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Next, a conversation about media coverage of U.S. military efforts with journalist David Martin.
He covered the Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community for over 40 years.
It's hosted by the non-profit Military Reporters and Editors.
That worked.
We'll start over again.
You have covered, you know, 40-plus years national security, every major conflict the U.S. has been involved in.
Start off by just telling us which one was, in your opinion, the most difficult to cover.
The most what?
The most difficult for you to cover.
Well, That's easy because it's a military operation that most of you probably may not have been alive for.
In 1983, my first year on the job, the U.S. invaded the island of Grenada.
I say that again.
The U.S. invaded the island of Grenada.
It was at the time viewed by the Reagan administration as the second coming of Fidel Castro.
And there were a whole bunch of American medical students that went to an offshore medical school there.
And there was some concern, not a lot of concern, for their safety, that they might be taken hostage.
So the Reagan administration put together in the course of five days an invasion plan and executed it.
And the invasion plan did not have any provision for coverage by the U.S. There was no embed.
It was all done in secret.
And after it started, the military threw up a cordon around the island to physically prevent anybody from reaching the island either by boat or by air.
And they came very, very close to blowing one small boat carrying reporters out of the water.
And that lasted for, I think, five days, which was also as long as the fighting lasted.
So there was no reporters on the ground through the course of the fighting.
And afterwards, and it was a very, very screwed up operation and really led to many of the military reforms that took place during the 80s and 90s.
But afterwards, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a guy named John Vesey then, said that his biggest mistake was not coming up with a plan to embed the military.
So from then on, they did.
The next major operation was Panama in 1989, and the U.S. military was embedded for that.
Well, just to follow on that a little bit, you know, you talked about the difficulties with getting in bed, with all of those issues.
How would you rank today's transparency that we're seeing with the military and the Pentagon officials there?
How's that compare with some of the other stuff you've had to work around throughout your career?
I would say transparency peaked in about 2004 as the war in Iraq started to go bad.
And they wanted then the embeds started getting harder and harder to come by.
And today, embeds are basically a thing of the past.
They almost never happen anymore.
And when they do happen, they happen for Less than a single day, 12 hours on a ship, on a carrier, for instance.
So we're in a cycle, I guess you call it, the bell curve.
The bell curve peaked in the early 2000s, and I think we're still on the downslope.
I know we've got quite a few reporters that want to ask you a lot of questions, but I've just got a couple more before I open it up to the audience.
When you left us at the Pentagon, the Pentagon Press Scourt, you said about three months ago something I'll never forget.
You said that your military career has been one long lesson in the limits of military power.
Can you tell our audience, you know, what were you thinking about when you wrote those words and when you spoke those words to us?
Well, first I was thinking about my own experience.
I graduated from college just as the Vietnam War was taking off, and so I ended up as an officer on a destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.
And, you know, you'd start the day operating with two aircraft carriers launching strikes against North Vietnam, and you'd end the day off the coast of South Vietnam, shooting away at targets real and imagined.
And a mile away would be a battleship lobbying 2,000-pound shells into targets real and imagined.
And overhead you'd see the contrails of B-52s on their way to carpet bomb the border area.
And then a few minutes later, the whole horizon would just erupt with the flashes of their bombs.
And you'd sit there on the bridge and say there's no way anybody could stand up to that.
Well, of course, they did.
Then you, in my mind, fast forward to 1991, the first Gulf War, in which the U.S. scored as clear-cut a victory as we will ever score.
It was just really between stealth fighters and precision-guided weapons and armored tank columns rolling across the desert.
It was about as close to perfect as a military operation can get.
And it succeeded in its objective, which was to evict the Iraqi army from Kuwait.
And George President George H.W. Bush said we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome at last.
And look where we are today.
You can argue that war and the presence of 500,000 American troops in Saudi Arabia is what set Osama bin Laden off.
And of course, 9-11 is what set George W. Bush off and led us into Iraq and Afghanistan.
And if you compare 1991, when the Soviet Union had just collapsed and we had just scored this amazing military triumph, U.S. was number one and there was no number two or even number three.
Look where we are today.
I think you can give the military credit for having no further attacks on the homeland, but what we have today is certainly not an epox Americana.
I want to shift gears just a little bit because we cover the wars, but we also cover the people.
And you and your producer, Mary Walsh, have produced without question, in my opinion, the most poignant examples of reporting on Medal of Honor recipients.
And some of these reports, I've told you before, they actually played a role in my wanting to cover the military beat.
And I'm thinking of Dakota Meyer and Ganjao.
These are moments where they're talking about, often cases, the worst day of their life.
A lot of people didn't make it back.
How do you prepare for an interview like that?
Well, what you have to do is not let yourself get blown away by the bravery of the person because the bravery is usually at an insane level that is really just them responding without thinking to what they've been trained to do.
And they just happened to be put into that situation and their training kicked in.
And it's admirable as hell.
But you have to keep telling yourself that behind every Medal of Honor, there's a screw-up because those guys only ended up in that position where it took extraordinarily, extraordinary courage because of some screw-up.
And I remember one of the first stories I did on a Medal of Honor out of Afghanistan, these guys had been sent out on a foot patrol as opposed to being helicoptered in because the helicopters had suddenly been needed for an operation somewhere else in the theater.
And in the course of hiking into their objective, they got ambushed and the firefight ensued and a bunch of them got killed.
And one guy who I think this was a posthumous medal had charged the enemy.
And when I put that fact in that there had been no helos available that day into the story, the commander of that unit just was furious with me because I was attributing the bravery in part to what had gone wrong.
But that's the fact of these operations.
You just need to take that into account whenever you're doing any of those stories.
And it doesn't diminish the bravery of what they did, but it just puts it in better perspective.
Yeah, I think in Gonjgao, I think you actually did have the military come out and talk about helicopters not arriving when they were supposed to.
There were reprimands that were put out.
Since there are reporters here, how do you go about getting the military to talk about their mistakes like you do?
Well, you know, one is just having a track record.
I mean, after you've covered the place, being on television, you can't hide your track record.
You are who you are.
And You develop a reputation that is either good, bad, or indifferent.
And the one rule I always abided by was never to do a false flag operation.
Never say, hey, I want to go someplace to do that story when I really wanted to go there to do that other story.
