 Good afternoon everybody and welcome. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildein here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and I'm really really pleased to see all of you here with us this afternoon. Before we begin I would like to thank Human Rights First, the International Policy Center here at the Ford School, and the Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation for really making this event possible. I'd also like to acknowledge two special guests who are here with us today. We have Don and Judy Rimmelhardt. Welcome. It's great to have you here. So actually named for Judy's parents, the Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation, was the organization that endowed the policy, Towsley Policymaker, in residence program that has just really been transformative for the Ford School. It's enabled us to bring more than two dozen high-profile policy leaders here to the University of Michigan. They join our faculty for brief stints. They teach students. They engage with members of the community and they really help to enlighten the school in a lot of special ways and you'll see some of that here this afternoon. They bring all of the complexities as well as opportunities from the real world into our classrooms and into our conversations and we're really grateful for having them here. The Ford School this year is especially honored to have Hardy view as our Towsley Policymaker in residence this semester. Since graduating in 1997, from what was then simply known as the School of Public Policy, not yet named for President Ford and with a dual degree from Michigan Law, Hardy has forged a really impressive and very high impact career in human rights law and policy. He's currently the legal director for Human Rights First, which is as I think this audience knows an influential nonpartisan organization. Now after earning his dual degrees from Michigan, Hardy enlisted in the Navy's JAG Corps and eventually went on to work for a private law practice. In 2010, the DC bar recognized him as its pro bono lawyer of the year for his litigation stemming from the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, his juvenile detention impact litigation and his asylum representation work and we commend him as well from all of the ongoing engagements he has. Hardy will introduce our distinguished panelists more fully in just a moment but for now, please simply join me in welcoming our special guests. Rear Admiral John Hudson, author and former Marine Phil Clay and former Army officer Ian Fishback who is now a philosophy PhD student right here at Michigan. A very warm welcome. We're delighted to have all of you here with us today. I'll also welcome Scott Cooper who's one of Hardy's colleagues at Human Rights First and who helped us to develop this event. You're also we're delighted to have you with us as well. So today's event is also co-sponsored by one of our student organizations which is known as the Ford plus SPP the SPPG group. Each year, our graduate students collaborate with colleagues from the University of Toronto School of Public Policy and Governance and they plan a major conference and case competition on issues that are of joint interest in the United States and Canada. This year's conference will kick off this Friday just two days from now right here in this room with a public event on some very timely and overlapping themes, human rights, specifically refugee policy and national security. You'll find details on the back of your program and I hope that many of you will join me back here on Friday afternoon for that event which I know will be very interesting as well. And meanwhile I understand that we have students from the University of Toronto who are watching us online. We are delighted to have you virtually with us. We will be on the lookout for your questions later in the program and we look forward to welcoming you to Ann Arbor next week. So speaking of questions, as you came into the auditorium you should have received a card and I'd like to remind you to if you have a question write it onto one of those cards and Ford School volunteers will be walking the aisles a little bit later today. Two of Hardy's students, Kothar Muhammad and Jacqueline Mullen will sort through question cards with me and Scott and we'll be reading your questions during the Q&A session. If you're watching online please submit your questions via Twitter using the hashtag policy talks and so with no further ado I'm delighted to turn the floor over to Hardy. Thank you Dean Collins. Welcome everyone it is an honor for me as a four school alumnus to serve as a Towsley policymaker in residence this semester. I have the pleasure of teaching and learning from 17 Ford School masters and undergraduate students. They are working me hard let me tell you but I also work out of class every Friday quite intellectually energized. That opportunity in today's talk would not have come to pass without Dean Collins's leadership and vision. In my short time teaching here it has become readily apparent to me that she helps set the conditions for greatness at the school. Thank you Dean Collins. I also want to thank the Harry A. Margaret D. Towsley Foundation for their generous support of the Ford School throughout the years. Their support redounds to the benefits of all to the benefit of all of our students who in my admittedly biased opinion will one day depart Ann Arbor prepared to leverage their intellectual gifts in the name of analyzing understanding and shaping policy. Finally I have to give a shout out to my organization my employer Human Rights First for the latitude to moonlight in Ann Arbor for allowing me to make perhaps just one more ask in the name of the Ford School and for enabling me enabling me to conspire with the likes of Scott Cooper a former Marine Corps aviator who serves as Human Rights First Director of National Security. Scott also leads our Veterans for American Ideals project which is a nonpartisan nationwide grassroots group of veterans who share the belief that America is strongest when its policies and actions match its ideals. Veterans for American ideals seeks to elevate and amplify the voices of our veterans in the human rights sphere. So it should be no surprise to anyone that I turned to Scott immediately to help me map out the contours of today's panel. He's much smarter than I am. His work in our mission at Human Rights First endeavor us to engage people of different ideological and political stripes in meaningful dialogue about protecting and advancing human rights. So that's why we're here today. Our hope is to help start and promote a conversation about where national security and human rights where human national security and human rights are not ships passing one another in the night. Rather, they complement and inform thoughtful nuanced conversation about what it means to be secure and protective of the rights inherent to all human beings regardless of nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, color, religion or language may be. To help us navigate these ostensibly parallel paths to an intersection, we have with us today Admiral John Hudson, who served honorably in the United States Navy for almost 30 years, culminating in his service as the Navy's judge advocate general, where he led a global law firm of lawyers and legal men charged with carrying out military justice, advising sailors and commanders and helping craft policy. Admiral Hudson also later served for 11 years as the Dean of the University of New Hampshire Law School. While in the Navy, Admiral Hudson was my boss, and I'm internally grateful that throughout the planning of this panel, he never recalled that I was so late to my first meeting with him at the Pentagon that it inspired him to tell me that it was an inauspicious start to my legal career. Look how well you turned out. We also have Phil Clay, a former Marine and now an accomplished author. Phil served as a Marine Corps Public Affairs Officer in Iraq for 13 months, which later was the basis of his first book, Redeployment. That collection of short stories garnered him the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction. If you have come to read any of Phil's many works, such as his recent piece in The New York Times, one adjective invariably leaps to mind, compelling. And finally, we have Ian Fishback, a former 15-year Army officer who served four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ian, a proud Wolverine, is currently earning his PhD here, having earned his master's degree here in philosophy. His research focuses on the relationship between the morality and law with respect to two principles, proportionality and necessity. When I mentioned to my students that Ian would be one of our panelists, I quickly learned that one of them wanted to be his graduate student instructor. The student simply described his intellect as intimidating, needless to say she opted for something else. Having spent time with Ian today, I get it. So we have the lawyer, the writer and the scholar, all of whom wore the uniform. So let's start with the lawyer. Admiral Hudson, in my student days here at Michigan before joining the Navy's Jaguar, I