my name is john henry. i'm president at csis. my role today is entirely ornamental. just to welcome all of you and to say how thankful i am to matt greene is here, bill lin will be with us later. you have made it possible for us to do the global security forum and we appreciate the opportunity. we have got a real lineup to -- a real lineup. we have the chairman of the joint chiefs coming. all six of the vice chiefs for the military services pit it is going to be a good day. the first panel is going to be a stellar group and we want to say thank you to michelle and tom and jennifer. thank you for moderating. kari is the genius who has been pulling this together. she picked the topic gathering storm. it refers to winston churchill's famous autobiography really of the interwar period and how it was building up to what became the tragedy of world war ii. we don't want to imply that we are heading in that direction but we want to recognize the severity of the issues in front of us. we have this ghastly illegal war in ukraine. we have tension in the taiwan straits. we have