Good morning and welcome to this Commonwealth Club online program. I am Gloria Duffey president and ceo of the Commonwealth Fund and was honored to serve as the Deputy Assistant secretary of defense in the 1990s. Peer are many issues today surrounding National Defense in our military and to the military be used to quell domestic unrest such as the recent protests and should the u. S. Be terminating many of our arms control treaties and contemplating resuming nuclear testing. Should the names of Confederate Military leaders be removed from u. S. Military bases and their statues be removed from our public places. To address these questions and many more today we will have a unique conversation between two recent secretary of defense, doctor robert gates and general james mattis. The bipartisan secretary of defense secretary robert gates served under president george w. Bush and barack obama. He is the author of a new book exercise of power american failures, successes and a new path forward in the postcold war world. Doctor gates was an officer in the u. S. Air force and spent 27 years at the cia. He served as cia director and became the first career officer in the cia history to move from entry level employee to head of the agency. Secretary gates served as the member of the National SecurityCouncil Staff in four different administrations and 48 president s of both Political Parties. For his numerous contributions secretary gates was awarded the president ial medal of freedom, the nations highest civilian award by president obama. He is also a threetime recipient of the distinguished intelligence medal on the of the cia most prestigious honors. In conversation with him today is general james mattis, general mattis served as our 26 secretary of defense from 20172019. He is now the distinguished fellow at Stanford UniversitysHoover Institution and general mattis served over 40 years in the marine corps starting as an infantry officer. He later served as commander of u. S. Joint forces command and as nato supreme allied commander for transformation. General mattis also tracked the motor operations of more than 200,000 soldiers from the airmen, coast guard men and marines and allied forces across the middle east as commander of the u. S. Central command. He commanded forces in the persian gulf war, the war in afghanistan and the iraq war. He is been outspoken recently about the president s to use of military unrest in washington. Join me in welcoming doctor robert gates and general James Madison for this very unique conversation. Thank you, doctor duffey. It is a pleasure to be here with the Commonwealth Club and it has been devoted to fighting proof and setting and loose for over 100 years. We all recognize that doctor gates flew grew into the leadership role with known what mr. Gates is my former boss, predecessor and office of an inspiring role model and was likened in one recent review is the rear foot soldier who rises high command. Secretary gates, and reading your book, one i would be reassured were required reading for president s and cabinet officers when they come into office, i was struck by you attributing a large part of americas 25 year decline in status, and prestige to the failure of postcold war president and congress is to recognize, resource and effectively use what we call our arsenal of nonmilitary instruments of power. Can you explain this fundamental failure and the significance of the title that you chose for your book . First of all, thank you jim. And i think the Commonwealth Club for inviting me. The germ of the book really began with a question in my mind of how the United States had gone from a position of supreme power, probably unrivaled since the roman empire in every dimension of power in 1993 to a country today beset by challenges everywhere. I thought about how did that happen and how did we get here and so i began looking at all of the major Foreign Policy challenges we have had since 1993 and thinking about what we had done and what we had not done that contributed to that decline in the role in world and our power in the world. What i came up with was a non military instruments of power that we had played such an Important Role in our success in the cold war against our soviet union and largely been neglected and withered after the end of the cold war. It was at a time when we continue to fund our military, we basically dismantled all that nonmilitary sources of power from diplomacy to economic leverage to Strategic Communications and more and we can go into that later. As i looked at the situation at these challenges from somalia and haiti in 1993 right up to our relationship with russia and china and north korea and it occurred to me that we had failed in many respects to figure out how to compete with these powers outside of the military realm and so, the reality is of the 15 challenges that i write about for all practical purposes i considered 13 to be failures and thats why in the title there are a couple of successes and important successes and lessons to be learned from those as well. But we had a lot of problems during that 27 year period and i would just include by saying the wars in iraq and afghanistan both began with very quick military victories and the problem that identified whether it was iraq and afghanistan or somalia or haiti or others was that once we had achieved military victory we then changed our mission we then decided to move to trying to bring democracy and reform to governments of those countries and that is where we ran into failure. Secretary gates, i would like to delve more deeply into what you just mentioned the symphony of power and i took a few notes from your book but you could give a brief overview of what youre referring