would have been tempted to pose a McCarthy-esque question to those in the military along the lines of, are you now or have you ever been against human rights? Embedded in my then world view was the assumption that human rights and national security are more like oil and water and less like maize and blue. They just don't mix. So we assume bad faith on the part of the person in the other camp. Is there anything to this view? And do you still see strands of it today, Admiral? I suppose they're, thank you, Hardy. And thank you for your support in this. And to Dean Collins, having been a dean, I know it ain't easy. And to Scott and Human Rights First that have brought me along. I loved your, I loved your analogy, good Navy analogy of two ships passing the night and hoping that they're passing in parallel human rights and national security and that they don't actually collide in the dark sea. I want to impress on you, take my few minutes. Well, I also want to thank Erin Flores. She's been great. She's just been so helpful getting us here and putting it all together. Thank you, Erin. I want to impress on you, if I may, as kind of from a 30,000 foot perspective, how what we're going to talk about here for the next hour or so is one, very, very important. And two, really, really fragile. The intersection of national security and human rights. If we mess this up, that intersection, if we forget what we're all about, we will lose the war on terror. We will lose the war on terror. And I'll, I'll describe why I say that in a minute. There is a thing called the garrus, and I'm going to mispronounce this, garrus, garrus mine off doctrine. Garrus mine off is a Russian general in Putin's army. And I'm not, I don't often quote Russian generals, but he said, at least not positively or affirmatively, the boundary between war and peace is blurred. And that in the future, covert actions are what will prevail. We are engaged in what I would call it, asymmetric or nonlinear. I'm going to talk about the war on terror. I always hiccup when I say the war on terror, the conflict, the fight, something against terrorism. But I will refer to this war on terror because it flows trippingly off the tongue. In this war, in an asymmetric war, the strategy is to pit your strength against the enemy's weakness. And that should work very well for us. Because our great strength as a nation isn't our military might, though mighty it is. It isn't the essential island nature of our land mass, although that gives us a great strategic advantage. It isn't our economy strong, though it may be. Our great strength as a nation is who we are and who we have been for many, many years since the beginning in terms of how we treat each other and how we treat other people, human rights. So if that's our great strength, the enemies is bereft of that. That's their great weakness. They have no sense of human rights or adherence to human rights or that human rights are important. The enemy can't defeat us militarily. They don't have the lift. They don't have the manpower. They don't have the money. They cannot defeat us militarily. Victory for the enemy is to make us more like them. To make us more like them, in the fog of war, in the hell of war, changing who we are to be more like them. And that's easy enough to do. We hear of waterboarding or even worse. We'll kill their families. We'll take their oil, torture, indefinite detention without trial. Every time we do one of those things, we become more like the enemy. And we have to very, very assiduously avoid that, falling into that trap. So that's why it's important. That's the way we could lose the war that is going on right now. Why it's fragile is because over the years, warfighting has evolved. We talked a little bit about this over the centuries. We talked a little bit about this at lunch today. We've gone from swords and spears, to longbows, to muskets, to rifles, to howitzers and nuclear weapons and drones. War gets increasingly impersonal in many respects. The second theory of thermodynamics is entropy. I'm going to kind of make this up for any physics majors that so don't hound me afterwards if I modified it a bit to try to make a point. The rule of entropy, the law of entropy basically says that any system through time will degrade to chaos and ultimately to ultimate chaos without some outside force ensuring order on the system. For us, for the military, for warfighting, for us as a nation in our international relationships, those outside forces are the Lieber Code dating back to the Civil War, the Hague Conventions after World War I, the Geneva Conventions after World War II, the Convention Against Torture, the Detainee Treatment Act. All of those things are the forces that ensure order on our system and that to the extent we let those go, to the extent we ignore them, to the extent we kill their families and engage in waterboarding and worse, to the extent we forget human rights, which is the one that brought us to the dance in the first place. We will, our system will degrade into chaos. The Sun Shui, who is a Chinese general and philosopher about 2,500 years ago or something like that, about 500 BC, said that the supreme art of war, art of war was his famous book. It's on all the shelves, you can get it. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. We have to figure out a way to do that. So yes, Hardy, I think that it is very problematic. It's important and it's fragile. We'll come back to that. Thank you. Phil, in your piece in your Times last month, you wrote an article and in it you reference how sailors and marines in Iraq providing medical care to another marine who had been severely wounded by an enemy sniper and how that marine dies on the table despite the best efforts of the sailors and the marines. And then without much time to catch their breath, the unit was informed that the sniper, the enemy sniper was going to be brought in for medical care and having been wounded severely and that sniper survives. And in fact, the members of the unit pump him full of American blood and then a Navy nurse sits in the helicopter with him and accompanies him to a hospital base. And there's a passage that I want to quote verbatim where you write, this was standard policy part of tradition stretching back to the Revolutionary War when George Washington ordered every soldier in the Continental Army to sign a copy of rules intended to limit harm to civilians and ensure that their conduct respected what he called the rights of humanity so that their restraint justly secured to us the attachment of all good men. From our founding, we have made these kinds of moral demands of our soldier. It starts with the oath they swear to support and defend the Constitution and oath made not to a flag or to a peace of ground or to an ethically distinct people, but to a set of principles established in our founding documents and no that demands a commitment to democracy, to liberty and to the rule of law and to the self-evident equality of all men. The Marines I knew fought and some of them died for these principles. So what inspired you to write that? And I suspect that that's one of many stories that sort of help brings your point about what we're doing, the values we're trying to instill in our Marines and other servicemen and women. Absolutely and it's because you know the things not just the things that made me proud to be a Marine that made me feel like we had honor that you know but also that I think were integral to some of the successes that we had during the time that I was in Iraq were related to the core values that were supposed to be upholding in the first place. And certainly with kind of the current political climate, I think a lot of that's been lost. You know we're not, we should not be just about securing our interests, getting the oil, getting the money. We're not a drug gang. We don't kill for profit. And you know the consequences there are not just moral and I think that's important. The story that I wanted to share with you all, so in November 2009 in Patekha province Afghanistan, this is a group of Navy SEALs that conducted a raid where they ended up killing a Taliban sub governor, a couple of Taliban fighters, and also accidentally a few civilians. This is the sort of thing that's happened many times before but the specific circumstances here are worth going into. So they'd raided a compound filled with nothing but Taliban so far so good, a clean raid, and then they saw that about 100 yards down the road there was a truck and underneath the truck they could see on the night vision there were what looked like three people maybe sleeping. So they do a tactical call out and the three emerge and the SEALs demand that they raise their hands in the air. Two of the people raise their arms. One of one of the people doesn't. Things escalate, there's more shouting, and one of the SEALs ends up shooting the Afghan who wouldn't raise his hand. The other two understandably freak out and they end up shooting them as well. It was only afterwards that the SEALs realized that the three had no weapons, no connections to the Taliban, and the reason the one Afghan hadn't raised his hands was because he was a 15 year old teenage boy