 Okay, what I want to do for a few minutes is to amplify on some themes that Admiral Howe and Dr. Johnson have already started on, but to do it in a little more systematic way, which is to explore this notion of what it means to be a profession, whether you are in fact members of a profession, and why it would matter. And once we've gone through that, then think about how it would frame a number of ethics questions that might not at least initially seem like ethics questions to you. So as Olinda was talking about, the question, why are you here? First of all, let's just think about the assumptions that underlie the fact that you're here. Assumption number one, that there are skills and expertise that you need to improve or learn new as you advance in rank. This is a developmental process, and somebody thought that that was important. The assumption is that that developmental leader, at least a part of it, is best addressed in an academic and educational environment, rather than, for example, experientially, or leaving it up to your personal choices to develop yourselves. So it's worth sending you to school, and if you don't know, I think it's fair to say I've taught at the Army War College, I know the other war colleges academically speaking this is by far the best, in my opinion. And somebody thinks it's worth spending a lot of money to do this. Just do the math. When people are in this room, pick your average salary, multiply it, then look at this physical plant and look at how many faculty members we have here. This is a lot of money going into this. Somebody thinks that this is really, really important. Even in constrained budget times, these places will continue to do this. So somebody thinks this is very, very important. So I'm going to suggest to you that the assumptions I just mentioned are characteristic of what professions do, not of what other kinds of work. What other kinds of people? Do we send DMB clerks to school for a year? I don't think so. Do we send telephone operators to school for a year? No we don't. So there's something special about this. Now as Admiral Howe said in his opening remarks, this question of whether military service and in particular military officership is professional activity, got its start nearly 15 years ago now in the Army at the work of this one scholar, Dr. Don Snyder, who taught at West Point for many years and has now retired in Carlisle. And he put together a bunch of scholars, about 50, who put together this book, The Future of the Army Profession. And we looked at it from many angles. I was working for the Army at the time, so I wrote a chapter in it, and we had a series of conferences at West Point. And this generated a dialogue in the Army that we really needed to reinvigorate the sense of professionalism. It was tipped off, by the way, when a young captain who was a West Point grad came back to West Point from a Balkan deployment and said to the cadets, you know, I told my folks that force protection is really our number one job here. There's nothing here worth anybody getting hurt over. And that sent Don kind of ballistic about when did we cease to focus on accomplishing the mission and just be worried about force protection. How did that ever happen? So this book is really good. I did, before I came here, I was at the Air Force Academy for a while, too, and I taught this book to the senior leadership elective. And the cadets were complaining, how come we're reading this green-covered book, you know, why are we reading the Air Force? When I said, you find me the Air Force equivalent of it, and we'll use it. But it didn't exist. This dialogue didn't exist. So Don is really the foundation from all this. And by the way, that resulted in the creation of this center up at West Point, the Center for the Army, Profession, and Ethic. I'm sure you Army people all know about it. But the rest of you, go to their website, cape.army.mil. It's a really excellent website. It's full of all kinds of unusual resources, including ethics video games, where you play a video game and a particular role in the game, and you make choices in the game. And depending on the quality of your choices, things go well or very badly on a deployment. So definitely look at that. If you've noticed, General Dempsey has talked a lot about this sort of stuff now, about the profession and the importance of the profession. Having been around this process from the very beginning, I can tell you, when Dempsey talks, he's channeling Don Snyder. It's Don Snyder's language that's coming out of everything the Army writes about this, and in the case of some of the Army videos, it's literally Don Snyder's voice narrating the videos. In the Navy, we're a little behind, but I think we're making progress. We have a Navy leadership and ethics center, as of about two years ago. The CNO signed out a new Navy leader development strategy that you're going to be hearing a great deal about. This is important, because historically the Navy has not addressed leader development terribly explicitly. It's tended to think that it was on the job training kinds of stuff, unlike to some degree the Army. What the leadership leader development strategy lays out is what kind of skill sets should people be developing at various levels of rank. And then to the communities saying, what are your gaps in developing your people according to this model? And how do you propose to address those gaps? So how many Navy people have heard of this? Okay, we'll need to fix that this year. Make sure the more of you understand it. And I suspect, Admiral Howe, we'll be talking about it quite a bit. And well, Dempsey signed this out of a little while ago. If you can't read it, it says America's military a profession of arms. And this is the chairman's instantiation of that discussion that started in the Army. So here are some things he says. We must renew our commitment to the profession of arms. As Admiral Howe was talking about, the ability to behave as a profession is a contingent ability. It's contingent upon the American people's trusting you, or for those of you from other countries, the degree to which your country trusts you. And let me give you a couple of examples when you lose it. Everybody remembers in the US, the tailhook scandal, right? What happened to tailhook? No officer was in the building during the tailhook scandal got promoted. The