 Welcome, and Happy New Year, everybody. God bless you all for coming to your U.S. Naval War College. I'd like to thank everyone for being here tonight. It's a special treat. Not only do we have the Honorable Jeanine Davidson, the Under Secretary of the Navy, but we also have our Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Bill Moran. And together they're going to have a dialogue about civil-military relations. So it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's moderator, Professor Lindsay Kahn. Professor Kahn is a faculty member in our National Security Affairs Department, teaches both our core courses and a number of electives, including currently is teaching an elective in civil-military relations. Her scholarly research agenda includes a significant focus on broad aspects of this very subject tonight. And so, with no further ado, Professor Kahn. So I'd like to thank everyone very much for coming tonight. As the Admiral remarked, we have the pleasure of two very distinguished guests, and I will introduce them in just a moment. The theme for tonight is the two sides of the civil-military coin, military advice and civilian control. And we do have two senior administration officials tonight, as we mentioned, the Honorable Undersecretary of the Navy and the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, who can speak to us from both sides of that coin. Dr. Jeanine Davidson is the 32nd Undersecretary of the Navy, responsible for all Department of Navy Affairs to include Navy and Marine Corps integration, acquisition, finance, personnel, legislative affairs, and research and development. She also serves as the Chief Management Officer for the Department of the Navy. Secretary Davidson has almost 30 years of experience in military operations, national security policy, and academic research. Her noteworthy civilian positions include, but are not limited to, Services Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Plans, Director for Stability Operations Capabilities in the Office of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, and as a presidentially appointed member of the National Commission on the Structure of the Air Force. She was most recently Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has taught National Security Policy and Political Science at Georgetown University, George Mason University, and Davidson College, no relation, and has written extensively on a range of defense issues. During her military career, she flew combat support, airdrop, and humanitarian air mobility missions in the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East, and was the first woman to fly the Air Force's tactical C-130. Admiral Bill Moran is the Navy's 39th Vice Chief of Naval Operations, functioning as a Senior Naval Advisor to the Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations. He previously held flag positions as Commander, Petroleum Reconnaissance Group, Director, Air Warfare N98 on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations, and most recently as the 57th Chief of Naval Personnel. Prior to attaining flag rank, his operational tours spanned both coasts, and he commanded Patrol Squadron 46 and Patrol and Reconnaissance Wing 2. Additionally, he has held senior leadership positions as Executive Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, Executive Assistant to Commander U.S. Pacific Command, and Deputy Director Navy Staff. Please join me in welcoming our very distinguished guests. So civil-military relations is sometimes thought of as simply the art of avoiding coups. Samuel Finer's Man on Horseback. For others, the term evokes issues of public attitudes towards military personnel and military service. You might think of how the current Thank You for Your Service situation compares to the treatment of returning Vietnam veterans, for example. But a classic and crucial focus of the field is the relationship between senior military officials and senior civilian government officials. This relationship, on first glance, appears quite clear. The military officer offers expert advice. The civilian official, accountable to the public, makes policy decisions based on that advice, which the officer then carries out whether he likes the decision or not. But things are, of course, not that simple. When a non-expert asks an expert for advice, he or she may have difficulty evaluating that advice, especially if there is conflicting advice coming from other sources. When a military officer considers how to give advice to someone who is not an expert, but who is considering a large spectrum of other issues outside of just the military, should the officer attempt to tailor that advice to what he or she thinks will meet the decision-maker's larger needs? If a policy-maker decides on a course of action, the officer considers unwise. Should the officer continue to dispute that decision? At what point does one accept that the civilian official's authority allows him or her to make decisions the expert disagrees with? If a civilian official herself has extensive military expertise, that's one thing. But how should a civilian official manage a relationship in which he or she holds the authority but is dependent on the military officer for information? Our speakers tonight will hopefully be able to go into some of these questions for us, illuminating the realities and complexities of the civil-military relationship and helping us, the voting public, academics interested in security and defense affairs and military officers who will in future be in these positions. Hopefully help us understand both sides of the civil-military coin. Madam Secretary, would you like to begin? Sure. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thanks everybody for coming out on a cool Wednesday night and thank you very much to the entire faculty and to Admiral Harley. It's great to be here. I love coming up here. What we'd like to do is just sort of kick off a little bit with our own sort of personal experiences and a little bit of, in my case, a little bit of academic experience and then kick it open for questions from you all because what I think is important and I think Admiral Moran feels the same way is doing what we can to help prepare you for when you potentially are sitting in our chairs or similar ones in the future. So for what it's worth, I came to this topic, this whole idea of civilian control of the military not when I was an Air Force officer, I was a junior officer, but then when I went to graduate school and I remember reading as many of you probably have about the Cuban Missile Crisis and it really struck me how President Kennedy was definitely, you know, looking for options from his military advisors and not necessarily getting what he wanted. What struck me was that there was this very tense dialogue or debate, perhaps. The president had to consider things that the military hadn't considered. The military brought him options to do airstrikes and he kept asking the same question over and over again and they didn't really have the answer which was, okay, so if we do that, then what? And then what? And they'd say, well, that's our military objective and it was very sort of cartoonish in a way from us these days when we look back at that. And at the scholarly level, we look at that case study and we think if it hadn't, Kennedy gets a lot of credit for really pushing and really sort of trying to find a more creative way and even when he did sort of settle on a blockade, he still did not actually understand or he was not aware of the fact that there was just sort of a cascade of actions that he had put into place just by saying yes because the military had presented him an option but they didn't tell him, okay, and then when you say yes, this is what's going to happen and this is what's going to happen and this is what's going to happen. So he didn't really have a good sense of how things were going to unfold and it really struck me that that's kind of a dangerous situation to be in if you're president of the United States and having recently been a military officer, I sort of really questioned, you know, how I sympathized with the military guys who were saying, you know, once you say yes, man, turn it over and we'll get it done for you, don't you worry. On the one hand, on the other hand, you know, I sort of thought you kind of want to know what you're asking these guys to do in a little more detail. So that was my sort of first eye-opener. After grad school, the Iraq war happened and I was, Mara was finishing grad school, I don't remember exactly where I was, but on my way to my next job in the Pentagon and I was thinking, kind of watching this thing, like many of you probably did, unfold on television, thinking like knowing that Iraq was going to fall apart and knowing that we didn't have the right forces in there and thinking who made this decision and didn't they ask that question? Like whose job was it? At what point in the whole process certain somebody had been saying, okay, okay, okay, so we get to Iraq and we knock over the country and then what? You know, nobody asked the and then what question? And it sort of blew me away just watching it on TV. Fast forward a few years later and my next experience was when I was the deputy assistant secretary for plans and I took that job, I had that job from 2009 to 2012 and my job was basically to review and tee up for the secretary of defense approval for these war plans, me and my small civil and military team and I was on the job for about a month when it dawned on me that all of a sudden it was my job to ask that question. Like when they came in to bring the plans and they had whatever they were going to do and whatever options they were presenting that was sort of the role of me now that I was a civilian to say and then what's going to happen and you need to help the secretary understand how this thing is totally going to unfold and I loved this job because it was fascinating but it was also surprising to me that for three years that was very hard to have that conversation with the military planners that even back then and I think it's changed somewhat but even back then the concept that we were all taught of military advice was this is my military advice or even maybe there's a couple options but there were hardly ever more than one option because in order to develop a fully fleshed out option that you as a commander felt comfortable presenting to the secretary of defense and potentially to the president of the United States you kind of want to know that it's going to work and so in order to know that it's going to work you do all the wargaming and all the analysis and it takes a long time and then this is your option you don't have time to do three options and so that was problematic. The other thing I learned in that job that I think is relevant sort of at a career level I had an interesting staff I had half of my staff on one side of the office were lieutenant commanders and commanders 05s and 06s and on the other half were civilians mostly in their early 30s and that was a bit of a culture clash you can tell the officers coming in who fresh out of the battlefield many of them are fresh off the ship who are these kids and why am I supposed to treat them as equals likewise you had the civilians the only time they've ever met any of these senior officers they're making coffee and they're in the cubicles right there with them so the idea that there are senior leaders in the military their idea of the military is very skewed because they'd only ever seen it in the Pentagon so we used to have these conversations to try to bring them together and those of you who haven't served in the Pentagon yet this is what I would tell them I would say to the civilians you gotta realize that these guys just came out of command they led thousands of troops potentially this guy over here was skipper on a ship commander of an aircraft carrier 5,000 people on that ship they're like big time leaders I know they just make coffee and do PowerPoint slides with you guys every day but you gotta have