to and where they might be more applicable or most likely that the use Military Form of power and if they are not played why are they not played . Historically what are these and what do you look to to bring on into the forefront here . The two primarily course of instruments of power are obviously the military, but i would also say cyber. In my opinion cyber has actually become the most effective weapon that a nation can have because it can accomplish military, political and economic harm to ones adversary. It is difficult to identify who perpetrated the attack as Cyber Attacks and it takes time to figure out attribution and the more damage that was done the more important it is stored in a fight i exactly where the ones and zeros came from and so cyber is a huge player now in a way that it has never been before and it can dismantle or disarm weapons and it can redirect weapons and they can shut down infrastructure in concrete so its a very versatile weapon and it doesnt take the kind of enormous expenditure of dollars or a money that a Nuclear Enterprise or even a chemical or biological threat would represent so i think cyber is a very important one and weve been pretty good about developing this for our military purposes that i think we have not taken advantage of in an offense of way with respect to either political or economic targets. Another important instrument is clearly economic measures and these can be both carrots and sticks. The truth is as i make the point in the book that we develop the stick part of the economic instrument pretty well and we levied sanctions on any country that looks at us cross eyed and it is become very, gated for a lot of companies because we got so many sanctions against so many countries the green out how to do business internationally stay within u. S. Laws to become a fulltime enterprise for accountants in these companies. So weve got the stick part of it down pretty well. Embargoes, tariffs, sanctions and so on. Where we have fallen down and where we once had real capability is how do we use economic assistance or our economy as an asset and as a caret to encourage them to induce other countries to do what we would like them to do or follow policy and what we would like for them to follow, whether its loans at discounts or whether economic concessions, trade concessions and so on and we are very good, as i said at sanctions, but not so hot it figured out how we might advantage someone in dealing with us. President clinton and president bush both were pretty good with africa when they arranged debt relief are a number of african countries back in the 1990s and early to thousands and that really helped a lot of african countries but that is a rare example of us using economic measures as an instrument of power. Strategic communications or as we used to call it the cold war propaganda and how to get our message around the world and the chinese have developed this to an extraordinary degree. Several years ago power devoted allocated 7 million for the chinese to build a Strategic Communication network around the world and we, on the other hand, in 1998 dismantled the United StatesInformation Agency and talked what we call Public Diplomacy into a corner of the state department and very elements of our government do strategic medications but there is no coherent strategy and each goes its own way and we also lack capability and rage that the chinese half. There are a variety of other instruments jim that i was just briefly mention things like intelligence and how we use it in other countries, science and technology, higher education, our culture and the use of nationalism as we watch russia and china interfere in the internal affairs of other countries and we have failed to use their own national nationalistic feeling to help build resistance what the chinese and russians and others are doing and religion is an important instrument. We have not thought about it in that way but religion has played a big part in international affairs, particularly since the end of the cold war and all you have to do is look at the role of religion in motivating terrorists to see that it has real power. There are a dozen or more of these instruments and the problem is we have neither resourced them nor have we figured out a Cohesive Strategy or coherent strategy on how to bring them together as i call it in the book in a symphony where they played together and each strengthens the other and overall strengthens the hand of the United States in dealing with the rest of the world. Why havent we enlisted these other instruments and symphony of power in america has the power of intimidation if we are threatened. Obviously, we are in an imperfect world and we need the military and cia but why have we summoned the instruments of inspiration that are so strong in america and what is the reluctance for us to use nonmilitary strategy . It is a tough question to answer. I think part of it is that the congress has been reluctant to fund these nonmilitary instruments really going back to the end of the cold war and it was congress that disestablished usia and it was congress that wanted the disestablish the agency for International Development and president clinton stop that but brought diminished usaid by bringing it under the state Department Rather than as an independent agency in the congress has not funded the state department properly and the state department has been starved of resources except for a couple of brief times during the george w. Bush administration when there was an increase in the number of Foreign Service officers though there has been a reluctance on the part of congress to fund but congress is developing of systems and they have considered a waste of time. If we