Join us for an enlightening fireside chat on Inside West Point: Ideas that Impact, with Retired General Raymond A. 'Tony' Thomas III, one of this generation's most experienced combat and military leaders. Thomas shares his reflections on leadership, historical lessons, and the future of warfare, particularly focusing on AI and unmanned capabilities. He discusses his extensive military career, including his role in major operations and his time leading U.S. Special Operations Command. Thomas offers profound insights into Afghanistan's strategic challenges, emphasizing the critical importance of historical study, evolving military tactics, and ethical considerations in advanced combat technologies while maintaining unwavering commitment to constitutional principles. His analysis bridges military experience with deep reflection on institutional learning and technological challenges in modern warfare. This conversation is filled with invaluable lessons for future military leaders and anyone interested in the intricacies of modern warfare.  

00:00 Introduction to the Fireside Chat  

00:29 General Thomas' Distinguished Military Career  

03:02 Leadership and Historical Reflections  

06:38 Lessons from Afghanistan  

13:47 The Role of Failure in Innovation  

18:52 Integrating Technology in Leadership  

23:30 Contrasting Warfare Standards  

24:00 Israel's Existential Fight  

24:55 Future Warfare and Legal Guidance  

25:12 Israel and Hezbollah Conflict  

28:30 Private Industry and Military Ethics  

28:47 The Reality of War  

30:09 Logistical Challenges in Warfare  

33:18 Global Power Dynamics  

35:51 AI in Military Operations  

41:30 Historical Lessons and Leadership  

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Recommended Books  

• "Washington's Crossing" by David Hackett Fischer  
• "The Civil War: A Narrative" (Trilogy) by Shelby Foote  
• "A History of the Twentieth Century" by Martin Gilbert  
• "An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943" (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson  
• "April 1865: The Month That Saved America" by Jay Winik  

Credits:      

1. Guest: General Raymond A. Thomas III:   (https://www.defense.gov/About/Biographies/Biography/Article/709270/general-raymond-a-thomas-iii/)  
2. Host: Brigadier General Shane Reeves: (http://linkedin.com/in/shane-reeves-7950a31b3)     
3. Recording: West Point Public Affairs-Visual Information Division  
4. Production: Growth Network Podcasts: (https://growthnetworkpodcasts.com)   
5. Publisher: West Point Press (https://westpointpress.com)     

This episode does not imply Federal endorsement.   

20241104 Dean Fireside Gen. Thomas_1

I'm incredibly excited about this particular fireside chat, as we have one of this generation's greatest combat and military leaders, here to talk to you all this afternoon

and so this is a great opportunity for you all to hear from someone who not only has a lot of, experience, but also is going to tell you the way it is. I also think this is a great way to continue this year's academic theme, The Human and the Machine Leadership on the Emerging Battlefield.

Cause today we're going to dig a little bit deeper into the leadership aspect, as many of you would guess, more than we have in other fireside chats. So General, let me just give you a little bit about General Thomas. General Raymond A. Tony Thomas, the third, served the United States Army for 39 years, culminating his career in the highest echelons of the United States military as a four star commanding general of more than 85,000 men and women who comprise U.S. Special Operations Command.

During his remarkable, four decades of service, General Thomas was involved in nearly every significant United States military operation during that time period, to include jumping into combat in both Grenada and Panama. His tenure, as a member of the 75th Ranger Regiment and Delta Force included service in Desert Storm with a joint task force responsible for defeating Iraqi Scud missile attacks on Israel, assisting the Colombian National Police in killing the notorious narco terrorist Pablo Escobar, and conducting operations to capture Serbian war criminals.

He's the only officer, this is an interesting one to me, to have commanded a squadron of Delta Force and a battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

That record was just broken by the way.

He's number, he's only one of two officers to have ever done that. In his 39 years, he's deployed numerous times to combat arenas including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. And on one of these deployments, he was a second in command for the mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

Prior to his promotion as the commander of US SOCOM and taking the reins of one of the United States most elite combatant commands. He commanded the Joint Special Operations Command, served as the Director of Military Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency, and created and commanded the first Special Operations Joint Task Force in Afghanistan.

He's very focused on trying to think about the future of warfare, and during his time in the Army, he recognized that the need for us to think not just now, but going forward. And so while his time at SOCOM, he, uh, started to adapt and think about artificial intelligence and unmanned capabilities.

And that passion has carried over into his post career service where he's worked in the defense industry to ensure today's service members can do is what I tell all of you that you need to be able to do is fight and win our nation's wars now and in tomorrow. Currently, he serves as the chairman of the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, a national nonprofit organization, which provides full cost education scholarships to the children of our nation's fallen special operation heroes.

He also serves as a venture partner with Lux Capital and on the board of advisory positions with lots of different leading technology firms. General Thomas and his wife have two sons and six grandchildren. Both of his sons graduated from the United States Military Academy and have served in combat on multiple occasions.