some respect and ask them what that's about but don't be intimidated by them either because you have something to offer that they don't have which is what I would say to the officers who would kind of be like who are these young bucks to listen to this little girl or young man whatever and I would say you know in the first 10 years of your career like mine I mean I was learning to fly the airplane I never read closet wits or I wasn't studying the kinds of things that you waited to war college to learn these guys have been doing this for 10 years they know the Pentagon they know international relations theory they know deterrence inside and out that guy over there's got a PhD in you know Middle East relations I mean they actually as a team you guys have it all so you've got to learn to understand that a lot of these military guys never worked with civilians in their lives so that was an eye-opener and then my final experience so far has been working with this guy for the last year and civil military relations in the service is a little bit of a different animal you know it wasn't plans it wasn't operational I mean on the day-to-day basis we're kind of like the COOs of the Navy we're managing this ginormous budget we're dealing with the crazy bureaucracy the third deck which is what we call OSD which is because they're on the third floor and I think what's helped us do this is that we openly talk about this stuff you know like what's your expectation for the undersecretary what's your expectation for the vice chief remember we actually did have a conversation where I said I am not a commander I'm not going to try to tell the sailors I'm not going to get out on a ship I'm going to do things that you should be doing you know but I'm a senior department of the Navy leader and that's different it's really hard to sort of draw a clear clean line because you know when bad things happen in the Navy we both feel like we need to get up and be responsible but we definitely have slightly different roles and so there are lots of different parts that we call animal that we call civil military relations so with that I'll wait and see what kinds of questions that you have for us and Bill can now say all the things that I got wrong not at all I just want you all to remember that she said I should be out commanding sailors at sea so as my senior civilian boss I'm going to take you up on that since I only have eight more working days in the Pentagon tell me what I need to sign hold on I got a whole list so I wanted to be known that I have done PowerPoint for Secretary Davidson she demands a lot of PowerPoint from all of us tough boss seriously great to be here tonight always love coming to Newport it is for a lot of reasons the cradle of intellect and good thoughts international, different perspectives inter-departmental and I always love to get a sense of the crowd we're talking to and so a quick show of hands the international folks here tonight okay great and how about the number of military students that are post what we would call 05 command your first command post 05 command how many of you okay how many pre-command assuming you're all aspiring to command something someday how many pre-command okay so we're split pretty good let me tell you my journey having never sat in your seat prior to command of anything and I got to war college 25 years into my career so I got to master is it a much later date than you're supposed to but that is the Navy isn't it for all the Navy folks in the room I mean you have to scrap and crawl just to get up here and get to be part of a year of study so that's the Navy the Navy's got some work to do on that and we're working on that so my experience with this discussion on civil relations both immediately devolves into civilian control of the military and I don't mind getting those into those conversations that discussion tonight but really it's a two part discussion one about relationships and one about the law the law says civilians control the military so I'm not sure there's much of a discussion to have but there is a serious discussion to how you build relationships to make that work well and so that's where I would focus it on and I'll be perfectly frank with you like most of the Naval officers and probably other services in the room I never gave a thought to this topic at all until I got to war college almost at least on a theoretical side in a practical side I never really got to experience it until I was about the 20 year mark in my career and that is because operational in my whole career for the most part out flying airplanes operating all over the world in one staff job in the Bureau of Naval Personality at a young age but even there it wasn't about civilian military relations at all and when you're an O5 commander in the fleet you're working with sailors and you're working with yards and you're working with depots you're not really working in the structure like we're talking about tonight so immediately after my command tour my first job was by serendipity I was selected to go out and interview competitively interview for a job out at Pacific Command when I found out I was the only person in the package I knew the competition was going to be tough so all I could do was screw it up so I get out to Pacific Command and my boss at the time a wonderful guy a Rhodes Scholar very intimidating because he was brilliant he had a photographic memory he still does he's a dear friend and mentor of mine Admiral Daddy Blair who started grilling me in my interview it wasn't hey Bill how you doing where's your family from where'd you grow up it was hey what do you know about the joint staff structure and who named me two under secretaries of defense and just now I got I'm failing this interview so I'm going to lose to myself tonight and literally got got out of that interview and of course long story short he selected me for the job and there was nobody else available apparently so deputy EA at Pacific Command in that front office there's the commander there's the 06 executive