 Admiral Kelly and the team have put together a great, great two-day program, and my task here this morning is to do two things. One is to greet you and say a couple of words, and then I want to introduce Dr. Don Snyder. So before I introduce, I want to give you my perspective on why this is important and why now. Many of us here in this room have been serving in the military for a long time, a couple of decades for most of us. What's different? Why are we spending so much time talking about ethics and a reinvigoration of the profession? And you know, aha moments come in different times and different places in our lives. I personally have spent most of my life at sea. I was brought up by the tail end of the Vietnam fighter pilot generation. I learned fighter tactics from them. I actually went to Top Gun in an F-4. I was in the last class that went through that. So my earliest influences were from that generation. There wasn't a whole lot of touchy-feely stuff from that group, I got to tell you. It was pretty much join up, shut up, and get on with it. So that was kind of how I viewed the business of my profession at that time. When I got to Miramar, I became a flight instructor and teaching young pilots how to land an F-14 on the back end of a pitch and flight deck, especially at night, makes you a little bit more than a flight instructor. You really start to become something between a sociologist and a psychologist. Maybe a little bit more religious than you might have been in the past. And that's when I really started to understand the human spirit, what it takes to be successful in a very, very stressful environment. I know not everybody in this room has landed an F-14 on the back end of a pitching deck at night, but I can tell you it wasn't an easy thing. We had about a one in three failure rate, first time around for those that did it. So I began to understand what it took to make people feel like they could do their job and be successful. And fast forward to my time in command and some of the other things I did, but before I came up here to Newport, the Chief of Naval Operations asked me to do a task force, lead a task force called Task Force Resilient. And the idea was to look into why we were having so much trouble with people having suicidal thoughts all the way to actual suicide. So the idea of this thing was to try to understand what's going on out there with our sailors. And to do that, obviously I had to spend a lot of time with my army, brothers and sisters, Air Force Marines, because this wasn't a Navy problem, this was an entire DOD problem. And to do that, I had to really do a deep dive into understanding generational thinking. Now I'm a baby boomer, and those of you may be somewhere in those next generations that are coming, whether you be Gen Xs, the millennial generation is obviously the young folks that are coming into our doors now. And really, there are many different phases of millennials. And the reason I bring all this up is millennials don't think like the Vietnam fighter pilots that taught me and they don't think like me. I understood getting yelled at was intended to be a motivator for me to do something. And I generally didn't have to get yelled at twice to do something. Today's youth don't really like to be yelled at. They don't feel like they need to be yelled at. In fact, I would tell you based on my own kids and understanding what I went through in this study, and I'll circle back as to where my big aha moment was, is for this generation, they truly, and I'm talking about the majority, they truly join because they want to be something that's bigger than themselves. And they get that. Now that may not have been part of the Gen Xs or the what's in it for me, not even necessarily my generation, quite honestly. But the reason why I think this matters is if you can't understand what makes our young sailor soldiers, airmen, Marines think, you have no chance of being successful and you can't have any of the discussion that we're about to have here over the next couple of days because they're the future. And many of you that are in this room will be charged with leading them. So we got to get this figured out. And you're going to hear some of that here I think over the next couple of days. So this gets down to whether or not we're even doing boot camps right. And it's something to consider, something to think about. I'm not saying we're going to go and rewrite how we do boot camp and how we get to basic good order and discipline, but most of outside society thinks that the U.S. military operates quite simply. You get a task, you give an order, and the people that get the order go out and execute it. We all know that is very far from the truth. So let me tell you about my a-ha moment. My a-ha moment didn't happen in combat, didn't happen in a fighter jet. It didn't happen, you know, doing work-ups. Didn't happen on my last deployment bringing USS Enterprise on our 25th and final deployment after 51 years of service. It happened when I was in command of USS Carl Vinson, and I had probably the most unique carrier tour, because I wasn't the guy that got to take Carl Vinson out to sea and drive around the world. I got to do a frame off restoration rebuild, a $2 billion refueling complex overhaul that was about the most unfun thing that you could think of. Take nuclear fuel out, put nuclear fuel back in, test it, strip down the flight deck, take catapults out, take a resting gear out, take every antenna off, take out 500 million feet of cable, and replace it. Now, we're talking not fun stuff. I had a full crew of 3,000 sailors, young men and women, and they were in all 18 departments. So I had a full ship, and I had about 11,000 shipyard workers that would come on board my ship every day. And I got to tell you, you know, we don't teach how to do this stuff. You know, the shipyard folks know how to do it, but we don't teach sailors how to live in a shipyard and rebuild a ship. So I had to rethink how do I build my crew, how do I keep the morale, how do I get them to own the ship, and it came down to understanding some of the things that I just talked about. It came down to teaching my sailors about how to behave, what's right and wrong. We had long discussions about ethical behavior, because what I found is on that cavernous ship with over 3,500 spaces, on any given day, most of my sailors were in a space by themselves doing a task with nobody looking over their shoulder. They got direction, they were told to do something. Sometimes they'd be in there with a shipyard worker, sometimes not. And if they didn't do the task right on time, I had no chance of re-delivering that ship on time or anywhere close to budget. And guess what? When I took over, none of that was happening, let me tell you. So how do you take a group of 3,000 men and women, over half of whom are under the age of 21, and teach them that what they do when nobody's looking is going to make the difference in our national defense? Certainly some of you may have read about the submarine USS Miami here in New England. She had an awful fire, they basically lost the ship. My first four months in command, every Friday, I had a fire on board my ship. Every Friday, I started to call it Fire Friday, and I started to ask a lot of questions. Why we having a fire? They weren't big fires, trash can type fires, insulation fires, stuff that could be put out pretty quickly. But it wasn't a coincidence. And I couldn't figure out whether my sailors were doing it, whether the shipyard was doing it. But when it happened, all work stopped, and sometimes they were bad enough that that would end the day early. Guess what? Early weekend. You can kind of see where this is going. So again, not only do I have this problem where I'm not sure that work is getting done, I have a