 Hello, everybody. Thank you for sticking around. I think we're the last ones before John McCain comes. Well, that means John McCain is the best for last thing. Tom's gonna be moderating with him, so he may duck out a little smidge early when we get word that the senator has arrived. But until then, we're gonna talk about is the Pentagon adapting fast enough? And I was I was glad to get this question for our panel. It's a topic I've thought about a lot really since last fall since the ISIS war began. Let's just call it the ISIS war. And the notion of all the commentary about the administration being behind the eight ball or playing catch-up and this notion of not just as the Pentagon adapting fast enough, but are all of Washington's national security structures able to adapt fast enough? To me the answer is no. We're seeing this. Congress is behind in the budget. Policymakers are resigning on decisions at least It seems to the public to the critics. We're never moving fast enough. So we have a good panel here that I think to talk about different perspectives of inside the Pentagon, inside the military, around town, what's changing and how we can adapt to what we all think is the future, which is more and more frequent and more widely dispersed of these types of conflicts that we're in now. I think that's pretty clear from where we're going. So we have Michelle Flournoy and Jeanine Davidson and Tom Ricks. You can read their bios for yourselves. So let's just get started in our time. I did ask them all to come with a little bit of an introduction of what they want to say to kick us off. So I'll let Michelle start first. She's got the rank. Well, good to see you all. And really just compliments to New America and to Anne-Marie and the whole team for putting together such a great agenda and group of speakers. I think in answer to the question is the Pentagon adapting fast enough, we can have a very short panel and just say no. But let me give you three examples of ways in which I think we're not adapting well enough or fast enough. First of all, I don't think there's adequate reflection or debate about the lessons we should learn from the past 14 years of war. We're so eager to get Iraq and Afghanistan in our rearview mirror that we're not really pausing to ask, you know, what worked, what didn't work? Why? What should we learn to inform the next time we're thinking about using military force? How does that affect our future concept of operation, our doctrine? How does it affect our training, our leader development and so forth? So that's the first example. Another one is with regard to leveraging new technologies in terms of understanding how we're going to maintain our military superiority in the future. And there I think that's a mixed record. On the positive side, you have people like Deputy Secretary Bob Work pushing this third offset strategy, which advertisement he started to develop when he was at CNAS. He's now pushed the Defense Innovation Initiative, you I think earlier heard from the Director of DARPA about some of the innovation they're pioneering. And, you know, there are lots of other good examples. But on the negative side, you know, you don't have the kind of government industry collaboration you'd like to see, particularly with non-defense industry, to really identify, you know, what's possible technologically. How can we harness that for the national defense in the future? You don't have real investment that at a level and focus necessary to protect the seed corn. Programs of record constantly squeeze out the new sort of more innovative opportunities that pop up. And then there are all kinds of cultural barriers, whether it's the tyranny of reaching consensus on everything as opposed to competing ideas, which is how innovation actually happens. Very risk averse culture where you experiment, but experiments aren't really allowed to fail because that would look bad on your fit rep. And just lack of incentives in the promotion and career development system to really give people the incentives to take risk and innovate. The last example I'll give is on the reform agenda and just to briefly say, you know, DOD has to fundamentally change how it does business if we're going to have the resources to invest in readiness and modernization for the future. And I think DOD has taken a very conventional approach that, frankly, Congress has rejected. It's become a debate about breaking versus keeping faith with the force. Instead of reframing something like overhauling health care and saying, well, how can we deliver better results, better outcomes in health care, drawing from the private sector best practice at lower cost? So the reform piece is a part of adaptation that's essential to ensure that we have the investment we need for the future. And that's another example of not adapting fast enough. And I could go on. No, you can stop. Thanks, but I have a lot of questions about all those points. But let's hear our next two. Great. