 William McRaven graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in journalism in 1977. He then went on to serve 37 years in the U.S. Navy, where he became a Navy SEAL, and ultimately advanced to the rank of four-star Admiral. In his last post, Admiral McRaven was the commander of U.S. Operations Command, leading a force of 69,000 men and women. He advised presidents, secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, and other top U.S. officials in the areas of U.S. foreign policy and defense. In addition to many other operations under his leadership, Admiral McRaven headed up the special ops raid in 2001 that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, briefing President Obama in real time as the operation was being executed. The same year, he was named runner-up for Time Magazine's Distinguished Person of the Year. Admiral McRaven retired from the Navy in 2014 and became the chancellor of the University of Texas system earlier this year. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Chancellor William McRaven. Well, thank you very much, Mark, and let me thank you in the LBJ Library for hosting this magnificent event. And let me also thank again, Director Jim Clapper and Director John Brennan, two very close friends who have worked with me side by side for many years now. We are really blessed to have these two gentlemen in the positions they are in. I can't think of any two guys that have done more to protect this nation over the years than Jim Clapper and John Brennan. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us today. And I also want to recognize again, former director, Porter Goss, so great to have you here and you've added a lot to the last two days. And I would be remiss if I didn't call out my very good friend and mentor, Admiral Bobby Inman, who has been so gracious as he has walked me through the minefields that sometimes can be politics at the University of Texas and has graciously worked with me as I have established my tenure here at the University of Texas. So, Admiral Inman, thank you again very much. Well, I'm going to approach this a little bit differently here. You've been looking at the first customer and now we're going to take intelligence and really kind of move it down to a tactical level. And then frankly, I hope to be able to walk you from the tactical, maybe back up to the first customer. So I've been asked to talk about why is intelligence necessary? And I want to start off with a little bit of a thought experiment. So in the world of special operations, one of the things we have to tackle off in are hostage rescues. So put yourself in a situation where you have a hostage situation and you have perfect intelligence on what is going on in the single room. So you have a single room, there is a hostage. He is on the right side of the room. He is in a chair, he is bound. You know exactly where he is. There is the hostage taker. The hostage taker is on the other side of the room. You know exactly what weapon systems he has. You know exactly the dimensions of the room. You know the thickness of the walls. You have some understanding of the intent of the hostage taker and you have some understanding of how the hostage himself or herself might react. You know how the door swings open. You have for all intent and purposes, perfect intelligence. And the purpose of that intelligence, of course, is to mitigate the risk to a manageable level. On the outside of that door, of course, you have special operations, soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines that are prepared to go in to rescue this hostage. And not only do you have perfect intelligence at a point in time, but you have it throughout those points in time. So it is real time intelligence and it is constant intelligence. And of course, what that does for you is it really does reduce that risk to a manageable level. Now, always in the process of going through the door, you blow the door open, the first man through the door could stumble and that creates problems and the next man through now has to adjust as you have a moving hostage taker. All those sorts of things are in play. But having said that, with perfect intelligence, the chances of success on that particular operation are very high. So when we look at intelligence from a military standpoint, and I'll talk in a little bit later about how I think policy makers use this intelligence. From the military standpoint, we love to quote Carl von Klauswitz, who talked about the fact that the defense is stronger than the offense. That the defense just has to preserve and protect. Well, the offense has to impose its will upon the enemy. The defense only has to preserve and protect and the offense has to impose its will on the enemy. Well, if you're going to impose your will on the enemy, the better the intelligence, the more likely you are to be successful against the stronger form, i.e. the defense. But of course, intelligence is never perfect. And I'm gonna walk you through some of the significant uses of intelligence we have. So we'll start with imagery, image intelligence or image as we refer to it. Many years ago in 2005, we were tracking a very, very high value al-Qaeda target in Iraq. But in 2005, the special forces there, we had only one predator. The predators were relatively new on the battlefield, certainly in terms of the military. And we had a very qualified special operations force, but we had one aircraft. And we had been tracking this individual through human intelligence, and we knew