potential for something catastrophic to happen on a mistake. Because somebody thinks it's cute, and maybe we can get out of work a little bit early and start a weekend. So this is a significant issue, and this is my aha moment. I got my chief petty officer's mess involved. I got my officer's mess involved. But I really started to get down to the junior sailors. And I got them to understand that if they did buy in, and that they understood that the ship was not a place where they came and tried to rebuild some, it was their house, and their behavior was going to matter to them for the rest of their life, all of a sudden they started to take ownership. And then I did something really bizarre. I took the contract away from the company that had the fire watch. Now anybody that's ever been in a shipyard, you know, anytime that's hot work being done in a space, there's somebody there with a fire extinguisher. Well, guess who does that work? Convicted felons. People have a record. They can't do anything else. And guess what their motivation is to do a good job? Not a whole lot. So I asked to have that removed. I saved a lot of money by asking to get that taken away from the contract. And I put that job with my sailors. Again, about the most unfun, not good deal that you could think of. And we incentivized it. And we gave them the best space on the ship. It had air conditioning. I gave them all computers so they could study and promote for their exams. And after three weeks, I had kids wanting to be in that division. And nobody wanted to leave. And guess what? I didn't have any more fires. I never had another fire for the last two years that I was on that ship on a Friday. I did have a few others, but not on Friday. And it was that foundation that we built upon to teach our sailors that what they did in a space, whether it was one or two or by themselves, mattered so much that eventually we'd be successful. And this was a ship that had a tough go of it. She had been on a deployment from Bremerton, Washington into a home port shift, which is a big deal, came to Virginia, was going to leave Virginia, go around the horn. As you may recall, Carl Vincent went into Haiti and went all the way back around the West Coast at three back-to-back deployments to include Bering Osama bin Laden. And I will tell you, the morale of that ship to this day is good because those young people got it. And it fed on itself. It took a while to do it. But even in the most nonsensical environments, you can impart this type of behavior on the people that matter the most. So that was my aha moment. I wanted to share that with you. And I think it's relevant to the discussions that we're going to have today. Okay. So now it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Don Snyder, Colonel, United States Army. Dr. Snyder retired from the United States Army in 1990. He's a combat veteran, three tours in Vietnam as an infantryman. He has served in many positions while active duty in the Army to include cheap plans for Theater Army Europe. He was a joint planner for the Army Chief of Staff and also worked on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Probably one of his more significant tours, maybe he'll talk a little bit about it. He was on the staff of the National Security Council in the White House. And he even today serves on the Executive Committee of the Inter-University Seminar of Armed Forces and Society. He currently is a senior fellow in the Center for Army Profession and Ethic CAPE, and he's a distinguished visiting professor in the Strategic Studies Institute Army War College. He's an emeritus professor of political science at West Point. And notably, his research examines American civil-military relations, identities and development of the American Army officer, military profession and professional military ethics. A week ago, Admiral Kelly and I were talking to all of our newest Navy flag officers and SESs. In the beginning of the morning that we're there, General Ray Odeirno, the Army Chief of Staff, led off. And General Odeirno spoke very openly about where the Army is in dealing in ethics and the profession of arms, and he listed it as the number one priority in the United States Army today. And I think in large part it's because of much of the work that Colonel Don Snyder had. I have his book right here, and I've actually been to this book. And I know he put this together, Dr. Snyder put this together a few years ago, but I can tell you, having just gone through it in preparation for our discussion down in NCLEX last week, it's still relevant. Some of the thinking that's in here has been written about even recently. So we are very, very honored to have Dr. Don Snyder, Colonel of the United States Army, retired here with us. So please give a U.S. Naval War College warm welcome to Dr. Don Snyder. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Great to be here today to serve you, seriously. Any time I can step out of the profession I've served in for so long and talk to people in a sister profession, then that's my advantage. On the other hand, I recognize I have a daunting task here today, because you're looking at someone, you're probably saying, this guy is old as dirt. He comes from a different service than I'm in, and what can he possibly have to say that's all that relevant to where the Navy's going in the near future? So I accept that challenge. That is my challenge. But I think that let me spend a little bit of time talking to you about the subject of professions. My role this morning is to be a contextualizer, what a marvelous vignette Admiral Carter just gave you. He contextualized in that vignette the concept of profession, the ethic that motivates the professionals and the role of leadership. And around all of that was the fact that if you cannot motivate based upon context, then you can't lead successfully at the strategic level. What a brilliant example you were just given. So I'm going to back up a little bit, and I'm going to open up the aperture, and I'm going to talk about professions and professional ethics as applied to the military in the United States. You have in your Navy ethos, in the second line of the Navy ethos, it says we are professionals, sailors, and civilians. And I really like the fact that you've included your civilians in your professional corps. We have only done that in the Army in the last four years, finally recognizing that we cannot fight major expeditionary warfare absent the presence and immense professional capability of our civilians. So professionalizing the civilian part is an immense challenge for us, and I assume that it is for you also. But when you read your ethos and you say we are professional sailors and civilians, I would submit to you that in your mind, the connotation of professional is not the one that I have in my mind. Because I've spent a great amount of time studying professions, the sociology of professions. When we started this project at West Point, of which one of your faculty, Dr. Cook, was a part of, contributed to one of the first books that we published on this, we found out that the Army had not studied itself as profession in over three decades. For three decades, the Army had simply asserted that it was a profession, but it had never studied itself as profession, and it had absolutely zero doctrine on what it meant to be a profession. So we're going to talk about that today. A lot has passed in the last ten years, both in the work that was done originally at the Academy, and just last year, the work that was culminated in the Army, and we now have published. We have a doctrine on profession. It's about a 30-page document, it's not everything I wanted it to be, but it's a very good start, and it will be improved year by year. And so really, that's what I'm here to