 Well good afternoon distinguished guests, fellow faculty, current and former Golden Bears, midshipmen and cadets, and of course friends. Welcome to Berkeley's 38th annual annual, sorry, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Memorial Lectureship and National Security Affairs, which since 1985 has hosted a distinguished scholar, military professional, or government official for a series of lectures on national security subjects. Now most of you know, I hope, especially those of you who have taken Naval Science 2, that Fleet Admiral Nimitz was the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific during World War II. However, he also has a very strong connection to Berkeley. In 1926, he founded Berkeley's Naval Reserve Officer's Training Corps unit as its first commanding officer, which along with five other units, were the first NROTC units in the nation. After the war and his subsequent stint as Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Nimitz retired to Berkeley, living at 728 Santa Barbara Road, not quite two miles north northeast of here as the peregrine falcon flies. And he often invited midshipmen from Berkeley's NROTC unit around for horseshoes and beverages. He also served as a regent for the University of California, and his son, Chet, would serve as Executive Officer of Berkeley's NROTC unit. So those of you who've been out and about in the Bay Area, you may have noticed some other things named after him. I'm Captain Travis Putzhol, Professor of Naval Science and the current commanding officer of Berkeley's Navy ROTC unit, which has composed of 52 young men and women who have volunteered to serve their country as officers in the United States Navy or Marine Corps after they earned their undergraduate degrees. Berkeley also hosts Army and Air Force ROTC, all under the Military Affairs Program in the College of Letters and Science. Army ROTC, I have to say, did beat Navy to Berkeley in 1916, and though they had been training officers at Berkeley since way back to 1870, and they started commissioning officers in the Army Air Corps in about 1920, the Air Force officially arrived at Berkeley in 1951. It is absolutely fantastic to be able to educate and mentor tomorrow's military officers here at Berkeley, and not just for Cal Rugby, who I should know are undefeated and headed for the National Quarter Finals, just in case you thought all exciting sports action ended last night. Public service has always had a great need for our best and our brightest, and leadership in our nation's armed forces is no exception. The United States is indeed fortunate to have young men and women from Berkeley volunteered to do this, and I thank all at Berkeley who support this effort, not just in supporting ROTC, but in providing that Berkeley education that is so valuable. I want to especially thank the members of the Military Officers Education Committee, composed of Professors Ponos Papadopoulos, Daniel Sargent, Eric Schickler, Richard Rhodes, and Ronit Stahl for all of their erstwhile support. Now as someone who is wearing a uniform of the Armed Forces of the United States, and who is also humbled to be a member of the faculty here at Berkeley, a standard disclaimer is in order. The opinions you will hear today are not those of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, or the University of California, Berkeley. They are those of our guest, an esteemed and experienced leader and scholar. That is in fact their value, to add to the diversity of opinions available and to encourage us to think deeply on the challenges that face us all. With all that said, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Dr. Ponos Papadopoulos, who is the Byron and Elvira Nishikian Chair in Structural Engineering and the current Chair of the Military Officers Education Committee to introduce our keynote speaker. Thank you, Captain Petzl, for the kind introduction. It's great to be back to campus in person for the 2022 Nimitz lecture. As remarked in our state's constitution, the University of California was founded in 1868 to quote, contribute even more than California's gold to the glory and happiness of advancing generations, end quote. One of the many such important contributions of our university has been to the national security of the United States. As you heard from Captain Petzl, Berkeley in particular has a long and distinguished record of supporting our nation's security needs, indeed some during some of the hardest, most challenging times in our history, including perhaps the present time. This is not only through our ROTC student program, like the men and women that are in uniform today in the audience, and who will be later commissioned to defend our nation, but also through the knowledge created and applied by every Berkeley graduate and every Berkeley researcher towards keeping the United States free, prosperous, and safe. With these thoughts in mind, it gives me a great pleasure to introduce this year's keynote speaker. One who has greatly contributed to America's national security. Janet Napolitano was born in New York City, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Santa Clara University with a degree in political science, then earned her JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. During the earlier part of her distinguished career, she served as U.S. attorney for the district of Arizona, attorney general of the state of Arizona, and then governor of the state of Arizona. Subsequently, Janet went to Washington and became our nation's third and as of this date longest serving secretary for Homeland Security. During her tenure as secretary, she worked hard to expand the nation's capacity to identify and thwart critical threats before they reached our shores, and to confront what at the time was the newly emerging threat of cyber terrorism. While a lot of this work takes place out of the public eye, nearly all of us have benefited from practical, everyday security initiatives ushered into existence by Secretary Napolitano, including TSA pre-check, global entry, and pre-clearance. If you don't have those, you should if you don't want to miss your flight next time. And of course, as secretary of Homeland Security, she played a critical role in the constitutionally mandated civilian control of our armed forces as service secretary for the U.S. Coast Guard. Upon concluding her Homeland Security tenure in 2013, Janet was appointed the 20th president of the University of California, the first female president at a time nearly 150 year life of our institution. Now, these