 So let's go ahead and get started. I know several of you have a policy exam later today. I appreciate everybody coming down in support. And I appreciate that you're taking an hour and a half of time that you otherwise would have to finish your policy exam in order to be here. So thanks for everybody to come. And if everybody's OK, just find a seat. We'll go ahead and get started. My objectives here today are two-fold, really. One is to talk about this concept that I had the honor and privilege of being a part of about 10 years ago and the strategic framework that we came up with as an alternative strategy to what the United States currently practices. And at the same time, I'd like to talk a little bit about my experience, my group's experience, and really entering the national debate and talking about a proposed alternative strategy. So there were some lessons learned that came out of that, both good and bad. But what nobody in our profession ever wants to be called is a hypocrite. And in my classes, both core curriculum and in my electives, I usually beat the drum on how important it is for you as military officers to enter this debate on ideas at the national level, at the policy level, at the strategy level. And there's a right way to do it, but you're going to find some things when you do that. So after banging the drum for weeks and weeks and months at a time, my students finally came back to me and said, okay, pal, let me hear you do it. So I agreed that I would present the sovereignty solution in open form. So I'll try to do those two things today. This project for us started in 2006. And I was attending the Naval Postgraduate School, working with one of the professors there, Dr. Anna Simons, and working with several other special operations officers really from across the joint spectrum. And at that time, Andrew Marshall was still the director of the Office of Net Assessment. For those of you that know Andrew Marshall or know of Andrew Marshall, he's the Yoda of Pentagon strategy. And if the Americas ever had a true deep strategic thinker, it was Andrew Marshall. Now, one of the things that Mr. Marshall did is he'd use seed money and go out and build strategic thinking groups. And part of that was creating the Newport Summer Study Program right here. So over the summer, they'd collect 10, 15, 20 folks from across the military services, government services, academia, and bring people together and talk about deep strategic types of problems. In 2006, he offered Dr. Simons the ability to do that at the Naval Postgraduate School. So we moved the Summer Study Program to the West Coast and did it out in Monterey. And that's how this whole project got started. Once we finished with the Summer Study Program, we were invited back east to brief several folks, some senior level leaders in OSD along with some folks at the State Department, USAID and at the Office of the Vice President. And I'll talk about some of the things that we learned as we went through that process. And following those briefs, we were encouraged and we felt necessary that we go ahead and publish some of the findings that we came up with and this framework of a strategy that we proposed. We did that in a journal article in 2007 in the American Interest. And eventually over the years, that would turn into a book that we published in 2011. My co-authors on that were Dr. Simons and another Special Forces officer, retired Lieutenant Colonel Dwayne Lechenko. Now the question that Andrew Marshall proposed to us in that summer of 2006 was how do we hedge against future shocks to the United States? Not how do we prepare to prevent future shocks, but how do we prepare the country for the eventuality of a future shock? So fast train on the East Coast derails and 200 Americans are dead, what do we do? Simultaneous attacks happen in San Francisco, something on the order of the Mumbai attacks or perhaps the Paris attacks, but instead of 300 or 500 dead, it's 3,000 dead or 5,000 dead. Or worst case scenario, a weapon of mass destruction goes off in the city of Chicago and there are 50,000 Americans dead. There's 100,000 Americans dead, several 100,000 Americans wounded. Chicago's burning, now what do we do? That was the question proposed to us. How do we hedge against these future shocks? So as I talk about this strategy, as I kind of describe what we came up with and how we came up with it, keep in mind the strategy that we propose is projective. We're looking forward. Now we did our homework and we went back and we read the history and we read of other strategies. We read on grand strategy, both theory and practitioners. We took a look at all of those elements that seemed to be necessary and then took a look at what we seem to be doing today in terms of strategy and then move forward and said, here's something for the future. So we project, we don't reflect. The options as I describe them, the strategies it comes together is not meant as a buffet and some strategists write in this fashion and that's fine. And we'll say, look, here's a series of things we could do. Here's a bunch of ideas that we think might work. Go ahead and pick and choose what you want. This isn't that. This is a series of ideas that come together to form a complete or to form a whole. So keep that in mind as well too. This isn't an adjustment and it's not a tweak of current strategy and that's important to remember. If you try to sit there and go, how would we take these ideas and kind of nudge what we currently do into what these guys are proposing? It doesn't work and you'll see why as I roll through some of the fundamental pieces and parts of the sovereignty solution. And this has nothing to do with good governance. When we were briefing in 2006 after the summer study program, we were briefing in OSD, a couple of assistant secretaries of defense. We're taking our information, we're taking our proposals. And I was stopped 30 seconds into the presentation and said, or the ASD told me, I think what you mean is good governance. Now, as you see as I unfold this thing, this has absolutely nothing to do with good governance or the US projecting its version of good governance on others. It's quite the opposite. If I knew then what I know now, I would have just stopped what I was doing, shut down the brief, invited the man to coffee and talked about Washington Redskins' projections for that season. Nothing else I said was going to be heard. And that was one of the things that we came away with. And remember, that's 2006, counterinsurgency, good governance. That was kind of the coin of the realm at the time. Didn't quite understand that dynamic as we walked into it. And if you start to get lost at any point in time or if you start to feel uneasy about what it is we're proposing, if you start to squirm in your seats, keep in mind, remember, the background for this concept is, Chicago is still burning. There are tens of thousands, 100,000 Americans dead and we need to be able to do something. Let me set some ground rules before I get into the meat of the brief. For those of you and there are several of you that have sat through my classes before, either the core curriculum or my electives. You know, the one thing I'm always looking for, the best time of class is when we get a good, hearty debate going right in the middle of class. That always makes the most interest, always the better thinking happens when we get that kind of dynamic going. In order for me to get through this material today, what I would ask is think of good questions, hold them until the end and then ask me really tough questions. The second part is you, most of you know, I despise slides, I can't stand slides, I don't like to make slides. But to get this material out and to get it out in a cogent form, because quite frankly, I haven't briefed this much really in the last five years due to operational assignments and then getting on the ground here at the War College. If I don't have the slides today, I'll forget some of the important pieces of information. If you enjoy the current strategy of today, if you enjoy what we call, what we term strategic ambiguity, which is really the strategy as practice for about the past 25 years, you're gonna hate this. This is not going to be your cup of tea. So at least you can use your own arguments and your own thinking and bounce it off of this and see how you might refine your own argument. So too, if you're in favor of what we call strategy by conop, where at the bottom level, we develop tactical options for strategic leaders then execute or not based on their decisions, what we think are tactical imperatives at the time and that somehow over time, these things connect into a cogent strategy. If you enjoy that, if you think that's the way to go, again, you're going to hate this. What I'd ask is sit back, take it in, try to connect the logic and then see how your own logic holds up against it. This was constructed in 2007, right? After that Newport Summer Study in 2006, we published the articles in 2007. The book was published in 2011 after a long learning process of how the publishing world works. My point being, it wasn't published this weekend and it wasn't written this weekend. So any echoes that you might think you have heard from the rather bizarre election cycle that we just had or anything that