share, is that where we have developed this set of concepts, and where I think they are applicable to you. Now, let me caution you again. When I went back to Teacher West Point, I'd finished a doctorate, I'd finished a military career, I was going back to teach. My father, who had never gone to college, a very practical man, still running the farms in Ohio that I had been raised on, looked at me in the eye when I told him I'm going back to West Point to teach, and he said, well, just be careful, son. It might be the case that you're educated beyond your intelligence. And I've never forgotten that. So again, I understand that this is a rather daunting issue to talk to consummate naval professions about your profession, but yet to come alongside and share with you what we have learned in the army in the last decade on this subject. Now, this may be an unusual way to start a presentation like this, but let me give you the bottom line up front. Could I have the next slide, please? Here's the bottom line up front. And let me cover the points for you. And then I'm going to go into some detail and come back to this conclusion at the end. First off, I will assert to you that you're not a profession because you say you are. In the sociology of professions, professions serve clients, and clients get to determine whether you are a profession or not. And if you don't behave as a profession, they will take away from you the limited autonomy they have been given you to practice your art. We'll talk about that. Professions are quintessentially human and quintessentially moral institutions. We'll talk about that. It's not that other means of production. There's three ways of producing things. You can produce things with businesses, with bureaucracies, with professions. Three organizational structures. Quintessentially among those professions operate at the human level, and they operate at the moral level. And that's why your ethos, your ethic, your ability to perform in consonance with your ethic is so important. We'll talk about the meritocratic nature of the ethic. Then the next two are important. This goes to leadership. I'm convinced that it's not the case that folks at your level can make the Navy a profession. To be sure, you are responsible for making your part of the Navy as professional as possible. Absolutely. And that you can do. However, to say that you're going to go at your rank and at your level in next assignment and that you collectively are going to make the Navy a profession, I doubt that that can happen. Because the senior level of leaders in military professions hold the big muscle movements of the profession. And they are the ones that are going to determine, by their human resource policies, fundamentally the motivation of individual professionals. And that is what makes professions professions. The individual. What Admiral Carter just described to you is the individual sailor in the compartment out of sight of anyone motivated to do what is right because it is right and because they want to do it right. Are they motivated by aspiration or are they in contrast motivated by a legal obligation? We'll talk about that. So the stewards of the Navy. This is a phrase that we've coined in the Army. It's in our doctrine, the stewards are colonels and above civilian equivalents, non-commissioned officer equivalents. They are the ones that control the major muscle movements of the profession and they are the ones that will determine whether the institution's culture is going to allow professionals to develop. A highly bureaucratic micromanaging culture simply will not enable the development of professionals. So the last point I will only touch on briefly. I've been through three build downs now. I remember the build down after Vietnam for the Army. It was immensely, not sure what right word to use but it was certainly an immense challenge but it was almost traumatic. Most of you may not know but during the Vietnam War we had lost our NCO ranks. We had expended the NCO Corps through multiple tours. The latter two years of the war I was in the infantry. Infantry leaders coming into country were called shaken-baked NCOs. They went to basic, they went to AIT, they took four weeks and put on E6 stripe and were sent to the field and infantry battalions and squad leaders. And they got themselves killed and they got their soldiers killed because they had not been developed. As professionals are developed through a slower process of apprenticeship by those who know the art and the practice of the trade. And so we had a very traumatic period. Build downs, we went to the all volunteer force. At the same time we had to rebuild our NCO Corps. And that was at the point that the Army learned that transactional leadership is not the way you will lead in the future. And we changed our doctrines then to transformational leadership. We'll talk about that today. A little bit, the difference between obligation and aspiration. How are you attempting to lead and motivate those who follow? So that's about a line up front. Build downs are very difficult. You're entering an immensely difficult time to behave as a profession because the natural tendency in a build down is to highly centralized and micromanage. And as one of your speakers to follow was the Nell and I were talking, we've got a lot of baggage from 12 years of war. We brought it back to garrison with us. And some of that baggage that came back to garrison with us will not help us be a profession. So those are the things I wanna cover. So let's get started. First thing I wanna do, next chart please. I wanna talk a little bit about the theory of professions, the sociology of professions. Because I know that when I say profession and professional I'm not, you and I have different conceptions and I want to try and contextualize that for the rest of this conference. One of the facts that we got doing the field research for the book that Admiral Carter held up. We did field research throughout the Army where you wanted to find out what was the state of understanding of what it meant to be in a profession and to serve as a professional. I will use two nouns folks, profession, professional. You will not hear me if I am successful. Use the word professionalism. You will not find that word anywhere in the book. You will not find it anywhere in Army doctrine. Professionalism, like most isms, means different things to different people and is therefore an unstable concept on which to teach and develop. So we threw it out. We'll talk at the level of professions. We'll talk at the level of individual professionals. Two separate levels of analysis. And so we had a young Army aviator come to one of our focus groups and in the course of the discussion with her this question came up. She looked at us and said, how can I be a professional if there is no profession? What do you think? She'd looked around the Army. She'd seen what was going on in the Army after the build down. This was after Desert Shield Desert Storm, the build down of the Carter era. And she saw the behavior of an institution that did not, in her mind, by her understanding of profession, this was not a profession. So how can I be a professional if there is no profession? And the answer, folks, is you can only do that if you have been previously developed as a professional in a profession. So my first point is if we're going to develop professionals, particularly in the millennial generation in Admiral, I would quantify your point. The United States Army today is 66% millennial. We are fighting our wars and have for two years with millennial formations. For those of you in the Marine Corps, you are 88% millennial today. So this is not something that's coming. This is what is here. The challenge is here and now. So she said, how can I be a professional