 First of all, I'd like to thank the Navy War College for this event. It's kind of iconic in the U.S. military, the current strategy form. And so many of my colleagues in civilian universities kind of envy the fact that some of us are invited. So it's really an honor to be here. I'd also like to thank the head, John Maurer, of the Politics and Strategy Department, the provost, the various deans and the president for continuing to support this kind of event. I think it matters more now when we're trying to figure out whether we're exiting wars for good and making various pivots around the world. So the work you're doing, trying to get back to the basic ideas, matters a lot. So when I talked with John Maurer about my talk, I thought I'd make it very Navy relevant. I've been on the CNO's executive panel since Admiral Clark appointed me in 2004. And then I thought about it a little bit more and I thought I should stick to my knitting and be an academic, though I've been exposed to and served on a number of Navy panels. There's a way in which political science and international relations theory and political and diplomatic history speak to the dilemmas of not only Navy officers, but throughout the services. So I'd like to do that today and then I'll make it Navy relevant for real at the end. I'll begin by saying that the United States is not just pivoting toward Asia. It's pivoting away from war. And the essence of President Obama's recent speech at the National Defense University was really a pivot away from war. And what concerns me and so many others about this broader pivot is that it's being done in the absence of a grand strategic vision of the United States in the world. So the war pivot is occurring in the context of very confusing geopolitics where there's a real void, not only in Washington, but I think throughout the broader policy world. There are diverse set of reasons why this pivot is happening and the absence of a grand strategy as well. I'll review these reasons. That diagnosis will then be followed by a discussion of the policy implications and actually the direct impact of the lack of some of the big ideas that are necessary. I'll then try in the final discussion to provide some solutions. Those scholars are rarely good at fixing things. That's not what we get paid for, so we're good at problem identifiers, but I'll try to do better than that this time. And then finally, I'll say a little bit about the Navy. So the big diagnosis I'd like to begin with first is one of the main reasons I think we have a strategic void in the United States. And this reason also I think is the represents the greatest threat to American national security is that we abandoned the golden age of say roughly 1945 to around 1970. And I call this a golden period because there was a relationship between the national government and the American university that we've never recaptured. The funding from the federal government for basic science in the United States, especially in the post-Sputnik era with the National Security Education Defense Act of 1958 alongside the creation of DARPA and NASA created an ecosystem between the universities, the lead universities in the United States and the scientific side of the federal government that had never been seen before either in the U.S. or any other part of the world. As a result of that period, the American university was radically transformed. Of the top 50 institutions of higher learning in the world, in no small measure as a result of what happened during those years, probably about 35 still today are in the United States. The massive funding for unclassified basic research primarily in the hard sciences but also in the social sciences and humanities allowed American universities to grow and to develop one of the positive externalities of all of this funding is that the U.S. obtained first-rate humanities departments it had never had. And back in the middle of the 20th century and earlier, if you went to college, if you studied Latin, Greek, German, that was about it. Full modern languages departments, Slavic languages departments emerged and the U.S. just had no competitor in higher education. It owned that space and we're living in the legacy of that. Things began to happen though as a result of a number of growing kind of military industrial complex. The Beltway emerged, contracting organizations, industry became more involved and promises were made to the national government that were just too attractive to turn down in fiscally difficult environments. The capacity and ability of Beltway organizations to promise short-term deliverables and turnaround research in two or three months, often using scientists as kind of fronts for their proposals and pulling them out to when it was time to actually do the work made it difficult for universities to compete in that arena and began, among other things, to break down what had been a very important bilateral relationship. What came out of this basic science? You might say, well, I teach at a university, Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh that wouldn't exist were not for DARPA and the Defense Department. Well, before we had anything called a School of Computer Science, we had funding for this emerging discipline and help create the ARPANET, which led to the internet and many scientists and scholars who long hair and sandals who were anti-Vietnam War were actually doing some of the research for the base technology for stealth weapons and so on. But it was unclassified. Often it was without, sometimes a price tag without an end date, without a specific deliverable and then comes an industry. And I've always said the last thing you want is an academic to be really good at walking the halls of the Pentagon and finding money. We're no longer good at our research. But that's actually what's necessary now if we're going to recreate that relationship. So part of what made the United States so competitive in the Cold War was the relationship between the university and government that had a bigger impact even on society. Can you imagine Silicon Valley without the relationship that developed between the federal government and the university? And for whatever reason private