 All right, thank you. Welcome back to current strategy forum in our second panel. I couldn't help but notice that Mike put everybody with last names with B on this panel. Poor Hans. I think he was looking around the college hard to find a moderator whose last name was B, and that's probably how I ended up here. Couple of quick reminders before we begin. So this day in history is an important day. Second Continental Congress, 14th of June. This is the birthday of the United States Army, 1775. It's the 241st birthday of the Army. Also, this is second Continental Congress in 1777. It's when we adopted the United States flag. And from this morning, a couple of things I took away. One was Dr. Krepenovich's great talk this morning. And one thing I remember is that scissors beats paper. And then, of course, we had the panel from our distinguished colleagues in the strategy and policy department on the classics and the masters. Kind of thinking about the canon of strategy and strategic text. I guess as we think about this panel, what I would say is that familiarity with the masters, or even a very deep understanding of those theoretical themes and those concepts from the classic masters does not guarantee strategic success. One of the professors here taught me years ago that strategy is not about guarantees. It is really more about increasing probabilities. So there is no guarantee for success in strategy, and there is no guarantee from the failure of strategy. And of course, that's what really the panel is about this afternoon, looking at the successes and failures of strategy. Now, we have really a privilege this afternoon. This is truly a world-class panel of distinguished professors that we have with us this afternoon. And we'll go in sequence. I'll introduce them as we get started, and we're going to start with Dr. Hal Brands. Welcome back to the college. Dr. Brands has been here with us before in a couple of forums. And he's been a professor at Duke for a number of years. He's the author of a book that my students particularly look at, came out a few years ago to rave reviews about what good is grand strategy, really looking at the arc of grand strategy in four different presidential administrations after the Second World War. And I believe that he has a new book that's just being published like this month. And that's on making the unipolar moment. Haven't seen it, Hal, but we're looking forward to it. And he's also done some writing that is a critique of the strategy of offshore balancing, which is kind of a popular notion in strategic circles today. And Hal, it's good to have you. And turn over to you. Well, thank you, Dave. And thanks to the organizers for having us. And thanks to everybody for coming out today. So as Dave mentioned, the subject of this panel is how policymakers have responded to complexity and geopolitical challenges and in previous eras. And so in my remarks, I'm going to take a crack at that by looking at what I call America's last geopolitical resurgence, so the period from the late 1970s to the early 90s. And as Dave mentioned, I didn't pick this period at random. It's actually the subject of a book that I've just published this week, in fact. But more importantly, I think it holds some interesting insights for thinking about American strategy today. So to start at the beginning of this period, if you had looked at US policy and power in 1979, you probably would have thought that America was in stark decline. At home, the country was being battered by stagflation and the second oil shock, which raised fundamental questions about the future of American economic power. Abroad, the US was suffering a seemingly unending train of setbacks and humiliations. So the revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the taking of US hostages in Tehran. And so as one writer put it at the time, America was entering the decade of the 1980s as a wounded demoralized colossus, a country that no longer controlled events, but that was at the mercy of events. And this perception of American weakness wasn't simply a product of what had happened in 1979. It was really a product of the entire decade before that. Broadly speaking, the 70s were a rough stretch for American foreign policy. The Cold War often appeared to be tilting in Moscow's direction amid a major Soviet military buildup and a string of Soviet advances in the third world. US economic primacy was under strain due to high oil prices and fierce competition from Western Europe and Japan. And then more broadly, and really throughout the decade, there were a series of crises that seemed to lay bare the limits of American influence and show a super power in retreat. So I'm thinking of the fall of Saigon, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in other incidents. And so what this added up to for a number of prominent observers at the time was a sense that the US was experiencing kind of the last dying gasps of its post-war predominance, that it was progressively losing global power and influence rather than gaining it. So that's where we stood in the late 1970s. Now fast forward about a dozen years to the early 90s and think how much had changed. The Cold War had ended decisively on US and Western terms. The Persian Gulf War had offered really an astonishing display of US operational military prowess. The Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union were disintegrating. And so the United States was clearly becoming the world's only superpower with no one even close and military capabilities and economic power and geopolitical influence. And the world seemed to be going America's way in other respects too. Democracy and free markets were ascendant. Rival models seemed utterly discredited. This is what the pundit Charles Krauthammer called the Unipolar Moment. So the rise of an international system defined by unrivaled and multi-dimensional American primacy. And so this was a fairly remarkable turnaround. In about a decade the US had gone from the malaise of the late 70s to the unipolarity of the post-Cold War era. And so what I'm gonna do is talk a little bit about how the United States made this transition and then what the story can tell us about the arc of American power today. So great changes in the international order often reflect a combination of deep structural forces on the one hand and conscious strategic choices on the other. And the American resurgence from the late 70s onward was at the confluence of these factors. So at a structural level the 70s were a paradoxical decade in US policy. So on a day-to-day basis the US often seemed to be taking it on the chin. But as this was happening the international system was actually undergoing three enormous long-term changes that would be highly favorable to American interests over time. And the first of these changes was the onset of terminal Soviet decline. So the Kremlin looked strong in the 1970s but in fact this was just when the internal cancers of the Soviet system were metastasizing. The economy was stagnating. The political system was ossifying. The communist regimes in Eastern Europe were becoming increasingly hollowed out. And so a great irony of the 70s was that Moscow appeared more menacing than ever but in fact it was becoming badly overextended geopolitically just as it was losing the inner vitality needed for long-term competition. And so the stage was being set for a Cold War counter-offensive by the United States and its allies. The stage was also being set for a parallel ideological offensive because the second key tectonic shift of the 70s was the onset of what we now call third wave democratization. So basically the series of democratic regime changes that started in Southern Europe and then spread into areas from South America to South Korea and beyond. So the overall number of electoral democracies went from 39 to 76 between 1974 and 1990 to about 120 by the year 2000. Now US policy didn't create this trend by any means but over the long-term this trend would prove highly advantageous to American influence because the spread of democracy would make the global environment more ideologically reflective of American values. It would also make that environment more geopolitically congenial to a country that was itself the world's foremost liberal power. The third and final tectonic shift of the 70s was the rise of what we would now think of as modern day globalization. So even amid stagflation in the oil shocks global trade flows surged from the early 70s onward. The value of international financial markets and global lending skyrocketed. So globalization was off and running. And again there wasn't any US policymaker who was masterminding these changes but once again the United States was well placed to profit. Globalization created new opportunities to export American goods and services. It created opportunities for corporations to outsource production and invest overseas. It allowed US financial markets to start sucking in vast sums of capital from all around the world. And so overall globalization was crucial to revitalizing US economic financial power during the 1980s and after. And so the 1970s weren't just a period of trauma in US policy. There were also when deep structural changes began reshaping the international system to American advantage. But structure