if there is no profession? The answer is if you've been developed into a profession, to be a professional, then you can move out of the profession and work a lot of different places and be successful as a professional. Example, Senate Armed Services Committee. Lawyers, people very familiar with applied technology in the military and the defense programs, professional military officers, professional communicators. So you can have organizations that have collections of professionals, but rest assured they were developed before that in a profession, or they did not arrive at the state of profession. Next chart. As I said, there's three ways you can produce things. We can have an army, we can have a navy by one of three methods. The American people decide how they want. You can have a mercenary force. You can operate on the logic of budgets. You can have a state-directed bureaucracy and it'll operate under the control of the leaders of the bureaucracy. Supervised, controlled work focused on predictability and efficiency. That's where Congress wants you folks, right here, right under the thumb. It's been that way since the revolution, since the first Congress. It was actually that way before the revolution. The colonial legislatures controlled the colonial militias down to the barrel of powder and hard tack. And that's where in our form of government, bureaucracies are controlled and that's how they want bureaucracies to be controlled. Evidence today, you don't get a manpower appropriation for civilians longer than one year. Why can't you get appropriations for two years or three years, don't they trust you? Couldn't you better develop your civilians if you knew exactly what your in-strength was gonna be year by year? But no, they're treating you like a bureaucracy because that's what legislatures do. Because in their mind, that is the most efficient form of military force that the Republic can have. However, there's a third way to do work. You can do it. People working with specialized knowledge who organize and control their own work. The key item of being a profession. You do that in a trust relationship with the client. Next chart. Let's apply this understanding to the Army. Well first, here's a statement of the five things that most sociologists agree that professions do. And now I'm challenging your understanding of what it means for the Navy to be a profession. First thing that professions do is they must provide a vital service. Let's talk about the professional basketball players and football players. In the sense that I'm describing it, are they professionals? Are they pros? Well yes, as an antonym to amateur, they are professionals, but that's not the context I'm using. Is there anything essential about having entertainment? Essentially, they're very good entertainers. I enjoy it. But I do not, as a member of our society, say, oh, we have to have it. This is a vital service. Not just vital, notice the words. Without which, it will not flourish. Folks, you have to provide a service without which the Republic will cease being the Republic. And certainly, security is one of those items. And so you meet that criteria. You must work with abstract expert knowledge developed into human expertise. We'll talk about this later. I'll break down your fields of knowledge for you. But you're here to study, some of what you were studying is the theoretical. You don't go out and do your work as a professional working just off computers, formulas, scenarios, et cetera. It goes far beyond that. You have in the back of your mind knowledge that you have accrued over years of experiential learning as well as institutional learning. So expert abstract knowledge takes years. How do you control a profession? That's the purpose of this conference, folks. And that's what I'm contextualizing this morning. Professions are only controlled by one thing. They're not controlled by the bureaucracy. Well, yes you are. There are antideficiency laws. And if you violate an antideficiency law, you go to jail. But by and large, if that is your motivation, when I say their means of social control, I mean what motivates the individual? And what motivates the individual should be your ethic, your ethos. As a result, you believe in that ethos so much that you regulate yourself. The key mark of this profession is itself policing. And the Army has, right now, as I'm sure generally we're in an arrow made clear at the Flag Officer Conference, we have had a spate of high-profile moral failures by senior leaders, which would seem to make it abundantly clear to everyone that we have been not self-policing. I wrote a piece recently on why the Army is having so much difficulty, had so much difficulty, still is having difficulty with assault and sexual harassment. It's not because we don't understand right from wrong. It's because we got a bunch of professionals, many at your level, on the sidelines, unengaged, not self-policing. Therefore, we are not behaving as a profession. And so what happens when you don't behave as a profession? Your client reaches into your structure and pulls away autonomy. And so now we have Congresspeople writing laws that will take sexual assault and harassment cases out of the chain of command and put them in a special chain of command. A very logical and predictable and understandable response brought on by the fact that the Army was not behaving as a profession. You have those instances in your history, Tailhook is one. The Navy had one recently in their training program. The Army had one earlier at Aberdeen. These things occur episodically. And almost in every case, I would conclude to someone who studies professions. Professionals were not behaving as professionals. They had stopped self-policing. See, if you do self-police, if you live by your ethic, you earn and maintain the trust of the society and they grant you the autonomy. The great embarrassment to the Army after Aberdeen. Imagine this. The Army who has prided itself since before the founding of the Republic in being able to take a citizen and make him the soldier. This is our knowledge, we know how to do this. And after the scandal at Aberdeen, what did the Congress do? They wrote legislation in the authorizing bill that year and told the Army how to do basic training. It was the back of the hand in the most obvious way to the leadership of the Army. They told us how to train, how's the recruits. They told us how to move the recruits in formation. An obvious case where we had lost the trust of our client and therefore they took away our autonomy. Next chart. That's what professions do. Here's the chronology of the Army. I'm not here to teach you Army history but I only want you to look at the last line. The Army has been for 238 years an Army but it's only been for 121 years in military profession. Next chart. So my point to you is that the Army is and I would submit the Navy also is you are an institution of dual character. And now I'm beginning to contextualize where you're gonna have to go as leaders. You're an institution of dual character. You were founded, you are organized and you are structured in hierarchy under the control of dual civilian masters, congressional executive as a government bureaucracy, no different than the Internal Revenue Service or the Department of Transportation. And that's how the committees in Congress look at you. And as I said earlier, that's how they want to look at you because they're concerned about efficiency more than they are concerned about effectiveness. So here's the comparison. Here are the ways that I think you as middle level leaders need to understand this constant tension within the Department of Navy and within the Department of the Army and within the Department of the Air Force. It is a profession bound in the hide of a bureaucracy and