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. And this has been a really illuminating day for me to listen to everybody talk about the future of war. I don't want to kind of reflect back for a second. And Sir Michael Howard said something to the effect of it doesn't really matter what our doctrine is right now, what we're planning for, because we're going to have it wrong. What matters is our ability to adapt when the time comes. And I really took that on when I when I wrote my book. Those of you who have read my book, you're in a very small elite club. But what I what I learned was, you know, I sort of demonstrated how the military, especially the army, learned to adapt. I thought they were learning how to learn. But really, when I think back about it, they were learning how to adapt. They had this sort of post Vietnam lessons learned culture that really clicked into high gear and you saw it in Iraq on the positive side. You really did see a lot of adaptation. It was a dynamic, but it was very tactical process, very tactical learning process. And I believe that it did facilitate whatever successes we had in the surge was also facilitated by this dynamic sort of learning loop that we had. And we can talk about that in greater detail. But, you know, adaptation is not the same as organizational learning. And so, you know, where Michael Howard was correct in saying that adaptation is the key, I think that Rumsfeld was also correct when he said, you go to war with the army that you have, not the army that you wish you had or whatever it was that he said, meaning that our institutional frameworks and the processes that we have for planning sort of delivers a certain military when the time comes. So that military that you have when the time comes, that could be something that is more easily adapted or not. So are we setting ourselves up for a more difficult learning curve when it comes. And I and this is where I think when I look at when I think about how much learning we did in Iraq and then where we are now, I am a little nervous that we're not actually really critically looking at the lessons that we need to learn in order to institutionalize some of the change and some of the doctrine. And I think that there are there are at least three persistent myths or stories that we like to tell ourselves about the military that is hindering us in doing this. And one is what I call the Maserati myth, and that is we have this amazing, technically sophisticated military and we want to keep it like a shiny Maserati in the garage and only use it for the big ones for the one that we want. Right. I mean, every time we think about sending the military to to this or that lesser war, we hear, well, that's not really our job. We're not really supposed to do that. You know, we're not supposed to do the Ebola thing. We're not supposed to do peacekeeping. We struggle with this idea about what the military's role is, because I think this is a theme that we heard today. We sort of tend to conflate, you know, being prepared for battle with being prepared for the vast array of strategic things that the American people are going to ask for military to do. So that's the Maserati myth. It's sort of supported also by the interagency myth, and I know this came up yesterday. I saw it on the Twitter feed. But, you know, this whole idea that, you know, the State Department or some other organization or NGOs or the Girl Scouts or whatever are going to come and be with the military shoulder to shoulder in a combat zone to do all the stuff that the military doesn't want to do sounds awesome, but it's just not true, and it hasn't been true. I don't actually know where the idea came from that, you know, I mean, if the military doesn't think that its role is to, you know, consolidate victory as HR McMaster said yesterday in doing all the things under international law that you're supposed to do under an occupation, if that's not their job, well, whose job is it? I mean, it's definitely not the Foreign Service doesn't get trained to do that either, so we have a big sort of interagency myth going on there. And then, the last one is what I call the shock and awe myth, right? This, that war is actually the shock battle, right? Quick, decisive, I mean, everything we've learned in the last 10 years is that that's just not how it works. It's enabled by our sort of obsession with technology, and I think that is, this is sort of the bit of the conundrum because on the one hand it is our exquisite overmatch that probably has ensured our security in many ways, but then also driven our adversaries into another area so that this whole, like preparing primarily for the quick, decisive shock and awe sort of battle is not necessarily good enough. And I kind of thought that these myths, these three myths would have been gone by now, but I see them coming back. I see them in the Pentagon. I see people talking about them as we try to pivot to the next thing. And so, this is what concerns me. I think we have an amazing ability to adapt. I'd like to see, I'd like to see us close the gap so that when the time comes, it's not quite as hard next time. Okay, we had, no, the Pentagon has not adapted fast enough. Yes, we can adapt fast. We have an ability to adapt. But we make it hard for ourselves. We help ourselves. All right, so, Tonya, what's the difference? No, I'm going to endorse everything they've said because I think they're both totally right. But the key is where we were adapted. It is a Maserati, but it's a Maserati without a steering wheel. And that's a very dangerous form of vehicle. The Maserati is being tactically proficient. The slack of the steering wheel is the lack of strategic leadership. And I'm going to kind of violate an unstated Washington rule, which is not supposed to be critical of other speakers. Because at least they came to your conference and so on. I say, screw it. Odierno this morning, the Chief of Staff of the Army, was to me, quietly horrifying. What you had was the Army Chief of Staff asked about basically, what did you guys learn coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan? His answer was, well, we learned