 Good morning and welcome. My name is Lisa Grande. I'm the head of the United States Institute of Peace. The Institute was established in 1984 by Congress as a nonpartisan public institution that's dedicated to helping prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict abroad. We're so pleased to welcome everyone who has joined us today in person and the hundreds of people that we know are joining us online. For this very special event, that is an honor of US military veterans and the role that they play in securing and promoting peace. For the Institute, this is a particularly important opportunity for us to pay our respect to and to salute the armed services and the work that they do day in and day out to ensure global stability. USIP, the Institute, was established by two senators, one Democrat and one Republican, both of whom were combat veterans. The legislation that created USIP was introduced by Sparky Matsunaga. He was the senator from Hawaii who had served with the renowned 442nd combat regiment. He was wounded twice in battle in World War II. The legislation was cosponsored by the senator from Oregon, Mark Hatfield. He commanded Navy landing craft in Irojima and in Okinawa. And he led the first US survey into Irojima after the use of the atomic bomb. Senator Daniel Inouye from Hawaii, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry at the risk of his own life above and beyond the call of duty during the battle near San Torezzo in Italy during World War II. He joined his fellow senators in securing passage of the bill. In honor of the trust that's been placed in USIP by these distinguished veterans and leaders, USIP is proud that every year we host an annual Veterans Day event that explores and that celebrates the role of citizen soldiers. The title of these events, First in Peace, First in War, is actually taken from a eulogy of President Washington, where our country's first president was described as First in War, First in Peace, First in the hearts of his countrymen. We cribbed from that eulogy. And our series is called First in Peace, First in War. As many of you may know, when President Washington was giving his last address to Congress in 1796, he asked the elected representatives of this country to do two things. He asked them to establish a military academy and he asked them to establish a peace academy. In 1802, the US Military Academy at West Point was established to teach the art of war. 180 years later, Congress established the US Institute of Peace to promote the arts of peace. We are privileged to welcome all of the veterans and active duty military personnel who have joined us today. May we salute all of you. Thank you for being with us. We're particularly privileged to be joined by General Kip Ward, who served as the inaugural commander of the United States Africa Command. Colonel Steve Lee, the president of the Korean War Memorial Foundation, and Jeff Weinbold, who is the superintendent of our national mall. We also want to single out the military officers who come to USIP each year as fellows. They collaborate with our USIP experts and our staff, working in 26 countries across the globe to build peace. The Institute is also very pleased that we have two of the co-chairs of the four country caucus who have provided videos about how they see their work as veterans who have now been elected to Congress and the efforts they make to build peace based on their military experience. Those are outside of the auditorium on the screens. Today's event is going to begin with opening comments from Dr. Patrick Spiro. He is the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. We are then honored to welcome to the stage, after Dr. Spiro's comments, Ambassador Douglas Lute. Ambassador Lute retired from the US Army as a Lieutenant General after 35 years of active duty, including multiple tours and NATO commands. That was a tour in Germany during the Cold War, and he commanded US forces in Kosovo. Ambassador Lute was the director of operations on the joint staff, overseeing US military operations worldwide. From 27 to 2013, Ambassador Lute served at the White House under Presidents Bush and Obama. He was the assistant to the president. He was then the deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. And he was the deputy assistant to the president on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. General Lute was appointed the US Ambassador to NATO from 2013 to 2017. And he currently holds the Midurmic Distinguished Chair of Social Sciences at the US Military Academy. Joining Ambassador Lute on the stage will be Admiral James Fogo. During the Admiral's 39 years of active duty in the US Navy, he served as commander of the United States Naval Forces Europe Africa, commander of Allied Joint Force Command Naples. He served as the director of Navy staff, commander of the United States Sixth Fleet. And earlier in his career, he was a commander of the attack submarine USS Oklahoma City. Admiral Fogo is currently the dean for the Center for Maritime Strategy at the Navy League of the United States. He has received numerous awards, including extinguished service medal, defense superior service medal, the Legion of Merit, and the French government awarded him the Les Jeun I Can't Speak French Wealth Donner. Both Ambassador Lute and Admiral Fogo are members of USIP Senior Military Advisory Group. This is a very special group. It's comprised of retired officers who have served in the highest command positions and senior positions in Washington DC and who provide sage advice and guidance to the Institute on all matters of conflict warfare and reconciliation. We are delighted to welcome our Admiral Peter Cressy, who is going to moderate the discussion with Ambassador Lute and Admiral Fogo. Our Admiral was on active duty for 28 years in the Navy. He had operational assignments in Alaska, Japan, Iceland, Italy, the Mediterranean. And he was a commander in NATO Air Mediterranean during Desert Storm. After retiring from active service, Dr. Cressy served for six years as the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and for two years as president of the Massachusetts Maritime College, where Admiral Cressy is currently the director of executive leadership programs at the Washington Presidential Library. May we please welcome Dr. Spiro for his opening comments. Thank you, Lise. And thank you also to Mike Yaffe for organizing this fantastic day or morning. It's great to be here in the morning. I'm so used to Pavlovian at that George Washington's Presidential Library. We host a lot of events, most of them in the evening time. So it's a little unusual to say good morning, but good morning. Thank you all for taking the time this morning to come in for this event. I just want to talk a little bit about George Washington. And Lise mentioned his farewell address of 1796, which for me is one of our founding documents. I think there