the uk in germany like how many times like back and forth back and forth and meanwhile china is really trying to position itself as a leader of the developing world and i'm no expert on the developing world but one thing at least in my advising to the government that i'm constantly bringing up is i don't think we have a strategy towards the developing world and honestly i don't think we care i think the u.s position has always been as long as we have a handful of countries that like us like and support us that's enough you know japan australia uk germany great but that's not how that's the strategic environment has changed since our rise that's not how the world works anymore and china is getting like the rest of the world in their camp while we are ignoring them right i think president biden is trying to have the second uh african summit you know president obama had won president biden will have a second you know china has these every year and in which they are you know more successful at co-opting elites and yes we can talk to the fact that that they have become less popular in recent years but their popularity for example in africa is still quite high and you can often rival that of the u.s the areas where they try to emulate the united states i mean one thing i want to point out is i don't think we should be fearful of china trying to be like us if china wants to build bases all over the world i'm all for it because they're going to be bad because they are bad at it and that's where the costs come in in my book i look at examples of when they do try to emulate the united states when the conditions aren't really ripe and they feel every single time they spend five times more than we do on public diplomacy and their soft power is still horrendous i mean even the amount of money they spend on making movies and submitting movies for prizes in paris and things like that you know as a chinese linguist it really hurts me how bad their movies are i don't know how they can reverse engineer everything but they can't make a good movie to save their life and i'm always trying to watch them to like practice my chinese and i'm just like oh my god like why is this so hard guys but their soft power you know even under president trump in which according to soft power indices the u.s dropped from like number one to like number four china has always been at the bottom you know no one buys a huawei phone like if they can get an apple phone you buy a huawei phone because you don't have any other choice but it's not only in these sort of areas of foreign policy i also look very much at military strategy and this is another you know not only am i not sort of fearful of chinese overseas basis i mean the united states has this military presence we have a quarter of a million people overseas at any point in time china during this whole period of its rise in which i think we can say they have been somewhat successfully competing with us at least to the point that we have now decided we are in a great power competition with us they've only had 3200 people overseas at any given period of time their strategy at least for now is to rely on host nation forces to provide security coupled with strategic use of peacekeeping operations and peacekeeping forces free riding over off of other countries militaries meanwhile the united states is constantly fighting wars abroad and not to say that we should or shouldn't but one statistic that that really stands out to me is that the war in afghanistan cost 10 belt and road initiatives right we could have done belt and road 10 times but instead we fought that war in afghanistan so when people come to me and they say oh china has all these resources for the past 25 years and even today the chinese economy has been smaller than ours right they have been able to compete from this weaker resource position from a smaller economy in the 1990s in which less than 4% of their equipment was modern you know and and they had they didn't have diplomatic relations with a lot of major countries like south korea they weren't members of most international institutions and yet they were still able to compete with us from that position so even if you know mike is right and their power has peaked even if their economy is stagnant for the next 25 years they'll have more resources over the next 25 to compete with us than they've had in the past 25 and they've done a pretty good job today and elastic also bring up as an example is nuclear strategy as i know everyone's concerned about china building nuclear weapons again this is an area where i'm not very concerned like if the china so the china has had a completely different approach to nuclear weapons it's whole history and not even just the number of weapons that it's built right that have you know basically been in in the low 100s and yes they've ramped it up right so now they have you know estimates have have wavered around 320 nuclear weapons compared to the us 5800 right so in the 1990s we had 47 times more nuclear weapons than they did even by the worst case estimates which a lot of people say i mean the chinese don't even have the nuclear reactors to build a thousand nuclear weapons but let's just say they did build a thousand nuclear weapons their arsenal will still be 17 percent of that of the united states they've had this minimal deterrent no first use policy in the united states has never had a no first use or sole purpose policy when it's come to nuclear weapons 76 percent of their weapons are land-based and they're very late to add on a sea triumph right 2015 while the majority of us forces um are not land-based they don't have tactical nuclear weapons which is 30 percent of our budget is for a weapon that china sees as completely relevant to war fighting they have the strategic rocket force we abstract comm etc etc so what area where they do emulate is a non-proliferation agreements but when i look at those agreements the 17 that they're a part of they all are to constrain china from doing things that they weren't planning on doing anyway so they look at in some cases we see them as responsible but all they're doing is saying okay we can constrain the united states in some ways it costs us nothing let's do this so when i look at the china problem now i'm constantly trying to ask myself like what are our conceptions of power are they correct in the new strategic environment you know are we sort of this big company are we in ibm doubling down on the way we've always done things when that era is over should the united states be thinking about new pathways for new institutions new types of relationships i think we have a lot of assumptions about how we do business that if we look deeply are not based in good you know theory or empirics for example when a country is engaging in human rights abuses we cut we cut our relations with them or we reduce our presence or an engagement why don't we double the size of our embassies in those countries well that's not how we do things why don't we take positions on territorial disputes in the south china sea that's not how we do it why aren't eez is a part of our defense agreements because that's not how it's been done i would just sort of say that there's a lot of these ideas that come from our assumptions about how autocracies work that everyone in china like must hate shijin ping because he's an autocrat that you know our our strengths lie in our democracy and our alliance system and the chinese people are just waiting for a moment to overthrow their government and if we fought a war with china the whole world would agree that the united states was in the right china was in the wrong and they would all come in support of us for all these things i'm just not so sure i think it requires work i think it requires work that we're not putting in uh in order to compete so i'll conclude with one thing a uh an advisor of mine at princeton bob cohen who's you know a brilliant mind in my view one said to me in a meeting one paper i wrote i don't even remember what's about he said orianna you remind me a lot of yourself of myself and i was like okay this is going really well right and then he said in that you have so many bad ideas so i would just say that you know and i'm at you know air force obviously i'm here only you know speaking to my civilian capacity my views do not represent those of the department of defense united states air force or the u.s government but because i'm air force i'm always thinking of the udalup right and you always have to remember brainstorming is the first part and the one thing i don't see a lot of space for at least in the do d is for their brainstorming phase you know i come up with a lot of ideas and maybe most of them are bad but but people won't even consider doing things differently than the way that we've done them and there's a lot of risk aversion in our leadership for this as well um and so i'm kind of that pain and that pain whether i'm in uniform or not that's always like this doesn't why do we do this why do we do this i know how annoying it is because i have a two-year-old and three-year-old so it's like i get this all the time at home but that's what i want to leave you with is just i think we need to question if we're going to compete effectively we need to question how we've done everything how we do everything and think is this really the best way because if you told someone running a business you need a business plan and you cannot deviate from it for the next 25 years but i want you to be a top company they couldn't do it yet experimentation trying to take the first step revisiting and relooking pivoting is very hard in our system in our political environment so hopefully in this discussion we can we can talk a bit more about that moving forward and thank you for having me well thank you all a tremendous and fascinating discussion uh while all of you form your questions i'm going to ask a very quick question and please because we have two virtual speakers please identify the speaker or speakers that you'd like to address your question to uh so i'm going to ask primarily dr may um but also if our other guests have have comments uh ukraine the war in ukraine is that in your view and in terms of doing that assessments in the art of it um is that a significant event in terms of i'm thinking particularly about china and the sino russian comprehensive strategic partnership now without limits uh is that something that if you had you know prior to february a net assessment then the war in ukraine has happened that's something that you would factor in is is there a level of threshold or critical mass of a world event that you would factor in do you think it's significant thank you thank you i um my views on this oriana's caution should be extended to me