that he was going to have a rendezvous where we suspected he was going to have a rendezvous at a certain place out in Al-Ramadi, in the western part of Iraq. So we had our human intelligence surrounding where we thought the link-up was going to be of this bad guy, and we had, again, a single predator overhead. So as the link-up was occurring, we were not able to verify that the individual in question was there. But as the link-up occurred, we thought we had identified the appropriate vehicle that the bad guy was in, and the vehicle started to move. And that was fine because we had a single predator overhead and we were watching as this vehicle moved, and then a second vehicle joined the convoy. And now we had two vehicles, which was fine, because they were moving in unisons together. And at some point in time, they came to a crossroad. And the Lieutenant Colonel who was working for me turned and looked at me and said, you got to call it. Are we going left or are we going right? So we took the vehicle on the right, and we allowed the vehicle on the left to move out in another direction. And so we followed the vehicle on the right for quite some time. And again, the predator flies at a fairly high altitude. And again, this was 2005. The quality of the sensors weren't all that great. But all of a sudden, the vehicle stopped near a palm grove. And we had a good beat on the vehicle. It was the only vehicle around the palm grove. And right at that moment in time, as we were watching this vehicle, the optical ball that is underneath the predator recycled. And what happens is it goes from a picture that appears to be a couple hundred meters away to a picture that is now several thousand feet away. And it recycled up, and it shocked us all. Now we could still see the vehicle, but instead of the vehicle being this large on our screen, it was now about this big. But we watched it very closely. And about 15 seconds later, the ball reactivated, came back down, and we thought, okay, good, everything's fine. We continued to follow the vehicle. And then finally, my patients ran out and I asked the assault force to interdict the vehicle to capture who was ever inside. And so we interdicted the vehicle, no shots were fired, we stopped the vehicle, and there was just a driver inside, not the guy we were looking for. But as it turned out, there was a AK-47, an assault weapon in the back, and a laptop. And so we quickly scarfed that up and we got it back to our headquarters. And as we began to do the forensics, we went back and looked, and we thought something is amiss here. And of course, as we did the forensics, we found right at that point in time when that optical ball recycled and went from a close-in view to a distance view, the individual in the back of the vehicle had gotten up and run into the palm grove and we missed him. And it took us another year to capture, to kill this individual. And in that year's time, dozens of Americans and hundreds or thousands of Iraqis were killed. And it really showed us both the power of imagery intelligence and also the limitations. The other technical intelligence we use is signals intelligence and I won't go into a great deal of detail, but suffice to say we have the ability to understand what is happening between two individuals on various communications. But at one point in time, in a country far, far away, not Iraq or Afghanistan, we were pursuing a target and we had interpreted listening to the two individuals on their devices that we thought, again, that they were going to link up with a very high-value target in this particular country. And so we stood ready to conduct a strike and as the operation evolved and we were continuing to pull in technical intelligence, we took the opportunity and took the strike and while it was a bad guy, it was not the bad guy we were looking for. And later on, I was asked a question about the quality of the intelligence and how I viewed the risk and how that risk was in fact presented to the decision makers up the chain of command. And it is something as a user of intelligence and a conveyor of the quality of the intelligence and the need for action that I never forgot. Suffice to say and I'll talk a little bit more about it is you have to be certain that the quality of the intelligence you get is in fact reducing the risk. We have other types of intelligence where we have large sensor devices and we use this quite a bit in Iraq and Afghanistan to hopefully locate buried explosives, homemade explosives. And what you would find is we would position these sensors on large aircraft and they could at times determine whether or not a particular route, a road had been dug up and a homemade explosive had been put in that road. Again, the technology was good, but it was hardly perfect and many times we would send assault folks in or explosive ordnance disposal folks in based on the intelligence we had to see if we could defuse the weapon. And of course it turned out that it had been just some young boy digging in a road that had no bearing on the threat that we perceived it to be. And then of course there was always human intelligence and that is probably the hardest of the intelligence but frankly the most important and the most vital in terms of understanding the context. And of course human intelligence gives you a sense of the intent of the individual. And nothing I think is harder to determine than the intent of a particular individual no matter whether you know them well or do not you just never know what their next move