with a muscular degenerative disease and he physically couldn't. Now normally we wouldn't hear this story in such detail. The only reason I noticed because there was an infantry unit deployed to the same region, the 1st Battalion of the 501st, and a buddy of mine, infantry officer, Nate Bethe, ended up having to deal with the aftermath. For unit like Nate's these things weren't just regrettable tragedies, a little bit of collateral damage that's part of the cost of doing war. They were very dangerous. Now anecdotally soldiers and Marines can tell you about the increased hostility they'd encounter out on a patrol after a unit had committed civilian, had killed civilians, but we don't actually have to rely on anecdotes. The political scientist Jacob Shapiro and the former special forces Colonel Joe Felter recently looked at every area of operations in Afghanistan and analyzed violent incidents tracking them against civilian casualties and they found out that, hey, no kidding, violence goes up after you kill civilians. And when they looked at Iraq they found that you could track tips received by the coalition forces against civilian casualties and find that again unsurprisingly when coalition forces cause a civilian casualty they get fewer tips from the local population about the location of IEDs and enemy forces. When our enemy al Qaeda interacted the same thing, we'd get more tips. Now back in 2009, Nate was furious. His men were doing daily patrols through the towns and countryside of Paktika province meeting with village elders, risking their lives trying to make friends and form alliances. And now these jerks, these SEALs who are supposed to be a force multiplier are jeopardizing that mission. Nate told me, there I am trying to pitch a notion of Jeffersonian democracy to Afghans and having to say, oh yeah, we're all about transparency and rule of law and that's why these shadow ninjas just killed your family and there's nothing anybody can do about it. That raid as well as another raid where the SEALs killed a couple of elderly men eventually led the battalion commander Colonel Baker to demand greater restrictions on the SEALs operations in his area for the very simple reason that an overly aggressive posture was making his mission harder. Nate eventually confronted one of the SEALs over the civilian casualties and the SEAL, a heavily muscled dude, looked at him with contempt and said I'd rather be tried by 12 than carried by six. A real tough guy response at least in that SEAL's mind it was but in Nate's mind the situation was very different. That SEAL had created a dangerous situation for his unit and the cost wasn't going to be borne by that SEAL. He wasn't likely to be tried by 12. The cost was going to be borne by Nate's soldiers who are now more likely to get shot in the head by an enemy sniper or have their legs blown off by IEDs because of the way that SEAL's actions had alienated the local population. That SEAL's callousness and tough guy veneer notwithstanding it's not too hard to say that what happened is simple. A highly trained fighter surrounded by fellow warriors faced with a relatively simple situation that they had under control panicked and shot a disabled child for no good reason thereby jeopardizing the lives of Nate's soldiers and the mission of his battalion. To Nate those weren't the actions of a tough guy they were the actions of a coward. The incident stays in my mind because I think it's indicative of a more general confusion about what constitutes military virtue that we have in our society today. In popular media we focus on heroes defined by kill counts and lethality. Reading books about America's deadliest soldier or watching movies about the most lethal sniper in US military history these accounts offer a simple and clear narrative in which a tough good guy kills a numeral bad bad guys and saves the day hopefully not getting too worried about the horrible cost along the way. Except a decade and a half into two wars we've had to relearn the old lesson from Vietnam that you can't kill your way out of this conflict. If all you needed to win wars was a callous attitude towards human life Bashar al-Assad would be ruling over a peaceful stable Syria right now. But in the military heroism is tied intimately to self-sacrifice. The quintessential military heroism story is not about indiscriminate slaughter but about guys like Kyle Carpenter who in a battle in Marja threw himself on a grenade to protect a fellow Marine and suffered severe injuries to his face and right arm and lost his right eye. And the history of the past 15 years is filled with simple stories stories of units like the one commanded by my friend Mac Gallagher which hunkered down in the midst of a three-way firefight in the middle of a neighborhood and refused to shoot back despite the bullets flying around because of the heavy presence of civilians around them. It wasn't just that they didn't want to kill us child by accident it was that they knew how dangerous killing a civilian would be in the long term. Achieving the mission sometimes means knowing when not to kill. And it's not hard to look back and see how military units that acted in accord with our values as nations are the ones that tended to be more successful. Which is why I'm so glad to be here talking to all of you. As we become more and more insulated for more and any kind of serious discussion of military policy becomes easy for us to avoid hard thinking about the consequences of our moral failures and more. And the reasons why the beginning of any military education includes an intense focus on the values that are meant to define our armed services. These days we have confused cruelty with toughness. Callously gunning down a disabled child because you're terrified of the small chance he might be a threat to you is not toughness just as for example calling for a complete and total shutdown of Muslim immigration to the United States in the midst of a massive refugee crisis because you're terrified of the infinitesimally small chance that a refugee might someday pose a threat is not toughness either. It's cowardice and cowards do not win wars. Ian, I'm thinking of one of the things that happened while you were in uniform in an act of courage it was you're writing a penning a letter to Senator McCain in 2005 in which you really so called out the lack of standards when it comes to torture and interrogating those we've we've captured in the battlefield. At one point in the letter you argue that you state others argue that clear standards will limit the president's ability to wage the war and terror. Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable. What led you to write what that letter to the senator and doing so while in uniform? Well originally my concern was that I thought we were relying to the american people specifically to congress because Abograb happened and then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld testified that those types of acts were aberrations and actuality a lot of what happened Abograb wasn't as much of an aberration as was claimed. But I then went through a process of about a year-long investigation of what was going on and I ended up looking more and more into torture and to even write about torture against torture and came to the conclusion that it was not only morally repugnant but it was also extremely ineffective which made the morality of it even that more circumspect. And when I say that it's inconsistent with our own values it's inconsistent with liberal values and I think Jeff telling with what John and Phil said to a certain degree about the way that effectiveness and morality come together in these types of situations is it's not only morally abhorrent but it's not an effective strategy for the United States to institute those types of policies and what do I mean by that? Well it might be an effective policy for an autocracy to institute a torture regime because an autocracy relies on terrorism of its own people to maintain order and so if you use a mechanism like torture it can actually enhance the stability of the regime but if if you're trying to instill a liberal regime then you can't rely on those types of tactics to instill terror and you're actually gonna simultaneously you'll fail to achieve order in that manner and you won't be able to achieve order in the manner which the lower institutions normally do which is they have a credible promise of respecting human rights and so I look at it as kind of liberal regimes have the opportunity to to issue a credible promise that they're going to respect those values human rights etc and build those types of institutions they have a relative inability to instill terror to give the credible threat that they're going to institute that type of terroristic regime whereas autocracies tend to have the inverse situation where autocracies tend to be able to issue credible threats of terrorism and they have a hard time issuing credible promises that they'll respect human rights so when we try to use those types of tactics they're ill suited for our own situation they're ill suited for the overall campaign that we want to wage we've already tried that method for a long time during