too my my views on this are probably completely out of step with the administration um so i'm this is definitely just my own view uh well obviously it's very hard to say my own sense as an analyst i tend to be skeptical of an enduring friendship between or even functional alliance between the russians and the chinese um there are just lots of reasons to think that they're not destined to be effective working together over the long term um that said you know one of the challenges we have right now i think in thinking about the war in ukraine is 20 years from now what do we think the russia's role is going to be in the international system i i have a hard time imagining them as a permanent vassal to the chinese uh on the other hand i'm not sure that we want them to be a kind of north korea like pariah um but then it starts to get very uncomfortable because then you start thinking well how you know what are they going to be the things that try to move countries to reintegrate them and right now that's a very uncomfortable conversation because their behavior is so low so um so right now we're sort of you know one of the benefits of being in that assessment is that we can explore lots of possibilities and we don't have house school solutions we get to look at a variety of futures and one of my jobs to be able to hold two competing ideas in my head at the same time and so we're we're certainly looking at possibilities in which there is this alliance and it does endure and i'm wrong which like orianna happens to me all the time um and we're looking at the possibility where where that alliance does not endure the last thing i'll say is the the real lesson i think for us coming out of ukraine when we make our assessments there's a natural inclination to look at the things that are easy to look at and talk about for structure muzzle velocity uh people get uncomfortable making judgments about skill level training competence command and control um but we're confronted again and again with the reality that these are the things that really move the needle and one of the reasons that our assessments tend to be so judgment driven is we're looking for military experts to look at another military and say yes i see they've got all this stuff but i'm not sure they're really going to use it effectively and it or maybe we think they are and it's hard to make those um those judgments but it's just clear again as it's been exhibited in military case after military case that those intangibles those things that are very hard to identify and discuss turn out to be the things that that that matter as much or more than than for structure thank you for the question if i can just weigh in um so i agree with everything that was just said i will also say that this is in my research i've written extensively about how i think china is seriously considering using force against taiwan and about a year and a half ago when i wrote this article in foreign affairs everyone was sort of like well you know then why aren't they going to do it right now right if you're if you're so worried about it you know and i'm worried that it's going to happen many a few years from now but given how slow we move i was kind of you know wanting to get that sense of urgency going but the two things i pointed out a year and a half ago that the chinese were concerned about were logistics and command and control shijin ping in 2013 recognized these as the two main weaknesses of his military they restructured it to have you know a joint logistics uh force and to improve their command and control structure those sort of things have now been in place for a couple of months but but my assessment was that they wanted to do more exercises they wanted to hone it a bit more and this was before ukraine right so i don't think that chinese will look at what the russians did a lot of my colleagues are like well russia performed badly so china is going to perform badly and i'm like you know and if anything there's a lot of parallels between the united states and russia like the united states is russia this big military with like obsolete equipment like aircraft carriers right can i say that at the naval war college i don't know and then you know china is the the asymmetric right they're the ones with the javelins like also known as the df 21d so it's like we can do a lot of those comparisons but i would just say that you know the chinese took a look before that and they were like this is what we need to win and at least a lot of the stuff i've read coming out of china and it's always hard because like they also can be kind of cocky in their writing and not not in a way that's really informative of their own thinking because they also have insecurities but there's a lot of this writing about how they would have done this campaign better and i think they they look at the russians and and they've always thought now that they are better than russia and now they really think they're better than russia so i don't think it gives them i think they already were cautious about what to do about taiwan because they were concerned about these things so i don't think it impacts their thinking greatly and i'll just say about the alliance or the alignment for two years i've been writing this paper about china russia alignment i put you these data sets on everything that they've done and said together and a new framework to try to understand it because again like we look at our relationship with our junior alliance partners and we then try to see if russia and china are doing those things but great powers at least countries that see themselves as great power they don't ever let other countries have bases on their territory they don't put their forces under the command of another country this isn't about closeness it's just it's just about what they they want to do so i'll just say my bottom line of all this work which hopefully i'll submit from publication sometime soon is that so the china russia alignment is is very deep but the scope is extremely limited it's only to russia helping china challenge the united states in asia and even when i talk to my chinese colleagues about the statements made about you know there's you know no end to the cooperation and i'm like okay so are you guys going to be more involved in europe and they're like oh no there's no end to the corporation that like russia can give us in asia right so that's how that's how they primarily see it and i think russia can create a lot of problems like an alliance gray zone situation in which they serve as the strategic rear they support china in terms of equipment logistics and other things in a war that make it even harder for us to win over taiwan especially in a protracted conflict in which the russians don't have to fight with china or in support of china to create headaches for us so that's that's one area that i continue to look at great thank you very much questions from the audience please sir ma'am lieutenant colonel john kelp over us army um so i'm not sure who would like to handle the question but yesterday we spoke or we learned about the idea that china would be able to create somewhat of a sizable blockade around taiwan that would prevent us from doing the reinforcement that we've been successfully doing in ukraine so with that idea of of not being able to maybe help them as quickly or as effectively as we've done in ukraine what would be the advantages and disadvantages of a loss of taiwan to the chinese would like to say that mic and then sure uh so i wasn't privy to the discussion but i mean it's certainly just given taiwan's dependence on external fuel food etc it's totally plausible that china could do that now can china sustain a blockade under heavy fire from the united states any other allies that's an open question but the idea that we can just resupply taiwan in the same way that weapons have been funneled into ukraine is pretty clearly not um an easy option and so i think you know that in when we were looking at the lessons that need to be learned from the ukraine crisis i mean i'm obviously going to defer to andrew but it seems like a pretty clear one is that if you are going to have a real defense that you have to get things in position early that you don't have this option of waiting till the war breaks out and then eventually sending supplies and so the efforts that the administration is trying to make to accelerate arm sales to change the nature of those arms sales for more asymmetric defense in taiwan i mean i think that needs to be redoubled especially given some of the scary timelines we're looking at or possible conflict over taiwan yeah if i if i could just add to that you know to the difference of thinking so i'm about to go military orders out here for a nato thing next week and i've done some nato stuff and and all my pme with the military and i get on that annoying person that every time we learn something i'm like none of this applies to to war with china like you're not going to do any of this when it comes to fighting a war with china i remember we had some great briefers come explain to us like medevac type of things like how quickly they can get someone from afghanistan to a hospital in germany and and i sort of brought up a born asia and they were like well i mean we're not even going to come get people and i'm like well do your pilots know that i mean we have this this whole generation of military people who are used to thinking about war in a certain way and it's like we can't even get close like you're on your own like once you fly over there like you're on your own so so a lot of the way that we think about fighting wars is is is a lot harder when it when it comes to china and absolutely like resupply is like not going to be happening now your question then kind of turn to this harder question of like is taiwan even important uh and it's something you know as someone who's pretty quickly deployable for these things like i think about a lot and and i come down to sort of two main points which are not potentially like rigorous in terms of like academic thinking but the way i think about i mean the first is war is really easy to avoid if you give the other side everything they want and at some point you know for the united states china being able to control asia which is the primary goal of with of which taiwan is sort of the cornerstone of it asia is the most important region of the world like asia today is what europe was during the cold war and people say well maybe china would be nice like once they controlled our futures all i can say is like anytime china is at any power they have used it right and i don't mean i don't want to get extreme about this but i'm just thinking about like if china had the ability to determine who got 10 years of universities