you might have heard from current Senate testimonial going on is purely coincidence. We wrote this 10 years ago, we published it five, six years ago. And keep in mind also, when the Bush administration came in in 2000, they were saying a lot of the same things that you hear today as the new administration takes root, which is no more nation building, American first type of principles. They weren't ready for the shock that would come on 9-11 and that strategy or at least that thinking fell away after that. And remember, if you get lost in what we're talking about or how we could possibly be suggesting what it is we're going to suggest, remember Chicago's burning. All right, we all remember 9-11. The shock that the country felt. The shock that that attack represented. And the one thing that all Grant's strategists agree on is there will be future shocks and we won't see them coming. So the question proposed to us again, if you remember from the office and assessment was how do we prepare the country for those future shocks? Not how do we anticipate what the shocks are going to be, but how do we prepare the country? How do we have a strategy ready to roll in the eventuality that we have another shock? If Chicago is burning, what should Americans expect? Now we all know first responders are gonna respond immediately, heroically. The country will gather together in small communities around Chicago to provide blood, to gather food, to get clothing, all those first responder types of activities, we know that will happen. That's part of being in America. That's part of what makes us Americans. But beyond that, what happens? What should the rest of the world expect the next time the United States takes a shock? What should they anticipate that we might do? Do we want them to anticipate what we might do? Those are the questions that we started with. And while we all remember there was a sense of American unity following 9-11, if we think back recent time to what the political atmosphere is in this country right now, how long would it take before fingers started to point? Before political activists started to use what had just happened to their political favor. I would suggest it wouldn't be very long. Instead of one to two years, it may now be one to two days. It may be one to two hours before we first start to see the blame game going on. And that's a problem. That is a threat. That is a danger to us. So we began by looking at what are the elements of grand strategy? And this is the look back into the theory of grand strategy and what does it require? What does it suggest we should do? Well, first off, you better define your ends. You better know where it is that you're trying to go and that just stands to reason. We need some clearly defined ends if we're going to design a strategic construct to get there. You have to know yourself and you have to know others, especially others that might be threats or future adversaries. How well do we know ourselves? How well do we use the strengths and the vulnerabilities that we come with? How well do we identify the strengths and the vulnerabilities of others? And do we incorporate that into strategy? We thought of those things. You have to be prepared to seize opportunity from the jaws of catastrophe. Now this was mentioned previously by Rahm Emanuel early in the Obama administration. He took a little bit of grief for it, but in grand strategic thinking, this is exactly the point. To anticipate catastrophe and to seize the opportunity for the nation towards strategy when catastrophe happens and not be left flat-footed or wounded. We'll talk about, we have to start with ends and we'll talk where we came up with what we thought our national ends are, what they should be for this strategy given another shock. Don't be confused and don't confuse national ends with national interests. Oftentimes in strategy, oftentimes in strategic thinking, we conflate the two terms. Ends are where we're going. That's the objective, that's the priority. Interests usually take on the terms in the sense of economic objectives and the problem with winding national interests up into national ends is economic objectives usually almost always place Americans against Americans. We're picking winners and losers when we do that. So we stayed focused and decided to stay focused on national ends and push aside anything that might be labeled national interests. It often confuses strategy if you're to do that. Grand strategy is the calculated relationship of means to large ends. It's determining where it is you wanna go and what you have to get there and how you're going to align those elements of strategy. That's John Lewis Gattis. I think if you boil all grand strategic thinking down, he nails it. That's the essence of what it is we're trying to do. So strategic ends, what's the objective? As in all JMO classes, we start with this question. When you start to design strategy, we think this is the place you start as well too. And you can see it's not a very extensive list. That's what we think it is. That's where we think we're going. The continued American prosperity defined by these three elements. And this holds up pretty well across American history. This is Eisenhower in 1950. This is what he suggested national ends for the United States are. But that also matches up with the historians and the political leaders of the 19th century, the 18th century, all the way back to the founders. This is it. This is the essence of where it is we're trying to go. So we stayed focused on these three things. Individual freedom of choice, democratic procedures of government, private enterprise for the economy. That's it, no national interest. So once we decided where it is we were trying to go, we started to try to determine those things that make us us. So what are our strengths? What are our vulnerabilities? We started with vulnerabilities. And the first one is one that we often talk about a lot. We're an open society. We are an open book. It is very easy to determine what it is that Americans are, how we work, how we function, what our standard operating procedures are. That's good, that's what makes us us, but it also leads to vulnerabilities as well. Because we are such an open society, because we do so much self advertising and self promotion, which are not bad things, they just are things that we need to recognize about ourselves. Others know us a lot better than we know them. Between Hollywood, between the internet, our open media, our natural tendency as individuals to self promote and self advertise when we come into contact with foreign peoples, they know us, we don't spend a lot of time worrying about thinking about what it is that makes others others. So that's just something going forward and it's probably a vulnerability. Because we're such an open society, we also have soft targets everywhere. And this has been bandied about ever since 9-11 and probably before. And we can't defend everywhere. To defend everywhere would require a police state or martial law. It would defeat that which it is that we're trying to, or I'm sorry, it would destroy that which it is that we're trying to defend. And that goes against the point. But because we are riddled with soft targets, that itself is a vulnerability as well too. But perhaps, and what we felt was our largest vulnerability are these social divides that exist within the United States. We're gonna talk to some extent about these social divides as we understood them. But I think we all recognize that they're there. And unlike other societies across the world that break down into sectarian divides, tribe, clan, family, bloodline, our divides have always been something else, something different. They've been racial, ethnic, elements of who gets to choose what. But recently those divides have started to take place along ideological lines. How we execute foreign policy? How should we execute foreign policy? What does our foreign policy mean to us? And if that can be divisive, if that can be used against us to pulse apart, that in and of itself is a vulnerability. And then we went ahead and looked at our strengths. We often forget and tend to not play up to its full potential, the strengths of the United States. We are still by far the most powerful country on the face of the earth. We are the most powerful country in the existence and the history of the earth. We should probably make good of that, make some hay out of that. While there are near peer competitors that are maybe closing the gap in some domains, we still absolutely dominate in space, on the seas, under the seas. We have an enormous nuclear capability and we have a fantastic and phenomenal ground component as well too. We are a very strong country militarily. And so too we're a strong country in the other elements of national power. Take for instance the dollar. The dollar is still the currency that carries the weight of the world. Other currencies talk value their strength against the dollar. English is still the language used in diplomacy, in commerce, in trade, in travel, air communications, sea communications. English rules the world. If you know English, you can speak in terms of government anywhere that you stand. That too is a strength. And then our abundance of natural resources which continues to be an enormous