 My name is Dr. Martin Cook. I'm the Stockdale Chair of Professional Military Ethics here at the War College. This is the first of three major ethics events we do during the course of the year. There'll be a two-day event in November, unfortunately attended only by the junior class, and then a May event that all classes will attend. So what I want to do in the next few minutes, and I know it's the first day, so getting people to ask questions is not always easy, but I hope you will have some. I'd like to try to maybe reframe your notion of what professional ethics is. What Edmonds Carter said just now is quite right. It's been my experience. A lot of people, if they haven't thought about it much, think of ethics almost entirely in terms of personal ethics, right? Telling the truth, keep your promises, and so forth. And I want to suggest that in a professional context, the problem gets both larger and more complicated than that. And there may actually be daylight between your personal ethics and your professional ethical obligations. And one of the things you need to think through is what happens when that happens. When you're not entirely comfortable with what your profession requires of you. So let's start. What I'd like to do is suggest that, viewed through a lens of ethics sufficiently large, you can actually think of a great deal of what you're going to be doing here this year and things that are not obviously ethics at all as related to your professional ethical development. That's the main theme I actually want to develop in this talk. All the things that you're going to do in terms of your intellectual growth and experience contribute to your ability to act ethically as professionals. So one question that we need to think of right away is this is the description of why we send people to a war college. This is from Goldwater Nichols. Just look at that for a minute. And in a minute I'm going to ask you to think what assumptions are embedded in the idea that the Congress had that this is time well spent? I'll suggest a few. It suggests that people think that as you advance and rank, you need to learn and know some new stuff, stuff that you didn't know before. And that's the rationale for sending you here is the perception that if you didn't come here, some of your development would be seriously deficient in the eyes of the Congress. Furthermore, it assumes that what you need is primarily intellectual, that what you've had along the way up till now has been a lot of experience and a lot of training, but here this is a primarily intellectual enterprise. So if somebody thinks that developing your minds for an extended period of time is an essential element in officer development. Pull out a pencil paper, don't do this literally. Do the math. How much are the American people spending on this room? Have you ever thought about that? A lot of salaries in this room, fairly high salaries. So the American people are spending literally millions of dollars on this, right? So somebody thinks this is pretty important, especially as the budget's going down, there's not been much of a hint that PME is gonna take a hit, which is kind of surprising when you think about it. You think that would be an easy way to harvest some money, right? A lot easier than getting rid of flying units or not deploying ships or something like that. But somehow, at least so far, we're still hanging in with the idea that we've gotta keep developing our people. Actually, one of the interesting things to think about is in historical times of really low budgets, like between the wars, what people actually did was go to school. If you ask what were Eisenhower and Patton and those guys doing between the wars, they were going to school at Leavenworth. They were developing their intellectual capability. Eisenhower got a few tanks from the French army because he was curious to know what you'd do with the tank if you had any, because the War Department wasn't gonna buy any. Now what's important about this is this kind of behavior, this kind of focus on intellectual development, a progressive intellectual development, is something only professions do. We don't send DMV clerks to a year of additional school. We don't send people who collect tolls to an additional year of school. But professions do this, right? Do professional development because they think it's important. All true professions have continuing education requirements of some sort. Although I don't know any profession that has a continuing education requirement for mid-career professionals equivalent to what we're giving you. Think about it, what do doctors do? What do lawyers do? They go to weekend short continuing ed courses and things like that. They don't come to a school for a year for that development. So somebody thinks this is pretty, pretty important. Now in the DOD, especially led by Chairman Dempsey, there's been a lot of discussion about the nature of the military as a true professional activity. Those of you in the Army know this conversation got started in the Army about 12 years ago with a book called The Future of the Army Profession and Don Snyder was the scholar who got that study going from West Point. He'll be one of our speakers in November to talk about how the Army's development is parallel to what's now happening in the Navy in terms of the leader development continuum that Ed Mulkelly is leading for the College of Operational and Strategic Leadership that you'll hear a little more about later today and you heard mentioned this morning. The way Don started this was he went around the Army asking this question, are military officers professionals or are they merely obedient bureaucrats? And why would it matter? Clearly we're all embedded in a big bureaucracy, right? So wishing the bureaucracy we're here is a fool's errand. We have the bureaucracy. But is that all we are? And if we're not, if there's a truly professional element to it, what would that mean and why would it matter? So General Dempsey issued this white paper, I don't know if you can read it, America's Military, a Profession of Arms. He issued that last year for all the joint services. And he asked these questions. He says we need to renew our commitment to the profession of arms to make sure that we continue to have the best lead and best trained force in the world. So being truly a profession and not