are three founding documents. There is the Declaration of Independence that establishes the principles upon which this nation was founded. There's the Constitution, which creates a framework for how to govern. And then the farewell address is Washington's prescription for how to govern in a democratic republic that can be fractured, that can be divisive, the way forward. But today, I actually don't want to talk about that farewell address. I want to talk about Washington's other farewell address. It's much less known, in fact, that George Washington's paperist project has yet to print it in their official volumes. But it's Washington's farewell address in 1783. It's the address that he delivered to the troops as he was returning home to Mount Vernon as the great census, the general who had an enormous amount of power but decided to give it up and retire and return to a life of agriculture. And why I find this so interesting is because this topic is first in war, first in peace. And this is the moment when Washington is transitioning himself from being a wartime leader to a peacetime citizen in this new republic. And this address, coming in 1783, was coming at a momentous moment for this country but also for all the troops who had been fighting this battle for freedom. For two years, from 1775 to 1781, the United States Army, the Continental Army, was engaged in battles throughout the Eastern seaboard to secure American independence. But after the battle of Yorktown in 1781, the United States fell into a truce. And the troops found themselves stationed for two years outside in New York, in Newberg, in New York. And those were two very difficult years for the army. The troops were uncertain about their future, they were anxious about their status. And there were several mutinies that Washington faced during this period of time. So his address to the troops coming in 1783 really was for him a prescription, just like the farewell address of 1796 was a prescription for how to govern. His address in 1783 was a prescription to troops for how to be citizens in this republic. And so there are a few things that I wanna highlight from his talk that I think are particularly pertinent today, especially as I think about the distinguished guests that we're gonna welcome onto this stage soon and their own careers, both in military life and outside of it. The first thing that Washington said is that one of the things that happened during this war was something incredible, a transformation in the way people imagined who they were and their responsibilities to their society. Before the American Revolution, colonists were divided by their colonies. They thought themselves as a Pennsylvanian or a Virginian first. They never thought of themselves as Americans. They most often looked east across the Atlantic to London for how to act, what to believe. But during the war itself, the troops had forged bonds that transcended these divisions. And this is how Washington described this transformation. Who that was not a witness could imagine that the most violent local prejudices would cease so soon. And that men who came from different parts of the continent strongly disposed by the habits of their own education to despise and quarrel with each other would instantly become but one patriotic band of brothers. The war itself and being a soldier had transformed these colonists into Americans. But Washington also knew that these Americans, these veterans who were returning to civilian life were anxious to return to home. They wanted to return to home, but they didn't know what awaited them. They didn't know what their status was gonna be. And so he gave them some words of advice. He said, it is universally acknowledged that the enlarged prospect of happiness opened by the confirmation of our independence and sovereignty exceeds the powers of description. So it's a hopeful future. And for soldiers, the brave men who have contributed so essentially to these inestimable acquisitions, the happiness they're about to receive, retiring victorious from the field of war to the field of agriculture, just like Cincinnati's, can participate in all the blessings which have been obtained. In such a republic, who will exclude them from the rights of all citizens and the fruits of their labors? He continued, the commander-in-chief conceives little is now wanting to enable the soldier to change from the military character they're used to into that of citizen. So Washington assured all of these veterans that they were going to be fully fledged citizens entitled the same rights and liberties that any other American had. But then he does something. He turns the tables on these veterans and tells them what their responsibilities and obligations as citizens are to this republic. And here's what he said. Washington at this period of time was very nervous. He was hopeful about the future of the country, but he was nervous about how it was going to govern. He had experienced on the front lines the weakness of the national government. Since at least 1780s, we have letters of Washington on the front lines talking about the need to reform government, that the Congress was too weak, that the executive was too feeble, that there needed to be a reform in government to better unite this country and to maintain the bonds that the army had forged during the war. And so he told these soldiers that as citizens, they had a duty to continue to fight for this republic as soon as they returned home. That although they secured independence on the battlefield, they still had a role and a responsibility in civilian life. And this is what he said to them. In order to effect this desirable purpose and to remove the prejudices which may have taken possession in the minds of any good people of the states, he knew, Washington knew that many people who had not fought in this war still harbored those same prejudices that the colonists had before, these divisions between the country. It is earnestly recommended to all the troops that with the strong attachments to the union that they have formed, they should carry with them into civil society these conciliating dispositions and they should prove themselves not less virtuous and useful as citizens than they have been in preserving the victories as soldiers. And then he continued, that unless the principles of the federal government were properly supported and the powers of the union increased, the honor and dignity and justice of the nation would be lost forever. Washington realized it was perilous times and that these veterans had a role to play. He called on every officer and every soldier to add his best endeavors to those of his worthy fellow citizens towards effecting their great and valuable purposes on which our very existence as a nation so materially depends. And so as I think about the Veterans Day coming up, this panel, but most especially, those who are about to take the stage, three