strength, an enormous all sorts of strategic potential for the United States. We need to probably determine what those strengths are and then design a strategy that plays to our strengths. So what about the threats? Through other areas of American history, we've always been able to identify our one priority competitor, our one priority threat. And that has helped us align strategic ends to ways and means because we can prioritize and it's easy. What about our threats today? Who's the priority? For every one of you that says China, there'll be another that says no, no, it's Russia. And then maybe somebody else that says no, no the real threat here is North Korea or perhaps Iran or perhaps ISIS or Al Qaeda, 2.0, 3.0, whatever they've metastasized into next. Or maybe you say no, no, it's none of those. It's the domestic threats. It's the lone wolves that are out there that threaten our society and threaten to blow up those social divides you talked about, but what we can decide upon is that there is no clear priority. And to reiterate from the last slide, we also know that they know us a lot better than we know them. That's important and it's important to keep in mind. So too that we are riddled with soft targets that any threat, any potential adversary can study how to hurt us because they know us and because we are wide open. Another important point to remember when we talk about threats is that globalization now makes it much easier, infinitely easier to destroy than to control populations. Through the speed of travel, through the miniaturization of weaponry, through the ease of travel, porous borders, much easier to destroy than it is to actually control population. And when we talk about penetration of information, that too plays into this element. We probably need to consider that when we design strategies. If there is no clear priority on the threat then, how do we prioritize limited resources? How do we do strategic alignment? How do we put ways and means towards ends if we can't figure it out what that threat is? These are the things that we thought about. Next we looked at, hey, what are we doing now? What's the current state of strategic affairs and how do we go ahead and conduct strategy? What is it that we would try to move from and move to given another shock? And what we called this current strategy, this compilation of strategic-like thought over the last 25 years or so, is strategic ambiguity or the art of the clever. Interesting in the employment of strategic ambiguity, the whole idea is adversaries can't guess as to what we might do, can't guess as to what our response might be. Unfortunately when you do that, nobody else can either, whether it's allies or domestic population. But let's talk about what these elements are in this execution of the art of the clever. What it requires is global, multiplayer, multi-dimensional chess. And the way you play global, multiplayer, multi-dimensional chess is that you study trends and then you anticipate second order, third order, fourth order effects based on those trends and not only your moves, but the moves that all the other players make. And a very clever thinker, a very clever strategic thinker believes that if you study well enough those trends and you anticipate all those second, third, and fourth order effects, then you can be one step ahead of everybody else. And to do that we employ clever ways. So again, think in terms of strategic language, ends to ways to means. You gotta use clever ways to reach strategic ambiguity or strategic ends. And the clever ways that we've used in the past are through proxies or through international organizations or through a combinations of carrots and sticks where we invite ourselves into other societies and say, well, we need you to nudge a little left or we need you to nudge a little right. But we can provide this economic aid or we can provide this advisory assistance but we really need you to take a look at some of your social domestic programs before we go ahead and do that. It's using clever ways, tricky ways in order to kind of manipulate other societies to do what it is we want them to do. That is part of the art of the clever. And that's really what we've been employing. The other thing we do is we try to match threat strengths and this is another ways, another part of the clever ways. And matching threat strengths means, look, if we're under attack or we're under threat from insurgent groups or non-state actors or proxies of states and the way they organize is they network themselves into these small cells. They have flat communications. They have distributed command and control. Well, we need to fight those networks with our own networks and we need to fight those proxies with our own proxies. We'll match their strength with strength that we can cook up. That's part of it as well. And then this whole concept, this whole question of, hey, are we interested in liberal democracy or are we interested in illiberal stability around the world? In the art of the clever, it just kind of depends because it matters on what we think those second, third, and fourth order effects are gonna be. So the way we might treat and deal and do diplomacy with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia is different than how we would do with Iran and Venezuela. The question of, do we want unstable democracy or we want stable head of state government it really all depends on what it is we think those second, third, and fourth order effects are going to be. So that is part of the clever. Now the problem with clever, as we saw it, is we probably didn't take into account what makes Americans Americans. This whole question, this whole concept of what makes XX, this is kind of the fundamental question of all of anthropology, right? What makes a society behave the way that society is? How does a society define itself? What makes an Algerian an Algerian? What makes a Canadian a Canadian? What makes an American an American? What is it that makes us awesome that we respect about ourselves and that we like to see in ourselves and we probably look for in others? And we said it's this, directness, transparency, matching words with deeds, dependability, follow through, that's what makes Americans Americans. And the problem with clever is it's none of those. It doesn't take any of those as strengths. The art of the clever requires something else. It requires that we get into societies and play their game, and it leaves everyone guessing. Strategic ambiguity was designed and came about by saying, hey, we don't want adversaries to be able to anticipate what it is that we're going to do. And the problem, as I said before is, neither can anybody else, not our adversaries, not our allies, and not our domestic population. Remember, the art of the clever requires heavy reliance on trend analysis and guessing where those trend lines are going to go. And the problem with trends are those unknown unknowns that Secretary Rumsfeld made as famous. And the way this works, and the one thing that all strategists agree upon, is that there are going to be things that happen out there that we can't anticipate, and the only thing we know for sure is they're going to happen, and we are going to be left stunned. Trends can't account for the unknown unknowns. I'll give you one example, and we use this one in the book as well, too. We can all remember when the HIV epidemic broke out in the 1980s in the United States and kind of the impact that that had here. But what many don't know about, and what many haven't read too much about or understand, is what that did to the continent of Africa. Now the trend lines for Africa at the time in the 80s reflected and expected this population explosion, and then that would have all sorts of second, third, and fourth order effects, some good, some bad. But our strategy going forward was dependent on what those second, third, and fourth order effects would be. None of that trend analysis took into account a viral strain, an epidemic that resulted in the death of middle-aged, working-aged men and women in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s. Epidemics don't work that way, HIV did. And what that left was the old and the young. So orphans raised orphans. And orphans raising orphans and not having enough food because there's nobody to grow it and there's nobody to harvest it and there's nobody to store it. And all the adults that you would use to trade it and are now gone, orphans raising orphans would lead to children being incorporated into our militia groups. We didn't expect that, we didn't see that coming. And that is a problem with trend analysis. We can't ever account for the unknown unknowns. And that's not to say that we don't do trend analysis. We do, you have to. All good strategies incorporated into it, but you can't believe that your trend analysis is going to lead you exactly where it is that you think you're going to go. And if that is not true, then all those second, third, and fourth order effects that come out of trend analysis are squishy as well. That was our point. And that's one of the problems we saw with kind of the art of the clever. And unfortunately, as Martin Van Kreveld said in 2004, up here describing the Israeli experience in their counterterrorism efforts, we have been at war continuously for the