Because I think once you lose your credibility for being a straight shooter, you're going to lose your access.
So my fundamental principle was just to be upfront with what I intended to do.
And I just found it worked.
You don't need to, they can usually figure it out.
So it's not like you're telling them anything you don't know.
They don't know.
But it really just helps establish your credibility.
I have a few more questions, but I'd like to give the audience an opportunity to ask some questions for David.
Does anybody have any questions for him?
Wait, we'll bring you a microphone.
All right.
Dan Lamoff, Washington Post.
Hi, David.
Thanks for joining us today.
With, I guess, the benefit of some time away, at least every day, what looks different to your eyes now in terms of the way the building functions, in terms of the way the press corps functions?
And I guess if you were to suggest any changes, does anything come to mind?
I'm glad you asked that question because I've only really been away from the daily beat since July, but it really gives you a different perspective because all of a sudden you're not immersed in the daily battle for scoops.
You're not chasing other people's stories or you're not trying to be first.
And you start to see more clearly how the administration in general and the Pentagon in particular are really pretty good at controlling the narrative.
And a long time ago, during the Clinton administration, the White House press secretary was a guy named Mike McCurry.
And he said his job was to tell the truth slowly.
And that's basically what the Pentagon does.
Tell the truth slowly.
And that allows them, one, to get their facts straight so that we don't hammer them for giving us inaccurate information.
It allows them to do all the congressional notifications and allied consultations.
And, oh yeah, it's classified.
But I've found over the years that classified is just really the cover excuse for those first two.
Just, you know, it's classified now, but it'll be unclassified as soon as we make our congressional notifications or it'll be unclassified as soon as the president gets to take credit for it.
So when you're immersed in it every day, you know, you're just beating on them to give it up.
But when you watch it afar, You see, they are giving it up, but they're just giving it up as much as they can on their own timetable.
And it allows them to, you know, it allows them to control the narrative.
And the purpose of controlling the narrative is to maintain public support for whatever your policies are.
So big counteroffensive in Ukraine is a bust.
Okay, we're still making slow but steady progress.
And that'll remain the talking point until, you know, if we cut off aid to Ukraine in a new administration, I bet you the talking point will then become how corrupt the Ukraine government is and how much it wastes our money.
There's sort of a talking point for every policy, and that's how it got to be a policy, right?
And they do, in my estimation, too good a job, or we don't do a good enough job of taking that narrative away from them.
And that was happening while I was there.
I'm not Monday morning quarterbacking since I've left.
Thanks, Sean.
Thanks for doing this, Sean Carberry, National Defense.
You know, you came up in an era where conflict journalism, I mean, first of all, it was three networks.
There was a format, there was kind of a style, a tone to that kind of reporting.
Yes, the personality, the correspondent was on camera, often in these settings, but was the conduit for the information, wasn't the story, wasn't about, you know, look at me in this setting.
Certainly over the last couple of decades with the growth of other media outlets and formats and styles of reporting, there's been an increase of the correspondent as the story, as the center of attention in a lot of the reporting.
I'm not going to name any names or anything like that, but we've all seen it, and we've all seen that kind of journalism.
I'm curious sort of what your thoughts and reflections are, having seen that coming through the tradition of conflict journalism is about keeping the spotlight on the troops, the conflict, the humans caught in it, not about the correspondent.
Yet today there's so much, again, personality-centric journalism in these places.
You know, it's kind of like Tom Brady doing play-by-play, right?
The story is not the game, but it's Tom Brady doing the play-by-play.
And he's either good or bad, depending on your point of view.
In fairness, though, since when I started, I mean, the name of the game is for you to establish yourself as somebody that will make people turn in CBS.
Oh, yeah, that guy Martin's on CBS.
We've got to tune in to see what he has.
I never saw any evidence that that ever happened in my case.
But the one clear case in the 1980s during the Reagan administration was Sam Donaldson at the White House, who was famously combative.
And he was the one who sort of began the practice of shouting questions at the president as he walked away.
And people did decide to watch ABC because Sam Donaldson was covering the White House.
The first time, I guess the first time I sort of noticed celebrity journalism was the First Gulf War.
He was a guy for CNN.
His first name was Kent, and I can't remember his last name, but he became known as the Stud Scud.
Arthur Kemp.
Arthur Kemp.
I think, yeah.
And, you know, he was just, he was a good-looking guy, and he happened to be on air when a Scud attack from Iraq came into Dharan, and the Patriots launched right next to him.
He did that, and he became an instant sensation.
And then you fast forward to the Second Gulf War, and Oliver North and Raldo Rivera were as much the story as what was happening.
You know, what can I tell you?
It's just the battle for eyeballs is so intense, and it only gets more intense as the media landscape gets divided that you'll go for every advantage you can.
Was the second Gulf War covered any worse than the first Gulf War?
I don't think so.
I mean, at the end of the day, there's so many stories out there that it all just kind of evens out.
And one or two people become household words as a result of it.
On my watch, you know, the first Gulf War, Wolf Blicker became a household word just overnight.
But look, look what he's done since.
I mean, he obviously was somebody that deserved to be, or I should say has earned his status as a household name.
I want to bring it back to the stories real quick.
Just talking about the people reminded me about just all the places that you've been, all the places you've reported from.
You've been on a Navy submarine, you've met it out at sea carrying nuclear weapons.
When you look back at the stories that you have, not the ones you're preparing to do, because I know you're still doing plenty, but when you look back at over the 40 years at all of the stories that you've covered, which one or two would you point to as the most consequential?
Consequential to me?
I was thinking just consequential in getting action from the U.S. government or the military, but also I'm curious to see which one's most consequential to you too, since you brought it up.
Well, first place, whenever you go someplace, it's always different than you thought it was going to be.
I remember the first time I went to Haiti, I thought that was going to be the scariest place on earth.
And it wasn't at all.
People were very friendly, and you'd wake up in the morning, and yeah, you know, there'd be a few bodies in the streets.
Um, it was, it was basically a, uh, a warm and friendly place and you just, those people just did not deserve what was happening to them.
And, and I think that's, um, still the case.
Um, I think the story I did that had the, the most consequences, at least the most immediate consequences was on.
the after.
