 We had a series of pearls without a string that is excellent talks but not a little wrap-up and so for this year we decided to add this panel and had Dr. Schneider been here he would be up here, had Clint still been here he would have been here too but we'd like to kind of pull together the conference and in my mind I wish I could take credit for how well I thought the logic of it flowed. I really can't I got great speakers on topics but the sequence seemed to line up really nicely in the sense that we started by talking about the nature of the profession and what makes you unique as members of a profession endowed with social trust by the society you serve and expected to be autonomous and self-policing. We flowed from that directly into a talk about the constitution and how you should understand your role as agents of policies that you yourself don't write, don't design and in the last session we had a little dialogue about why in the world would you voluntarily submit yourself to that when you're you know going in that your personal values your personal beliefs can and often some at least sometimes will diverge from the policies that you're serving. We ended the day yesterday with Clint suggesting that you really need to think a lot about guardrails because senior leaders fail for some fairly predictable reasons and today we ended up with some of the social science that suggests why that's so why we need to be more reflective about it. So I'd like to start by asking Admiral Carter to reflect on the professionalism part in particular because that conversation is well advanced in the army thanks to Don's work and then the work of Cape and the work of General Dempsey and the Navy is rapidly I think beginning to think more explicitly and more deeply about all of that in ways that you're intimately familiar with so I wonder if you would comment on that particular dimension of what we've talked about. Okay well good morning again everyone and I know this has been a great couple of days and I haven't been able to sit in on all of it but I've certainly gotten you know a lot of the key moments and I really enjoyed it. You know most of what I get to talk about when we're in this realm comes from my personal experience obviously I've been in the business a long time and when it comes to understanding the profession you know this reinvigoration this renewal that I think we're about to turn the corner on and get into again I reflect with my opening remarks about my experiences in my first fighter squadron with the Vietnam era folks and how they thought and acted and then I go right to my time in my my first command at the O5 level and it was a pretty unique experience because we were thrust into a combat situation right away and it was fairly short notice and this was the Kosovo conflict so I want to just tender my remarks based on something that I don't know what drove me to do this action but it has to do with the profession and we had such a short time between when we went into the conflict from when we left Norfolk on the Theodore Roosevelt this is in the spring of 99 we were the only aircraft carrier that was supporting the combat action there was a large shore footprint a large NATO footprint but we were the only tactical aviation outfit flying from the decks of the Roosevelt I was a commander of an F-14 squadron and I had a really young ready room 30 aviators 15 pilots 15 back seaters two of us had actually seen any level of combat at all and one of them was me and the other one was the pilot who I was flying most of my major missions with so the two guys that had the most experience were crewed together and I realized on the night before our first mission that that was probably not going to work out so well and I don't I can't say exactly where I came up with this idea but it has to do with the profession at what point and many of our discussions has been at what point do we take our youngest men and women and immerse them completely in the business and this gets to the most basic thing and each and every one of you will deal with this dilemma as senior leaders and that will be do I play everybody or do I create an A and a B team you call it a B CD team some people say well no I'm tailoring the right people for every mission and it occurred to me that nobody could define how long this particular conflict was going to go on it's a very complicated political combat arena it was hard for me to stand up in front of my 300 troops and aviators and define to them who the really bad people were in this conflict to be quite honest but I decided the night before that I was going to have everybody and I mean everybody play evenly I had no A team B team whether it was my ordinance men my aviators my mechanics because this was the profession and a lot of them came without the experience and we did have to do a couple balancing acts but I had no A team and B team and there were consequences for that there were going to be some mistakes made and I realized that I had to do a little extra work to teach what was right and wrong and so I immediately brought my training officer and some other folks and this may sound like a lot of tactical discussion but there are there are life lessons in this most people get into a battle rhythm or cycle where you do your teaching your learning your sleeping you know when you're in combat you're not doing a lot of other administrative things but I realized that we had to have a learning session at every day and everybody had to be the beneficiary of what other people were doing so that we could share the mistakes that were made not always we didn't talk about the good things we talked about the mistakes we were making tactically things in the cockpit as well as decisions that we were making in the air that had ethical repercussions you know where you put your ordinance and you know whether collateral damage unintended or intended effects those types of discussions we were having in our ready room and I was doing it at midnight and that's that wasn't very popular and I made everybody check their ego at the door and I was the one that as the commanding officer that would lead off and say alright I'm going to show you the video of what I did that day and I'm going to tell you everything I did wrong so that you don't repeat what I did and it took us about a week to get through a lot of mistakes fortunately