Senate said, we are taking away your marbles. Same thing happened, for example, to the entire profession of accountancy after Enron, accountancy used to be able to operate according to generally accepted accounting practices. After that, the Congress says, we don't trust you. And so we're gonna regulate you. So there's this complicated dance between professions and the societies they serve. And it's a constantly being negotiated space. So when we have in the Navy scandals like Fat Leonard, obviously the Congress gets very interested in what's going on with Navy leadership and PECO, and as they should be. And General Pepsi says, that trust is founded on the fact that you are absolutely apolitical and that you would never betray your oath of loyalty to the Constitution of the United States. If there's ever any question about that, the whole thing falls apart. One of the great movies, Cold War movies, if you've never seen it, called Seven Days in May, anybody ever seen it? It's a great movie about the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is planning a coup because the president is negotiating an arms control treaty that the military doesn't like, and it's a very dramatic film. So if you've never seen it, have a look at it. This is from the Joint Education White Paper, also General Dempsey's staff work. Pointing out the obvious, we haven't had so many seasoned combat leaders in school in a very, very long time. The purpose of professional military education is to convey a broad body of professional knowledge and to develop habits of mind. Think about what Dr. Johnson was just saying to you. Many of us have the same problem, right? When we know things and we feel comfortable, we know things. It's often easy to just put up your armor and say, I didn't, a new idea can't get in here, I've got this, I'm sure about it. But the habit of mind to keep, to be continually learning. That's certainly one mark of a profession. With the DMV clerk, I can train them in a couple of days to do practically everything they need to know about the DMV. But I can't train a doctor once and done, right? They've got to be continually learning, continually reading journals, continually developing their knowledge. And failure to do so would be, what? Unethical, right? It would be professionally unethical to not be intellectually developing in that way. So here's the one, the chairman expects you to become scholars, scholars. Not many military people I know comfortably use that title of themselves. But notice, scholars have a particular discipline, scholars of the profession of arms. He expects you to understand this deeply. So as Dr. Johnson said, we hope that we can revisit this topic of professional, of the profession periodically throughout the year. So that it provides a kind of overarching framework for you to try to organize what you're learning into some kind of coherent whole. How does this all matter? So for example, today we're doing, I don't know, force planning for our future force structure. Is that a professional activity? Tomorrow we're doing civil military relations. Is that a professional activity? All of those things I think you can come to see really are all part of how a profession behaves. How it negotiates its relationship to the society it serves. How it negotiates its relationship to the civilians who control us. Okay, now as Ed Mahau said, there are a number of challenges to trying to think this way. One of them is the way we use the word professional in colloquial English. Often we talk about it just as what people do for a living or get paid to do as opposed to amateurs who do it just because they like it, right? So we talk about professional football players. They're not truly a profession in the sense I'm trying to talk about, but they are paid to do what they do. So that's one thing you've got to kind of put aside. When we talk about you being professionals, we don't just mean that you're paid to do it, although of course you are. In the scholarly literature about professions, and there's quite a lot of it actually, mostly in sociology. The sociologists distinguish professions as one way of organizing work from another way of organizing work, which is bureaucratic. And they differ in some systematic ways. Now, to blinding flash to the obvious, all of us work for bureaucracies, right? So it's not an either or problem. It's not going to be, I want to be a professional, so I don't want to have anything to do with the bureaucracy. That's really not an option. But what is a challenge is to make sure the bureaucratic stuff doesn't swamp the professional stuff. So every doctor struggles with this, right? I'm spending too much of my time doing insurance forms, but really what I want to do is be practicing medicine, right? All of you struggle with this, I realize I've got to meet this mandatory training schedule. But in the end what matters is that I've trained my unit to be combat effective. If I haven't got that, if I've answered all the bureaucratic mail properly, I've failed, right? I haven't got it done. Now historically in the West, in the early modern period, there were only three true professions. Anybody want to give a shot at what they were? I know it's the first day, but don't be shy. Doctors, good. Lawyers and clergy, bingo, we got it. Doctors, lawyers, and clergy, bum, bum. Okay, so what do those have in common among themselves that distinguish them from other kinds of work, like mechanic or blacksmith or whatever you like? What sets them apart as a group? What are their common features? An ethical code. A body of knowledge. Certify their own members, great. Sorry, I didn't hear the word, sorry. Doctrine, yeah, which is body of knowledge. Okay, let me read you through the official list. You hit many of them, great. They provide a service that's absolutely essential to the society that they serve. Think about those three classical ones in terms of the values of the society at the time. What are the purposes of those three professions? Justice, health, and salvation. In terms of the values of the society at the time, among the most important things in question. There are a lot of nice to have things in the world, but lacking justice, health, and salvation in terms of the values of the society at the time is the most serious things you could not have. So the job of those professions is to provide