate and as military assistant to the Secretary of Defense General Milley, sir. It is our honor to have you here with us today. And we certainly look forward to your remarks. And the floor is yours, sir. Yeah. So this is a great opportunity for me to say go Navy. Mhm. And I might actually mean it. So that’s important. How about sacrifice? So I just sort of curious. I really can’t see because the lights really bright. But just go by a voice vote. How many marines we got? Mm. How many sailors? Let’s try that again. How many marines? Uh huh. How long are you gonna do with you guys? Any soldiers by the way, look at that. You got a couple of anybody from the Air Force Coast Guard space for us. Alright, well they’re up in space. So hey look, I do want to thank uh mike stevens. Uh, Ceo, this is my first time at the Navy League and I’m sure he told me it’s the first time and perhaps the last time an Army officer will ever address the Navy League. But I do want to thank Mike for 33 years of tremendous service to our nation. Obviously rising to the senior enlisted rank of the Navy. But mike thank you for so many years and decades actually of great service to our country. And there’s a lot of admirals, generals, senior uh civilians, Ceos, lots of folks here that I should call out my name, but I won’t because there’s just too many of you. But just so that, you know, I recognize that each and every one of you is very special and it’s very important. And I want to thank you all for taking the time to be here. I do want to address a few things. This is the 55th year of the Navy League putting on this luncheon and putting on this event where we bring together not only Naval leaders and Marine Corps leaders and also space and air, but all the industry leaders. And that’s important because it’s a team, it’s a team of teams that goes into defending our country and also the allies and partners that are here. There are 42 countries at this conference and that’s not unimportant. Anyone who’s read the National Defense strategy knows that one of its principles, one of the core elements of the NDS, is to leverage our Allies and partners. Secretary in Austin and I were in a session this morning, in fact where we were discussing how better to do that in the future. And it’s one of the great asymmetric advantages that we have. So thanks to all of you, allies and partners uh, for being here because the United States, you know, armies and navies and air forces and marines, we don’t fight wars, nations fight wars and we fight wars as a joint force and we fight in a combined environment with our allies and partners. So thank you all for being here. And I’d like a quick round of applause for the allies and partners that are here. Mhm Yeah. And I’d like to say that I’m very proud of the United States Navy in part because both of my parents were in the Navy in World War Two. My Father was a Navy Corman who served with the 4th Marine Division and made the assault landings at Kwajalein Atoll, The SaiPan, Tinian and then finally Uwajima. And he was teed up Uh for the invasion of the home islands. In fact, his division was slated to invade Kyushu in the fall of 1945. He passed away a few years ago, but he always remembered with great fondness, his time and service and the cause for which he fought. And I will say that he hated officers. He was one of those guys who is your classic E four E five and just couldn’t deal with the officers because none of them ever talked to him. Uh, as far as generals, he had no idea what the general was until his son became one. And that’s about the only time he ever gave a compliment to any officer in my life. You talk about a great Santini household. I can tell you stories, but I won’t do it right now. And my mother, God bless her. She passed away as well. But she served in what was called in World War Two, the waves. And she was a Navy wave and served in the Medical corps. And she served out of a hospital in Seattle taking care of the wounded coming back from the pacific and today we enjoy the world’s greatest navy, perhaps the greatest navy in the history of the world. And that’s because, not because of the ships, planes, trains and automobiles that the navy has. It’s because of the people that are in the Navy. And just as my parents served in this navy, just as you serve in this Navy, just as the uh, several hundreds of thousands of sailors that are out there around the world today, keeping the global comments free and open. I can say with certainty that the Navy is with the Navy is because of the people who are serving in it. So thank you all for what you do every single day and the United States and it’s not lost on me as an army officer. The United States is indeed a maritime nation and from the very earliest days of our country. In fact, even before we became a country, we are dependant absolutely dependent economically and for our security on a free and open ocean C control and power projection are not new concepts. Those are concepts that date way back in our nation’s history. Shortly later this month, I’ll be going up to visit the oldest ship on active duty in the United States Navy, the U. S. S. Constitution and from those days to today, C control and power projection have been the fundamental task and purpose of the United States Navy. And in my mind, no one has ever done it better than the United States Navy in the history of the world. The same is true for air and space and cyber and our ground forces. In fact, our joint force is second to none. And maintaining and bolstering our competitive advantage and sea air space cyber in on the ground is apparent mount for our paramount importance to our future security and the Navy in particular the Navy that we have today is the best in the world and we want to keep it that way. It requires a very deliberate balance of our present day urgency, urgency and our future priorities decisions that we are making now right now in the pentagon right now with me and the Cno and the Secretary of Defense. Those decisions that are being made now are going to spell the future of our Navy and whether we succeed or fail in our future task of c control and power projection, how we invest our time and how we allocate