we didn't have significant collateral damage issues with what we were doing but after a week my most junior lieutenant JG's were now seasoned combat veterans they all had five to ten missions under their belt and consequently some of my sister squadrons who were playing in A and B team they found themselves in a really tough place because they had the people that knew what they were doing and they had a whole bunch of other people that couldn't do a lot of the missions so you know when you look back and you go where did I feel like I was suddenly a part of the profession because of that extreme scenario I was able to put my most junior people in it and treat them like they were seasoned combat veterans out of the gate and the benefit of all that to this day is most of those aviators and a lot of those enlisted people and you know we're going back now 14 years they're still serving they're still in the Navy and again I wasn't thinking of that then but they were bought into the fact that I was included in every aspect of the mission no matter what my grade was no matter what my rank or experience was and those people are now leading the profession many I have two of them that are admirals already and others are commanding officers or carriers, air wing commanders and I just sit back and I watch them do these amazing things and I would tell you is because we threw them into the profession and we guided them we gave them the tools and we talked about things that are not comfortable in the ready room door was closed gloves were off and we talked about what right and wrong was they heard it you know the comment that was talked about by the chaplain about how you get people to do the right things on Liberty we had that conversation too and I was a product of the era where that was the type of behavior that you saw when you went ashore and we talked about how people would view us now after these combat actions and how we would talk about what we did and really not talk about what we did so that we didn't walk around thinking we were you know more important than somebody else who was doing these significant combat actions so I think that is things that can be influenced by senior leaders and make a big impact so that's my throat of the profession. To put it in sort of Snyder speak what you described there I would say would be several aspects of the sociological definition of profession you're engaging in self-policing you're reinforcing a shared ethic you're signaling that that's very important to you as the leader what prepared you to know you needed to do that? I think I learned that because I had seen somebody else not do that and not that I was ever part of the team that didn't get included I watched another squadron do that and I watched the consequences of failure because they didn't get everybody brought in early I have to admit I didn't understand the longer-range consequences of what I see today it would have not occurred to me that that would have been a longer-range outcome but I just and maybe it's part of my own upbringing coming from the state here a very small town where we didn't have enough kids in my high school to have people that only played football or ice hockey those same people were in the marching band think about that so that was maybe part of it it would seem to me as the Navy is turning to think more explicitly about leader development it's precisely that kind of lesson learned that would be something that ought to be incorporated explicitly into N-Flex or the new flag course or other kinds of middle mid-grade to senior officer development you see that happening anytime in the future as opposed to the more typical Navy thing of in-time technical training for specific jobs I mean obviously we have the command leadership school we have conferences like this but it's not as formalized as you would probably like it to be out there I know Admiral Kelly's team goes over and talks at the command leadership school level at the 0506 level I get to address them I bring this topic up with a lot of them but where else does it exist if you're a department head going to your ship if you're a department head going to an aviation squadron or to a submarine do you get this discussion and that's part of why we believe that reinvigorating the profession at all levels no matter what your designator you can have these kind of discussions you can have people tell you hey this is some things that have happened in the past and here are some of the outcomes good, bad or in the middle and you can make your own decisions when it's your turn so I think there's some value in that I think the Army is a number of years ahead of us and having these kind of discussions and we in the Navy are coming to the realization that as maybe our operational tempo may slow down with budget decreases that we may not get the amount of operational experience in the next 10 years as we've enjoyed maybe in the last 20 so I think there will be a need for that another suggestion from previous groups that would be nice interesting to have one of your fellow students on the panel to that end I thought I've invited Sean here to join us Sean was in my elective last term so I got to know him well and he also has the added benefit of being a non-U.S. perspective so let me just ask you the open question Sean any immediate thoughts about things you've heard that interested you or struck you as culturally different and worth remarking on? Hi so I think one of the first things that really struck me was we got here in I think one of the first things that struck me was we got here at the international program we got here in July and I think one of the very first things that we had at the start of the academic year was an ethics conference and that I mean there's no other way to signal emphasis and intent rather than the first thing out of the door was an ethics conference and I think back in Singapore in our command and staff college we do have a module a day and a day and a half on that and we do talk about these issues but there's nothing quite like a structured sort of program three times a year to really just drive that message home and I think I really appreciated a lot of the presenters that came I think the thing about ethics is that it can often be very sort of nebulous, very airy-fairy and I think the way that we try to make it very practical