we really need the rest of the government to show up the whole of government. This is a pernicious myth. It's a very sophisticated form of the civilian's knifes in the back. We did everything right, the civilians screwed us up. Yeah, the Bush administration screwed up Iraq a lot and the Obama administration contributed a few things too. But the US military's first job is to examine its own self. And what you saw this morning was General Odierno politely refusing to do that. Why is this a problem? Because if you don't know where you've been, you can't know where you're going. A military that does not engage in sober, serious reflection about its errors will not be able to adapt strategically. Doing great in lessons learned in the field. How to operate a 50 cal. Actually how to run a war not so good. Great at the quote unquote warfighter level. And I'm a warfighter, I'm a warrior. What that means is I know how to run battles. I don't have a clue about how to run a war. We have a generation of generals who don't know how to run wars. The one ray of light I saw in General Odierno's talk was he said he wanted to focus on senior leadership. My problem is when I hear senior leaders talk about senior leadership, what I hear them saying is I want to produce more people like me who produce this wonderful four star officer you see here. So in some the key to victory is being adaptive. We know that. What I do not see is any evidence of the US military becoming more strategically adaptive and that scares me. So cut to today then. I'll stick with you for a second Tom and say that. Do you think the military is going to be able to do that? The administration's response to how it's using the military in Iraq this time around is too similar to what we've seen before. What I see is a military that's constantly muttering up its sleeves that this isn't going to work, but not giving that that advice at the senior level. Now Michelle probably has seen instances where this does happen. What I don't see is guys who address the fundamental questions. It's a little bit like Vietnam where LBJ thought what he wanted from the chiefs was consensus. The last thing you want, what you want is to understand what are your differences. Let's surface the differences and examine them. What are your assumptions? Let's bring those up and examine them. So for example, the classic example is when General Shinseki walked around town muttering we're going to need more troops in Iraq, that was the perfect thing for the president to say well tell me about that. Instead they kind of all stuffed that back in the box, very LBJ-like. You're all Johnson men, he told the Joint Chiefs. So maybe they learned not to do that. What they did, actually I think what happened in many ways is this is a hit on both parties. Colin Powell scared them as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They didn't like having a politically powerful Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And thereafter, all too often the men who were picked were pliable and weak. Now I think that's not true of Mullen. And I think that General Dempsey has stood up on his hind legs quite a lot and not always been congratulated by the administration for doing it. But clear, my hero here is George Marshall. And he became Chief of Staff of the Army in September 1, 1939 because he told FDR when he thought FDR was full of shit. In those terms, no Mr. President, number one my name is not George as General and number two you're wrong and here's why. He refused to go to Hyde Park because he didn't want to socialize with the President and get his arm twisted socially. He refused to laugh at the President's jokes. Partly because he had no sense of humor. That's why you love him. Okay, there's a lot there and I want your response of course. I can see gritting your teeth and grinning. I will say that I recall it wasn't long after this started in the end of the last summer when we heard very early on that CENTCOM and General Austin and Odeon as well that they were asked for special ops forces for quicker for something on the ground and they were told no by the administration. It was not, we're gonna do the same way but I think you're absolutely right and I hear as defense one editor all the time is the constant mumbling up the sleeve the grumbling of oh we did this before we're gonna go do the same thing again and you're right the civilians are gonna fuck it up. You had a failure to address basic questions. If I was a Muslim in Iraq, you go and talk to a brigade commander, division commander and he'd say what's your mission? They'd say stability. And I'd say well where is that in the mission statement? It wasn't in the mission statement but that's what they do, we do stability. Then you go to CPA and they're conducting revolutionary operations. And so you had this constant but nobody ever says this. Nobody ever actually said there's a fundamental problem here, we are working at odds and it's that type of basic discussion. So the next time the army comes back and says we got everything solved and we're gonna have brigades that are sensitized to cultures. Look great. So your answer is you wanna send a division headquarters. The question should be why? Why not a J Soda direct action team and special forces advisors? Why would whatever the question is the answer is division headquarters. But to do that you need sophisticated White House people who understand the military intimately. And I think the Obama administration tends instead to hire political hacks and hail rats present company that's accepted. You