notice the differences. Bureaucracies don't deal on expert knowledge. There are people who basically say I'm here, you develop me, I'll go through the schools I'm supposed to go through. But that's what I understand that. I understand that that's what you want me to do. That's not the professional. The professional seeks every opportunity to advance their knowledge, knowing that their knowledge is their art. Professions only deal with new situations. Can you imagine what would happen if a doctor had a patient come in in clinic and said, well, I don't need to read this person's background. I mean, this looks obvious to me. And did not treat that patient as an absolutely new situation when in fact the pharmacological history of the patient, the history of treatments, reactions, et cetera is entirely different? How about a lawyer that took your case? You were going before the bar and you wanted justice and the lawyer came in and five minutes into the conversation, folds up his book and says, I don't do this. I know how to do this. I'm gonna defend this this way. Folks, if you go to work at your level anywhere in the Navy and you find yourself more than five days in a row doing non-expert work and you find yourself not addressing new situations then my statement to you is you're behaving as a bureaucrat. And you better find out how your job is defined and how you can change it so that you can serve as a professional. That's part of self-policing also is creating your environment in which you're going to operate. You practice by humans. I'll come back to that in the next chart. Work their way down. There's only one measure for professions, effectiveness. Efficiency is important in bureaucracies. I had a little bout with cancer a couple of years ago and I was selecting a surgeon. So I went to see one surgeon and I said, how many of these surgeries have you done and how many resulted in condition A and how many in condition B? And believe it or not, he opened up his computer. He'd just gone before state boards in New York. I was teaching at New York at West Point then. He opened up his computer and he showed me 604 surgeries and he showed me the results of all of them. And I said, you're the man. Now, why did I do that? I was looking for effectiveness. Folks, that's the nature of professions. The sick want cured. The insecure want security. Those facing the bar want justice. The sinner wants repentance. They don't care what it cost. I didn't care what this was going to cost, seriously. I had already made up my mind that I would spend, our kids were through college and I would spend everything else we had. But I wanted the cancer out. Effectiveness is the measure of a profession. Now we can't ignore efficiency. You're a public institution. We know that. But middle-level professionals move your department towards the conduct of effectiveness. And this is going to be immensely difficult, immensely difficult in a build-down. Sometimes this is very easy in a build-up, but not what you're gonna face in the next few years. So working our way down in the contrast that maintain a self-policing ethos will come back to this intrinsic motivations versus extrinsic makes all the difference in the world. And the final one is the most important. Are you called to what you're doing? In the Latin, vocate, meaning work is sacred. Meaning the sacredness of the work is more important than the worker. Is that how you're approaching your service in the Navy today? Or are you tracking a career? Or you say, well, I've got a career and the next thing I have to do in my career, notice the pronouns, in my career is I have to do this and then I have to do this. Rather than saying, I'm here for the long haul, I have been called to this and I'm gonna live a life of sacrifice and service. Because that's who I am. That's what a calling is. Because of who I am, I am motivated intrinsically to do these things. Not by the extrinsics of how much leave you get what your pay is, how big your window is, and some of the other things that tend to be important when we're looking around, this used to drive me crazy in a Pentagon. I mean, if you ever wanna see a place where very good professionals sometimes melt into this proposition of, well, he's got a window and he's the office and all I've got's a carol, give me a break. Anyway, are you following a calling? Is it a calling? More importantly, for you as middle level leaders, your challenge is can you make it a calling for the people you are leading? Can you find the point in the millennial spirituality which they are willing to say, this job is more important than I am? I believe in this job, and therefore I am motivated inherently to want to do what is best for the institution and for the job, not for me. I had the privilege of giving a eulogy of one of our very finest military leaders. He'd been the superintendent at the academy in one of his assignments. And I could honestly say of that man that of all the time that I served with him, and I was his executive when I came out of the White House and came back to the chairman's office, of all the high level decisions he had to make and of all the arms control decisions that were of immensely important and to build down at the end of the Cold War, I could honestly say that when he made a recommendation to the secretary of state on what our position in this negotiation should be, he did not have a personal equity in the decision. And frankly, most of the time he took the army's equities out and put them on the table. And I thought that was remarkable when we were negotiating the build down of conventional forces in Europe, when we started that set of discussions. He had risen to the point in his profession that there were no personal equities. It was a calling to him, a life of service and sacrifice. Next chart. Final chart on the theory of professions, but I do want you to know that military professions are not that different than any other profession. All professions operate in what the sociologists call jurisdictions. The upper half shows your external jurisdictions and for the army, the land power force of the nation, are jurisdictions which are negotiated through civil military relations, through the joint staff with OSD and the Congress. We provide for decisive action in unified action, offensive forces, defensive forces, stability ops forces and defense support to civil authorities. Those are the jurisdictions in which we must be effective. That's not what's important here. What's important here is what's below the dotted line. Every profession in America, medical, legal, accountancy, theology, the ministry, the church, pick one, they all have the same two internal jurisdictions. And now I'm getting back into your work and the work of this institution, this college. You develop your own expert knowledge. That's the first point that I want you to understand about professions. Yes, you have a lot of contractors and yes, you have a lot of laboratories and yes, you have people working with applied technology. But in essence, the operational art of the Department of the Navy and of the Department of the Army is created by the professionals in them. We write our own doctrine. The Congress does not tell us how to write the doctrine for offensive actions or for stability operations. So you have to create your own knowledge and then your biggest challenge, the role that this institution plays so critically is can I take that knowledge and embed it in humans to practice humanly? And that's how you do your art. There are four fields of expert knowledge. We laid them out in the book and the first time that the fields have really been extrapolated and got some reasonable consensus across the academic communities. One field of knowledge is military technical. How do you fight wars? Applied