for people in that moment of darkness when you also have that can you recognize that and I think if you can recognize that and if the image of John Wayne comes to your mind, fine but if you can recognize that I think half the battle is won and I thought there was some very practical tips guardrails, accountability partners and I think really the key message that we shouldn't walk away thinking that it can never happen to us and I thought these were all very practical lessons so I'll take away from here. Before I let you off the hook, Sean, Linnell's talk about the Constitution and constitutional ethics was obviously very specific to U.S. culture and U.S. forms of governmental organization. Could you give us a little contrast and compare with how this works in Singapore? I think in many ways it's actually very similar. So in Singapore we operate on the Westminster and we inherited from the British a Westminster Parliament system so in the executive chain you have the Prime Minister, the Minister for Defence and the Chief of Defence and all the armed forces and we have a President who is primarily a custodial sort of role and the Constitution of the Singapore Armed Forces says that we would protect and defend the President and Republic of Singapore as well as the Constitution. All the bases pretty much. So there's the President, the country, as well as the Constitution. So I think in that sense I think it's very similar. A key difference I didn't notice was in terms of some discussions about Don't Ask, Don't Tell and some of these other issues about testifying and I think in many ways American society and American armed forces has really progressed away but all these conversations are really taking place right now and I think it's really interesting to see how this would go and I think just in my country we're not quite at the stage where in terms of the level of conversation in society as well as within armed forces we're not quite there but I do see the start of these things and I think in a couple of years we might be facing these very same conversations and I think it's really good to have these discussed here pressing issues that could drastically shape the future of armed forces that were over discussed at this ethics conference. Anyone on the panel want to offer any reflections on the panel we just had on Dr. Mastriani and my dialogue? Any thoughts about how that contributes to the discussion from any of you? Manel has something to say. Well one thing I thought was interesting your talk about cognitive dissidents and how we have and how the scope of our profession has changed in terms of what types of operations were involved. We have moved from simply being and executing direct conflict to being much more involved in stability operations and so forth and that mental change of just thinking about well that's the enemy and that cognitive dissidents of being almost able or promoting that sort of us versus them and now we enter into warfare with the expectation that at the end of the day we need to fix the mess that we created and this idea of stability operations and how that changes that sort of role or that mindset that we need to be going into with our folks in both the verbal and the actions that coin realm that you had discussed was something really fascinating as you spoke and I appreciate it. In light of that I think George I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about this. Taking up Manel's point that if you're engaged in counterinsurgency or stability operations obviously the relationship with the people is a fundamental strategic goal. Nevertheless we put you in an environment where you're experiencing being shot at and IDs exploding and people taking shots at you on a regular basis. I mean tell me a little about the psychology of maintaining the counterinsurgency mindset under that kind of stress. Well I think I'll state the obvious point which is that it's very challenging to do so that we especially with the all volunteer force I think emphasize force protection as a key tenet in our leadership posture and I remember several years ago when I was at West Point some of the people at West Point were saying that officers were going to Iraq with the stated goal that they would come back with all their soldiers and that they would consider themselves leadership failures if they had any casualties at all. That I think is an attitude that is different than perhaps existed in the past and in a counterinsurgency situation the goal of complete force protection is obviously in direct conflict with some of the operational requirements of getting out among the population and engaging in the kinds of activities that will build stronger relationships with people in the country so when you combine that with the melting into the populace not wearing uniforms purposely hiding among people who are innocent in order to promote and provoke responses that will further complicate your goals it's just very challenging when comrades are killed or wounded to maintain the right ethical posture and that I think it speaks directly to the role of leaders where leaders establish reinforce, refine values and then model them and continue throughout the relationship with the unit to ensure that those values are being acted upon but I think it's just extremely challenging psychologically I had the opportunity to interview about 150 soldiers early in the war in 2005 from Fort Carson it would come back from Iraq and listening to the stories that they told it was just devastating to hear the experiences that they had had and the frustration that they felt the anger and yet the inability at that time the army still I think wants to be a World War II army we want to fight a tank battle somewhere and it's difficult culturally to accept the idea that we cannot apply overwhelming combat power to protect ourselves and solve our problems and I think that cultural frustration trickles down to the individual soldier and demands a great deal in terms of leadership one of those Cape video games I mentioned it's called the high ground I believe one of the first decisions if you play the role of the lieutenant you get to pick which role you play if you play the role of the lieutenant one of the first things that happens in the game is he's walking through the motor pool and he hears his first sergeant say to the unit we're going to bring