individuals who have lived Washington's creed. And so I'm looking forward to this conversation. Thank you all for joining us. Well, this was a very select group and as many of you know, Washington as they measured his coffin determined he was probably six foot two and a half. I'd like to point out that these other three gentlemen are all six foot two and a half and I'm only five, nine and a half. Washington looked great on a horse and my wife likes to remind me if I stretch real hard, she was five, 10 when we got married. I might be five, nine and three quarters and when I got on a horse, I made the damn thing look like a mule. Well, we've got important stuff to do today and we are thrilled to have these extraordinary people with us. Again, thanks to USIP and all of you for being here. It certainly is appropriate of all these distinguished residents. I want to pick up on what Pat said about George Washington about being productive soldiers, being productive citizens. He really gets quite specific. He says we can go into agriculture. We can go into fisheries. We can even go west. Washington was very focused on the west and we can be no less virtuous, as Pat said, as civilians. But the one I love is he goes into the third person, very conscious of being on stage and he says the commander in chief is about to retire from service. Now he meant specifically military service because as we know, he certainly came back and served again as both you gentlemen did. The curtain of separation, he's very theatrical, will soon be drawn and the military scene to him will be closed forever. But yet as a general, he agrees and he retires but he comes back. He comes back when he's called again to go to the Constitutional Convention and then of course it's a foregone conclusion that he'll be president. But even as a general, he was conscious of the diplomatic role. Concerned about getting the French into the war, thus his great friendship with Lafayette. Concerned about Spain perhaps taking advantage of the situation coming up from Florida, capturing Georgia, perhaps South Carolina. And then of course turns the table as president. He goes to being commander in chief of the diplomatic corps at the same time. Concerned about keeping us out of war. So we have many things to look at today and I wanna turn to our panel and ask that we look at sort of three or four fundamental things. First, your perspective as citizen shoulders in the present, looking at the example of George Washington, military officers in uniform and out of uniform as peacekeepers, as soldier diplomats, your stories and anecdotes. I've had a chance to look at some of them. I know we'll be fascinating to folks. And as a veteran, and we have so many here in the audience today, how do you view your role as a citizen? How was it shaped by your time in the service? Well Ambassador, let me turn to you first. You had the thrill or despair, I don't know of working in various administrations after being a great soldier with extraordinary experiences. Why don't you lead off, sir? Well, thanks. And thanks to Lisa and USIP for bringing us together this morning, especially on the sort of the eve of Veterans Day. So my experience on either side of this curtain that you described, right? Military service to civilian service was a pretty stark awakening. So on a Friday, I was a three star director of operations on the joint staff. And on Monday, I changed into civilian garb and went to the West Wing where my new duty assignment. The only thing on my calendar that first Monday was 0700, brief the president, right? And this was because my portfolio was Iraq and Afghanistan. This 2007, Iraq is burning, the surge is underway in Iraq, Afghanistan's a bit of a second thought. But that was my portfolio. I thought, you know, I've been doing Iraq and Afghanistan for a number of years. This isn't gonna be that hard. I got there early, you know, I read the presidential daily briefing, I read the intel of the day, I talked to Dave Patreus and Ryan Crocker and Baghdad. I had my little three by five card with the three points I was gonna make with the president at seven o'clock. Seven o'clock, president walks over from the residence, yells my last name, my cue to get up and walk in and brief him. And I make my three points. He has a short conversation, five to seven minutes. And that was it, right? So I go down the hall, down the stairway, just below the oval. And I take my jacket off and say, well, that's it. That's the only thing on my scandal today. This is gonna be a pretty sweet job, right? A few minutes later, okay, a few minutes later, one of President Bush's assistants comes down and says, oh, General Lute, I'm so happy I found you. And then he looked at it, I said, I didn't even know this was an office. He said, you know, it was actually a closet, which was the only available space, I think, in the West Wing. But at eight o'clock, you're supposed to be back up in the Oval Office for the PDB, the presidential daily briefing. This is a CIA briefing to the president every morning. President Bush took his at eight o'clock. I thought, well, you know, I've read the PDB. It's all about Iraq, which is the dominant theme at the time. I'm supposed to be the Iraq guy. Yes, I believe, I know how to get to the Oval Office. I believe I can do this. There's no competing events on my calendar, right? So at eight o'clock, I make my way back up there. The door closes, about seven or eight of us in the room. The CIA briefers, briefing President Bush, it's all about Iraq. Because I'm so familiar with this, and because I wasn't on the hook to brief, I'm kind of gazing around, you know? They could, wow, I'm from Michigan City, Indiana. What am I doing in the Oval Office? You know, twice in the same morning. I thought like, wow, that's why they call it the Oval Office, you know? Because if you look at the ceiling, you can really tell. I remember thinking, there's this grandfather clock there by the main entrance. I wonder if that chimes every hour on the hour. This could be disruptive, I thought to myself, right? Briefing goes on, right? A few minutes into the briefing, the President looks seemingly right at me and gives me this, towards the door. I thought, ah, he saw me gazing around, okay? Not paying attention, and he's now dismissing me. I panic, right? This is my first morning. I thought, my first line of defense, I will ignore him. I said, it was my first day, okay? Bear with me. So a few minutes go by, and this repeats. He now again looks up from the briefing, nods me towards the door. I thought, well, I can't ignore him. He's, you know, clearly there's something going on. This is not a good sign on my first morning. I begin to pack up my notes, getting ready to leave. Josh Bolton, George Bush's White House Chief of Staff, is watching all this, somewhat amused. He sees the first nod, the second, sees me now packing up. He says, Doug, the