philanthropy has not been able to step in and fill the void. It wasn't just the money. It was the intellectual relationships around the problems that mattered to our national government that directed the research and helped scholars think in ways they would not have otherwise. So we have now huge foundations, gates and etc. But they can't do what DARPA and others did many years ago. So I think that's part of the problem that we have a kind of strategic void now is that we are missing a critical piece of what made our nation great and what helped our military and our national government more broadly. Also during these years security studies as a discipline was created. Prior to the World War II you didn't have many security studies departments at universities. This is not primarily due to the national government but it played an important role and the military as well. But in the years starting around the 1980s there was a shrinkage and then especially after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s a shrinkage in financial support and interest at universities and studying the wars and the military, diplomatic history the issues that we talk about here at the Naval War College. Those in the civilian universities many of those programs went away and they've never come back. A few are growing strong but the faculty who direct them are aging and they're not necessarily in a professional position to replace themselves when they decide to retire and some are hanging on longer as a result. And so the whole, the set of disciplines in political science and in history that helped develop a set of ideas that around deterrence and compelence and a whole range of kind of grand strategic thinking just aren't there now. There's not a critical mass at the elite universities in the United States and it makes the politics and the strategy and politics department here all the more important since we don't have that and we don't have a clear pathway to its return. And then also something happened starting in the 1970s and 80s in terms of theoretical development and arguments and positioning and methodology in the social sciences that I think is showing up now in our strategic environment. Though if you ask me to really show the deep causality that might be a bit difficult but I think I'm on to something here. What has happened in the last couple of decades is that political science has become much more quantitative, formal theory bringing imports from economics and from mathematics and statistics. The formalization of the discipline now dominates the top political science departments, hasn't affected the history field as much but there's a related problem of diplomatic history being on the demise in many universities. But the formalization of the study of politics and strategy has made what we do as scholars less relevant and less accessible for policy people, for statesmen, for military leaders and so we get ignored. We've become a lot more irrelevant than we were in the 50s and 60s when someone like Ahans-Morgan Fowle would find his way to the State Department to comment perhaps on a draft of NSC 68 which was this important strategic vision of how the United States would compete in the Cold War. We don't have that kind of relationship now I saw that when Secretary Rumsfeld invited me in 2001 to join the Defense Policy Board, our first meetings began about 10 or 12 days after 9-11. Being one of the more junior people in the meetings wanted to kind of talk about how we might use some game theoretic ideas to model what we thought Al Qaeda might do next and the very senior people in the room, the Harold Browns of the world and the Henry Kissinger's and so forth showed almost no interest in formal theory and that was surprising to me at least in the case of Brown because he'd been president of Caltech. And it occurred to me then that what we had at that point to offer as scholars was a limited utility for the challenges the United States was facing, the leaders almost immediately. And so I think that that's been important as well. Another theoretical problem which I think is significant is that the dominant theories in our field about politics all suggest that there's no such thing as an objective national interest. Median voter theorem, retrospective economic voting, selected theory all basically state that what happens in terms of public policy and what goes on in elections is about the political survival of leaders and that leaders care more about their own survival the next election or what happens in the polls, what the median voter is thinking than anything like an objective national interest. Well when you abandon the idea that the nation can do something better than what a ruling class of leaders want then you can't really have a conversation about geopolitics or about grand strategy because those things are in the main about how do you protect and advance the national interest. So these big theories and I won't spend a lot of time going into them have had an I think an outsized effect on what goes on in Washington because when you think about the median voter theorem it's had a huge effect on how members of Congress position themselves for elections and trying to find out what the typical voter is like so they can position themselves on major issues to hold an unusual coalition together. I also think more recently behavioral economics which played a key role in helping President Obama get re-elected of which the Republican side had no idea this was actually going on. I don't know if there are even five behavioral economists who are conservative but the role that behavioral economics is now playing in addition to these theories of saying that you can the kinds of questions you ask in a survey how you call a potential voter will have an impact on whether that person goes to the polls or how they vote and so on. This notion that there's nothing objective, national, big and important anymore it's just getting elected the way that you can and doing a little good along the way but holding a coalition together that's all that matters that's what we as scholars are offering and if that's the main part of what we're offering I don't think that we can help our nation