have all these people from Biden's staff. Hill staffers don't understand a lot about the world except the hill. They don't know how to run anything and they tend not to know anything about the military. And these are the interlocutors of people like Mullen and Dempsey and it makes me just weep to think of what those conversations must be like. Well that was a lot of Secretary Gates' complain in his book about the political point he's on now having managed my experience. I wanna, Secretary Foen, you said in your opening remarks that I think two different things that some decisions move too fast and that there's no time to pause and think about the lessons from the past. But how do you do that when something comes up as fast as ISIS? That storms across Syria into Iraq and completely changes all the strategic calculations of an entire region. And now you've got decision points have to be made and not just go right back to the well of whatever worked in the last time around or it didn't work, but just whatever you did and quickly get it out there. I guess I think there's several things that could improve the process. One is to start from the premise that presidents and leaders in general make better decisions when they have a greater variety of perspectives brought to the table. That the goal is not to get to a consensus option that you present up and have endless meetings until you water it down to get to consensus. The goal is to actually accurately and honestly and faithfully frame the real debate and the real options and the real differences and the real descent. So the president and that can be discussed in front of the president and better decision. I mean, there's all kinds of historical cases to show that better decisions get made when that happens. That means that the people in the process have to have a very clear idea of their role in the process and what the rules of the road are. And that is not always the case. We, Janine and I have had a lot of discussion about this, but we train our military officers about the national security system at War College that is this sort of Huntingtonian model that is a wonderful theory, but no administration's ever seen it that way. It's never existed in practice. It is much more of an Elliot Cohen world. And it's this iterative, messy process and yet we don't prepare our military officers for that. Worse, we prepare them to expect something else so they come to the table and they're immediately frustrated and disappointed with the civilians because it's not this highly clean, deductive, rational process. On the other hand, we don't train the civilians at all. I had, there are people at the table with discussing decisions about the use of force who'd never read Title X or Goldwater Nichols and didn't understand why the legislation had the chairman not only as an advisor to the secretary of defense, but to the president if there's a reason for that and it is so military dissent can be heard and cannot be stopped by a political pointee. I mean, so I think there's a lot that can be done to norm and form a team up front with clear role clarity. This is how the president's gonna make decisions. This is gonna how we want information brought up. And then importantly, once a decision is made, set a strategy, clarify that mission and the objectives, right and left limits and then let people go execute and power them to execute and then hold them accountable. They screw up, they're either gonna get disciplined or fired but don't try to micromanage every aspect of implementation and keep re-adjudicating it, the policy through implementation. So I think there's just a lot in basic sort of process that can help the system be more responsive and more adaptive. Eisenhower once appointed an officer to a position and the officer said, well, how will I know if I'm failing? And Eisenhower said, because I'll fire you. Right, right. But do you need, you know, maybe I'm more attached to the level if what we're saying is that the political side can empower the military commanders to I guess be better, to be more adaptive? My thought was, as you were speaking, what's the difference between adaptation and the ability for adaptation and preparedness? You kind of started to touch on that. Why doesn't the Pentagon do a better job of being prepared for the unexpected? They always say to us, we never know what's coming. That's the one thing we know. We know 100%, we don't know the next war coming. That's great. So why is your system not as flexible as possible? We keep hearing about flexibility and agility and especially, that's what we heard two years ago. This past year was supposed to be the year that the services worked on that. They went home, they trained, and they created a whole new system, but the world happened. Russia happened, ISIS happened, everything happened. So how do you get to that? One of the panels this morning actually said something that I thought was clever. I'll say something nice about the previous speakers. But, you know, when the Pentagon's planning for things, they have these elaborate scenarios and they have sort of prototype scenarios for the types of missions that they think they're gonna see. One of my critiques is that they ignore some of the missions that they just don't wanna do. So that's one problem set. But the other thing is, when they're deeply planning for something, as we used to like to say, planning's more important than the plan, part of it allows you to have this robust dialogue and sort of circle back and kind of prevent that thing from happening to