merely an obedient bureaucracy is gonna matter and I'll say more about that in a minute. This is one critical point and I'll come back to it when we talk more generally about professions. What makes a profession able to be a profession and not be micromanaged as merely a bureaucracy is rests on one essential foundation. The trust that the society has toward the profession. Before Admiral Mullen retired, he used to say the thing that kept him up at night more than anything else was the disconnect with the American people. One of his phrases was they don't know us, we don't know them and that really scares me. Think about what happens when professions lose social trust. I'll play the old guy card here. I went to college in 1969. If you know your ancient history, you have some idea what my freshman year of college was like. There were riots on campus. The National Guard was a Bivouac in the Quad. It wasn't safe to walk across my campus wearing an ROTC uniform and returning soldiers got spit upon. So if you don't think, I mean the US military has been on a roll in terms of social trust and confidence for the last 10 or 12 years, but you'd be a fool to take this for granted. If you don't think the American people can and do lose confidence in you, I'm here to tell you they can and do and it's ugly. On a smaller scale, look what happened to naval aviation after tail hook. Or look to happen to what army training after Aberdeen. I mean the list goes on when those things happen or to use another profession or used to be profession. Accountants used to say we're professionals, trust us. We audit according to generally accepted accounting rules. Just rely on us to be professionals. And then Enron happened and Congress took most of their professional marvels away and regulated them to death. So that's what happens when the confidence gets lost. So a deep question to think about is what is it that maintains the trust and confidence of the American people in you? The biggest threat I see right now is sexual assault. Which is certainly where the leadership of the services are spending a great deal of energy and have to do it. But when you have a veteran senator saying in public, I wouldn't send my daughter to the US military, you know you've got a problem. You've got a pretty serious problem. This is still Dempsey. One essential element of that trust is the complete confidence of the American people in your apolitical character. That you were above partisan politics. It's easy to say in the current state of American society it's pretty hard to be above partisan politics, right? It's pretty hard to say anything that doesn't come across as partisan. But the best of our leaders are scrupulously good at this, right? Do you really want a political leader of either party to have serious doubts? Whether he or she can trust the advice they're getting from military leaders because they may have some partisan agenda to make them look good or bad or whatever. So that absolute apolitical character, General Dempsey says, is key to the trust relationship. This is the joint education white paper which follows on to that white paper on profession. In this it says, points out the obvious. We haven't had so many seasoned combat vets in a classroom in a very long time. You are a uniquely experienced group and frankly in some way, in some cases, a suffering group. And we need to be conscious of that. I'm not gonna read you the slide, but here's the one I really like, the last bullet here. Now think about this. Every member of the profession or arms should seek to be a scholar of the profession. How many of you think of yourselves as scholars? And why would the chairman of the Joint Chief say that what I'm worried about is that you be scholars, that you think deeply about this. And by the way, and be able to teach it to the people who come behind you. So you're not just leading by example or by directive, but you're exemplifying for them what it is to be a part of a profession. Which now begs a big question. I've been talking a lot about professions, what are these things, right? What are they and how do they develop? Well, it turns out there is a fairly robust concept of what professions are in the sociological literature. There are some barriers to understanding this. First of all, in modern American English, we use the word profession to mean anything people do for pay. So we can talk about professional athletes or professional telephone installers or whatever, right? I set that aside. We're interested in something much more robust than that. Historically in the early modern West, there were only three things people did that were true professions. Anybody want to give a shot at what they were? Sorry? I can't hear you. One more time. Not educating, law, that's one of them. Medicine, clergy, that's it. Law, medicine and clergy, those three. Now think about those three. What do those three have in common that differentiate them from all kinds of other things people do? Code of ethics, they have their own code of ethics. Want to say a little more about that? The Hippocratic oath? Right, and one thing they all have in common is each of them promises to serve the interests of their client and not to serve themselves, right? Whereas if I'm just a moneymaker, I'm going to give you a service, but it's not my central goal to provide a service to you. It's my goal to make money and along the way, I hope I can give you something that you want to buy, but that's a commercial relationship, right? What else? They're so fragilating, right? Who gets to decide who gets to be a doctor? Doctors, who gets to decide who gets to be a lawyer? Lawyers, who gets to decide who gets to be a minister, or other ministers, right? They have their own body of abstract knowledge, which is a slightly technical term, so let me define it. When you go to the DMV to register your car, the clerk has knowledge you haven't got, right? The clerk knows what forms you need, where the signatures need to go, all that kind of stuff. It's a specialized knowledge that they have that you don't have, but it's not abstract knowledge. It's trainable knowledge. I can train you to be a decent DMV clerk in probably a couple of days. Is this something you're reasonably smart? But when I go into the doctor's office and I say, her tier doc, what is she doing in her head? Something called differential