last 15 years. We have spent an enormous amount of blood and treasure and we have little to show for it. And that is a sensitive subject here. That is a sensitive subject with this audience. We have been the practitioners of our foreign policy, our entire adult lives. And this hurts because we have all lost friends and colleagues and people that we've known in this effort and we've spent trillions of dollars towards it. There's little, little to show for it. So if the analysis of our own self-analysis of how our strategy has worked for us looks like this, looks like what Van Kreveld suggested for the Israelis in 2004, then we have a problem. Clever strategy does, however, provide at least one thing. Clever strategy makes us prime to be split apart by our differences, by these social divides that we talked about. One thing is very clear. Americans can be divided over our execution and employment of foreign policy. I don't think anybody can reasonably question that fact today. And foreign policy is the one place, it's the best place. It's the most efficient place for adversaries to touch us if in fact they want to exploit the vulnerability of social divides that exist in the United States today. That's what makes it so dangerous. It isn't just the social divides themselves, it's that our aspects of foreign policy are easily manipulated by threats and adversaries out there and can divide us along these lines. We know what these lines are. I mean, we've seen it play out over this last year. We're divided between left and right. We're divided between red and blue. We're divided by red media and blue media. We're divided by the spread, the explosion of social media and the echo chambers that it allows and provides for that didn't really even exist. It's certainly not to the extent they do today when we wrote this in 2006. So the problem has grown exponentially worse even since we conceived this and decided that this was America's largest vulnerability. What we thought at the time, and what we still believe today is, as bad as horrific as destroying Chicago would be to the American psyche, to the American people, the destruction of one major American city does not destroy the United States. The destruction of five American cities probably doesn't destroy the United States. The citizenry of the country tearing themselves apart over social divides following the destruction of one of our cities might very well destroy the United States. We collapse under our own weight. So when we designed the sovereignty solution, we designed it in a way that would play to our strength. So go ahead, fasten your seat belts now because this is where it gets interesting and this is where you may begin to squirm a little bit in your seats. Remember as we go through this, the backdrop is Chicago is still burning and tens of thousand Americans are dead. Rather than the art of the clever, what we did was flip it. A strategy of ambiguity, interestingly enough, goes hand in hand with operational clarity. So we're not gonna tell you what it is we're gonna do. We're not even gonna tell you where it is we're trying to go, but we are gonna tell you no boots on the ground. Or we are going to tell you, here's our operational red lines. Or we are going to tell you we'll have advisors, but they're not combat troops. Or we are going to tell you we may use drones and we may use small teams, special forces teams on the ground calling for fire, but we're not gonna employ conventional forces. So strategic ambiguity goes with operational clarity and again, we flipped it. We want strategic clarity. We know where our national ends are, we're going to tell ourselves and we're going to tell everyone else. Continued American prosperity along those three lines. But we're gonna keep operational ambiguity. How we go about doing that, you'll know when it's happening to you and not before. We have an entire enormous inventory of national power, both military and non. And we'll use that as we see fit to meet our national ends. No more chess, no more proxies. No more anticipating second and third and fourth order effects by ourselves and by everybody else. We're going to rely back on those things that we said makes Americans Americans. We're going to fall back on American strengths, consistency, dependency, follow through, matching words with deeds. Anybody know what the, well first let me go back, second bullet there. We're often asked for a bumper sticker, an elevator speech of what this strategy is. And we don't have a bumper sticker, but if we did, we would say, hey let's take the two quintessential American phrases, Americanisms and put them together. To each his own, you be you will be us and marry that up with don't tread on me. Don't even think about doing something to us and putting those two concepts together. That would be our bumper sticker and I'll talk extensively about how those two things fit together and how we kind of operationalize them for a grand strategy. And lastly, like we don't have a bumper sticker, we don't have a spokesman either. Anybody know who said this quote here on the bottom? Anybody? Nobody? This is John Wayne in the shoots. And I like this quote because I think better than any other quote I've seen, it gets at the essence of this, what makes an American an American? I won't be wronged, I won't be harmed, I won't be laid a hand upon. I don't do these things to other people and I expect the same from them. To each his own, don't tread on me. Now the art of the clever or strategic ambiguity plays out something like this. We're gonna root out insurgent leaders from foreign populations that we don't fully understand and we're gonna restrict the ways and means that we use to root them out so that we can maintain our standing on an international and moral high ground. That's how this plays out. And it's really hard for us. And the reason it's really hard for us is because it requires all of these things. It requires language fluency. It requires anthropological eyes. It requires understanding culture and the nuance is a culture. It requires patience, lots of patience and a heavy investment in blood and treasure over a long period of time. And we're not good at any of this. Every trimester through joint military operations, we talk about counterinsurgency, we talk about a regular warfare and you guys as students tell me, we're not good at any of this. Why build a strategy around it? Strategic ambiguity requires us to be phenomenal at these things. We're not. We are, however, good at this. We can level Kandahar in 15 minutes. We are really good at that. We have the power, we have the might. We like, intrinsically, we like overwhelming use of force. But you're not allowed to say that. In fact, you're not even allowed to think that. Once we started thinking in this direction, it was interesting what else we started to think about. Other questions that you're really not supposed to ask. But let's start with kind of the building blocks of what the strategy uses. We took a look at states and then we'll talk a little bit about state sovereignty. But first with states, perhaps the demise of states has been greatly exaggerated over the last 30 or 40 years. With the growth of international government organizations, super state concepts, it's been long prophesized that Westphalia is in its long, steady decline. Well, maybe not so much. Given recent political activity from Brexit to troubles within the EU, perhaps the NATO alliance starting to twist and turn into something else, perhaps states aren't quite dead yet. And if you think about it, there's a reason why states aren't quite dead yet and seem to have more of a capability to stand that we might give them credit for. Take, for instance, Somalia. Somalia hasn't been a functioning state in my lifetime. Yet if we look at the Ram McNally Atlas today, it's still gonna have that black line around the area and space where Somalia used to exist. Still says Somalia there. And other states need it to still say Somalia there. Even though there are other groups and other regions of the country which operate phenomenally more like states than Somalia or Somalia's central government, we still consider it Somalia. The body of nations still consider it Somalia and states need it to exist because it hardens their own lines on their own maps for their own borders. Something else about states. This concept of universal values, universal law, universal rights, they only exist in the West. Problem with universal values is that they're not universal. Some strategies depend upon this narrative that universal values are accepted universally. We thought otherwise. All states claim sovereignty over their people, over their land within their borders and over their territorial waters. Something can be made of this. Something can be made of this. Everybody that's out there, from non-state actors to allied populations, they all exist in territory that's ostensibly claimed by an owner of a state. So we use that as one of the strengths we had available. And then we started to take a look at this concept of sovereignty. Now these first two bullets up there are important. This is the essence of sovereignty, these two things. Borders are invalid. You can't come across my borders. I own them. And I can't come across yours. Now if you recognize the