in the united states if china had the ability to freeze our accounts when they don't like what we say or what we do i mean they're gonna cut off all of our access to asia for trade for goods for you know our alliances anything like they're gonna use that power and so we are left with either the ability to deter china from regression in which china is going to be very unhappy or china will be undeterred but happy but we but we can't have it both ways and so from my perspective taiwan is just the first part it's less about taiwan for me and more about the fact that the united states has to be in a position to protect its security and protect its interests against chinese coercion and aggression and that to me is where the line starts good morning commander jim calling us coast guard this is primarily for dr beckley given the list of liabilities you described in the fact that even though companies and countries are attempting to decouple from china the global economy still immensely intertwined with theirs and how likely is it that they will accidentally or intentionally take the rest of the world or be willing to take the rest of the world down with them in an attempt to avoid stagnation or decline if you mean take the rest of the world down with them because of an economic crisis kind of the old adage that you know when the united states economy sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold it's not on the same level as what the united happened in the 2008 financial crisis where the us caught a very major cold and the rest of the world suffered horrifically simply because the chinese market is roughly three to four times smaller even though china's gdp is bigger a lot of chinese consumers don't spend as much so countries just aren't nearly as invested in the chinese market as they are in the american market china obviously is not floating a global currency um and china's new inroads are primarily as orianna said in the developing world trying to dole out loans there and build infrastructure so those countries might suddenly suffer a credit crunch because their main creditor has suddenly dried up and is no longer willing to dole out that kind of finance that could cause a whole raft of political instability in the developing world but if you actually look at trade and there's been really interesting studies done recently about the formation of economic blocks between the united states and its mostly rich western democratic allies and china's sort of motley crew of economic partners and there was actually surprisingly surprising amount of of trade going on within those blocks and less going across the blocks than you might assume and entire industries like um you know internet firms are already largely walled off in china so i think people actually tend to overestimate the potential global depression inducing effects of a seizure in the chinese economy although obviously there would be major effects other questions please in the back and then we'll come in front hi there steve white ron levy this is to dr becley initially but anyone obviously can uh can jump in um gideon rachman spoke about easternization um so with china at the center of a shift of the global balance of power over the past half century which continues today so even if china is a risen power as you suggest we're we anticipate other asian countries to continue to rise for example india who demographic will take over from china's the most populous country so how how could the us move from a period of great power competition to great power cooperation even if that may mean losing influence in certain regions such as western decolonization in the past so um if it depends on which country you're talking about so in some areas china is sort of doing the hard work for the united states by itself so simply by scaring a country like india which might otherwise gravitate towards china for economic reasons uh you kind of pushed india not into the us camp but certainly willing to engage much more with united states than they otherwise might be i think in a world where china is no longer the only sort of strong economy in in asia that the united states actually has tremendous amounts of flexibility in order to pick and choose partners on a bilateral basis there at the same time i don't i don't think there's really much risk of the united states losing other trade venues and the sort of easternization that rockman talks about i think is primarily about the decline of europe from its superpower status largely for demographic reasons and while i think there's a ton of truth there sometimes i think this is another area where the media representation is maybe overstating it at least in the short term because like the g7 alone controls more than half the world's wealth like real net wealth people tend to assume it's much more evenly distributed or rapidly shifting to asia that's only true if you're measuring wealth through something like gdp which is just a measure of activity if you look at the real assets and wealth it's still highly concentrated among very wealthy powers many of which are still located in europe and so even if their populations decline their share of global gdp declines it doesn't mean that they're unimportant actors or that the united states can't sustain major trading relationships with europe north america through the western hemisphere and then picking partners elsewhere um to to come along in this new trading network uh good morning captain bencip early i work in navy strategy and concepts in the pentagon uh first of all thank you very much for the incredible panel all of your perspectives have been fantastic this morning my question is really directed at dr may but i'd really appreciate uh dr beckley and and dr uh master's comments as well so the 2018 nds really talked about the importance of the gray zone the commission report uh the 2022 nds at least the what has been released on it so far has talked about the importance of campaigning uh we know that this is a tactic that our adversaries use our adversaries use and for some reason while we discuss its importance we never actually make uh either policy decisions or strategy or concepts that relate to how are we actually going to compete in the gray zone and so i just like from a net assessment perspective do you see this is an important factor to include uh and if so what are some recommendations on how we can do this better uh well thank you for the question i uh i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna dodge it uh by saying first of all you know and one of the important things for us is that we not um as an office we're more sort of where you are which is we identify this as an emerging trend and suggest that maybe this is a a trended warfare and identify certain kinds of capabilities we're likely to need in contingencies we ought to be preparing for um and then we would want the secretary to work out what to do about it with the with the people who are going to do the the implementation right i mean uh i i find generally it doesn't osd has a lot of people in it who think they can come in as civilians and tell the services what to do and while i'm a big believer in civilian control um that very rarely works out right i mean what you really want is for the the secretary and the services to to come up with a solution together that they really both believe in uh and so i'm very cherry of of as a career civilian sitting in osd and telling telling the services how to solve this problem uh but i certainly agree with you that it's a a a trend in how militaries have been behaving and it's a little bit to what oriano was saying earlier it's a it's a classic uh case of kind of a major aspect of our core business is changing and we're reluctant to acknowledge it the tools and the measures that we have invested in for the last several decades and which we are proficient aren't especially useful in these cases um and so i think the tendency has been generally to um write them off as one-offs rather than as a potential trend in the character of conflict um and i think i'm going to stop stop kind of dancing here and and see if either of the other panelists have anything more um uh pointed or concrete that they'd like to say thank you i could add a few thoughts i have a lot of ideas about brazen well i'll try to keep it brief i mean the first thing is we got to close the gaps right that china is exploiting we like to like protect like we'll be like oh there's all this norms and consensus and china's breaking them like taiwan agrees with china's position on the south chinese city not helpful taiwan india agrees with china's position on the ability to regulate military activities in the eases not helpful india right there's there is actually no strong consensus as much as we want to believe there is about our views of freedom of navigation what military should be able to you know do in all of these waters there is a contingent of countries that are more in line with chinese thinking and so we have to do the work to really build up that norm and there's a lot of ways we can make this harder for china i mean i think we should be doing a lot of summit diplomacy with southeast asian countries and get them not to agree you know which islands or whose islands but make explicit statements of maritime rights that are associated with those islands i've already mentioned the idea of maybe including easy is as part of our of our defense packs with other countries freedom of country is to you know exploit their own eases and the last thing i'll say about closing the gaps is we're always like what are chinese intentions did they do it on purpose did they not do it on purpose it doesn't matter we should stop spending our time trying to figure out what chinese intentions are and start telling china what we're gonna think based on certain behavior so one of my favorite books which is somewhat unread because he wrote so many other brilliant ones is the logic of images by robert juris and when she talks about sort of coupling signals and and if if you know as a just a personal relationship right if your wife says to you if you don't get me flowers i feel like you don't love me there's nothing you can do to uncouple that signal right you can give all the rationales in the world but once the signal is coupled the meaning goes with that action we should be doing this with the chinese all the time we should you know it doesn't matter if something like the state directed this or not directed this or if this was rogue or not rogue we will say like we will take any major military exercise in the south china see as a sign of preparations for the invasion of taiwan for example this is just a random example so the chinese this isn't a red line because we don't tell