the Cold War when we supported numerous autocracies in the Middle East that were essentially terroristic whether it was Saddam Hussein the Shah of Iran Saudi Arabia to some degree Egypt to some degree and what we found is that fomented so much anger and resentment that we ended up with international terrorist organizations oriented on attack of the United States so it's not a feasible long-term solution for us to use these terroristic methods in the long run we have to support human rights and the types of institutions that are going to undermine those types of seed beds for international terrorism the problem is I think that when we look at what intuitively works at a gut and visceral level people have a hard time understanding that you can't merely beat someone into submission I used to tell my cadets at West Point I used to very first day of class I'd tell the cadets I said so how many of you think that you can get someone to do your will through the use of force and they'd all raise their hands and I said okay now think about it in this way if I punch you in the nose what are you going to do I punch you in the nose and tell you to do something what are you going to do and all of them respond well I'm going to punch you back and say well exactly it's but for some reason we have this intuition that political violence works I also worry that as soon as you institute a rule the rule carries a certain moral hazard because when you tell someone there's a rule whether it's true or not that person tends to assume that the rules instituted for fair play and that if you break the rule you gain some kind of advantage it's just this intuition that works on a playground for kids it works for adults too you're like out there some teacher gives you a rule you're going to play dodgeball but don't do x well if I do x then I must have some kind of advantage but a lot of the rules aren't designed that way instead they're more like spearing in football I don't know how many of you are familiar with football spearing is when you lead with the crown of the head and you might break your own neck and the rule again spearing has nothing to do with some kind of advantage that you might gain it has to do with protecting yourself and keeping yourself from doing something stupid and actually a lot of human rights rules are like that they're not restrictions that undermine your military capability they're an acknowledgement of the psychological pressures that exist in war and tend to exert themselves on soldiers and and civilians on the battlefield and lead them to do stupid things that cause a lot of harm and human rights are designed to prevent you from doing unnecessary harm they're not designed to keep you from accomplishing your mission so I worry that those basic intuitive impulses underlie what John was talking about about how sometimes there seems to be this tension between mission effectiveness and human rights but in actuality most of the time that tension is false it's just it's just a chimera in your talk I could hear strains of values and sort of what we're trying to instill in our soldiers airmen and sailors and marines what are those values I mean what is it that we're trying to instill in these women and men as they go forth in the operating theater and what those values say about us I think those values say everything about us are for better or worse you know the extent to which we are successful or not in instilling those values makes all the difference you know the the navy core values are honor courage and commitment which are three words and unless the navy is successful or to the extent that the navy is successful in instilling concepts of honor courage and commitment into all the sailors nothing happens you know that we have to be able to do that and we have to struggle with it you know we've all seen is kind of an example off the off the subject in a way but it I'm reminded of we've all seen the the scandal within the marine core which we're told extends beyond just the the marine core now somewhere some people failed in instilling in a number of marines the the the the values that we're all fighting for and what what the hell's the point of fighting if if you don't know what you're fighting for or if you're willing to sacrifice what you're fighting for during the fight it you know it it takes away the whole point of what it is we're we're trying to do I think the military is is better than it was with regard to identifying those values and fighting for them uh within I don't mean fighting a war but fighting for them within the military and we've but we've also got a long long long way to go you know Phil's example you know it is an example of it you know you can't make too much of isolated incidents but you know once you start having them pretty soon they're not isolated anymore they're just but it's not doctrine you know the thing that scared me so much about torture was when John Yoo and Judge Bybee in the hallowed halls of the department of justice said torture was only those things that that instilled or caused print of body damage and death well that allowed for waterboarding and a whole host of of unspeakable crimes and uh but that became doctrine that became what it was we were doing and that was a very very sad time for the United States it wasn't isolated incidents it was it wasn't just bad apples it was us doctrine coming out of the department of justice in the White House that was a terrible time I'll you know I have a friend Deli Dachman who is in the second battle flusion um it's Marine an author and journalist um great guy and he he described to me once uh watching a you know Marine had been injured and was out exposed and another Marine ran out to try and rescue him was shot and then he said and then another Marine went out to try and rescue rescue him and he thought to himself why would somebody do that like you just saw another guy get shot right there's no reason it's not going to happen to you um and I was thinking more generally about courage what what it even is right because courage as he told me it's not an emotion he said I never felt brave felt fear um but what's the opposite of fear the answer is fairly simple right it's love people do that because they love each other they love the film you know the the Marine around them and he and he you know talked to me about how training his troops when you when you want a really effective unit right one where people trust each other and work really well with each other uh it's a process of putting them through a lot so that they actually in a weird way fall in love with each other right and you take them out and you put them into really trying circumstances and why people are doing that in the first place um and the motivations for it um you you can't get that kind of thing by beating somebody or you know telling them that i'm just going to brutalize you until you're a great brave soldier right um uh when you sign up uh you swear an oath and as you know you quoted from me it's to the constitution it's to a set of principles right uh Ralph Ellison once called the united states an abstract and futuristic nation right um justerson said we're the only nation uh that uh has a creed um you know we are uh as Ellison said we're bound by sacred words words like uh you know equality uh rights of man and so on and that makes what we are universal it makes us able to reach out across culture um it can make us a very compelling force in the world that's able to you know garner allies um uh and actually garner the kind of respect and good feeling that you need to to to be an effective actor in the world um and so inculcating that understanding of not just the way that somebody acts in a unit and you need to be bound by a set of uh of you know emotions um but also have a moral relationship not just to the members of your platoon but to your nation and to the to the mission that you're serving and it can't just be based on pure self-interest um or you know said getting the oil or getting mine does anybody want to die for that we're not going to be able to be an effective nation if we don't actually call the people's you know highest values um and we're not going to have the kind of war fighters that you need uh to make the kind of decisions that people are making in these very murky and complicated war zones um if if you only focus on on the most brutal aspects of of of war Ian we have this respect and good feeling on the one hand that members of the american citizenry feel toward the military you know we may be against you know the media we may be against congress we may be against political parties but we sure are for the military to the tomb possibly of adding 54 billion dollars to the budget on the other hand you have those who say you know what is this war have what do they have to do with me that it's it's it's something over there there's no draft we hardly have any members of of our congress who have served in uniform so you've got this these two things that that reside in the same space but they're inherently at odds what do you make of that well the main thing I make of it is people are confused they they lack information they lack confidence in information they have