were tumultuous times for the university with lots of burning issues. One would say every year is a tumultuous year in the university, but I digress. One of them was the prospect of increasing tuition. Something that, to some members of our community, was and is akin to an act of profound sacrilege. So let me go off script for a moment to recount an event that I personally attended. This was a Board of Regents meeting in San Francisco with two levels of police security in order to get into the room. And the reason for that was there was going to be this heated discussion of whether there should be an increase in tuition after many years of no increases. So before the meeting started, a number of the students who entered the meeting room at UCSF got on their chairs and one of them reached into her undergarment and picked up this batch of fake dollars and threw them theatrically towards the president in indignation for even considering the possibility of raising tuition. I don't know of any government job that will prepare anybody for this kind of undertaking. Nevertheless, Janet worked very vigorously to stabilize and rationalize the UC budget to improve the perennially challenging, let's say, relations with the state legislature and to increase access to UC education for an ever broader cohort of California students with great success, I should say. And after serving as UC president, Janet finally reached what any educated person would reasonably regard as the pinnacle of their career. She became a full-time Berkeley faculty, specifically in our school of graduate school of public policy. At the GSPP, Janet is also the founding director of the Center of Security and Politics, which was launched in February of 21 and whose objective is to promote policymaking, training and awareness in the areas of institutional resilience, climate change, cybersecurity and emerging technologies. Janet is the recipient of nine honorary degrees, including the Jefferson Medal from the University of Virginia, that university's highest honor. In 2015, she was elected in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she also serves on the Council of the American Law Institute, as well as on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honor to welcome governor, secretary, president, and more than anything, professor, Janet Napolitano. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. All right, thank you, Panos, for that introduction. And it's really a great honor to be asked to give the Nimitz lecture here at Berkeley, and also to thank those of you who are in the ROTC program, who have already evidenced your intent to serve our country, and that is to be honored as well. I thought this afternoon I would talk a bit about my experience as the Secretary of Homeland Security, and then tie it to some of the ongoing issues with respect to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But just let's go back a little bit in time. It's January of 2009. I have left the governorship of Arizona to become the third Secretary of Homeland Security. And I had, I would say, three welcome to the NFL moments when I began. One was I was told that I was entitled and would be having Secret Service Protection 24-7, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. The Saturday before the inauguration, there were a bunch of parties, and I, of course, went to a few, got back to my condo. And even though it was late, I wasn't sleepy yet, so I decided I'd start shelving some books and kind of moving in a bit. My condo was always overheated, and so I just had on a little tank top and some little shorts. And about two o'clock in the morning, I opened my door to take some trash out. I opened the door, and who's standing in the hallway? A six-foot-two Secret Service agent. And all I could think of to say was change you can believe in. The second welcome to the NFL moment was the first time I saw the White House Situation Room. It's dinky. It's about the size of a conference room in a medium-priced hotel. Now, there are some differences. First of all, there are no windows. Secondly, there's a video scream at the end where you can have secure video calls with generals and other officers calling in from in theater, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so forth. And the third is that there is a big black leather chair at the end of the long table that is in the middle of the room, and that chair is for the President of the United States. You know, I would end up spending hours in the Situation Room, especially late Tuesday afternoon. On Tuesday afternoons, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, myself, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. In short, the so-called principles of our nation's military, justice, and security apparatus, where we would meet with the President and the Vice President, and each of us would give a short brief on what we were seeing, what threat streams we were following, what trends we were observing, and the like. And we dubbed those meetings Terrorism Tuesdays, and they were designed to make sure that the principles for that day in train, all were singing off the same sheet of music, and all knew what the President knew and what the President wanted to know. And the third welcome to the NFL moment actually occurred the day before Inauguration Day, Inauguration is January the 20th of 2009. I got a call from Michael Chertoff, who was my predecessor. Telling me that there was an active threat stream against the Inauguration that they hadn't yet been able to run it down. And he proposed and I agreed that I would delay my taking office for a day or two so that there would not be a change of command in case that threat actually manifest itself on Inauguration Day. And as I said, I agreed to delay my taking the oath. Obviously they were able to mitigate the threat and nothing happened. But actually the day of the Inauguration, I was sitting in my chair on the platform, the Inauguration platform that's on the side of the Capitol. And all the way down the mall from the US Capitol to the Washington Monument, from side to side, it was crammed with people. Excited people, happy people, freezing people. But it was crammed with people. And I just had this moment looking down at those hundreds of thousands of people that I recognized to myself that now I was responsible for their safety and security. And that was a welcome to the NFL moment. Now a bit of background about the Department of Homeland Security. It was formed in the wake of the attacks of 9-11. By a statute adopted in November of 2002, and the department actually opened its doors in January of 2003. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security was the largest reorganization of our federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. Congress took 22 separate agencies from legacy departments, from treasury, from transportation, from justice, from commerce, etc. And put them all under one roof, making DHS the third largest department of the federal government with now some 260,000 employees. Spread all across the United States and indeed all over the world. With that many agencies all under one roof, you can imagine the number of mission areas that we had. But you could put them generally into five main buckets. Anti-terrorism, border security, air, land, and sea, immigration and customs, cybersecurity, and disaster prevention, management, and recovery. So I served as secretary for almost five years and they were an active time. In the course of those five years, we managed the H1N1 pandemic. We had the underwear bomber, the Times Square bomber, and the Boston Marathon bomber. We had the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. That was the spill where an oil rig run by British petroleum was drilling for oil over a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf. The rig exploded and the oil began leaking. And we had any number of natural disasters including Superstorm Sandy in 2012 which was the largest landfall hurricane in the United States since Hurricane Katrina. And I learned lessons from handling all of these things. From the H1N1 pandemic which was early in the administration. The first case of H1N1 occurred in the United States in April of 2009. But I learned there the importance of communicating clearly with the public what we knew and what we didn't know. And also to communicate clearly with the public the steps they could take to best protect themselves. And we didn't have much. It was cough into your arm, wash your hands thoroughly. You sing happy birthday when you wash your hands, make sure you wash them long enough and stay home from school or work if you're feeling sick. In the Deep Water Horizon oil spill, I learned the need for interagency coordination at the very top. The spill was denominated by President Obama as a spill of national significance. And under the law, when the President makes such a designation, it's the Secretary of Homeland Security who is responsible for coordinating the overall federal response. And so we began by having twice daily principal calls. Myself, the Secretary of Interior, the Secretary of Energy, the EPA administrator, the White House, and the incident commander who was Admiral Thad Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard. In Superstorm Sandy, we were able to put into effect many lessons learned from disaster management over the past five years. For example, we had learned that we could actually do pre-disaster emergency declarations. So for example, when you have a hurricane, you know several days out what the likely path of the hurricane is gonna be and where it's likely to hit land. And you can generally predict what the force, the intensity of that hurricane is going to be. Well, we figured out that we didn't have to wait until after the hurricane hit to begin processing the paperwork necessary for the President to issue a major disaster declaration so that federal money could begin flowing as quickly as possible. We had learned the importance of pre-positioning supplies. Estimating where the storm's impacts were likely to be. And then right around the edges of that pre-positioning, food, potable water, medical supplies, all the things we were likely to need. And we had learned the importance of working closely with state and local officials, with governors and mayors. I was a prior governor, so I had already appreciated that. But it took a while to convince other colleagues of mine who were from the federal side of the importance of that coordination. The hardest part was restoring electricity. Because without electricity, a lot of things don't work. So the eye of Hurricane Sandy came into New York Harbor. And I don't know how many of you have been back to that area of the country. But on one side of the harbor, you have New York City, and you have Manhattan, which lost power in Superstorm Sandy. On the other side, you have New Jersey, and on the New Jersey side, you have lots of high rises, 30 stories, 35 stories in which thousands of people reside. And if you don't have electricity, you know what doesn't work in a high rise? The elevator, right? So we had to figure out how to get food and medications and everything necessary all the way up and down those high rises until electricity could be restored. But we had known before the storm we were likely to lose power. So we had already reached out to utility companies across the country, and asked them to have crews on standby. And we asked the Department of Defense to loan us some of those big cargo planes they have that they used to transport manpower and tanks and everything else. We asked them to loan us some of those aircraft so they could fly around the country and pick up utility crews with their trucks and their tools, etc. And bring them back to the Northeast United States so that we could begin the process of restoring electric power. Because you know what else doesn't work when you don't have electricity? Gasoline pumps. We were able, we had fuel. The filling stations all had, their tanks were all full. But without electricity, drivers couldn't get the gasoline from the tank into their cars. And so we had these enormously long lines of autos. But they worked day and night and while electricity was not restored overnight, nothing happens that quickly when you have a disaster of that size and scope. It was restored, I think, as quickly as possible. But security is not static. And the risks that the country faces change. And there are at least three categories of risk that have changed that I think are relevant to Ukraine and Russia. The first are the effects of climate change. We already know, we can observe that the climate is warming. Increasing the number and intensity of hurricanes and tropical cyclones. Coupled with drought in the west, particularly in the western United States. Which in turn has led to increasing wildfire. Coupled with sea level rise due to the melting of Arctic ice. And the consequential threats to coastal communities and military installations. There are geopolitical risks that attain climate change. Populations in countries that will become