diagnosis, right? It's a very complicated thing. Her tier doc could be this, could be this, could be this. If I do this test, I can eliminate that. Some doctors are better than others at that. That's why we like to watch Dr. House, even though he's a jerk, right? Because he's a really great diagnostician. He knows how to do this. But notice there's no little rule book for this, right? The DMV clerk can go look up in the rule book, what do I do with this complicated case? There's no little rule book for the doc. I mean, there's some guidance, typically her tier doc means this, but there are like 57 other things it could be, right? And if you read those columns in the New York Times about difficult diagnoses columns in the paper, it's always like, well, I didn't think of that for a long time and it finally dawned on me it could be this, and I never thought about that. Now think about it in the same way our military people professionals in that sense, that they have discretion about how they apply their knowledge. Think about Edmund Carter's example. I mean, that was a high risk application of discretionary professional knowledge involved considerable personal risk to him, right? But it was something that was on him to decide. There wasn't a rule book for it. This body of abstract knowledge grows through time, right? That's why we send you to school because there's a sense that you need more. That's what was in the Goldwater Knickers thing I gave you. So we've talked about the three professions. What makes them unique? Let me give you a more formal list of the things they have in common that make them different from other things. First, they provide a specific service deemed essential to the society that they serve. Think about clergy medicine and law in the early modern period. What do they provide? In terms of the values of the society at the time, justice, health, salvation, the three central societal goods, right? So there's something very, very important that they provide and only they provide. In the same way, insofar as the military functions as a professional activity, it provides for the common defense of the nation, right? That's, and that's arguably even more vital than those other things, right? Because if you don't have those things, you have Hobbes state of nature. You have a very specialized technical knowledge developed over time that is manifested by the fact that you speak a jargon that lay people don't understand. Now, somebody once said all professions are conspiracies against lay people. And in some sense that's true, but there are reasons why lay people perceive it as a conspiracy because they don't understand you, right? So when I go see my doc, I'm happy with the answer, you have a bacterial infection, right? But he's not happy with the answer. What bacterium, which is responsive to what antibiotic, and by the way, what are the probable side effects of this and when is it not responsive? Are there okay resistant cases of this that I'm likely to run into? They need to know that. I don't need to know that if I trust them, right? If I stop trusting them, then I wanna hear some more details about exactly why are you doing this? What do you think you know? We've talked about this already. Professions make discretionary judgments about how to apply their knowledge. And you've all been around people who are good at this and people who are good at this, right? They used to float around the internet some British officer evaluations, at least that's what they said they were. And my favorite one, his men would follow him anywhere if only out of curiosity. I mean, that's somebody or you really don't have the trust relationship about. Somebody talked about the self-regulating. When professions are indeed trusted, they have a very high degree of autonomy. They're allowed to run their own affairs. Again, only when they're trusted. When the trust erodes, the autonomy starts to erode too. Think what happened to the promotion system and naval aviation after Taylor. There was a whole generation of aviators who got looked at by name by the Senate. Because we wanna know by name who is where. And until we're satisfied with that, we count on you to discipline your own people, right? What is the effect on social trust when there's an atrocity in the US military? And there's no trial at all. Or the trial is only of the most junior people. Or the convictions are perceived as too lax. What's the effect? We don't really trust you any longer. Think what's happening right now with Senator Jellibrand regarding taking sexual assault reporting away from the chain of command. She may be right, she may be wrong, but what's at issue is, do we trust our leaders to do this properly? Or is their self-interest so involved in these cases that we can't trust them anymore, right? That's the debate going on today in the United Senate about that issue. You get to decide who's in, who's out, who gets promoted, according to what criteria. And again, when we trust you, we let you do it. We don't ask too many questions about it. High degree of public trust. You probably know the US military has been ranked by far the most trusted institution in American society for the last couple of decades. By far, we're talking in the upper 70s, percentage-wise I think, as highly trusted. No other entity in our society comes anywhere close to that. But I just wanna remind you again what I said a minute ago. Don't take it for granted. It's not, it's more fragile than you think it is. And this is a critical one. Individuals are motivated primarily for intrinsic reasons. They wanna do what they're doing because they love doing their professional activity and serving their client. You know, if you ran into a doc who said, I'm really only in it for the money, you'd kinda not wanna see that doc for one thing. We used to use a case at the major command school of a very rich guy who was captain of a ship that said, you know, I don't really need command. I've got plenty of money anyway. I'm just kinda doing this now. There's something wrong with that, right? When you hear that from another profession. So what has all this stuff got to do with ethics? This is a nice little trip down in sociology of professions. But what has it got to do with ethics? Well, remember I suggested we were gonna try to broaden the aperture of what ethics includes. So let me go