them how we're going to respond but we tell them how we view the situation which they cannot change because the signal is coupled but that they know what a proportionate response would be right we we are saying we think you're preparing for the attack of taiwan then they see our response in a certain different light and so in general i think we can complicate their use of the gray zone so it's not quite as effective as it's been but we've just been like bumbling around being like but let's talk about it and like like tell us how you feel about it and why you're doing this and like can we have a discussion when that's not really you know china is doing this stuff on purpose and so we need to lay out you know how we feel about it what we're going to think about it how you know and and the chinese can then make their own decisions internally about whether or not they want to change their behavior or a very good point suggested one thing to me which is i think one of the challenges we have in this respect and one of the big asymmetries between our system of government or our way of thinking in the chinese is that our government is overwhelmingly constituted by people who have come out of law school and they tend to one they were attracted to law school for particular reasons but certainly by that training they tend to think a lot about norms and rules and red lines and proportionate responses and they they think in a legal sort of framework well i mean that is just not where the chinese leadership comes from nor the russian leadership and so their whole view of rules and norms and how these things should be established and what order should look like i mean they're just going to be completely different just for that reason forget the cultural reasons right which are themselves profound and one of the things i one of the habits i believe our senior leaders often fall into is thinking that the rest of the world comes out of a similar type of intellectual training that in fact is almost unique to to western countries and then i'd just like to apologize i i know we started a bit late but i have to run into the building for a for a meeting so i'm going to sign off but i as you can tell i like talking about net assessment and net assessment topics and if there are people who'd like to follow up with me separately please please go ahead and do so get in touch and i'll be sure to follow up with you and thank you again to the to the college and and and all of you for for hosting me thank you well thank you very much and and i think we'll end it there because we are at risk of going beyond and we i know we have a hard stop at at noontime so please join me with hearty and great round of applause for our speakers good afternoon to all of our current strategy forum attendees it is now my honor to introduce the 38th commandant of the united states marine corps general david berger uh good afternoon and uh first thanks admiral shutfield for allowing me to speak with this group and some of you all probably have heard i i have a tremendous amount of respect for admiral shutfield and i've worked alongside her before you could not ask for a better not just person to run the college but really just flat out leadership so i'm i'm her biggest fan i would just tell you up front um thanks also to all the distinguished faculty and guests who are part of this forum and i am uh aware that the cno spoke already and that's now you get a now you get a great pairing of both of us for me this morning i got to i had a privilege of speaking to the graduating class at marine corps university in quantico and then this afternoon i get to spend time with you all so it's really just a phenomenal special day for me personally so with that uh first class of 22 uh early congratulations and uh i can what i consider graduating from an elite institution and people use that phrase i think too much but it's accurate in your in the case of naval war college i know very very aware that you've been involved in some pretty hefty discussions and thought about net assessment and great power competition i'm not sure that i rate the really the distinction of being the last speaker with the expertise that you've been exposed to so far but uh i i will hope to make a case for how net assessment is helping shape our force going forward and afterwards really want to hear your thoughts either here on the net or by email as a follow-up because really that's probably the most important aspect of today so let me get right to it um i'm going to start first by stating an obvious point that i'm pretty sure everybody there will agree with which is the age in which the u.s military enjoyed really assured cross-domain or all-domain dominance over our enemies is over at least for a while in fact and i would argue in some areas and domains we are losing more fighting advantages at a pace that sometime in the near future may leave us with parody at best and uh as you all are aware uh we engaged in a couple decades of conflict in the middle east and afghanistan and rightfully so uh but our competitors were watching and learning and i would say uh you could make the argument that the prc has been observing and adapting back as early as the 1990s which means some total there are 30 years into a really a systemic adaptation so focused on the task at hand in oif and oef we used all the proven tools and methods as a marine corps and a joint force that were required to succeed in a protracted campaign ashore but in doing so i would offer to you we lost sight of what was in front of us what was to come i think we should acknowledge that a number of very talented individuals primarily in the navy many of whom were affiliated with naval war college started thinking about the future and in the process developed as what we came to know as air sea battle and while that may have been ahead of its time and overshadowed by the demands of the current many of the foundational thinkers behind air sea battle i believe were right but they were in the minority everyone else was very hyper focused on the present most everyone except for our potential adversaries who were preparing so what were they prepared for well they were preparing for us and they specifically designed their strategies their militaries even their industries to counter us supremacy and military advantages and to do so effectively they utilized net assessment and they did it i think pretty well today in the case of china most estimates agree that we may meet today we maintain warfighting advantages in space uh undersea and seabed warfare and long range penetrating airborne surveillance and strike and those are substantial advantages to be sure and some may argue that we may still have an advantage in offensive cyber and nuclear second strike but even these advantages are eroding and we may reach parity with our potential adversaries much sooner than we thought that said i would offer to you parity is not necessarily a disadvantage and marshal many of you know have read or have met him this is what he said in 1966 merely adding up all us forces and comparing them actual or potential present or future does not really tell one very much well if that's the case then so why net assessment well for starters a leading pla military official in 2012 described andy marshal as one of the most important figures in changing chinese defense thing thinking in the 90s and the 2000s so i figure if they listen to him we probably ought to also and of course mr baker jim baker who you had the pleasure of listening to earlier but the reality is the chinese probably have done a little better job of listening and learning than we have they are completing i would argue one of the most ambitious and impressive military overhauls in history and on the surface it appears to have been the product of conscious thought projected over an extended time span kind of sounds like net assessment net assessment encourages us to take that extended view and warrants against short-term decisions subject to the budgetary and political pressures of the day as americans we tend to think through one of two lenses the new cycle or maybe the rotation of political administrations and i admit even after three years of being a common on in this job it's very difficult to look beyond the next meeting the next budget cycle or the next crisis but we must if we want to compete effectively with our pacing threat another aspect of chinese modernization that merits our attention is a clear definition of the competition they are in the problem in other words they are trying to solve and that problem was us as admiral aquilino stated in his confirmation hearing last year china's goals are to supplant u.s security leadership in the region overall and generate a change in the international rules to the benefit of the prc now that might not be an easy problem for them to solve but it certainly is a clearly defined problem and they have a clearly defined remedy systems destruction warfare which is based on their net assessment sense strategic forecasting anyone who is interacted with a practitioner of net assessment recognizes in them a universal trait the ability to discover and properly frame the critical question at stake problem framing as an example for the plan the right question is not how to prevent us submarines and surface combatants from operating in the near sea or contested spaces the right question for them is how to take advantage of systemic vulnerabilities like the need we have to reload the ls or to refuel i think that is the question they're probably asking themselves what's the overlook but important common denominator for those questions you probably picked up on logistics but more on that in a minute a few years ago general meller my predecessor made a simple but powerful assessment of the state of the marine corps he said the marine corps is not organized trained equipped or postured to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving future operating environment i could not agree more and while not the product of a formal net assessment it was an accurate identification of the central problem for the u.s. marine corps knowing what he knew about the changing character of war and where we stood as a force general meller properly framed the issue and for the record general meller was a lifelong student of idf operations and of successful military adaptation but asking the right question by asking that in the right way our 37th common not before me forced us to look at ourselves and ask if we do nothing what's the result was i'm sure most of you are aware over the past three years the marine corps has undertaken a modernization effort in answer to that question and that effort involved change changes necessary to align with the national