virtually uninhabitable due to heat. That will cause and is already causing mass migration. In fact, I think we can attribute at least some of the migration to our southwest border to the effects of climate change in Central America. There are many who attribute both the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War to climate change. To a period of drought in the years preceding 2011. Which caused the price of food to rise dramatically. Led to unrest in Tunisia and Egypt. To in Syria, killing off the crops in the small farms in rural Syria. Without the farms, people couldn't sustain themselves. And so there was a mass intra-country migration from rural to urban cities in Syria. But there was no work in the urban areas. And that led to a larger than a normal population. Particularly of young men who themselves became parts of groups. Some of them combating Assad, the president of Syria. Some of them actually subject to recruitment by terrorist organizations that inhabit that part of the world. And another geopolitical risk that attains climate change is increasing competition for the Arctic. People don't think about the Arctic a lot, but they should. The Arctic holds a lot of the world's natural resources. Rare earths, rare metals. As the ice has melted, the northern passageway through the Arctic has widened. So that now those big ships that carry containers can pass through that way. And transport through the northern passageway saves on average about 35% of the time over having to come down and through the Panama Canal. And that saves a lot of money. The combined result of all of that are that countries like and in particular Russia have been playing a very active role in the Arctic. They've been taking over airfields, building military installations. They now have a fleet of something like 28 ice cutters. Ice cutters cost about $4 billion a piece. They're very expensive vessels. Do you know how many the United States has? Three, bingo. And one is usually in dry dock. Only one qualified an operational ice breaker. The point of fact is that the Arctic is likely to be a zone of the world that becomes a proxy for a lot of international tension and struggle. And we are likely to see that increase over the coming years. Now we know that the nations of the world have been meeting about climate change for a number of years. Most significantly in 2015, when they met in Paris and reached what is known as the Paris Agreement. Where for the first time they set a target for the world that we would seek to keep the increase in temperature to one and a half degrees centigrade or at the very least below two degrees centigrade by the year 2100. The only way to do this are three. One is to improve our energy efficiency. And a number of technologies have been developed that have helped us do that. Some of them developed right here at Berkeley. A second is to invest in strategies to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And again, I think we're only at the beginning of the science involving how that can be accomplished. But the science is certainly being explored. And a third is to move to cleaner sources of energy. And to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels. The price of the cost of renewable forms of energy, solar and wind, has gone down more than people predicted. In fact, the economics of it are that renewable energy is, in point of fact, cheaper than developing new sources of fossil fuel. But making that transition to a clean energy future is going to recover dramatic action by the nations of the world. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC just this week, issued a report that under the current trajectory, the world is likely to increase its global temperature by 1.8 degrees centigrade. By the year 2030, which is like just around the corner, emissions between the year 2010 and 2019 were actually higher than they were in the previous decade. The current track is that we are not going to make the Paris target. Indeed, the current track is that by the end of the century, the world's temperature will have increased 3.2 degrees centigrade. And why is that important? Because that's a tipping point. That's a tipping point from which we will have irreversible damage to the world's surface, to our biodiversity, to the ability of mankind to survive on the planet. And when we talk about the need to take dramatic action to wean ourselves away from fossil fuel, that ties directly into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Russia is the world's third largest exporter of oil. And their largest customer is Western Europe, which is heavily dependent on not just oil, but also liquefied natural gas from Russia. Absent the ability to immediately terminate their purchases of energy from Russia. One could say that the West, in terms of Western Europe, is actually paying for Putin's war. And the need for Western Europe and the United States, but particularly Western Europe, to find an alternative source of energy, to move more rapidly to a clean energy future, to wean themselves away from Russia is manifest. Because that is, energy represents almost 60% of the revenue that flows into Russia's budget. And that's what's paying for the manpower and the weapons that are being deployed in Ukraine. And that's how climate change and Russia and Ukraine are deeply related. A second area of risk that continues to evolve and that connects with Russia and Ukraine is cybersecurity. It is a growing threat to the United States. When I started at DHS as secretary in 2009, I spent maybe 10% of my time on issues related to climate change. By the time I finished, I was spending a good 40% of my time on cybersecurity matters. And I suspect Secretary Mayorkas is exceeding even that number. It is a key concern for our nation's critical infrastructure. Our grids, our telecommunications, our banking systems, our municipal systems and emergency response systems, our water systems, all are networked and all are susceptible to being attacked and hacked and disabled. And by both state, meaning state countries, and non-state actors, it is an area where the geopolitical rules are unclear. It's an area where Russia and Russian-based actors have been very active. Look to the 2016 presidential election as an example. Here are some of the questions. Does a cyber attack on a NATO country constitute an act that triggers Article 5 of the NATO treaty? A NATO treaty, Article 5, that's an attack on one, is an attack on all, but it was crafted when an attack was viewed as involving infantry and tanks and aviation, not