Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, Jr., gave some insight into the thought processes of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a Fireside Chat with Fox News luminary Jennifer Griffin at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
Brown is the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. military, and it is his job to advise the president, vice president, secretary of defense, secretary of state and other members of the National Security Council on military matters.
Griffin asked Brown about a number of issues during her talk with the chairman, from Ukraine to China, to Russia, to the Red Sea and rebuilding the national armament infrastructure. Brown said all of these aspects of international relations have to be viewed as a whole. He said the U.S. government cannot really just deal with one aspect of a crisis, but what dealing with the aspect would mean to other governments in other parts of the world.
“We could look at things individually and [say], ‘Because this happened, we should go do X,'” he said. “But I’m looking at it from not only with X but what happens with Y and Z, too.”
The U.S. military has to look at any situation and determine the second and third orders of effects that are possible, he said. “I have a responsibility to be thinking strategically about the actions we take, the recommendations I make, and what the risks [are] of broadening it [to] further escalation or broader conflict,” Brown said.
In the Middle East, for example, that means looking at the Hamas attack on Israel in October, he said. One of the first lines of effort for the U.S. government from President Joe Biden was to “not to let the conflict in the Middle East broaden,” he said. “I think we’ve been so effective doing that.”
One effect of the Hamas attack was the Houthi effort to shut down the sea lanes in the Red Sea. U.S. service members serve magnificently in the effort to protect shipping and civilian mariners in that area, Brown said. “I have to say how proud I am of our service members,” he said.
One of his expectations upon becoming chairman was that honing warfighting skills has primacy in all the U.S. military does. The destroyer USS Carney, other ships, and air assets used that training to ensure the free flow of ships and supplies in that crucial waterway. “Our service members are proud of being able to do exactly that, to be able to defend themselves, and do it extremely well,” the chairman said.
Brown also spoke strategically about Russia’s war on Ukraine. The chairman flat out said that Ukraine matters. “Unprovoked aggression doesn’t stay in one part of the world,” he said. If Russian President Vladimir Putin manages to conquer Ukraine and wrest sovereignty from that nation, it will embolden autocrats in other parts of the world to do the same thing, he said.Ukraine is the focus of not just the United States, but more than 50 other nations supplying the besieged country with the means to defend itself, the chairman said. “Putin went into Ukraine with the goal to take Ukraine very quickly and fracture NATO; neither one of those occurred,” Brown said. “He’s still fighting in Ukraine, and NATO is stronger.”
The NATO growth in strength is not limited to Finland and Sweden joining the alliance because of Putin’s reckless actions, but also because “the dialogue within NATO is stronger than it has ever been,” he said. NATO nations have stepped up and are investing in defense in ways not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union.
“What you are seeing here is this type of aggression has actually strengthened allies and partnerships,” he said. “That’s what I see in NATO. That’s what I saw just this past week when I was in the Indo-Pacific. It’s very important that we all stay together and focus on maintaining global security by the actions we take and how we work together.”
If, collectively, the nations stopped supporting Ukraine, Putin wins, Brown said. The democracies would lose credibility in the eyes of the world. “If we just back away, that opens the door for Xi Jinping and others that want to do unprovoked aggression,” he said.
Still, Brown does not see conflict with China as imminent or inevitable. That doesn’t mean the United States military is going to let down its guard. “In all we do, I want our service members to be so focused on their individual skill set: How they bring that individual skill set together as a team in their units, how we bring it together as a joint force, how we deal with their allies and partners,” the chairman said. “We exist to fight with our nation’s wars. We want to be so good at what we do, that our adversaries never want to mess with us. And if they do, we want to be their worst nightmare, personally, professionally.
“I do not play for second place,” the chairman continued. “I play to win, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure it’s an unfair fight. That’s my focus.”
