 Well, without further ado, that Admiral Carter is here. It's my pleasure to introduce to you our Admiral Ted Carter, the 54th President of the Naval War College. He is a native of Broadville, Rhode Island. Admiral Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, the class of 1981, and was designated a Naval Flight Officer in 1982. He graduated from the Naval Fighter Weapon School, top gun in the last F-4 Phantom class in 1985. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our Admiral Carter. All right. Well, good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. It's good to see you're all still dressed up from this morning, and everybody looks like they've gotten through lunch so well. This is a great day. It's a great day because you started your academic journey. But maybe more importantly, it's the order in which things are happening. So as you look at what you're about to be exposed to here over the next couple of hours, it brings up an interesting question. Why ethics and why right out of the gate? It's something maybe some of you haven't really thought a lot about. And how does it fit into your thinking? How does it fit into your decision making? How does it interwoven into how we plan and how we execute? So I think this is a great start to your entire year that you'll spend here. This lays the groundwork for why this discussion has to happen up front. And as you go through the year, I ask that you consider this series of discussions that you have here and what it means. And the material that you have here, the notes that you take, circle back to it and think again about how this should fit into the process of your critical thinking as you change, and you will change here over the next year. My own experience, I have to admit that I just thought I always understood what ethics was and it was just basic, you know, how you were brought up. It's doing the right thing when nobody's looking or doing the right thing when everybody's looking. And what you'll come to find as you mature and you get further away, whether you're a ship driver, an airplane driver, a submarine operator, a EOD explosive ordnance disposal expert or Navy SEAL, or any of the variations of uniforms that we have in our United States and abroad, A is that as Admiral Harwood talked about this morning, you're never really as smart as you think. I found myself to be a very cocky lieutenant when I was young. I thought I knew everything. I had been to Top Gun. I had been exposed to the best tacticians in the world. And I thought I knew how to apply my craft better than anyone. And as I got older and more mature, I realized I didn't know everything and that the ethical part of my thinking became a bigger part of how I operated when I was doing my business. And that mattered whether or not I was in the shipbuilding world, whether I was in the training world, and most importantly, when I was in the combat world. And ethical thinking is something that's different. I mean, you'll hear us talk a lot about thinking at the operational and strategic level. Impacts from ethical decisions happen at the tactical level and can have strategic consequences. And it can happen very fast. So it's important for you as future leaders, as current leaders, to understand how do you transmit what you know to be right? How do you take an idea that you know that you have and impart that on everyone that's in and around you? How do you put that kind of influence in your planning teams and your commands and the people that you work with and for the people you work for? Because sometimes you're told to do something and you have to make a decision, am I executing as a direct order or do I challenge that because I know ethically it might not be correct or it might have some impact beyond what maybe was asked for me to do? And by the way, there's no checklist. There's no knee board card. There's nothing that you get to go reference to back yourself up in many of these occasions. And oftentimes it does come down to understanding war, the consequences of war. What's the right thing to do? I told a story to the faculty when I first came here about one of my first real tough decisions that I had to make in an air combat mission and it was over Kosovo and I'll just share it to you and I'll give you the shortened version of it because the point is very evident in how it went down. And I never really even thought of it as an ethical decision because it was really happening so fast. As many of you know, we had been involved in the Kosovo operations for a number of weeks before the U.S. Navy showed up. And I happened to be on board. The Theodore Roosevelt was the only aircraft carrier we sent to the Ionian. We had Air Wing 8 on board. I was a commanding officer of one of the F-14 squadrons. I had led the first strike in Kosovo on 6 April 1999 and we subsequently flew for five straight nights without any daytime combat missions. The weather had not been that good that time of year in the Balkans. The Navy did not have fly through the weather weapons so we had laser guided weapons that needed to see the ground. On the 12th of April, we had our first daytime assignment and I was the lead. It was not a huge strike and it was not expected to be seriously opposed but it was against a bridge. And this wasn't just any bridge. This is a bridge of some significance, not maybe quite as big as the Pell Bridge, but pretty close. And the idea was we were to take away the logistical chains that the Serbians had been using their tanks to run across to get into the villages. So this was, again, a daytime mission. We had eight strike airplanes, four Tomcats, four F-18s and we had all the support that went with it. As we launched and I had sat in before we got to the launch, there was a long process of briefing. We did our own tactical planning so we had done all the weaponry and we knew how to take down the bridge. Some of us in the planning stage knew that it was Easter Orthodox Sunday. Not the most significant holiday, maybe in Kosovo and some of the provinces that were east. But we knew that it would be a day that a lot of people would probably be out and about. And we asked that hard question, is this really a smart thing to be going after a major transportation lane on a major religious holiday? Anyway, long and short of it, as we did get airborne, we asked all that question that by the way, that had gone all the way back to the headquarters and we were airborne and we were dealing with weather. Probably not too unlike a day like today. It was a little hazy, there were some clouds out there. 30 mile run in, we're doing about 600 knots. So we're moving pretty fast. We're gonna have a weapons release at somewhere around the five mile and these gravity dropped weapons to go into this target area. About eight miles out from the target, we finally could see the bridge clear on our screens and our dimpy points were easy to pick out because they were so large. The F-18s weren't even having any trouble. The Tomcat had a little bit better system in the back. We could talk about that with my Hornet brother sometime later. But the point is that as we closed in very quickly on this target area at 10 miles a minute, we didn't see any movement initially on the bridge and I felt very good as the lead because the intel people told me that they wouldn't be anybody out because they knew that we were taking out bridges. So I thought the intel was very good. Well, as we crossed eight miles, the latency of the information coming through the system was good enough that I could actually see that it was a complete traffic jam on the bridge. Cars, hundreds, maybe thousands of them were locked and nothing was moving. And we were in a calm out tactical position. I broke radio silence, transmitted the one code word to abort and nobody dropped the weapon, which was very fortunate. We took a lot of heat when we got back and I wasn't sure whether I had just truly disobeyed an order or whether I was following what I thought was ethically right by not killing literally thousands of civilians who were not the target. Thankfully, we had a very good videotape to state our case. The next day was the famous mission where the F-15E with a laser guided Maverick took out a train crossing a train trestle and unfortunately made a direct hit and it made a lot of news and we saw the strategic impact of what that mission meant and I had a lot of time to think about this over the years as to what would have changed in my life, to me personally and to the overall mission had we just went ahead and took the order and said take out the bridge and let the consequences be what they were. And we probably would have had a good argument to say we didn't have time to abort because we might not have been able to really tell how many people were on the bridge. So the ethical question that if you had time to debate it would have been the cost of that human loss of life to allow that to happen versus not take out that bridge, maybe have to go back, maybe lose an airplane who might come under fire. All of those obvious questions that you should ask yourselves and fortunately I was brought up in a manner that it was an instinctual decision and never even occurred to me to not call the code word about no matter how much heat I was gonna take afterwards. So I've taken that as a lesson to myself, one that I've had personal experience in and I just offer it as something that's easily understood at the tactical level to which now you can apply and see what the strategic consequences may or may not have been. So these are some of the questions and the things that you'll be asked to think about as you go through not only this discussion, some of the presentation, but as you go through this year and what you are asked to think about and how decision making will be made for you down the road. So with that, I think I'll get off the stage and let some of the other experts come on up and I welcome the discussion. I know this is a large group and this to be quite honest, the first time I've sat in on one group this large, I know we have about three hours here. So again, I look forward to the discussion. Thank you all very much.