they lack confidence in their own judgment they lack experience and what happens in those types of conditions um is that people look for markers of trust rather than the specifics of the issue um we see this in our own political discourse I think climate change is a really good example um what we find is that people don't really look for the facts on climate change what they look to is they look to their political leaders for the people who seem to share the same values they do and then once they identify whatever group that is they just accept whatever that group says I think the same phenomenon is going on with the military right now there are certain values that are embodied by the military that a lot of people think are very admirable and most people don't have the experience or the knowledge to be able to make judgments about military affairs and so anything the military says goes I mean it's that marker trust is there they trust the military etc um and I think that's very dangerous for a whole host of reasons we lack the ability to think critically about whether or not the military is telling us good information whatever the military institution tells us is probably going to be accepted by the vast majority not only of lay people but of the highest level politicians in our country um and so I think that um the the trust on the one hand and the distance on the other are actually intimately related to each other so as we prosecuted these wars in Afghanistan Iraq we've clearly made some mistakes have we learned from these mistakes I have I don't know who else you have okay what have you learned uh I you know it's that's a really interesting question I think that um learning from mistakes doesn't necessarily mean you're not going to repeat the mistakes uh you know we all know that in our own lives you know there's some mistakes that I have learned time and time and time again uh and yet uh you know they they still happen and you know I would like to think that yeah we're we're better now we strive to be better now than we were before but we we still aren't all that good about it sometimes Scott and human rights first have put together a group of retired admirals and generals uh that's gotten to be a pretty large group and uh you know a bunch of four stars and three stars and a few you know two-button lawyers uh involved and that would have never happened you know when I retired from the navy in 2000 the idea that I was going to be on the board of directors of a human rights organization or very closely involved with a bunch of other retired admirals and generals in a human rights organization would have it was the furthest thing from my mind uh and and but then things started to kind of fall apart uh in my mind in uh in how we were prosecuting the war and uh you know that we opened up Guantanamo uh which as you recall was was picked was identified as the place to put our uh detainees because it was a lawless zone you know it wasn't the United States and it wasn't Cuba and so that the president and others thought that we could put people there and there won't be any laws there won't be any constitution that covers them that's the whole reason it was there and then we decided to engage in torture and or enhanced interrogation so you know in in the life of a country that wasn't that long ago you know the supreme court came along and said uh in a famous decision that the law did apply in Guantanamo so that we got out of that one uh you know John McCain bless his heart came along and uh ensured that in the detainee treatment act uh that uh we would not engage in uh torture anymore uh although even then it's come up during the Gorsuch hearing uh there's there's a question about the extent to which the commander in chief in his role as commander in chief could override that if he thought that it was important or ignore it I guess uh for our national security so you know the answer to the question is uh yes and no I think we learned the lessons I think we repeat the mistakes but I would like to think maybe this is just my you know uh Michigan born and bred state of not university of born and bred uh optimism but uh I'd like to think that we are striving and we'll ultimately get better at it yeah I remember famously reading in an army general who said something like we don't do body counts um and then later on in um David David Petraeus revised the U.S. Army field manual in 2006 to focus on the human cost of war in terms of the population and and the many collateral effects that ensue when when war is undertaken are we getting better at and this probably goes more to you you know we're getting better at truly understanding and thinking about the cost the human cost of war as we make policy or we still struggling with that I think we still struggle for a number of reasons I think um there are pockets of knowledge in the military that really understand counterinsurgency but the idea that it's permeated the institution I think is false I divide the officer corps into probably three large groups I include senior NCOs when I talk with the officer corps there's one group that really gets it unfortunately I put them probably below 30 percent maybe well below 30 percent there's another group that probably comprises the majority and that group understands the terminology but then they take that terminology and they just slap it on the template they know which is conventional war um and then there's another group that and is probably larger than you would expect adamantly opposes the idea that counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare is part of what the army is supposed to do or what the military is supposed to do and and the reason I'm skeptical I'll just give a couple examples for example when I was in Baghdad at the height of the surge it was pretty clear to me that the commanding general Baghdad didn't really understand counterinsurgency I think he was in the second group where he he was a fair military officer who understood conventional war and he learned all the words and he would say the words but then when you looked at what he was doing he didn't really understand like he actually wanted to take missions away from Iraqis and give them to Americans even though the Iraqis were really competent at what they were doing it was like counterinsurgency in reverse um and then uh there there's a friend of mine who was the intelligence officer for a large regional of Afghanistan and he said that uh he was tasked by a brigade commander to template the enemy and use world war one as an example so he had to template a counterinsurgency and this is 2011 he had to template for a brigade which is a high level it's about a thousand soldiers in a brigade more than that um the commander a full bird colonel wanted the intelligence officer to template Afghanistan as if it were world war one I can't think of any two things that are more diametrically opposed than those two wars um and you get these examples that crop up and I think part of the problem is that institutional learning is very challenging when you don't have clear markers of success and failure and I think on a conventional battlefield the markers are clearer in world war two we replaced a lot of generals and high ranking officers when they just didn't cut it on a battlefield you lose a battle it's really obvious you lost a battle like on the plains of europe you lost a battle in north africa then you didn't do a good job you're getting replaced and so you could do that I think in counterinsurgency the metrics are a lot harder to identify they tend to take place over longer periods of time and it's hard to identify who's responsible for the change in the metric amongst your own friendly forces and so what tends to happen is there are narratives that get told and there's a lot of fancy talk I mean not to disparage business but in business when you get the fancy board meeting and everybody just slaps a veneer on what's actually going on and they can talk their way out of anything I think the same thing happens in counterinsurgency like the the description of responsibility tends to be more at the mercy of the rhetorical abilities of the different people in the room than it does the actual objective facts on the ground you know fill the stories you've told make me wonder do our men and women out in in operational theater do they do they understand human rights and right that we have all these combatant commanders and um establishing human rights offices we sort of share the principles widely and yet there's this still notion there's still the notion that the militaries are our job is to blow things up and kill people so what happens when the boots hit the ground when human rights how does that actually play out I think leadership has a huge role in that um and and you know it's like Ian said it's really going to vary widely um not just you know battalion by battalion but even sometimes company by company platoon by platoon and um you know what kind of example senior leaders are setting for the young marines I you know I knew one battalion that was going out to Afghanistan and you'd asked any Lance Corporal how are you gonna be successful in Afghanistan from that particular battalion