Latin up there, for those of you educated Catholic high school, you'll quickly translate that Latin into he who possesses. And the term has been used in sovereignty, international sovereignty claims for hundreds and hundreds of years. He who possesses is the literal translation, but what it really means, the essence of what that is, is he who holds, so may he have. He who holds, so may he have, or said another way, he who defends, so may he have. What that means is in international law, in the application of international law, in the application of strategy or sovereignty, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Or really, to be more accurate, possession is 10-tenths of the law. Ask ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea. The only equalizer among states, the only thing that makes states the unit of account in the national order, international order, is their equality and sovereignty. That they all claim sovereign realm over their peoples, lands and territorial waters, and that you can't violate their borders. There is a common understanding, there is a base among states within that concept. And this contract between states, this contract and understanding between states, I can't cross your border and you can't cross mine. You're responsible for the people within your border and you leave me the hell alone because I'm responsible for the people within mine. This contract between states is what allows the social contract to exist within states. And that's important. Leaders of countries are not responsible for their own populations if other states are constantly intermingling into their own affairs. So our relationships as leaders of states allows me to have my social contract within my state as I see fit and as my population sees fit. Sovereignty provides both rights and responsibility then. I have the rights to have my borders remain in valid. You can't cross mine, I can't cross yours. But it also means there's a responsibility on my part to develop the social contract down and in within my population. And if your borders can't be crossed, then I'm responsible for what's within my borders that they don't cross yours. Those are important points. And again, this is what we try to build the strategy around. So, how do you put sovereignty into some sort of a strategic framework? Well, we took a look at kind of past practices. Now the US government historically, recent historically, has been pretty good about respecting the rights of sovereign realms. We usually don't cross borders. Well, sometimes we cross borders. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, depending on whether you believe or not that we're actually at war with those countries. And sometimes we cross borders in tricky ways, in clever ways, in the art of the clever ways. And we say, look, we're gonna kind of invite ourselves in and we need you to let us in and we're gonna kind of build some capability and capacity as we think you need fit. And we're going to tweak and adjust what we want your vision of threats to be, but we're gonna provide some economic aid. But we really do need you to work on some of these social programs that you're instituting. Now that takes an invitation. That's what we call our phase zero shaping operations. And it's not really a violation of sovereign rights, but it's kind of getting close. It's a tricky way to do it. But for the most part, we understand that we don't have the right to invade other countries. What we seldom do is enforce the responsibility of states. So we don't hold states accountable for what comes out of their borders. We don't hold states accountable for what persons holding their passports might do in other places. So rights, we're okay. We kind of follow that one. Responsibilities we've kind of given the past to. The failure to uphold the responsibility of sovereignty, that function is what allows non-state actors to exist. It's this lack of adherence to the responsibility of state owners for their state sovereignty that have allowed the genies of non-state actors to escape their bottles. So probably something could be made of that. Now, so here's the framework. Here's the shift. Here's where we get different. How do we reset the conditions for US security by putting responsibility back into the sovereignty equation? You're the owner of a state. You want everything that comes with owning that state and you want to be recognized as the owner of a sovereign state. What we say, what we propose is you got it and you get all the trappings that come with it. We will not violate the sovereignty of your realm. You be you. The social contract you develop with your people is your social contract. You want people, everybody to wear funny hats and cats and dogs living together and everybody have to ride bicycles to work backwards. That's fine, do it well. It's not the way we do it here, but you do it your way. We're good with that, but you're responsible for everything that crawls out of your country or everything that bears your passport that comes from your country. We're gonna hold you to account. That's the sovereignty solution framework. And the way this plays out, if American sovereignty is violated, if our sovereignty is violated, then we will first identify the perpetrators and where they came from. Once we've identified the perpetrators and who the owning states are of those perpetrators, we're going to issue demands to that state. That state then has the ability to respond to those demands. They can accept them or they can turn them down, but whatever they do, whatever their response is to those demands, that sets the relationship with the United States going forward. And that relationship takes one of four forms and you've seen these kinds of forms before. You've seen this in other strategic work. You've seen this in other writings. We're gonna use it in a little bit of a different way, but state relationships with us, following a sovereignty violation and our issuance of demands and the response to those demands will determine whether you in fact are a partner state, a struggling state, an adversary state, or a failed state. And I'll talk about each of these. Partner states, as you might expect, are those states who, after a violation of US sovereignty, we issue the demands to that state and that state says, yep, you're right. We do own the problem. You want us to take care of it? We're gonna take care of it. We've got all the capability that we need. Partner states are both able and willing. And again, you would expect that just from the term itself. What you might not expect and within this strategy, partner states can come from anywhere. Partner states might be Canada and Great Britain, but they also might be Venezuela or Iran. Or Russia. Or China. All that's required is, our sovereignty's been violated. You own the problem. We issue demands and you say, yep, got it, you're right. We will take care of the problem. You're now a partner state. It's far different from the way we do things today. The relationship that you had with us before that violation matters not a damn. Let me talk real quickly about these demands. Demands are exactly that. They're demands. They're not requests. They're not diplomatic talks. They're not negotiated settlements. They're demands. So we've been attacked. You own the problem. You will destroy terrorist group X in three months. You will capture or kill terrorist Y within two weeks. You will solidify your port of entry procedures so that nobody with a fake passport ever gets through again and will verify it within one month. Those are what demand sounds like. That's what we're gonna issue within this strategic framework. How about struggling states? Again, as you might expect, struggling states are those states that are willing but not fully able to carry out US demands. So perhaps they're missing an element of national power. Perhaps they don't have the logistics they need. Perhaps they don't have an intelligence asset. Perhaps they don't have the ISR that they think are required to go ahead and make good on our demands. That's fine, good. We're here to help. Phone a friend. We'll provide those elements of power that you lack. But we're only providing those elements of power to make good on our demands. We're not going to do capacity building. We're not going to do capability building. We're not there for long-term development. We're there to make sure that our demands are met. And that makes sense. Strategically, that makes sense. Because if you didn't do it this way, then a clever struggling state would simply say, all we need to do is find a proxy that we really don't like anyway or an insurgent problem within our own borders, encourage them to attack the United States and then they'll come over here and help us build some capacity and capability and thwart our actors. We're only there to take care of our demands. What about adversary states? This one's pretty easy. US sovereignty is violated. We identify the perpetrators. You own the problem. We issue our demands and you say, get lost. Not interested, not gonna help. Don't even care. That's fine. This is an easy part of the relationship. Sovereignty violated, demand, response, equation. We're now in state-on-state warfare and we know how to do this really well. And in state-on-state warfare and