will be. So what we had tried to do really since 9-11 as I have watched it closely is how do we go about improving the quality of intelligence. So in the eminent realm, in the area where we use imagery the quality of the image of course has increased dramatically. In the early days as I said in some cases the ISR that we had, the optical ball was what we would consider kind of standard definition. And so the quality of the image you got was sometimes a little grainy. Not that you couldn't see people very clearly but it didn't also operate well at night. And so there were a lot of problems with it. As time has gone on and technology has gotten better and better the quality of that image has gotten to the point where it is as clear as I'm looking at you in some cases. And that's very, very important because again as I said from the beginning the purpose of the intelligence is to buy down the risk. And if you don't understand the factors that are involved in creating that risk if you're looking at a picture that isn't as clear as you think it is then that risk is greater and you're not going to be able to provide the options that you want to the decision makers. You also need more angles. So I talked about the fact that we had one predator. So if one predator is good more predators are better. And the fact of the matter is again a single angle on a target in particularly as we were looking at Afghanistan many times we would be looking at a compound in Afghanistan and the angle of the view was obstructed by the compound itself. And so consequently you went in without perfect intelligence sometimes without even good intelligence but at least it was better because you had some angle. But of course pulling one predator and multiple predators together and working them with fire support that you get from the AC 130 is one of our gunships with the aircraft in the sky all that requires a very delicate and sophisticated dance and that's very difficult to do but it's important to make sure that under the imagery aspect of this you have multiple angles. The longer dwell again fortunately over time what we found with some of our imagery platforms is they were limited in timeframe. Before we had the predators we actually had a helicopter with a small optical ball on it. Well the helicopter was limited by the fuel and therefore every once in a while in the middle of an operation you would have to land the helicopter. It was the only helicopter with the only optical ball we had and we realized you just couldn't do business that way. So we invested a lot not only we special operations but we the United States government invested a lot in making sure we had multiple platforms in order to do the job. And then we talked about the timeframe. When you look at the PDBs and what they provide the president in terms of strategic intelligence and operational intelligence on the battlefield and Frank Denious asked the question yesterday to director Brennan and the panel and I about the quality of intelligence and what can you get down to the soldier today and what you can get to the soldier today is unprecedented. The soldier in the foxhole if you will can have a terrific view of the battlefield a visual view of the battlefield. But if that view is time late and I associate it with I have a box at the stadium to watch the football games. And the interesting thing is we have a number of TVs up in the box but the TVs are about five seconds late. Well you know what that means when you're watching football and you hear everybody cheer and you're looking up going to wonder what they're cheering about and then five seconds later you begin to find out what they were cheering about. Well in the world of intelligence when that intelligence has to be so timely because it is being relayed to the operator the soldier on the ground five seconds can be a lifetime and five seconds can mean the difference between life or death. So as you look at the imagery you have to work on ensuring that the quality of the image is good that the multiple angles are out there that you can increase the dwell time and that the timing between the actual capture of the image and the return is as small as you can make it. On the signals on the technical intelligence this is really about ensuring that we are able to collect on a variety of different platforms and I won't go into a lot of detail there. But the other aspect of this is making sure that the analysts you have and the interpreters that you have are good. In a lot of cases as we are chasing bad guys around the world some of the dialects that we are trying to translate are not common. And therefore there may be one or two people in the Department of Defense that speak this particular dialect and they may not speak it as well as you would hope they would speak it. So in the middle of a very complex operation as you are trying to interpret the nature and the intent of the bad guys through technical intelligence the nature of that translator is absolutely critical. I learned this the hard way as well when I was giving a speech to the graduating West Point Academy folks in Afghanistan. And I got up and gave what I thought was a rousing fabulous speech to the graduating class and I got a very kind of polite applause at the end. I thought boy I must have missed the mark. The Chief of Staff of the Afghan Army came up to me afterwards and he said your translator is terrible. He misrepresented everything you said. And so if you take that to an intelligence standpoint and you realize if you