 I've had that affect my whole life. I'd get on the bus as a child, and people would just stop and stare at me. I'm not exactly sure why. Hey, welcome, another day of symposium. And of course, we shift topics today to leadership and ethics and leadership in the profession of arms. So I think this is an exciting new thing that we're doing here, so I'll be very interested in getting your feedback on that. So far, it's been a great week, plus or minus some of the technical challenges that we have, but the opportunity to have a future warfighting symposium that emphasizes the thing that we do, which is warfighting and, of course, the desire to prevent wars if we can, those constructs of peace. There's a lot of things going on. We discussed emerging technologies. We discussed cyber and space, and you'll have some of those touch points across your curriculum. But in the past, we've not taught some of these topics. And yet, your strategic environment is so greatly influenced by the changes that is occurring around us in this exponential rate of change. And I was excited to see the space lecture being a scientist, a political scientist, to see this idea of being an Alpha Centauri in just really what's half of a lifetime away. And it's almost impossible to get your mind around the distances and traveling at 20% of the speed of light. And I think it's just a reflection of the extraordinary things that we must try to grasp as we move forward. Now these four days have really been about a kickstart for your thinking. We stumbled into this methodology a year ago when we realized that as part of some futurization initiatives that we wanted to add some more of this future stuff to the curriculum. And what we learned is by having a week like this, you kind of get inculcated into the college. There's no papers due on Friday that we've told you about yet. But it gets us started on that journey. And you're already making friends as I walk around and see the great student body that we have here. So this is part of your journey. It's part of the intellectual capital that you're going to develop, part of the strategic thinking skill set that you'll take away when you get here. I've had several faculty and several students approach me about the choice to have General Petraeus here the other day for part of the future war fighting symposium. He is a convicted individual, just got off probation, actually. But the world has indeed embraced him. He's on the board of a number of extraordinary universities and colleges, Harvard, University Southern California, International University as well. The senator from the great state of Rhode Island came to hear his presentation because of his extraordinary renown. And in spite of those mistakes that he made, and he would have been happy to talk to you about them if you chose to ask him, he would have told you how conflicted he is with the challenges that was before him and the mistakes that he made. He might have talked to you about the Bathsheba effect of not being in the right place at the right time, like King David in the Bible, and what he's learned from that experience. But as we look at the presentation of a General Petraeus, hopefully we were able to exploit the experience that he had, even with the reservations that we might have about his personal mistakes. There's an idea that, how dare you, which is one of the notes taped to my door, but how dare you have a convicted criminal come to the college on leadership and ethics week? Well, first I would say there is no leadership and ethics week. There is leadership and ethics all the time. And it's one of the pieces that we focused on in modifying our curriculum so that we actually teach leadership and ethics year round instead of a small subset of one of the trimasters. The other thing I would say is that when you look at a General Petraeus or some of the other folks that we'll bring in, and they're just folks you're going to disagree with, some of them might be convicted in some way. You will see all of the personal faults that are possible across the range of humankind. But what I'd ask you to do is embrace the idea of what we do. We explore ideas. There can be no safe space when you're dealing with intellectual ideas. It's part of our own development. Absolutely OK to disagree. Absolutely OK to ask questions in a courteous and consistent manner to find out what somebody's actually thinking about. That's part of the journey that you're on. But I respect the concerns that people have about some of the leaders that we will bring here to have this conversation. I encourage you to use your voice, the most powerful tool that you have, and one that we will help to develop alongside your writing skills, alongside this new thinking critical toolkit that will give you by the end of this education. There are many threads that run through this academic year. Warfighting is first and foremost among those, hence the clever title of future warfighting symposium. We've been tasked to increase our lethality at the college. We've done that with three additional weeks of warfighting in the curriculum. There'll be the constructs of peace discussion because there are many warriors in this room, and I appreciate that. People scarred from the choices that were made at the policy level and that you had to execute in the killing of other human beings. It's a challenge. It's why we have these discussions about leadership and ethics and what this means to our professions. The profession of arms, yes, but also the profession of the interagency, of the whole of government, of the global maritime partnership in which we must work. We'll have other threads, and they're defined by the core courses that you take, strategy and policy, national security fairs, joint military operations. You'll do all of those. There's a new decision-making sub-course within the National Security Affairs Department. But the newest thread is what you're doing today. It's teaching of leadership and ethics year-round and what's amounting to a one-credit course in our new College of Leadership and Ethics. We've assembled an extraordinary team of people to help you in that journey. Now, there are some who will say, hey, I'm already a leader. Why do I need leadership and ethics? And what you'll see in this journey is that leadership must continue to evolve. The principles, the ideas, the very ethical challenges that you'll face as you get more senior. We hope to give you, in the course of this number of leadership and ethics events this year, an opportunity to embrace