begin with. Now, it's counterfactual. You can hardly ever prove that you prevented something, but that was what the comment was this morning from one of the historians. And I do think that, therefore, by definition, the bad stuff that happens is the stuff you weren't prepared for because you were prepared for the other stuff. And there's plenty of stuff that we are sort of prepared for. So, I mean. But there's plenty, we're not. I mean, ISIS and terrorism across the Middle East and North Africa is a perfect example where there is some ability of small operations to go after pinprick, pinprick, pinprick, pinprick. Yeah, so my... And then we have big army. But there's not a sense, at least from my perspective, tell me if I'm wrong. There's a sense of marrying those two together, having the entire organization dealing with that threat now, the most recent, the most current, and the most likely threats to happen. We got a lot of forces and thought and resources still to nuclear war, still to large land, still to large big Navy, you name it. And we had that whole decade of counterinsurgency to go. But then last year happened and it seemed to just throw everybody for a move. How could that be? Well, back to my original thing about, you know, things you think you don't have to deal with anymore, these myths that we teach ourselves. I mean, when we left Iraq, you know, inside the Pentagon, people were like, even inside the Pentagon, and you know, people doing risk assessments about the whole world and Iraq's not even listed on there because we're finished with that. And so, you know, that the civilian military thing is kind of a blurry line a lot of times. I mean, these myths that I'm talking about are not just uniform military myths, they're sort of like, you know, we in the national security establishment like to believe these things. And so I think that feeds into the dilemma that you're identifying. And I'll say, you know, one other sort of weird thing. And that is, you know, I remember when Secretary Gates came, when we came into the Pentagon, it was halfway through his, he decided to stay, or he was asked to stay. And he was talking about how when he came into the Pentagon, you know, there was this big war on, well, there were two of them actually. And who in the Pentagon is working on the war? Well, turns out, you know, I mean, under Goldwater Nichols, the services, they organize, train, and equip and think about the next war. So everybody in the Pentagon is doing what they've been doing ever since, you know, my dad's era, you know, which is thinking about the QDR, thinking about acquisition, working on the budget. And he was like, whoa, like, who's working on the war? And so there's this institutional sort of broken part where he, and I think he kind of, you know, rallied people. You know, the people working on the war are at the COCOMs, but who's in the building supporting that? And how are you thinking it through? So I think that's an institute, sort of a structural problem. So we're under five minutes in this very short time already. So questions from the audience is happening, I heard. Let's see, we have one quickly in the back and then we'll come over to the front here. Hi, I'm Jeff Gustafson from Duke University. Talking, or expanding on what you were talking about, Rick's about, Tom Rick's about mythologies and blaming it a lot on civilians. I was wondering if you could comment about kind of the creep of kind of militarization of development and in terms of military led development that we've been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. And where does that come from and what do you see about kind of having the military leading development initiatives and conflict zones and where's that going and what do you think we've learned from that? I'd rather hear from these two on that subject, but I'll say it quickly. The one amazing skill that the US military has, the ability to basically, or not the one, but in a consistently amazing skill of the US military is the ability to go anywhere in the world in a very short period of time be giving you electricity, clean water, and good bandwidth. And it's a great skill and you fall into what Charlie Dunlap called the sort of, whatever the question is, let's throw the military into it. And that's not the answer. Brigade commanders are not development experts and trying to think, well, what would I do, what would I want is not the answer. And there are real development experts who were consistently ignored in Iraq by the military for this reason. I would say two things. The military gets into development in situations where they're present in numbers, they have the capacity, they have the dispersed footprint. There aren't, it may be too contested in area or there just may be too few development folks, be they government or NGOs present. And so they get involved in development as a way of, in a very tactical sense of how do I try to start meeting the needs of the population to stabilize and pacify the environment. There's a real tension between how you prioritize development activities that are really designed for stabilization in the very short term versus what's a development program that's actually going to lift this country over many, many years and probably decades of time. And if you wind those things up, they rarely, they're very separate lines of effort and sometimes even intention or in conflict. But the arc, the timeline for the operations, the military is worried about that command tour for that commander and how do I leave my AOR more stable than in