there. First, professional ethics is, as I hinted at the beginning, distinct from personal ethics. Let me give you an example. Suppose you've got a doc who's the nicest person in the world, but is totally incompetent. Nicest person in the world, but totally incompetent. Are they professionally ethical? No, because the trust relationship is grounded on my belief that you are able to engage in your professional activity in a way that is effective for the client, right? And it's not a question about what kind of person you are. In fact, Dr. House is a good example. It can be nearly irrelevant, how nice a person you are. I mean, being nice person is in general a nice thing, but we can recognize professional expertise in jerks, right? And it really is professional expertise. So what is your primary responsibility as a professional? If you are truly one of the, it is to be as prepared to meet the needs of your client in your designated area of special social trust as you can possibly be. So I talked to a doc who said, you know, we're gonna do the surgery on you. We're gonna do it the way I was taught in med school in 1985, I haven't read a journal since. It was good in 85, it's good now, okay? About that doc, you'd say they are professionally unethical. Does everybody see that? Again, doesn't matter at all how nice a person they are. It is their job to be on top of this stuff, right? Within the level of the standard of care. Failure to anticipate foreseeable needs of your client is an ethical failure. So this has an intellectual component, right? We heard a lot this morning about how the service you're gonna be serving in in the near future is gonna be very different. The challenges are gonna be very different. The way you were brought up in whatever service you come from, whatever platform you're used to, may or may not continue to have the same relevance to the problem. And you know, the temptation is always to hunker down and say, I love my platform, I love where I came from, but that's an unprofessional response to the problem and the reasons I just indicated. Has the self-discipline component, we've already talked about this. If you're not perceived as disciplining your own people and maintaining trustworthy and reliable service, then you're losing your professional status and it has a conduct component. How do you yourself behave? If you're not perceived as acting in a professional manner, and by the way, we often use the word professional very promiscuously, right? To praise or blame almost anything, but does everybody now see it has a very precise meaning here? It's unprofessional of my doctor to come in and chat up, chat me up about certain personal questions unless they're relevant to what we're doing, right? That's not their job. We don't have that kind of relationship. I don't wanna have that kind of relationship, right? I wanna have a relationship that sticks to their expertise and my telling them what I need to tell them. And by the way, why is there this Hippocratic oath that says I will never talk about what patients tell me outside the exam room? Because if they don't assume that that's true, I'll never get them to tell me what I need to know so that I can be professionally effective in treating them. Right, I mean so there's a functional reason driven by the nature of the professional activity why the rule has to be what it is. Or take doctors, take lawyers. Most people who aren't lawyers really have hard time getting their minds around the idea that it is my job as a lawyer to defend the interests of my client. No matter who my client is, right? This French lawyer just died who made a career out of defending people who were charged with war crimes. He said, look, I would have defended Adolf Hitler because if Adolf Hitler's gonna get a fair trial, somebody's gotta be his lawyer, right? Somebody's gotta be the advocate for this. Now there's some specific things I think are barriers to broadening your aperture and understanding military ethics. So let me go down these a little bit. These are things I've observed over the years. First of all, the vocabulary of military people to talk about ethical matters is pretty narrow. These are I think your two favorite words. Professionalism and integrity. And as I mentioned, professionalism is used very broadly. It can be everything from a sloppy uniform to how well you fly your airplane. I mean, it can be all of that stuff. And integrity just comes from the Latin word integer, which means to be at one with oneself. And it suggests that if you have integrity, then you are completely consistent across environments and you can be relied on to behave in a certain kind of way almost no matter what. Well, the bad news from social scientific literature, especially moral psychology is integrity defined as that doesn't exist. I could give you a ton of literature to convince you that changes of an environment, even small ones, make decisive effects on how people behave. I'll give you one little one. There's a guy named Dan Ariely, who's a research psychologist. He did a study at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh of cheating on college students. The basic study was students come into a room, there's an envelope with $10 bills on it. They're told to answer a set of math problems, pay themselves 50 cents for every correctly answered math problem, leave the room and tear up the answer paper. It would appear that there's no way to detect cheating in this environment. He actually has a way. He's got a camera or something. Turns out most people cheat a little. Couple of problems. The average is a couple of problems more. Then he puts an actor in the room. And the actor, the minute the experimenter leaves the room, the actor gets up, takes all $10, says I've solved them all and walks out of the room. Question, would the presence of the actor increase or decrease cheating? What do you think? The answer is it depends what sweatshirt the actor wears. If the actor wears a Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt, cheating goes way up. If the cheating wears a sweatshirt, the cheating goes way down. Now, why is that? Well, because if a behavior is perceived as tolerated by my group, I'm more likely to go along with it. If the person doing the behavior is, someone I perceived as the other, and in particular a group I have a rivalry with and I don't