In your world, you're going to have to optimize yourselves for urban combat, not rural combat. That has huge implications for intelligence collection… - Mark A. Milley

The 6th of January was one of the days of high risk. Neither I, nor anyone that I know of, to include the FBI or anybody else, envisioned the thousands of people who assaulted the capitol. To basically encircle the Capitol and assault it from multiple directions simultaneously, and to do what they did, that was something else. The 6th was pretty dramatic. That's about as dramatic as you're going to see it, short of a civil war... What you might have seen was a precursor to something far worse down the road.

And finally, there is the mother of all technologies — artificial intelligence — where machines are actually developing the capacity to learn and to reason. These rapidly converging developments in time and space are resulting in that profound change — the most profound change ever in human history. And whatever overmatch we, the United States, enjoy militarily … the United States is challenged in every domain of warfare: space, cyber, maritime, air and land.

As senior leaders, everything you do will be closely watched, and I am not immune. As many of you saw, the result of the photograph of me at Lafayette Square last week, that sparked a national debate about the role of the military in civil society. I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I've learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it. Embrace the Constitution, keep it close to your heart. It is our North Star.