to eight this is in 2009 he would have said um through cultural effectiveness right can you imagine a marine saying that but that's what you that's what you got from any of them because that's what they were being told right and they're you know 19 year old kids who want to do well and their leadership is like really demanding they're demanding everybody you know at the senior level is is you know reading all these books and trying to to learn as much about the region as possible um you know uh there's a uh I knew another colonel um who during the combined arms exercise before they were going to uh Iraq um you know a trainer was trying to take people through escalation of force uh procedures and the colonel walked in and just cut the thing off he goes in our battalion you know we shoot to kill I was like great you know um I guess we'll have a lot more dead civilians and traffic stops unnecessarily um that's really gonna help the mission uh so it depends um uh and but I think that there are a lot of people at this stage who you know have spent earlier part of their career doing counterinsurgency and saw the differences and so you're starting to get more people who were you know lieutenants and captains and majors uh in in different stages of these conflicts and saw you know what worked and what didn't um I mean even you know talking to been doing a lot of interviews with folks in the special forces community there's sort of a long time uh in Afghanistan or one uh one soldier said to me it's like we're going to the same valleys every year going up and we weren't telling the people we're going to bring you money for schools or roads because we didn't have any of that stuff we're just doing you know moving to contact interdiction missions we're just going out going we're going to get in the biggest gnarliest firefight getting these lopsided firefights and for a while I wondered like man like we're just you know why is a Taliban throwing these people at us and then it took me a while before I realized oh because they can um was the saying uh we have the watches but they have the time and um and then you know in 2009 they tried to change strategy and it was this very painful process and it's you could talk probably much more effectively than I about to the extent to which that gets down to the individual member but you know right now everything that we're doing is a supervised training assist mission really I mean not everything we do but we're increasingly relying on things where we depend absolutely on local partners and yet we talk about war here as if it's something that we can do alone without any allies and without any concern for the way that our actions in one sphere might have you know like for example the refugee ban might affect our ability to work with allies in another you've been a big opponent of rule of law and human rights how does it play uh you know this is this stuff is that we're talking about is really hard you know the civil war and world war one world war two and many respects were easier they're they were more brutal more people were killed uh but uh there were clear lines the uh everybody's wearing uniforms there was a chain of command on both sides and everybody knew what victory would be not necessarily able knew that we were going to be able to achieve it but they at least knew what it was you know how many of you know what winning the war on terror is you know how do you know if you've won it wins it over and I think that that uh we sometimes ask the military to do too much you know as as uh Phil and Ian have have said that the military does what it does kill people and break things really really well but the military is never the real solution all the military can do is buy you provide to you the time and space for the real solutions to take place and that's never the military you know that that's not what they're that's not what they're trained to do that that they can do some peacekeeping but they're not very good at nation building and it's organizations like doctors without borders and amnesty international and human rights first and those kinds of groups that can actually create the change that's necessary for the war to end but because you know less than one percent of us have no anybody that's in the military now and Ian or Phil was just saying there's no or maybe it's hardy you know there's nobody very few people in congress anymore so we just you know let department of defense you know let the joint chiefs you know they'll they'll handle it and they can handle what they can handle really well but they're not so good at being able to handle what they can't handle and that's keeping the peace you know the the the berlin wall didn't come down because of our military might the berlin wall came down because of our ideas and our ideals that was our strength that's what caused the soviet union to collapse let's get some questions now from the audience and hear what they're what's on their minds or jack wood first i'd just like to give a big thank you to you hardy and to our panelists that was really engaging and insightful let's give a round of a plus so our first question from the audience do your insights about human rights abuses during times of war and involving us forces travel to security and protest in the us and communities like south dakota or ferguson missouri i'm sorry what was the verb in that travel travel extent i i actually think there's there's been some really interesting work from veterans about this about and about police brutality is a wonderful article by alex horton um that was in the washington post called i used to raid insurgents in iraq um the police raided me and my home in in um wherever he was living it's a suburb of dc um and i mean it's the same thing right you you you don't for effective policing and police officer you need the cooperation of the community right uh you you can't brutalize your way to effective policing in a democracy just doesn't happen um and so i think that you know they're they're there's certainly some groups that are um you know very much about and i you know i have a friend who works for the loss for the new york police department um in in uh you know trying to reduce violence and working on community relations and for her it's you know it's very simple that you know the more we're able to limit the things that that rightfully enraged the community against us the safer it is for us the safer it is for the community the better it is for everybody um and uh it's it's just an integral part of of of policing yeah i worry that it doesn't go that it goes the other way that what happens overseas and in the in the war on terror uh becomes kind of the norm and that's how we deal with people and we don't value human life quite as much as we once did so this clear empirical evidence that it's not just these wars it's previous wars too but when abuses tend to happen um in combat zones um in militaries that fight for democracies those soldiers when they get out they tend to join the law enforcement forces back home and so there's uh deris rajali torture and democracy is a really good study of some of this shows how the torture techniques for example french and algeria us and vietnam to some degree um and then now our current problems uh migrate back to law enforcement but i think there's a bigger problem too which which um i noticed first downrange and i think it started to come to light a little bit more now and that's the relationship between transparency and human rights and accountability and human rights and i thought one of the main problems we had downrange as a u.s military was there weren't a lot of transparency or accountability mechanisms in place to hold our own forces accountable or to have some kind of dialogue with local nationals from that country about what was going on in their own communities and that breakdown in communication and transparency led to a lot of human rights abuses and actually i think when i want to see a lot of the um what what seems to be a lot of race um race relations slash racially motivated police violence or at least um racially um racially colored police violence recently that seems to be another that seems to be the same type of problem um that's going on is there's a lack of accountability a lack of transparency and i've i've almost come to the conclusion that foremost amongst any human rights institutions is transparency because i i just think if you don't have transparency you don't have accountability um then all the other human rights that you claim to be aiming for just become that much harder to achieve probably even impossible to achieve another question hello my name is kothar Mahmood i'm a junior studying international studies with the focus in international security and development and so one question asked president obama has been praised and criticized for not prosecuting any early war on war on terror for war crimes and human rights abuses do you think it is plausible to prioritize human rights and national security military policy without holding high-level transgressors accountable no uh i i suppose you know some of the criticism uh is is justified but uh and unless you hold the high-level people