this vitally needed and essential service to the society. So if military officership is a professional activity, what is the good that you provide to the society you serve? Security, right, defense. Defense of national interests. All professions possess a highly technical vocabulary, a jargon, someone once said all professions are conspiracies against lay people. And there's some truth in it, but if you think about, when I go to the doc, I wanna, and I'm not feeling well, and she says to me, you have an infection, take this medicine, and I'll see you next week, that's pretty much good enough for me, right? But it's not good enough for her. She's gotta know what particular bacterium has cooked God, right? Because if I don't get that exactly right, then I don't know exactly what to prescribe, right? So when she talks to other docs, she's gonna speak in a language that I will probably not understand at all. But it's essential that they have that vocabulary because they need what? They need conceptual precision, and that's what a vocabulary does. Anybody ever talk to a bunch of lawyers? They lapse into Latin all the time, right? So you just gotta recognize that they've got this. So do you all have a jargon that distinguishes you from your fellow citizens that when you get around them and you speak it makes them look at you with a baffled expression on their face? Of course you do, right? You don't even notice it, right? You're in it so long that you don't even notice it. Somebody sent me a really funny, I'm an Air Force brat, somebody sent me a really funny thing on Facebook the other day of things only military brats would understand. It's a little video, anybody seen this? Look it up, it's really funny. One of my Soviet friends, actually, Ella, my Soviet assistant said, I got some of it, but not all of it. Another thing, professionals make discretionary judgments about how to apply their knowledge as opposed to relatively rote scenarios. So the DMV cork doesn't have a lot of discretion about which forms I need to register my vehicle, right? There's not a lot of options here. But when I go into the dock and say Hertz here dock, he or she is doing a very complicated thing in their heads called differential diagnosis. And Hertz here dock could be this, could be this, could be this. Maybe I think I should run this test, maybe not that test. And by the way, almost no two docks would come to exactly the same course of action. Y'all realize that, right? That's why you ask for second opinions on complicated things because they, and by the way, it doesn't mean one of them is right and the other one is wrong. If there's a malpractice suit, the question asked to the expert witnesses is not, did the person make a mistake? What is what they did within the standard of care? Was it reasonable? If it was reasonable, then it's not malpractice, even if it isn't exactly what I would have done, right? So that you all know that when you command a unit, you have a lot of discretion about exactly how you do that, right? Exactly how you train it, what you anticipate and so forth. So professionals have this discretion. The Army did a study maybe 15 years ago now in which they were worried, this is before 9-11, that they were losing captains, O3s in large numbers and they wanted to know what was going on, why were they bleeding captains out of the Army? It was done by a brilliant guy down at Carlisle named Lenny Wong, Colonel retired, Dr. Lenny Wong. The going in assumption was it was lower pay than their colleagues outside the military and smaller housing, that was the assumption. When they did the study, it turned out that wasn't it. What it was, they looked at the mandatory training schedule that Army companies were given and they mapped it onto the calendar. They said there's not even enough time to do the mandatory training stuff, let alone to do anything else. So the captains were leaving because they said I joined the Army because I wanted to lead and train my people and do what I wanna do and I'm not being allowed to behave as a professional, I'm being treated like a micromanaged bureaucrat. And by the way, all of our services have this tendency. Every time something goes wrong, it tends to get more micromanagement and then somebody has to take a weed wacker to it and say we're about to kill ourselves professionally if we don't cut back some of the weeds that have grown up around this. We've already talked about this degree of autonomy. Think about the fact that except when the Congress is really unhappy with you, you have almost complete discretion about promoting people, right? You have almost complete discretion. Yes, the Senate technically approves you, but unless you individually or your service has gotten big time on the radar of the Senate, that's a routine and pro forma thing, right? They don't really dig into it. Interance in promotion is governed by some agreed upon standards. This is by the way why I think the Navy leader development strategy is gonna be very helpful for the Navy in the long run because we start saying, well, what should a commander look like in terms of what their skills and abilities are? Can we explicitly lay that out? And how does that differ from what we expect a captain to have or a flag officer to have? Can we articulate that in some clear cut way? In the same way, think about other professions. I could be a doc, an MD, and have a license to practice medicine, but I could not be not board certified in anything, right? So I can't do thoracic surgery unless I'm a board certified thoracic surgeon, but I could be an MD, I can be a general physician, but for these specialized areas, we need technical guarantees that you got specifically what we need for that. Think of all the technical schools that you all go to at various points along. What are those? They're basically the equivalent of board certifications for medicine, right? So yeah, you're good about that. Trust we've talked about. And this one is really important. The individuals are motivated to do what they do primarily out of an internal sense that this is what they want to be. They're not motivated by money. You know, if you ran into a docuses, I'm really just in this for the money. You would really have doubts about whether you wanted to go to them and you would begin to say they're not really professional, right? You have all been in your