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.