defense strategy and defense planning guidance and like most change many of the decisions were really hard to make they were about things you could probably guess where should we invest limited resources to either gain or maintain a relative advantage what is the relevance of certain capabilities and platforms what are the models for organization and employment of the force within the context of service and joint war fighting concepts those decisions were based on many of the tools employed in that assessment including scenario thinking war games we used modeling and simulation we use trend analysis and those tools produced estimates on which we began to act so for us embarking on a campaign of learning that reveals new insights every day every week that refines our estimates and betters our understanding of the problem and i will not pretend today that we've gotten everything right we have not but i do know that we haven't gotten logistics right but we're not alone in that regardless estimates are often wrong and decisions of this magnitude deserve scrutiny but for an estimate to be wrong it has to exist first and then be tested and that process of iterative learning that's important given the complexity of today's operating environment in some ways the bureaucracy was like intentionally created and structured here in the department of defense in the pentagon to prevent rapid change unfortunately the pace of change exceeds the pace of our bureaucracy but this is why we had to get started and why we will press forward we cannot afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good through time-consumptive research and analysis the world is simply changing too fast i echo andy marshals thought that when he said i'd rather have a decent answer to the right question than great answers to irrelevant questions that's what happens if we do nothing we become irrelevant earlier i pointed out the obvious that we no longer have a decisive advantage in most domains against the pacing threat and this is a problem we should become comfortable with because the reality is the pace of innovation is creating a paradigm we have not seen before like all of you i'm watching and learning from the conflict in Ukraine and other recent conflicts and i'm seeing signs that point to the shifts on the battlefield by the way if you haven't read um seven seconds to die this is about the recent conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh i would command you to add that to your reading list simple inexpensive systems are growing the relative power of small distributed forces against traditional large formations and i know many others have recognized this for a long time within the marine corps there were many who watched the 2006 second Lebanon war they reached the same conclusion including retired marine dr tx hams who's written about this for years former signs of great power strength like aircraft carriers and tanks and exquisite aircraft aviation platforms even joint forcible entry capabilities are now increasingly vulnerable in an age of abundant sensors unmanned systems and long range precision missiles those are these are strategic asymmetries and in the model of net assessment we need to embrace asymmetries and exploit them i think to our advantage we may not be in an unrivaled military power anymore but beyond pure rivalry we can institute changes that highlight the differences between us and any adversary when it comes to our people our organizations our technology and our network of course of allies and partners and this will require more hard decisions and more change we're going to need to decide what capabilities to invest in to maximize asymmetric advantage things like algorithmic warfare and space denial counter space denial capabilities this may require accepting parity in other areas like defensive cyber and mobile ground launch precision fires or conceivably even hypersonics though these still require enormous effort and investment i think it also might require us to thin out or divest of redundant capabilities fourth generation aviation attack helicopters sustainment heavy ground vehicles at a minimum we're going to need to reimagine their use on the future battlefield and the Marine Corps has done both to this point but our priority is providing the joint force with a competitive advantage our primary bid to do that is to act as a stand-in force providing the naval or the joint force commander extended reach really sort of as the leading edge of a maritime defense in depth or or an expeditionary network of sense and strike options that creates disruption for an adversary as we sit here today this afternoon more than 30 000 board deployed and forward station Marines are doing just that and that's not a new role for the Marine Corps but it is certainly reimagined on today's battlefield I think never before really have we encountered the undersea portion of the maritime domain but net assessment tells us we ought to take notice in order to maximize our advantage there whether our aircraft delivers sonobuys or emerging uuv capability grants us sensing to build the maritime picture we owe it to the joint force to do that and it's no secret that I think amphibs are a short or a source of competitive war fighting advantage can note the PLAN expansion in amphibious capability but if the threat precludes their delivery of marines and ground equipment what's to say they can't carry and deliver uuvs and AUVs that sort of thicken and expand our undersea advantage another thought what if marines on amphibs provided a mobile advanced base to reload vls this creates advantage through logistics in an utterly sort of unimagined reimagined way space space has never before been a regular topic at our schools and training venues in the marine corps but we may need to host capabilities from forward positions or provide terrestrial calm communication solutions for the force to operate on should we become denied or degraded and we assume that we will and we're going to continue to provide lethal options of course to the joint force commander but that may occur by facilitating the kill chain gaining and maintaining custody of targets providing terminal guidance to munitions launched hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles away i think that is maneuver warfare it's just a modern application of it and if we can do these things instead of attacking the enemy directly we're attacking the very assessments that shape their strategy and we don't know yet everything the stand-in force can provide but by merit of their existence inside the weapon engagement zone and that might be as a marine littoral regiment or marine expeditionary unit or traditional formation i do know all of that will create opportunities for the naval component for the joint force and and our partners and allies to gain advantage and that's what we offer as a core and it's absolutely asymmetric to anything our adversaries have to offer we intend to keep it that way and we owe it to you and anyone else who fights alongside us i think to do so but perhaps i've demonstrated you'll be the judge of it my belief in net assessment i'm a believer i don't claim to be an expert but as a force your marine core is trying to incorporate and be better at it if not i'll close with this and then see what's on your mind in 2013 six former secretaries of defense wrote a letter to the president in opposition to a proposal to shutter the office of net assessment because that's what was on the table at the time they were going to close it and in it they said that andrew marshall's office had quote repeatedly paid enormous dividends during some of the most challenging periods in our recent history we're now entering another such period one in which the contributions of the office of net assessment will be needed every bit as much as they have in the past friends i don't i don't think we're entering that time we're here and i urge each of you to see the value of net assessment and to serve as practitioners for the challenges that we face again admiral shatfield i'm deeply humbled for the opportunity to join you all today and i look forward to your questions or your feedback and i'll turn it back over to you ma'am general my name is sam tengreddy uh i've got three quick questions for you all interrelated maybe you have three quick answers they're all related to your new direction of the marine core the first is stand-in force what if the philippines don't let you in the second is concerning naval strike missile and other weapons are getting what makes you think the plan is going to come within range to conduct their operations and finally what force is going to take the future uh pla and uh bases and the solomons and jibouti and other places thanks sam can you just the third part i just want to make sure i get it right what was the third part of this uh what what forces uh are gonna take the future chinese bases and the solomon islands and jibouti and uh others on a global basis got it a three four all right um to take back the you're talking about the pla and prc bases in the indopacific region and around the world if i heard you right okay let me tackle them uh and you let me know if i don't scratch the itch here what if the republic of the philippines or any other sovereign nation doesn't let the u.s uh use their territory that's the beauty of being an amphibious expeditionary force and our partnership with the navy that an expeditionary base for us could be a board ship sometimes the best expeditionary advanced base is not terra firma it's an amphibious ship so we will go where nations allow us to go uh if the philippines denies us that capability we'll operate from the sea um i think uh our take on it is you know politically the the winds change as in our country administration to administration we will need to be uh operationally and strategically able to flex with that but if at a certain given time there are restrictions on what the government of the philippines the republic of the philippines where other nations have will certainly abide by that but we are we are by nature a seago and force so sometimes the best platforms aren't aren't assured second what if the pln doesn't come in our range well we're not that's not going to be a problem because we're going to stay inside their range persistently they're going to be in in the range of our collection systems we're going to be in the range of theirs mutually we're not going to back away outside of their range this is actually the sweet spot the comfortable spot for the Marine Corps sort of i don't know a great analogy whether it's boxing or martial arts but the in close where both of you are in range of each other's collection systems sensors and weapon systems this is where