President doesn't want you to leave in the meeting. Barney the dog is outside in the Rose Garden, scratching on the door, because Barney's bed was in the Oval Office, right? You are closest to the door. He only wants you to get up and let Barney in. And I thought, you know, I'm a three star, I could do this. And so I tell you this story, because it represents, it's a bit of a vignette that represents this curtain that Washington was talking about, right? I mean, life is tremendously different. It's an entirely different culture on either side of this curtain between being, and I found that I sort of passed through this curtain without knowing it on that first Monday morning. But it's a quite distinct culture, and I hope we talk about that this morning. That's terrific. Admiral, you were a few years later right in the midst of that whole piece in a different part of the Mediterranean. How about your concepts and some of your anecdotes? Yeah, thank you very much, Peter, and thank you, Ambassador Lute, for being here today, a great friend, and somebody that I knew in the Pentagon, and while he was up at the White House. I guess I'll start by saying I am a submariner, was a submariner for 39 years, 12 years underwater, 12 years in the Pentagon, and the 12 years in the Pentagon was like being 12 years underwater. And then 12 years in nine different commands, primarily in Europe. So it was really kind of an eye-opening experience for me. I worked for some great people in my life, but as a submariner on my first boat, everybody on that boat was nuclear trained and we were all kind of of the same mold. And so I never really got the opportunity to mix with people in the rest of government until I had a great chance to attend the John F. Kennedy School of Government and get my master's degree back in 1986. Met all sorts of people from academia, from the Department of State, from all of the cabinets, and I really liked it. And I said, this is the kind of thing that I want to do in my career, but we're kind of round peg, round hole in the submarine force. You always go back and you do the nuclear thing, attack submarines, ballistic missile submarines. After command, I had a chance to go to the Pentagon and do something different. And that was a chance of a lifetime, really, to work for the chairman of the Joint Chief, Savile Mike Mullen. I was his EA. Doug had the place called the Bunker, which is the office just outside the door of the chairman for a couple of years and so did I. And I really learned a lot from Admiral Mullen. He's my favorite chairman, but I'm biased. He and Secretary Gates always talked about the value of diplomacy and its role in deterrence. And Admiral Mullen would coin the phrase, the expeditionary diplomat, when he talked about people from the State Department. Secretary Gates, I remember oftentimes we get an opportunity to look at some of his speeches and offer anecdotes or remarks. He went out to Kansas University, Kansas State, and made a speech about the expeditionary diplomats and what Mike Mullen had told him about the importance of this partnership with our civilian counterparts. And the fact that Admiral Mullen used to say, you know, I'd give up one aircraft carrier, that's about $13 billion, and give that money to the Department of State if I knew that it could be used to expand our network around the world. And keep in mind, this is when Ambassador Lute was up at the White House, you know, working with President Obama, and we were involved in two ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not so much today. And so I really appreciated their perspective and it kind of wore off on me. And that's the way I looked at the world when I took command in Europe. I want to talk about this briefly. This is not my work. It's the work of Ambassador Phil Cosnett. It's a book called Boots and Suits, and it really gets to the matter of civil military relations, which I think is the purpose of today's seminar. Ambassador Cosnett was Sharjah in Turkey. He was the ambassador to Kosovo. He saved my bacon many, many times because I had the military commands in NATO and Kosovo, in particular in Pristina, in Sarajevo, in Macedonia before she became a member of the Alliance and also a liaison office in Belgrade, Serbia and a liaison office with Elthea, the EU. When we both retired, Ambassador Cosnett called me from his cabinet in North Carolina and said, hey, you're doing some interesting things. I'd like to do some writing. I said, well, let me introduce you to my friends at Marine Corps University Press. And sure enough, within a year, he had this edited volume called Boots and Suits. It's a collection of his friends from the State Department and the military, foreign area officers and defense attaches who talk about their experiences on the pointy end of the spear. And it's really good. I commend it to you and it's free. If you get on the website for Marine Corps University Press, you can download it for free on your device. On the cover, there's an interesting photo. And while he was going through the editing and the publication process, General McKenzie did the forward, I did the preface, really talks to our work with the rest of government. There was some controversy over this photo. And because it was his personal photo, it was a little grainy. And Marine Corps University said, man, we can't put that on the cover. And so, you know, I made a phone call. He made some phone calls and they published the book with the grainy photo of Phil Cosnett in a Kevlar vest, a Kevlar helmet, holding a nine millimeter Beretta and walking amongst the troops had just been ambushed on the way to Najaf, I think. And he got out of the vehicle as a foreign service officer to try to help the Marines or whoever was going after the insurgents that tried to attack this convoy. And the caption reads, because he was headed to Ashura, and I think he had a suit in the car, never wear a pink shirt to a firefight. And so, it's quite a controversial thing and actually pretty entertaining. The next quick antidote I wanna talk to you about is General Ward is here, right? Is he in the audience? I think he was coming today, but I wanna talk about General Ward with great reverence. While I was in the Pentagon in 2008, 2009, before my assignments as the commander naval forces Europe and Africa, General Ward came back as the first AFRICOM commander. And I got a seat in a briefing. It was probably the last seat in the room. And they call those seats in the corner of the room in the back, the strap hanger seats. So I was a strap hanger and I got to listen to him talk about his first encounter with members of the 54 African states on the continent as the new AFRICOM commander, the COCOM that was going to try to help. And he was very self deprecating. I never forgot it. He said, well, when I went to brief some of the prime ministers and the defense ministers and the chiefs of defense, I put