want to be associated with, then I'm likely to behave better because I want to be better than them, right? So this is just one small example. If anybody's interested in this literature, I've been reading a lot of this last year or so, so if anybody wants to do a paper on that, come see me, I'll help you out. Okay, so that's one problem. We've got this, another problem is when we talk about ethics and military, pretty often we're actually talking about law. So, you know, we all get our annual ethics brief. Dave Lee, where are you? Our staff Jag from last year, where is he? There he is. I had my ethics brief from Dave Lee, who's a wonderful Jag officer. It was basically what will send me to jail, right? What to report on my travel claims, how to fill out the forms correctly, what kind of gifts I can and can't receive up to how much money and so forth, right? That's the ethics brief. So if you've been raised in a culture where that's what ethics is, talking to Dave, love Dave to death, don't get me wrong, it's still not gonna get you to what we're now talking about, right? Admiral Weisskopf, who's the IG of the Navy right now, about to retire, loves this little book. You're not so smart. And he's been passing around the Navy. It's a really fun little read. The structure of the book is here's what everybody thinks is true, now here's what's actually true. And he's got like 30 examples of things we all commonly assume to be true about our service and our behavior that are demonstrably false. So I commend that to you if you want. Okay, so what is this professional ethics I'm talking about? If it's distinct from personal ethics and it's distinct from the legal question, what is it? Well, we've already talked about this. You could be honest, loyal, diligent, whatever you want, but incompetent. And if you're that, you are professionally unethical. Think about that for a minute. I don't care whether you're honest, I don't care whether you're loyal, I don't care whether you're diligent. He tried really hard, but he still crashed the airplane, really doesn't help. Here's the key one for your thinking about your year here. To be intellectually lazy in your professional development is unethical. To be intellectually lazy in your professional development is unethical. Because the client is assuming that you've done everything in your power to prepare to meet their needs as effectively as you can. And to the extent that you are coasting, you are not preparing yourself to meet that requirement, which is the lifeblood of what makes a profession a profession and not merely an obedient bureaucracy. So that's key. This is a big one for this year, more than in previous years. Failure to adapt to foreseeably changing environments is unethical. Does everybody see that? Failure to adapt to foreseeable changes in the environment. So I think Ed McKelly's gonna talk about this a little bit, but you know, Secretary Hagel said last couple of weeks ago, maybe the Navy is gonna go to nine or eight carriers. If the Navy goes to nine or eight carriers, the Navy cannot operate the way it's operated for the last 50 years. I mean, it's just not possible, right? So if that's the force structure you're given, how do you use it? Got any clever ideas about that? Cause that would radically redefine how you operate. And just say, well, we'll do less of what we've been used to doing may continue to get people seeming around the world, but whether it's gonna be effective or not is highly debatable. Failure to serve the client's interests. We've already talked about this. Professionals, true professionals, it's not about them. It's not about them getting what they want. It's figuring out how to meet the needs of the client. So, PME, if you think about it, assumes that there's a kind of developmental path that officers should be on, that they should get certain things at certain stages. As Admiral Carter mentioned this morning, historically the Navy has paid the least attention to this among the services. We believe that that may be shifting. That would be a valuable thing, but part of what's driving the leader development continuum that we've been working on for the last several years is the belief, and in fact, we could prove that there are developmental gaps in Navy leader development. That is to say, people are reporting, I wasn't ready to do my job when I got to rank X because I wasn't really prepared yet. So we asked them, when should you have gotten that, and when did you get it, and the gulf is pretty big in some cases. So that's what PME is supposed to address. Now, I'm gonna suggest something which I know is totally counterintuitive to most of you, which is that ethics too gets very complicated. We talk so much as if it's just a matter of looking myself in the mirror or telling the truth and keeping my promises. If I can do those things, then I'll be fine. Well, it's not true, and here's the reason it's not true. This is an acronym invented at Carlyle, where I taught for a few years. It says, look, the environment you go to as you rise and rank is increasingly characterized by these four dimensions. The acronym is VUCA. We tell guys at Carlyle on day one that welcome to VUCA, you. That's what we're doing today. The first word is volatile, a term borrowed from chemistry, right? Things that evaporate quickly. The simplest way to think about this is at the senior levels of leadership, what are the odds that you'll be doing today, what you thought you'd be doing today when you drove into the office? Fairly small, right? And then that takes a whole new skill set, right? New stuff comes over the transom, two equal and opposite ways to go wrong. You could get so busy chasing the inbox that you'd never get anything done, or you can get so focused on trying to ignore the stuff that comes in the inbox and driving what you think is the main thing, that it catches you, right? And where did anybody teach you the skill to figure that out? How to balance volatility in that way? It is uncertain. By this, I don't just mean that you don't know all that's going on. I mean that you will never know all that's going on. I worked for a two-star once, I won't name names, who was the most indecisive person I ever knew. I'd go to these long meetings where we'd talk for a entire weekend sometimes. The end of it would say, did anybody get any decision out of this guy? The