isn't all determining in global politics. Strategy also has a key role. And what happened from the early 80s onward was that structural opportunity met good strategy. So American officials increasingly perceived the positive changes at work. They crafted policies to exploit those changes and to drive them forward. And the result was first to help foster a broad and multidimensional American resurgence and then to lock in what was really a historic shift in the international order. So I'll give three examples here. First consider the arc of US-Soviet relations in the 1980s. The Reagan administration certainly didn't create the crisis of Soviet power but it did exploit it. Almost from the outset Reagan launched a multi-prong campaign featuring a major military buildup, covert action, ideological and economic warfare that really pounced on Soviet weaknesses and helped reclaim the geopolitical high ground. And from mid-decade onward Reagan and his secretary of state, George Schultz, then blended diplomacy and pressure to encourage a dramatic easing of tensions on remarkably favorable terms. Now US policy toward Moscow wasn't solely responsible for this Soviet decline played a role, Mikhail Gorbachev played a role and there were no shortage of tensions and crises along the way. But even so, American strategy was quite effective in capitalizing on Soviet stability during the 1980s and pushing the Cold War toward its conclusions. And then something similar was happening vis-a-vis third wave democratization. So here's a second example. Despite some early backtracking, by 1982-83 the Reagan administration was embracing democracy promotion with even greater fervor than the Carter administration had done before it. So the administration increasingly recognized this moment of democratic ferment before it and so it pursued a strategy that blended long-term efforts to strengthen the building blocks of democracy with near-term initiatives that were meant to bolster reformers and pressure authoritarian regimes. Now this strategy was sometimes applied haltingly and selectively and there were certainly places such as Central America where it could be very, very messy and very morally ambiguous. But overall, if you take the broad view in case after case, U.S. influence became a critical factor, a necessary but not sufficient component in assisting democratic breakthroughs and strengthening this democratic trend. And then third, U.S. policy was also driving forward the trend toward a more integrated global economy. And the key inflection point here was the third world debt crisis. So even before that crisis erupted in 1982 the Reagan administration had committed itself to fostering a more open, more market-oriented order. So when the crisis broke, U.S. officials basically used it as an opening to encourage free market reformers and Latin America and elsewhere in the third world. And the administration applied American leverage directly. It used diplomatic engagement and economic assistance to major debtors. It applied that leverage indirectly by using IMF and World Banking engagement and resources to reward and encourage liberalization. And there was nothing smooth or easy or linear about this process, but over the course of roughly a decade these efforts did gradually strengthen the economic liberalizers and helped push globalization into the global south. And so what you can see is that across an array of issues American policy was now pushing forward the pace of positive change and pushing the global system toward a major transformation. And that transformation would ultimately climax during the George H.W. Bush years. So from 1989 to 1992 the Bush administration faced a series of what can really only be described as epic strategic shocks. For the fall of the Berlin Wall to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And each of these shocks ruptured an increasingly tenuous bipolar system and created moments of immense fluidity and opportunity. And the common theme here was that in each case the administration responded in ways that helped establish US primacy as the foundation of the post-Cold War order. So just think about the US response to the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the wall was first breached in November 1989 Bush and his team were initially surprised. But they quickly realized this crisis had shattered the bipolar structure in Europe and that it had created an opening to fundamentally reshape the European geopolitical landscape. And so as Helmut Kohl, the West German Chancellor began to push German reunification forward the administration also leaned forward to guide that process at a time when virtually every other major actor was either ambivalent or opposed. And Bush did so in several ways. First he quickly came out in favor of reunification and thereby preempted more concerted resistance from opponents in both Eastern and Western Europe. He provided full diplomatic support to Kohl and the Germans while also binding the Germans to the West by making clear that the support hinged on a reunified Germany remaining within NATO. Third, the administration eased the anxieties of Germany's historical enemies, countries like Britain and France by pledging to maintain the US security presence in post-Cold War Europe. And then fourth, Bush played a very deaf diplomatic game with Moscow. He made clear that reunification was going ahead and that Soviet obstruction would really poison Moscow's relationship with the West. But he also minimized the chances of a desperate Soviet backlash. He included the Soviets in the diplomacy surrounding reunification. He encouraged Kohl to provide economic aid to Moscow. He provided reassurances that America wouldn't allow a reunified Germany to threaten the Soviet Union. And so in essence, what Bush did was to use America's position of diplomatic centrality, its role as the one actor that had leverage with all of the players to help drive reunification forward while also mitigating its dangers. And in doing so, he helped enable German reunification on terms that gutted the Warsaw Pact and helped replace a bipolar European order with one in which Washington and its allies were clearly dominant. And so the way you can think about this is that amid great flux in the international system, Bush helped steer this change in a unipolar direction. And in fact, the administration did similar things during other major crises on its watch, including the Persian Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. I won't talk about those in any detail, but the takeaway point is that by the time Bush left office, the contours of the unipolar order were coming into view. So to pull back and to take all this together, how should we think about this period as a whole? I would say that the key point from a historical perspective is that the American resurgence occurred at the crossroads of good policy and good fortune. So certainly good fortune because the shifts of the 1970s created powerful geopolitical tailwinds for the United States and they allowed American officials to work with rather than against some of the most dynamic forces in the international environment. But also good policy because American officials were able to discern these shifts. They were able to use American power to accentuate them. They were able to capitalize on moments of great historical contingency. And so structure and strategy were deeply intertwined. The rise of the unipolar moment reflected things that US policymakers could control as well as things that they couldn't. So to get to the second question that I started out with, how can this history and form are thinking about the trajectory of American power today? At a time when that power again seems to be eroding and under-challenged. I think that there are three main insights that are worth considering. So the first is that day-to-day events can be deceiving when it comes to understanding long-range trends. One of the reasons that prophecies of American decline were so pervasive during the 70s was because many observers were influenced by what was in the headlines rather than by a deeper analysis of global changes and global power dynamics. So basically people missed the forests because they were focusing on the trees. And I think this point bears remembering today. If you really wanna get a sense of America's trajectory, where American power is going, you can't just look at the high-profile events that shape the headlines. You have to take a look at the deeper trends in the US share of global economic and military power. And also at the even deeper underlying phenomena, the demographic, the economic, the political trends that will affect how much power we can generate in the future. And of course you have to do that with respect to other global players as well. Now doing this isn't going to conclusively resolve the debate about whether America is in long-term decline because there's more than one way to read the trends. But I think it is essential in sort of getting past cliches and grappling with this question in a meaningful way. A second and related point is that it's worth remembering that American power has repeatedly proven more resilient than expected. The 1970s were just one of several instances during the post-war period in which it was widely