Rebeccah Heinrichs:
Hello, and welcome to this event at Hudson Institute. My name is Rebeccah Heinrichs, and today we will be discussing the strategic importance of Guam and the threat to Guam in particular from the Chinese Communist Party, from China. And I have a wonderful group of panelists with me. First, this will be a two-part panel. Our first panel, we will be discussing the role of Guam and how we might deter the PRC and then when and if deterrence fails, and we find ourselves in a military contest with China. My first panelist is my colleague here at Hudson, Mr. Bryan Clark. He’s a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology here at Hudson. He’s an expert in naval operations, electronic warfare, autonomous systems, military competitions, and war gaming. You can see the rest of his biography on the Hudson Institute website.

And then I have my friend and colleague, Ms. Patty-Jane Geller. She is the policy analyst for nuclear deterrence and missile defense in the Heritage Foundation Center for National Defense. And my friend and colleague as well, Mr. Matthew Costlow. He is a senior analyst at the National Institute for Public Policy and his areas of expertise are in nuclear deterrence, missile defense policy, arms control, and Russian and Chinese nuclear doctrine. It is a great privilege to be able to moderate this discussion. I intend to just ask each of my panelists to please open with five to eight minutes of remarks, just to put some interesting things on the table, and then we will have a discussion about those. So with that, I’m going to turn it over to my friend, Bryan. Bryan, the floor is yours.