Sir, it is always wonderful to have you back at the Academy. We're very thankful that you could be here with us. So we're going to talk about a lot of different things and we go, we can take this in lots of different directions, but I would like to start with the, just to give you some time to talk about your experiences in Afghanistan and your thoughts on our withdrawal.

Okay, easy topic. We've got 20 minutes or less to do that. First of all, thanks for the opportunity to be here with you. Selfishly, when the dean afforded me this opportunity, I had him down in an AI summit for the venture company I'm with recently, and he crushed it. He represented the Academy very well represented our profession very well.

But we had talked about this opportunity and when he tendered the invitation, I jumped all over it because selfishly I'm going to walk away with an incredible buzz from interacting with all of you. Any old grad that doesn't tell you that is full of themselves because, you can't help but come back to this alma mater and acknowledge that you all are much, much better than we were.

I am very appreciative and thankful that you've opted into the greatest leadership factory on the planet.

I'm a little bit parochial there, but I'm pretty confident I can get away with that statement, and that you're intent on serving our country because we absolutely need you going forward. And two topics that I told the Dean I would like to emphasize today, and one is study of history and leadership and what it means to you all.

I would offer on the leadership side, start keeping book now. I was late in life and really formulating a book, you know, a book to myself, a book of notes and reflections on leadership and it's all over the planet right now, but it was brought home to me when I was talking to the Citadel one day as a four star and some Citadel cadets asked me, what's the most profound leadership decision you ever had to make?

And arguably I fumbled the question when, when he asked me and it made me reflect on what have I learned from this experience? Here I'm a four star and I'd kept, you know, odd scraps on leadership, but I really never sat down. As much to reflect on myself is to reflect on, you know, the art, the practice of leadership.

So you're at the best leadership factor in the world. Take note now, churn on it, iterate on it, and then be that profit going forward. It applied everything you're doing. The other part is study of history, and I would offer to you as much as I bumbled through a career that was every conflict that was thrown on our plate, and I feel very appreciative of that.

Usually we went into these conflicts acknowledging we didn't know. We didn't know the environment. We didn't know the culture. We didn't know the history. The history part you can fill in. And I'm a big advocate that past equals prologue. I'll recommend a couple of books to you later on.

But for every episode from this point on, as we venture into national security challenges, your first question to yourself should be, how did we get here? And do a little bit of research backwards because I can guarantee you there's prologue to this. There are things that preceded this that got you to where you are.

I mentioned to the Dean, and again, an area where I think the Academy is so much better than when I was here. I'm so happy that you aren't living in an ivory palace rather, that doesn't reflect on things happening now, things happening in your lifetime that parlay to your profession. The biggest one, the most profound one that occurred recently in your lifetime was the withdrawal from Afghanistan and arguably the capper on that whole episode.

We're not going to talk about it. Best to brush it off and go by. And I know it stuck with me then and it's really come back more, since then that that was a huge missed opportunity. And the other one was April of my senior year. When the New York Times was dropped on my front doorstep and the title was debacle in the desert.

It paralleled my career for the next 40 years. And, you know, it created units that I ended up commanding, you know, 40 years later.

My point to you, be, be a student of history now and into the future. Afghanistan very quickly. I wrote an op ed on this that I gave to, Tom Friedman and a couple others, they said really good op ed way too long. And I said, I'm having difficulty distilling 19 years of experience down to a, you know, a wall street journal op ed.

Our blood was boiling. I was a Ranger Battalion commander at that time. I had just landed in Hungary. We thought it was part of the exercise. We set up our satellite radio, and they said, Hey, a report just in. A high speed aircraft just hit one of the towers. And we thought, OK, you're going to change the exercise.

We're now going to hunt something else. You know, it's a tweak of the exercise. And the next very profound real world sit rep was another aircraft just hit the other tower. End Ex. Get back home. It took us about five days to get back home, but we realized when we got back home, combat was now on the training schedule.

We were going to war and that was we didn't know how long it was going to last, but it was going to drive the next couple years. I'm not saying it as a shortcoming that you don't appreciate the national animus at the time, but our blood was up and we were ready to whack something.

Literally, I don't think a politician could have survived at the time to say, let's study the problem. Let's figure out who that was that just, you know, knocked down the towers, who hit the Pentagon, who did these heinous acts. And so we launched, and I think we launched in the right direction.

We went to Afghanistan with two strategic goals. One, get the perpetrators from 9 11, pretty defined task. Get UBL, get Zawahiri, get his guys. We thought they were somewhere in the Afghan Pakistan region.

And the second part of the strategy, and I would argue it was the open ended part of the strategy that ended up biting us in the tail, was prevent another 9 11 from happening. And you can look back in retrospect, all sorts of ways that we could have prevented another 9 11, but we were all over.

I told the dean anecdotally. As a Ranger Battalion commander, we got there to Bagram. It was the detritus of the Russian war effort, mines everywhere, just a sloppy, you know, leftover from, from that Russian experience. And we innocently wanted to raise an American flag on top of our compound, and we were told no.