all you guys home and one of his first decision points is does he stop and say no we're going to try to do that but mission accomplishment is a really goal the first time I played it knowing it was the wrong answer just letting it go just to see where it would go and where it ends is the sergeant ends up lighting up a house and killing kids at the end of the game and then walks out with the dead kid in his arms so it's pretty powerful by the way the rules of engagement here if anybody wants to comment on anything anybody says please do sir I'd like to make a comment here and it goes back to some of the comments that were made previously by the doctor and it gets back to your discussion about PTSD and where that was not considered either a syndrome or a malady you know 20 plus years ago and where we are today and we are still evolving I mean the last 12 years of war have taught us a lot about post traumatic stress syndrome what it is maybe what it isn't we've seen it born out in the complex issue of suicide suicide related behaviors and we're still learning we're still evolving and what we are learning and I think all of the services have embraced this now is that to be really fit totally fit involves so much more than just going to the gym just being physically fit is a very small aspect of what it takes to be fit in today's complex world and I think these unusual combat scenarios and the environment that we operate in now is teaching that and there's a lot of soul searching going on in all of our services I mean we went from suicide being something that we've known about for many years not really understanding it to now over the last few years it's elevated it's the number one cause of death as a service member now obviously the army numbers are higher than the other services but none of the services are immune from it now of course we haven't solved this but it has caused us to take a very introspective look towards it and it does have relevance in all the discussion we're having because it gets into understanding human behavior and as I said all the services are now recognizing that it's a multifaceted person that's truly fit meaning that there is a physical fitness aspect think about how much money we all spend on having fitness facilities whether you're at sea or shore or anywhere and then maybe how much money we don't spend on embedding mental health professionals not only with our combat units but those who have returned from combat and the need for that but there are other aspects too there's a social fitness or an emotional fitness if you will and in today's world we can't deny that we were talking about the video gaming piece it's connected I agree with you that there's no evidence to prove but there is some impact to it and it can be very positive very negative it can also be it can attract young people to get into it too where they just can't stop playing those games they get addicted to them and that can't be really good behavior and then there's a religious aspect and it's one that we don't talk about very much and it doesn't matter which type of God you believe in or whether you don't believe in one at all there has to be a fitness a spiritual fitness part that people are allowed to embrace and it's interesting we have chaplains I mean we were getting into that I was listening to you talk yesterday and I recognized the Air Force the academy has recently taken the so help me God part out of the oath is that right or made it optional the honor right and that disturbs some people you know it's an emotional issue my personal view is it's one that should be understood as maybe an option as to how it should play out you know on ships at sea we still every night at 2200 have a prayer now a lot of people that may think well this gets into this forcing something on people that they shouldn't have and as a captain I would often have this very long conversation with my chaplain to say I'm not going to tell you what you can or can't say but make sure it's non-denominational because we're not going to try to push one type of religion over another but this is an uncomfortable conversation that people don't want to have and it is part of the total fitness aspects so the physical, mental social, emotional and spiritual are all part of it and we still have a lot to learn and many of you here in this audience will become smarter on this and help us evolve this so that we can make our sailors and soldiers airmen and marines that much better so as the needies expert on this I don't know if I'd go there what is the state of play on the stigma stigma about seeking mental health support I mean everywhere I've been no matter what people were told they believed that there was a stigma for seeking help and there were security clearances were at risk it's a say do complex we're saying that we're going to reduce the stigma but until we actually do it we're going to still deal with it and if you're a operator or you have very high clearance and you are diagnosed as having a significant mental health issue you run that risk and until we figure out what things are treatable and do not pose a risk to your security clearance where I would tell you we're not there yet well now you want to come up with some of that seeking a mental health services well it's a fascinating thing that I know my commanders struggle with every day and this relationship between privacy HIPAA versus their need to know as a commander and they really struggle because as a commander they want to know they need to know for the good of the individual who is suffering from some sort of mental health issue where maybe they need to pull them out of a situation or change the environment in which they're operating and yet we also have the protection of the individual and the privacy interests and our mental health community that's being very guarded about that information and it's posing a lot of tension in the field and while on one hand from an individual perspective we want to promote okay you can go and seek this help without implications to your career and it's hard for us to say that we're on the same hand saying yes but this information is going to get to your command but I certainly also in being the advisor to command hear and feel their frustrations with this tension of saying but I need to know in order for the effective operation of my unit to have a