the historically this is where the strength of the Marine Corps operation so we're not going to allow them to back up and we're not going to back up we're going to operate persistently persistently within each other's weapons and sensors ranges third what what forces are going to take back bases that the pr prc may have taken if we need to if the us or the joint force or an international force needs to take them back it'll be marines we will and and do today retain the the joint force of entry capability as a power projection force but it's going to be in a different way than uh you know some folks envision mentally about a you know two brigade coming across two colored beaches sort of approaches it's not going to be that but with the tools we have now we don't need to do nor want to do it in the same way it's not going to be a bunch of Amtrak's plowing across a beach we're going to we're going to if we need to take back some some real estate then we have by air by sea and and in all domains we have the means to do that we have better tools than we had 20 years ago 30 years ago so it'll be the marines with the Navy to that teamwork of the Navy and the Marine Corps together that takes those bases back if we're directed to and just let me know if i if sam if i didn't cover all the bases there thank you very much sir afternoon sir major robert bendy united states marine corps my question is what do you see as the most critical domain excuse me what do you see as the most critical domain and the operational warfighting function be it logistics needed for successful operations against china and the end of pacific theater thank you you well that's a fantastic question um just make sure i'm narrowing the question down to make sure i grasp it what do i think is the most critical domain within the logistics warfighting function or as it relates to the uh work logistics warfighting function but don't let me put words in your mouth here no sir kind of a two part what do you see as the most critical domain and then additionally what the most critical work operational warfighting function is it logistic system yeah second part is easy that i think the most critical warfighting function is logistics going forward um although i would tell you i'm an i am in a minority there even among my peers i think they would tell you command and control or perhaps fires i would proffer that it's it's neither of those at the at the highest level in other words against a peer adversary anything less than that i think certainly it's another probably warfighting function but at a peer-to-peer level it's going to be logistics the one who the one who can properly account for that in their war planning uh is is going to have a clear clear advantage and all the other all the other functions uh aren't going to work if you in other words if you fail to do that so i think like logistics is the driver going forward again in a peer-to-peer kind of uh competition or campaigning what's the most critical domain boy that's a fantastic question i suppose it depends on what the adversary is that you're dealing with do you have a particular adversary in mind are you talking about writ large what do i think is the most critical domain no sir for the for china in the endo pacific theater yeah for china in the endo pacific what's the most critical domain wow that's a great question you could make an argument probably at least three domains come to mind that you could make a strong argument for any of them i'll give you one that probably most people are not going to talk about it and it might be if not decisive um relative to the other ones what's the most critical domain it could be information um and i'm very conscious not to draw too many lessons too quick out of an ongoing conflict but more and more and more even outside of the ukraine conflict i'm watching the impact of information that domain on everything that uh two parties in conflict have in other words you can win the kinetic part and lose the information part and lose it overall um i don't see how you can win if you're losing the information space so i i think you could make an argument for several domains and probably all of them would be really compelling arguments but in terms of learning for me the information domain can might be critical uh the most critical in your words what's the most critical domain it could be that you if you gain an advantage there early on sort of like you know that uh book uh i can't think of his name there and the author the navy captain although show is going to tell me in a second here about shooting first he who shoots first um she she knows the author but i can't pull it out of my brain right now these but anyway i think in the information space it's sort of like the kinetic space only more powerful you get in front of that early shooting first in other words with information gives you a clearer relative advantage the visa v the prc but i think you could make an argument out of several domains i'm just giving you mine and so i'm gonna at before i hang up today you have to tell me who the captain something navy captain retired you just passed away last year a year before wane hueser yeah sam thank you god i would stay up all night thank you show sir thank you very much for your time my name's barrett won i'm a former uh war college professor now with leidos uh pulling the string on your discussion today about future technologies and reimagining uh roles i just wanted to know what your thoughts were regarding the use of autonomous vehicles vessels in support roles i e like supply and if any other potential usage uh for autonomy um yes i would say uh here we got to get past some emotional uh or not emotional we got to get past some biases here frankly um in in through through several lenses but assume we can vault pass over the biases that we carry around with us and go towards autonomy um first area logistics logistics logistics logistics logistics there's for all the reasons i mentioned earlier i think it is it is a determining function perhaps going forward and the more we can um allow systems to take the load off of manned systems and manned decision makings we're going to be in a better place logistically and that way the mental capacity and physical capacity we do have to apply to logistics that is necessarily manned is much less and we'll be able to do much more this is the asymmetric part i was trying to highlight if we both go at it symmetrically in logistics and apply an autonomy on the top of that i think we're we're back at parity again we don't have an advantage the value of autonomy in other words to me in areas like logistics is the anticipated anticipatory forecasted sort of mode where things are put in place are moving into place just ahead of the maneuver unit just ahead of the user and they're doing it without anybody any human being making conscious decisions they're anticipating that and by in doing that they're that generates tempo that generates relative velocity relative speed compared to your adversary so autonomy there absolutely yes the tough part is i think we're looking some people look at autonomy in the basket of a weapon system oh my god we're going to take the human out of the loop and machines are going to you know be on the kinetic end of things and i park park that off to the side and say there's probably like 17 other areas where comfortably we can apply autonomy now fast and gain a relative advantage over it really anyone else on the globe we can't be hamstrung here by human in the loop bias you know ethical concerns and i don't want to go any faster than we can solve that wicked problem we need to move much quicker than that so everything from logistics to intelligence collection which we're already applying now some autonomy too but there's so much capacity here for speed for operational and tactical tempo we're looking at mq-9s now that are autonomous takeoff and landing well why would we not want to do that so that you could use them in a way in other words in a large region that really maximizes their legs their ranges but they can land on some other field where you don't have any people already preset in place to land them do why would you not want to do that autonomously so i think from logistics to collection systems in a lot of areas we'll we'll work our way past the kinetic lethal part but that should not slow us down in advance in the value of autonomy and it's not as a replacement for in my mind it says an augment for so that whatever mental capacity you have left your carbonate a portion of it and something's taken care of that already afternoon general major courage United States Marine Corps curious sir your name's been dropped by a bunch of the other service chiefs in terms of how to enact change you've talked a bit about speed and the ability to change internally i think at least in recent history in terms of cutting things internally to pay for things today as a model going forward we just read a story this morning about the house armed services committee forced the navy to keep its commitment to amphibious ships just curious on your take where you're sitting at now with making some of the bold changes that you have with force design is that the way you change an organization looking at it with where you're sitting at now and having some some time from your initial white letter to the marine corps major curse i don't know if it's the wave of the future my understanding of force design as it's defined in in joint terminology us joint terminology was force development was the near term like one to two years sort of annual or or at most biannual sort of look at where we are make adjustments move ahead which i was very familiar with coming from command at quantico that was my job as force development for a couple of years so i was i knew i understood force development the joint definition of force design sort of analogous to uh to um non-military organizations whenever your organization reaches the point where those incremental gradual evolutionary sort of changes will not keep up with either technology or an adversary then you take a step back and whether you're a google or the u.s marine corps you look at where you need to be in the future and look at your organization fundamentally and see if you're going to be what you need to do to get to be suited for that so i don't know that it's a way for the future it's force design in other words it's not something that you do every year you do it episodically periodically when either in in our case the operating environment the adversary technology was moving at such a pace where my sense was that annual sort of force development machinery was not going to keep pace and we would at some point five six seven eight years into the future