services or agencies long enough that I would guess at this point, this isn't what you do, it's who you are. And you will be members of your service long after you've retired. You'll still think like and act like and somebody behave like what you are. In the same way, you know, I've been in academic, we were joking today, my academic role I wore this morning is now, I think I've had it for 40 years. So I think, you know, it's starting to fall apart, but so am I. But it's also really, really old because that's what I am, you know, I'm in academic. That's what I've done all my life. So what's all it's got to do with ethics? That's really the question, right? And this is the big, we hope take away the big framing thing that we'd like you to carry forward with you into the year. First, professional ethics is distinct from personal ethics. They can and sometimes do diverge and when they do it's very important that you think that through and decide what to do with it. So let me give you an example from recent US history. With the repeal of don't ask, don't tell and the inclusion of gay, lesbian and transgender folks in the military. It's pretty clear what the policy of the United States government is with respect to gay, lesbian and transgender people, right? And you as sworn agents of the Constitution have a duty to carry out that policy conscientiously and fairly to the best of your ability. Now, is it possible you could personally have convictions that make that difficult or impossible for you to do? Sure, of course it's possible. But if you find yourself in that spot, the question you have to ask yourself in the mirror is can I get over that or should I be looking for the door? Because my professional duty is clear here, right? And it's not about what do I personally believe? In the same way when the president asks you, Admiral in your professional military judgment, can we do thing X with the capability I'm willing to give you? He's not asking your personal opinion. He's asking given the years of training we've given you as a professional to make an assessment of the feasibility of the thing in question. Now, I suppose as you could at the end of the conversation say I personally would advise against it. So for example, if you go to your attorney and you're asking your attorney for legal advice, he or she should clearly distinguish telling you what's possible and legal from what they personally would advise you to do, right? These can be different things. Same thing with a doctor, right? Well, we could do this very invasive surgery on your 90-year-old grandmother but we don't particularly recommend it but patient on time meeting what it is, it's not our decision to make over to you. We already talked about this grounding in the unique relationship of trust and here's the bottom line. What has this got to do with ethics? It is your obligation to be as prepared as you can possibly be to meet the need of your client. So you meet a doc who says, I graduated from medical school in 1985. I do this surgery exactly the way they taught me to do it in 1985 and I haven't read a journal since, okay? You see that that would be professionally unethical. Professionally unethical because when you go to see the doctor, you assume that they do everything in their power to remain razor-sharp competent in their area as you expect as they should be and the fact that they're intellectually lazy isn't just a negative fact about them as human beings, it's a mark against their professional ethical quality. So when Dr. Johnson talks about the full-service approach to the War College, I would suggest it's your obligation to buy the full-service package because we're spending a lot of money on you based on a bunch of assumptions that I articulated for you and that frankly your countries, your nations expect you to come back a much cleaner car than you went into the car wash. Already talked about this, professional military advice is distinct from personal opinion. You need to be able to sharply distinguish those two things. This applies in many areas, by the way, even in academic things. If someone asked me an academic question, I can give them an answer based on what I believe to be true, even if it's not what I particularly wish to be true. I mean, it seems to me this is where the evidence go. Okay, some barriers to understanding everything I've just said. Well, let me just stop there for a minute. Any comments, questions, observations before I roll on? Okay, some of the problems with this. First of all, we constantly encounter, when we go talk to, for example, the major command course or other senior leaders, a tendency to think that ethics is the domain of the lawyers. So if I have an ethics problem, what I need to do is talk to a JAG, right? And there's an important role for that. I mean, that is the legal compliance component of ethics and only a fool would not pay attention to it, right? It's important. But the lawyers themselves will tell you, once I've told you all your legal options, you still got some choices to make, right? Now, you have discretionary judgment, Commander. I can give you the outer limits of the parameters of that discretionary judgment. But it's the commander's job to make the decision. It's not the lawyer's job to make the decision. Now, the lawyer's job is to tell them the limits of legally possible. Even in war, for example, there's a tendency to think that it's reduced to the law of armed conflict. But it's very easy to create scenarios where we can say, it would be legal to do this under international law. But it might also be unnecessarily cruel or unnecessary to pursue the mission or simply overkill. Another area I've gotten very interested in in the last few years, I'm by training a philosopher, so this is relatively new to me, but if you listen to military people talk about ethics, there's a fairly standard vocabulary. You talk about integrity, you talk about character, and sometimes you use professional in the all-purpose way that Admiral Howe indicated, an all-purpose turret of praise and blame. There's a deep intellectual background to this integrity and character stuff, and I just to prove I actually have a degree in philosophy, I'll tell you just a little bit about it. Aristotle had this idea that we all come out of the womb with a bunch of capabilities, and then we develop them by doing habitual