And it really, it kind of bristled, we were bristling with that, why, everywhere we go, we're able to raise an American flag, why not here? And anecdotally, what came back to us, Donald Rumsfeld said, can't raise an American flag there because we aren't staying, we aren't occupying, and we aren't nation building.

And then we proceeded to do all the above. By hook or crook over the next 20 years, as we took bigger bites of that apple, it was, hey, maybe we can recreate Afghanistan back to the, you know, the way it was back, back in the day. So first part strategy aimless, you could go back now and say we could have maybe done a CT approach and that would have solved the problem for later.

But that's if it could have would have a proposition corruption. When I was over, there's a two star in charge of special operations. I had the opportunity to meet a guy named Mutasim, who was the former Afghan finance minister. He had been gunned down on the streets of Lahore. I think are quite a for having the nerve to try and talk reconciliation with the Karzai brothers.

Now he survived that episode. The Karzai's brought him in. I met with him in a safe house in Kabul with my CIA senior and we were all trying to figure out, is this really mutasim and determine if we were talking to the real guy. And so I thought I'd play my best little CIA case officer at the time. And I said, I'd like to think I know how you made money as the Taliban.

And I think you made it through zakat, through religious tithing. Yeah. Through drugs, certainly. And then I said, illicit activities like this mining operation. We just broke up down in Baram Shah in Southern Afghanistan because there were all sorts of illicit activities going on. I said, are those good money makers for you?

And little smug son of a gun smiled at me. He goes, yeah, those are good money makers. I said, anything else? A good source of income for you? The Taliban. He smiled. He said, kidnapping is pretty good for us. We make a good amount of money off kidnapping. And I said, okay, of those four things, if I wanted to press hardest, Against the source of your resources, your money, which one is the biggest cash cow?

And he sat back and he smiled at me. He said, none of those, I said, what's the biggest cash cow for the Taliban? And he said, you are. We get a cut out of everything you put into this country. There are many in the Taliban who hope you never leave. But our money was fueling the insurgency at the time. And we, we blissfully just kept throwing money at the problem.

The last and most profound lesson of all this, which relates back to our Vietnam predecessors, we won every fight and we lost the war. Why? There is no military solution. that can substitute for legitimate governance on the end of the day, you have to hang it on somebody. People have to rule and govern themselves.

And for too long, we were wishful in terms of we can stand this up. We can stand this up when reality was we were too close to the problem. And we probably really couldn't take stock, although with one caveat that they can't stand by itself, that's the caveat that I would also offer. You should take away for the 19 years that I was associated with that problem from the time of Lieutenant Colonel to four star.

We always, always assumed there would be a stay behind force, a CT force to stay behind, to make sure we'd never, ever have another nine 11 at the end of the day, that was pulled from underneath. And so it, it defied all the previous preceding assumptions. And in fact, it was predictable. Afghanistan is not going to hold.

If we're not there to help them, this thing is not going to hold. And you got the result that came out of it, but I, encourage you to please appreciate, and I offer now, I used to sympathize with Vietnam veterans, I now empathize with them because we've lived the same dream, although the one luxury that we enjoyed that they didn't, we had the support of the American public to the hilt, and they certainly didn't have that.

They had the opposite extreme that can never ever happen again in this country. But please walk away with the lessons we learned as you go forward. There are lessons from both Iraq and Afghanistan apply, and then there's a ton that don't, but you should know your history as military professionals going forward.

You know, I had Eric Schmidt visit me when I was so calm commander, and it actually was my epiphany for AI to bring AI faster, more furiously into our current approach.

And so imagine in a suburban riding back to MacDill Air Force Base. He said, General, I'd like to give you my assessment of special operations command. This should be interesting. You've met us for all of one day, but go ahead, give it to me.

He said, your prototype pretty effectively. And I thought, Yep, we've been failing fast long before I ever heard that term. But we had that luxury to try things, fail and iterate on it.

And then he went off on a bender. I mean, it was, I won't, I'll spare you guys the expletives that were in this, but he goes, you absolutely suck at applied machine learning. He said, I know you live in a very complex world, but I bet if I got under your tent, I could solve most of your problems to easy up down, switch answers with advanced algorithms.

Again, he might have said quantum and I was ready to boot him out of the car. I mean, I thought you arrogant son of a gun. And luckily, Admiral McCraven engaged him because it gave me a moment to take a deep breath, think a little bit, and it struck me that he's absolutely right, not that he could solve all my problems with advanced algorithms, but where the private sector was with machine learning, hadn't even started yet. We were mulling it like, Oh, this is an out your project. So it drove me right away, off the failing fast kind of construct to immediately, appoint a chief data officer for SOCOM. The guy was so good, self taught, so good he was next plucked to be the DOD chief data officer.

And then we went on a bender with the first priority being educate the force. You can't start if you're forced, can barely spell AI. So it was, let's really knuckle down here, learn about AI and then take small bites of the pie. And ours was predictive maintenance, which some of the airlines were doing.