technology, doctrine, integration of forces, the combined error, ground, maneuver. That is the military technical knowledge. That is your knowledge. You have to develop that for your profession. The second field is moral ethical. The first part tells you how to fight wars. The second part tells you how to fight wars rightly. And not rightly by your definition, but rightly by the definition of your client. I can't imagine a greater disaster in the Army's recent history than Abdul-Garib. We violated every ethical sinew of our republic. It was absolutely rupturing of the trust because we had some folks who had decided that they were not going to fight wars rightly by the ethic of the profession, which is a reflection of the values of the republic. So that's a whole field of knowledge. I'm delighted to know that you're spending two days focusing on it. I mean, we have to do that. The political cultural knowledge. How does the institution operate outside of its own boundaries? No profession can exist inside of its own boundaries because you're dealing with clients. And so you have to operate across institutional boundaries and that takes a lot across cultural savvy. Civil military relations, all of the things that it takes for the military departments to operate in our government. And then lastly, the most critical field of expert knowledge, the development of human beings in roles of leadership. Now, most of you in the Navy, I would assume, if I asked you to prioritize those force fields of knowledge, you would likely put the military technical field first. In the Army, we would traditionally put leadership first because of the atomization of our force and the fact that we fight at the small unit level. The Marines would probably do the same thing. So when we did our study in 2002 of the Army and we looked across these fields of knowledge, we went out in the Army, we pulled the people in the Army surveys and then we did focus groups. Which field of knowledge for the Army in 2002 do you think was the weakest? Sure enough, we were weakest where we should have been strongest. The weakest field of knowledge is human and leader development. And within human and leader development, the weakest element is moral development of soldiers and their leaders. And I would submit to you, it hasn't changed very much. 12 years of war, it changed some. We are working mightily now, coming back from the theaters after 12 years of war through leader development programs that have significantly increased content in them on the moral development of individuals and particularly the moral role of leaders. The nature of warfare in the last 12 years taught us that we can no longer ignore this. It'll eat our lunch in the kind of warfare that we fight among the people and it did in many cases, eat our lunch. So all professions, the four fields of knowledge, next chart, final chart on professions. If I ask you what you do as a military professional, I would hope this is what you would tell me. Read it carefully. This is quintessentially your art as a military professional. Taking a new situation, you apply your expert knowledge through the process of classification, the diagnostic art. You do that not with formulas, not with computers. Think of the Marine Lieutenant on patrol or leading a convoy. The knowledge is here. It's not too mature, but it's there. Reasoning, applying the knowledge, acting, following up the action, evaluating again for effectiveness, not efficiency, and ultimately going back and adapting the profession's expert knowledge. Why do you think the doctor, when you leave the office in the doctor's office, says if this medication doesn't work in three days, call me. Why does she say that? It's because she's so interested in your well-being. Well, of course she is, but that's not the reason. The reason she says that is as a professional, she knows that she is as responsible to the American people for the knowledge that she used to make the diagnosis as she is for the result of the treatment. She is a steward of her profession's expert knowledge. And if that diagnosis didn't work, she wants to change the knowledge quickly. That's why in the Army we focus so much on our center for lessons learned at Fort Leavenworth. That's why we have so many people in the field whose sole job is to write up quickly the findings of actions and get the information back to Leavenworth so that it can be processed with information coming from many other sources and we can update doctrine accordingly. If you're operating off of false knowledge, you are going to be operating ineffectively. So this is what you do, the repetitive exercise of discretionary judgments. So let me ask you a question. Can any of you suggest a judgment made by a military professional that is not of high moral content? And by high moral content, I mean a decision that influences the well-being of another human being, a rather broad standard definition of morality. Whether that human being be one of the soldiers you're leading, one of the sailors you're leading, whether it be their family, whether it be an enemy, whether it be a non-combatant in the battle space, whether it be a wounded warrior who has already served and is now still suffering, or whether it be the American people whose safety you are responsible in security for providing. Someone please tell me a decision a military member makes that does not have high moral content. I never get an answer to this. And for good reason, you're all people of great sagacity, you understand. Your work is absolutely of noble proportions because you are dealing with the welfare of an immense number of people in this ecosystem around what military professionals do. A two-star general serving in a Pentagon, allocating shortages during the build-down. Serving in the Army G8 has to make a decision whether we cut funds for wounded warriors or whether we cut funds for future technology. That is a moral decision of immense consequence. So whatever level you're at, whether you're at the operational, out in the field, or up at the policy level, your work quintessentially is human work. It's a discretionary judgment, and let me caution you now, we were talking about this at breakfast. One of your great challenges is that as a profession, after 12 years of war, coming back to the States, at least in the Army, we find that our middle-level leaders are uncomfortable exercising some of their own authorities. They want to check with someone, and particularly they want to check with the JAG officer too often. If they're working in the Pentagon, they want to work with the operations research folks. I need more data. I need to have this question analyzed further. That's not what professions are about. We're not frivolous in our decisions. But our clients expect us to use our judgment. That's why we have and have created judgment and earned their trust. So this will be one of your challenges during the build-down. This is the quintessential work of a professional. And this is why I'm confident that I can say, when I started this discussion with you, I probably wasn't thinking the same way you were thinking. This is your art. Next chart, please. So what did we determine in the last year that we studied the Army as a profession and rewrote this doctrine? Let me just summarize this very quickly. We decided that in this tension between bureaucracy and profession, if our leaders could create five things throughout the Army, then there was a great likelihood we were a profession and we would behave as a profession. We had to have the right expertise. We had to inculcate in our soldiers the concept of honorable service. Honorable service is simply doing what is right by the ethos of the profession. That is honorable. Anything less than that, standing on the sidelines with your