I wasn't, I didn't go any place, I was in the Pentagon, and it was after Iraq had invaded Kuwait and the big question was whether the the U.S. Was going to do anything about it,
Come to the defense of Saudi Arabia, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had gone to Saudi Arabia to meet with the royal family and he was on his way back and everybody wanted to know well, what happened.
And I found out what happened, and I found out that they were going to send troops and in fact by the time I found out, they were already sending troops.
They were, they were en route, and the last, the last person that confirmed that for me, said to me, but please don't report it until they get there.
You've heard, all heard, that before we had this great military consultant, military consultants.
Today it's, it's become a cottage industry.
But this, this I didn't even know.
We had a military consultant until that day and he, his name, was George Christ.
He was just buried at Arlington this Monday and he was the former CENTCOM commander.
So you know, I told my bosses that yeah, we had this story, I got it confirmed, but they're asking us not to go with it.
We asked George Chris, is it safe to go with this?
And what we were saying was the 82ND Airborne and and a squadron of F-15s.
Of course, that was just, you know, the beginning of a very big military buildup.
And George Chris said, yeah, there's no danger in reporting that Saddam can't do anything about it.
And so we went on the air and did that and at the time you know it was, it was a world scoop.
And Cole, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, went through the roof and he he called.
He called George Chris and said, what the hell are you doing?
And you know, Chris was comfortable with his decision.
And or the next day, when George H.W. Bush announced the deployment, one of the questions he was asked was, did the, did the leak do any damage?
And he said no.
So Chris had made the, the perfect for us.
But he had started this cottage industry of consultants.
And, and now you know, consultants are just influencers.
They're used by the Pentagon as as influencers.
I remember at the in the early stages of the invasion of Iraq, for some reason I needed to know what Pete Pace, who was then, I think, the vice chairman, was doing that day and I went in to find out his schedule and they said, oh, he's meeting with military consultants right now.
He can't, he can't talk to you.
I said, what do you mean, military consultants?
Why isn't?
He should be talking to me and the head of public affairs for the joint staff looks at me and said, you guys walked right into that one.
So we we we brought those guys down upon ourselves.
Does anybody else have a question Sig, would you like to ask one?
Chris, he's bringing your mic down.
I have a question that's kind of near and dear to me.
I nearly took the buyout a couple of weeks ago and I decided not to.
When you came to the end of your career, how hard was that and what thinking went into it, and what do you want to be remembered for?
Or what do you want?
What do you think you want to have people know about the work you did over those 40 years?
You know it was really hard and if I hadn't been pushed I'd probably still be there.
But the fact is I'm 81 years old and you know I really sympathize with Joe Biden and So and I was.
I was becoming almost functionally illiterate when it came to social media.
And they had they had recognized that about three years before when they sent a young woman over to sort of help me deal with the social media.
You know she was in first grade on 9-11 and had her first email account when she was in the third grade.
So she's just, you know she lives in that environment and she really did keep me afloat for the last three years.
But you just you need to go.
You lose your hunger.
You really do.
You've seen it all before.
You've heard that story, you've checked that out before and you, you know what's going to happen to me.
You know one of the first questions that always gets asked is when somebody's killed is what's the name.
So after 40 years, I have become totally comfortable with abiding by the 24-hour period of waiting for release of names.
But you know it's not written in the law anywhere.
It's just.
It's just custom and you see, sort of after a while maybe you've adopted too many of the customs and you've become you're just not as adversarial as as you should be.
As for legacy, you know I asked, I did an interview with Bob Woodward about his new book and the last question he's, he's my age, so I asked him, Are you going to write another book?
And he gave me a non-answer.
And then I said, are you worried about that another book, you might jeopardize your legacy?
And he had a great answer, which I'm just going to use from now on, which he said, you know, in this business, you don't worry about your legacy.
You just realize that being a reporter is the best job in the world.
I would like to say that one of the legacy stories I think that you have done and Mary together was that 60 Minutes piece that you did on the new Cold War, where you got into strategic command.
And since I have you here, how on earth did you get camera access into Stratcom?
Talk to us a little bit about how you gained their trust and what that process was like.
So they used to do, I remember when I first started covering the Pentagon for Newsweek back in 1979, one of the first places they took me was in that command center just to show me the big map.
But obviously that was without cameras.
You know, there's always something in it for them, right?
They're not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
And what was in it for them was, this was 2015, this is when they were starting to really get serious about this new trillion dollar nuclear buildup.
So they started trying to bring attention to the fact that there still were all these missiles pointed at the United States and our systems were getting older and older.
And so it wasn't hard to get access.
The hard part was to get the commander of StratCom, a guy named Cecil Haney, who was about as low-key as a commander of that rank can be, to do a good interview because he was our main interview.
And they talk in such jargon, extended deterrence, you know, mutual assured destruction and all that stuff.
And if you haven't been steeped in that for half your life, you don't know what the hell they're talking about.
And I remember meeting with him before I went out there.
He was in town for some congressional testimony.
And I took a transcript of his congressional testimony and I highlighted every single piece of jargon that he used that if he used it, and I said, if you use that in the interview, you're just wasting your breath because it doesn't mean anything to people.
And, you know, by the time I got out there, he was really surprised to learn that, that people don't know what extended deterrence is.
So by the time I got out there with the camera, he really had spiffed up his act to make it more accessible to viewers.
And And I've now sort of adopted that any time I go any place is try to talk to them ahead of time about putting this damn thing into English.
And, you know, just the first time you hear an acronym, you just stop and say, okay, now we're going to start over.
Some guys just can't help themselves.
They've been doing it too long.
We've got just a few more minutes.
I'll take a couple more questions.
Go ahead.
Hi.
I'm Michael Maury.
I write for Breaking the Fence.
I wanted to ask kind of a similar question to Sean, which is, over the course of your career, combined with the changing media landscape, do you think differently, if at all, about the question of objectivity and journalism?
I think that's objectivity, remaining objective in your reporting.
I think that's something that, especially, at least from my perspective, younger reporters, this is a lot different now than it used to be, and I was wondering your thoughts on that.
You know, I never changed my opinion on objectivity.
Objectivity doesn't prohibit you from having a point of view.
You know, I mean, I'll admit it, when the U.S. military is involved in a war, I want the U.S. military to win.