things. And as we do these things repeatedly, they become more like second nature to us. And those add up to what he calls virtues. And so the well brought up person has this little cluster of virtues that cumulative are their character. And once they've got that, the assumption is they're good to go, right? So if you're a person of character and integrity, we can put you in any environment and you'll be fine because we formed you in that way and you're good. Well, here's the bad news. There's a ton of social science literature in the last 25 years in moral psychology, Sheng. That is way less reliable than you think it is. Way less reliable than you think it is. Probably the easiest way to find out about this is this guy, Dan Ariely, down at Duke. He's got wonderful TED talks. If you wanna really cheap out on me, just go watch him on TED. But if you wanna read the book, it's called The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. And what he does is do little environmental manipulations to see how it will affect how people behave, right? So here's one of my favorite ones. He did a study of cheating among college students, and he did it at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. And the basic experiment is students come into a room, they sit down, there are a set of math problems in front of them. They're asked to solve as many of these problems as they can. There's an envelope of money on each desk, and they're asked to pay themselves correctly for every problem they solve, and tear up the answer sheet so they can cheat if they want and leave, okay? In that default condition, most people cheat a little. They pay themselves like one or two problems and more than they actually solve. Nobody takes it all. So he says, well, why not? They could, there's no controls over this. He says, well, I think the reason they don't is we all have what he calls a personal fudge factor. You're willing to bend the rule a little bit, but you still wanna feel okay about yourself, right? So you're willing to drive five, maybe even 10 miles over the speed limit, but not 30, you know? At that point, we're into the not feeling good about myself as I went in at that point, right? Then the experiment is he puts an actor in the room, and as soon as the experimenter leaves, the actor says, I've solved them all, takes all the money on his desk and leaves. The question then is will having this actor in the room increase or decrease cheating in the study group? What do you think? The answer is it depends what sweatshirt you put the actor in. If you put the actor in a Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt, the school where the experiment is done, then indeed cheating goes up. But if you put the actor in a pit sweatshirt, the school on the other side of town that you wanna think you're better than, then it goes down below the norm of the original experiment. People don't cheat at all because they really wanna feel good about themselves. Now I think that experiment has enormous implications for military ethics because if there's any organization that's all about the sweatshirt, you're it, right? So it doesn't matter what we tell you with the PowerPoint slides about what's good, what matters, and you all know this, you've been in different units, they have different ethical climates, right? You get there and you realize the way things are done around here is X, and you, unless you're a really strong personality, you usually don't wanna make waves on your first couple of days in the job, right? You wanna be the person who fits in okay, right? So ask yourself, there's a great book called Black Hearts, one platoons dissented to hell in the Iraqi Triangle of Death. Anybody read that one? It's about this unit of the 101st that makes this plan to rape an Iraqi girl, kill her family, burn down the house and cover up the whole story. The trials are going on right now. But what's cool about the book is a strange sense of cool is it doesn't just tell you about the bad day. It tells you how they got there over a period of some months. People knew that that unit was going bad. They knew they had problems with some of the people in the unit. People made some efforts, but ineffectual ones to do anything about it. Another example, most of you, almost anybody had Psych 101 knows about the Zimbardo Prison Experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, where you put undergraduates in a basement, have some of them play guards, some of them play prisoners. And it gets so bad that in terms of the guards abusing the prisoners that they have to call it off after a couple of days. And these are just Stanford undergraduates, right? So now, by the way, there's some stuff coming out saying that experiment is more flawed than it has Tom Olympia talked about. So if I had time, I'd caveat it in a bunch of ways. But anyway, that's the way it's usually taught. Now ask yourself this, here's my idea. We're gonna get some poorly trained National Guard MPs where they'll leave them alone at night in an Iraqi prison. How do you think that's gonna go? So now, when you ask yourself about who gets blamed here, obviously the people who did the bad stuff have to be blamed, you can't talk yourself out of that. But you certainly gotta ask people, any good commander should have seen this coming, right? And should have taken proactive actions to try to prevent this. Of course, we don't know the whole story on Fat Leonard yet, most of you probably know this, this big scandal in Pacific Command, involving bribery of all sorts, which is taking down a bunch of pretty senior officers. I mean, there are two possibilities here. Once we just, for whatever reason, sent a whole lot of bad apples to pay come. I mean, I suppose that's possible, but I doubt it, right? I suspect what was going on there is there was an environment, a culture of how we do things out here that got pretty well established and it would have taken a moral saint or hero to come in and say, well, let's stop it. Let's not do it that way. So the reason I think that's important is, for you as leaders, it's very important, unit climate is not just a feel good thing. It's also something about what signals are you giving people in your organization about what our sweatshirt is, right? What do we accept among ourselves? Okay, so a couple of takeaways from this. A person who is honest, loyal, and