answer was no. So I'm complaining about this to this infantry colonel that I work with. He says, here's the problem, Martin, this is an army guy. He says, he's a cavalry officer. I said, yeah, so? He said, well, think about what they do. They drive around the battlefield, they acquire information that they pass to other people, and then those other people make the decision with this information. So he's driving around. He's gonna drive around forever. He's never gonna have enough to get him over the decision-making threshold because he'll never feel comfortable that he knows enough. It is complex. Complex is different than complicated. Up till now, we've trained you to deal with very complicated problems, and we've given you a way to deal with them. You break them down into little pieces, you analyze the little pieces, you come up with courses of action, you reassemble them, and you come up with a way forward. Complex is different than that. Complex is, you don't even know for sure what the end state is. I mean, at least in complicated problems, you know you're trying to get from A to B, it's just complicated to get there, right? So you gotta figure out the intervening steps and kind of break them down and analyze them. In inherently complex problems, if you keep insisting on applying linear methods, you probably won't ultimately get anywhere because they're not subject to that kind of linear analysis at all. When have we trained you to think about complexity and to be comfortable in complexity? The quote we heard this morning about the first half of your career is about physical stuff. It's also about relatively simple stuff, right? I mean, it's about complicated sense, but not complex things. Now it's all about complex things from here on, and it's ambiguous. You're not gonna know everything that's going on. You're not gonna know the motives of all the players. Of course, the more you deal with other services, other cultures, civilian agencies and so forth, the more the differing agendas amount, and you just don't know what's going on all the time, right? And it's back to the driving around problem. If you wait till you're absolutely clear that you understand it, you'll be paralyzed. So another problem, another barrier to understanding is if you think about how military organizations fix ethical failure, they engage in what I call the holy trinity. They fire the leadership, they mandate some more training, and they issue a new policy. And somehow, those three things in combination are the universal solvent that's supposed to fix every ethical failure, right? Now, there's several problems of that. One is if you do that iteratively, what you get is a very rule-bound system, right? You just get layers and layers of policy that you can't dig yourself out from under, or even understand. But what if the problem really isn't any of those things? What if it's a systemic thing? The simplest example I observed personally was when General Sunseki came in as Chief Staff of the Army, he called up Carlile and said, I need 10 colonels to tell me how to fix the readiness reporting system. Because the one thing I know for sure about the Army is I have no idea how ready the Army is today. And why is that? Because the culture of the Army won't let you report below C2. You just can't do it, right? So if you're a lonely little O3 captain company commander and you're unit C3 and you try to report it, you're gonna be counseled by higher headquarters and it's gonna be pencil-whipped anyway, right? So now ask yourself, is the captain who falsely reports C2 lying? Well, in the ordinary sense of the word, of course, right? If deliberately, intentionally stating something to be true that you know isn't true, isn't lying, what is lying? But it's also just a stupid way to look at the captain's problem, right? So if there's a fix to the captain's problem, it's not gonna come from the captain. Who's it gonna come from? People with enough stuff on their shoulders to fix the system, right? And until they do it, the captain is pretty well stuck, right? So now why does this matter? Because many of you in this room are beginning to own pieces of systems and that will just increase. So before you, when you run into failure in your units, I mean, I would suggest before leaping immediately to the Holy Trinity, that extra little thought loop would be what's driving this behavior? Is there something driving this behavior other than just bad people or bad policies or inadequate training? And if I can identify what that is, do I have the power to fix it? And if I don't have the power to fix it, do I at least know the phone number of somebody who might? So that's the system. Now, the Navy, of course, has had a rash of detachments for cause, which has gotten the Navy leadership somewhat concerned. It's been very important as we've worked on the leader development continuum to say, this is not a fix for your DFC problem. I mean, the DFC problem is a problem and it's embarrassing and something needs to be done about it, but by the way, this article by Captain Light, the Navy's moral compass from the Naval War College Review about a year ago is an excellent article. It's made all around the Navy. Most of the admirals have read it. It's a very thoughtful piece. I highly recommend it to you. There's something that the Navy glummed on to explain these failures. If anybody's read the IG reports about the DFCs, they glummed onto this article called the Bathsheba Syndrome by a guy named Clint Longnecker, who spoke here once already. By the way, the last four years of ethics events are up on our YouTube channel. So if anybody's curious, go to the Naval War College and YouTube channels up there. Clint's up there giving a talk. How many of you have heard or read of this article? Anybody? Most of you? About half of you, I'd say. Remember the thesis is that this is interesting because these are people who fail not because they're a fear of failure, but because they've been successful so long they kind of take it for granted. And they get the sort of delusions of grandeur that they can manage the problem. And if they get caught, they have enough power to cover it up. And so we're not gonna labor this today. I've invited Clint to come in November. I haven't yet heard whether he's coming, but I hope he will. But the Navy did glum onto this as their best guess about