zeros and ones. And if it is viewed as triggering Article 5, what constitutes an appropriate and proportionate response? And who decides? And who carries that out? And what if attribution is unclear? Many people assume that once there's a cyber attack and once you've discovered it, you immediately know who did it. But attribution is one of the hardest things to do in the cybersecurity realm. And if you're going to go about thinking in terms of Article 5, you better make sure you have certainty about the source of the attack, the attribution of the source. And in the meantime, is the United States properly prepared? What if a cyber attack shuts down one of our power grids, our water systems, our 9-11 systems? When I was secretary, I participated in a briefing in a secure compartment information facility, a SCIF, in the basement of the US Capitol for members of the US Senate and the US House. And the lead briefer was General Keith Alexander, who was the head of the NSA. But participating in the briefing were the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the head of the CIA, the head of the FBI myself, and the President's Homeland Security Advisor. And one of the things General Alexander did is he had a little demo about what it would take to shut down the power system in the Northeast Quadrant of the United States. And it turns out it wouldn't be all that complicated in even medium-skilled hands. So our nation's critical infrastructure is at risk. One of the reasons or one of the issues we face in the United States is that even though 80% of our nation's critical infrastructure is owned and operated in private hands, there are no nationally mandated cybersecurity requirements on that infrastructure. There's no mandated standards. There's no mandated testing. There's no mandated monitoring. This is left as a voluntary security system in the United States. It's the only part of our security apparatus that is actually in voluntary hands. And part of that reason is pure politics. Investing in cybersecurity doesn't generally increase a company's bottom line. Many people in the C-suite, in the boardroom, in the CEO's office fail to appreciate the importance of cybersecurity, although that level of knowledge has been growing rapidly, but still. And so in our country, we've left ourselves open to a cyber attack to our nation's critical infrastructure by our inability to pass an enforceable legal regime to require that certain standards must be upheld. I think this is one of those situations where our country will have to suffer a major destructive cyber event before the politics catches up really with the problem. And the third element of risk that has been growing in the United States that ties somewhat to Russia and Ukraine are under a category, I think, generally as threats to democracy. What do I mean by that? We have witnessed in our country a period of growing polarization, distrust of institutions, really a diminution in a shared sense of what it means to be an American. Exhibit A, the election of 2020. 65 court cases, the attorney general of the United States, even the post-election audit in Maricopa County, Arizona, conducted by the cyber ninjas, all concluded that there was no evidence of election tampering that would have changed the election's results. Yet upwards of 70% of Republicans in the country don't trust the outcome of the election. This led, in turn, to the insurrection of January 6, where for the first time, there was an attempt to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power in the United States. Social media originally conceived as a means to bring people together has proven to be a powerful accelerant of driving people apart. There's an interesting contrast here in a way with Russia. Let me build that out. In Russia, they have an authoritarian government. President Putin has shut down a free press. He's shut off the people's ability to connect with social media. And we see the result. It's not a war. It's an exercise. Everything is going according to Putin's plan. Ukraine is governed by neo-Nazis. The West is intent on destroying Russia. So as he has clamped down on information, in the United States, one of our treasured freedoms is embodied in the First Amendment, the freedom of press, the freedom of expression, the freedom of the right to assemble. It's one of our most treasured freedoms. But in a free environment, as we have, if facts are continually distorted, misstated, and inserted into the social media ecosystem with the intent to deceive, we run the risk that our First Amendment, as being carried out, could be as dangerous to our democracy as an authoritarian like Putin could be. Now, what are some of the immediate activities that DHS is involved in in connection with the invasion of Ukraine, where there are at least three? One is with respect to cyber and cybersecurity. As I mentioned earlier, Russia has been very active in the cyber realm for a number of years. The Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, which is part of DHS, I am sure, is got all kinds of alarms going off and watching very carefully for any evidence of Russia conducting a cyber attack inside the United States. In fact, many of us are somewhat surprised that they haven't done so already. A second area where DHS is involved is in the enforcement of the sanctions that the United States has imposed on Russia, particularly with respect to the export of any of our technology and material associated with that technology to companies in Russia or to Russia itself. The US customs part of DHS enforces our country's import and export laws, and particularly with respect to the sanctions, which is how we are primarily dealing with Russia right now. That falls to DHS. And then the third area that DHS is involved in is with respect to the refugee situation. As you no doubt saw, President Biden has said that the country will take in 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. I think that is a start, not a cap. But to take in a refugee, you need a social infrastructure. You need a way to do a security check. But you also need a way to handle medical care, to handle housing, to handle getting the kids in school, to handle helping people set up a bank account, to help people find work. In this arena, the United States government works primarily with a group of nonprofit organizations that specialize in refugee resettlement, the Lutheran Church, the International Rescue Committee. But the kind of public-private partnership, that intersection, that infrastructure was basically disabled during