assistant and then there's the deputy and then all of the the staff directors underneath and within a few months of being in the job Mahimi Maru Greenville collision off the coast of Hawaii we got thrust into a political military discussion a very tragic event a tough one for arguably our strongest ally in the Pacific at the time and continues very very very challenging time for my boss who had to balance across the whole spectrum of relationships not in the classic sense of civilian control the military inside the Pentagon inside the structure of defense but inside the State Department inside how the NSC is operating trying to balance the messages and the impacts to the relationship my head has spinned me because I don't that's not an operational discussion so much as it is what are the potential impacts in the future of our relationship with the key ally that you know if we had to go to war in the Pacific they got to be there with us and those conversations thrust me into this civil-mil relationship that I was not ready for within a couple months of that guess what happened EP3 Hanai Island remember that and within a couple months of that what happened 9-11 so within nine months we had three major events that were all international in scope all challenged our ability to navigate through relationships with allies and partners around the globe and challenged me to understand how to give my best support to a boss who's dealing with all of that dealing with Secretary of Defense a new administration relatively new administration and all the challenges that go with how do you support the Joint Chiefs how do you support the combatant commander echelons below that structure all the way through so it was an amazing time my 39 months at Paycom as the DEA and then my last 18 months in the job where as the EA to Admiral Fargo who took over not long after were a rocket ship it went by in no time and finally Admiral Fargo let me go to Major Command where I took my experience at Paycom thinking at the strategic level and had to immediately figure out how to get back down to the operational tactical level but with always a mind towards or an eye towards how my teams were going to operate forward in a very politically charged tough environment whether you were in the Pacific or in many cases the squadrons I was commanding were in the Middle East supporting that effort so it was a very challenging time for me operationally but I always found myself thinking about the political military discussions that I had at Paycom where I was part of or at least I got to sit on the sidelines and listen to it and then two years go by in a heartbeat in Major Command and I get the Bureau those great guys in the Bureau that we all love dearly don't we yeah they called and said hey you're going to war college and I said war college I got 25 years in the Navy what am I going to war college for I don't need to go to school now you're going to war college you got to get that joint thing you got a state competitive so I went to national war college where I got a wonderful introduction into civilian military relations because half of my classmates were or at least in the syscoms we had a wonderful class a wonderful mix of people civil relations we had guest speakers at the time like Lieutenant General Petraeus Lieutenant General all these combat warriors and many of my classmates had been three or four times back to Iraq and Afghanistan so we had a clash of right and wrong in our minds about whether the civilian guys got it right whether the military guys got it and guys got it right or not and it was a fascinating year and shortly after leaving that job I ended up in the Pentagon working for Admiral Mullen his EA as he began to transition to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and what did we talk about we talked about civil relations high on his radar was trust and confidence in the institution of the military by the American public because remember this was 07 right before the surge and that's right when you came into the building and those debates were raging in 07 and 08 Admiral Mullen Admiral Ruffhead and then I found myself in the middle of civil relations outside of warfare and deeply embedded in program and that's a whole another world building relationships and building relationships with our civilian friends in OSD in Navy and other places so this whole discussion about relationships is really where I think we need to focus our energy and how do you deal with that if you're like me and many of you probably are your first exposure to this is when you get that first assignment to by the way I have a photographic memory too and I remember every one of you with your hand and I'm going to look you up and we're going to bring you to Pentagon or at least Washington DC and then you'll never like me again but seriously your first real exposure to this idea that you've got to build relationships with our civilian partners in every organization not just defense will become very apparent and you've got to work through this my sense is that when we talk about and our Secretary Davidson discuss this best military advice can often be viewed as a cop out for having to really intellectually dive into the issues and have conversations deep tension filled conversations about topics and they can be small and very large and I found myself in the middle of all those from about the 05 level all the way to where I am now and it's hard but it's all about getting to know each other and appreciating the fact that we all come from different places and different experiences you know I don't often get to work for a 25 year olds undersecretary of the Navy but I am and her experiences in the Air Force and in academia and OSD have taught me a lot and made me think differently about what comes as the Vice Chief and then provide my insights I won't say best military advice I like to just say hey if you're willing to talk to me based on my experience and my insights and how I feel about things then we're going to get along just fine but if