A lot of them aren't amazing. They're still doing Excel spreadsheets. Some places to do predictive maintenance. You know, in this day and age, you'll be out of business. You keep doing that. But we were lucky to be able to do that with 1 60th for predictive maintenance. And then it burned into other fields.

Interestingly, at the time, I was the customer for a nascent program called the Maven Project, which was led by Google. I'm now on the Google Public Sector Board. Full disclosure, but Google was knee deep in developing a command and control system.

It was after I was after a dashboard, something I could I could see, touch, feel, predict, etcetera. And we were endeavoring to do that. And if you know what transpired back in. It in that time frame, Google had a little internal conundrum among their workforce where about 3, 000 people signed a petition saying we don't want to have anything to do with the U.

S. and war fighting. And so they stepped away from that project. Google has now had their kind of epiphany internal to the company that we do want to be part of American national defense. We are coming back, but it began a whole cycle going forward of really aggressive applied AI. The challenge that I think you're going to have going forward is you are so AI conversant and so used to unmanned.

I mean, I've watched what you're building. I get all the kind of West Point media stuff. He sends me a ton of stuff. I'm inundated by everything he sends me. But talk about a contrast. My weapons systems engineering senior project. We took a jeep apart and we put a jeep back together. I think what you guys are doing now for, you know, any number of courses out there, you're cutting edge technology.

You know, the academy has adapted that we can teach you all sorts of arcane things that you'll never use, or you can be right on that cutting edge where you'll go out and do it. The challenge for you going out in the future is your senior leaders are not as comfortable as you are with any of that stuff.

Some of them can barely spell a I. Some of them, and this is the most entrenched, you know, obstacle you're going to have out there, tank drivers, ship drivers, pilots, who are so entrenched in the manned approach to doing everything, manned, crewed approach to doing everything, that they're going to push back at every level for, why would we go unmanned?

And you're going to have to be the zealots, the advocates for that going forward in terms of here's the advantage it gives me as the human leveraging these things and here's how our tactics and techniques should adapt going forward. You guys are on a transformational period of time. I'm so excited for what you have right outside this institution as soon as you get out there in terms of what I think is going to be a revolution in military affairs.

I feel very comfortable saying that. Usually we're hesitant to Hey, is this the evolution of the machine gun? Is this so much more than that? So much more powerful than that. And you all will be the leaders in that mix. But your challenge will be with a bunch of senior leaders who didn't grow up that way are not necessarily comfortable that way.

And you're going to have to get them comfortable.

So how do you see that revolution? You just mentioned, playing out as we talk about developing future leaders, like how should they be looking to integrate technology into how they approach leadership and not just in terms of communicating up to those who aren't as as Technologically literate, but also how should they use that to complement their own leadership style?

Where should they rely on technology? And when should they rely on the more traditional tenets of leadership?

Yeah, again, I think the point of friction is going to be the army the big green that you're gonna join soon And the way we've been doing business for a long time You and how we have to adapt in a hurry.

This is not an out your project. This is happening right now in Ukraine, in the Ukraine, Russia, dynamic. It's happening right now in the Israelis and Gaza and Hezbollah and Iran dynamic. It's happening. Maybe coming to a theater near you on a timeline that some of us might be underestimating, relative to a conflict with China.

So it's not, it's not a, we have time here. So it's, there should be a little bit of friction there in terms of. The speed of adoption, but it can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Amateurs these days will say drones are going to replace everything. Not, not true. I'm a chairman for a drone company that just won the army's MRR contract with Andrew Andrews, this other company that you probably all know about this little company came out of drone racing league, that I'm with is now precision drone works and has merged with Andrew to provide the army a solution, but that's just the beginning of what should be integral to every squad platoon company going in the future and you all are gonna drive that train What do I need to make me better to close with the enemy to develop the situation to do whatever your mission set is? But again, I think you've got an advantage you're used to just bringing in what's the latest out there bringing it on both Corporate America and DOD is having a hard time Taking the plunge with how fast technology is emerging, you know, they need to jump in now and iterate instead of I'm waiting for version 3.0, 4.0., 5.0.

You're missing movement. You're not getting there. The good news. There are some storefronts where this is really developing with some with very robustly. I would offer, you know, Chris Donahue at 18th Airborne Corps through some of the geographic and combat commanders, General Carrillo at CENTCOM.

General Cavoli forward and certainly what we got going in, in Europe. And then Sam Papparo came out of CENTCOM. Who's, another guy who's intent on having something that's gone on since time immemorial for military affairs, information dominance.

Okay. Napoleon might not have caused it, called it information dominance. Others might not have called it, but that's what they were after. They wanted that advantage on decision making. Vis a vis their enemy, and what we're doing now with MAVEN is exquisite. It, it, it's the way the United States has to, be enabled going forward, and we're only at that first stage, with the hardest, or the biggest degree of difficulty fighting through a proxy.

General Donahue will tell you that as the first guy out as the 82nd commander working through the Ukrainians. The hardest part for him, his limb fact, he could see the Russian trace distinctly. He said, in fact, if I were fighting it, It would evaporate overnight. Unfortunately, I'm fighting through a proxy and my limb factor.

