[applause] >> good afternoon, everybody. it is good to be. secretary, i didn't see. good to see you. it is an honor to be here. thanks very much to all csis, doctor henry, thank you. it's kind of interesting being a vice chairman. it's kind of not, i don't know how you would describe it but it's, until you have experienced it it's hard to imagine all the things that happen when you're vice chairman but there's an interesting dynamic that happens because on 18 november i change commit at your strategic command. what a a changean commit change commit at you strategic command i was in command of 150,000 americans that went to work every day to do, and 150,000 americans, interesting element in command structure. and then on the 21st of november i swore in as vice chairman of joint chiefs of staff and if went to a staff of five because i'm actually not ie command of anything anymore. i have no command responsibilities. i don't command anything, and when we drove out of omaha on the way over here, and were in a little bit of a hurry because the children had been without a vice chairman for a little while and he wanted me there quick so we were moving pretty fast across the country and my wife looked over at me so in kentucky and said, this feels quite different, doesn't it? i said, what you mean? and shehe said, well, it's likea huge burden is lifted off your shoulders. even when you're -- use were in as vice chairman that word will not be there to guide the direct responsibility for not just the 150,000 soldiers, sailors and marines in the command also the nuclear weapons of the united states of america. each and every day. 150,000 sold marines and the command that the nuclear weapons of the united states of america. each and every day. the movement of every one of those weapons and the readiness of every one of those weapons and when i started there was a space capabilities cyber capabilities and all the pieces that came across and all of a sudden there i am in the middle of the kentucky and it's all gone. then i swear in as vice chairman and now i'm an advisor.that's what my job is, i'm an advisor.the second highest ranking person that was introduced that's true but i'm just an advisor and i'm not in the chain of command. the chain of command goes for the president, secretary defense to the combat commanders. i'm not in the chain of command anymore but i very critical position where my advice is very important. my advice on as a member of the joint chiefs of staff and statutory responsibility there i take very seriously my advice on the fourth design of the future capabilities of the united states, my advice on our partnerships with our allies and how to reach allies and i'm about to take our first trip overseas to europe in a couple weeks, actually i went to romania very briefly last week probably uso got called back because some things were going on in the world and the chairman said leave and i got on a plane and came back right away. i'm involved in almost everything. but it's a very different role. i meet with the joint chief of staff, i meet with the secretary of defense, i meet with the president of the united states frequently but it's a different function. when i think about my priorities, when i thought long and hard about the priorities i need to have their very different than the priorities of a commander. my priorities i have three priorities, it's a good way to start the discussion. my three priorities are pretty straightforward, number one as a member of the joint chief of staff and vice chairman most important word in that duty title is vice my job is to make sure that i do my job as a member of the joint chief of staff that i support the chairman and being successful in his responsibilities, i support the secretary of defense and give honest best military device to the presence of the united states when i am asked. thus the number one priority. that takes up most of my time. it's seven or eight weeks in the job it taken up most of my time because it's been a very busy world since 21 november. the second priority, that kind of gets into things i can control a little bit. things i can control a little bit is that one of my responsibilities as i'm the head of the joint requirements oversight council. the council such requirements for the future force capabilities of united states of america. i'm also on a number of different councils and committees in the pentagon that look at budget i look at acquisition i look at force design and force development, all of those structures and i work those issues very seriously and the one thing i noticed about all those processes when i look at even the j rock is that the one element that is not in those processes is speed. it is not a rapid process anywhere in the department of defense. i will talk about some of our competitors here shortly but when you look at our competitors large and small, one of the things you find that they have in common is they are moving very fast. very very fast. we are not. my second priority is to do everything i can to insert speed into the processes inside the pentagon. that's going to be a difficult challenge because we have built processes over the years but by design are not built for speed. by design they are built to remove risk. and if you have a process designed to remove all risk it becomes very deliberate. very structured, very bureaucratic, step overture step after step and you basically relate authorities from the field and move them into the pentagon so you can make sure that we don't take risk. and that means you go slow. if you have an adversary, competitor that's going fast and you are going slow, that doesn't matter how far ahead you are, at some point that adversary will catch and pass you.that's the nature of any competition. if we are in competition in the united states and i don't shy away from competition i like competition but the goal of the competition is to win. not to finish second and in our business finishing second is bad, there is no such thing as second place in our business, which means we have to put speed back in the process we have to understand how to take risk how to properly manage risk how to delegate risk down to the people that can actually move fast and move on from there. that's gonna be a significant challenge and while in vice chairman and going to work hard at every element of the pentagon i'm involved in to try to put speed back into that. we will come back to that in a second. a third party, third priority is to basically make sure we don't forget that we are nothing without our people and their families. when