will spend money why are we spending it here at home rather than in other countries and they dont see how that can benefit the United States. I think partly it has been a big part of the reason is the reluctance for the congress to fund it and in all honesty the reluctance for the most part on the part of all four administrations to push for such funding. The irony for me is that at a time when the congress has become more and more resistant to the use of military force overseas in the aftermath of iraq and afghanistan but at the same time they refused to fund or make more robust the nonmilitary instruments that could take the place of some of that military activity. In that regard, doctor gates, you brought up the war in iraq and you brought up what we call oftentimes in the affirmative defense known what so we go into iraq and you write in the book that it has happened so often after the cold war there was a lack of imagination in the white house in con how to access non civilian government expertise to strengthen nonmilitary capabilities. They seemingly had no appreciation to go on to say of the importance of the private sector apart from contractors as an instrument of power and it just begs the question how can we leverage that private sector and obviously we keep the government out of some market things and we dont want our government running economy and how do we enlist the private sector in enhancing our ability to basically exercise power and to again go to the nonmilitary aspect so how do we do that . The first thing is to recognize that it actually has something to contribute and then you can figure out how to make it work. One of the things that frustrated all of us in the apartment of defense is that through all of the afghan war experience was the relatively few number of civilian experts and here we were engaged in nationbuilding and yet we have very few, relatively speaking, very few civilian experts who were in country and helping make that happen. One of the instruments that has some effectiveness in both iraq and afghanistan with something called provincial reconstruction but at times when we had at the peak of our president s in iraq we had 170,000 troops in the country and we had 360 civilians in all of those prts in the entire country of iraq. One of the things i proposed the secretary of defense that got no traction was to go to a particularly, one of the things we could provide help with was helping both the afghans and the iraqis improving the terms of their farming and how they took care of their herds and that kind of thing and because theyre both basically rural countries and i suggested to the state department why dont you go to her countries land universities and i had been the president of texas a m so i knew what these universities were doing around the world in terms of their faculties working in very inhospitable and insecure situations and why dont you go to these universities and ask them to help and to partner with us and augment what we are trying to do in these countries and many other factors were in those countries so how could we help them and how could we help provide some funding and so on. We also had the advantage at the head of the National Association of landgrant universities with a man name Peter Mcpherson had been the president of Michigan State university but also the head of usaid under president reagan so here was a guy who knew what we needed to do and could have galvanized this universities to be a powerful partner and nothing ever happened. Similarly, i think where we could use the private sector or where we could partner with the private sector is in figuring out how we are going to counter trying to develop the belton Road Initiative this trillion Dollar Program of infrastructure building ports and airports and highways and sports arenas and so on throughout and in most places around the world. A lot of these things are White Elephant projects and they involve a lot of debt for the country and the chinese make these countries signed contracts with Chinese Construction Companies to do these things and they dont pay much attention to doing things honestly or in ways that actually benefit the people of the countries that are receiving but if we could somehow, we cant compete with that and the chinese through the state owned enterprises and banks and so on can find the cash to fund these projects and we cant do that, our economy and government just does not have that, they are not structured it that way. What we have is private sector that invests all over the world and how can the United States partner with revit companies in the United States and incentivize them to invest in some of these developing countries and bring jobs, bring Environmental Concerns and bring sustainability and in a way that doesnt settle these countries with projects that ends up being useless or settled the countries with huge amounts of debt. We dont really do much in the way of trying to incentivize companies to move down that path. It is a resource that i think we could make better use of an finally, i would say we have all these enormous numbers of churches and charities and others that do projects around the world, whether in terms of health and alleviating or getting read of diseases and the work of the Gates Foundation and a number of others, they often dont want much to do with the government but if there was a way we can augment their activities when we work in partnership with them and how can we Work Together and frankly, there is just not much done to try and move down that road. There are three examples of where i think we just havent been very imaginative in terms of how we can leverage our great strength and translate that into efforts to what i