why they're having this DFC problem. The problem with it, of course, is just a thought piece. It just takes the story of King David in the Bible and his relationship with Bathsheba and uses that as a model for leaders who aren't any longer focused on what they ought to be doing, right, and or get distracted. We're not even gonna labor it here. I think you're gonna read it later. So why does your life get vooka as you rise and rank? Well, one reason why is your web of obligations gets a lot more complex in terms of who you're answerable to and related to and your timeframe shifts a lot. You know, when you're an O-304, your life is pretty simple in some ways, right? You're answerable to your boss and to your subordinates and you kind of do your job. Think, run to the other end. What is CNO worried about? CNO is worried about the Navy 25 years from now. It's worried about the relationship between our Navy and all of our partner navies who are with us here. Worryed about relations to the Congress, to the executive and to the judiciary. And by the way, those all pull in different directions. So how do you think through all of that as you rise and rank? How do you juggle it? How do you know which of these things have to be paid attention to and which ones can be treated as lower priority? That's a very vooka kind of problem. So ethics gets vooka too in that way. General McMaster was here a couple of years ago. Most of you, I'm sure all the Army people know him. He was the, as a colonel, he took the 3rd Army Cavalry Regiment to Tel Offer in Iraq and basically invented the counter-insurgency strategy that then got written into the counter-insurgency manual. He's now an Army two star, is that right? Two star Army guys? I think, yeah. Very thoughtful guy, has a PhD, wrote this wonderful book, Derelection of Duty, for his PhD thesis. And he said this about our Army in the early stages of Iraq. We weren't intellectually prepared. And we didn't adapt fast enough. This is Army guy talking to his own Army, right? So a couple of hard problems at the higher levels. You are clearly required to be subordinates of the in authority. General Dempsey made very clear that it's the apolitical character of your advice and your conduct that is the foundation of the trust relationship between the military and the society it serves. On the other hand, if you are professionals, you have expertise that few of your civilian leaders are gonna have and that means you have to give them professional military advice. And what's the difference between professional military advice and the personal opinion of a person who happens to be in a uniform? Those are totally different questions, right? Does everybody see that? So for example, we will have Lieutenant Colonel Latandra from the Air Force Jaguar speak again. The last time she was here, she spoke about her role as the legal advisor to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell, repeal group. And the general convened that and said, look, I don't even care to know what your personal opinions about this are. Just leave that at the door. I don't care. Our charge is to advise in our best professional capacity what would be the implications of a change in the policy. Our civilian leadership is asking us for this. You may have strong feelings one way or the other. I don't care. They don't belong in this room. Some recent examples. This one's getting a little old. You may remember that late in the end of the first Bush administration, six recently retired generals all called publicly and in an uncoordinated way for the resignation of the Secretary of Defense. Tricky matter. That's a pretty rare event in American history. In fact, I can't think of any other example where six people did that. There was a considerable short literature about whether that was an exercise of professional ethical judgment on the part of those people who were now out of office and therefore in some sense free to speak or whether it was undermining good order and discipline and a role that retired flag officers simply shouldn't take on. We're not gonna settle that question today, but it's a hard one. Think about it for a minute. What do you do if you're convinced that you're on a really bad path and the civilian leaders are not listening to the people in uniform who either are advising them and being ignored or not advising them clearly. And they have a view that the policy's misguided. What is your role? Another example and even more egregious one is retired General Keane, former Vice Chief of Staff, who was watching TV, retired guy, watching Iraq's and we're losing this thing. Gets on the phone to the American Enterprise Institute, reworks the entire surge strategy, sells it to the president over the head of the joint staff and that becomes the policy. Exercise of professional ethics or totally out of his lane. Leave it to you, think about it. The firing of General McChrystal. Everybody's familiar with that, right? Was that his fault that his people talked that way about the vice president? Should the president have taken the view that his competence was so great that the apparent insubordination and disrespect was tolerable? Hard problem. Most recently, I thought if any of you watch General Dempsey's testimony at the Senate Armed Services Committee about Syria when Senator McCain was pushing him hard to give him some intervention strategies. And General Dempsey was being very respectful but saying basically counseling against it, right? And I think this is a bad idea and I don't want to be drawn into it. Now of course he also said if you politicians order us that we should create a no fly zone or do some other thing in Syria, of course we'll do it to the best of our ability but you're asking for my advice and my advice is we don't want to do that. This is gonna be really big as the budget looms because think about the professional obligation here. What is the tendency of military services during times of budget cuts always to do? To defend every rice bowl to the death, right? I mean that's just a natural bureaucratic response to budgetary drawdown. It's not gonna work this time as far as I can tell the drawdown's gonna happen. So you can either cut smarter, you can cut dumb and who would be the best people to decide what cut smart looks like? Military professionals, right? Cause if you don't do it, they're