accountable now what accountable means is maybe you know debated you know do you court-martial them uh you know just just send them to prison or are they far enough away from the actual bad event that it was only their lack of leadership so i mean that becomes an issue um but uh they have to one way or another you know somewhere between a letter of admonition which is like just getting more mail or or losing their command or going to prison you know somewhere in that specter the leadership has to be held accountable for one reason if you don't the people at the at the at the bottom of the command uh chain of command don't have any respect for the people at the top of the chain of command because they're being held to a different standard so you'd possibly even like the policymakers at office of legal counsel absolutely who sanctioned enhanced interrogation uh yes well prosecute uh i don't know i have to think about that not in terms of the degree but whether there's any you know if you're giving your best you know we're back in law school now if you're giving your best legal advice and and you believe it to be accurate and true it just happens to be wrong you know do you go to jail for that or do you just lose your job you know i i don't know that gets back to the issues of the where on the spectrum it falls but uh you know the the the people in the department of justice who defined torture as i said it was defined you know uh permanent bodily injury and death and and limited to that and and don rumsfeld and the chain all the people that participated in that i think had to be held accountable by something more than the uh court of public opinion and historians thank you apologies for skipping the introduction earlier my name is jack wolyn i'm a first year mpp student and i'm really interested in immigration and refugee policy um so i'd like to ask this question from the audience how did the cuts to the state department affect this intersection of security and human rights i think general matt is said at best if you cut the state department you're gonna have to give me more bullets uh i mean that's one of the things we were talking about before i think is is that you know human rights isn't just it isn't just the military you know the environmental protection agency the department of labor all of those things in one way or another are our human rights and they affect the they affect the effectiveness of the military uh you know the united states has held itself out as a moral leader and and a role model in the area of human rights and and we've done that i think quite effectively over over the years we can't hold ourselves out to russia and and you know to a whole whole host of human rights abusers as the moral authority if we're not the moral authority and i think cutting uh you know cutting foreign aid and cutting diplomacy and all of that is uh is is just a terrible idea it's not even something i mean how many of the past chairmen to the joint chiefs of staff sector as a defense it's that we need more money for the state department yeah right it's it's in order to achieve the objectives that you're giving us there are things that we can't do with the core competencies are in other institutions you know give maybe give them more money instead we're like gonna i don't know buy two more aircraft carriers so and it's it's even more uh invidious when you think about what it's really intended to do which is it's symbolic and it's supposed to send a message that we're going to get tough by putting more money in the military and we're it's it's actually intended to send the message that we don't really care about what the state department does it's not like it wasn't an actual decision to say we don't really need that money or we do need that money that wasn't really what went on what really went on is symbolically we just want to tell you that we just don't care right and and and and also i think one of the messages that it sends to sort of thoughtful people working on policy even within the pentagon is we don't really care about what you're doing either it's about the symbolism because at no point in the past 15 years has anybody said you know what we would have won the war in afghanistan by now if we had two more aircraft carriers no one has ever said that sentence until now i'm the first one thank you um so soft power matters winning hearts and minds matters but the link between right public opinion and anti-us terrorism or anti-us policy is often weak so where do you go with that i mean i i mean i look i i i i we've had a lot of different types of policy over the past 15 years and we've actually got a good sense of some of the things that that have shown a lot of promise some of the things that have failed um at a certain point politically and it goes back to leadership i was talking about at the small unit level what people are doing to instill in their you know young marines a sense of what we're doing and why we're doing it and what are the values that that all this is resting on and that's something that when it comes to military policy as a country we stopped doing a while ago uh i you know telling the students earlier i was there's a journalist who had done an embed in afghanistan and he uh uh you know came back and uh and been back in the states for a couple months and he said to me he said man you know just the other day i caught myself talking about the war in afghanistan as if it was over and i was just there right he told me this in 2013 so i think one of the problems here is that um as we mentioned earlier we're hardwired psychologically to be prone to violence in a number of ways especially when we perceive someone's in an outgroup or that someone's a threat and so public opinion is largely molded by that instinct or that psych it's not it's not as if you can't that that's not something that you have to deal with there are ways to get around those types of instincts there are ways to get beyond those instincts but we all have those instincts and that's what what's getting played on and what's being manipulated for public opinion purposes right now um unfortunately we're in an age where that's especially counterproductive given the nature of the fight we're in and the times that we're in and um it's incumbent upon leadership to kind of illuminate how our own psychological propensities are counterproductive and how other methods that maybe cut against our initial intuitions would be we'd be better served by following those types of policies um but I mean who would do that the military I mean we we don't seem to have mastered what it is we're doing right now and even if it was the case that we had mastered it as an institution we have a really strong norm against countering our elected representatives in public so I'm not sure that the value of to be gained by taking those types of measures without strip the disvalue of undermining our own democratic institutions even if we were in a position to do that so speaking to the role of the public do you think that the ending of the draft and the subsequent detachment of the armed forces from American society has decreased the salience of human rights law and military planning excuse the in military planning so it's not like Vietnam was like the golden era of human rights you know um you can quote him on that and I think actually within the military like there's there's a lot of problems but I think particularly as we deal with um these really complicated types of problems I think there's increasingly an understanding that these things are linked and not just actually in in the American military this is an experiment I was interviewing a retired colonel from the columbian army right about the what was then the upcoming peace accord with the FARC the communist guerrilla movement and uh he's an interesting guy he was actually trained at the school of america's by a bunch of um vietnam veterans he told me um sus tacticos un poquito agresivo um just a little yeah and you know I asked him about you know what he was concerned with with the coming peace accord and he you know made a big deal about the money that we give them for the maintenance of helicopters he thought the helicopter was really important it's a jungle mountain country they really need the helicopters helicopters a lot about the helicopters got it so it's like is there anything else that you think the united states like a that they're giving to you that is important and he said and he thought for a while he said oh the human rights classes right we've been trying to train up their their uh military lawyers those are good they should keep going and at first I thought like he knew I was an american he'd say the word human war rights and my heart was melt and then we'd like push each other on a swing um uh but but that wasn't it at all actually it was it was absolutely pragmatic he said to me he said if this court goes through we will be operating in regions where we've um massacred civilians um and if we keep behaving that way over the long term it's going to cause a lot of problems for us and so we can't do that and so we need to have better you know mechanisms of accountability it was just it was a purely pragmatic