 Good afternoon. I'm still Jeff Harley and now welcome to the afternoon session on ethics. So this symposium of sorts is the first academic event for the incoming class and it's entirely appropriate that we begin our work together with the discussion of issues in professional military ethics as it relates to your year here at the Naval War College. Now in fairness some among you will say why ethics and why ethics first? Why is it our first event? And in part it's because the War College mission is to educate and develop leaders and you may not believe it but your future duties will actually require an even more developed tool kit to deal with the ethical issues that lay ahead. Now for many the subject of ethics relates to a compliance to a set of rules which when broken often can out unethical behavior but this is not the lens we want you to look through today. It's more complex than that. Morality, right, wrong, courage, balance, code, pirates code, the ethical judgment and not lying to ourselves either. So in the Army Lenny Wong wrote a piece called Lying to Ourselves. It's about a 30 page book about the Army and about how when requirements exceed capabilities we simply lie in the name of mission. How many of us have said we've done that midterm counseling of an officer when in truth we haven't? How many of us clicked the box I have read and understand the terms of agreement to use the Internet? So not so long ago the great Greek philosopher Socrates who was on trial for corrupting youth using the same method we're going to teach you this year said the unexamined life is not worth living. So instead this year we're going to ask you to examine your life, to look through a different lens. The lens of humankind is one so let me ask you who follows the law here in this audience. Now that we all always follow the law how many of you today routinely and deliberately exceeded the speed limit to get here. On the other extreme some folks would tell you that modern-day genocide or holocausts are impossible. But in reality the veil between good and evil is very thin indeed. History does not just happen. History or his story is a secession of actions or inactions made by human beings. And human beings are not simple and cannot simply be sorted into good or bad. The great philosopher Sirius Black of the Harry Potter series said we've all got light and dark inside of us. What matters is what we choose to act on. That's who we really are. And the complexity of the ethical issues you will face will be more complex as you develop into senior leaders. So just ask King David of Bible fame whose lust for Bathsheba caused him to send Bathsheba's husband into battle in hopes that he would be killed. King David gave into the dark side. Or ask Admiral Carter, now superintendent of the Naval Academy and once the 54th president of the Naval War College who called off a strike mission on a bridge in Bosnia because a traffic jam led to too many civilians on the bridge. He was driven by a force of light that day, a different ethical code. But can we really develop new toolkits? Can we really evolve our thinking in just one year? Yes, you will. You will be educated in critical thinking. You'll study these moral dilemmas. You'll enhance your ethical understanding. And you'll walk away with not only a new perspective on joint operations, you will develop as leaders. So for example, not so long ago, my generation thought it was okay to drink and drive in spite of the damage inflicted on fellow humans. Not so long ago, all of our organizations only worried about how to take care of the victims of sexual assault and not how to prevent it through bystander intervention awareness. You will grow. You must grow. That is your ethical imperative. Moreover, the larger lens that we want you to view ethics through is the lens of your profession during your time here. Ethics as seen through this lens is a values based view. The values are the values of the organization. In the case of the Navy, our core values are honor, courage and commitment. Ethics viewed through this lens means that our actions and behaviors guide the way by which we discern issues, make judgments and ultimately make those decisions. Decisions made through this process strengthen our very profession. So Admiral Gardner Howe, the 55th president of this great college, said we have an operational imperative to see our military officership as a profession, a profession bound by ethics. The societies we serve and trust to us, they're very survival and safety. They expect us to be obedient, but intelligently obedient. They expect us to take responsibility to adapt our profession to ensure its continued relevance to future challenges and to foresee them accurately. The missions we are regularly asked to perform, we must be ready to perform together with the lives of those we are charged to lead, demands a trust in our leadership to employ every means available to make the right decisions. And that is what this year is all about. This is your opportunity to increase your knowledge by committing yourself to the coursework and challenging yourself intellectually throughout the year ahead. It is your professional ethical obligation. And you've heard me before and I've said, if not now, then when? If not you, then who? And to aid you in your development, one of the initiatives that we've started this year is to not simply have long symposiums, but instead to integrate ethics and professional ethics into our core curricula. So each of the core courses will include lessons where you will have an opportunity to discuss ethics and share ideas with classmates within your seminar. Sharing ideas with classmates and the faculty moderators enables us to learn from one another. We're also going to have periodic lectures of opportunity that showcase ethics and professionalism. So, for example, our first lecture will be on Tuesday the 4th of October with Ms. Yael Melamed. She's an Oscar-winning producer who made a movie with Dr. Dan Ariel Lee, author of the bestselling book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. As a quick side note, on the 4th of October we're anticipating inviting all of your spouses here for a special spouse night evening of lectures. You all get to take care of the kids. So this afternoon in the time that we have left, we're going to devote a few hours to start the conversation about the profession, professional military ethics, and frame the academic year in context. Two members of our faculty, Dr. George Lucas, not of the Star Wars fame, even though I made those cool references to dark and light, and Dr. Olinda Johnson will engage you in this thought process. First up is Dr. Lucas, our James Bond Stockdale Chair of Professional Military Ethics. He has served as the distinguished Chair of Ethics in the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy and Professor of Ethics and Public Policy at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. He has taught at Georgetown University, Emory University, Randolph-Macon College, the Catholic University of Lulein, Belgium, and served as Philosophy Department Chair at the University of Santa Clara. He is the author of five books, more than 40 journal articles, translations, and book reviews. He's also edited eight book length collections of articles in philosophy and ethics. After him will be Dr. Olinda Johnson. She is a professor of strategic leadership and a leader development in the College of Operational Strategic Leadership. She received her doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh. She previously served on the faculties of the Army War College and U.S. Air Force Academy. In addition to teaching the Naval War College elective program, Dr. Johnson's primary role at the college is to advise senior Navy leadership, including the Chief of Naval Operations, on leader and ethics development across the Navy. Finally, Rare Admiral Jamie Kelly, our Dean of the College of Operational and Strategic Leadership, will wrap up the symposium with some concluding remarks.