assumed that America was in long-term decline. And in the 1970s, as in these other cases, these predictions proved wrong. They were wrong because they placed too much emphasis on short-term setbacks and because they placed too little emphasis on the more profound weaknesses of our rivals like the Soviet Union. They were wrong because they slighted the resilience of American economic power. They were wrong because they underestimated the extent to which some underlying international trends were actually quite favorable to the United States and the ability of U.S. policymakers to capitalize on those trends. And so as a result of these factors, the United States didn't come out of the Cold War in decline, it came out sort of on a trajectory of reinvigorated ascent. Now there's a limit to sort of extrapolating from the past here. The fact that U.S. power has proven resilient before doesn't mean that it will do so again. And indeed, American primacy is more contested today than at any time since the Cold War. And I think it's fair to say the United States confronts major problems in virtually every key strategic theater. But even so, I think this history does highlight some reasons to avoid undue pessimism about the American trajectory. So it reminds us that we should pay as much attention to our rival's weaknesses as we do to our own. And so it alerts us to the fact that a challenger, such as China for instance, it's still faces major long-term problems. Corrupt and authoritarian governance, a rapidly aging population, a massive asset bubble, declining long-term growth rates, these things make straight line projections of Chinese ascent seem incredibly problematic. This history also reminds us to take stock of the fundamental underlying strengths that the United States still possesses from its higher education system to its capacity for high-tech innovation. And then finally, and this brings me to the third insight that I'll mention, I think this history reminds us that the United States isn't simply a passive observer to its own fate, that there are choices that we can make that will fundamentally impact our long-term position. So yes, a great deal of what happens in the international system is driven by factors that are essentially beyond policy makers control, geography, demography, long-range economic trends. But I think this story also reminds us that strategy and strategic choice also matters fundamentally. Strategy is what allows countries to capitalize on favorable global trends. It's what allows them to mitigate the consequences of the adverse trends. And this theme is essential today. So the question of whether the United States can sustain the primacy and the position that it's enjoyed since the Cold War, it obviously hinges substantially on issues like what China's future growth rate will be. And so these are issues that US policy can really only affect at the margins if it can affect them at all. But this question also hinges on issues that American policy makers can affect fundamentally. Whether we'll make the investments necessary to sustain our military edge in a new era of great power competition. Whether we'll make the decisions that are necessary to rationalize tax and entitlement policies and address deficits in a reasonable way. And then finally, the fate of America's position, American primacy hinges on how we handle those inevitable strategic inflection points. So those key crises, those moments of great fluidity when the application of US power can really have a profound impact on the future course of events. And so American officials won't fully be the masters of the nation's destiny in the years ahead, but they won't simply be prisoners of events either. I think that to the extent that American officials think seriously about underlying global trends and how best to exploit or to grapple with them, they can forge perceptive and effective strategies within the constraints that structure imposes. And so if you're looking for sort of a defining takeaway from the period that I've discussed here, I would say that this is it. Thank you very much. All right, so our next panelist is Dr. Andrew Bacevich and Dr. Bacevich is an American historian. He's taught at Boston University where he's now a professor emeritus. He's a prolific author, a former army officer as well. Prolific author of such works as American Empire, the new American militarism, Limits of Power. And he's got a new book that has just come out on the Middle East. You know, here at Newport, especially in the strategy curriculums that we teach here, we've absolutely value argument, we value debate, and we absolutely value the consideration of the counter argument. And I can think of no one more than Dr. Bacevich who has actually challenged conventional wisdom, particularly concerning government policies, the government elites, and has made serious critiques of strategies at the national level, particularly in wars of choice, particularly about policies of intervention and what he has described as overly militarized foreign policy. And I'd have to make a final note that has been regardless of party politics or party affiliation. And Dr. Bacevich, welcome this afternoon. Thank you for that introduction which sounded slightly like a warning. So Professor Brands gave you a narrative basically running from 1979 to 1992. And it was a pretty upbeat story. I'm gonna tell you what comes next. And it's not an upbeat story, but perhaps the two presentations will complement one another. I have to confess that the end of the Cold War caught me completely by surprise. I was then a serving officer. I think like many serving officers in those days, I had assumed that the Cold War would continue until the end of time. So when the end came, I personally was completely clueless as to what the end of the Cold War signified. Others, however, claimed to know and were quick to say so. With the passing of the Cold War, history itself had ended, one wrote to very considerable acclaim. The verdict was in, Professor Brands alluded to this, no alternative existed to liberal democratic capitalism. Our approach to political economy was now the only plausible approach as the rest of the world was sure to acknowledge. Unipolarity, another term that he referenced, defined the New World Order. United States was now the sole superpower, positioned to exercise what some at the time were calling global benign, excuse me, benign global hegemony. Endowing global hegemony with a, at least a simulacrum of plausibility were the advantages enjoyed by the United States as it entered the post-Cold War world. Those advantages were economic, technological, cultural, and ideological, but above all, they were military. Revolutionary changes were altering the very nature of warfare. Spurred by advances in information technology, and those changes had endowed upon the United States something akin to military supremacy, not military strength, not military advantage, military supremacy. Never in recorded history, commentators fell all over themselves to make this point. Never in recorded history had a nation or empire enjoyed such a military edge over any and all competitors. Therefore, ensuring that the United States remained militarily supreme, ranked as a very high priority. The Cold War may have ended, but the United States needed to retain, indeed, to enhance its global power projection capabilities which formed a very cornerstone of American influence. It's important today to recall the triumphalism that crowded out serious thinking in the 1990s. It's also worth noting that different interpretations of what the Cold War's end of the Cold War signified might have been possible. Granted, an alternative interpretation would have required uncharacteristic modesty on our part. Americans might have seen the end of the Cold War as the event that finally rang down the curtain on what had been a catastrophic century, one that had inflicted immeasurable suffering and caused untold material damage, moral and material damage. We might have seen the end of the Cold War as a moment calling not for celebration, but for contrition, soberly reflecting on all the horrific evil that man had done to man and for making amends and repairing damage, for begging for God's forgiveness. To be sure, by no means were all the sins committed between 1914 and 1989 attributable to America, but we had by no means been innocent bystanders. Americans, especially those with access to megaphones, chose otherwise. Those in a position to influence opinion chose to see the end of the Cold War as a great vindication. After all, we had won. Victory implied validation, not only in the struggle against the Soviet Union, but also in the larger sense of concluding the 20th century on a high note. In the end, things had come out all right. To cite one of the favorite cliches of the 1990s, when history ended, it found us on the right side. Heck, we defined the right side. This triumphal mood had important implications for policy, of particular importance. We're changing attitudes with regard to the utility of force. Instead of something to be husbanded and used as a last resort, military now became in the eyes of policy makers something to be put to work. During the Cold War, the principal role of American military power had been to defend and