do not have the right translator and if that translation is somehow skewed then again your understanding of the intent therefore your understanding of the risk is entirely different. And the analysts and of course we have a lot of analysts that look at these sort of things and it is the same problem set. You not only have to have translations but you have to have analysts that understand in context what is going on. On the human side we really do look at the training and we have and the CIA are without a doubt the world's finest when it comes to intelligence analysis and we have great folks across the intelligence community at the Defense Intelligence Agency the NASA Geospatial Agency all of the parts of the IC some fabulous Intel analysts. But clearly what separates us us the US intelligence community I think from any other organization in the world is the quality of the training that these analysts go through in order to be analysts. And what you find again it's like any other aspect of life you have the rookie analysts and you have the experienced analysts. So the reason you have the quality of PDB briefer you have is because that individual has spent a lot of time being an analyst is able to convey the analytical information in context and that's very important to anybody that's receiving intelligence. And then again understanding the behavior of the individual. So a lot of times we're chasing people that we know very little about. Somebody in one of the organizations with the intelligence community knows something about them and that person becomes a subject matter expert on a particular individual. And sometimes there's only one person or maybe one or two people and you really do rely a lot on them to provide you the analysis of that particular individual in that target set. So as you look at the various types of intelligence what we learned very quickly in the war in Iraq is really where we started this is that you have to be able to fuse the intelligence. You have to do what we call using all source intelligence and we've always known that the intelligence agencies have always understood that but sometimes on the battlefield you tended to take whatever you got an image, a technical intelligence, a human intelligence and that became a little bit of your only source intelligence. What you have to be able to do is fuse them all together. It is the fused intelligence that now reduces your risk again. So I go back to my scenario of the room. If all you have in that room is a camera that is observing the hostage and the hostage taker then you don't understand the dialogue that's going on between the two. If you have the dialogue but you don't have a photo or you don't have a constant video stream then again you have an incomplete picture. So what is critical is to be able to take these various types of intelligence and fuse them together. And this is again a very important aspect of what we did in Iraq. Not only did we fuse them but then we recognize that from the military standpoint we also were not the sole source of intelligence when it came to the various types of intelligence. So we would bring in CIA, DIA, National Geospatial Agency, FBI, Iraqi intelligence and we would, we created these fusion cells. Also the conventional forces were part of these fusion cells and we realized that if you wanted to be able to pass information and use information you needed to understand what was going on the ground. Sometimes the soldiers who were closest to the problem set could give you a better insight into what was going on in the ground than the analyst that was back in Baghdad or potentially Langley or Fort Bragg. So you pulled all the subject matter experts together in a single place and you would look at a target set and you would fuse the intelligence and you would use this inter-agency process to have the best intelligence you could and therefore again reduce the risk on a particular mission. We used a lot of what we call Metcalfe's law and Bob Metcalfe created this law some time ago that talks about telecommunications networks and in it when you look at telecommunications network what he said was if you add a new node to a telecommunications network so if you have A and B and then you add C what you get is an exponential increase in the power of that communications. Now C and B have got to be able to talk equally as strong as A and B but this concept of Metcalfe's law frankly applies to kind of human networks as well. So every time you add a node you exponentially increase the power of your knowledge and I think the power of the intelligence that is out there. So as we created these joint inter-agency task force these gyatus we called them and we had analysts from all the Intel communities we had analysts and operators from the military and from all the other constituents that were out there fighting the battle the state department, et cetera you had a much better look at the picture on the ground and this was vitally important and again with each node you added you had a better understanding of the picture. So we took this concept of fusion and we started off small with fusion cells we created these locally grown joint inter-agency task force in Iraq and then Afghanistan. We began to partner the Iraq and Afghanistan node when we found out the enemy network did not see any boundaries between Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan and other places and then we created this global gyatum where we could look at the problem set globally and each iteration along the