gonna do it to you with salami slices and sequesters and furloughs, right? And that's not gonna be effective. Okay so if I've made any sense till now, here's a Navy question. How is this a professional ethics challenge? Yeah, gotta figure out how to operate in that environment and what that means most immediately is you can't bring carriers in close to shore if they have any such capability, right? They may be, you may have to stay out beyond the legs of your carrier-based aircraft. What does that mean for what the Navy does if that's true, right? I'm not saying this is true, I'm just saying this is the kind of thing professional ethics would require you to need to be thinking about. Back to the adaptability question. Secretary DeGate said this. I think it's already clear by now I hope how this is a professional ethics question that the money is gonna shut off for a good long time. So what does that mean? What is your responsibility, uniform people, to figure out how to do the best job you can creating a defense structure that meets the needs of your client, i.e. the American people, within the budget you're gonna get. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna get new acquisition systems. You may be stuck with old platforms much longer than you'd like. You may have to fundamentally rethink how you operate back to my eight carrier scenario, right? I mean that would be a very different thing. So here are some of the things you need to think about as professional ethical requirements. Force structure and campaign planning. In the National Security Affairs course, you will design notional force structures. What you design varies on your ethical obligations, right? Because as Secretary Romsell said, you come to the war with the army you have and not the army you wish you had, right? If you built the wrong stuff, it might have been that you did your very best and thought it through and tried your very best to see the force and you just missed, that'll happen. I'm gonna use an example I used before and got some flak from the historians, but I just think it's still a pretty good one. Think about the French general staff that spent all the money on the Maginot line before World War II. And then the Germans show up and just drive around it, right? Is that an ethical failure on the part of the French general staff? Should they have known better? Well, maybe if they'd read the newspapers about how the Germans operate in Spain in the 30s, they might have had a clue, right? That fixed fortifications may not be the key to defense next round. Okay, now here's the war college mission and I just wanna kinda walk through this quickly and see what aspects of the strike you is professional ethical stuff now. Anybody pick out phrases that sound like professional ethics in there? Well, the obvious ones, leaders of character and trust, right? That goes, that's the easy one. Critical thinkers. Is that an ethics obligation to be a critical thinker? I would say, yeah. If you're not thinking about how this is gonna work into the future as best you can, it's an ethical failure. If you're not thinking about how to operate with naval force and with joint forces in new and creative ways, think about what's Air Sea Battle all about, right? You could love it or you can hate it. I don't mean to address that little tempest, but what is it about? It's a suggestion that we're gonna need to operate more jointly with the air force and the Navy in the Pacific Theater for reasons related to that missile I just showed you, right, having to do with being able to get close enough into shore to do anything. This is more of the mission. Anticipate future operational and strategic needs. That's what we've just been talking about, right? Assess the risk. You know, very soon the question is gonna come from the Secretary of Defense and the President. What is the risk if I go to aid carriers? What is the risk if I cancel out two air force squadrons? Can I do it? Of course I can do it, I can cut the budget to do it, I need a risk associated with it. I don't wanna hear from you, Admiral, I don't wanna hear from you, General, is just please don't do it because we love it. I wanna hear really no kidding, what is your professional judgment about what's at stake if you end up doing that? So this is all you understand the War College mission. This is what we say in our official documents is why you're here to do these things. Robust international partners. You have a whole wing of international partners sitting right here in the front. My personal opinion is one of the most valuable things all of you will do in your years get to know your international partners as best you can. You'll learn a lot and they will help broaden your perspective more than you could possibly imagine. So why do you need to worry about all that? Bottom line to maintain the bond of trust of the society that you are true professionals. Back to General McMaster again. This is from his talk here a couple of years ago. Notice the language he's using is the same professionalism language I've just been using. Maintaining the sacred trust in the covenant. We published that piece by the way in the Naval War College Review so all of that's available online. So if you just go online for the Naval War College Review and search on General McMaster you'll find the article that this is all taken from. This is General Dempsey recently. Think more and train leaders better. It's General Dempsey's idea of the main thing we need to be doing. I'm gonna skip through that. I love this. This is about a year ago, General Dempsey said this. He said, I've been struck by this quote from Einstein. If you have an hour to save the world spend 55 minutes of it understanding the problem. Had five minutes trying to fix it. Have you ever watched a military officer be given a problem? How long do they spend trying to understand the problem before they start thrashing around finding courses of action? My experience it's measured in nanoseconds, right? So I mean, here's your chance to think seriously about what General Dempsey's saying here. Our leader development paradigms he says haven't really changed that much. We're still doing the same old thing. So here's my suggestion to you. Welcome to Newport. Get out 55 minutes to understand the problem. Thank you very much. I will take a few questions if there are any.