the past. And the development people are thinking, how do I bring Afghanistan up 10 spots in the ranking over the next 20 years? So it's just, it's a very different set of frameworks that have to be reconciled. I'll say, we just got a little bit more time on that, which is great. I'll just say, I'll respond, I'm gonna answer one of the questions of that if I can take the liberty and say, I think the militarization of development should have sailed years ago. And I think Hillary Clinton put her stamp on it. And it's in the first QDDR, their version of the QDR. When a flat out says as policy, that development is a purposeful function of security, of American interests abroad. And this, maybe another myth of its own is that if ever that development somehow was completely divorced from those strategic objectives, if not ball faced military objectives. The same thing you're gonna use development to support security objectives is not necessarily militarizing it. I mean, I think those are two different. I took your question about military conducting what looks like development, which I think has. I mean, there were early complaints of things like the Trans-Saharan Threat Initiative, of using that money for education programs, which was really about going after drug networks because they were funding tariffs. So therefore it wasn't a pure development program. I think the boss was a question. Oh, just a comment. She pays for this by the way. You're from the source of the QDDR. Emory Slaughter, the president and CEO of New America and the executive director of the QDDR. That definitely was not the intent. What Secretary Clinton wanted was to elevate development. It's much closer to what Michelle is saying is to elevate development to be equal to diplomacy and defense so that we are thinking long-term and short-term at the same time. She was very clear that it wasn't charity, that it's American taxpayers' money and it's gotta have a purpose. And the purpose is to support security but I think she would blanche at the idea that that's militarizing development. Good point and good distinction. I'll say it's a good thing to raise this week. Just yesterday, Secretary Kerry was on the Hill making, you know, having one of his budget hearings and again pitching for the 1% line again, which I thought that could tell us all something that after all this time and after the last decade and on the call of the police for the non-military side, we still have the Secretary of State asking and begging Congress for the 1% of the budget number for the 150 account. We had one more question to share. Thank you, Sharon Burke with New America. I hope I'm lobbing a softball at all four of you, which is a pretty boot view and you're foremost experts in this in the country. How are you gonna fix it? How are we gonna fix it? How what? How are we gonna fix it? How are you gonna fix it? I mean, you've given a litany of everything that's wrong and not working. How do we make it better? We have to make it better. How? Good question and we spoke a little backstage. I mentioned we have Congress with budget, policy makers, the actual decisions of how to respond, send the military, law enforcement, Intel, JSOC, whatever it's gonna be. Where do you start? How do you create a better system that is able to adapt fast enough? I'll be very fast and I'll leave it at these guys. The conclusion I came to writing the book The Generals was if you want adaptiveness, which is what you want, the quality of being adaptive, you must have accountability. You must punish failure, reward success because otherwise people simply become risk averse as honorable floor might say. Okay, but that's not creating something new though. Let's see, can we, what, what needs to happen? I think there's no quick fix, okay? I mean, that's a great leadership fix. The right person that comes in there and is more accountable. I mean, again, Secretary Gates came in and just quietly started firing people, right? A lot of them. Education, professional military education is huge. Get the myths out of the doctrine. There's a lot of them, you know, read all the manuals, all this myths I'm talking about. They're just embedded in there and reinforced in every generation. You know, let's stop doing that. So let's, I would start with that. And then there are processes in the Pentagon itself that I hope, I hope she'll have some ideas about because she's the expert. But I mean, they're, I mean, acquisition reform and you know, all the inefficiencies we have with compensation and BRAC and all those kinds of things need to be fixed. But I don't think it gets to the core. I mean, that's gonna have to be generational. I think that from my experience, you know, one of the lessons I learned was if there's a particular behavior you're trying to encourage, you have to, first of all, prioritize and shine a light on it, really elevate it, define it, help people understand what it is you're looking for. And then you have to really look at the context of why isn't that behavior happening and look at the incentive structure, change the incentive structure. I'll give you a very tiny little tactical example but it illustrates the point. We had a major human capital strategy in OSD because we realized that people were our only asset and nobody was taking care of the people and the performance of the organization was suffering. And, you know, we talked about the importance of professional development and getting, even though we're really, really busy, getting people to training and ever say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But