diligent, but incompetent is professionally unethical. That takes a minute to swallow, right? I don't care how nice you are. I don't care what a nice person you are. What I care about is, are you doing everything in your power to do what you do competently? And if the answer to that is no, none of the rest of it matters to me, right? That just doesn't count. As we've already talked about, to be intellectually lazy is professionally unethical. And this is a big one, and this is a big one for all of the US services. Failure to adapt to foreseeable future challenges of your profession is unethical. Now, so as all of our services are going to go through these big budget drills with constrained resources, right? Don't think it's just an argument about the budget. It's an argument about what military force are you gonna show up on for the next battlefield, right? Remember, Rumsfeld famously said, well, you go to war with the army you have and not the army you wish you had or we'll have it some future time. That was a way of blowing off the fact that we didn't have any armored Humvees in Iraq, right? And finally, we got a secretary of defense, Gates, who said, let's get some armored stuff over there. But just to say, oh well, we didn't anticipate the need for armored vehicles, so we don't have them. So you guys have a nice day in Iraq. I mean, that's an example of ethical failure to see or to adapt in the face of obvious challenges. So you read about what the Chinese are building in terms of coastal defenses and area denial. And one thing that's kind of obvious is you're not gonna operate carriers the way the US has operated carriers since World War II, right? I'm not sure what the right answer is, but you better be thinking long and hard about that because that more of that is not gonna be the answer, right? And it's your fundamental job to serve your client's interests. So in this case, who's your client? Your client is your country, whatever it is. Okay, so PME assumes a developmental path that you're gonna develop these new knowledge, new skills as you advance. Is it true of ethics as well? I often run into resistance on the mere suggestion that ethics needs to evolve with complexity, but I wanna make the case for you that it does. Olinda already introduced this acronym, which I think was invented by the Army War College, VUCA, and the speech here at Carlisle on day one, and by the way, it's only the senior class there, only 05s and 06s, is welcome to VUCA you. Everything you've done, if you're an Army officer, for example, you're typically just coming out of battalion command. And so you've grown up in armor, infantry, whatever your branch is, right? And the speech on day one is that's over. You're not gonna be doing just that anymore. It's gonna be a whole new environment, and some of you will not come to be comfortable in it because you've gotten used to linearity and predictability and so forth. Instead, the environment you're going to, we say is VUCA, it is volatile. A term borrowed from chemistry, things that evaporate quickly, right? And the way I think about that is the chances that you will be doing today, what you intended to be doing is you drove to the office are pretty low. The chances that you'll be doing today, what you thought you wanted to do when you drove to the office are pretty low. And that means you're gonna need a new kind of skill because how do you strike the balance between responding appropriately to the volatile thing that just popped and not being totally distracted by what's coming over your transom so that you don't get anything fundamental done, right? And where did we teach you that skill about how to figure out how to balance those things? And by the way, obviously, you can get it seriously wrong in both directions, right? If all you do is chase volatility, then you'll get nothing important or long-term done. If all you do is try to hunker down and focus on what you wanna focus on and say, I'm gonna ignore the volatility. If you ignore the wrong volatile thing, it will eat your lunch, right? And you gotta figure that out. Is this volatile and important or just volatile and trivial? Is it just white noise in the system or is it something I really need to pay attention to? It's uncertain. That is, it's not that you don't yet know enough. It's that you're never going to know enough. And if the only way you're happy to make a decision is when you feel virtually certain you're in possession of all the facts, then you're gonna have a very hard time operating at this level. I once worked for an Army two-star who will remain nameless and was the most indecisive flagger general officer I ever saw. And I was, we'd go to these long offsite meetings and then we'd come back after a weekend and I'd say, did we get anything decided? I don't think we did. So I'm complaining about this to the infantry colonel I work with. And Mike's view of the world was if you know an Army officer's branch, you know all you need to know, right? So Mike says to me, well, look, think about it, Ryan, he's a cavalry officer. And I said, well, yeah, so he says, well, think about what those guys do. They drive around the battlefield, they acquire information, they pass to other people, then decide what to do with it, right? And that's what he's doing. He's driving around. Acquire more information to pass to somebody else so figure out what to decide about it. But there is no somebody else, right? He's now risen to the rank where he's the somebody, but he's not comfortable with doing that. It's complex. Most of what we've trained you to do up to the stage is train you to deal with complicated things. And we've taught you to deal with complicated things in a very deliberative and linear manner. You break down the complicated thing into its subordinate parts, you solve each little part, and then you put it all back together and it's like fixing a jet engine that's broken, right? You figured it all out. It's very complicated, but there's a kind of linear diagnostic procedure you can go through, and we've taught you that. But in a complex environment, as Dr. Johnson was saying, you don't even know what the end state is. There's no idea that you can say, okay, here's the end state, now all you need is three COAs and we'll line those up and we'll figure that out. That model may not work for you in a complex environment, right? Because