that, to make changes within your own thinking, to develop additional desired leader attributes, as they're called in the joint world, to be the better individual, the better teammate, and the better leader for the future. So with all that, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our Dean of the College of Leadership and Ethics, Rear Admiral Peg Klein. Good morning. Good morning. There are for the folks who are standing, if you don't want to be standing in back, there are seats. So please come. This is a great time, kind of like before the seventh inning stretch, for you to make yourself comfortable, or more comfortable, and in the humidity. So yeah, we can't do anything about the humidity. The temperature is great. Oh, can I get rid of this? Yeah, humidity. OK, so the humidity is not going away, so we'll try to keep the temperature down. All right, so welcome to Newport. It is fantastic to have you here. I want to talk to you today on the heels of the past three days that you've spent talking about things. So here's Newport, right? And so we're having a team meeting, and I won't say how many dove chocolates they had to open before we got to a meaningful one, but this is an actual wrapper. It was less than 10, actually. So we weren't consuming multiple. The leadership and ethics department doesn't spend their free time opening and eating dove chocolate. But you've spent the last three days. In reality, let me back up. You have spent the time before you were here. Let's just go back a year in very challenging, command-or-staff positions. So by a show of hands, how many of you are coming here more or less directly from command? Wow. Wow, well, congratulations on your successful accomplishment of leading future generations. And so staff, how many of you came from staff? I would kind of assume it's the rest of the audience. OK, all right, well, that's wonderful. So you came here likely. First of all, the weather is usually fairly different here than it is, even just 10 miles from here. Today, it happens to be very similar, and then it's kind of muggy up and down the East Coast. But we're thrilled to have you here not so much to provide a source of entertainment, not so much to just fill your minds with thoughts, but to challenge you. We think that you've spent the last three days talking about things. And it's pretty interesting that while you've spent a lot of time talking about things in the future warfighting topic, today we're going to immerse you in the future warfighting topic of you, your brain, your mindset, your intellect, your heart, your soul, your character. Here's a way to think about the topic of you. You've likely spent some time doing PT, right? OK, so when I ask for a show of hands, it's not because I probably don't know the answer to the question. It's just that I know that sleeping with your eyes open is a thing and that you likely cannot sleep while putting your hand up and down, right? I mean, maybe. OK, so those of you who follow some kind of physical fitness regimen, your hands please. OK, wonderful. So you pay attention to things like endurance, muscle mass, oxygenation, flexibility, balance, nutrition, to feed that, to feed your ability to do physical fitness. Those things are incredibly important to your health and to your future service and to your lethality. But what about your character? Again, a show of hands. I won't call on you yet. How many of you have tried to measure your character? You step on a scale to do that? I've tried to step on the scale. It still gives me my weight by the gravitational force of the earth. And I can only change that with physical fitness. I've not been able to change that with character development. So it's incredibly hard to measure. So oftentimes, we shy away from it. But just like measuring is not just quantitative, measuring can be qualitative. Measuring your character can be a qualitative exercise. How about self-awareness? How you relate to others? Then how do you think about your thinking? Again, something not measurable? How you learn? How you think? How do you understand how you think? How you learn? How you relate to others? None of those things are measurable. But I would posit that just because they're not measurable doesn't mean they're irrelevant. And they are worth contemplation. It turns out that while there may not be a numerical scale to measure these non-physical things through the advance of neuroscience, we know much more than we did even at the end of the 20th century, just 18 years ago. This understanding of how our brain works, and we'll talk to you throughout the course of the day about different authors and economists and neuroscientists. OK, there's no quizzes about the neuroscience unless you'd like to help us do an elective about neuroscience. But we have so much more knowledge about how humans think than we did a short 18 years ago at the turn of the century. It has allowed us to understand. It's allowed us to understand what parts of the brain are activated. And it's allowed us to validate some thinking that occurred in the last couple of decades, but that we didn't really have good, hard science to confirm. So we now understand to a greater degree, which we knew before, we could infer before, that people are complex. So working with people is a complex operation. Bring in emerging and proven technology, add to that people, and our voracious appetite for information where you have people making a living or a hobby out of providing information. The information cycle sometimes changes our behavior or our planning. And we find ourselves in a really dynamic operating environment. You've heard over the last few days, it's more complex. It's more dynamic. We evolve faster than we've ever evolved. You have or will lead in this environment. So how do you tackle it? So we talk about things. You've spent a considerable amount of time talking about things. And if you're in the Navy or the Air Force, your entire career has very much been very focused on things. Well, we're going to shift your focus to people. And here's why. A colleague of mine posted this article on LinkedIn just a couple days ago. And I can't remember what country Rody is from. He works here. Rody is from South Africa, if I remember correctly. Rody wrote this great leadership article, but it was enveloped in a framework of change. GE, a company that started doing leader development 100 years ago, has a leader now who is very focused on bringing GE out of the challenges they've had. But GE, if you've read the headlines over