I'm not going to say that on television, but I'm going to say that I'm going to be reporting from a point of view that if the U.S. military takes an objective without many losses, that's a good thing.
And I'm going to report from the point of view that if they take an objective with prohibitive losses, that's a bad thing.
And of course, that will be exactly opposite of what reporters in other countries might do.
And I think one of the biggest changes that's happened in the press corps in the last 40 years, first, the biggest change is women.
There was one woman on the beat when I started in 1983.
Now, on any given day, there are more women than men in the Pentagon briefing room.
And that's a good thing because basically what's happened is that now the recruiting pool has doubled.
So you're just going to get a better press score.
And the other thing that's happened is that there are so many foreign news organizations that have assigned people to cover the Pentagon on a daily basis.
So now when you go into the briefing room, the most interesting part of any Pentagon briefing is not what the briefer says, it's the questions.
The questions from Al Jazeera.
And it really helps you realize that there is another point of view on this stuff.
And you do get caught up in wanting your side to win.
But you can be objective about that and you can report screw-ups.
I mean, you report screw-ups so they don't happen again, right?
But you have this overall point of view that you don't want the United States to lose, and that means you're going to be considerate of classified information.
I think we're altogether too considerate of classified information because as I've said earlier, you know, I cannot think of a story I held that would have made a difference if I had gone with it.
But you just feel better not having something go wrong that you might possibly have been responsible for.
I don't, I mean, you tell me, is the mainstream media less objective than it was 20 years ago, or is it all the other media?
I mean, the cables definitely have their political points of view, but was Barbara Starr?
She was objective, right?
At the same time, from 7 o'clock to 11 o'clock every night, they were bashing Trump day in, day out.
She was totally objective.
So the two can exist in the universe at the same time.
And if you're looking for advice on which to be, I'd advise you to be objective.
All right, let's take one more.
Any questions?
Well, good.
I can take one more then.
You know, I don't want to put you on the spot here, but when I started working at the Pentagon, I'd been there for a few months and I was overwhelmed.
And I came to David's door and I asked him, I said, how long does it take you to know this beat, to know where everybody is in the Pentagon, to know who to go to outside of the Pentagon?
And again, don't want to put you on the spot here, but do you remember what you told me?
No.
Stray face.
Straight face.
He looks at me and he goes, Carla, about three years.
I'd been there about three months and I was like, oh my goodness, I am never going to survive here.
But so what advice would you give for new reporters in the room or watching us about how to maintain relationships, A, so people keep you on their radar when they need to get information out or when you need to go to them for information when you're covering such a large beat as the military beat?
So to begin with, I had an advantage because I spent three years in the Navy.
That didn't mean I knew anybody in the Pentagon when I showed up there in 1983, because that was, what, 12, 13 years after I'd left the Navy.
But I knew those guys, and they weren't guys then.
You know, they were just people like me.
They were wearing uniforms, I was wearing a suit, and that was it.
So it was very easy to relate to them.
And I find people who come over to the Pentagon and fail fail for two reasons.
One is they view the military as an alien species.
And you're just never going to develop a good relationship with an alien.
So you got to see past the uniforms and see that they're people just like you.
And then the other is not to let the acronyms and the jargon snow you.
The person I saw who landed fastest in the Pentagon was Katie Couric.
She was already slated to be the star of the the Today show, but they were just trying to run her through some Washington beats just to give her a little more gravitas before they made her the star of that show.
And from day one, she just knew what to do, which was just to go around and talk to people and ask questions.
And if they told you something that you didn't understand because it was too embedded in jargon and acronyms, and just say, hey, what are you saying?
Tell me again.
And she was quite a lot to compete against.
It didn't hurt that she was so attractive and vivacious.
I would literally come into my office in the morning, and my booth was right next to hers.
And I would have to push my way through the crowd of people out her door, officers waiting to see her and tell her something to get her interested in her story.
So, you know, not everybody has Kitty Couric's charisma, but everybody can go in and sort of just treat it like you would treat any other beat,
a police beat or any other beat in Washington, is just get to know the people and respect them and treat them as you would anybody else you're trying to get information from.
And, you know, some people just, I could never hit it off with FBI agents, so I wasn't very good at covering the FBI.
But maybe because I'd had three years in the military, I could, you know, I could talk to people in uniform without any difficulty.
But that just gave me a head start over time.
Everybody can learn that skill.
Well, David, you are having such an inspirational career.
Thank you so much for your time.
It's been such an honor to facilitate this conversation with members of the Military Reporters and Editors Association.
I just, if you have any closing things that you want to say, we're actually a little over, but do you have any final thoughts on what reporters need to do to try to bring that transparency back that you said peaked several years ago?
Is there anything we can do?
Well, whatever you can to take back control of the narrative.
When I started, CBS was known as the Communist Broadcasting System.
And we were being overtly threatened with prosecution for revealing classified information.
And the military was in a total fetal position.
They just, from Vietnam, and they just didn't want to have anything to do with you.
And public affairs was just a buffer, a shield to keep the press away.
And along came the first Gulf War, and the military realized, one, that it had a duty to give the press access, but two, it realized that giving the press access actually made it easier for them to tell their story.
And ever since, that's been the MO, is to take control of the narrative.
And we too often, and I blame myself specifically, go along with the narrative.
And the most glaring example is Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
And we, you know, we said, oh, yes, just a circumstantial case, but we never challenged that narrative in a convincing enough way that it slowed the rush to war.
And look what it got us.
And we never convincingly challenged the narrative that we're making slow and steady progress in Afghanistan.
How can you buy into that for 20 years?
But we did.
Well, we let them get away with it.
I don't know if that buy-in's the wrong word.
We let them get away with it.
And when I say we, I do mean myself included.
So I obviously don't have a solution, but it's just not a good thing for our country when the government has total control of the narrative because our country does things that are wrong.
It's not because they're mendacious.
It's just because it's a complicated world and you make bad decisions.
And then, of course, you give all the reasons why it really wasn't such a bad decision.
So when these things fail, then we all come down from the hills and shoot the wounded and blame intelligence failures and single out culprits.
When, you know, these failures are on us too.
And we're in this daily little battle for scoops.
But there's this larger battle going on over control of the narrative.