be at a relative disadvantage compared to the prc which is our pacing threat and we can't afford to to let that happen um hard to do of course right and the methodology we used is not perhaps normal we envisioned where we would need to be 10 years into the future with a lot of assumptions and then map it back to the force we have today and the concepts we have today as opposed to mapping forward if you're here and i need to get to there this is the steps to get us there we did it in reverse that's where we need to be so sort of like plan from the objective back which you know major curse kind of how we're how we're wired to think that's what we did yeah you gotta the the the decisions you have to make along the way are not certainly not easy ones and not actually once we could make a loan the navy had to be part of the discussion the secretary of defense because we're part of the joint force part of the discussion congress part of the discussion we had to convince in other words my challenge was convincing four different committees in congress these are the fundamental changes the marine corps going to need to make over the next four or five years i need your support so on multiple levels a lot of work by a lot of really brilliant people and a lot of briefs and explanations and q and a's i don't know that it's the wave of the future but certainly i would say our force development process is going to have to turn at a higher rpm then than it had to 10 years ago when the operating environment and technology we're not advancing at that pace they are today they put it in a different i've got a piece of paper here the show is going to love this like holding something up here and this is way oversimplified but that's the way the u.s. thinks it's like a linear line right we like x amount of change per year we can adjust to it we can adapt we're very very comfortable with that so is congress so is everybody else that ain't the world we're more like we're more like moore's law right like things are happening so fast uh on a curve you either adapt to that or you're left behind well i think force design is working for the marine corps we're learning rapidly not everything is working but we have such brilliant field grade officers and staff and seos that they're as fast as they're experimenting is plugging back into the to the brain of the marine corps and saying we tried that it didn't work well try something try try a different way good afternoon general tenant commander r&d is navy supper shifting back conversation to logistics in our asymmetric advantage why not pivot away from laws to a more numerous attritable maybe even autonomous asset something similar to like a narco sub that's discussed in project agrippa this would give us some effort to solve the logistics hurdles that exist was if i think that there's we absolutely have to pursue that i don't know on the light amphibious worship the law i don't know if that's a long-term answer or not but i do know that sailing big lha's and lpds around inside the weapons engagement zone is going to come at a pretty high high risk so we need something that can move smaller units hundred seventy five hundred one hundred fifty marines around um they have to be affordable they have to be low signature um enough so that we can actually do distributed operations i think the the systems you're talking about either surface or subsurface absolutely yes all i know is what our requirement is what we need to be able to do which is tactically reposition forces dynamically inside of threats um targeting cycle collection and targeting cycle we have to be able to do that whether that's i know 50 laws or 35 laws or five laws and five autonomous vessels actually i'm agnostic to we just need the means so if you have a suggestion well boy i would love uh love to talk with you and um if especially if it's a not a platform but it's a capability that you're familiar with i'd love to get your uh your email address and just get exchange back and forth got that for action sir yeah he's got homework now right just what he wanted on the last week yeah comment on that is the last question we have time for to keep you on your schedule i know that everyone in this community uh and all of our attendees today are grateful to you for making time for us we know it's been a very busy day for you but your insights have really enriched our experience here and what a fantastic gift you've given to our future graduates who will walk the stage on friday as they prepare 75 of them here will prepare to return to their operational units and i know that they will have echoes in their heads of the things that you've said today the importance of framing questions and getting those questions right before applying so much time and effort to developing solutions first so sir i don't know if you have any final words but i know that this room is and those who are attending online are grateful uh admiral i have three pages now of questions and a bad little drawing so as usual i think i'm drawing away more from the from the audience than i'm offering i'm very grateful again admiral for just the chance today to spend time with you thank you thank you a warm round of applause please well this concludes our conference today i hope that you feel that the selection of this topic for our current strategy forum was both appropriate and useful as we close out this academic year and as you position yourselves to move forward in your careers taking on more and more responsibility and working to incorporate new concepts that you will be exposed to every day for the rest of your career i want to again thank professor mike surelock our really fantastic audio visual public affairs and events teams and all who are so productive in organizing this event and mike do you have anything to say on behalf of your team okay well okay in that case um have a nice afternoon i know that there are some events tomorrow um but i'll expect to see most of you under the tent on friday thank you


Great. Thank you Leonard. And thank you to the speaker because I think it really sets the stage in talking about this campaign and the origins. I've been involved in many campaigns throughout my career and I think that when we began the idea was to try something new. We didn't know if it was going to work, but we recognized that we really needed to be able to put the campaign into the hands of the migrants and put them in the driver's seat. So what I want to do is start by giving a bit of an overview of the campaign itself and talking through the design. As a bit of background, I wanted to talk about IOM role in voluntary return. So since January 2018, IOM has supported over 15,000 migrants in returning to their countries of origin. The vast majority of those are coming from the detention centers in Libya. And we know from the news reports the conditions that are there and the conditions that many of them met along the way. But an important thing to keep in mind is that returning home isn't always the same. In particular, attorneys when they come back to their communities, oftentimes they face obstacles to reintegration. You have to put their code in. This code? A lot of this is difficult to stigma and discrimination that they encounter in the communities when they come back. I think that in particular the challenge is that many of them, the communities had such high expectations for these people. When they left, they often pooled together the resources from the community to send this bright young person to make their fortune. So oftentimes when they return to their communities, they're ostracized and they lack opportunities. So this is where migrants as messengers, as we designed the campaign, we wanted to take a new approach. We wanted to both be able to raise awareness but also to combat the stigma that so many of the returnees face when they're returning to their communities. And so the approach that we took is peer-to-peer messaging, recognizing, as the speakers before me said, that we as IOM or as governments here in Europe, we are not the ones to be sharing the messages and telling people what to do or what not to do. When in fact it's their peers, their communities, their friends and loved ones that they trust the most and have the most reliable understanding of the information shared. So our goal within the campaign was to capture and be able to share these really candid, authentic and powerful testimonies of the returnees through the campaign. The way that we wanted to design it was very much taking a participatory approach, making sure that the migrants themselves were in the driver's seat and were shaping the campaign rather than us coming in with our, here's our plan, here's our key messages, but they themselves through workshops were able to identify what are the messages that they wanted to share with their communities. And it was really fascinating as the returnees came together to discuss their experiences, the networks and the community that they found in these groups of, they're called VFOs, volunteer field officers. And in fact one of the outcomes that we didn't write into a project document we didn't expect was the psychosocial support that the returnees found as they came together rather than being isolated, feeling like, oh I've come home dejected and my family is disappointed at me, but they really found support within one another in these communities that they developed through the campaign. And so how are we going to capture these stories? This was the question. Everyone had a powerful story to tell, but we needed a way to leverage the mobile technology that we all carry around in our pockets that we have in our bags and turn them into community journalists. So this was an aim from the beginning of the campaign to be able to conduct the interviews through using mobile technology, easy video capture, and then allow them to be able to use their social media networks as well. There wasn't necessarily messaging coming from us. And in fact through the process we got a lot of inputs in terms of developing the mobile technology that was used in the project. And the key for us was a mobile toolkit that we developed called Community Response Act. And essentially what it does is it allows for migrants to be able to respond to a series of questions in a very candid way and be able to use those answers to share their stories. And we trained them using smartphone kits, so a small tripod, an external mic, and they were able to take on the role of community journalists in interviewing one another. One of the key things that I'd like to reiterate is that informed consent was critical in all of the activities that we did. And so the Community Response Act also integrates a digital consent form. So before we went to take