the past year, none of the GE headlines have been positive. So GE leadership has been working in the background of the five big companies in the US, which are all technology that GE is not best known for. So Apple, in the past week, exceeded their valued at more than $1 trillion. The first time in commercial and financial history that that's happened, that flipped 20 years ago. I don't remember the year that Steve Jobs came back in and rescued Apple from near destruction. This all happens in days and weeks and months. And our planning cycle is not sufficient to give you the tools to handle that. The planning cycle is a great framework to help you and your team be on the same page. But I would argue that it is not sufficient for you to lead into the future, because the enemy not only gets a vote, but the context of the environment of change also gets a vote. And we want to help you think about that today. So this isn't your father's or your grandfather's leadership course. We're going to walk you through some things today. We're going to help you think. I'd say toolkit, but toolkit sounds so 20th century. I don't have a better word for it, right? But we're not pulling out hammers and wrenches. Maybe we're pulling out, as General Alexander did for his staff, maybe he's pulling out a piece of software that helps us learn how to ethically hack. It's those kind of toolkits that we're talking about, not a hammer and a wrench. So that's the context of which you're walking into today and that you're going to spend the next 10 months thinking about and operating in this environment. Because as you'll see at the end, this is about you. And while we want to bring you, we want to set a beautiful table of things for you to choose from, it will be your choice to take from the junk food or the nutrition. And I would offer that there's no junk food at the Naval War College. I don't mean to compare one curriculum over another. What I mean is you can spend time on your phone. You can spend time kind of keeping up with things. Or you can be present and listen to what people are trying to help you do for yourself. That's the junk food part. OK, so learning. General Petraeus made a great point about this year or 10 months being all about building intellectual capital. And I think that your time to learn is not necessarily more things. And we'll talk about that more in one of the later sessions. But it's not about just learning more. It's learning how you think. It's learning about your learning. And it's not learning style. Do you prefer to read or listen? Those things are important, but there's so much more. Do you learn better in small snippets? Do you really need to learn? Oh, by the way, neuroscience says that multitasking really screws with your learning. So those of you like me, so I'm a recent convert. Perhaps I'm a recovering multitasker. And I'm at least through the first step of recognizing that I have a problem. But multitasking screws with your ability to absorb knowledge. We'll talk more about that later. But it's that kind of understanding that we're here to share with you and the team of professionals across the War College. They want to invest in you, which is why you saw one of the bubbles up here about investment. But it's learning about how you think. There's another really important part of leadership. And that's learning how you interact with others. Learning about the world around you, right? The parts of the world that you haven't been exposed to. Let me take a quick aside. Just so you know that our empathy is real, there are three of us in the College of Leadership and Ethics that are pursuing our doctoral degrees while we share and learn with you. So when we talk about learning, this is very real for us because we learn to help you learn, but we also learn on the side. And so I have this amazing cohort at the University of Pennsylvania that helped me learn. And one of the blocks that I took there, because it was part of our sequence, was about leadership. And I really had to suppress the urge to say or even think. Because when I think, you can pretty much see on my face actually what I'm thinking. Like if I'm not happy, like it pretty much, you know it. It's like everything is right here. Some people wear their emotions on their shoulder. Mine are right here. It would be great if somebody would invent glasses that let me see you, but you not see how my facial expression actually changes. But I had to suppress the urge to when we came in the leadership block to go 35 years of experience, what are you going to teach me about leadership? Now I was probably the oldest person in the class. The youngest person in the class was in their 20s. And there were about 30 of us. And they came from across the globe. So I said, you know, let me listen. Because my leadership experience is in a very hierarchical organization. The Navy, when I was in uniform, not this uniform, a different uniform, frequently told me what I was going to do next. I mean, it started at the Naval Academy. Like here's what time you'll march down the stairs. And here's what time you'll be in your seat. And that squashes some, while there are distinct advantages to doing that, it squashes some creativity. So it was an amazing journey. I spent a year and a half going to class about one week out of every other month, going to class and learning from these people. And learning what I need to do better to lead people in a multi-generational world. The Department of Defense is comprised of five generations of people. So if you are leading civilians and uniform personnel, sometimes we call them people, but like personnel makes us feel important. If you're leading civilians and uniform people, you could find yourself leading five generations of people. If you think you've got that mastered, come see you would love for you to teach an elective about leading in a multi-generational world. So it's really important to learn about the world around you that you've not yet been exposed to. Unbelievable, incredulous as it may be, there are experiences ahead of you that you will continue to learn from. As one of the folks will tell you later on, part of the reason we can compress a master's course in far shorter time than Harvard does is because of your wealth of experience. We're able to compress into 10 months your ability to get a master's degree. You'll learn about the other services, and hopefully you've been doing that. You'll learn about other government agencies. You'll learn about history. You'll learn about strategy. You'll