And we have to do, not just for our sake, but for the sake of the country, a better job of contesting that narrative.
Well, thank you.
Definitely some food for thought, self-inflection.
On behalf of everyone here, it has been an honor.
Thank you so much for your time today, David.
Sure, thank you.
Thank you.
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A look now at strengthening the defense industrial base among the U.S. and its allies.
This discussion focused on defense production cooperation, Navy shipbuilding programs, and efforts to improve defense innovation.
From the Hudson Institute, it's about two hours.
Well, good morning and welcome to the Hudson Institute.
I'm Tim Walton.
I'm a senior fellow here in Hudson Center for Defense Concepts and Technology.
And I'm delighted that all of you have made the time to join what should be, I think, an illuminating conversation with some illustrious leaders in the field.
To introduce them, we'll start off with Michael Quensley, who's the deputy to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Exports and Cooperation.
He has a distinguished career in Army aviation and then serving as an acquisition civilian in aviation, but also in Army space and missile roles.
And he's now focused on export controls and accelerating exports to allies and partners.
Our second panelist is Mr. Rob Smith, who's serving as Chief Innovation Officer at Saab Incorporated.
He previously served as a British Army officer, a professor, and helped stand up NATO's defense innovation accelerator for the North Atlantic and the NATO Innovation Fund in his role as NATO's first and an inaugural head of innovation.
And then lastly, we have Mr. Mike Smith, who after starting his career in the U.S. Navy served in various roles in BAE systems, Lockheed Martin as president of HII's nuclear power business.
And relevant to our conversation today, he helped establish a joint venture in India.
He's now HANWA's president, HANWA Defense USA's President and CEO.
In terms of our plan for today, I plan on kicking off the conversation with a few questions to our panelists and then opening it up to questions and comments all of you may have.
And my first question has to do for each of you, please, on the topic of the unique contributions allies can bring.
Most of the conversation today is focused on what can allies bring in terms of defense industrial capacity.
Driven by the war in Ukraine and the prospects of a potential conflict with China, we're looking to allies contributions to either accelerate defense industrial capacity here or across the broader defense industrial space.
But I think it's fair to say that allies have unique perspectives.
Either their geographic situation, security circumstances, technology bases can differ, and that tends to bring different ideas regarding operational concepts, what's promising and what works.
So I wanted to ask each of you, what have some of your observations been regarding promising areas that each allies come up with as a result of their own circumstances that could be shared with the United States or should be shared more broadly?
Well, I'll start.
Certainly, What we've seen here recently is just an unprecedented demand on, and it's really driven by Ukraine, on innovation, on the sharing of technology and just international agreements in general.
So that's been one of those things that we've had to adapt to.
But the real benefit we have is we have more folks, more partners and allies with shared values that are contributing to our ability to take our weapon systems forward, to build resilient supply chains, to build distributed production facilities.
So all of that are things that are beneficial.
Thank you, Michael.
Yeah, Mike, let me pick up on that and take it a little bit further perhaps.
So I think that when we think about allies, and I'm kind of putting my old hat on now, having spent 10 years in NATO headquarters on the Secretary General's staff and kind of lived and breathed this through the lens of Brussels at least, there is very much a political element when we think about armaments.
And so whilst perhaps the logical approach is to have areas of specialization among the countries, for example, trying to make things as efficient as one might wish to see, the politics of that makes that incredibly difficult and incredibly hard because of notions of sovereignty and sort of the nation state, how we operate as countries, these leviathans.
So I think that how do allies bring something to contribute to this?
I think that actually when we have to recognize that it's really unlikely to have some super efficient model where nations are kind of all kind of contributing their part to some beautiful picture.
That's not likely to occur.
And so I think rather than look for efficiency, what we should be looking for is effectiveness.
And does that mean it's going to be the most efficient way of doing XYZ?
Almost certainly not.
It's going to be sticky and it's going to be difficult and it's going to be fraught with some of the political elements which we heard in our last panel.
But the other point to this, and I'm being sort of slightly vague here in terms of specific capabilities, is that I think that allies writ large, and Mike, you just brought this to life with regards to Ukraine, have recognized that the cost of conflict is such that we've perhaps collectively forgotten over the last 25 years or so.
And one example of that, and I think Jim talked about 155 shells on the last panel, you look at artillery shells, you look at the cost of a 155 artillery shell, and before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it was approximately $2,000, roughly.
Today, it's nearer to around $8,000.
And so the point being is that inflation associated to armaments, when there is quite a challenging supply level, supply kind of stays the same, broadly speaking, broadly speaking, whilst demand has massively increased, it does one thing, it puts the price up.
So my point being is what can allies bring to this context?
It's not just about armaments and production and the traditional things, how we've thought about this.
I think there's an entire world where we start to bring in capital markets and financing and areas which perhaps we haven't really considered at a proper detailed level in the context of defense and defense production.
And I think allied nations have a vast wealth of experience there, no pun intended, which could really be brought to bear.
I'll have to ask you to follow up on that.
But Mike, first, over to you, please.
Yeah, first of all, good morning and thank you for having me.
I think Michael and Rob are onto something, but I also think we're all suffering from a failure of creativity.
I'm going to be very simple.
I think we have to demolish and explode what it means to be part of the U.S. defense industrial base.
It doesn't need to be in CONUS in the continental United States.
And when we really think about it, we need to expand that dib westward, where the threat is.
We're not going to be able to shrink or vaporize the Pacific Ocean, but we can diminish its influence on our ability to wage war and protect national security far to the west.
And what I mean is, we've talked about the RSF, and that's great.
That's an important part of all this.
We need to be able to work with partners to maintain, repair, overhaul forward.
We've done Army pre-positioned stocks.
We've done things like that, pre-position the gear that we're going to need.
But we also need to create production capacity.
One thing we've done in Hanoi, we've actually built a factory to produce forward, and we are looking at finding ways to help the Army produce in Australia the things that it will need when it's time to face China head on.
So I think we need to kind of recreate and rebuild capacity.
It's great that we have incentives to get shipyards.
I was chief strategy officer at HII, so I know shipbuilding.
It's great to have incentives to be able to build commercial and naval in a single yard, but we don't have the capacity to build the ships that we're trying to build now.