way we became better and better. So now let's talk about the intelligence and its role to the policy makers and I will use a little bit again another football analogy if I can. You know when you look at two opposing teams on the football field and if you said again I'm gonna have perfect intelligence on my opponent and I'm gonna be able to steal their signals I'm gonna know exactly what I need to know about each player which one's hurt which one stayed up the night before how fast are they you know everything about their scheme maneuver their defense their offense you know how they're gonna play on the football field and you say I got it I have perfect intelligence on that football team. The problem is if that football team happens to be the Dallas Cowboys and you're a high school football team I don't care how good your intelligence is it's not going to help you. So this is the point for policy makers. It's not just about the intelligence it's about using the intelligence to understand what your options are and how to apply those options against the problem set. I had a chance to talk to the Texas football team a couple of weeks ago and I was talking to him about the Notre Dame game the Notre Dame game of 2007 and in the Notre Dame game now this is Notre Dame in the Naval Academy so the Naval Academy had not beaten the University of Notre Dame in 43 years. It was a given that Notre Dame was gonna beat the Naval Academy and they had I think half a dozen four and five star recruits on the Notre Dame team and I asked the players on the Longhorns I said I want y'all to raise your hand somebody out here raise your hand on those of you that wanted to go to the Naval Academy to play football of course nobody raised their hand and I said exactly right. So you had the case of the Dallas Cowboys against the high school team. Well the game goes into its first overtime conclusion of the regular time frame goes into its first overtime goes into its second overtime goes into its third overtime and the Navy beats Notre Dame 47 to 43 and my point to them and it is a point that should not be lost here is Navy studied Notre Dame Navy understood what Notre Dame strengths were and Navy understood where their weaknesses were and they developed a plan they reduced the risk to a manageable level to defeat Notre Dame and that's really when you look at it that's the value of intelligence to policy makers. So we'll talk about the Bin Laden raid. The CIA did a magnificent job along with the NSA and NGA and others in providing us the operators the intelligence for the Bin Laden raid and it was as good as we could have gotten it but the fact of the matter is we didn't know what the inside of the compound looked like because we're just not able quite to do that. We weren't exactly sure whether in fact it was Bin Laden and we thought it was about a 50-50 chance at best there was a lot of things we didn't know about the compound where Bin Laden was but when we presented it to the president it was well Mr. President we're the Dallas Cowboys and they're the high school football team we will be successful on this we have the intelligence we need but our team is better than their team and that is the nature of what policy makers have got to grapple with what are their options? What are their options? What the president did for me in the Bin Laden raid was he said I don't only want you to be the Dallas Cowboy I want you to be the Dallas Cowboys that won the Super Bowl I want you to make sure that there are no that you have reduced that risk to absolutely the smallest possible level you've got great intelligence but now come up with every plan B, C, D and E so that we are buying down all the contingencies we did that through good intelligence we took the intelligence we had and we continued to mitigate the risk so now let's take that scenario of mano a mano a single football team against a single football team the Cowboys against a high school team my seals against what we thought the threat was the Bin Laden compound and now let's look at Dash or ISIS as people call it think of the complexity of a situation like we have in Syria and Iraq this is not the single room in the thought experiment this is a room with another room and another room and another room and another room and another room and another room these are problems on top of problems on top of problems so when you have multiple factors involved you have ISIS you have the Syrian army under a side you have the moderate Syrians you have our allies and the Turks and the Jordanians and the Saudis and the Emirates and the Iraqis you have the Iranians and the Russians so you can see the dilemma that occurs when now all of a sudden what was a nice clean picture gets multiplied a hundred fold so therein lies the problem for decision makers but I would offer that you begin to slice the problem into definable areas and you tackle the best options you can so what are we gonna do against ISIS what are my options how do I build the better team against ISIS how do I build the better team to help build the Syrian military up how do I deal with the Iranians how do I deal with the Iraqis how do I encourage the Iraqis to be more forceful in each one of these cases you build an intelligence portfolio that provides the president the national security advisor options for dealing with these problems the great thing about the options in an area like that unlike the bin Laden raid for me where it was the military against the military target you have the advantage of having