photos and start interviewing the returnies, that it was shared with them, the project and the campaign, and how the stories were used. And as the returnies went out into the field, we started getting a cold catalog of really powerful testimonies, stories of return, that I think were honest to a level that we would never have been able to do if you or I walked into that returnies home. The willingness to share and the authenticity of those stories showed how genuine the stories were and I think that led to the credibility of the campaign. And also, in addition to the return, the returnies talked about the hope that they had. Many of them were starting new businesses. In fact, through this project, quite a number of returny associations have been formed. My colleague, Monica, will speak more to that, but I think that it gave the returnies more and more purpose. And these stories and folk were also really powerful for this campaign. As they collected stories, they saw kind of a transformation, rather than feeling dejected and ostracized and a few more competent. They became advocates saying, I don't want my brothers and my sisters to experience what I did. And over the process of the project, they became much more outspoken and more willing to share their stories. One of the key aspects of the campaign, in addition to the town halls, which could be about the impact evaluation, was social media. As we know, all of us are regularly on our social media feeds. But one critical component is that the campaign itself was more mechanic. So the spread was not boosted or not paying Facebook to send back these messages, but it was through the returnies leveraging their own networks that the messages went quite widespread to the communities of origin. And so when we compiled the numbers we saw that Leonard suggested 1,000 videos, there were actually over 5,000 videos across the countries where the campaign was implemented. Though a minority of returnies are female, we made a concerted effort to make sure that they were part of this campaign in the countries where it was implemented. And the VFOs, in fact, we had abandoned a smaller number of volunteer field officers, but we got regular requests for people to join this community of returnies that were captured stories. And so it continued to grow. And now we're all in phase two, we're going to expand to seven countries. So the original project, as in three countries, the next phase will be in seven countries. In terms of impact of that, I'll leave to the experts to talk about that. And I think that there's a great video. We'll share the link on the webinar. I don't think we're going to be able to play it at this time. But now I'd like to pass it over to my colleague, Muhammadou, who's going to talk more about the first-hand experience as an improvement. Thank you for introducing me here. It's not easy to speak after you. Well, coming to me first of all to speak on behalf of IA Senegal, and thank you for inviting us in this event. Every project we implement, every activity we carry out is an opportunity for us. And my friends as messengers have been a great experience that gave room for improvement in the planning implementation of other programs with electronics. Just being said, I would like to share with you our experience working with the voluntary field officers, of what VFOs have initiated, said it. Personally, I was tasked with conducting the direction process. So it was quite an easy task because we were receiving requests from the attendee members to join the program. And I would suggest that you can pass it. Yeah, thank you. We're asking them to meet their rights. Okay, if you're hearing us, please do meet your mic. Okay, and I also took part in the training of the volunteers. They had me, as Em said, we did not outline messages to be spread out. We said by volunteers, but they had their own messages. We helped them give them the tools to go outside and conduct peer-to-peer interviews and festivals. And I also had to charge to the coordination and monitoring of their field work. So I can say that I know each one of them pretty well. And I can tell you that I saw the transformation that Amy was talking about a while ago. In the beginning, at the Uptown, I saw them when they felt exhausted, which is my next slide. Yes, I saw them at the airport when they felt exhausted. This happened, worried certainly about the reaction of the families and the feeling of failure. And later on, I saw them gain more self-confidence. They built their self-esteem, become influencers and change makers in their communities. In the beginning, they tried to be from the camera, not wanted to appear public. But later on, they took initiatives, conducted peer-to-peer interviews and facilitated crowd-reviews. May I present that I studied with IOM at IOM with Microsoft's Messenger, and it was hard for me to see that the activities we are doing, the project we are implementing, is having a real effect on the scrutiny migrants. And yes, the migrants, as Amy said, underwent a series of trainings. But before getting to that, I would like to share with you the introduction to one of our volunteers. His name is Ismael Barji. I will tell you where I told him. Ismael Barji is a 29-year-old Brutani migrant who dropped his at least at the university level and tried to migrate to Europe. On his way to Libya, in the desert, his convoy was attacked by harrier robbers and they were stripped of all their belongings, left to his little nothing. Nevertheless, Barji managed to reach Libya, where unfortunately he fell in by hands once again. And was captured and imprisoned. In 2017, with the support of IOM, Barji returned to Casa Mons with his village in the south of Senegal. Here is what he read in his story. Barji said that despite his fears, his family was very supportive and very welcoming. But he did not feel the same, because he felt ashamed. As if he felt them, because they invested a lot of money in his trip, they contributed. So Brutani like this is sort of betraying him. He couldn't go out and spend all his days in those enjoying with the company of two of his friends, who would advise him, who would take him out from time to time and make him realize that finally it was, as he said, the end of the road. I would like to say that this is the story of one of our volunteers, but the volunteers might take the symbols, they might end up with the same challenges, but each of their stories is unique and specific on its own. So if you allow me, I would like to play... I forgot my powerpoint. This is Barji, it's my letter that I introduced to you a while ago. And I would like to play the two short video clips. One is Adama Jalo, he is a Lutheran migrant. He is talking about his experience in Libya. And the second one is the 17 years old Brutani migrant, Amudu Jalo, who is talking about his family welcoming him at his居民. So I would like to watch too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This was Adama Jalo, now we are listening to Amudu Jalo. This is Adama Jalo, he is talking about his family welcoming him at his居民. This is Adama Jalo, he is talking about his family welcoming him at his居民. Being a Senegalese and being also the age-mate, because most of the volunteers are between 18 and 25, I can really understand the struggle to meet the pressure they feel when they come home and all the stress they are going through. To help them from the experience and share their stories, we gave them a series of trainings to in public speaking and to help them improve their leadership potential and faster their entrepreneurship. So they conducted, they represented the market, so they conducted peer-to-peer interviews with the community response app. They facilitated debates and they engaged with media, working with people who give the same experience. In fact, I gave them a platform of exchange where they can share and speak to people who can relate, to people who give the same experience. And this sort of therapy, because it was not easy in the beginning for them to search deep down of their experiences and speak it out. So the fact of getting together between peers, between people who share the same history almost, it helped them improve and feel better socially. So after the trainings, they were now ready to go outside and engage with media. As you see in this picture, we see the media. They are talking on radio. They are interviewed by the press. They are interviewed on TV by the local and international media. These pictures were taken with the International Alliance Day. Which was the framework of the TAMF, the Modernization Film Festival. So you see the VF was interviewed in five seconds.  Now, I would like to talk a bit about the film type evaluation. I will go deep down in the technical space. This is up to you guys. So I would like to highlight the participation of the volunteers in the impact evaluation. Before we started the impact evaluation, the non-volunteers were invited to a meeting, to a workshop, where they brainstormed on how to facilitate the case. Actually, the questions they were asking to the participants during the impact evaluation were drafted and were chosen by themselves. They are the ones who took the questions and also contributed to the one video that we screened during the impact evaluation. The impact evaluation was in this format. We had streaming, we had debates and were fascinated by the poll and shared, and we had after-data poll. Now, this is the experience that generally will not be comfortable with. It is a good and bad memory. The first test day of the impact evaluation, I remember when we were leaving the office, we were all excited, and we were placing pets here. I was the most hopeful one. I was expecting hundreds and hundreds of people. But when we arrived at the venue, we found that it was not the number we were expecting, actually, and we were so disappointed that we had to go to the office and try to find quite a formula, which we did, fortunately. But imagine during that first day, among the few people that attended that stream, one of them was just a week away from trouble, from taking over. He had his trip already planned, and he was just a week away from trouble. And after watching the movie and listening to the volunteers, he established his mind and said that he is not taking the risk. This is not an isolated case. This is the same reaction we had all over the impact evaluation process. And this is the real impact that Microsoft Messengers is having on the communities. So, in this specific phase, we hope to talk with more people and impact more lives. Thank you. Very much. A slight change in the agenda. We're going to do the coffee break now. I'm very sure I'll understand and jump into the results of the report. So, a big break.