figure out where we should put our resources and other parts of the world. Another theory I'd like to mention just briefly but I think it's important is the Democratic piece, the notion that mutual democracy blocks mutual belligerency. Well in the 90s as colleagues of mine like Professor Bill Wolforth know that became religion like in political science and if you wanted to question the idea that democracies have ever fought each other. You couldn't get on a major panel in the field and if you look at most of the literature you couldn't get published. There was one important paper I did with a colleague a formal theorist actually at UCLA and it wasn't until we got to Orbis that we were able to get that paper published because there was an editor there who likes the historical arguments, the counter examples that suggested that perhaps democracies have been war like with each other. The impact of the Democratic piece a week I think theory on its own when it's translated into public policy we get something called the Bush Doctrine which is really troubling for a lot of Americans and those of us who even served in the Bush administration. This idea if you just increase the zone of Democratic states at all costs because everyone wants it you will increase the zone of peace among those states. That was very problematic and it wasn't really rooted I think in the best science. So I think in a way our disciplines have hurt our capacity to contribute to national readiness and then I think the most successful non-formal theory in political science that's dominating now is neoliberal institutionalism and it's focused on the importance of institutions, of norms, of regimes, of cooperative arrangements. That's well and good and that's a huge space of the international system and on a daily basis most states and most people are cooperating at the international level in some significant ways but it does not provide a guide for the kinds of issues that we're talking about in this forum and insofar as it does it relates back to what our keynote speaker said this morning. You look at war in a humanitarian way. Well this is a humanitarian it's a global issue as such and it leads you into this whole discussion of globalization, of global citizenry, of humanitarian interventions. Well we still have war quaw war for some of the traditional reasons and they're not all about the issues that neoliberal theorists talk about. So there's, there's, there's some many problems I think on the academic side in terms of helping us get a better understanding of what's going on in the world. That's not to say nothing good is happening. In addition to the Naval War College there's the Wargate King's College in London. There are small select programs in security studies and grand strategy at the U.S. but there's just not enough of a critical mass at least in the U.S. perhaps it's different in Europe. The two major scenarios then facing the U.S. right now, we don't have a lot of theorizing I think that will help us in those. One, that we still have great power rivalries going on and part of what we're seeing in Syria is that there's so many levels to what Syria is actually about. There's a great power contest of which Russia is not going to let go and will not be an easy ally for the West. And then we have, so we have the, some of the Cold War features have not gone away. And when you think about the Levant, it is emerging as a great power region again of contest. In part because of the energy supply so we'll have a kind of hydrocarbon diplomacy taking place. But then also we have this other scenario. And I think in addition to the great power one, this one may be the hardest one in international relations right now. It's the hardest one to theorize about. It's when one side in an adversarial dyad is politically free and open society, transparent and it's a nation state. And then the adversary is a black box and it's a transnational actor or some kind of non-state actor. That's a really hard scenario. That's not one you want to be in charge of but it's the one that we face in the global war and terror. I think in both of these big scenarios we don't have a lot to contribute as scholars and I think it's allowed then Washington to kind of run amuck. There's another factor. I think that as a result of all of this there's some factors that have big policy impact. One, we have Washington going its own way and not really testing the ideas against some background theories. And I think that that's very problematic. I think it also leads to and allows confusing historical narratives. For example, Professor Lambert gave a great talk yesterday or a day before at Annapolis about the war of 1812 and that it wasn't just a clear cut American victory and this whole American way of war, the way that we're taught, that until Vietnam, the United States won every war, it won every war decisively. It completely defeated its adversary. If that's the that narrative in and of itself is not historically correct, but it allows for this notion that we control war and it influenced I think President Obama's NDU speech that we can just declare war is over and war is over. And when we don't have good scholarship behind what the policymakers are doing or through that golden age period a way to get to them naturally and I don't think think tanks are quite the way, though I think they proliferated in fact to feel the void of what had happened in this earlier more golden period, it allows the slippery thinking that we can declare war to be over and when we exit and we bring our troops home and we leave a reserve of security forces everything will be okay. I know it's not quite that simplistic, but that's the thing that I think a stronger intellectual base. So that's one of the policy one impact on the policy side. Another one is that we've not been forced to get rigorous about what we mean by the global war on terror. In this administration starting early on in 09 President Obama's team basically scrubbed our counter-terrorism and insurgency documents with taking away the words radical Islam, Islamism, extremism. And so if we can't really talk about and define the adversary it's a little difficult to have a strong strategy to