 Dr. Olinda Johnson, especially because she's probably crippled right now, so never pick on somebody like that. She's a great person and every one of you who has not had the joy and pleasure of meeting her yet, you will love her. So anyway, today you've heard a whole good deal about the professional nature of military service starting this morning with Admiral Carter. His thoughts up front is tasking, especially to the new class on your year here, and I hope maybe as a end of the summer break, I'm looking at my friend Commander DeWalt down here to get you back in gear if you've had one semester left or two semesters left if you had a head start on the folks that were sworn in this morning. But anyway, tasking from Admiral Carter this morning, inspiring words from Admiral Luce spoken so long ago, but frankly as relevant today as they were then, there's no doubt about it. And then Admiral Hayward, Howard, sorry, Admiral Howard's truly inspirational and I'd say spot on remarks about what you need to be doing in your futures and what you need to be thinking about while you're here. And now, of course, Dr. Cook, thank you Martin and Dr. Johnson's spinning the web of the requirements of our profession as mostly military folks, but spinning it a little bit differently than maybe you've heard before or thought about before. You know, you've been challenged to broaden your perspective on the nature of that professional military ethic or ethics set to include your intellectual growth, the self-policing of the conduct of the profession, your profession, and also maintaining, perhaps more importantly, maintaining the trust and confidence and the conduct of the profession, maintaining the trust and confidence, not only of our leaders, but also of the American people, certainly for a person like me and of course for our international students, your countrymen and your leadership, it applies just as well. Making sure that the foundation of our ability to maintain our true professional status is founded, grounded, and that we are up to speed on it. That's what this year is all about. So as the Dean of COSL, I want to end our discussion today just by drawing out what I have as takeaways, if you will, a few practical implications based on what I'm hearing, not only today, but also are the concerns of our senior leadership today. So it's pretty simple. There's only three things. At any rate, number one, you will serve in times of great budget constraint. Okay. Often military organizations, as Martin's already spoken about a little bit, they respond to financial challenges in the two ways that are probably easiest. They adopt that defensive crouch. Okay, I'm going to huddle in. I'm going to try to keep and defend as much as possible of the programs that I have of the things that I have, or they can simply just sort of roll over, play dead, behave as the obedient bureaucrat. Now obviously, neither of those answers is right. Option number three, door number three is the right option. It's the only option that's right. That's grounded in the discussion of the professionalism that we've just heard from Dr. Cook. You don't want to be in a cut-dumb situation. You want to be in a cut-smart situation, right? Professions enjoy social trust only, only when they demonstrate their ability to act in the true interests of their clients. And again, that's the American people for the US folks here, the national governments in your countrymen for our international students. And as military professionals, and it applies as well, of course, to our interagency professionals, your job is to act within whatever the budgetary constraints you find yourselves in will be and to provide the most effective force or capability possible out of that money that you have. And sometimes, that will mean pushing back against excessive cuts if they truly threaten our military's ability to fulfill its core missions. For example, we've talked about Secretary Hagel a couple of times here, suggesting that we might be needing to reduce the number of carrier strike groups to nine or even eight. Okay, as Martin's already talked about, if that were to happen, the Navy simply would not any longer be able to operate as we have assumed as a Navy that we've had to since World War II. The professional ethical question is, can you find, are you sailors out there, right, can you find ways to employ and maintain eight carriers in ways that meet the objective defense requirements of our nation? Even if that requires new and creative thinking about how to use those aircraft carriers, or is that number simply too small to meet our real defense needs? And if so, how consistent with subordination to our civilian authorities, do you articulate the reality? How far can the objection go before it becomes in subordination? You have got to be able to make the eloquent argument. It's something to think about, it gets into Admiral Carter's piece. Are you brave enough, are you gutsy enough, are you smart enough to argue the answer the way it should be answered as a professional? Now, these are obviously not easy questions to answer, but some of you will have to work on answers to them in your near term futures. Not this year, not at the Naval War College, you'll be thinking about them, but in your next assignments. Of course, this is a US Navy example, but I think the other services, agencies, and nations in this room all face their own equivalents of those questions, and I just think the easy ones are Air Force, how many wings do we lose? Army, how many divisions do we lose in this argument? We've got to think this out, you've got to be smart on it. Second point, we've said that part of the obligation of a profession is to ensure that its members are educated, and are trained, and are developed so as to be prepared to best serve their client. Part of what our studies in Navy leader development have revealed, though, and what our senior leaders in the Navy are telling us, is that we have significant gaps in that development, and that applies outside of the Navy too, some of the statements from General Dempsey. Things like talking Navy now, maybe we wait a little too long, or a little too late in a career, or me, we miss completely learning the ability to think critically and strategically. To better know oneself, and how you think, and what your biases are, so you can work through your weaknesses, and better use your strengths as a leader. Now, a professional ethical challenge, if you buy that, therefore is to figure out how to better fill in those gaps, whether it's personal professional needs, or service professional needs. For us in the Navy, again, we've always done okay with experience and training, right, and training, most of it just in time. In other words, en route training, as you're getting refreshed, maybe in your platform, as you're heading back out to a sea duty tour, a sea duty tour, or something like that. But we haven't really given education and personal development the kind of focus that we should. We recognize that. For example, we tend to detail our sailors to this Naval War College, who have time to be here, rather than ensuring that the right sailor comes here at the right time in their career. Or, maybe we don't even fill all of our very, very, very valuable seats, in a place like this because there isn't time to immerse in a war college experience at the expense of community or joint needs, right, fair? Furthermore, across the whole of our Navy, we ignore or to value giving people the right attention at the right time to develop themselves personally, touchy-feely stuff, right? We don't have time for that. An MBTI or a 360 