you're not really solving the problem, you're somebody trying to manage the problem. You don't know where this is gonna go when you start down this road. And if your only level of comfort is when I say, I'm here, I wanna go there, give me COAs, this is gonna be not a very fun place for you. And it's ambiguous. I mean, you don't really know everything that's going on. I often encounter this, especially when I'm traveling outside the US and it's clear to me that my hosts want me to do something, but I have no idea why. I don't know what this means to them, why this is important to them, but it's clearly something they really want. And I can't, I have to try to figure out, am I doing something inappropriate by giving them this? And sometimes I never actually know what that was all about. Another problem is, I think, I've invented this term, the holy trinity. If you think about how military organizations try to deal with failure, the solution is usually the holy trinity. You fire the leadership, you mandate more training, and you issue a new policy, right? Now there are a couple of things to think about there. First of all, if you do that over and over again, what do you get? You get the very thing that captains in the army were complaining about, right? You've got so many policies, so many prescribed things that are trying to micromanage you, that you can't move, right? You just become more and more bureaucratic, right? And if you really want to be a profession, you've got to find, at your appropriate level, ways to push back against the bureaucratization that takes place. Here's an example that I thought was particularly telling because I was working for the Army at the time. When General Senceki came in as Chief of Staff of the Army, one of the first things he did, literally one of the first things he did, was call Carl out and say, I want 10 colonels to tell me how to fix the Army readiness reporting system. Because the one thing I know for a fact is I have no idea how ready the Army is. And the reason I don't is because the culture of the Army won't let anybody report below C2 no matter what it is. So now ask yourself, if you're a company commander in O3 and you're falsely reporting your C3 unit to be C2, are you lying? Well, in the ordinary sense of the word, of course you are, you're deliberately, intentionally stating something to be true that you know isn't true. If that's not a lie, what's a lie, right? But on the other hand, that would be a completely stupid way to look at what's going on here, right? What's going on here is the system is driving behaviors, right? And until something fixes the system, the behaviors aren't gonna change, right? So the Holy Trinity fix turns out sometimes to actually miss the root cause. You can kind of suppress some of the manifestations of the problem, but you're not fixing the problem unless you get at what drives the behavior in the system. And for all of you, especially the senior class, you're at stages of your development where you start to own systems. So you can start to ask yourself that kind of question about when I'm seeing things I don't like in my organization, is it just bad apples, or have I got something built into the system that's driving it? I was talking to a friend of mine who was a missile launch officer in the Air Force. And he said the culture of the missile launch community was if you missed even a single question from a single quiz, you lost your inspector status as a missile launch officer. And so the common saying among missile launch guys was if you're not cheating, you're not trying, right? Because the incentives are all, we can't allow that to happen. We can't, so everybody's gotta try to figure out how to get the gouge on the test because the system has made it, so incentivized it for you to try to figure out how to do that. So Admiral Richardson asked similar questions when they had the cheating scandal in the Navy Nuke schools. Is there something in the way we structured the schoolhouse that's driving these behaviors? Or is it just a bunch of bad individuals, right? And I would suggest you take that thought on board and try to explore it. If anybody's interested in this whole thing about, by the way, moral psychology, come see me, there's a vast, a great literature and there's a great project to read up on and it's really insightful, I think, so I would encourage you to do it. So as you increase in rank, you start owning the system. So when you see these failures, you can ask yourself, what in the system is driving this? Okay, in the Navy, there's been a pretty serious increase in detachments for cause. This is a little old now, this data, from a very good article of the Navy's moral compass in the Naval War College Review three years ago. We've been firing a lot of people in the Navy, mostly at the 05 and 06 ranks and Command Master Chief ranks, and 80% of that is for personal misconduct, 80% of it. Most of it is stuff that, if it weren't sad, would be kind of funny. You know, really, he did that? For example, married 40-something year submarine commander, goes online, meets states and impregnates a 20-something young woman down at, no fuck, I think it was. Then when she gets pregnant, he fakes his own death by making up a false email saying he also, unfortunately, he's died. She comes to credit of condolences of the family and says, no, he's fine, he's up in New London, go check, go check, so stuff like that. So now what's going on here? These are people who've been squared away for 20 plus years, right? I mean, some percentage of it is probably people who were doing bad stuff all along who just finally got caught, but that's not interesting philosophically, right? What's interesting philosophically is what if they were fine for 23 years, and then they go off the rails in these crazy ways, right? What would be the most likely hypothesis to explain that? Well, the most likely hypothesis would be there's something about the changed environment, the same changed social environment where they find themselves, that is disorienting them. Just take a hip-hop example, a surface warfare officer in the Navy. As an O4, you're a department head, right? So you've got the other department heads around you, you've got the triad above you, you're a very socially structured thing. At O5, you're the captain of the ship. Where'd your peers go? Where