our financial resources and talent. That is going to set the agenda for future generations to come. And why don’t you think back a little bit because we have not had a great power conflict 1945? To be sure, we’ve had a lot of very serious and high casualty producing conflicts. The korean war in Vietnam gulf war one in gulf war two and the present conflicts that were engaged in. There’s been a lot of conflict and there’s been a lot of casualties but there’s not been a great power conflict and there hasn’t been for many, many reasons. one of those is the United States Navy, another is the nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction and the doctrines of strategic deterrence. Another as we’ve invested in an amazing amount of time and energy over the last seven decades and our allies and partners in the valuable relationships like NATO or mutual defense treaties with Japan and South Korea. We’ve had an incredible innovative workforce in our population and enables our industry to thrive and gives our economy it uncommon strength, capacity and resilience. But one of those reasons, as I mentioned up front, one of those reasons we have not had a great power war is because of our incredible navy and I would add because of our incredible air force twice before in west european history that I’m aware of. We’ve had two international orders. Each lasted about 100 years. The first followed the 30 years war And in 1648 there was a thing called the Treaty was failure And from 1648 to 1750, they established a international order on the continent of europe to try to prevent great power war war between the powers of the day. The second follow the Napoleonic wars. So that order of 1648-1750 broke down and to what was called the Seven Years war in europe, or the french and indian war in north north America. And from 1752, 1815, 65 consecutive years europe toward itself. Apart In 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, they came up with what was called the concert of Europe and that lasted Until the summer of 1914. These were orders were established to prevent war and they both lasted about a century. Today We are in the 76th year of the current international order and the current international order is under intense and growing stress. Nations, non state actors, terrorists, cybercriminals are all stressing the system and the rise of a pierre nation state china is coming at us rapidly with increasingly diplomatic capabilities, economic capabilities and military capabilities to include a world class navy with surface capability, undersea capability and naval air capability. China will be a major agent of change to the current international order of that. There is little doubt and in this dynamic geo strategic context, there is another factor. We are currently experiencing a significant and very fundamental change in the character of war, not just the nature of war, which more or less stays constant because it’s based on politics and human nature and its fog and friction and chance. Those sort of things will be constants that will always have to deal with. But the character of war, how we fight the organizations we fight with, the technology we use. Those change often, but they don’t change in a fundamental way. Very often. The last fundamental change that we can see in the character of war really occurs Between World Wars one and 2, where we witness mechanization and tanks and tracked vehicles for the ground forces and we see the introduction of the airplane and all the implications it had for naval and ground based air power. We combine those with advances that led to wireless communications and specifically the introduction of the radio which allowed commanding control from great distances to become a possibility. And there are many other capabilities. Radar, approximate fuse artillery and so many more. All of those in combination changed the fundamental character of war and every country. The United States, Japan Germany Russia Britain France. Every country had access to all of those technologies and every one of them combined them in a different way. Every one of them having a different tactic, different organization, a different technique and they train their leaders differently. But one of those countries Germany combined those technologies in a very specific german way of war, which we now call Blitzkrieg. They integrated these technologies through their organizations and leader development in such a way that Nazi Germany was able to overrun Western europe In only 18 months, right here. At this very moment. Here in national harbor where we are, we can see a fundamental change in the character of wars currently underway and it’s not the first time the city has experienced such a thing. Go back 1916, just outside these walls, America had not yet entered World War One, But within a year, the purpose of this port would revolutionize in the state of Maryland, converted a small maritime organization into Squadron eight of the Fifth Naval District With about 100 men and 19 small boats. The Oyster Navy, as it was called, Patrolled Maryland waters until 1918. Even after the war had ended, Marilyn had become a naval hub for recruiting intelligence and waterway security. But at the beginning of World War One, and later, at the beginning of World War Two, we, the United States were terribly unprepared. We headed across the Atlantic in 1917, already for the rigors of trench warfare, The training, the doctor in the weaponry of 1917 and 1918, And then again in 1939 and 40 and 41 and 42 and so on. All of that, we were unprepared for Marylanders, with a lion’s share of the 29th Division, in the newly formed 79th Division, that both served in France, and both of them fought in the bloody Battle of the Meuse Argonne. The bloodiest battle in american history, quote. Those divisions suffered tremendous casualties. In fact, one in every three soldiers were killed were wounded. And put that in perspective, Look to your left and your right in this very room and imagine that one out of three is killed were wounded. To give us a broader sense of great power war. Consider The 26,000 26,000 U. S. Soldiers and marines were killed In the six weeks from october to