i look at the structure of the joint staff, and i testified in front of congress many times a look at the structure when i look at all the people and family programs we have in a look at the way we actually testify in front of congress the way we tell our stories realize that basically whoever is going to testify the staff is working that particular problem whatever problem it happens to be comes running to you and says here's your talking point, say this, you go to the hell you say this and move on and go back to the rest of your job. if you look at all the issues we have across our people programs and family programs, i think you will see that in many cases we are not succeeding. in many cases, things are getting worse. if you look at our housing problems, the housing problem is not an overnight sensation. somehow the privatized housing issue has come to the forefront after the last few months, last year but that issue has been around for a long time. i've lived in privatized housing i work with privatized housing contractors i see good contracts and by bad contracts that i see the problems there somehow we just kept going down that path and things kept getting worse and worse and it became a crisis. he looked at the numbers for suicide prevention you look at the numbers suicides in the military they are not getting better. some people like to say, that's a societal problem the numbers are no different than society, from my perspective that's hogwash and acceptable. when the mothers and fathers of our nation give their most precious item in the world, their sons and daughters come into the united states military, they expect a better environment and better world and they expect us the leaders of the military to take them. which means, and i've had to deal with it multiple times, suicides in the military i walk up and look at the mother and we failed, we absolutely will be a single suicide that's acceptable. we will probably never get to zero but it has to be the goal for look at the numbers, they're not going the right direction. which means that everything we've been doing, everything we've been doing is not working. we have to take a fresh look at that. you look at our healthcare in the military healthcare is actually quite good. unless you have a very unique capabilities, a lot of those revolve around what we call accepting family members. usually kids with very special needs. it is very difficult to figure out how to get the special needs kids into the right treatment to our very bureaucratic healthcare system. it got to figure out how to do better because a family that comes in a has a special needs child has to be taken care of it has to be work because we want the member to know their family is being taken care of. you look at sexual assault the numbers there are going the wrong way as well. we have to make sure we take a look across the board and we've had many programs in that area to look after it is not getting better. i so i'm going to hire a special assistant to the people in our families she's going to start work next tuesday and report directly to me report required and will get after all these people and family programs to make sure we are taking part of our most precious resource. those are my three priorities. make sure i support the chairman, support the president, act as a member of the joint chief insert speed into everything we do and take care of our people and families three priorities. pretty straightforward but very hard to do given the challenge we have. willing to spend a little time now talking about our competitors and relating it into the priorities to the issues but i want you to take a step back and think about a couple of things that have been going on in the world over the last few decades in last few years. i'm going to use china and north korea as examples of what consisted strategies mean and what the ability to go fast means. let's look at china. take a look at china, i'm looking around i see different ages of people and different audiences some of you are under 40 some over 40, some of you are way over 40. [laughter] edited point fingers anywhere. a little over 40 years ago, 1979, china came up with a new strategy the strategy of allowing foreign investment the strategy of free market. that was 1979. when they did that, their country, if you look at the numbers, 88 percent of the chinese population lived in poverty in 1979. 88 percent. today, six percent of the nation lives in poverty. that's in 40 years. that's an unbelievable transformation. it shows you the power of free market the power of it shows you the power of integrating into the world economy. at the same time, they realized they needed a different security strategy and started going down a different path. it's interesting to me when we look at china and many of the readings you do, china was our friend until just a few years ago. china was our friend until a few years ago. their strategy, their military strategies dates back to the mid-1990s, and their military strategy in the mid-1990s you can go read it because it's in public documentation was focused on countering the united states of america and our allies. it started in 1990s. the interesting thing about their economic power and structure that came from that decision in 1979, is tied very tightly to the military because everything that happens in china, every technology in china is available for military use. there is not the separation like you see in the west, the separation you see in the united states, it's very tied together all the economic power can be brought to bear for military use at the same time. when that happens, if you end up with this competition going on. this is not an overnight thing. when i look at what china has done in space they now froze those initiatives back in the 1990s. i read them in the 1990s. but it wasn't until a few years ago people started looking and saying, this is new no it's not, they have an economic strategy that dates back to the 1989. they been on a consistent approach to dealing with those pieces and if we don't wake up the world is good to be different and in many cases, that's not good. some cases it is good but in many cases it's not and we have to deal that. that consistent strategy is hugely powerful in terms of achieving the objectives they stated as long as 41 years ago. china is a powerful economy. let's look at another powerful economy. i put that in big quotes. north korea, north korea is 115th most powerful economy in the world. 