deter, pursuant to a larger strategy of containment. The end of the Cold War rendered such thinking out of date, even timorous. Military power now became an instrument used to shape. This became a favored term in national security circles. Coversion, actual or threatened, promised to bring others into compliance with American expectations, completing the job that God or Providence had assigned to this nation. Well, prior to September 2001, the self-congratulatory line of thinking gave rise to only minor mischief. Yet the arrogance and hubris in forming such thinking was profound and would eventually prove to be pernicious. And indeed, the events of 9-11 revealed as much. It fell to President George W. Bush to explain what had occurred on 9-11 and what actions the nation's national security apparatus, having completely failed, would now take to prevent any further recurrence. And Bush wasted no time in offering his interpretation. We have seen their kind before, he told the American people nine days after the attack. They're the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. They follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism, and they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history's unmarked grade of discarded lies. Victory over this new enemy would therefore affirm the verdict of the 20th century, rendered by the end of the Cold War. The path ahead was clear, mapped by the path the United States had traversed in emerging as an almighty superpower. Through war, the United States would extend the so-called American Century into the indefinite future to its own benefit and to the benefit of the entire planet. In unvarnished language, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld laid out the task, my favorite quote, we have a choice, he remarked not long after 9-11, we have a choice to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live. And we chose the latter. Well, consider, Secretary Rumsfeld stated aim, indeed the imperative of changing the way they live. They, of course, remaining unspecified. The implied approach was not through suasion, or seduction, but through blunt coercion. And the urgency associated with the task suggested that the requisite changes in the way they live needed to occur sooner rather than later. What made the Defense Secretary so confident that this was a feasible undertaking, this changing the way they live? Well, I think the question answers itself. The presumed trajectory of history, combined with the American mastery of war, made it feasible. Both of these propositions, products of the decade between the end of the Cold War and the inauguration of the global war on terrorism were now gonna be put to the test, and you know what followed. The Bush doctrine of preventive war, targeting, at least for starters, the axis of evil. The unveiling of the freedom agenda applicable to every nation, whether they like it or not. The initiation of a war of choice against Iraq, expectations of a quick and easy victory giving way to an epic quagmire. If we've changed the way they live, it hasn't exactly been for the better. Well, fast forward another decade to where we are today, and this war has become permanent. We don't call it the global war on terrorism anymore. As far as I can tell, we don't know what to call it, and we certainly don't know how to win it, or how to end it. For the most part, even in the midst of a presidential campaign, we don't even talk about it. Members of the American political class accept war as a normal condition. So too, sadly, does the American public. Meanwhile, global hegemony has become a sour joke. A month ago, I sat in a conversation about the course of U.S. policy, small group of people, among the participants were two former officials from the George W. Bush administration. The one person had served in a senior State Department billet, the other person had served on the National Security Council staff. But I must report to you that my encounter with them was beyond unpleasant. I don't know what I expected to hear from these two Bush loyalists, perhaps expressions of regret or disappointment, evidence of hard won wisdom, if nothing else, chagrin. Instead, the pair of them, each, I have to say, happily occupying an academic post in a prestigious university while they wait for summons back to Washington, D.C., each of them offered a pointed critique of U.S. policy that easily reduces to a single sentence four words in length. It's all Obama's fault. Pick an issue, violence, corruption, and political instability in Iraq, a bloody civil war in Syria, the rise of ISIS, deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan, aggressive Russian action in the Crimea or Ukraine, muscle flexing by China, provocative behavior by North Korea, in each and every case the cause, they said, was plain to see, the failure of the present Democratic administration to provide forceful leadership. In the Islamic world, they argued, the mistakes attributed to the Obama administration were particularly grievous. The Bush administration's charged Obama with disengaging from the region. They characterized Obama's policy as isolationism. Now the list of countries in the greater Middle East where U.S. forces have been active since Obama became president includes Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and a parcel of nations across the waist of Africa. You might wonder by what definition of the term this qualifies as isolationism. The point of the Bush loyalists appeared to be this. The level of violence that Obama had perpetrated in these various countries was insufficient. The solution to the problems so much in evidence in their view lay in further escalation. Obama they charge seems to be seeking to extricate the United States from war. Imagine that. Here is the ultimate confirmation of Obama's folly in their view, because the situation requires more war, not less, and war waged on a larger scale to boot. I must confess that I found the breathtaking smugness, the naked partisanship, and the grotesque dishonesty of these two individuals a bit difficult to take. But what I found above all distressing was this. Their utter obliviousness to the harm done and the costs incurred by the policies undertaken by the administration they had served and to which they profess continued loyalty. Here's what they never mentioned. The thousands of American soldiers killed in a needless war. The tens of thousands of other American soldiers who have suffered severe and sometimes irreparable harm. The many hundreds of billions of dollars, no doubt, amounting to trillions before the final accounting is done. All the money squandered. I wanna emphasize, it's not that these two former and probably future officials argued that the costs incurred were somehow worth it. Rather it's that they refuse even to acknowledge the existence of costs. They just aren't interested. They're too busy peddling platitudes about the absence of any alternative to American global leadership and about the need to fulfill America's putative responsibilities. They can't be bothered to consider what the actual exercise of this so-called leadership has wrought in a place like Iraq. Here it seems to me is the very essence of the American foreign policy establishment on display. Encourageable, impervious to learning, and morally inert. Let me emphasize that this charge is as applicable to the democratic wing of that establishment as to the Republican wing. Both wings blindly adhere to what President himself has disparagingly described as the Washington playbook. And they stick to that playbook regardless of outcome. Both wings of the establishment lack the imagination even to conceive of an alternative. The elites to whom we entrust the security of our nation are unworthy of trust. They have demonstrated that by the fact of their own ineptitude and by their inability, their refusal to confront their own abysmal failures of judgment. Professor Brands concluded his remarks by saying that there are choices that we can make. And I agree with that. Power confers choice. We are the most powerful country in the world. We can choose to do differently. But I think choosing to do differently first requires an honest accounting of where we find ourselves today. Our war for the greater Middle East has failed. Trying harder won't redeem that failure. Acknowledging that failure is a precondition for change. Thank you very much. Andy, thank you very much. Our third panelist this afternoon is the eminent Dr. Paul Bracken. And Dr. Bracken is a professor of political science and business at Yale. He sits on several boards of advisors, including the CNO's executive panel. He's been advisor to members of government and also is involved in the National Academy of Science as a task force. He's no stranger to the Naval War College, obviously, and he's a gifted professor and writer. At Yale, he teaches on strategy, technology, and war. He also teaches on business, government, and globalization. It's also written on strategic surprise, strategic foresight. And recently, a relook at nuclear weapons and their complex interaction in our current security environment. In his off-sided book, The Second Nuclear Age, Dr. Bracken, welcome back to the War College. I feel that I'm back in The Second Nuclear Age here. Do I get