the Trump administration because during the Trump administration, we were taking virtually no refugees whatsoever. And so that infrastructure needs to be quickly reconstructed because in addition to Ukrainian refugees, we also have Afghani refugees being resettled in our country. And we need to extend open arms and show the best of the United States to people who are fleeing such desperate circumstances. That's an American value, I think, we can all be proud of. Thank you very much. We'll open up, I think, for some question and answer at this particular time. So do we have a couple of who's holding the microphones here? So we have Mitcham and first class Nathan Moore, who's a Berkeley student, is going to go be a submarine officer who, yeah, at some point. And also Mitcham and Farrell is also on his way to do that as well, two submarine officers. Excellent. All right, so if you want to go ahead and we'll start asking some questions here as we get moving. We ask that you raise your hand. I'll try to call on you to prevent some sense of order. And if you can, please wait for the microphone so that we can capture your comments and your questions for posterity on the microphone in this particular case here. So and I think the first question, we have a lead off question ready to go there from Lieutenant Ken Sair. So without any further ado, we'll just go ahead and get started. Thank you, sir. Ma'am, thank you for the lecture. Can you describe a time when you were on a leadership role in a particularly intense security crisis as your time at DHS? Well, I had many, but actually one that comes to mind was when I was governor. And when I was governor, we had two lifers at our maximum security prison, take two of the prison guards hostage. And they got the two guards into a tower that had been built in the middle of the prison yard. And the tower had been built to be impregnable so that if there were ever a riot in the yard, the guards could get in there and be protected. And so as a result, it was also home to the prison pharmacy and the prison armory. We didn't have sight lines into the tower. All we had was audio. We immediately had to set up a command center. We immediately stationed snipers around the rim of the roof of the prison. We got our state hostage rescue team and the FBI HRT down to the prison. It was in Buckeye, Arizona, Lewis Prison. And we began the process of trying to negotiate our guards out safely. This went on for a week. And at the end of the first week, they let the male guard out. He'd been injured during the takeover. The other guard was a female. And we kept talking to these guys. There wasn't, they wanted a plane and millions of dollars to fly to South America. Like, no, we're not doing that. Anyway, during the second week and right when radio started kind of, banging on me, like, why doesn't she storm the tower? She needs to storm the tower. And my director of corrections was also a woman. And there was a subtext there that, these women are just not tough enough to storm the tower. But I knew what they didn't know. I knew about the armory. And I knew if we stormed the tower, that not only would our guards and the hostage takers, but also those doing the storming, likely would be injured and there'd be some fatalities, likely as well. So my view was that we would keep talking as long as they kept talking. We were delivering food to the tower with this little robot thing. And one day we delivered the wrong kind of hamburger, like we delivered Wendy's instead of McDonald's or something, this was before in and out. And, but, and we could hear, they took Lois's hand, one of the hostage takers did, and a piece of rebar and we're trying to saw off one of her fingers in retribution. Fortunately, the other hostage taker calmed his buddy down. We finally negotiated a deal that at the end of the second week, which would be Super Bowl Sunday, if we delivered a steak dinner and a six pack, they would come down after the game. Normally you don't allow alcohol in a prison, but in this circumstance, I thought it was not a, that was a deal we could live with. And so we delivered the steak dinner, the six pack, maybe it was light beer, I don't know. And after the game, they came down from the tower, they released Lois, she was immediately medevacked to the roof of a hospital in downtown Phoenix and myself and our head of corrections, we met her on the roof as she was being unloaded. And I still, she just grabbed our arms and she said, thank you for not storming the tower, they would have killed me and they would have. So that was a fairly intense moment. Thank you very much, ma'am, I appreciate it. Hey, Captain Devine. Good afternoon ma'am, thanks for the comments and the lecture, that was very nice. So, midshipmen, cadets in the room, heading out to the fleet, to the Air Force, future leaders, some will report directly to ships, at which time they'll find themselves as young division officers. They'll be in charge of 15, 20, maybe junior enlisted. Some will go off to Nuke Power School and do that for, I think that's a couple years aviation. So it'll take a little while to get there. I firmly believe that a well-read and informed leader is going to be a better leader. So as these young men and women in front of you head out to the fleet, their understanding of what's going on in the world will I think be important that they'll be able to explain to their young men and women that they're in charge of out there why it is we're heading out on deployment. What we're going to do, why it's important, why we're doing it. I guess my direct question for you is when you wake up in the morning, what do you read to stay well informed about what's going on in the world and do you have some recommendations for the midshipmen and cadets? So I skim The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. I read The Economist, which is a very good magazine that covers a lot of international affairs. And I don't watch much television. I don't find television all that helpful. And in terms of other things to read, history and biographies are very useful. They can give you context, they can give you background, they can give you lessons. And it almost doesn't require you to pinpoint a particular period in history or a particular individual that you wanna read about. Just pick some. And then I always have at least two books going at a time because I find that that gives me perspective. And one of the things reading a biography gives me perspective on is that everybody makes mistakes. Every leader, I don't care if you're talking about Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln or whomever. Nobody is perfect, they've all made mistakes and I've made more than my fair share. And one of the things that you appreciate is how really good leaders not only have the ability to acknowledge their mistakes but to reflect on them and to recover from them. Senator Colonel Staffin, Sean Staffin is in charge of our Air Force ROTC unit here. Ma'am, thank you for taking the time. Just kind of a broad question for you. You've been obviously at the governorship up to national level and then into the education leadership. I often find myself explaining to our cadets just given all the rhetoric in the times in which we live just what is, from your perspective, the value of government in today's day and age. Because at the end of the day, we are expected to be as apolitical as possible in these given roles that we have. Often times it's challenging. A lot of our family members and everything come to us with their latest outrage, wanting our opinion and try to teach everyone that the uniforms that we wear are apolitical even though we all have our own opinions. Just any thoughts you have on just the role of government in our day and age? Well, I think one of the, and I mentioned this in my talk, one of the consequences of this period of disinformation and misinformation we've had is sewing distressed in our institutions. Distressed in our universities, distressed in our government and in our leaders. But we are a representative democracy, really a republic. And we are, operate under the rule of law. And we operate with some sense of shared responsibility. And government helps us reflect and implement those basic values. You can't operate under the rule of law unless you have police, unless you have investigators, unless you have prosecutors and defense counsel, unless you have a judiciary that sets forth in writing the reasons for its decision, unless you have a court system. Think about what our country would be like if we didn't have those things. So sometimes when I'm talking with folks about the importance of government, I ask them to imagine what would happen if we didn't. What would happen if you called 911 and there was nobody on the other end of the phone? What would happen if God forbid, but if our country were attacked and we didn't have a military, well-trained, well-armed, well-prepared? Sometimes if you imagine the negative, the lack of something, it helps you better conceive the importance of that function. Professor Sgt. Thank you for a really terrific talk. I wonder if I could pick up, Janet, on the sort of ominous observation that you made towards the end of the talk, that it might take a major cyber attack against the United States in order for us to take cyber security with the kind of seriousness that the threat demands. And the observations that have put me in mind of your experience at DHS, an agency whose creation was in some sense a reactive response to an unexpected external threat, the 9-11 attacks against the United States. And I suppose the question that I wanna sort of push you to answer for us is whether you think that we have the capability as a society to be proactive in anticipating threats that are coming down the pipeline, and perhaps in reforming our institutions to be more prepared and more capable of responding to inbound threats, or whether we are in some sense sort of condemned by our institutional structures to always be reactive to new and emerging threats. Yeah, that's a really good question, Daniel. You know, here's the thing. You know, when you're in political life and you prevent something from happening, nobody knows about it. And let's say you allocate a billion dollars to undertake some kind of preventive program. Well, you've spent a billion dollars, but nobody knows, right? And in political life, I think most office holders generally are afflicted with kind of short-term thinking. Where, for example, climate change is concerned. You know, we've known since the 1970s that the climate was warming, that this was related to human activity since the Industrial Revolution, that the planet couldn't sustain itself at the pace at which it was warming, but it's so gradual that it doesn't amount to an urgency, a crisis, until it is. And then we have to take dramatic action. So our systems, and particularly our political system, are really not well-designed to be preventive. Even 9-11, the United States had information about Osama bin Laden. They had information about al-Qaeda. They had some red flags that they were planning a major event. But in the massive flow of information and intel that comes across a desk or whatever, it didn't actually cut into anybody's consciousness at that time to tighten up on security checks at small pilot training schools across the country. Even though an FBI agent had written a memo saying, why are all these people from the Middle East signing up to take pilot training? And so it's not as if there were not information there that might have enabled the country to protect itself. But because we really just naturally have a bias more toward responsive, reactive, than proactive, it becomes very difficult. And I think actually the hallmark of really good intelligence and intelligence gathering and analysis is that which tells the reader a trend that has been observed, the basis for the observation and the actions that the person reading the intelligence should consider taking. That's a good intelligence product. All right, we have a cadet right down here. Go ahead and raise your hand, right? There you go. Thank you, ma'am. Cadet First Class Chen from the Air Force ROTC program. You mentioned or you talked a lot about today about a number of different issues ranging from cybersecurity, climate change, all with a kind of a technological component to them. And my question is given the steps that our adversaries have taken to become more technologically capable, how can the United States remain technologically capable in order to address these pressing issues? Yeah, so you're right. Other countries in the world have taken steps to improve their technological capability. They haven't caught up yet. And I think it behooves the United States to keep investing in kind of innovation, in education, and in making sure that re-retain our technological superiority, because that's really what makes the United States the number one performing economy in the world amongst other things. That's why, for example, it's so important for our country to invest in its great universities, and particularly its