115 out 192, one of the poorest countries in the world. somehow over the last few years north korea has developed a ballistic missile program that can threaten its neighbors and threaten the united states and nuclear program that can threaten its neighbors and the united states and they've done that and change the entire structure of the world with 115th most powerful economy in the world. what's been different about north korea? they learn how to go fast. if you look back at kim jong-un, look at his father and his grandfather, it there are some significant differences. when his father and grandfather ãbhis grandfather launched i think nine, his father launched i think 22 during their entire tenure. kim jong-un has lost 67. he's lost over a dozen in 2016, 2017, 2019, didn't want anything in 2018. his father and grandfather, when they were failures in the missile program, let's just say the engineers and scientists that failed were not treated well. kim jong-un realized that was not the way to go fast. the way to go fast in the missile program and i've been around rockets and missiles my entire life, my dad worked on a saturn five is been about around rockets and missiles my entire life, i know how they work, i know how they test. i've been working in the business since the beginning of time, if you want to go fast in the missile business, you need to test fast, fly fast, learn fast. look at spacex in this country. there are some pretty spectacular failures. did they stop? no. they had instrumented the heck out of their capabilities, they learn from failures, launched rapidly again and change systems and changed subsystems, they go in a completely different direction, that's what north korea has been doing and north korea has been building new missiles new capabilities new weapons as fast as anybody on the planet with 115th most powerful economy in the world. speed itself is efficiency. speed builds capability and savings into your programs. but you have to be able to accept failure. if the dictator of north korea has learned how to accept failure, why can't the united states learn how to accept failure? we need to understand what failure is and learn from those failures, learn from the mistakes we make. move quickly from these mistakes. i look back at hypersonic's, we are in a significant competition with a number of competitors around the world, we were ahead in hypersonic's a decade ago. we had two programs, two flights, they didn't quite work. what did we do after they failed? we instituted multi-year studies into the failure process and then canceled the programs. that's not how you go fast. every time we have a failure in a large business, i been in there and it's not a good thing. we stopped for years at a time to recover. if there's human life involved that's essential like if you have the tragedy of the challenge or columbia you have to because you can't risk human life but if you don't have human life involved, you have to figure out how to go fast. that's why we need speed back in our processes. we have to learn how to take risks. when you look at our nation today and he looked at our stature in the world in terms of a competitive environment, there are so many places where our country is the leading technology engine of the world. in the information technology area, in the information application area, we are the leading? why is that? because we go faster than everybody. we turn faster than others can get started. the defense sector that's not the case. but it has to be the case. which means we have to do something. back in the 1980s when i started in the space business, and that's kind of my background, the space business was really a government only business. there was really no commercial sector to leverage. we decided we would leverage everything into the commercial side and everything would be good and it didn't happen. he said we have to do everything ourselves and we went and put everything back ourselves and went back to these long structured risk adverse programs and while that was going on marshall sector did develop in the commercial sector now is starting to lead the world in many areas. we are starting to embrace that but we haven't fully embraced yet. we've got to embrace the elements of this country that are going fast but know how to do things. have you watched how the united states america build software? it's amazing. when you go to the commercial sector and watch how we build software is so fast. look at google or facebook or amazon web services or any of the small startups in cambridge and silicon valley and seattle and here in washington it's amazing. ãb the united states doesn't know how to build software? we are the leading software nation in the world. we just haven't translated that to the department of defense. and by the way, there is a j rock requirements process that has to be changed in order to allow that kind of thing and there is statutory requirements that drive the j rock but the j rock is an industrial age model. not an information age model. we have to change the structure we have to change how we are going to do business across those lines. that will translate into the acquisition business. that will translate and the biggest thing with doing the acquisition business is real simple, we have to allow people to take risks and delegate responsibilities to people that are executing programs. we don't train people how to bind things anymore we train people how to get programs to the pentagon and the congress. what we are really doing is buying stuff, buying stuff for many people in this room, but we don't know how to buy stuff anymore. we have to reengineer how we buy stuff and secretary lord and doctor griffin and department of defense are starting to do that, we push things down back at the services and it's good now we have to line the rest of the department to those initiatives and make sure we take advantage. i could go on and on about that structure but i just think back for a second on where china has been in the last 40 years and the constancy purpose and ability to move fast anything about north korea and what they've done in the last few years anything about the potential of the united states of america we should be able to defend ourselves against anything, we should be able to deter any adversary from taking action against us with a $700 billion defense budget we should be able to create the environment of peace in the world across the board. in order to do that we are going to have to look at the world, compete in the world and that means we have to go fast again. i'm going to stop there and open it for questions but i thank you for your attention i think you for your time