learn about decision-making. You'll learn about you and how you lead. So hopefully I've given you some ideas about, hey, I get that I'm a good leader, but I get that it's a continual journey, not just to be continuously better, that's also good, but your leadership is a journey. So learning and interacting and thinking relating. Right in the academic world, we learn, we think, we reflect, we write. Well, I added a couple of things in here because in your classes, you're gonna have other people. So it's not just a you and the professor experience, right? You're gonna end up learning from the people around you. And from those people around you, you can interact. And unlike a safe space that's talked about in the academic world outside these four walls, you will have a psychologically safe place where you can say to somebody, hey, I'm not sure I got this right. I'm concerned that this is a vulnerability that I have and you can share that vulnerability and people will share in return. It's that kind of psychological safe space that your leaders, that your facilitators, that your professors will create for you so you can ask those questions that you might not feel safe asking your commanding officer or your ISIC. So reflecting and writing and relating to people, practice your relational skills. It's a really safe place to do this. So after learning, I've put up here investment. You are, we are invested in your improvement. We are invested in your development. The President of the War College set this day aside so we can talk about leader development. But you have to also make that investment. And these are the topics that I'm introducing for you today. These are the topics that we're gonna go through. We've had a change in the schedule so that Admiral Moran normally would have been between Admiral Harley and myself but his jet was delayed for weather so he's accommodated his schedule to come up here. This interaction with you is that important that he will be back here at 1600 so you'll have a nice break for lunch and a couple breaks throughout the day so you're not gonna be sitting here until 1600 waiting for the four star. We are invested in you. Admiral Moran said this is important enough for him that he's investing in you too and when weather got in the way he arranged his schedule so he could still come talk to you because it's that important. But these are things we're gonna offer to you, threads in a way that you can pull through the year to help you think about your character, your self-awareness, your professional military ethics, the other PME we'll call it, critical thinking and mental complexity, all these things that are so important. As I imagine Vice Chief will share with you this afternoon, leader development is critical to war fighting. The business world figured this out long before the military, the department of defense as an enterprise did. We know that executives, senior executives who participate in leader development programs are more productive. Their bottom line is better than their counterparts who don't invest in leader development. So we know from this, from other scholarship that's written across the department that your leader development is critical to your war fighting and therefore critical to your lethality. And so every once in a while, just as an example, you'll think, well, doesn't everybody think as I do? And so there are assumptions built into that. We're gonna pull some of those. Do you think your character is fully formed? So we're gonna ask you all kinds of those questions. We're also gonna help you understand that your intellect and the investment that you're making isn't just your mind, it's your heart and soul. It is the emotional side of you that is connected that you cannot just operate on intellect alone. Just like you can't rely on strength, you have to have endurance as well. Mind and soul are connected. And that connection is something, again, we don't know how to measure. So we don't often talk about and we certainly don't grade you on your performance reports. But it's that emotional component is very important for you to think through and in peers with your peers talk about it, understand how it can connect. It's that important that in the Navy leader development framework, the chief of naval operations brought out the fact that character and competence are intertwined. Oh, by the way, General Schwarzkopf said this in 1991 in his retirement speech at West Point, Aristotle talked about character and competence being intertwined. So we know now, understanding the brain more than we did, certainly in Aristotle's time and I would argue even more than we did in General Schwarzkopf's time, we now kind of understand what parts of the brain work when emotion is activated. So character and competence, you don't become really competent in the long run unless you understand your character. So you, this is it. You get to write your narrative. Throughout the course, we are gonna spend time exposing you to some of these topics in the last bubble. We're gonna spend some time helping you think about your thinking, helping how you relate to other people and each of us will give you a strand to pull on throughout the year. You'll pull on these strands, some of them will resonate more than others, some of them will be more continuous than others, some will break up and you'll listen to something or you'll talk to somebody and you'll realize that you need to pick that strand back up. Each strand is brought to you based on scholarship for your development. I can't emphasize that enough. You get to write your story. The story that you tell yourself, the story that you exude to others is you've got things running in the background now but through that reflection, through the writing that you're gonna do, you will be writing that story as you speak. So write that narrative. So when you graduate, part of that story will be that you'll be more lethal, more effective, more capable, more thoughtful. Each of these strands that we present to you today and throughout the year will make you a better leader. If you're a better leader, you will understand that developing your team to be a better team is part and parcel of that. So what's your narrative? That's why you're sitting here today. You've been sitting for a little while, been sitting for about 35 minutes. We're gonna give you one more hour and then we're gonna give you a break. So I'd like to introduce Professor Meyer, who's gonna talk to you about character in the profession of arms. So thanks so much.