to be like tiebreaker between the other two? I decided to pick a much less complex, controversial subject. I wanna take on the subject of technology and bureaucracy. This came up in a question from over here in the morning about whether the Navy would be able to adapt to the new technologies or whether bureaucracy would win. Just so we're clear, what I mean by the bureaucracy is the acquisition system and more broadly, the innovation system of the Department of Defense and the Navy, just so we're clear. And by technology, just to give it some specificity, I'd like to focus in on two or three areas like big data analytics and the internet of things. This is where you have embedded microcontrollers and microprocessors, lots of cheap sensors, reporting back vast quantities of information on blade wear and turbans and things like that. And it gets into artificial intelligence and other matters. And I wanna make sort of the overall point of this talk. The takeaway is that the Navy and the DOD have to get a lot better at leadership which they consider in terms of leading people into combat or leading at the grand strategy level but they really need to consider more leadership of technology which I'll try to define through this talk. This is sort of fallen, I wouldn't say fallen through the cracks but other matters have kind of overtaken it. Just so I get some sense of this audience, let me, I wanna take a quick poll and ask you to raise your hands to two questions. And the first question is if I were to use the word Shodan, S-H-O-D-A-N, raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about please, Shodan, S-H-O-D-A-N. Okay? Shodan is the search engine for the internet of things. And it's what microcontrollers and microprocessors are out there. Okay, this leads me to my second question which is if there was going to be a contest between the DOD's, what shall we say, Baroque, generally considered non-agile acquisition and innovation system and technology who would win. So let me ask, if we were to come back five years from today to the current strategy forum and five years is very important. I don't want 10 or 20 years, I want five years. Who's going to win? Will these new technologies like big data and the internet of things be significant drivers and fleet operations? How many think they will be in five years if you could raise your hands? How many raise your hands if you think that bureaucracy is likely to slow them down and that they will not be? Okay, well, you can count the hands, all right? It's sort of interesting to get a sense of the audience and how these things go. Let me first define leadership in a practical way. I'm a big believer in practical definitions and I want to contrast it with management. It says up here, strategy and complex and uncertain times. Management is about complexity. Leadership is about direction. Okay, leadership has to simplify things because otherwise it gets too complex for anyone to manage. And one of the big things I believe in and I teach in my course is that to be a good leader you have to simplify, you have to generalize. The opposite of generalization is not precision. It's intellectual and organizational chaos because people don't know what to do. And just as in combat or geo-strategy you need direction which is simplifying containment. We've heard several examples already. So in the technological area we gotta get a lot better. And I must say this is something that's going on in the country. If you were to ask me the biggest gap in MBA programs in the United States today, it's technology management. People are just thrown into roles where they're spending billions of dollars without any frameworks of a kind that exists to grab market share or corporate strategy. Technology is becoming a very important part of all of this but we really don't give them any frameworks. So let me just give you some thought and then we can get into a conversation about these or other matters. What I see going on right now is a lot of interest in innovation, I'm sure you see it. There's the new DIUX unit, Defense Innovation Unit experimental. And what do all of these things do? What do these repeated visits to Silicon Valley? They try to introduce one community into another community. And that may not work but it's not a bad thing. It's probably a good thing. There's ways of thinking about problems that maybe Silicon Valley or somebody else has that could be really useful to the Navy but if you don't know about them, you can't use them. There's many variations of this. One variation is for the services to start their own venture capital funds like NQTEL, the CIA's venture capital arm. Another is to invite people from industry who know about these technologies to play in your war games. And this sort of maybe by osmosis, something's gonna be very useful will happen. And I think this is a very good start and God bless them for trying. The downside seems to me quite small. Another point I would make along these lines is that if you look at the pattern of innovation in large multinational corporations, so GE, an airline, Ernst & Young, Boeing, IBM, Lenovo, Cisco, Yulet Packard, what are some of the patterns we see there? One of the very strong patterns you see there is that in industry, very much unlike the Pentagon, they don't look at innovation as being conflated with R&D. So if we need more innovative stuff in the Pentagon, the idea is increase the money into 6.1, 6.2. There's a whole linear model of like first you innovate it, you pass it off to the services, they operationally test it and eventually it gets deployed into the field if it meets all the criteria. This is extremely different in industry where innovation can happen in very different parts of the organization and you're not looking to lab coated scientists down in the laboratory to produce your next new product. If you were to look at who the biggest R&D expenditures are in the United States to take our multinationals, there's no correlation whatsoever between innovation and R&D spending. None whatsoever. Google and the Apple spend very little on R&D in anything like the way the Pentagon defines it. Okay, another very important point if you look at commercial innovation is that they have whole spaces, is what I would say, of innovation, the way they think about it. The DOD tends to think about innovation in terms of products and our whole acquisition system is designed to buy good products, not in a particularly agile way, obviously, but it's not designed to buy complex software systems. It's not designed to buy huge techno structures which you can integrate into standardizing the work of the middle line or of the fleets. It's really designed still for metal bending and it has been that way since the 1960s. Okay, what are some different frameworks beyond product innovation that you see in industry there's really two big ones. I mean, they do product innovation but one is process innovation which I'm going to include improvement in services. All right. And the other is mission integration, thinking up new things to do, new business models. Let me take process innovation. What's a process? Okay, I said I like to define things. A process is a flow of work or information. And if you change the process, you can innovate. I didn't define innovation, let me do that now. Let me give you a business school innovation. One of the jobs of a professor, I think, is to read all of this stuff so that you don't have to. Okay? All right, if you read 10 books on innovation, you will learn that innovation is defined to be something new, comma, that somebody is willing to pay for, that they actually have value in what it is. Okay? It isn't just something new. So process innovation is one of the big drivers of what's going on in the world today. Isn't new products only like we think of the iPhone? The iPhone has a lot of processes established with it. Let me give some simple examples that I use in my courses. How many in here have heard of a company called ZARA, Z-A-R-A? See, we got some issues here, folks. Okay. Go ask your daughters if they've heard of ZARA, they have. Okay? Because it's one of the fastest growing fashion houses in the world. And they've invented something called fast fashion. So instead of investing a gazillion dollars in inventory systems, what ZARA has done is to shrink the time it makes, to make a garment so that if something is, if green sweaters or tube skirts are selling in Boston, they can produce these almost instantly in Spain, put them on an airplane and get them into the stores. They have taken the value chain of like sourcing, production, sales, retail distribution, and shrunk it so it's very tightly coupled. And they've invented a new industry called fast fashion, which is the reason pennies and Macy's are getting killed. They're in all the major cities of the world. Walk into one in Boston or New York. They're right on Fifth Avenue. Other examples of process innovation are even simpler. Okay? My favorite example in the course I use is the 20 minute oil change. This was invented 30 years ago and illustrates that to do major innovation, you don't have to spend a lot of money. These 20 minute oil changes you drive in without an appointment. They get you in and they get you out. And you know what it was like in the old days if you