How many high Mars can I get to them so that that's his particular situation? But in and around that experience, that living laboratory, the United States is developing a command control system, which I think is exquisite. It's best in world, but we need to keep the repetitions going. So we stay against ahead of others who were not getting those repetitions right now.

So is these advanced technologies start to become more important? What would you want these young leaders to think about when they think about the ethical considerations of applying that technology, both in terms of how they lead and at the tactical, operational, strategic level?

Yeah, it's interesting.

So, your dean and I actually have a shared background in that he's a card carrying operational lawyer. One of the things you should not take away from here, which unfortunately has been misconstrued for the last 20 or so years. of combat is somehow lawyers are making all these decisions out there.

D. S. Commanders are making these decisions. Lawyers are advising, they're playing an integral role in terms of the ethics, the law, the policies, the concepts. We in the West are steeped in concepts of, law of warfare that are proportionality, discrimination, necessity. These are big words.

These are profound words. It is filling all the, opinionated, perspectives on what the Israelis are doing right now. And I had to remind an audience the other night in New York that if you are, contrasting side by side how we fought the last 20 years, which was incredibly precise. My standard as the JSOC commander and elsewhere was either near or reasonable certainty that the individual I was about to lose to hellfire on was in that shock group and that there was zero collateral damage.

That was our standard. I mean, a lot of people think, well, you carpet bomb, you did. No, our U. S. way of, of warfare, the CT fight was that very exhausting standard. I would tell you that was the same standard, for the IC. And we, and we, you know, perform that at an exquisite level. I waived collateral damage one time out of multiple hundreds of shots that I authorized.

But you contrast that kind of war with what the Israelis are doing and all sorts of criticism about, about collateral.

And where I had to correct people that day, I said, you're misconstruing context here. CT fight. existential fight, the Israelis are doing what they think they have to do against people who are sworn to eradicate them from this earth. And I said, if you want to extrapolate a little further forward to think we wouldn't fight that kind of war, think of our last existential challenge, and we, with our allies, flattened Hamburg.

We firebombed Dresden, we firebombed a bunch of cities in Japan, and we eventually dropped two nuclear weapons. We went ahead to do similar efforts in Vietnam, now, why we did that when that really wasn't an existential threat, unless you were drawn into the bigger communist threat, it wasn't as dire a threat as World War II, certainly.

But when push came to shove in a high end of the continuum war environment, those aspects of proportionality, necessity, discrimination, are blurred. It then becomes who wins, who has what it takes to make the other take a knee and force their will upon them. So again, you all as professionals need to understand where we've been operating in the continuum, where we might go with real peer, peer adversaries in the future and everything in between and talk to your lawyers, get their advice, get their guidance.

And ultimately it's your decision.

Sticking with Israel and Gaza, and as that conflict has proliferated to southern Lebanon, with Hezbollah, how do you think the Israelis are doing in terms of their targeting analysis?

They're innovating.

And the interesting part, and I guess my point of discomfort with The way the Israelis are operating is we, the U S do not have, I don't think any leverage for how this ends. This is the BB Net Yahoo show going on right now.

Because that was the provocation, right? He was already on thin ice politically. Now he's the great war fighter for the Israelis. He'll take it to some culminating point here in the future. I don't think we know what it is. Most recently he took out all the air defense systems, we think, most of the effective air defense systems in Iran.

Next step you're watching this, tit for tat approach. The Iranians are like that kid on the block who's getting the crap kicked out of them that you're thinking, please stay down. Don't make me do this to you again. The conventional wisdom is the Iranians are going to try and retaliate for the latest Israeli strike.

Which may beget strikes at their regime leadership, strikes at their nuclear facilities. Back to my first point, I don't think we the U. S. are in the driver's seat. We are more in the following support. Can we get this to some culmination and our, our leverage is pretty limited right now.

So that's interesting as you talked about and I, we have a few minutes before I turn this over.

So anyone who has questions start thinking about it. You talk about the policies that were in place as we were fighting our counterterrorism conflicts with near certainty or this extreme effort to reduce or minimize or Have no civilian casualties and you talk about the Israelis and they've expanded that a little bit because they're fighting a deeply embedded non state transnational ideologically motivated actor Who is using an urban environment and human shields to their advantage.

But even still, they're taking extreme precautions. They're still trying to do different things to warn the civilian population, trying to move them out. How would this play out in say a large scale military operation, say a war as general Cavoli discussed in, for example, over 2, 200 kilometers in Ukraine, where there's 102 brigades facing, you know, whatever, or even larger army groups in Asia type thing.

A question I don't know that I'm equipped to answer, because you didn't even mention, mega cities, mega metropolitan areas that will eat up cores and cores of current kind of methodology, ground forces, just from the way we've done it forever. Well then it probably means, and we don't have cores and cores to throw into you pick the large urban area.

How are you going to crack that going forward in terms of capabilities that will make you bigger than what you are, be able to discern adversarial forces, from, civilian collateral, as we're inclined to call it. Although again, if it's a major peer adversary, that'll blur the lines going forward.