degree review, for example, if those are happening for the first time as an 06, it's too late. It's too late. So we're responding as a profession on this stuff. Take knowledge gaps that we know we have in overall leader development through a continuum that aligns that experience and training piece with education and personal development. You know, what a concept. Why? So we can make better leaders across all the ranks and rates of the Navy and ensure that we can meet the demands of our clients, the people of the United States of America, and the chief of naval operations in doing our jobs. Keeping the war fighting first, all right? All you sailors know, war fighting first, operating forward, being ready to execute the orders of our civilian leaders, as well as our service chiefs, our combatant commanders, and our agency chiefs for the civilians in the crowd. Our national strategy has announced a rebalance to Asia, right? Rebalance to Asia. Power relations in the world, we know they're changing so rapidly, we can't keep up with them. Many of our platforms across all of our services are fairly old. Much of our equipment has reached service life way early, due to the demands of 12 years of combat. And it's obvious that our future acquisition programs will be few. So, point number three. You will need to think creatively and deeply about how you lead the military profession forward in this changing and complex environment. VUCA applies, thanks, Dr. Cook. We don't know what the future is gonna be, but we know it won't be more of the same. This year at the Naval War College is the best, maybe even the only opportunity that you will have to prepare yourselves to think creatively about this. Let's use a Navy example for the kind of thinking I'm talking about. Last October, okay, right here, our Chief of Naval Operations, Amal Greener, brought all of his senior leadership up here for a what we call a rock drill, a review of concept drill. Think how does the Navy, how does he as a CNO plan to handle the requirement that's levied on him as a service chief from all around the world. The players that came up to the War College to do this game were the senior leaderships of the Navy. The systems commanders as the designers of all of our weapons programs, weapons systems, if you will, and their supporting programs. The force providers and the OPNAV leadership, operational Navy staff, for those that aren't familiar, as our program implementers, the force providers and planners and allocators. And lastly, the fleet commanders, all of the numbered fleet commanders were here from around the globe as the commanders and users of the Navy. Now, CNO wasn't in this room. Dean Rubel, you'll all get to see McCarty Little Hall at some point in here, particularly in your JMO drills, but you'll get to know the forum that he used for this. Huge floor, a little bit bigger than the stage up here. Had a huge map of the globe, had what we had deployed where, what stuff we had in various stages of training and readiness, four deployments in the future laid out, or maybe four repairs laid out appropriately, so that he and his commanders could walk through our critical points. Shifting assets around the globe is required to answer the global demand and any crisis that he'd say, okay, what if that crazy guy in North Korea does X right now? Where do we shift? How do we do this? Anyway, he wanted to take a look at where we were and where we would be over a period of years that started this summer, like right now. Using the existing force structure that was in place set at the time of October last year and the agreements that we had on the table at the time, joint force stuff on force employment, on combating command, commanders' requirements, on the joint force directives at the time. And then resetting, his goal was, all right, let's take a look at it now, if you will, then let's reset, let's take a couple of future looks at intervals some years downstream so he could try to start getting his head about it. He wanted to work this whole drill in about three hours time frame with all of his leadership help. So, how'd it go? Well, suffice to say that in using all the time allowed, the three hours, okay, he only got through the current period of the drill. And the current period of the drill was so hard to do, to walk through, but so learning for him and for the other people that were in the room that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, okay. But what did he figure out is that it was obvious to everybody that we were not able to continue meeting the global demands of what our strategy was last fall, okay. So, what do you do with that, leaders, okay, what do you do with that? We have an ethical obligation, come up all through the day here. Ethical obligation to outline the issues for our senior leadership, be it civilian or military. CNO's got a boss too, right, okay, call the secretary of defense, call the chairman, all right, any ratings, but he's got to outline the issues for senior leadership and set the redefinition of the mission requirements, right. And so he did, he made the eloquent argument and get back to that piece again, the eloquent argument about our global responsibilities and our requirements and subsequently they changed to something that we could sustain, well, so far, right. So, how about another example, air-sea battle. I say it's a great example of the kind of thinking that's required here given our strategy. Air Force and Navy fully recognizing they can't go it alone, particularly in an anti-access area denial environment where defenses and the whole set of things that go with what we're talking about in ASB and in A2AD require us to work differently than we've ever thought about before. And it takes our joint force issues to new levels of cooperation that again we've never before reached, we've never even talked about things in some cases up until two years ago. And of course that debate has got to continue evolving. It's required of all of us in the profession. And Admiral Harward was pretty eloquent about that one this morning. And lastly if you need one more, think coalition operations, okay. Whether something like Odyssey Dawn, support of the Libya issues or around the Gulf with the task force commanders and the combined maritime force that's in play out there. Do the subordinate commanders of the coalitions that are involved in those operations, do those commanders have an obligation ethically and morally to define for their bosses, their commanders what they and their forces, their services or their agencies can and can't do along national lines as well as coalition lines and what those limits are. Well of course they have those responsibilities. They've got to be open and honest with the commanders, right. And you all have to think about leading in a coalition that changes daily in the kind of complex world that we've got out there. So let me close with this. All that I've tried to raise was being worked before sequestration, right. And all that goes with it. So everything that I've raised gets even more difficult. And all the issues that have come up today get even more difficult when you start folding that thinking in. You have to engage your brains. You've got to think differently than before. And you have to get it right. Your profession requires it. So open up your minds. Engage with your classmates. They're the best source always. And your teachers the unbelievable strategic resource that we've got here in this war college. Set your future path for success in a really tough world. Have the best year of your lives. Thanks for listening and good luck this year.