the diplomatic option so diplomacy can work economic sanctions can work the military obviously is an option law enforcement is an option so the president has to have the intelligence he has to look at all his options and then in every case he's gotta work to buy down that option so he has the best course to go forward and so I will end just with again a couple of final thoughts here as you look at intelligence and as I said what intelligence brings not only to the battlefield but I think to the policymakers is the intelligence is there to reduce the risk to reduce the risk to a manageable level so then you can apply your options against the risk that you know and sometimes the risk you don't know the intelligence is there also because it's not always just about offense and my business it's almost always about offense it is the nature of special operations to be on the offensive to go against a defended position but that's not always the case the president and the national security team also is looking for opportunities to be able to play defense against the threat that might come from overseas we have to work continuously to improve the nature of our intelligence and when you look at the director of national intelligence and director of the CIA and the other directors and leaders of the Intel community that's what they do every day because the game changes every day the enemy is a thinking enemy the enemy is a reactive enemy and every step of the way you're trying to get ahead of their reaction because every time you come up with a solution I guarantee you it won't be long before the enemy comes up with something that counters that and now you're off on another tangent in order to tackle that aspect of the intelligence so you are constantly battling this loop if you will of the enemy being able to adapt and then again as I said the whole purpose I see it from my standpoint as a military commander and I think from the standpoint of policy makers is that that intelligence helps them with the options that they've got to be able to put on the table to do what is best for the United States of America I thank you very much and Mark wherever you are would you like me to take any questions and I can't tell you who killed Kennedy I don't know that I need a few questions Mark said I can take one or two questions so yes sir Fantastic do you prefer Chancellor McRaven or Abram McRaven or both It's Bill to my friends and I'm happy to be called Bill or Chancellor my time as an admiral is behind me and I'm thrilled to be the Chancellor of the University of Texas system Okay Chancellor McRaven I have a question for you about a media report that came out four years ago regarding a Freedom of Information Act request for the Osama bin Laden death photos Right Did you yes or no did you destroy the bin Laden photos in request to a FOI request by judicial watch so they could not get them Yeah thanks we've answered that question and that's for the record already so you can go back and check the record on that thanks Yes ma'am Sasha Parsons here third year student at UT I had a question for you you spoke a lot about or we've heard a lot today about how policy makers are consumers of intelligence and you spoke in about the very strong relationships between the military and the intelligence community I was wondering if you can go a little bit deeper about what kind of training military officials get about how to be good consumers for intelligence and what kind of questions to ask so they get the information they need Yeah you know that's a great question and I will tell you we have learned so much as tragic as 9-11 was and it was incredibly tragic you know we have learned a lot I think as a nation on how to deal with pulling the interagency together how military officers can be better consumers of intelligence one of the things that really helps if you go back to the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986-87 timeframe it told the military that you really need to become joint officers so as a naval officer I was required to spend time with the army and the air force in order to be jointized and when 9-11 happened we realized in the military and the rest of the interagency did as well that if you want to learn and understand how intelligence is built how other people think about problem sets then you have to have this interagency flavor to you so what has become kind of standard at least within the military certainly within special operations is that we cross-pollinate all the time with our interagency partners so a young army captain who in years prior to 9-11 would have gone through the standard schools at Fort Wachuka or someplace else and they would learn how to do army intelligence now what they get an opportunity to do as a young captain, army captain is they will spend time at the CIA or they will spend time at the National Geospatial Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency and they get a whole different look at one how the intelligence is developed how it is produced and the questions to ask because they're around these great folks who do this for a living so by the time that captain becomes a Lieutenant Colonel and a battalion commander in a combat zone they are very well schooled and very well educated in the process and understand the questions to ask because they've been had an opportunity to live with the people that do this for a living. Thank you. Thank you. All right, one more question? Okay, seeing none, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.