deal with the adversary. And so I saw in the president's indie youth speech him moving more he was talking about extremism and I think he may have even used the term radicalism more so than he had in any other way. And that speech did upset deeply his political base on the left. But there's a real difficult time in this administration with coming to grips with the fact that we're in a global war on terror, that the source of terror comes primarily from Islamism, Islamist and extremist and their friends. That's very different than the golden period that I talked about and soon after Churchill's iron curtain speech we came to a broad consensus in the United States that we were in a cold war. We didn't spend 10 or 15 years debating about what the challenge was. We debated about the ways to address the challenge but we accepted the fact that there was this common big important threat out there. The impact of scholarship I think on allowing the global war on terror I think is important. Also, I think what's also happened and this is not primarily or only due to academics but I think we play a role in it, that there was a better time of war in the United States where we had limited objectives and we used total means for those specific objectives. We don't fight wars that way anymore. Our wars have confusing and broad objectives that evolve and sometimes we use very limited means to do what we need to do. That scenario is not one that a predominant power in the international system can use I think and be very effective and stay credible in the long run. Thus, the pivot to Asia in the context of all of this I think makes sense because just run away from the broader Middle East. Given that you can't declare that you're in a war that every time you turn around another country has blown up and the Arab Spring has become in Syria a proxy for every major problem in the international system that not only is relevant for the eastern Mediterranean but the Gulf as well and down to North Africa and other parts it's just a very, very difficult. Pivot away from all of that because we don't have really the theoretical and strategic metrics to deal with the broader Middle East. And another impact of not having really good science and the study of history behind what Washington is doing is that we have an odd bipartisan foreign policy consensus emerging and that sounds like a counter intuitive thing to say given how bad Washington is behaving between the parties but when you strip away the rhetoric and the noise and the screaming there's actually a lot of agreement and I think it's not the earlier consensus of the Cold War when it was just a consensus about the problem not always about the means necessary to prevail in the Cold War. What we have is a consensus on a set of kind of near-term objectives and tactics. For example, very few Americans disagree with the fact or the proposal to exit Afghanistan in 2014. Part of the problem in the Romney campaign and the foreign policy side and I was a foreign policy advisor at the end of the campaign for Governor Romney is that and you saw it in the third debate which was on foreign policy and Boko Ratan is that he couldn't find a way to differentiate himself from the foreign policy side. He couldn't take him on on Libya. He couldn't take him on in Afghanistan because he agreed with getting out of there. Maybe Libya was just Benghazi too much of a hot issue to address but in terms of really coming with an alternative position on first principles around foreign and defense policy it's just absent. It's about various tactics and strategies. I think Iraq is not the success that many of us had hoped it would be. Very few people are saying Iraq has worked well. Iraq is now in Syria, Iraq has its own al-Qaeda franchise on and on. Also there's a lot of support for some more controversial issues on both sides like global zero nuclear weapons. Part of what I think happened in Chuck Hagel's Senate confirmation hearing is that he was trying to kind of relitigate Iraq and because they could see that something else was going on even in the Republican ranks and Chuck Hagel represents this. He had a Democrat and Republican former senators on either side of him when he testified and he has real credentials in a bipartisan way that they do not and so they wanted to press him on Iraq because he's saying things and taking action. This whole idea of global zero whether you like it or not and I have some real problems with it and I don't think it's quite as Reagan-esque having studied Reagan for many years as it's being presented but that's another matter but there are many Republicans who support that idea as well and that are like Chuck Hagel or like George Schultz and Henry Kissinger joining with Sam Nun and others and writing many articles about the Republican Party and the Constitutionalist and the Republican Party along with the ACLU and in fact it was Wasserman Schultz who applauded the filibuster by Rand Paul on the issue of drone warfare so in the absence I think of really good ideas we're getting a consensus and not a healthy consensus but it's not really being identified as such and also supporting many of the leading ones a decrease in defense spending and so they're joining on the more liberal side so what are some of the solutions I want to not spend too much time talking so I can take some questions what are solutions so I've identified problems which are good at scholars we're less good at fixing things but I'm going to try to suggest some ideas one I think we have to get back to the question of diversity after Vietnam I think there was a real breakdown but in terms of the kind of funding on scientific problems that matter that is where I think part of the solution to our future is and when we work with the military and we work well we help innovate military operations in a way that the military can't do it by itself we can do it not just in terms of strategic thinking but really in terms of technology and problems and in the cyber arena where warfare is heading it will be impossible for the United States to have the kind of dominance in that arena without the university the university has perforced the partner because the kind of scientific