the sovereignty solution framework, we build, I'm sorry, we destroy, we don't rebuild anything and we destroy with overwhelming force. There's no incrementalism here. Failed states. Failed states are a little bit different. Willing enable components to find the other three and their response to our demands. But with failed states, there's no central government to issue demands too. So you can't get into the demand, response, reply, equation that we've set up in the framework. The good news is, it's an anthropological fact. Every society on earth, every part of the globe where there is some form of civilization, someone or a group of someone's is in charge. We're just gonna issue those demands to whoever is in charge. Now this is where we say, within the strategy that we propose, there's a means here, there's an element of strategy that we don't yet possess, that we don't have. And this is the only one. For everything else here, we're saying U.S. inventory of national power, good to go. Don't need to build on, don't need to add to. We've got the power that we need. For this element, we say, here's a means that we're going to have to develop. And what we say is, we're gonna need something that we call ethnographic sensors. And all ethnographic sensors are, are persons on the ground that can identify those invisible social networks, those ties between people, determine who's in charge in subgroups, especially in those places where there is no central government. Different from intelligence assets and different from those that work for the Department of State. These are overt. They are information booths, presenting information on what the United States is and understanding the dynamics and the networks and the connections between people who's beholden to who on different areas of the planet. Ethnographic sensors provide us the information we need to issue the demands to somebody in the case of a failed state. We'll talk a little bit more about ethnographic sensors. What would this do? What would this framework do to other states? How might other states react to such a strategy as a sovereignty solution? Well, we think, we believe, looking forward, that there's lots of other states that might adopt it, especially in those states that are regional powers. That makes sense. Now let me get this straight. Here's the deal. Okay, United States, let me make sure I understand you the right way. I am free to conduct a social contract with my population within my borders as I see fit and you'll do no more proselytizing. You'll do no more sneaky ways to try to get me to twist my social agenda or the way that I engage with my population or how it is that we do things here. You're gonna let me be me so long as I let you be you and I can take care of any unrest in my country the way I best see fit. Yeah, that's what we're saying. Sign me up. We think it makes intrinsic sense that there would be a lot of other states that would say, yeah, we're all in on this strategy. This works for us. It incentivizes self-policing. Think about it. If you're a state, if you're a small state, you've got insurgent problems within your borders. You've got proxy forces that operate within your borders. This tells you that you're gonna have to do some things so that you can solidify that social contract within your population because the chances of one of those bad actors deciding that the way to get at you is to do something to the United States is not something that you wanna think about. It's not something that you wanna allow. So you're going to have to do some adjustments. You're going to have to do some self-policing within your own borders. Either be more responsive to your population or put down elements of your population that might constitute a risk to you or to us. States are gonna have to determine how to defend their own borders. That is no change from the way it is today. Here's the difference. In the art of the clever and strategic ambiguity, there are a lot of states left out there that think that have an idea whether they're the states or an insurgent element within them that they can bring the United States into the conflict. If they can set this up as a problem between liberal democracy or illiberal stability and they can bring the United States into engagement, well, that might be good for them. There is no question about it right now. If our sovereignty isn't violated, we're not coming. And that lets others know they have to defend their own borders. There's no false sense of security that the United States is going to come if their borders are threatened. We think that's a strength. Don't tread on me demands that they and their citizens respect our sovereignty or else. Well, to each his own allows other states and populations to execute the social contract as they see fit. So to each his own, married up with, don't tread on me. That's how we think this works with the other states. One of the things that this is going to require is a return to declarations of war. And there's a few reasons for that. For one, they're constitutional. The Framers thought at the time of the founding that wars were inevitable part of statecraft. Wars are going to happen. And that there was so serious about war, so serious about how they thought about war that they divided the powers of war among the branches of government. We all know this, we've heard our history. We understand how the Constitution works. What we're saying is, put that constitutional system back into place. We need to go back to declarations of war. Let's look at the historical context of this. Before 1945, during United States declarations of war, we're 11 and 0 undefeated. Since 1945, we've declared war on all sorts of human conditions. Poverty, hunger, disease, terrorism, crime, drugs. And we haven't won a one of them. And at the same time, we've almost had continuous deployment of military forces around the world in conflicts and called none of them wars. But we certainly haven't declared war beyond the fact, beyond kind of the third grade response of, hey, we're undefeated when we do declarations of war. Let's go to declarations of war. Let's use those again. There's a reason why we were 11 and 0 when we declared war, because declarations of war do something to the country. They set clear and unambiguous objectives in a way that authorizations and the use of military force do not. When you declare war, you either win the war or you lose. You either achieve the objectives or you lose the war. It puts politicians into a bind. But once they do this, you have got to follow through because you can be held to account if you don't. It's the clarity of the objective that helps us with the declaration of war. So too, declarations of war make it for a very uncomfortable citizenry. Declarations of war do. They're usually associated with a rise in taxes, a decrease in liberties, mobilization of both material and personnel. That makes people uncomfortable. That isn't what we want to be doing. Certainly not long-term. We want continued American prosperity. We want individual choice. We want economic freedom. We want democratic governance. We don't like this setting that comes with the declaration of war. And because it's an uncomfortable setting, it provides some urgency to the situation. We want to get out of it as fast as we can. And the way we get out of it is either you lose the war, not preferred, or you achieve the objectives. The politicians are now directly tied to and can be held account for. That's why declarations of war work. And what we're saying is from now on when we use force, we have got to go back to this. It's the constitutional mechanism that ensures that the whole of government and the people go to war. Right now in the current employment strategy, the executive in the legislative branches can avoid the responsibility, lay down in the constitution, through the use of authorization, use of military force, War Powers Act, holds no way to account. And there's no check, or very little check, from the people and the media. Because the country isn't at war. Aspects of the government are at war, but the country is not. That's not a good thing going forward. So we say one thing, you're gonna have to return to declarations of war. Side note on that, what you see at the bottom here, standing declarations of deterrence. Look, we realize in the world today, things can happen very fast. And one of the critiques about using declarations of war is, oh, it takes a long time for debate. Which is what we're saying is an essential good thing about declaration of war. Debate it out, have the debate, ensure that you have continuity of government in the backing of the people before you go. But in today's world, with the way weapons can be employed and the time the weapons can be employed, the critique is, this is antiquated, it's not fast enough, you can't respond to threats around the world. Well, we say, okay, got it, but you're not off the hook. What we'll create in addition to declarations of war are standing declarations of deterrence. And what these are, are a recognition that there are threats existing around the world that can cause trouble for us in a short amount of time. Take, for example, North Korea with their missile program. The standing declarations of deterrence are basically decorations of