up a chart on the PowerPoint screen and it was the continent of Africa. And I said, ladies and gentlemen, this is my AOR. And the African leaders said, general, what's an AOR? And he said, my area of responsibility. And their response was, general, whose responsibility yours or ours? And so he advised us to be very careful in dealing with allies and partners. It's their country. They have to provide the solutions to their problems. And from that grew the new definition of the acronym ASAP, ASAP, as soon as possible, not in Africa. African solutions to African problems. I spent 10 years of my life overseas working with the African partners to try to build capacity in the coastal nations so that they could go after illegal trafficking and narcotics, human trafficking and weapons trafficking. And it's a symbiotic relationship with the terrorists because in order to get from the Sahel up there would be to put people in small rubber rafts, many of whom drowned coming across the Mediterranean. You've got to pass through a terrorist checkpoint. Every time I set foot on the African continent, I was reminded by Admiral Mullen's remarks on expeditionary diplomats and I didn't go anywhere until I stopped in the embassy, talked to the ambassador or talked to the country team. And many, many times they saved my bacon and prevented me from making a mistake. We worked together and it turned out very well and that's a function of that relationship. So thank you for the opportunity to chat. Well, that's a great transition to talking a little bit about the different perspective that all of us in Washington have. I remember so well after my first command as a young naval commander of a squadron out in the West Coast. I came east to be the George Marshall Fellow of the State Department. Wow, what an education. I thought I could write, oh, I couldn't hold a candle to Richard Haas, who was my boss at the time. Of course, nobody can. But I was stunned because a year or so later I was sent up to Capitol Hill to be the liaison of the House of Representatives. And of course I'd been already brainwashed at the Pentagon. I was very conscious of how differently everybody in Washington thought about. Where you stood on an issue was where you sat in the great bureaucracy of Washington. And would you comment a little bit, Ambassador, on the difference perspective that civilians in military bring, the Hill brings, state brings, this wonderful institution brings, the Pentagon brings, the decision-making, perhaps a few anecdotes along that line. Well, I think Graham Allison coined this phrase where you stand depends upon where you sit. Exactly, he did. And what he was saying is that if you're from the State Department or from the intelligence community or from the military, you have very different views on the same issue. So it's as though you're looking at this from entirely different perspectives. I think the military role in this is really important. And Washington certainly epitomizes this. I mean, he put his uniform away and never took it out of the closet again. So he sort of exemplifies the sharp divide between civil and military. In my experience, the civil-military relationship works best when there are a couple principles that we adhere to. First of all, as military officers, we have to understand that we're the subordinates. I mean, it's not military-civilian relationships. It's civilian-military relationships. It puts it in the right order. We're the subordinates. And this should come rather naturally to professional military officers because we grew up in a hierarchical structure where you're always subordinate to someone. But we have to remember that, especially this subordination in our system, in our democracy, which goes all the way back to the Constitution, is really the bedrock of civil-military relations. So first principle, we are the subordinates. The second is that this works best when we are as professional, we military officers are as professional as we hope to be, right? So we are expert in our field. We understand our subordinate role. We understand the difference between advising and executing. So in the policy-making arena, we're advisors. We're simply advisors. We're not the decision-makers, right? And the elected civilian officials have the right, as Peter Fever from Duke University reminds us, civilian leaders have the privilege of being wrong, right? I mean, that's just the way the system works. And then when the role moves from decision-making, policy-making to policy-doing implementation, the military has a different role, and we actually become executors. So the difference that plays out inside the White House Situation Room during the decision-making process and outside in the field during the execution process, I think really illuminates the difference and the primacy of civilian control of the military. And again, it works best when we're the subordinates. Here, Elliot Cohen from Johns Hopkins and so forth cites an unequal dialogue, which is interesting. So we're in a dialogue, so we're advising, military advising civilians, but it's an unequal dialogue because we're subordinate. So I think there are some principles, some ground rules here for effective civil-military relations, and those are the two I would cite. Admiral, the ambassador mentioned that notion of when diplomacy actually goes into action, and I think in the whole Bosnia situation, your famous incident on the bridge would be of terrific interest to this audience. Yeah, thanks very much, Peter. So I spent probably a few days a month in the Balkans because it was that important. And you can see from recent events that things haven't really calmed down there. So I would fly from Naples, Italy. We had a nice King aircraft, a little twin engine that probably 20 years old, and I could take a couple of staff members and I would bounce around. Pristina go out into the field to see the troops. Some people are surprised that the Kosovo force, and Doug was involved in the stabilization force that was there beforehand, and so was General Ward, is still about 4,000 troops. And I was asked the question, why are we still there? The war with Serbia was over in 1999 because of the unrest and because of the animosity across the different borders in the Balkans region. It's the same reason we're still in the Sinai. It's the same reason we're still in Korea to keep the peace and security and stability. And I learned from a great mentor, Admiral Grog Johnson, how important this was. He was 14 years in the job before me as the commander of Allied Joint Force Naples, and I had the pleasure as a desk officer in the Pentagon of flying back through Naples and meeting with him during his regional ambassadors conference. He started these things to bring in the Balkans region, the North African region, the High North, the Eastern European region. Groups of ambassadors, six, seven, who would come to Naples, Italy. They'd