did the people who were visibly over you go? They're now gone, right? You don't have that sort of embeddedness in a rich social structure anymore. And social science would lead you to predict that that's a point where you might expect things to start to go wrong, right? Because of that change of the environment. The main reason that ethics gets VUCA too, I think, is that you start being responsible. You think about yourself as the middle of a little web, and you have a web of obligations that go a lot of direction. As the O4 department head, you're responsible for your department down, you're responsible for your other department heads laterally, and you're responsible for the triad above you, right? It's a pretty simple diagram, you can do this. Make yourself CNO for a minute. Ask yourself who you need to be worried about as CNO. You gotta be worried about today's Navy, the other services, the Congress, the current administration, the Navy 15 to 20 years from now, foreign partners, which of those is important, right? All of them, right? How do you decide which is the more important one to be dealing with today? Well, good luck with that, right? Because that's a skill that you have to develop, and I think Ed Mulhowell was quite eloquent about it this morning about how it, really it's about managing complexity and uncertainty at this stage, not about just linear clarity. Okay, so if we think about professional ethics in this way, some things that aren't obviously ethics start to become ethics. I mentioned that we are gonna have several ethics conferences over the course of a year. One of the common remarks that we get sometimes is that was an interesting conference, but I don't see what it had to do with ethics. Why not? Well, it was about civil military relations. Well, yeah, but properly viewed, civil military relations is one of your fundamental ethical obligations, right? To balance that relationship between advocacy for your service and your civilian masters or designing future for structure or this restructuring of the personnel system. All of that is part of how the profession changes and adapts, right? I once published a piece and I said, well, what about this? Suppose I'm a thoracic surgeon and I'm really proud of all these high tech skills I got, but there's a major public health crisis and we need every medical person available to do low tech public health, right? Okay, it would be legitimate for you to say, no, no, I'm a thoracic surgeon, I'm just gonna sit in my corner and protect my little specialized competence or did I say, all right, yeah, I like being the high tech thoracic surgeon, but right now I get that the objective need is that we all get out there and do public health. That's what we need to do right now. Okay, this is the War College's mission. So now as we've come through this little talk, let's look at this and see whether you see things that point directly at professional military ethics of the sort we've discussed. So how about this? Just shout it out if you see anything that strikes a bell for you. Trust and confidence, a mindset, right? Critical thinking, strategically minded. Here's some more. So anticipating future challenges, right? What we talked about before. You heard this morning that war plan orange, was basically the war plan for World War II in the Pacific, done here long before the war and missing only kamikaze's. That's some pretty good forward thinking, if you were trying to think that. So are you in a position to do that? Not just the weapons systems and platforms and skills that you're seeing in the rear view mirror, but what's out there on the horizon and how do we prepare both you and your service to be prepared to deal with that? Again, ability to be effective as a profession. That's not me, I don't know what I'm thinking. So all of these elements I think, if viewed through the lens of the profession, capture these things. You need to adapt the profession to meet emerging challenges. Ensure the highest possible competence of each of you to do that. And at the bottom of it all, maintaining the bond of trust between the US and its military. So every time we have an embarrassing scandal, it's not just bad for that person. It's bad for the very degree of autonomy that you need to have if you wanna operate. So for you not to be self-policing of your peers when you see serious things going wrong is not just being loyal to your buddy. It's seriously undermining what we need. Okay, Chairman Dempsey gave some very interesting testimony to the Senate. I think this was a couple of years ago now, but it's so interesting that I wanna end on this note. Here's what he said. Issues don't exist in isolation. They're always complex. And I've been scarred by rereading a quote from Einstein who said, you have an hour to save the world. Spend 55 minutes of it understanding the problem and five minutes trying to solve it. As a military culture, we don't have the ratio right. We tend to spend 55 minutes trying to solve the problem and five minutes understanding. We used to do a decision-making exercise watching. You just throw out a problem to a bunch of military officers in a classroom. And it's really kind of funny to watch. How they just immediately start flailing around with courses of action, right? No serious discussion of what is the problem here. Certainly not 55 minutes worth of discussion of what's the problem. But the point of that is, Dempsey said, and that's one of our big lessons for me in developing leaders for the future, not only in the Army, but have confirmed in the Joint Force. We have pushed enormous capability, responsibility, and authority to the edge, to captains and sergeants of all services. Yet our leader development paradigms haven't really changed that much. The shift has to be followed with a change in the way we prepare them to accept that responsibility. So why are you in Newport? You got 55 minutes to think about the problem. Use it well. A couple of resources for you. The Naval War College has its own YouTube channel. The last seven years of these ethics conferences are all up there on many, many topics. So if you just go put Naval War College Ethics in the search block on YouTube, you can pull up all that stuff if you want. And that will be enjoyable for you. So with that, we have about 10 minutes. If there are any questions, comments, observations.