So we actually have to virtually create geographically dispersed capacity overseas.
And as we're thinking about it, we really need to think about doing it where we're going to need it, which is in the Pacific Rim.
So, I mean, that's my thought when you think about how allies can contribute to the industrial base within the U.S. and national security.
Thank you.
Michael, to continue with you, if I could, the character of cooperation seems to be changing.
Obviously, it's accelerating.
You spoke a little bit about that.
Can you expound a little bit on how else it might be changing?
Is it still pretty much the U.S. trying to help other allies adopt some of its own concepts and capabilities, or is there starting to be at least some nascent bilateral, multilateral cooperation, innovation that makes sense?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So, yeah, in the past, it was really about us helping other nations.
What we've really found is other nations are catching up or on par with us, right?
And so, our recent AUKUS agreement, that is agreement, overarching agreements between Australia, U.K., and the U.S., where all of us are mutually benefiting from that agreement as we push different types of science and technology.
We look at things like distributed production facilities as well on a bilateral standpoint with some of our allies.
So, yeah, the nature of it has changed and the ability, again, of not just looking at production, we're looking more at co-production and less at co-assembly.
So, that is the other thing that we had done previously, where we're all using the exact same supply chains.
We're just assembling in different countries.
We've advanced past that to actually being able to produce and develop second sources.
Though there's always been the dream of co-development, too, but as Rob was mentioning, sometimes it's difficult to narrow down your performance parameters, requirements, to things that make sense for a broad range of countries.
Is there, though, interest in, I think, trying to define government reference architecture?
Is there other approaches by which we can facilitate that innovation?
And it's not just the co-production type of work.
Well, there it is, and I think they highlighted very well.
The modular open system architecture is one of those areas that if we agree on what that standard is, we open up competition worldwide.
So it's not just limited to the US.
It's also open to foreign companies as well.
So it's mutually beneficial to all of our industrial base.
Rob, I saw you were waiting to jump in.
I think you had some thoughts on that.
Maybe expound on your earlier thoughts about specialization and how do we, and complementarity as opposed to getting scale.
Yeah, I mean, so the way I kind of think about this is there's kind of three mountains to try and climb here.
One is the money mountain, and I've never worked anywhere ever where there's enough money where everyone's like, yeah, we're good.
We've got enough money.
So there's like, you know, and it's certainly the same in my household as well if you ask my kids.
So there's always a, you know, we need the money.
We've got to figure that out.
And I think there's creative ways, going back to Mike's point, how we think about that.
The second bit, and we've all seen this, is the challenges of contracting, of procurement, of acquisition.
Because if all the money from the sky dropped tomorrow on the desks of folks in the Pentagon or in ministries of defense, could it be spent?
Could it be get out the door such that it could be used?
Maybe.
And then the third bit is what we're talking about here is production.
And how do we reimagine production?
So I wholeheartedly agree with you, Mike, about the notion of pushing production as far forward as possible.
And not only does that make sense in terms of how you start to build resilience in your production line sort of strategic level, because you haven't got it concentrated in one nation, just for example's sake.
But also I think coming back to the notion of creativity, and it comes back to your point, Mike, about open architectures, we've got to be more creative and reimagine how we think about production.
You know, there are some amazing companies here in the United States.
I'll call out Divergent out in Los Angeles, who are probably the world's best additive manufacturing company that started off in the automotive industry.
And the way they think about production is like nothing else.
And I appreciate, yes, they're building road-going cars and building components for Ferrari and Aston Martin and Mercedes and so forth.
So it's not quite a ship and it's not shipbuilding.
I get that.
However, the notion of actually putting production as far forward as possible to the battle line, having seven, eight ISO containers stitched together and be able to print your own small arms ammunition and also your components for perhaps vehicles or whatever else it might be, that absolutely is part of this discussion as to how we start to reimagine production.
And the reason why that's important is because it comes back to cost and it puts your cost curve down.
Suddenly the marginal cost of production becomes incredibly cheap and fast.
So I think that there is obviously the political element to this with regards to onshoring and where the production takes place and how the cooperation with nations takes place and so on and so forth.
But equally, there's an entire world of technological innovation here which really needs to be tapped into.
And I see that being, and that's fundamentally part of open architectures as well.
To build on that, Rob, Saab established, or Saab Incorporated established an innovation center in San Diego earlier this year, Scott, I believe, that's focused on trying to have this co-development between operational concepts, technology, and develop a new approach to fighting as opposed to maybe just accelerating the current approach.
Can you expound a little bit about how you're trying to drive that innovation and how are you trying to avoid this just being more or less a marketing center, right?
Which many of the so-called innovation centers will be set up in other countries are marketing elements that bring in industry and government, but really don't innovate.
But it sounds like you're pushing towards a different vision.
Well, I'm going to quote the great late, great Peter Drucker, who felt that the only thing in business that was worthwhile was innovation and marketing, and everything else was a cost.
So I'm kind of cool with marketing.
But the point being though is, yeah, what we've done in San Diego is essentially, it's pretty straightforward.
I'm a former Army officer, British Army officer.
And for me, the mission is about getting the latest tech into the hands of operators as quickly as possible.
It's no more complicated than this.
And so what we've tried to do is put ourselves in San Diego very close to various parts of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, Navy SEALs, et cetera. and really start to co-develop and work with that community and just trying to accelerate pace into the technology.
And this is a cultural thing.
There's nothing really, this is a people business.
This is about trying to build trust between the different entities.
And that's kind of, and we don't see it as a Saab special source thing.
This is our contribution to the community.
This is a community effort across national security and defense, you know, to try to build the level of deterrence needed.
So it's really just trying to get as close, in this case, to the operator as possible and then bring in some amazing mines that are in California, not necessarily would traditionally work in the defense sector, but we've brought them across and doing things perhaps which haven't been seen before.
Thank you.
Mike, I want to turn to you.
HANWA is doing amazing work around the world.
It's delivering tanks and artillery systems to the Middle East, Eastern Europe, but also working ships and aircraft.
And it seems like it's generating value across sort of the portfolio of capabilities, both in terms of developing effective systems, but also quick delivery timelines, which is, I think, increasingly of interest to countries driven by the war in Ukraine or prospects of conflict with China.