war with a red line trigger attached. North Korea, if you do X, if you begin to fuel missiles of this size on the pads, we will destroy them in place. It's been debated by the Congress, it's been authorized by the Congress, and acted by the Congress for the president to execute. It's still within the constitutional model and it gives us a trigger to go ahead and let the president execute in the time required. And once that's done, once that standing declaration of deterrence has taken place, you've still got to go back and get a declaration of war. It was placed in the constitutional way it was for a reason. We think it needs to go back into it when we apply military force. So, too, I think we believe that we need to rethink just war theory and our application of just war theory. And this one, if the last one didn't blow your hair back, this one's certain to. The problem with just war theory and the Western application of just war theory today is it puts us into a lose, lose situation, a lose, lose dilemma with non-state actors around the world. And the way the game is played is this. I'm a non-state actor, or I'm a clever state adversary who uses proxies. I understand the United States and the West's application of just war theory, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to attack you with my land-based cruise missiles, or I'm going to attack you with my suicide bombers, or I'm going to attack you with my guerrilla forces, but I'm going to keep my weapons and my forces and my logistics and my command and control assets in hospitals, in schools, in places of worship, in apartment buildings. And the way the game is played is if you don't attack me, I'm just going to continue to attack you. I'm going to continue to destroy your forces. I'm going to continue to slaughter your population, and you're going to continue to lose legitimacy within your own domestic population because you can't keep them safe. But if you do attack me, even better. If you do attack me, you're going to kill civilians and you're going to kill innocents. And I'm going to drag those bodies out in the street and make sure the world sees it. Now you're going to lose international legitimacy and domestic legitimacy because you're killing innocents. If we run the lose, lose dilemma to its logical conclusions, what does it mean? If we continue to apply just war theory as we did in the 20th century today, what does it mean? Strong to its logical conclusions, it means we lose. The United States loses. The United States is defeated because you can't defeat this. There needs to be a maturing or a rematuring of the American understanding, hopefully the West's understanding of the application of just war theory in today's 21st century environment. We already do this to some extent, especially at the tactical level. We apply what's called double effect. If a sniper takes hold in a hospital or a church or a school or a mosque and begins to fire against troops maneuvering against him, those troops can return fire and kill that sniper. It's double effect, that school or that hospital no longer has neutrality in just war theory. The sniper has wrecked it. He's taken that neutrality away. And as those troops maneuver on that sniper and they happen to kill two of his children that he's put in the same room as him, just war theory says not the maneuvering troops fault, the snipers fault. That's double effect. And what we suggest is, what we state is, what you have to use in the sovereignty solution is, you have to take double effect and you have to apply it at the strategic level. If you're gonna put C-301s or land-based cruise missiles in apartment building complexes, we're gonna destroy the town. We're gonna destroy the city. And the civilians that are killed, that's on you. It's double effect. You took away their civilian status. You took away their neutral status. The day you parked missiles or the day you started running logistics or the day you put your command and control center above that school. We'll no longer play the devil's dilemma with you. Double effect is an application. Go back one real quick. Again, who dares think like this? Who asks questions like this? Let me go back to the first slide where I said, look, enter the national debate. Get some calluses on. Writing is thinking. Enter the debate and talk about what it is that you think we might do in terms of strategy, in terms of policy. And think like this. Think outside the box. My goodness, everybody wants you to think outside the box. Everybody tells you to think outside the box. This is outside the box thinking. It's different. Would we do this? Would we return to declarations of war? Would we rethink our application to just war theory in the 21st century? Remember, Chicago's burning. There's 100,000 Americans dead. What wouldn't we do in that situation? Towards the end of the brief, I'll say, do we have to get there in the first place before we apply something like this? Strength through deterrence. Deterrence doesn't get a lot of play, or it hasn't gotten a lot of play outside of nuclear deterrence in the recent past. Fortunately, I'm beginning to see some people write about it. And Dr. Pagahi does a strategic deterrence class here at the Naval War College outside of the nuclear realm. We have to start thinking about this again and how we get a deterrent effect without the equation or calculation of nuclear weapons. We think that's a good thing. This strategy that we're proposing, it's not pro-war. It may sound barbarism to some. We think it's not. We think it's an absolute principal old application of power in a way that we don't even do today. But it's not pro-war. What it is is it's anti-clever war. It's anti-sneaky war. It's anti-long war. Because in sneaky war and clever war and long war, the people that pay the highest price are civilian populations because they're the tools of implement. They are what's used to fight sneaky wars and clever wars. They are the shields that guard fighters. They are the implements that send in destruction. Civilians and innocents and non-combatants pay the price as do anyone that adheres to 20th century just war theory in long war and sneaky war. And besides, none of this is us. This isn't the way we fight. This is not the American way of war. So we're not going to do this anymore in our strategic approach, but it isn't pro-war at the same time. We think we get the deterrent effect out of it. It does require the constitutional mechanism as we suggested, and it does require a rematuring of our application of just war theory. Let's talk about Indivisible America again. How do we get at this vulnerability of ethnic divides? How do we do it abroad? UBU will be us. Again, everybody wears funny hats in your country, rides your bicycles backward to work, put cats and dogs together, whatever it is you wanna do, you do it. We will stop proselytizing to you on how you run your social contract. We're gonna be us. And part of being us is, we're going to assimilate our immigrants at home into a common American creed toward continued American prosperity along those three lines. And we're gonna leave you to do whatever it is that you wanna do. We've had it backwards the last 50 years. We're trying to be everything to all people back at home while we try to make little America around the world. Flip that. Flip that. Immigrants absolutely assimilated into the American creed start to cross-cut these divides that exist within society. Hey, others' laws are going to apply to our citizens. That means if you wanna travel to Venezuela or North Korea or Iran, their laws apply. And if you go over there and you don't wear your funny hat and they lock you up, hey, I'm sorry. It's your violation of their sovereignty. And we're not coming to rescue you. Their laws apply at home. Education and training, yes, absolutely. Education and training can't be corrupted. We'd rather we do most of the education and training of others here in our country. They can't take a look around, see what works for them, see what might not. But education and training can't be transferred. It can't be corrupted. It can't be handed over to warlords or political leaders or other families. Foreign aid can. Every dollar of foreign aid we invest in some way manipulates the social contract in the countries that we send it to. Foreign aid ends with the sovereignty solution. Education and training, absolutely. And what we do say is, look, we have the capability. We have the ways and means to be the greatest global good neighbor the world has ever seen. And we do a lot of this already and we're saying, absolutely. In fact, create more means so that we can do this. Anytime there's a natural disaster which could impact any country on earth, regardless of what it is they do or don't, we should be able to show up the next day with an amphibious readiness group and vertical lift and lots of food and water for triage. Not for chronic pain. Not for chronic dysfunction. Not for four years following an earthquake. But for the triage, we should be the first responders to it. We should do it gladly. There should be no strings attached. In divisible America at home, think about it, in a sovereignty rules world, states are the unit of account. States are the unit of account in international order. We're just leveraging that fact. And