S. War machine. Yet what you find is that, interestingly and ironically, they're actually working against their own interest in minimizing collateral damage or being able to greater, Follow the principles of distinction if you can use the technology. Do you think the private industry is starting to recognize the need not just to plug into the U.

S. military industrial base, because we could face an existential threat, but also for ethical and humanitarian and legal reasons that the technology can help us?

Yeah, you know, the conundrum and it goes to the profession you're about to join. War is the ugliest of things, right? Anybody who lusts after war, lusts after conflict, you shouldn't actually be here.

You should acknowledge it's inevitable. We're going to fight wars. We need people like you to lead our country as we go forward. But it's not something we're seeking going forward. So the dilemma now in this interwar period. Someone was trying to say, we're done with forever wars.

I can cite where we have people right now in harm's way in Syria, Iraq, Somalia, other places, you know, on the high seas in the air right now, the daily atmospherics over Syria are Russian planes, painting us planes, Israeli planes coming over the top. It is as complicated as you can imagine, but as we're in these interwar periods, you know, it behooves you all to again, go to school.

What we learned, but really aggressively. apply it to future conflict in terms of how are we gonna deal with that kind of dilemma, that kind of environment because we haven't fought that kind of war lately. We were prepared to do it when I first graduated from here and it was a bipolar world and the Russians were the threat before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

And we parked a lot of that core capability, that core approach and perspective. It's certainly time to bring it back out in terms of being prepared at the highest end and then as necessary deal with lower spectrum conflicts. Alright, so let me

Open up. Cadets, questions.

Thank you, sir. Cadet plank company, H two. Sir, taking into consideration the material costs that is projected for a large scale combat operation and the current logistical constraints in Ukraine, where do you believe the compromise is between the cost of quality over the necessity of quantity?

For future warfighting or for the current?

For future warfighting, yes sir.

Yeah, I'm from the school of thought that mass has a quality all to itself. And if you think of a pure adversary, mass will matter. I can think of a one off and that's specifically the Korea context where I think it's going to be a race and it's gonna be a race if it push comes to shove to eliminate and ensure that we've eliminated KGU's nuclear capability.

So that may be a high flash, short duration, effort that may or may not require. The kind of masks that can see for other problems. But for China and Russia, Masses has got a quality all to itself that you're gonna need going forward. It does get into how woefully inept our defense infrastructure is now.

I was reading, we're going to commend a couple books to you, but one Atkinson's trilogy, he gets into details in terms of logistics for world war two that make your head hurt. But the daily consumption rate about the time of the hurricane forest was two tons of ammo per minute per day.

Two tons of ammo just being expended just to win in the Hurtgen forest and to try and push to the Rhine. We would, we'd be hard pressed to do that. Now some, I've read other studies, a, you know, a tank in this day and age and that construct won't need the same amount of ammo that, you know, Shermans were just firing off rounds as fast as they could load them up in their gun racks.

But, It's another area where we're woefully unprepared. We don't have the reps lately for doing a sustained logistics effort going forward. And you know, the old adage that amateurs talk operations, experts talk logistics. You have to be just as steep in that.

That's a really interesting, relevant question is there was just an article a few days ago in the wall street journal about how we're concerned about not having enough.

missiles as they're being shot, and it does become about not just scale, but how much it costs. It's so expensive to shoot down

And Gerald Milley, the Chief of Staff of the Army and I went to Mattis, the Secretary of Defense. And if you'll remember about that time, KJU would launch a new ballistic missile every night. And we're just watching this thing. What's going on here?

And we went to Madison said in a busy world, how ready should we be for the war for potential conflict with Korea? And Madison is typically dramatic style said, you should be more prepared for war every day and you should treat every day like it's the last day of peace on earth.

Are you ready? I'm ready. And so when the Army and we at SOCOM started pouring in this problem, the Fight Tonight bunch on the Korean Peninsula at the time had one day's worth of ammo supply. That was a lot of ammo, but that's all they had on the peninsula at that time. So the Army went to great pains to, you know, to stock ammo and actually get ready for a war footing, which luckily dissipated over the Winter Olympics and is, somewhere, On hold right now.

But what is KJU doing right now in this weird world, the world that you've inherited? My sons used to, tell me that dad, you had it so easy. You lived in a bipolar world. You have the Soviet union and us and a couple of brush fires in the side. You have a world right now that has a true convergence.

Bush talked at the axis of evil back in at nine 11. I think he was premature. It was random. It was Iran, Iraq, and Korea. They had nothing in common at the time. You have a world now that is China, Russia, Iran. And, Korea, working together, sending troops, sending ammo, providing money, buying oil, sustaining each other with one common adversary, us.

It's not natural. In fact, in my lifetime, Nixon and his administration, played the Sino Soviet, fissure expertly and broke them apart because it wasn't, they're not natural, you know, brothers in arms or, bosom buddies that Xi Jinping and Putin refer to each other. But that's what we have right now for a construct going forward.