As you look at the portfolio, how are you trying to ensure that Hanwha here in the United States can innovate with the U.S. military and have, I think, approaches by which Hanwha in Korea and Hanwha here in the United States can sort of co-develop capabilities or at least adapt what you're working on globally to the unique circumstances here?
Yeah, I don't want this to be a commercial for Hanwha, but this is a good example of how things can get done.
With the canine thunder that the ambassador mentioned this morning, it's a self-propelled tracked howitzer.
It's been sold to 11 different nations.
Each nation has a slightly different set of needs, so harmonizing requirements is really difficult.
It's difficult to do in the United States alone.
But what we've done is we've created a user group, basically a user jury, a buyer's club, where we bring customers together to look at, okay, how can I improve the system in a certain way for a certain type of threat environment?
And sharing that information, backhauling that back to Korea, and cutting it into production into the base model.
So for instance, I'll just give a quick and easy one.
The need for five operators in this system is kind of a standard feature of the system.
However, that same need isn't the same in the U.S.
It's four.
And then how much automation can we cut into the system so we can bring the operator count down to three?
I was at AUSA this entire week, and one of the big focus areas is survivability.
Well, if you take the soldier out of the system itself, that's the ultimate in survivability.
We don't want to necessarily take the thinking and creativity from the soldier from the system, but we do want to minimize the workload that a soldier has to undertake to be effective in terms of achieving a mission.
So I think developing adaptive systems, using model-based systems engineering and design, everyone's doing it.
How do you build that into the system so that when you ship it and export it to the next customer, they have the sovereign capability to upgrade, modify, and sustain through life that system.
And then being able to bring those different customers together to help optimize what the system looks like for the next customer, which will be the U.S. Army, if I have my way with it.
So anyway, that's what we're doing.
And it's co-development.
It's cooperative development kind of in sync so that we can create better systems that meet the needs of our entire customer base and future prospective customers.
Could you expound a bit more on this user group approach?
One approach would be a user group with only one country.
You're soliciting feedback from the different Army communities, Marine Corps, but also user groups across countries.
And then you get to the problem that Rob mentioned of, well, everybody has a different opinion on it.
Yeah, they do.
And the next one's going to be in Finland.
And the danger of getting all your customers together and even inviting prospects is that we're letting them behind the curtain.
Okay, here's what's wrong.
Here's what's not working right.
You know, what might be right for Finland might not be right for Estonia.
So those are some of the challenges that we're working on.
We have a subset, subgroup, which we have six NATO countries are buying the system.
So there's some needs in terms of interoperability that they're looking for that perhaps other customers aren't.
But this gives a forum, a technical forum, and an operator's forum to be able to modify the system and really have their say in terms of what the future technical technology roadmap looks like.
And then it also emphasizes or it helps us from an engineering perspective design in a degree of flexibility that we may not have had at the outset.
So there are discussions amongst engineers from different nations, from operators, from armies from different nations around how they want to use the system, how it may not be meeting the needs.
And we can take that information back to our designers so we can iterate and bring a set of features and capabilities that they may not have purchased in the initial buy, but now would meet the needs of what they have to do as their threat environment evolves and as their missions change.
Thank you.
Michael, to build off of that, as different countries, let's say, have these user groups, consultations, engagements, they'll come up with ideas regarding operational concepts that work or capabilities and technologies that are promising.
In many cases, those could be controlled, have different types of controls, including export controls on them.
So how is the Army thinking through trying to facilitate at appropriate levels sharing of that kind of information and make it a more interactive environment?
And you mentioned AUKUS before.
Have there been any lessons from that that are applicable, or is there sort of another approach we should be taking?
Yeah, so export planning and export design needs to happen earlier in the process, right?
Because for all the right reasons.
We're trying to protect our cutting-edge technologies, right?
But we also want to share at the same time to our mutual benefits, right?
So AUKUS helps because among like-minded nations, we're able to actually bring and change law that allowed us to streamline such things and share more information more freely.
Extending that, that type of approach is probably something that would be needed for the Indo-Pacific area, especially given the threats that are out there.
But that's, yes, that has really been a good mechanism for us to be able to share.
Just knowing that that is a very highest level of our government.
So filtering all of that down over decades of how we've done export control in the past, it's had some time to take effect at the very lowest level, but we have seen some benefits.
And I guess what's the approach to scale that or extend that AUKUS-like approach?
Is it more waivers for specific technologies or classes of activities, or is there a different class of reform that would facilitate a greater pace of adaptation?
Just because I'm thinking if it's one-offs for promising technologies that are identified, it might not allow the speed of innovation that Mike and Rob were discussing before.
Right.
So it all starts with having an agreement, right?
And we don't just enter into agreements as a U.S. government if we're not going to get something out of it, right?
And so we need to understand what that technology is.
And once we've identified what that technology is, then we try to enter into the agreements at that point.
Whether it's co-development, co-production, co-sustainment, whatever that benefit is to the U.S. government as well as that partner is what we try to pursue.
Rob, did you have a thought on that, Mike?
I mean, just thinking about AUKUS pillar one, just in the past life, the pipe clear that we've selected in nuclear submarines, you couldn't be more complex.
We are going the hardest one first.
Everything else will be easy.
And then one of the biggest challenges is not just because we're building 1.4 subs a year, which is not where we need to be, but it's also the nuclear infrastructure and training that goes along with all this.
So I think some of the changes and some of the policy evolutions that we've made to support AUKUS are fantastic.
But execution is going to be tremendously challenging.
But I think it's a fantastic direction.
It's just, we've picked a really challenging first article on this one.
Rob, Saab has a history of upgrading its platforms in different ways.
We could think about the Saab Group in, we could think about the CB90 fast assault craft that's now incorporating uncrewed systems onto it.
As you're engaging here in the United States and then with other allies, how do you view, I think, the tendency towards adaptation and upgrades of systems as opposed to maybe leaping ahead of the new technology and that balance?
Yeah, it's a really key question, Tim, because I think it's unrealistic to expect multiple nations to easily, easily replace existing, or dare I say, legacy hardware and armaments just because of the time and the cost that goes with that.
So going back to the earlier panel, the notion that actually software is the way in which we start to increase and improve sort of older heritage hardware, that's absolutely fundamental to how we think about this.