research that goes on in industry and in the belt of science it's not 6162 research at all and so we're more important now than we were probably 10 or 15 years ago because there's some kid in a lab that's doing something that's really important in the cyber arena for the US military another one I think is to begin to foster alternative hypotheses about what's possible what was interesting to me about Ronald Reagan was not all the conservatives that said about him that he set out to and ended the cold war but by the mid 1970s at the height of US Soviet detente he had developed based on a lot of work happening in the world of ideas a set of alternative hypotheses that actually guided his presidency and helped make resolving the cold war possible they were intellectual heresy at the time but they were pretty powerful because they came out of it and one that the sole source of legitimacy of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe was the Red Army pulled the Red Army out and the countries would basically go their own way that's a simplified notion of what actually happened after 89 but that's in effect what happened two that the Soviet economy was so weak at bottom he was really challenging CIA statistics that it could not survive a technology race with the United States we now know that to be the case you're strong at bottom you may disagree with that now but that it could survive deficit spending in pursuit of technological dominance of the Soviet Union and recover and finally that the American public would support massive peacetime rearmament if a leader would explain to them that rearmament was a strategy not an objective and the objective was to get to mutual cooperation which happened to be the Soviet Union quitting the fight and joining the Soviet Union and that's basically all that Reagan had to contribute to the international system to the discussion but it worked it was a powerful set of arguments that helped him get elected in 1980 and it wasn't just retrospective economic voting so I think getting back to alternative ideas that are not accepted in the mainstream that are rooted in research and also I think we have to have an honest conversation about I think we're coming to the point where we understand Russia and China these are big rivalries and there's a great game out there that hasn't gone away but we've got to be able to talk about Islamism with some degree of honesty and reality and that the real threat in Islamism is not just the tactic of terror but the attempt to implement Sharia law and to return to a kind of theocracy that we fought a revolution not to have a place but that's so politically incorrect and unpopular that we don't talk about it very much but I think it's at the heart of what we're facing in the world and it's not going away even though we may decide to use rhetoric against it so finally the Navy what does all this mean for the Navy? The Navy is ground zero for the wars that we're fighting the challenges that we're facing and it is also the intellectual innovator at this time not to say that the other services are not but the Navy has I think because of its position in the US military and its long history it has a way forward that I think is instructive for the other services if it's allowed to move forward think of the ways in which the Navy's been innovating concepts in the last couple of years the information dominance core and standing up in two six was a brilliant move because it said let's put the oceanographers let's put the intel guys let's put all of these people who think in a broad area that really touch on each other together to find a way to make the United States the dominant force in the information arena not only to be ahead of the rest of the world on information but be able to know what to do with that information and get ahead of that of the series in it and I think and then related standing up the 10th fleet cyber command in the cyber arena the Navy is the leader I think for the US government because of the very work that it does. Third I want to mention Air Sea battle doctrine or not doctrine concept I get corrected on that Air Sea battle shouldn't even really be discussed it shouldn't be a point of confusion it should not be upsetting the Chinese reason that I think it's taken on this big importance is that we don't really have a grand strategy in the United States so what is an operational concept to help the Air Force and the Navy perform better together in the way that the Air Force and Army did in the Air Land Battle days of the of the Cold War has become a spooky concept for people it's an attempt to make us work better together across the other services in an A to A D environment which we know exist not just in the Pacific region but possibly and perhaps more importantly in the near term future with Iran all of these concepts single naval battle Air Sea battle information dominance the work that the Navy is doing in the cyber arena it's new emphasis on trying to educate a cyber work force as well all of that's well and good but ought to be so under the radar but it's elevated because of the absence of larger strategic ideas but I still think that they matter I'm going to stop now and take some questions and will do my best to answer them thank you so much Commander Alexander Ma'am you talked about Islam or the discussion of Islam being kind of the white elephant in the room where we don't talk about it in political circles but I think that in the social circles in the demographics in America we talk about it and I think it's seen can you speak to maybe the rise of our own Christian theocracy the rise of it in America as a response to what we're seeing coming from the Islam arena overseas so that's actually a good question there's no the fundamentalism of the United States is not a response to fundamentalism in the Islamic world and fundamentalism Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. is as early as the United States and even before the creation of what we now call the United States I think it's an interesting question why sometime by the 1970s we get the religious right emerging I think it was called the moral majority and then it became the religious right it's an