puzzle that is there's not a good answer because there's no one answer for getting there. If I could just follow up on one thing that Admiral Carter said thinking about suicide for a moment there's many people have the misconception that suicide rates in the military are closely connected to combat exposure and deployment and that turns out to not be so true but you know the we in the Army at least have significantly reduced deployments combat operations in the last few years but our suicide rate went from 10 per 100,000 in the year 2000 to now it hovers around 22 per 100,000 it's actually stayed the same even gone up a little since the Iraq war ended and the rates in the Marine Corps have increased significantly as well and in the other services to a certain degree and I think it does go back to which is sort of the overall effects on military culture of the last 12 years and how that has changed what I think is an important an important objective that we have in the military which is to make meaning of what we do soldiers I think nowadays struggle to understand the meaning of what they have sacrificed and what their friends have sacrificed over the last decade or so and looking forward to an era in which the budgets are going to be drastically cut people are going to be separated from the military at high rates and thrown back into civil society I think American military history is such that people want to believe that they were part of something significant and important and meaningful and that task is more difficult now than it once was and I think it's a significant role that leaders play in helping people to make meaning and make sense of their own experience and I think that's a real challenge today too but I think honestly that until the sort of cultural issues in the military are solved we're going to continue to see these high suicide rates and it's not because people are being repetitively deployed it's because they're having trouble making sense of the reality that now exists Sean there are a couple of points I'd like to hear from you based on my very limited time in Singapore that have come up already we've already touched on this religious pluralism and multicultural aspects of American society and Singapore obviously has a different version of that in a very strong way having three large communities of very different ethnicities, very different religious backgrounds, very different cultural roots so I'd like to say a little about how you address national unity issues and specifically in your military and then the other thing I noticed is that your leadership materials and the people who design it are almost entirely social scientists a very social scientific orientation so for example I asked to ever talk to the philosophy department the University of Singapore and it never occurred to them to do that and so I think while I love and respect my social science buddies in the end all social scientists will tell you that most people are average and it seems to me if you're looking for normative guidance from something you need more than social science to get there so any thoughts about those two I think that was more to comment I think the first thing in the question of national unity I think I should explain a bit of the background I think we all have actually a conscription system so all males above the age of 18 actually do need to sort of end this in the army instead for two years and I think the very nature of that actually changes the whole fabric of sort of the armed forces in the Singapore I think you don't have an all volunteer force you have a core of regulars yes but at the same time you have everyone in Singapore and in many ways we have found that it actually enhances national unity because that provides a common base you go to boot camp together everyone suffers together and it's a very defining right of passage and I think you add that to sort of the cultural mix in Singapore where you have three very large groups of Chinese, Malays and Indians and how that all sort of two years spent together in uniform really brings all of that together but the flip side to that really is when we want to try to make we have same conversations in Singapore about making the armed forces a profession of arms how do you be a true professional and that sometimes makes it very difficult because everyone has gone through that and experiences vary some people have a good time, some people don't some people just want to get in and just serve out their two years and be done with it and despite your best efforts to want to try to make it a professional force people, you have your detractors people who said it wasn't all that great and this happened and so on and so forth so I think that is really where we see that tension I think in terms of really trying to build that experience being a national unity building sort of experience versus really trying to be a professional force as well so I think that's sort of the first point and the second question was about the curriculum I think you hit both of them actually but it's great that was really good Lynel, one of the things that came through especially from Clint's talk yesterday is that fear of punishment doesn't seem to be a very effective motivator to good behavior I've read a couple of the IG reports in the Navy about detachments for cause and some things that glaring come through there is that every one of them knew what they were doing was wrong they believed they wouldn't get caught but they knew that it was wrong they wrongly believed that nobody else knew what was going on and they grossly underestimated the consequences to them if this went badly so as a lawyer thinking about that I know you wear many hats and a lawyer is only one of them but how can we augment the talk that Admiral Carter and I heard to the new flags and the IG and the JAG telling you all the things that you kill you for with something that's actually going to be an effective motivator to behavior well I think one thing is that we need to start thinking about what the word discipline really means we use it incorrectly all the time we in the Air Force have what's called status of discipline meetings where all the commanders get together either on a monthly or a quarterly basis and they talk about what sort of punishments were handed out as a result of Article 15s or who they discharged and