have an opportunity to stock up on things in the Navy exchange or do their medical and then spend time with Admiral Johnson. And it was a quid pro quo. How can I help you and how can you help me? And I watched this real time and I said, you know, I'm gonna try to do that when I'm there. He did advise me. He said, be careful. I had a great boss in General Jim Jones as Sackier and you need to talk to your Supreme Allied Commander and make sure you're not ruffling feathers by speaking to prime ministers, defense ministers or ambassadors. And with General Skapperati, it was okay. So I realized right away, I was gonna have to spend some time not only with the troops, but also with the local governments down in the Balkans to keep the peace. Prime Minister Haradnay, who was difficult, was the prime minister at the time. Ambassador Koznet dealt with him and also the new prime minister, Albin Kurti. Everything bad in the Balkans seemed to revolve around one place and that was Mitrovica and a bridge separating the south side from the north side called the Australis Bridge. And the EU spent a fortune building this bridge, which still to this day has Jersey barriers and no vehicular traffic because the Serbs live on the north side, the Albanians live on the south side. And just after I got there as a four-star commander, a popular Kosovo-Serbian politician named Oliver Venovic was assassinated. I mean, he was shot nine times in the back going into his political headquarters in northern Mitrovica. And Grock Johnson had deployed the NATO Reserve Force there to quell the violence in 2004. I mean, he had 1,000 troops come in and stop Serbian Albanians from hurting themselves across that bridge, the Australis Bridge. So I got in a helicopter and said, take me there right away. And I met my Italian commander on the ground, General Quachi. And I said, I want to speak to the mayor of southern Mitrovica. He was a Kosovo-Albanian named Agham Batiri. He'd been a mushroom farmer in Netherlands, made a lot of money and come back and he was going to be the guy that saved Kosovo. Really good man. Nice transition from agriculture. There you go. All walks of life. So I said, hey, you and your police chief, you know, this thing happened. He goes, yeah, it happened up in the north. And I said, well, would you consider walking across the bridge with me and meeting the mayor of northern Mitrovica who was the top of the Serbian list in their parliament, Goran Ratchage and his chief of police. And maybe we can talk about this. He said, sure, I'll go with you. And as we walked across that bridge, it immediately struck me that people on the bridge were lining the bridge and they were scared. And they were calling out saying, will you stay? Or is K-4 going to protect us? You know, will you help us? This is terrible. And you know, you have to give human beings reassurance. And so I said, of course we're gonna stay. Yes, we're here for you. We're not going anywhere. We're gonna try to solve this thing. And you know, everybody has a lawyer and somebody's whispering for the back, sure, you can't say that. That's a police action. Well, no, not really. If you look at the UN Security Council Resolution 1244, we, I was charged with a safe and secure environment in the Balkans. And it's still that way today. So we met Goran Ratchage and then General Kowachi says, look, why don't we have a, after we talked about it, we're gonna solve this thing. Let's have a four-way handshake. And that picture was pretty cool. And it went viral. And it meant a lot to me. And I think it meant something to them. And it provided some reassurance. Now, the caveat is things aren't good today. Albin Kurti and President Vucic hadn't been able to come to compromise. There's been violence. Kosovo K-4 troops have been shot, burned in recent violence a couple of months ago. And we still haven't solved that murder. So we need the boots on the ground and we need our expeditionary diplomats to bring this thing to fruition once and for all. Ambassador, and thank you, sir. Ambassador in the real world, those particular and very important relationships between individuals in the field, I think I remember that you've cited that special relationship with General Petraeus and Ambassador Cochran had. Would you like to comment on that and what you take from that? Right, so it tells you my funny story about the first Monday morning. But you may have missed, I mentioned that before I went in at seven o'clock in the morning, I called Baghdad and spoke to Dave Petraeus who I'd known for at that time, something like 40 years, and Ryan Crocker, who was his civilian counterpart, the ambassador in Baghdad. And I made that call because I didn't want to brief the president on things that came from only the sort of bubble of Washington, D.C., right? That's Washington looking at itself in the mirror, right? I wanted to try to reach out, break through that, and I saw my job as essentially what Clausewitz would call a directed telescope. In other words, break through the bureaucracy and so forth, tell me what's actually happening out ground. So I made this call. And what was really interesting is that these two leaders, one military, one civilian, I think to this day stand as the best example of what today is a euphemism around Washington, whole of government approach, right? I mean, if you read the national security strategy, the national defense strategy, the national military, this term, whole of government, is littered all through those documents, right? And we cite it as though this is the magic sauce, right? This is the magic that allows us to achieve our objectives on the ground. My observation over the last 15 years is we very seldom pull it off. Sorry, I wish that were not the case. I wish this were second nature, right? And in fact, the Institute here has a role in trying to bring whole of government, all the agencies together sort of working in the same direction. But Petraeus and Crocker pulled it off. And here's how they did it, right? First of all, they both were able to subordinate their personal egos so that neither of them had to be declared the proconsul of Iraq at the time, right? But very important, Dave Petraeus moved from his headquarters in one of Saddam's palaces to Ryan's embassy. He literally picked up and moved his office, right? So when I visited from Washington or President Bush visited or congressional delegations visited, they saw physically that Dave and Ryan were connected, right? They were co-located. If you walked into this office in the embassy, you turned left and there was Dave's offices, the commander of multinational forces, Iraq, and you turned right, there was Ryan's office as the US ambassador. They took every briefing together. They met every congressional delegation together. They made every senior engagement with Iraqi officials together. They wrote and signed together a joint campaign plan. So when we