hands in your pocket, not self-policing, the issue of sexual assault and sexual harassment is not honorable service, whether your rank is lieutenant commander or whether your rank is a major. Trust, that is the result of the other four. Esprit de Cour, obviously essential for martial work by professions. And the other thing we're focusing on very hard in the Army is the role of the stewards. Now that we've written doctrine on profession and divided the responsibility of the stewards of the profession from all of the other professionals, we're focusing hard and have even included some new instructional courses after the war college and before flag promotion. And that whole focus is on stewardship of the profession. How are you making the probability that the Army will be a profession to increase? Next chart, please. So what do we think? I'll just share this data with you very quickly. This is what when we asked recently, this was just we now survey the Army for status of understanding of profession in our leadership survey every year. So let me share some results with you. Yes, they say the Army is a profession. And yes, they say in high proportion, the blue is active, the red is reserve component. They say in high proportion, it's important to their identity. They have professional identity. They want to be identified as professionals. And it's important to me that the Army be referred to as a profession. Notice the numbers, 80s, 90s and 70s. Next chart, please. And then we ask some other questions. The Army should be a profession, but we don't always act like one. 65% of the people are willing to admit that we do not. Indicating that the problem is well recognized. That was encouraging to us. And then we ask the question of who is a professional? We had this great debate as we were writing our professional doctrine. And let me ask you this question. It would be great when you go back to your seminars, ask each other at what point did you become a professional? When did you recognize that your life was in response to calling and not in response to a job? What factors influenced you at that particular point to recognize it? When we do this in small focus groups in the Army, what we almost always find out is they were influenced by the model and an example of a more senior professional. And it finally, the aha moment, the finally the aha moment is now I see what it is like and that's who I want to become. Are all Army members of the Army a profession? Professionals? Answer, no. And then the big question of when do you become a professional? Next chart, please. Some other data. This is more indicting. I put this data into you and I'm sharing it with you to show you how seriously in our service we are taking this issue. I trust other members of my unit. Remember, one of the five characteristics of profession is trust. If trust does not exist, there's no way you can behave other than as a bureaucracy under legal code and threat of penalty. Not much chance for intrinsic motivation. So can I trust the people in this unit? Two thirds, is that enough for the Army to be a profession? I can tell you our chief of staff is not satisfied with that at all. I can trust my subordinates to fully support my directive, only two thirds. The Army allows candid opinions without fear of repercussion. Boy, did we get banged on that one? Not surprisingly, bureaucratic, micromanaging. People can make an honest mistake without ruining their career, only 40% agreed. More evidence of micromanaging, more evidence of behavior as a bureaucracy. This is place where the tension, where bureaucracy is dominating profession as opposed to profession dominating. You're never gonna be purely profession, you're never gonna be purely bureaucracy. That's the role of leadership. Every day you have to get up and move the dial further towards that of profession. A point of major interest, the Army no longer demonstrates it is committed to me as, it expects me to be committed to it. I'll talk about this on my last chart, but let me tip my hand now. One of your major challenges as the leader of your profession in this build-down is dealing with military entitlements. And you're gonna have to take it on. It's already being presented to you. It's eating your lunch in the budget allocations. And you simply will not have the military technical capabilities in the future you need unless you get control of military entitlements. We'll come back to that. When a senior Army leader says something you can believe it's true, 20% disagreed. I won't comment. We trust elected and appointed civilian officials to do what's best for the Army. 40% of the Army said no. Historically that number's been roughly the same and our respect for the media has never been high and that's another problem of our professionalism. Next chart, please. So this is what we concluded. We have cultural dysfunction in the Army. In many cases we are not living by our own ethos. The certification system was critically important. Professions certify bureaucracies promote. Remember the aphorism. Professions certify bureaucracies promote. We were promoting. We had officers who deferred the War College four years in a row because in the latter stages of the war we had gone to a by name request system for Army colonels and flag officers got whatever colonel they wanted and so colonels were going back on a one year in, one year out, some cases only six months out. And many of them were deferring professional education. As soon as General Ordnio became the chief of staff that stopped immediately with one letter. Everybody now attends the War College on time. If you don't attend one time then your chances of promotion and future assignments are very small. Incidentally we're going through the same downsizing that you are. Our selected early retirement boards just completed their first screening for Lieutenant colonels and colonels. They could select up to 30% of the year groups that were applied. And the news is they did select 30%. So we are using the maximum amount in that case. And so it makes an immense difference if someone had deferred twice to the War College and now was facing a serve board and never had a Mell 1 education. So build downs are critical. Build downs will of their own nature cause some changes. So certification immensely important. Next chart. This is what we're training this year throughout the Army. Next year we will be training four more quarterly themes throughout the Army on profession. But they will all be on aspects of the ethic. We will be moving almost entirely to the ethic. Frankly who are the biggest supporters of this program in the Army? Our non-commissioned officer corps. Our non-commissioned officer corps has picked up these particular topics understanding that as we come back from the war and come back to garrison, we have many junior officers and NCOs who do not know how to operate in garrison. Property accountability, I see you nodding your heads, you've seen all this. But we are addressing it and we are addressing it in the context of profession. That's what's important. Next chart. I wanna talk three charts about the ethic. Again, to frame a little bit of your discussion in your seminars today. What is the ethic, the ethos? It's in essence, it's embedded culture. It's a set of assumptions, beliefs, valued, values, multi-dimensional. The organizational theorists tell us, but it is at the core of the culture of the institution and informs the rest of the culture. Your challenge as leaders is that you have to manage the evolution of your ethos because it's constantly being buffeted by three things. First, the expectations and the norms of the society you're serving. And you just saw that with repeal of don't ask, don't tell and you're seeing it now with the significant debates on women in