Are you ready to fight them tonight? I don't think we have to go to war with all these people but our luxury is our We don't have the luxury of you can't assume it's not going to happen You have to be prepared for that contingency. China to me is a classic balance of power problem right now and diplomatically And economically we can crack this code Right now in your lifetime.

What is what's happened? You Is it converge? While we have that convergence of bad guys with us is the focal point, and I would not have predicted this Japan back big into defense spending, realizing that they've outsourced Japan or a defense forever, they want to be more viable by themselves, and they're now authorizing a new four star army their connection with Korea better than it's ever been, despite some bad historical baggage there with, with some combined threats. The Philippines, which kicked us out in my lifetime from Clark and Subic. Now, inviting us back in because of the fishing threats, you know, vis a vis the Chinese, the Vietnamese now doing more with us, and then the last major cog in the piece where I could see us actively or actually affecting a balance of power that means we don't have to go to war over Taiwan.

We can actually talk through it, you know, negotiate it, work it. is bringing Indian in the fold, which, you know, the biggest English speaking democratic country on the planet, which for 30 of my 39 years, we didn't have relationships with, we had no mill to mill relationships with India because they run aligned.

Now they're very much buying our stuff, inclined to work with us. But think of a world where that's tied diplomatically and economically as a deterrent as the backdrop, you can now start talking strategy for how do you deal with Taiwan. If we do do it in a disjointed fashion, expect it to get played to our disadvantage.

Sir, you spoke on, going unmanned and you advocate for more AI use in the military, can you speak on any limitations, if any, that you think the U S military, should implement for AI, especially in regards to lethal autonomous weapons systems?

Yeah, I think it's a fool's errand is my personal opinion.

So I don't represent DoD or SOCOM. I think it's a fool's errand to go in limiting AI up front because that's our, it's certainly prevalent in policy channels right now. We've got to regulate this. We've got to, you know, hedge it when reality is the technology outside of us, the military is outpacing us.

So there's things going on and that's where I find, I used to be inclined to use the nuclear analogy for how transformational this is, but this is where I think it's transcended that, you know, the nuclear phenomenon and the nuclear experience in that. That was driven by national defense and academics.

For the most part, you think of Oppenheimer and all that. There was not a commercial entity that was, you know, thinking, Hey, here's the time. We obviously had atomic power that came out of that eventually, but it was not what's driving it. Now you have the commercial world driving a I the genies out, you know, and our adversaries are actively seeking as well.

So I pushed back initially at the regulate the limits. I think a more constructive approach is let's iterate hard on this for how, how and where it might be applied with an eye to the other thing. That's the cause of so much anxiety. Where and how is the human in the loop on the loop?

If you know this story, you know that, I don't, I'm by no means criticizing the captain and the decision he made, but as he was sitting there performing a freedom of navigation mission, among other things, he had an inbound aircraft. They interrogated it. One night I was on a CV 22 coming out of Yemen and we couldn't talk to the Navy ship.

And I thought, oh my God, I'm going to eat the same sandwich that they did. But he interrogated this aircraft, which was an Iranian Airbus. They couldn't respond, couldn't respond. And he, in the moment, driven by concerns for the welfare of his ship, his crew, launched a fateful strike on that aircraft.

It was an Iranian passenger jet, 236 Iranians, you know, plunked into the water. Think now an unmanned capability out there doing freedom of navigation, AI enabled, can sit there and not take that shot, maybe even get, if it is hostile, be blown out of the water and we'll put another unmanned aircraft out there.

But the human in the loop was the one driven to make a fateful decision, given the information that he had. DARPA dogfight. So you talk about unmanned. So if you guys want to check something out, it's a four hour video. You can Google it. DARPA dogfight.

It starts with H that won out in the competition to put their A. I enabled unmanned capability against this, man capability. It's almost a little sickening because I'll cut the chase for our video. Go to the last 10 minutes. The last 10 minutes are five dogfights and you watch a fighter weapons guy in a chair, you know, just desperate to keep up with this unmanned capability comes at him and kills him every time five to nothing.

We did learn some hard lessons there, but the machine was inclined to do suicidal tactics. We would never do that. Do you want your kid in a future fight going against something like that? Or can you acknowledge that that may be the way the future with man or woman at a ground control station, controlling those assets and not being up there in a fighter going.

Do that voodoo that you do, Mav, you know, get on top of him, whatever it might be. That's our future fight. Fun fact for you all and the Americans in the room? We're building two more aircraft carriers while they're cheap at 15. Bill a copy. You'll see them 10 years from now. They will be even more vulnerable 10 years from now for any conceivable fight in the Strait of Taiwan. And would you want your kid on that aircraft carrier in that fight?

Both my boys have served in combat. I have no reluctance, you know, to do what the nation's gotta do. But we should have the most unfair fight possible and putting. Our kids, our future on legacy platforms that the enemy has already adapted to is not our best bet. It's not something we could stick with. It is time now, if we go to war tonight, we will use those platforms. Aircraft carriers. Think of it. That's how we fought forever. And I'm spending a lot of quality time on aircraft careers. The best power projection platform you can think of.