ask ourselves, how did that work and what were the ingredients of whole of government when we actually saw a good example of it? Those are the examples. This is both of them subordinating themselves a bit to reach out with them. And now you can imagine when Dave Petraeus moves his headquarters from one palace and co-locates with the ambassador, the message that sends to everybody in that chain of command. And pretty soon you had as many military people in the embassy as you had civilians, right? So it's a really powerful example, I think, of leadership at the top, but also the importance of co-location and not just talking a good game about whole of government, but acting like it. You know, it's so important to this co-location piece. I remember distinctly at a much earlier time, 1991, 1990, the first move to save Kuwait. And I was right next door to your headquarters in Naples. And they had done a very smart thing. We had a US command, which was, and then we had, right underneath it, floor below was the NATO command. And we shared everything. We spent a great deal of time in all of those officers, whether they were French, whether they were Turkish, whether they were Greek, Italians, British, got along, and they became our conduit to the various embassies. So that when we had to conduct overflight rights with simple things like fully loaded FAA teams, in order not to, we had to get those just-in-time weapons to the front, it required this conversation with each embassy, with each government as we flew over. So we had those contacts, and it does seem to me that the military operating appropriately can build these extraordinary bridges. And I'm sure you saw that numerous times, Admiral. I did. Thank you, Peter. So that headquarters where you were located is Comfair Med. That command has moved out, and NATO now has its own headquarters, which is absolutely beautiful. It's better than the Supreme Allied Commanders. In fact, Todd Wolters used to say, you wanna trade? You know, it looks like- It's out of the volcano. Yes, and it's on earthquake rubber mounts. I mean, for massive headquarters, but it's absolutely beautiful, and all seem to be 32 allies are there. Hopefully 32. 32, hopefully 32. I think with President Erdogan's acquiescence, we're gonna get them approved, and Sweden and their great partners. So it was about 30 minutes difference between the two headquarters, and I made it my business to spend time in both, because I had both jobs, NAVIR, NAVF, and also the Allied Command, and bring people together. And because I'd done that as a one star, and a three star, and a four star, it made sense to me, it was the right thing to do. And a good example of what you're talking about is when Jens Stoltenberg came and said, look, NATO has a 360 degree approach, and we're pretty good in the high north, we're not bad in the east, but we're not very good in the south. So I wanna start this thing called the NATO Strategic Direction South for Middle East, North Africa. And basically through the football to Allied Joint Force Command Naples, Michelle Howard, my predecessor, who's a wonderful officer, picked it up and took the command to NATO's hub to initial operational capability, and I went to full operational capability. What that meant is we had to establish a rapport with all 54 of those African countries, and several in the Middle East, and we inherited the NATO training mission in Iraq at the same time, so I had that one to lord over as well. You know, Jordan Key Ally, and look what's happening there now with the crisis between Israel and Palestine, and the king is sitting on a precipice, but we have to support them, we've gotta have them. So that was the purpose of the hub. And you know, I thought to myself, well, the Chinese do this in a bilateral way. So they'll go to each 54, the 54 countries, and they'll make a deal, and they'll trade one another off against the other. I don't have the bandwidth to do that. I think we got FTO of 80 employees that took us a while to bring them on, and it all walks the life in all nationalities. So I went to my friends in the State Department, Ambassador Mary Beth Leonard, and Ruben Brigady, who were the subsequent ambassadors to the African Union, said, how should I do this? And they said, look, the African Union is the answer. You need to get in here and coordinate with them because they have the tentacles all over Africa, and they even have somebody that looks at military operations for the five standing armies and all the economic consortiums like ECOWAS. So I thought that was pretty good. I went to Addis Ababa, and I sat down with my friend Ruben Brigady, by the way. Now the ambassador to South Africa, formerly to the African Union, and a Naval Academy graduate. And the provost is- We won't hold that again. Yeah. So Ruben says, hey, this is like three cups of tea, okay? You need to make sure you don't make the same mistake that most Americans do. You walk in, here's your five talking points. This is what you're going to do. Remember what General Ward said, African solutions to African problems. So on the three cups of tea, you need to sit down and talk about something other than business, the background. The commissioners were key. Smell, Chergy, Joseph Asako, and we ideally signed an agreement. They didn't want to go to Brussels. They came to Naples and signed a memorandum of agreement to establish a liaison office, to work with the hub, to try to find African solutions to African problems. And it's going strong today. And there's still lots of work to do. Last thing I'll tell you is my good friend, Ambassador George Ward, I think he was a three-time ambassador in Africa, wrote a, he did a study for IDA, the Institute for Defense Analysis. And he had an excerpt for that study and more on the rocks about a year and a half ago. And it's about the United States and China and strategic competition in Africa. And in 2019, when this article came out, we were neck and neck, but the Chinese are climbing ahead of us. We had 10 years of advanced progress and we're letting it slip away and that just cannot happen. So more of this needs to be done. Well, that's exactly a transition I'd love to have as we begin to close things up. We have so many people in the audience who've served. I'd love to get perspective from both of you. With both hats on, both your military hat and your civilian hat. First, are we as a military, as we are, we as a nation, prepared to continue to take on this immense challenge around the world, whether it's in the Middle East, whether it's in Europe, whether it's in the Far East, whether it is the whole China piece, are we ready? And secondly related to that is you have a chance to see today's generation of soldiers, sailors and airmen. How do you rate our ability? How are they doing? How are we doing? And inculcating them into this great concept of service and to the nation. Ambassador, I'll start with