interesting question why there's just a spread of fundamental fundamentalist in the faith world around the world you have all kinds of fundamentalist emerging and in the American case I think it's part of the American narrative it is interesting to me that probably only three sets of people can fill the Georgia Dome within minutes President Obama because of his popularity I don't think George Bush could have done it at the height of his presidency someone like Madonna I guess it's Lady Gaga I'm a little older now than my students so I don't know who the people are so a rock star type person and then a fundamentalist preacher that's about it for the United States and so I think it is an interesting issue that we do have fundamentalism on our side as well but it's not equivalent I don't think there's a equivalence in terms of the strategies and tactics and objectives to the most radical wing of Islam so and on your point about in the social realm what I'm saying is not to offend any of my colleagues who are of Islamic faith and background I'm really talking about Islamism which is different than being a Muslim and what that means in the geopolitical context Barney Ruble from the War College when you talk about the relationship between the universities and the government and re-establishing it can is there any possibility for the Navy acting on its own behalf to work towards this so does this have to be DOD wide or does it have to be broader in the government well actually the services are doing they're going in various directions on this point and to this end a couple of years ago Admiral Gary Ruffhead and I helped stand up a new masters program out of N26 in the cyber information dominance arena at Carnegie Mellon and they're actually the second cohort is there now and I think it'll continue on with the RPI so I took that as a sign that the services are beginning to try to figure out this on their own in terms of like an all hands approach across the services I don't think that that has happened yet but that just that education part is helping them reassess the research component the military is so locked down I think by contractors and those relationships that it will be easy to undo it or whoever figures that out really wins a prize that's just it's so deep and so many decades long and universities are so bad at it and but we want them to be bad at it so they're losing and it's going to be I think very important for the military side to figure out a graceful exit from some of those longstanding relationships contracts FFRDC relationships that maybe have grown you know grown too big without giving much in return but that conversation is happening in all the services First of all thank you for briefly flogging democratic peace theory but my interest is in having spent some time using and developing formal models they bring a lot of rigor to our analysis don't we as international relations scholars need to do a better job communicating the results of the analysis to policy makers I mean isn't that the way forward rather than potentially abandoning modeling so I didn't say abandoning modeling so I agree I think it's a good question so there's no opposition to modeling but I think the esoteric nature of where some of that is going on smaller and smaller problems that are unlikely to ever happen in the real world will close down the relevant policy makers especially at a very high level when they're busy they don't have time and so modeling is most effective I think or formal theory when we draw insights from it to problems and apply models to those problems but that's not finding finding people who on the formal side who can do that it's quite small and it's a non-trivial issue in the way we're training people for those issues and for that kind of work and so in so far as we can do that and it's not happening in policy schools it really will happen in more traditional departments but when there's no connection to the government in academia it makes it harder to work on problems that actually matter so you conjure up things and you conjure up things sometimes that really just aren't likely to ever be a scenario of importance Good afternoon ma'am Chris Smith Australia you spoke about the importance of high education in US power and I'm going to look at it from the other side looking at Afghanistan, the extraordinarily high levels of literacy rates the lack of institutions do you think that we're being overly optimistic about what's going to happen in the future of Afghanistan once the Allied Forces move out in 2014 because clearly the basics are just not there So if I can answer that from a vantage point that where I think I can add some value kind of elite US universities are going global and so they're setting campuses the big Middle East kind of beachhead now is Qatar with Education City and CMU is there and Georgetown is there and Cornell has a medical school there and Northwestern has some programs there I think journalism and others and I was really skeptical more than a decade ago when this thing was stood up and I thought first of all we shouldn't be there and it was going to be dangerous and risky and our faculty would get killed and so on and then we began the things happened and this is really where we're replicating our home campus abroad and that often you're just taking programs but it's a full curriculum undergraduate then I did a tour in January 07 for Admiral Mullen when he was CNO of the Gulf with Dove Zakheim we co-chaired a study on the Middle East every country we went to someone had a child cousin relative who was at Carnegie Mellon studying computer science and they were primarily female and I began to see that trying to educate people take education to them which is a really new model for the U.S. I still like the older model of we do it here in this country we work closely with our government it was a formula that worked it was this innovation ecosystem I still think that that's important but I am beginning to see maybe it's somewhat anecdotal where our methods and values around learning and the kind of free ideas associated with that can have an impact you're talking about just the very difficult case of Afghanistan and educating children