But it begs the question with an 860 billion dollar budget that will go to a trillion here with the rate of advance over the last couple of years, a trillion bucks for defense every year. Are we buying the best tools, the best capabilities, the best AI possible to make you as lethal and capable? As you need to be in the future.

Again, you're going to be driving that from the ground up, as part of this conversation, sir. Last question.

Sir, cadet William Niven company. I too, thank you again for coming out and giving us some of your experience. In the beginning of your speech, you talked about, the past is a prologue and how important history is for informing our decisions that we make now.

And then you also talked about how illegitimate government was a key failing in Afghanistan. What key takeaways about illegitimate government Can we give to the Israelis to try and find a lasting solution of peace in Gaza?

Thank you a great question. Yeah, I think in for the Israeli Application obviously we have more in common our way of governing their way of governing than what we were trying to apply You know through the Afghan people and I'd say through almost with intent there because it really needed to be how they thought they should Govern, I think we had some level of conversation with him on how do you think this will go forward.

But it was, I don't think it was as honest and as holistic as it needed to be. I mean, it was a very complex situation. I, I'm profiled in a book by Annie Duke, who's the world poker champion. And she's written a couple of great books. One was decide. The most recent one was a bestseller is called quit where she takes on the mysticism and really the kind of negative, negative.

Idea about quitting that. Quitting, especially in a poker context. Quitting is what you do should do more often than not if you don't have the hand. And where she played me like a fiddle and I got, Admiral McCraven involved as well, and she didn't have to say it, but she drew it outta me, that as a profession, we, the military suffer from sunk costs more than anybody on the planet.

And I hope it's not your experience, but it was my experience early on as a lieutenant where I lost three of my rangers in Grenada. you'd see the terrible price you pay when you go to war, and you'll, you'll see it if, if and when we do go to war and the odd character is, and it's actually a compliment to us as a profession.

It's going to make you knuckled down harder. It's going to make you want to win more. It's the analogy to your sports teams is is very apropos, you take one in the nose, you have something, a mishap, you try harder, right? And we in the military, arguably are the worst when it comes to sunk costs.

And I can personally acknowledge, I was too close to this problem. I wanted to win more than anybody on the planet. I probably shared that with a bunch of other people, but I really wanted to win. And whether or not I could step back and ask the honest question, Can we win going forward?

Can we affect this? Can we put a capper on it? How does it end? That was portrays his famous question way back in the day. Tell me how this end ever. You could tell me. I think that was one of his and it was that was a pregnant question. If the four star in command is asking, how does this end?

We definitely need to delve into that conversation going forward. I mentioned, when HR was here, he gave you a couple books to read. I did a random selection, and I can send this to the dean later on. But, past equals prologue. If you read these books and can't see direct links to now, please text me or email me.

And I'm gonna start in the revolution with Washington's Crossing by, David, Hacker Fisher, and then step right to the Civil War, Shelby Foote's trilogy on the Civil War, self explanatory for the value of that, especially as people talk about the potential to go to Civil War now. One that you may not have heard of is Martin Gilbert's History of the 20th Century, and I just reread that for the second time.

They're still scarred by the experience of a country that was occupied, and that is trying to find, you know, go pursue its manifest destiny. But I, I've scribbled more notes in the, in the sidebars of that book than I can imagine. Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy, I know H. R.

He does not pull any punches around the great leaders that won that war force, and a lot of them in the moment were a little bit petty. They were little frail as human beings go. There was a lot of internet scene fighting, Bradley at one point who was, Patton's, subordinate in Sicily is his superior when they're in Europe, and literally it's in his diary.

But it's an unbelievable study of leadership in the moment. And arguably the last existential threat we had and with extraordinary insights into logistics and the other aspects of that fight.

How you, how you pursue a wartime conflict, but not to the ending that you don't want to have. I have started reading more business books as much because I'm in the business sector. If you're inclined to think, you know, what are the business books that are out there that might work for you, I'd recommend Frank Slootman's Amp It Up, Tony Fidel's Build.

I would offer to you though that every one of those business books that I've read, my usual reaction is nothing I didn't learn in the military, just recast In a different kind of environment. You are at the epicenter of leadership development. You're the focus of it obviously, but you'll also be the prophets of it going forward.

Really important. I feel compelled to remind you that for 39 years, for every enlistment and for every promotion, I'd raise my right hand, say, you, state your full name, do solemnly swear to support the, then defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

I would encourage you to stay laser focused on your people, the mission, and the Constitution.

Sir, we, truly appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. You were asking, hey, what are some of the things you want them to take out of it? Leadership matters. Look at the world as it is, not what, how you want it to, want it to be, right? Study history and speak truth, and I think your final summary there is, really important, which is keep laser focused on our obligations and our oath to the Constitution United States.

I don't think I could have said any better. So, sir, we're very appreciative that you came and I want to thank you on behalf of the Academy.