you try to box me in to this Samuel Huntington model of you know we are only in this category which is what we often get accused of we're in the uniform then the civilian side doesn't get us and Jeanine talked about that really well on the flip side of it is we can't come in with our own guards up about who we're working with on the civilian side and so you just got to work through it it's a human endeavor and it's one that I think if you really dive into it no matter what job you have you're going to find that your experience is that much richer at the end of the day so I really look forward to your questions and getting into this in whatever shape or fashion you like over you Thank you sir if I could just follow up on something that you said at the end that you mentioned that giving your best military advice is sometimes viewed as a cop out if you could expand a little bit on what you think about when you are trying to give your best military advice and also if it's different when you are advising for example do you come commander or when you are advising a civilian secretary hmm I guess I can honestly say I've never sat there and said I'm just going to give you my best military advice because my experience at war college was I walked away from that conversation more often than not thinking like we're just copping out of the conversation if that's what we're going to say if we're going to finish it with well I gave you my best military advice it has never worked for me so I would tell you that no matter who it is and this goes to my grandkids too we sit there and we talk about things we debate things and if I feel like I'm losing on the losing end of that conversation then I probably haven't got enough information to win that conversation and I will walk back to my cubby hole and take it all in deep breath and say okay did I was I wrong and if we're not willing to admit we're wrong on important topics that we deal with every day then we're probably never going to get it right and we'll always end up in that box of this is my best military advice and so I try to avoid that as much as I can so more of a conversation than a sort of here are your options what are my orders I've been very lucky that I've never worked for somebody who got so energized that I felt like I was in more than a debate I always work for people who were very calmly taking my input and I got to listen to theirs and more often than not they were right and I was wrong and I learned Secretary Davidson I would love for you to talk a little bit more about how you view your role as a senior civilian in the service secretary position do you how do you approach that role do you see it as a bridge do you see yourself as sort of an advocate for the service to hire civilian authorities or as a translator between the top and lower down if you could talk more about that yeah it is different in the services I think that I'm a little bit of all of you both because it depends on the issue right I one time asked a retired four star who I respect a lot retired admiral when I first came into the job what do you think that the military expects from under secretary and secretary and he said well we expect you to do the things we can't do to make us do the things we won't do right so things like you know integration you know I mean that's probably a good thing you know on a day to day basis he said you know we're going to wake up every day and we're going to keep doing what we're doing we're going to operate the force and you know there's a reason why it's the chief of naval operations we're focused on the war fighting mission and sometimes there are things that need to change and so recognizing that and being the one that can push for that even if it's unpopular at first sometimes that comes from congress we haven't talked about that but there's a whole other civil military dynamic that is congress you know see that a lot as an under secretary because people often say that the under secretary position is like the COO of this ginormous enterprise and the secretary is the CEO but imagine if you were running an enterprise that has $170 billion budget 900,000 people, sailors, marines family members and your board of directors was 535 congress people up on the hill like that's pretty hard and so a lot of times in my perfect world and I don't always get to live in my perfect world but in my perfect world I would be working very closely with the senior leadership I would be deeply engaged in the strategic conversations that they're having in places like this the OPNAV staff you know where they aren't just like hey we're working on the strategy and we'll show it to you when we're ready for you to sign it off and send it over to OSD like that's the last thing I want some leaders may want it that way but I feel like I want to see it at different stages just like just like people want to see war plans as they're being developed because and I have encountered some naval officers who are like yeah you know we're not ready yet hasn't been approved by the CNO yet we'll let you see it when it's ready and my answer to that is you're kind of missing out and you guys should take this kind of as a tip you should be brainwashing all this people on the secretariat staff if you bring them in and help them understand how you took this journey and why you think you need this many ships or why you think it's time to come up with a new operating concept and why you think you need to have this kind of a thing in the budget for this year if they are like on your bus the whole way now they're your advocate right now I go up to the hill with the admiral or I know people he doesn't know out in the think tank community and now they're singing your tune right I mean it is all about relationships my point is getting into that intellectual journey sort of shoulder to shoulder then makes it more likely that I am an advocate as opposed to hey I'm here I'm from the outside and you guys need to change sometimes it will be like that too but I think my perfect world is the opposite