had to schedule that with your mechanic. You know, you'd have to give the car up for a damn day. This simple process innovation has transformed auto maintenance because they load up and try to sell you a bunch of other things. Two more examples quickly that I use for process innovation is how many in here are on that one click Kindle Amazon program? Isn't that a horrible program? Don't you buy too many books and they're so good at predicting what you're gonna want. Okay? That costs them almost nothing. It was a simple process change which has revolutionized book selling to people who buy a lot of books. The final example of process innovation I will use, I'm not gonna detail here, but you can come down and sit in my course. It's called the Tomahawk cruise missile. If you look how long it took to target a Tomahawk in 2004, if they were reports of where there's bad guys at X, Y, Z, it took a long time to get that Tomahawk on the target. Dude, you had to go through a lot of bureaucratic stuff to get release, permission, collateral damage constraints. The Navy has that down to levels which are classified but are less than an hour today. Okay? So you're up there with Zara and Kindle and you didn't even know it. All right. What else has gone on in industry of relevance to the Navy? I would say the biggest trend I see is the software is substituting for a lot of routine jobs. And the big costs you can pull out of a company are in services, in speeding up things in middle management. I know there's all this infatuation today with the pilotless airplanes that can land on a carrier or can do dog fighting and things like that. But the real payoffs is removing costs out of the value chain. That is so much more easier because you can experiment with it. That's really the easy low-hanging fruit and I just don't see the services going into that because it's not really sexy enough but that's where the money is if you wanna pull the money out and use it for other things. Okay, just a couple more points. When I look at the DOD in a particular, it's more the services. DOD is a really hard problem to do this but instead of like letting 1,000 flowers bloom or in addition to doing that and letting communities talk to each other, you need to come up one level of generality or one level in the organization and develop frameworks for driving change about what you invest in. And I would urge you, we're not jumping two or three levels to say how should the US handle China? What should the grand strategy of the United States be? Let's leave that to others but within the services themselves, they haven't developed a sort of set of frameworks for should I invest in, what is it? Sea Hunter or should I invest in some other thing? What is the best way to do it? And this, what change is being driven today from the bottom up as I see it in all of the services and maybe that's a start. And again, you have to introduce these communities to each other but we need something like, like GE has a fantastically interesting strategy of trying to take all of their industrial products, put microcontrollers or microprocessors on them to generate data to sell this to customers saying you can save money if you buy this IT stuff that we know about because we manufactured the goods. Okay, and a very famous case where if you can save 1% on the maintenance of a jet engine for Emirates Air over 10 years, you're looking at something like $50 million and they're sort of, they're selling this internet of things but you have to look at it not from the ground up but like one level up. And finally, I'll just leave you with some things that I've learned over the years that sort of fit into this and frankly a little bit to the earlier two discussions. One is every organization looks worse from the inside. Have you ever noticed that? Like you wonder how the hell did we win the Cold War? Sort of. So let's not be too harsh. The Navy didn't do a bad job in the late 19th century when it built a fleet just at the right time with no threats on it. I mean in the 1880s and 1890s the US had no threats but we built a fleet which was damn handy to have in the 20th century. The Navy did not do a bad job in the World War II or the Cold War so the historical record is here. You will figure this stuff out but I would emphasize let's try to do it in five years not the life cycle of a 10 to 20 year which the world is changing too rapidly. My final takeaway point, something I learned over the years and it goes like this, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. Now you and I were, we sort of like our parents told us anything worth doing is worth doing well. I always hated that because it was drilled into me but if it's worth doing well it's also worth doing poorly and conceptualizing what the internet of things and how to bring big data into the Navy other than from the bottom up, let's just try a lot of stuff and it's gonna work. Try to have some sort of a framework which drives change. You could leave this meeting today and I could challenge you to go back to your shop or your next command and ask yourselves how can I drive change to adapt these technologies? Will they really help me in completing the mission that's given to me? Thank you. Well it's usually the job of the moderator try to bring all the things that are paneled together. And here's what I got for you. Dr. Bacevich, American War for Greater Middle East and Dr. Brands, a unipolar moment. Kendall, one click. Okay, you'll get it in a minute. I think what we do see is some sort of connective tissue here is the importance of strategic choice, strategic choice matters. I think with Dr. Brands, strategic success is still partially dependent on strategic choice. And with Dr. Bacevich's comments, this one militarized playbook without a real analysis of its impact on such policy choices and its costs. And I think Dr. Bracken, this leadership needs informed choices to make a difference in the future of both the Navy and the DOD, particularly in emerging tech and their strategic implications. I'm sure there's plenty here to ask this esteemed panel. So we'll open up the questions and see who would like to engage with our experts. Thank you. I think that since Dr. Bracken, thank you you referenced my question about the Navy and being Barnes and Noble from this morning. I'd like to ask you, it seems to me that what the military needs to do is to start to have a way of thinking that can only be grown, developed, and enhanced if you have some people in technology that can talk the language of technology with industry separated from the bureaucracy. One element of that might be that it was raised in this hall this morning. The strategic studies group is gonna be reformulated by the CNO and maybe brought closer to the Pentagon. I would think it should go in the opposite direction and have more separation from the Pentagon. And throughout the Navy, maybe groups that can work in technology and create a subculture so they can really get it and play in real time. What do you think, sir? I would agree with that and I would just add to it that the Navy has something that your rivals don't have and it reminds me of the GE case study which is that the one thing GE has is knowledge of the aircraft engines, the GE manufacturers of the medical equipment the GE makes, they know that stuff. That gives them an advantage on how to wire it together in the internet of things. When I look at China or Russia, a lot of times what they're just doing is a technological overlay. They don't have the deep knowledge of how the naval systems, maritime systems actually work. So I would wanna make sure that we don't throw that tremendous competitive advantage out. You do have to shield the innovative parts of the organization. The biggest tension line in corporate America today and I think the world, there's very little study of this is how do you manage these two different kinds of organizations? One innovates and builds the, thinks about the products of the future, okay? One designs the future theme parks for Disney. The other operates the Disney parks and there are two very different skill sets. We don't have a really good way to bring those two together yet but if you think about a lot of companies and a lot of experience, that's where it's going. Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers are pulling together the audit people, the tax people and the management consulting people. GE is taking their manufacturing people and bringing in internet technologists to work with them. Cisco Systems, Lenovo, another. I'll just say one final thing that the, it's really pays to look at other countries like the Chinese and the Russian innovation systems from this point of view. The Chinese, for example, have put a huge emphasis on accelerated innovation. Like get it, first of all, if it's a commercial product you liberate it, that means you steal it, the design, and you reverse engineer it and you get it into the field to see if it'll sell in Africa or South America at a cheaper rate. So it's very useful for the Intel people to look at other countries this way too. Who else? Please. Bill McGurk, Proud Navy Veteran, Life Member of the Foundation for Professor Bracken. Why I voted for bureaucracy over technology. I read recently about continued use of floppy disks relating to nuclear weapons system and defending this rather outdated technology as free from hacking. I also read the Navy is developing large projectile, very large projectile, fired at great speed via magnetic force. Is that really fighting the last war? Yeah, what you didn't mention was the floppy disks, they're not like the five and a quarter inch floppy disks. They're the big floppy disks, you know. From the IBM 360 computer, that was a hell of a computer, right? It had 10 gigs of memory, right? You know, I don't know where I'm gonna vote. I mean, when I look at the history of the Navy, there were bleak times and it, they always came through in a big way. I mean, this institution was founded when steam engine and electrical engineering and the new technologies were coming in and somebody back then had the foresight to found the Naval Post Graduate School and this place to study two different aspects of that problem. And I'm a big believer in the history as being a guide. So if you solved it before, but I could certainly understand why one would vote for the bureaucracy winning. Let me just, another problem we have is that the big defense, the big five defense companies, no offense, they do their job, but they, in the 1990s, the last thing they wanted was to look for new technologies in Silicon Valley. I mean, they didn't want to outsource anything. They wanted to keep everything in house. And the value change, I just did a study on this with John Berkler at the Rand Corporation. The value chains are becoming much more outsourced because the big defense contractors don't have, they don't know the technologies. So they gotta reach out. So to the extent that their core competencies were Capitol Hill, bureaucracy and federal acquisition regulations, that's where I think the defense leadership and the Navy leadership needed to signal that they need to change as well. Because a lot of the technologies we're talking about here will be effectively operated by contractors. Erin back. Yes, sir, Erin Ayers, United States Navy. My question is for Dr. Bracken. You spoke recently about the tension between the bureaucracy and innovation. Don't you think that Bell Labs could serve as a good example for DOD to use in the future as opposed to DUIX? Bell Labs in this literature has such a bad reputation because they missed something. What was it? Oh yeah, digital, okay. Of course, like when I was growing up, I didn't have television because my dad said it's a passing fad, it will never last, all right. That was 1953, okay. There's a lot of good models out there. I would make a distinction between sort of thinking like Silicon Valley. I don't want the Navy to think like Silicon Valley. I want them to think like Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, okay. But there's huge missions coming down the road that could carry innovation models in new ways of doing things. I personally think the biggest effect of cyber technology, strategically speaking, is going to dramatically improve the hunt for mobile missiles. All kinds of ways technologies are coming together. It's gonna be very hard to protect mobile missiles. Just think what that means. That means if you have your nuclear deterrence of a secondary nuclear power like North Korea, Pakistan, Israel on mobile missiles, they're gonna be vulnerable to conventional attack, either possibly from a neighbor because these technologies are leaking out or from the United States. And I haven't been able to find a single paper on the cyber threat to nuclear stability in the past several years. Doug referred with War College Foundation with a focus on cyber defense. And Dr. Brown for you, we talk about strategy for the future and whoever should speak to this. We have a dichotomy in that other nations have greater cyber capabilities than we do and that's a threat to us. We have government policies which restrict the development of technology in the United States from being sold and shipped overseas. We have sequestration which eliminates the funds to provide our innovators in our country to be able to develop that. Who owns the strategy for eliminating that conundrum? Emily Goldman from Cybercom will be speaking tomorrow afternoon. I'm sure she'll take up that question. I would just say, in general, my understanding of cyber issues is limited but my understanding is that it's not necessarily that our capabilities are limited, particularly in the offensive realm. I'm sure we actually have very advanced capability. I think that the trick is figuring out some of the bureaucratic, some of the authorities, some of the legal issues that go along with that and I think that when it comes to any sort of new technology those are often some of the biggest hurdles and I think that's true today as well. One of the senior leaders in the entire world was here talking about the same thing and it's not so much they said they didn't have enough technical advisors to talk about what kinds of attacks to integrate or to defend against really had a lack of strategic thinkers about what the implications might be. Other questions? Jim Romondo, the federal executive fellow up at the Fletcher School. Dr. Basavich, I wanted to go to your point about the population. You said population is used to war but to me the population is fairly disengaged from what's going on. I would like to get your comments on the aspect of not having a draft or having that population engaged maybe to Dr. Brands as well about the positivity and the implications of that and your comments on how that factors into some of the failures that you mentioned. Well, when you do your one-click order of books from Amazon, order my book called Breach of Trust which gets to this issue and it is an issue. I mean, my telling of the tale would be that as a direct consequence of the Vietnam War we the people chose to abandon the tradition of the citizen soldier which really was the foundation of American military policy going back to the revolution. Not so much affecting your service but affecting my former service, the army that when the United States went to war in a significant way, whether we're talking to War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War all the way going forward to Vietnam, the nation in one way or the other whether through volunteers or relying on conscription raised up a great and mighty army to go do what needed to be done. And among other things, that approach did engage the energies of the American people in whatever the particular contingency happened to be. So as a consequence of Vietnam, we chose to abandon that. We chose to create what the founders would have called a standing army. We in our judgment, that standing army found great favor through the 1980s and 1990s when contingencies were small or relatively brief like Operation Desert Storm what we have found since 9-11 when the wars have turned out to be protracted is that this new system of relying on professionals doesn't work so well. Among other things, it denies the people who manage wars the opportunity to expand the force in order to meet the contingencies at hand. One of the things that really strikes me so much about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in a historical context is how puny they were. If I am not mistaken, somebody here can correct me. I don't believe that the total size of the force in Iraq ever got above 200,000. And indeed, the total size of the contractor force in Iraq and in Afghanistan got to be larger than the uniform force because of our inability with a population of 300 and what, 20 million to put a sufficient number of boots on the job to get the job done. So part of the problem of the present system is that it limits our ability to expand the force to meet the requirements. The other problem, the one I think that you were really alluding to, is that it has allowed this gap between the American people and the American military to develop. It has allowed most Americans to disengage. It has resulted in this, I don't know what you all think about it. I find rather contemptible notion of expressing rhetorical support for those who bear the burden of our wars as if that fulfills our civic obligation. Please, next time you fly, if you're wearing your uniform, feel free to board the plane before I do. And yet, although there is I think sort of a growing awareness, because I get asked this question every time I give a talk. There's a growing awareness that there's something wrong with this arrangement. It doesn't set well. It also doesn't work very well. And yet, again, it's how striking it is. Even in the context of a presidential campaign that nobody talks about it. I mean, nobody talks about it in the political arena. There's an unwillingness on the part, again, this is not a partisan comment, an unwillingness on the part of Democrats and Republicans alike, except for Charlie Rangel of New York who's gonna retire, to acknowledge that there's a problem here that ought to be part of our sort of political debate. I wouldn't add a whole lot to that. I would just say that there was this post-Vietnam bargain where we will pay the uniform military quite well compared to the private sector workforce of comparable education. We will give the military as an institution a great deal of respect. And if you look at the military, the military