Transcript
GENERAL HUGHES: The book that you are going to receive today "Right-Sizing the PLA: Exploring the Contours," as was mentioned, does embody a certain mystery, but I think probably most people in this audience understand this [the PLA] is a huge organizational structure and has a meaning perhaps deeper than the mere outlines or contours of its organizational structure. I don't think Americans are very well equipped to understand that, frankly, so I am hoping that not only out of this book but perhaps other work to come we will know much more about the Chinese military than we do today.
I think it is a great example, this work, of cooperation and collaboration between the U.S. government, to some degree especially embodied by the Strategic Studies Institute and the U.S. Army War College, cooperation by academia, think tanks, research organizations, and individual scholars, about China, and that collaboration and cooperation must continue. I do represent industry here. You might say I am one of the guys who represents a little bit of money, and it is important that industry and business here in the United States support these kinds of endeavors. Without that support, the time and the energy to produce such a work and to think through honest truths about topics like the PLA cannot be done. So I hope that you will take my presence here in the spirit in which it is intended, and that is support for what we think at L-3 and what I think personally is vital work.
I have been looking at China for quite a few years, not as a China scholar. I fortunately have been associated with several other people in this audience including Dave Finkelstein and Roy and others over the years to help me understand issues about China that I could not otherwise know about because I do not have the facility of the language, nor have I had the time or the opportunity to study the culture or the place. But I have had contact with it. I have been there on several occasions and have had contact with their military, and I have had compelling reasons, one might say, to want to know more about China because China has been an inertial pole apart from the United States. We must recognize, when we see one, a strategic competitor, a rival, a friend, a partner, a force for stability in the world or instability in the world depending upon how things go. And it is in part up to us and in part up to the Chinese to make sure that we go down the right pathway in the future. And so this kind of understanding is not only valuable, it is critical, it is necessary, it is the force by which we are going to move into hopefully a bright and prosperous future for us all. I don't think you can overstate the importance of that.
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