no training requests. Fine, it took going into the performance evaluations and saying to supervisors, you will now, number one, performance evaluation metric is what percentage of your workforce did you get to the OPM required standard of training this year and you cannot get a five, which is what everybody in the Pentagon aspires to, you may not get a five if you don't hit the target. And everybody understand? Okay, you know, literally a week later, 600 training requests, I guess. So, I mean, it's just a tiny example but like what's the behavior? What's the, why, you know, why is the behavior not happening? Change the context, change the incentive, reward the behavior you want, hold up, celebrate the good examples, hold accountable the people who fail and you can start to get behavior change but it takes getting in, sometimes you gotta get into the nitty gritty of the machinery to make the change happen. Well, I'd love to know how do you get Congress, what are the incentives to get Congress to pass a budget on time, to have an AUMF debate when it's a little more timelier than seven months after the thing started or to get technology, we're gonna say, everyone's always saying DOD's gotta do better at getting technology faster. Yeah, we've heard that for decades. How, what can, what can finally change? Is it gonna be small and incremental and getting at miss, is it gonna, or does it really need to be something big or is it really gonna be a tragedy? It's gonna be the next 9-11, it's gonna be our version of Paris, it's gonna be something really big and that's what really it takes to have something change these giant institutions that we're all mired in somehow. So there's a balance between holding people accountable and I think we have to do a lot of that and then also having it sort of a zero-tolerance risk-averse culture, right? And especially with the acquisition of the kinds of things you're talking about, I mean, we need the ability to try and fail. We need the ability to prototype, we need the ability to do things quickly and I don't think that our system is structured like that, right? So that Congress will be like, you wasted all this money and it's all down the drain. Now, well, yeah, because we tried this and it didn't work, we've got this other thing. I mean, that's kind of how innovation happens in other places but there's these structural barriers to allowing that to happen, I think. We're getting a little more time now. I have one more question from the audience. I'll change, okay. Then I'll ask Secretary Florento, when you were in the Pentagon, the time it took from an event to happen to a decision to be made, a use of force decision, an action, a reaction to that, is it too long? Is it too micromanaged? We've heard a lot of outside of you. You're an imminent lover and if so, whatever the answer would be, what's the way to fix it for this question, this adapting fast enough question, to responding to Mosul faster, to responding to a hostage crisis that needs to happen, be taken care of quickly or a mall being taken over in Kenya. There's no way to answer that question. I think there were time, when it happened reasonably, the flash to bang or the decision making happened relatively quickly and responsibly, it tended to be in situations where we had a very defined framework, we knew what the strategy was so that it was an operation happening in the context of a defined framework, like I would give a number of our counterterrorism operations where you've defined the strategy, the rules of the road, you've got a set of objectives you're going after, one opportunity pops up and as long as all of the rulesets are met, the authorization to actually go after that target happens very pretty quickly. In cases where it's a use of forced decision that's really in the context of a situation where we really haven't figured out our strategy and or we're still working through that process, then that one decision becomes a surrogate for a much larger conversation and that's when you tend to have these very long drawn out processes sort of going around and around the issues. I think the third thing that contributes to the length of delay is the one we fail to delegate and let people execute, whether you keep, beyond once the strategy is set, you keep micromanaging the implementation. And I think the desire, the motivation for that is to try to buy down risk. The irony is it actually brings risk higher up the chain of command when you pull the decision making up and the better approach is to set the framework, set the clear limits, and then hold people who are down the chain responsible for executing, hold them accountable for getting it right. So, there are lots of, this is, I mean we could have a whole another panel discussion on this. I love this clock that keeps adding time but I'm not sure we have enough time. Now we're out, we had minutes and we're down to zero, probably means the senators here. I'm getting back. I want to thank our panelists for this panel. I don't want to thank New America for putting together two days of thought. This is something we do have time to do and it's a luxury of I think our hashtag First World that we get to kind of sit back and take a couple of days to think about the future and the past and everything we do because this is a room full of decision makers and a city full of decision makers and it matters and it's good to have these conversations out loud. So thank you to the audience and to the foundation and to New America and to all of you. Thanks. Thank you.