why and etc and they're doing that for purposes of discussing among commanders remaining consistent etc but the fallacy exists in what we even call it we call it a status of discipline it's a status of undiscipline it's a status of punishment it is a demonstration of how we have lacked discipline and therefore needed to gain folks back in discipline is what we talked about yesterday especially in Don's presentation this idea of self-regulation this idea of doing the right thing because we should and so I think if we get back to the real root of what does discipline mean and talking with our troops setting that example setting those expectations and then living it talking about punishment as that's just what it is it's punishment when you show a lack thereof of discipline George, why is it that punishment is so ineffective? I mean you read these stories and think these are people who've got if not at all and you've got an awful lot and once this goes south they're gonna never probably recover from that loss I mean on the face of it you'd think if we were remotely rational if you having seen what happens other people get caught in this stuff it would be a deterrent but it seems to be pretty ineffective I think first of all it's an interesting thing in psychology that people who studied learning years and years ago B.F. Skinner and people like him were convinced that punishment was not an effective way to change behavior and I think that's largely because Skinner didn't want to use punishment because he didn't want to be seen as an Orwellian behavior manipulator but one thing that we've learned in psychology is an extremely effective way to change behavior if it's applied correctly and so there's a fascinating study that was done with pigeons I won't bore you too long I promise but study with pigeons where they were punishing pigeons with an electric shock for pecking a key and it turns out that if you start at a low level of punishment as we often do with humans and escalate that punishment gradually the pigeons will learn to tolerate a very high electric shock whereas if you started with a moderately higher shock in the first place the pigeon would never peck the key again so if you apply a strong and powerful punishment right when the first transgression occurs that behavior will stop we psychologists know that that's true but what often happens is we apply punishment inappropriately and continue to escalate punishments gradually which simply teaches people to tolerate punishment which is not the goal so perhaps what's happening with some of these people is that they are getting away with things throughout their career and not being punished and so the inconsistency and consequence and the consequence that's applied for their behavior really is teaching them the wrong thing which is that you can escape the consequences of certain actions so what the answer is obviously to not let people get away with anything ever Lynel if that's what we know from psychology that you want the first shock to be moderately high will the legal system allow commanders to do that they do at my base and I will say that I have seen two commanders who have taken over similarly sized squadrons who have had similar issues with lack of discipline handle them in completely different ways and within a six month period of time you can tell the one commander who went in and laid out very clear expectations and followed that up with equally clear punishments and was extremely consistent in those in those applications his squadron doesn't see me very often in terms of coming for additional article 15s etc the other commander took a very different tact he would implement some punishments in one level of severity other punishments or ignoring problems because that person was an otherwise good troop the troops saw it and the end result is we still have issues in that particular squadron and their discipline has remained in a general disarray and so I think that once a leader recognizes that and can set that tone that first initial shock if you will a good order in discipline really does follow and I'm a true believer in that Admiral you want to comment on that from a practical commander I agree with that line of thinking in fact I had that very question in front of about 45 commanding officers over command leadership school early this morning exact question and the way the question was framed how do you discipline your best and you can fill in a blank you know sailor pilot officer of the deck when they have misbehaved to the point where you are worried that they will impact your tactical ability to finish your mission or to execute your mission or it has an impact because they are great guy or they are great gal and they are already part of the fabric of your team and to remove them is going to have some impact and my advice and I have had to practice this in some pretty high profile events in my career is you have to bring the sledge hammer and you got to act and it isn't just I mean there is the right and wrong aspect make no mistake about that but there is another aspect here and it is a leadership tool because everybody else in the command will know that you are in action in effect condoning the behavior and it gets to your point where you have now through your inaction told everyone that this is okay to do and it will repeat it will find itself it will manifest itself and not just in the person who was let off but in others to know that this is how things get done in this unit so it can be very painful and it gets to the very root of the hot topic today about where does the authority for things like sexual assault really reside and I am very hopeful that we don't completely undo the commander's authority to diminish the right level of punishment especially early on before they become larger issues because to me that is the very heart of good order and discipline and that requires that you have good knowledge of what is going on in your unit that you have facts as best as you can have them and that you take the appropriate action swiftly because time matters in these events so yeah I think it is a very relevant discussion one extra issue sir do you have any comments about the discussion Jordan had briefly about stamping out casual use of language that is inappropriate yeah this this goes back to a task I was doing for our chief naval operations