is one of the most respected institutions in the country, year in and year out. And the return part of the bargain is that we'll use a very small percentage of the population to carry most of the burden of going to war. And I think that Professor Bezovich very rightly pointed to a number of the negative implications of this, the growing gap between civilians in the military, the issue of how sacrifice is distributed. I think that there's also the fact that it's much more expensive to fight this way, soldier for soldier, but there is another side to this as well, which is that I think in general, the quality of sort of the average quality of folks in the armed forces increases when you have a professional military as opposed to a conscript military. And when I give talks and occasionally this come up, I really find that people want to fight next to a conscript. They'd much rather fight next to somebody who chose to be there and has the same level of professionalism. So I don't dispute some of the pernicious issues that Dr. Bezovich has raised, but I think it is something of a mixed bag. Well, I disagree. And because it's, I mean, I don't disagree that the average soldier in the ranks, not that I have much contact, but the average soldier I am confident is manifestly better in every respect than the young soldiers that I had in my armored cavalry troop back in 1973. That said, and I hope this is not insulting, we don't win. I mean, winning victory is to achieve conclusively your political objectives. That's what war is supposed to be all about. Our force does not achieve conclusively our political objectives. Now, tactically brilliant, operationally spectacular, strategically and politically, we are failing. Now it's a big question, what are the causes of those failures? And in our conversation right here, I am suggesting that one of the explanations for that failure, that inability to achieve our purposes politically in a conclusive way has to do with the way we organize the force. And it seems to me that given the amount of money that we spend, given the blood that we have spilled, there ought to be a serious conversation about why it is that we don't win and that a conversation can be undertaken without in any way actually implying an insult to those who serve and who have made sacrifices on our behalf. Dr. Beswitch, would you advocate a return to some form of prescription, at least for the Army? Well, I understand that that's politically infeasible. It seems to me that what we ought to be discussing, again, what ought to be part of our political agenda is what are the means available to try to close this gap between the military and society, for a nation that is more or less permanently in war to re-engage the American people in that reality. I think one approach that deserves to be discussed is the whole notion of national service. I mean, to posit that every young American owes a term of service to country and community, where one option on a menu of service opportunities is gonna be to go join the Marine Corps. It's got complicated, that would be expensive, there's all kinds of bureaucratic reasons why you give you a headache to think about how you do it. But I think that that's at least one approach that deserves to be addressed, if we actually cared enough about the fact that we're permanently at war but actually can't win. All right, we still have time for a couple more questions here in the center. Dr. Beswitch, you've been very articulate in outlining the failures of the current and past administration in the fighting in the Middle East. Given that we are where we are, what would you do now? Well, the new book, which I have to buy out, I don't think anybody has actually stated the title, and I want you to get this right, when you go to your one button purchase, it's called America's War for the Greater Middle East colon and military history. And the subtitle is not accidentally chosen. I'm a historian, I try to explain what happened and why. That said, I'll answer your question. Specifically, what ought to be, how can we begin to extricate ourselves from a military misadventure that I have described as a failure? I mean, step number one, I think, is in realistically identifying the threat to effective defenses. I don't know what you think the principal cause of 9-11 was. I think the principal cause, not letting the perpetrators off the hook, the principal explanation for 9-11 is that our vast and expensive national security apparatus let its guard down, fail to take the most simple steps to keep us safe. Now, we've learned from that. Since 9-11, it seems to me there's been a very significant effort in order to erect effective defenses against terrorist activity, and that needs to be sustained. Because the actual terrorist threat, and I say this even understanding or acknowledging the events that occurred in Orlando a couple days ago, the actual terrorist threat here in the United States of America of radical Islamism is quite limited. It's far away. So we should protect ourselves. We should shield ourselves. Will that guarantee that there will be no terrorist attacks here? Obviously not. Nor can I guarantee that you're all gonna get home safely after you leave this auditorium. So there's gonna be some amount of risk. Step number one, protect ourselves. Step number two is to get nations in the region to take responsibility for issues that are rightly theirs. ISIS may not represent an existential threat to the United States of America. ISIS does represent an existential threat to who? Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey. Let them collaborate to address the problem. To which you would say, oh, come on. They all hate each other. There's a Sunni-Shia divide. There's an Arab-Persia divide. There's these deep-seated animosities. Yeah, sure. What do you think was the relationship between Imperial Great Britain, Democratic capitalists of the United States of America, and Stalinist Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II, somehow or other we managed to recognize that Nazi Germany posed a threat that transcended our differences and we collaborated to address that. They can do that as well. Our policy. This is a huge diplomatic challenge. Huge. Can't be fixed by Tuesday. Is to get countries in the region to recognize that they face a transcendent threat that they need to deal with and could deal with. I mean, how big is ISIS? I don't have a security clearance. 25,000? Something like that? 30? 30,000 fighters? Virtually no heavy equipment? No Air Force? No Navy? No allies? No significant resource base? Yes, they're a bunch of vicious killers. But I mean, this is not Festum Europa. So we need to encourage countries in the region who can handle the threat to deal with the threat. That's the second step. Third step, it seems to me, is stepping back a little bit. What's really the problem here? The problem here, it seems to me, is that there is within Islam. I'm not buying into this, they're a religion of hate and violence. But there is within Islam a great crisis that is ongoing and is underway. And as somebody who's not an expert in these matters, I would still posit that the essence of the crisis is finding a way to reconcile faith with modernity in that faith tradition. And that's hard to do. It was hard to do back when we were part of what we used to call Christendom. So that reconciliation between faith and modernity is the ultimate solution to this problem. That will end the violence, that will end the dysfunction. How's that gonna come about? Not by us invading and occupying countries, I'll tell you that for sure. It's gonna come about when they find their path towards that reconciliation. What can we do in the meantime? I think what we can do in the meantime is operating on the margins through educational and cultural exchanges, for example, to try to ease the perception among some in the Islamic world that we are their adversary, we are their enemy, to encourage them, particularly young people in that part of the world, to recognize that there are ways to reconcile faith with modern existence, hoping that over a very long period of time, decades, right, decades, that that will then lead to some positive outcome. So I think that, in my real point here is to say, their power confers choice. We are powerful to take the position, which does seem to me to be the default position in Washington, D.C., that we have no choice except to try harder. You know, what the hell, occupying countries didn't work, so let's try target assassination. Let's see how that, to just keep sort of going through kind of a Rolodex of tactical methodologies, seeing if something ultimately is gonna work, that's a self-defeating proposition. And all it does is jack up the costs, and at the same time, while you're jacking up the costs, we're probably increasing the animosity directed toward us. All right, a couple of final comments. One, strategic choice matters from Dr. Krepenevich this morning. Strategic leadership and strategy is hard, if it wasn't, then we wouldn't need you to be strategic leaders. And there's no guarantee of success or failures, and so hopefully you've learned something about considerations for future strategic leaders. Join me in welcoming and thanking this panel this afternoon for this lively debate.