um approach um and so I think that there are there is a lot of sort of in segments of various militaries institutional knowledge about this thing and there's just kind of increasing evidence that we collect as time goes on about the importance of these things it's but the political debate often happens as though we've learned nothing I think the distance of the military from the general population has lots through the loss of draft and all that those kinds of things I think has lots of negative consequences I wouldn't say that human rights is one of them uh you know I think in some respects the military understands human rights better than the civilian population because they care more about it you know they're the guys on the guys and gals on the uh on the front lines I can remember speaking to the New York City Bar Association this guy says well they're chopping our heads off why shouldn't we chop their heads off this is the New York City lawyer and you know I quoted John McCain you know it's not about uh about them it's about us I think the military understands that better than a lot of civilians do it's not an accident that you know Jim Mattis was the one to tell the president no we shouldn't torture right yeah he was one of many officers in Iraq when Abu Ghraib happened just thought my god that's a good point what have we done and how many people are going to die because we decided we were scared and we wanted to torture people and there's a void I think and that's you almost in the contemporary conflict conflicts that we face you almost need somebody who's more than a human rights lawyer you need somebody who understands the genealogy the history of how human rights developed and the history of our own liberal institutions to understand to just give you a basic framework about how you might go about trying to build these institutions in what are usually at at best a semi-vacuum of political institutions and I think we lack that there's little pockets of that type of knowledge in various government agencies but earlier when you're talking about creating space through the military um well the military creates a space and then we said well somebody else needs to come in and fill that void I don't I don't think there's an institution that's designed to fill that void right now like build rule of law various ones try to contribute little pieces to it but nobody's actually capable of saying hey here's some ways to build these we don't have a department of right filling the void yeah all right and someone argued that a department of makes it seem like it is only it's siloed right that in as opposed to being suffused throughout the yes yeah but there's just a general lack of it's I'll give a real quick example is what I was in special forces training I remember the star major gets up and he goes when did we declare independence from great britain and when did we get the first iteration of the constitution so we now know it and I remember this was and this is a more sophisticated argument than we normally get about human rights and I remember thinking well that's 10 years or 10 years plus or minus a couple years and his point was it's going to take a long time but in my own mind I was thinking you know I don't think we're at the Magna Carta yet and that gives us about 500 years to cover so but but that type of thinking about like hey here's how our institutions evolved over time combined with the humility to realize that the people you're working with might not evolve in exactly the same manner and trying to pragmatically take that knowledge and use it in a way that suits them and their local customs we just don't have that capability let's take another question so I'm sorry that we're out of time already we just have time for one more question I assure you have a pile of really thoughtful and interesting questions here and I wish I could ask them all this member of the audience was also interested in in the seeming disconnect between American society and the military at least its perception of the military its capabilities and purpose etc do the members of the panel see such a disconnect within the military itself i.e officers versus enlisted or where military personnel are coming from within the United States I don't think so I mean there's a clear there's a chain of command and there's you know there's officers and enlisted but there's you know there's ensigns and admirals and you know there's master chief petty officers and seamen recruits so that yeah there is a there is a chain of command but there I think that there is more of a bond and a a oneness a feeling of camaraderie of shared mission and shared goals and shared experiences in the military than there is in the civilian community and you know every everybody in the military came from the civilian community not everybody in the civilian community in fact as we've been talking about very few people in civilian community have any experience in the military but you know my mother was a civilian you know you know everybody knows civilians I am one yeah I think the the military doesn't doesn't obscure the differences and divisions that that that exist but they do put people together and they yoke you do a common purpose and you know you have to work together in a pragmatic way and that's good and I think that you know because there's this sort of rank structure everybody kind of knows who they are what their primary identity is marine and you know what you're supposed to to be doing I remember a reporter talking to me about having been embedded with a unit in Iraq and and then came back to interview them stateside and met them at like a bar around where the base was and I said it was kind of amazing when they walked in because all of a sudden it was like oh black guy like poor rural region white guy like you know all of these sort of markers of identity that we are constantly categorizing when we meet somebody based on not just people's skin color but how they dress all of a sudden we're so much more apparent to him in the civilian sector than in you know in Iraq where you know it's more important if you were a corp corporal or you know it's not that things disappear overseas but that there are other things that become more primary the one thing that I would say that is a huge caveat to that is gender relationships we already talked about the marines united scandal I think there's a huge problem with a lot of really just toxic attitudes towards women and attitudes about sexual harassment sexual assault and military more generally personally as a big fan of Kirsten Gillibrand's bill and I'm a big fan of protect our defenders which is a very good group that works on trying to reform the ways that the military deals with such things that we have more accountability but I think that you know there are women obviously have incredible amazing times in the military have great units and so on but there's also some pretty toxic stuff that people encounter and the marines united scandal none of the veterans that I know were surprised by it they were just deeply deeply disgusted and saddened and I think there's an ideological selection effect that has gotten perhaps more prominent over the years we tend to be more conservative especially in the officer corps and our political leanings and what's weird is when you have these types of panels you usually end up I don't want to speak for anyone else here but I think you have the minority that isn't part of the selection effect that happens here so when you speak at the University of Michigan you don't see that but if you're in the military and you see the conservative bent especially what I worry about is there are certain types of units like special forces where you get that selection effect even more on the elite infantry units you tend to get that type of selection so in the army and those are the types of units that get tapped for high level commands in the military and so you can end up with this selection effect that works its way up to the highest levels of military now I don't I know there's a selection effect at the bottom level I don't know if it actually works its way into the top levels or not but I worry about it that selection selection effect allowed us to have to pick Ian fill an Admiral Hudson to join us today so thank you for making time in your busy schedules this has been an engaging conversation you've given us a lot to think about Admiral really appreciate the fact that you somehow suppressed your affiliation with no I I really really really hope that Michigan beats Oregon but the blue thank you everyone and I would just first like to thank our audience we really had tremendous questions and I'm sorry we didn't get to them all however please stay and continue the conversation there's a reception out in our great hall and then to our fabulous panelists this was really wonderful and it was also a pleasure to partner with human rights first so thank you all for being here and remember I remember another event and put on by our four school students and starting at four o'clock here and Annabelle Annabelle auditorium focusing on immigration refugee policy so we'd love to see all of you there as well absolutely thank you