and women and the status of women and girls I think the anchoring of some of our institutions of higher learning like NYU and Abu Dhabi I know the president of NYU was recently censored for how he's doing all of these things by the faculty but in the long run I think if these campuses work they have an impact if for no other reason they're an aspiration for people in the region so I hope that gets a little bit to your question Lawrence Madison at Naval War College last couple of days we've of course been talking about American grand strategy and we've heard a lot about the absence of one some of us this morning heard an excellent lecture by one of our professors on Chinese maritime strategy but my question is do you feel that other nations I guess I would confine the question to the BRICNations, Brazil, Russia India, China, South Africa do you feel that any or some or all of those nations are doing a better job than we at this point in developing grand strategies to develop these policies some of those countries I haven't thought about at all in terms of that question and so I can't answer that but I do think that China is developing a much broader strategic vision of what it's doing than the United States some of what we're doing has an ad hoc feel to it and I don't see that as much with the Chinese their presence on the African continent if you just happen to be in a country where they're there and you know they're doing these kind of sometimes low level commercial projects but it's having an impact on hearts and minds and I think it can pay dividends in the future even if they're making an investment where they can't see what the future looks like in terms of the United States I would say that we're not as cohesive as we have been but I would look at the Chinese in a stronger shape than we might have expected but in terms of Russia I just think it's never really exited the cold war in the way that we thought it had I mean it shed some power and it did it voluntarily it gave up its red army and abandoned the class struggle but I don't think it abandoned some of the kind of authoritarian practices that it now has it's not so much of a surprise Thank you for your presentation and I totally agree with you that there's much need for scholarship in the development of grand strategy and as an outsider I can say that grand strategy also speaks to your friends and allies because that's your USP that's what tells you what the country is going to do I want to at this point of time mention an article I read by Patrick O'Rourke in the World Affairs Journal and it says that in the 60s and the 70s the US had the tallest building and the fastest train and the fastest aircraft and today the fastest train runs in China the tallest building is in Dubai and the fastest car runs in France and just as scholarship is needed to progress grand strategy do you think there has to be a domestic will to create symbols of national power or symbols that US is a superpower so that people believe in your grand strategy That's a really interesting point to view I think the symbols are different now so I don't think you're right the tallest building or the fastest train or those things necessarily mean that you're a great power though it means something about your national capacity I don't get the sense that in my study of American political culture that that is what is driving young people in the innovation economy that they see those things they see things in actually smaller realms that have a big impact their capacity to use a small cell phone and do a lot of work and that they've contributed to the development of that technology which is far more powerful than maybe the software in that very fast train and so I think that younger people see bigness in a different way and it's not the physical bigness that once represented you know kind of a dominant force in the international system Ian Clark Marine Corps every day we hear criticisms of the U.S. education system that we under emphasize STEM as a area that we need to build up our capacity in this country you're suggesting in some respects that we under utilize the liberal arts or community I'm glad my Indian colleague came up and asked a question because India if we understand correctly is producing more engineers every day in the United States is in a year is government the only solution to increase that capacity or do we see other means within our society to increase that academic field so actually the Navy is doing a lot on STEM in O and R it actually is funding STEM initiatives at the K through 12 level and I don't know that it's always done that recognizing that its own workforce needs demand that it be more active at earlier levels or lower levels on the education chain so I do think the absence of a strong kind of STEM presence in the U.S. in K through 12 is part of the national challenge that we face and it does show up in universities most of what we do in terms of engineering and computer science at top universities could not be done without non-Americans this is a part of the big problem too for the U.S. in terms of recreating the golden age because so much now of the research that maybe was on the unclass side is now classified and once you move into that realm and you still want to do 6162 research you can't have foreigners in the lab and that's the real problem for scientists at U.S. universities and that may be in part fueling this going global in the U.S. university happening which I think is problematic so the ability if you just dump a couple hundred million dollars at any U.S. university say in engineering and say do this for the Navy but it has to be with only Americans and a lot of what say 75% of it's got to be done in a classified environment first of all you can't do classified in universities but you can do certain things off campus or through a U.R.C. or FFRDC to do that initiative with American graduate students and faculty and so I think that that's also a part of this larger story I'm talking about of our national challenge internally and how we fix that I think what the Navy is doing through O&R is quite heroic at the K-12 level I think we're we're finishing six minutes early which is thank you so much