And key to that is, A, comes back to architectures, we want to make sure our architectures are as open as possible.
And the reason being is A, or B, I should say, it makes it easier to upgrade downstream.
But perhaps more importantly, it allows us to partner with other companies, non-traditional, smaller companies, who could do phenomenal work.
So an example is an airborne early warning box, or ELIN box actually, that Saab makes, and it's on a German Eurofighter.
Now, we've worked with Helsing, a European defense tech company, and they've essentially jailbroken that box and increased the performance of it by around sort of 30, 40, 50%.
It's quite remarkable just through software.
And therefore, when we think about the upgrades of our hardware and so on and so forth downstream, we have to be looking at this through a lens of how software can achieve that.
Because for nation states to be able to afford new hardware swap outs and so forth, that is really tough.
But also, as we've talked about at the beginning, just the sheer capacity in production and so on and so forth to actually enable that and make it happen and do so on time, on price, et cetera, et cetera, that's hard to manage as well.
I mean, these things are relatively bespoke, so it's tricky.
So therefore, open architectures, partnering with like-minded companies and looking for software answers is really fundamental to how we think about this.
Rob, you focus on software.
How do you set up that software architecture so that you can actually do that, though?
I guess from one, there's the technical element of it, but also the regulatory element so that whatever you create in it, then maybe, you know, in some arranges, maybe you can develop great software here in the United States, but then it might be difficult to export it abroad or share it and have interactive collaboration.
How are you balancing that?
Yeah, I mean, there's no two ways about that.
I mean, that is a very real challenge that I suspect most sort of SSA companies, special security agreement companies like Reimantal, like Saab, et cetera, have in this, when we're trying to do technology transfers from the mothership, so from Sweden in this case, it is difficult.
There's no two ways about that.
The way we think about it is very much first principles, though.
So, first of all, let's make the hardware as open as possible in terms of architectures.
So, when it's being literally at the whiteboard, the very day one, week one, designing the hardware and so forth, have that future-proofing in mind.
Second of all, it's quite dry, but it's absolutely relevant and it's been mentioned a couple of times this morning: standards, interoperability.
They are key and they're critical.
And again, going back to a previous life and a previous job when I was in NATO, one of the roles I had was I was vice chair of the NATO Army Armaments Group and also the NATO Naval Armaments Group.
And when all of these sorts of various technical standards were being written by various sort of working groups and so forth, the drive to try to politicize that was kind of high because each nation wanted to have their own spin on the standard, which really benefited their defense industry.
And sometimes to get a political agreement on whatever it might be, you kind of have a compromise.
And the standard could be a mile wide, in which case, well, it's not really a standard.
It doesn't really help us.
So, the point being is, I think as a community, from government, from industry, so forth, we really need to be cognizant that it really doesn't benefit anyone in the long term to be so parochial when it comes to trying to sort of dominate standards.
That the market's too big for that to happen.
And I think that's more of a cultural thing than anything else.
I almost have to put on my blue and yellow Swedish hat.
I ran Bofors for about three years.
And I have to say, Sweden is a phenomenal country when it comes to defense exports.
They understand that their defense spend, the FMV, cannot purchase enough kit to sustain a local defense industry.
So, I think about the example of CB90.
That system designed by Hoglunds was designed in an open way so that the turret itself could be hot swappable.
I sell to Poland, you may have a turret, you be the provider, you be the integrator.
I sell to Latvia, you have your own turret, you be the integrator.
The whole idea of export and the need to export is designed in at the outset, which to me is genius.
We don't necessarily have that same perspective here because we have a defense industry or a buyer who is buying 47% of everything in the world.
We take China out of the equation.
Well, you have enough demand here to sustain industry, so you don't have to design that in.
That's changing in the U.S.
I think policy as well in the U.S. will help facilitate that.
It's been very difficult for ever.
Hopefully, you know, that will continue to evolve.
We saw a little breakthrough with AUKUS.
But when you think about exports and defense exports, it has to go all the way back to design, not just how am I going to repair and sustain and modernize.
It goes all the way back to the inception of the system itself.
So I had to chime in and give a commercial for Sweden real quick.
I had a final question, but before we open up to the floor briefly, and it has to do with sort of investment.
You've done a lot of work over your years, Mike, in terms of different investment deals and advising other companies regarding investments that they can make.
HANWA is now partnering with some startups here in the United States, particularly software startups.
Andrew was announced, but also considering this investment in Philly's shipyard.
What's your framework for guiding some of this work and identifying where it makes sense and how it makes sense for allied defense industry to cooperate?
I mean, there are two major levers that we'll be pulling in the U.S. You heard about the special security agreement with Saab, and of course, Ryan Mattel has something similar.
We will have one very soon.
I've been here for seven weeks, so give me some time.
But there are two major levers: one is acquisition so you can establish your own footprint, a trained, skilled workforce, a backlog, and capability locally on the ground.
So Philadelphia was part of that.
Obviously, with being the second largest shipbuilder in Korea and one of the top in the world, there are a number of processes, technologies that we'll be cutting in and investing in in Philadelphia.
Doosan DSME actually was a consultant to NASCO several decades ago.
That's Show Dynamics.
So, you know, bringing those same types of work practices and workflows to the shipyard will help us bring that yard back to its state of national prominence where it was back in the 40s.
Andoril and other companies that are similar that bring certain niche, bespoke capability, will also be partnering with companies like that.
So there are companies that have tremendous software capability, defense electronics, systems, ISR, sensors.
Those are the types of companies that we'll look to partner with.
We have those capabilities back in Korea, but that doesn't help us with the U.S. content element of being able to win here in the U.S.
So, you know, the partnership with Andoril with a few other companies are similar, also looking at Assured PNT, those different pieces.
We're going to be looking to partner.
And the good news is that we have those capabilities back home in Korea, which will make us smart partners when we move forward in the U.S.
So stay tuned to what we're doing on the MA side and the partnering side, because it's going to be quite exciting.
Thank you, Mike.
First question here in the front row.
I have to cut questions because Congressman Whitman is waiting online.
So that is just right now.
Perfect.
Please join me in thanking our panel.
Seed by the bell.
I look forward to representing Mark.
Side by the bell.
Thank you all.
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