you. Well, you know, you pose it as do we have, which choice do we take? Do we take a choice of being engaged and having these responsibilities and interests globally or do we just dismiss those and sort of retrench, right? And I think it's a false choice. I mean, cannot defend America from America's borders alone. You cannot promote American prosperity with the domestic economy alone. We are so intertwined today that there's really no choice but to protect our interests abroad. And we do that through a number of ways. I mean, we do it on a case by case basis in conflict areas like support for Ukraine or support for Israel today and so forth. We do it bilaterally every day with 190 some embassies and so forth around the world with military commands like the ones that Jamie has commanded. We do it multilaterally and this often doesn't get enough attention but we do it at the UN headquarters every single day, multilateral diplomacy. We do it every single day at NATO headquarters in Brussels where now 31 allies are all under the same roof. And again, it goes back to this notion of co-location, right? They don't go home at night. They stay under that roof and they collaborate together. So I see this as a false choice and you sometimes see in our very polarized domestic political scene this posed as one or the other. It's really not. It's not a choice. Look, on the security front, I think American, which is probably the foremost American interest, right? National interest. The foremost task of any president of the United States is to secure the United States people in our continent. We have a couple of huge advantages in this regard. Our geography. We live in a pretty benign geographic setting, right? With Mexico and Canada as principal neighbors. We have these two huge tank ditches called the Pacific and the Atlantic that protect us from ground incursions and so forth, right? But equally important, and maybe our biggest geo-strategic advantage is this network of alliances that we have. So the 31 allies today who make up NATO soon, I hope with Sweden 32, right? But likewise, our constellation of alliances in the Pacific, in the Indo-Pacific. So Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and so forth, right? And if you look at a comparison between our network of alliances, founded on NATO, but not just NATO, right? And compare it in a strategic sense to the alliance structures supporting Vladimir Putin or President Xi of China, there simply is no comparison, right? The most, one of my favorite juxtaposition of two photos is after the Vilnius summit and the NATO summit in Vilnius this summer, that all the heads of state and government assemble for a family photo, right? So here you have Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, President Biden, all the President Biden's counterparts, and it fills, it would fill this state. In fact, you could not get them all on this stage, right? That is juxtaposed against Vladimir Putin at the same time, meeting with a representative from Iran and North Korea. So compare the two photos, right? Which team would you rather be on, right? And so the multilateral diplomacy of things like the alliance structures and the United Nations are fundamental to us and we simply don't, it's not even a reasonable conversation. There's simply no choice. Thank you, Admiral? Yeah, I couldn't agree more with Ambassador Lute and I want to seize on the subject of the tank traps in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Which I know are good operating space for submarines. They are. So it shows the inner service work here. Two things to remember about those tank traps, which are the oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and that is what Robert Kaplan, the great author, one of my favorites says in Asia's cauldron, the tyranny of distance and the stopping power of water. And the only way for the United States to project its power and to maintain stability and security with all of these incredible alliances that we have out in the Pacific and in NATO is to be able to have a strong forward presence and primarily a naval presence. Now you'll note that I am a naval officer so I am slightly biased. If you think about what happened just prior to the war in Ukraine, December of 21 before February 22 in the attack, we had three ships in the Black Sea, the USS Mount Whitney, my favorite ship, my command ship when I was six fleet, Arleigh Burke and Porter. And we pulled them out so as not to exacerbate Vladimir Putin and not to push him into attacking Ukraine. Well, he did anyway. And we created a new normal of virtual presence. Ladies and gentlemen, virtual presence is actual absence. So we have to be there. Now everybody laments the fact that the United States oftentimes is the world cop. I think for a great power that's very necessary and we have to be there to deter. I think the Navy is an extended arm of diplomacy and the fact that we have two carrier strike groups in the Eastern Mediterranean along with that command ship along with three allied strike groups and a joint task force has prevented Nasrallah and Lebanon or Assad or the Iranian malign influence in Syria from attacking Israel on a two front war. And that would be a heck of a lot worse than the tragedy and the travesty that we see there now between Hamas and the Palestinians and Israel. So we've done some good work. And I think we need to continue to do that in the future with our forward military presence. It's expensive, but it's worthwhile. Well, sadly, our time is up, but I'm sure Pat would agree with me as students of George Washington, General Washington and President Washington would have been thrilled to have had these two extraordinary officers on his staff, both with their warrior hats and with their civilian hats on. So thank you both very much. I think it's important to end up as, they get to pick up on your remarks Admiral that General Washington said at one point after the revolution that recognizing that we didn't have a Navy at the time and the French Navy had been of invaluable assistance in the great victory at Yorktown, that with a Navy all things great and glorious can happen. So I know we mostly have Army and Air Force folks out there, but I hope there's a few Navy folks too. We're absolutely thrilled to have you and just to wrap up Mount Vernon and USIP, certainly want to thank all of you for coming today for this remarkable discussion about the citizen soldier. We do want to thank the audience. So many of you have served and we're very grateful for that. USIP is very kindly set up refreshments for us outside the auditorium. So if you'd like an opportunity to meet these two great gentlemen and Pat, we would be absolutely delighted to have you do that. And everyone's also invited to go to the exhibit hall. So thank you all for coming. My great honor and pleasure to be with these gentlemen. I remember you back. Thank you. Thank you.