states have both rights and responsibilities and we're putting responsibilities back into the sovereignty equation. What about back at home? Well, at home, in the United States, individuals are the unit of account. And citizenship comes with rights and responsibilities as well too. We make a lot out of rights of citizenship, both enumerated in the Constitution and the ones that have been added on over 230 years. We don't make much out of responsibility of citizenship and we have identified that as one of the things that we need to do to cross cut these social divides that exist. Now, unlike the rest of the book where we say, look, this is the framework. Here it is. It's not a buffet option. Can't pick and choose. It all kind of works together. When we start talking about this domestic side and what we can do to cross cut divides, it's here in the book that we kind of lay out a bunch of options. Things that we might do, things that we might consider to get at this problem in social division. So we talk about things like perhaps mandatory national services in order. Not mandatory military service, but mandatory national service. Everybody has to get in the game. Or mandatory national service, if it is that you want to receive some of these extra additional rights that we've added onto the enumerated rights. So free healthcare or free education or social security or student aid loans or student loans. You want those things, fine. There's a national service requirement that comes with it. As a concept, as an idea, how do we get organizations back into being the kind of cross cut society before? Where are the Elks clubs of today? You are more likely, according to a New York Times magazine and article 2008, you are much more likely to live next to somebody who votes like you than to live next to somebody who looks like you. I understand what I'm saying? It's not the ethnic or the racial or the religious divides that separate us that glob us together. It's the ideological division that globs us together. And that's dangerous, especially if it can be divided along foreign policy. We are our own first responders. We know that. We have to be prepared to do that. So one of the things that we might be able to do is how do we get communities more prepared to deal with natural disaster? It doesn't even have to be an attack. But how do you get communities at home to take on that burden when the state can't respond, when the federal government can't respond? How do we harden ourselves at home to prevent the next Katrina? Not the hurricane, but everything that happened after. How do we become our own first responders at the local level? That too should probably help seal some of the social divides. Hey, some of the other aspects that we talk about in the book that I just don't have time to get into today, the comments, how do we deal with the comments? Well, this is the one area that we say international organizations have a lot to say about. All those spaces on the earth that we all share in our equality of state sovereignty, how do we go about doing that? International organizations are pretty good at setting weights and measures, determining language that's going to be used, vernacular, vocabulary, time. There's a place for those in this framework. Alliances, yes, coalitions, no, and alliances with teeth. We get something from it. For our sovereignty, they get something for their sovereignty, but this is damn serious business now in a sovereignty rules world, because if their sovereignty is violated, we are right back into the, identify the perpetrators, issue demands, and then we're determining whether our alliance has a partner, struggling adversary, or failed state relationship with the offending state. They are damn serious, so we have to rethink where our alliances go. What's in it for us? Hey, we talk about cyber warfare. I'm very proud of this. In 2006, we do take on cyber warfare and decide what about cyber warfare makes for violations of sovereignty? Is it cyber crime? Is it cyber spying? Does it take kinetic activity? We do address that in the book. Pollution, pollution can be a violation of sovereignty. You pollute my river that flows into my borders? You're absolutely violating my sovereignty. How's that handled? What other forms of pollution might work into that thing as well? Refugees, refugees always mandate a violation of somebody's sovereignty when they're crossing borders. How's that handled? Genocide. In the United States, if our violation isn't, or if our sovereignty isn't violated, we say we don't go unless it's with an ally. So how does genocide work? We talk about that as well too. Well, one thing I will tell you, all genocides have one thing in common. They create waves of refugees. Somebody's sovereignty is being violated by any genocide that goes on in the world. We talk about propaganda and fake news, not really in the way that it's exactly being bandied about today. But in terms of what we do, we have given so much weight, written thousands of pages, spilled gallons of ink, talking about how we need a better message, more information operations, explain ourselves better around the world as we conduct clever strategy. Strategic ambiguity. We just need better messages. We've been around for 230 years, plus, we've already said we're the most open society the world has ever seen, and everybody knows who we are. We don't need a better message. We just need to stop being hypocritical. We have to match words with deeds. That's us. That's what makes us us, not better messaging. Better messaging doesn't get at when we can't match our deeds with the words that we say. Strategic ambiguity almost breeds it. That's why we are constantly on the look for better information operations, for better messaging. It plays to none of our strengths, and we're never going to get there because everybody knows who we are. You can't get a better message than continued American prosperity along those three lines. If you come off of that, the rest of the world is going to see you as hypocritical. So let's use that as our strengths. Some closing thoughts, and I'd like to thank the people that set this up. I know I'm over time right now, and everybody that's kind of hung around for the whole thing. Some closing thoughts. What we've found through trial and experiment is this has about a 72-hour flash-to-bang effect. So, as uncomfortable as you might be right now as mystified as you might be right now, give it about three days to settle in, rattle around in your brain a little bit. I guarantee, like it or hate it, it will change the way you process the news and watch the news. So give it the whole three days. So too, it has an ink block effect. So we've been contacted by various members of various administrations since we first wrote this article in 2007 and then through the book in 2011. People have a way of globbing on their own biases to what they like to pull out of this strategy and say, yeah, that'll work for us. Again, this isn't a buffet option list. This stuff all works together. If you want to understand it fully, the book is 143 pages long. 143, it's not many. It has 70 pages of cited references behind it. So if you wanna see where we pull this information and who we study to get there, that's all available as well, too. And it's not written for policy wonks, much as they hate that. This is written for Americans. It's written for military. It's written for government workers. It's written for anybody that's concerned that strategic ambiguity or the strategy the last 25 years may not be working. And it does provide a new way to think about it. It does attack tired old arguments that are being bandied about. So I will close this as I opened it and encourage all of you, as I do in class, write. Thinking or writing is thinking. Enter the debate. Get your calluses. Be prepared to be critiqued and critique yourself because the tired old arguments need somebody to push up against them. And if you don't enter the debate, there's several think tanks around the national capital region full of people who have none of the operational experience that you do in carrying out strategic ambiguity of the last 25 years who will control the debate without you entering into it. Final comment. We wrote this as a strategy to hedge against the future shock. So Chicago is burning. What do we do now? We say this. But the more we thought about it, the more we talked about it, debated it, offered it to people. The more we began to believe that Chicago, in fact, doesn't need to burn before this is put in place. That if we have these ethnographic sensors out there, then we should mitigate ourselves to be surprised again. If we're attacked anyway, but we've prepared the American population to absorb the blow, then we're in much better standing. If we have a series of contingent responses ready to go, then we can't be mortally wounded from the blow itself. And if we advertise and project what those responses are going to be, why would anyone want to attack us in the first place? How does it possibly meet their ends? How does it possibly get them where they want to go? Ladies and gentlemen, I've held you over. Thank you very much for attending. Thank you for your time. You guys know where I'm at in Connolly Hall. If you have any questions, please come up and see me.