public universities, because much of our technological innovation arises from the basic research that's been done at those institutions, including the campuses of the University of California, I might add. So, but as you noted, there's been some catching up, but they haven't caught up. The Chipman Marco. Good afternoon, ma'am, and Chipman First Class Marco, UC Berkeley, International Relations and Marine Science. A little bit of a continuation off of an earlier question. You were talking about, obviously, with climate change, we've seen a rise in refugee crises around the world. Do you think there'll be a restructuring in the United States to take in more refugees? And even beyond that, do you think we might ever see a secretary of immigration like in the cabinet? Yeah, so I actually think where our resources might best be deployed are in dealing with the countries of origin for climate-related immigration. So take the countries of the Northern Chronicle in Central America. They've had a lot of weather-related climate disasters, and they've also had disease, diseases such as coffee rust that destroyed the small coffee farms in El Salvador and Guatemala. That, in turn, led to migration. And then those countries of the world also suffer from violence and poor governance. I think investing in those countries so that people can live safely and securely so that they don't have to fear for the futures of their children, in a way, will be more effective than the United States simply saying, we'll take everybody. Now, on the other hand, we can take more, and we should take more. Our economy needs more. We have, I think, a responsibility to take more of the refugee population. And so I think we are the world's richest nation. We can do more in terms of immigration around the world, but really, I think we should put a focus on dealing with the countries of origin. And in terms of a cabinet department on immigration, so immigration is part of DHS. It's part in three ways. There's an agency called Citizenship and Immigration Services. That's kind of the naturalization part of legal immigration. There's Customs and Border Protection. So Border Protection focuses on illegal migration between the ports of entry. Customs deals with migration through the ports of entry. And then there's Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That deals with the interior to the United States enforcement of our immigration laws. None of these are without controversy. Immigration is, in some respects, a third rail, in a way, in politics today. But I'm not sure that making it its own cabinet department will improve that. I think what may improve it is if we could persuade our political leadership not to make it a third rail, but persuade our political leadership that, look, we are a nation of immigrants. Immigrants provide benefits to our society. We need to have a fair and enforced and enforceable immigration policy. It's Jim and Alexander. Good afternoon, ma'am. Mr. and First Class Alexander, University of California, Davis, History and Political Science. In a recent piece you co-wrote for the foreign policy magazine, it stated the need for a new federal agency with the sole power, purpose for the protection of digital human rights. My question is, what would the core principles of the digital human rights agenda look like for such an agency, the United States? I don't know. That's an interesting question. And by digital human rights, is that the right to privacy? Is that what's considered there? Yeah. I don't know, but it strikes me, it's not a bad idea to think about creating a division in, say, the Department of Justice that is focused on the continued need to evolve our laws in a digital era and also what the rights of individuals are and then how those would be enforced. So, an interesting question. Thanks. I think we have time to squeeze one more in here. So, Mitch and Bojajian, I believe you're the lucky individual. Good evening, ma'am. Mitch and Second Class Bojajian, UC Berkeley Economics. It's very clear that you're knowledgeable on many different subjects, law, state, disease and cybersecurity. And I'm certain you were knowledgeable in all these things while you were in charge of the Department of Homeland Security. My question, I believe, ultimately comes in. How did you find how far you were supposed to go in your knowledge to ensure that you could properly react to everything, whether it is in disease or the hacking and things like that? And how technical should your knowledge be? So, obviously, I don't have a technology background. I was a polysci major and a lawyer. You can learn some, but you can't know everything, right? So that's why it's important to have good staff and to have good people around you who have the knowledge and expertise, not only that, but have the ability to communicate it to someone who's a layperson, say, in a given field. And just as many technologists don't know a lot about government or law, the reverse is true. So I think it's a matter of knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know and then having good staff people around you who can fill the gap. All right, well, speaking of good staff, I've been told that that's all we have time for today as far as question goes. Professor, thank you very much. Any closing thoughts or? No, good luck to everybody. Good luck to everybody. Well, thank you so much for your time today. You've given us all a great deal to think about. Please accept the following as a token of our appreciation or the following as tokens of our appreciation for Mitchum and Moore. He's our Mitchum and executive officer today and he's got a few mementos to remember your time here supporting Navy RTC. Oh, now we have to get another one of those. Oh, thanks. And a ball cap. You probably have no shortage of ball caps. Yeah, but I can always use another one. Let's try this one on. Excellent. We'd also greatly appreciate it if you could stick around for a photo with the Mitchum and we'll gather them up here and do that. It's kind of a Nimitz tradition for us. Thank all of you for attending. Great ideas. Go very far if no one is willing to hear or engage with them. Navy ROTC Berkeley and the Military Officers Education Committee value your support. We hope to see you all next year, except for those of you first classes that are all commissioning this year. We hope you get out in the fleet and in the force and all that sort of thing. If you were invited in RSVP for the banquet, you can head directly to the faculty club as it'll start shortly. Otherwise, have a great evening.