before I came here we were trying to advise him on some of the root causes of some of the misbehavior that is going on in our society and I went to that point I said this is not about the worst cases of sexual assault we are going to continue to deal with those and those are criminal acts I would be much more interested in concentrating on the things that reside in each and every one of us at the conscious and unconscious bias that we have because we all came from different places you know we all grew up in different regions of the world and different communities and then all of us enter service and many of us do it at such an age that we are still developing and some of us bring these biases with us that sometimes are left unchecked and we carry and we continue to carry them so how do we get to that and how do we change what we teach our young folks either at boot camp or the service academies or elsewhere what is the correct behavior for the organization you are going to join and it's never steady state you just don't give somebody a power point brief or a lecture I mean it's constant work and you have to help police yourselves it's more than having a swear jar and how you teach people that calling people homos is a joke is you just that those days are you can't do that I mean it wasn't acceptable 10 years ago but today you know you're condoning future behavior that will manifest itself in your units and have bad consequences so to me the whole sexual assault and even harassment which by the way are disconnected in all of our services but really are similar problems will not ever be rooted out until we get to the most basic understanding of what biases we carry the conscious and the unconscious and this is a lot of hard work that's going to have to happen at our most basic school houses and one that we have to continually hit upon as we go through all of our development all along the way regardless of whether you're going from E1 to E9 or 01 to 010 it doesn't matter and we need it at every level including up to the 010 level so like I said I think it's a lot of hard work and it's still something that we're just starting to understand Sean I don't want to put you on the spot no it's an okay answer but would you care to comment on what we've just been talking about well I think these are really really difficult issues and I mean just even though my time serving on the ships I think I definitely have heard a certain language a certain jokes being made and I've not done anything about it and I think really just that the awareness that I think as you're progressing your career the more the oneness is upon you and I think we talked about the being the stewards of the profession and I think that really goes to that and I think one of the things that just so I have to step away from that a little bit is that I've really broadened my definitions off is really what it means to be a professional and I think in many ways before coming here I thought about it as the first time I could drive a ship by myself the first time I could fight an air war by myself and really moving away from the definition of being a professional to away from technical qualifications the certificate that you get to really what it means what does that service stand for and really things like stamping out some of this loose language you know course jokes and I think really that becomes more and more a responsibility as we advance in the career and I think it's a problem that is not unique to this country and I think a lot of places a lot of countries elsewhere would also face that I want to make a point to the comments I made because sometimes when I start saying things like conscious and unconscious bias I'm starting to get into your world sir and I probably shouldn't stay there too long because I'm but next time you watch a sporting event on TV no matter whether it's football golf pay attention to the commercials that come on during the break and take this discussion that we're having about conscious and unconscious bias and just take a step back and look at the messaging that's going on the minimalization of women the objectification of women in our commercials I'm reminded of a commercial that I saw watching a golf tournament this summer and the commercial was there's a whole bunch of pros well known pros that are at this kind of like this golf pro shop and they're in the they're one of them is heading up the cashier and this very attractive woman walks into the pro shop she's in golf gear and she's asking to you know get some sort of information on a golf club or some lesson and she's not really getting what she needs from this sort of well known professional who's at the cash register and then at the end of the commercial Lee Trevino walks in and he says the right thing and all of a sudden he's got this very young woman underneath his arm and he's winking at his fellow professionals as he walks out the door as he has won the prize and it's just when you take a step back it just it just tells you all of the wrong things that we would want our young people and but yet we elevate these professionals to think that this is the right kind of behavior that we would expect our people to want to do and as you look at how we have come across the other social challenges in our military and I will use the racial divides that we saw in the 60's and how we came through that and not that we're perfect today but we have come a long way what we did have going for us in the military is we had American society wanting to do us do those things too even though we were leading that change in the military we didn't have American society fighting us on that when it comes to sexual assault and unconscious bias we do we don't have commercial world helping us we don't have television programming helping us it's hurting us and we're not going to turn that around but you got to be aware of it and you got to understand that what is normal behavior and what our young people and what we are subjected to daily does not line up with the say do continuum and that's going to be a challenge for us and it won't go away really profound point I think sir all right let's open it to questions from the audience please feel free to talk about anything we've now talked about or to the speakers things that they said in their talks earlier that you'd like them to further amplify please go right