november 1918. In the battle, the meetings are gone, consider the Second World War Were 26,000 U. S. Troops were killed In the eight weeks, the landings at Normandy to the liberation paris. At the same time, 18,000 more, Americans were killed in the central pacific where my father was in the marianas campaign, SaiPan and Tinian in the south, pacific in china burma India and Italy. In that fateful summer of 1944, 58,000 americans were killed in action in the air, at sea inland In five weeks and five theaters of war. In a very short period of time. That is the human cost, the human cost of great power war. From 19 14, the beginning of World War I, 1945 More or less a 30 year period, About 150 million people gave their lives in the slaughterhouse of war. In World Wars one and 2, those are the grim calculations. The butcher’s bill in blood and in neither war was America prepared failure to recognize adapt and capitalized on the changing character of war. Tell you to see the future produces devastating consequences and it did for our military results and losses on a scale that’s difficult to fathom. Then none of us alive today I’ve ever experienced today. There’s a whole set of technologies that are driving the fundamental change in the character of war. And if we fail to adapt, if we fail to change that, we will be condemning a future generation to that which preceded us in the last century. If we, the United States military along with our industry and our international partners do not adapt and do not change. If we don’t increase and accelerate Our change over the next 10 years, then we are condemning that future generation to what occurred three decades ago. It’s not about this year, volume of weapons, it’s not about numbers, not about the machines we possess, it’s about having a different set of capabilities, capabilities that can to turn our adversary and win. If deterrence fails, it isn’t about how much money we’re spending, it’s what we’re spending it on and how it reflects the operating environment of tomorrow. Consider right now, precision munitions and combination with our ubiquitous is our capability and where we can now see a map and sense the world around us like at no time in human history and we can shoot at rangers never before known add that artificial intelligence which is an incredibly powerful technology and the information capabilities that accompanied the speed of decision making the man machine interface. Think today of robotics and what that’s going to mean to the navy to NATO air forces, ground forces in the very near future add biotechnology, human engineering, miniaturization, three D. Printing and many many more. It’s about 40 or 50 technologies that are all converging very very rapidly in the near future In the next five years, 10 years or at most 15 and combined are going to fundamentally change the conduct of war. It’s not easy to strike the balance between preserving present readiness and future modernization. But we must shift now towards the future operating environment. In the joint force we have prioritized nuclear modernization, long range fires, hypersonic technology, artificial intelligence, shipbuilding, microelectronic space, cyber and five G. As the top tier technologies we want to fully develop for the navy in particular. And Admiral Gilda has alluded to several times and I think he was on a panel with the commandant a little earlier. A significant proportion of both sea and air assets probably will be unmanned as early as next decade. He’s projected by that time frame Up to a 3rd of our subsurface and surface fleet to be unmanned. Additionally, about 40 to 60 of future air forces. Air wings and squadrons will be robotic pilotless And they’ll be teamed up with manned aircraft and 4th and 5th generation And I would imagine by then 6th generation on the way those technologies are available right now to every country in the world, there is nothing particularly secret about many of them. And I would argue that the country that masters those technologies combines them with their doctrine, develops our talent. Our troops are sailors, are admirals, all of the leadership teams to take maximum advantage. That country is likely to have a significant and perhaps decisive advantage at the beginning of the next war. I want to believe that war will be purged from the human being experienced, but I seriously doubt it will be in our lifetime. So it’s incumbent upon us, those of us in uniform now to set the table and set the conditions so that future generations don’t operate a significant disadvantage. And in fact as long as a lot more or less mastering the changes that are occurring, mastering the change in this fundamental change in the character of war is going to be the most important thing we will do As a professional military in the next 10 years. All of us should be confident in our collective ability to ensure that whether it’s in the Caribbean or in the arctic or across the atlantic or the pacific or whether it’s in space, cyberspace, on the sea, undersea your on the land or in the air, the United States shoulder to shoulder with our partners and allies. We will continue to project the most powerful military the world has ever seen and together we have to maintain that readiness in the present. But we also must as an imperative modernize for the future. We recognize that we are a very expensive capability for our nation. We cost billions of dollars to operate every single year. There are very few things as expensive as preventing a war. But there are two that are more expensive. one is fighting a war and the most expensive at all is fighting and losing a war. Every single cent spent on the U. S. Military is an investment. It’s an investment to maintain global great power piece in order to deter war. Our task as a military is to be prepared for war and by doing that task we hopefully will prevent war. But if war does break out then our task is to win that war. We exist for no other purpose. We are ready right now today and we must be ready in the future and that future begins right now with our United States Navy. Thank you very much. Yeah let’s give our chairman one more round of applause as he leaves the building. Yeah.