combat. It's your ethic. It is going to evolve you as the leaders of the profession must own your ethic and super intend its evolution, a critical role of the stewards of the profession. And besides that, there are functional imperatives that you have to represent to your client that you don't lose. One of your functional imperatives, physical fitness. We cannot have armed forces that are not fit. You have to represent that idea of functional imperative. In case I just use a professional schooling and then international laws and treaties. So ethics evolve over time. That's my point. Let's look at the ethic of the army. Next chart. As we just wrote it in our doctrine, there's a, we've now taken our ethic and broken it into four quadrants. We've framed our ethic. We still have an awful lot, have you noticed in the lower right quadrant of creeds and mottos, just the same as you have your own Navy ethos, a short statement of value orientation. But the point I want to make here is the framework of the army ethic is founded both legally and morally. One of our great challenges in the last 10 years I mentioned is we have focused increasingly on the legal basis of our ethic. Almost to the detriment of the moral basis of the ethic. The second thing you should get from this chart is that an ethic must influence the behavior of the institution, the big muscle movements. Let me give you an example. Three weeks ago, the secretary of defense signed out a memorandum saying that homosexual soldiers were granted uncharged leave to travel to nearby states to be married if they were stationed in a state that made them unequally situated with the rest of their service. Meaning they were situated in a state where they could not marry. I don't know what your reaction to that was. As someone who studies professions, my reaction was that that is probably one of the most egregious policies that you can imagine. Because it's established a special benefit for a special group of people. When in fact your ethic historically and functionally has always maintained a meritocracy. Soldiers and sailors get what they merit individually by certification of competence, character, and commitment. I noticed in your doctrine it's competence and character. We added commitment. A great debate, I can come back to that if you wanna talk about it. How do you measure commitment? Just observe. We do it all the time in our non-commissioned officer reports and in our officer reports. We've been evaluating commitment for a long time. But now we've made it official that our professionals were looking for competence, character, and commitment. And we want that in a meritocratic culture. So whose responsibility was it to push back against the policy coming down from OSD? That's the stewards responsibility. Always the responsibility of the steward as Huntington wrote decades ago in the soldier and state. The responsibility of the leader of the military is to represent the military because you have unique knowledge and unique perspective nobody has. Let me give you an example. I was serving at the White House. Chared a lot of meetings on arms control. And so here I am, an active duty colonel in civilian clothes, chairing a meeting in the inter-agency and there were Navy officers representing strategic weapons, Air Force officers representing strategic weapons, the intelligence community, the state department's own intelligence community who didn't get along with the other intelligence community at all, the Treasury on occasion, but anyway a very strong inter-agency group. And I began to notice after a while that if the uniformed representatives at the meeting did not speak up and state the position of the military, guess what happened? It was not heard. It was not considered. It was not part of the final consideration. Because nobody else at the table for all of their expertise and everything they knew about arms control, they could not state the military point of view because they didn't have 20 years in the military or whatever, they did not have the professional standing, the abstract knowledge. To look at this from a unique perspective and say from our professional perspective, this is what we need. So it is always the critical role of the steward to represent the profession without which there will be no representation. Nobody else can do that for you. That's why it's so important. This political, cultural field of knowledge. Do we develop sufficient numbers of officers to work outside our departments to accurately ensure we're represented where we need to be represented? So back to the policy from OSD. Fortunately, some members of Congress raised the issue. Raised the issue in very forceful terms directly to the Secretary of Defense. So the Secretary came back from a trip, had a very quick next morning meeting with service secretaries, service chiefs, and the chairman, if we're to believe the testimony about the meeting that was later presented to the Armed Services Committee. And they decided that they had made a mistake. That was not a good policy. There was not a meritocratic policy at all. It was, in fact, establishing a special privilege for a special group of people, unlike what it's called for in the military ethic. And so they changed the policy and allowed people to use administrative leave based on merit, as it had always been. Now these are the kinds of things that you have to deal with as a profession to guard your ethic and to protect your ethic and to represent the needs of the profession. Are you gonna win all these arguments? Of course not. Your ethic will evolve over time. You should expect your ethic to evolve over time. But you need to have the say in how it evolves and to ensure that your view is represented. Next chart, final point on the ethic. This is a point I made earlier. If you are operating or the people you are leading are operating under the legal foundations of your ethic, then what it produced is the motivation of obligation. I must do this because it is my duty. The type of leadership that normally goes with that understanding is what we used to call transactional leadership, the quid pro quo. The army dropped transactional leadership 20 years ago and moved to a new doctrine of leadership, transformational leadership, some call it authentic leadership, where you seek to align the aspirations of the individual with the performance, the outcome, the work of the organization. And that kind of motivation is aspirational. I wanna do this because I know it's right, this is who I am and this is what I'm dedicated to doing. Back to the point I made earlier, this is a response to calling, vocati. I will do it because I'm called to do it. So this is one way of understanding your ethic. I would encourage you in your seminars to discuss among yourselves, how legalistic have you become in the last 10 years of war? Where is the moral foundation of your ethic? How well is it understood? How well can you communicate it to millennials? How well do they respond to it? Because this is your leadership challenge in leading a profession in the next decade, next chart. Final subject I wanna discuss, two charts. Downsizing's deprofessionalized, that's my point. I just want you to understand that. History is abundantly clear. Now, it's not just downsizing. All professions in Western democracies are now serving in declining legitimacy. And this is a phenomenon of two things. The information age and globalization. Example, my daughter has three children. The first children saw the pediatrician regularly. The second two children seldom saw the pediatrician. Why? Web MD. I've been through this before. I think I know what it is. I can go on the web and I can get it done. This is the information explosion. It has eroded the boundaries of the medical profession. If you wanna will, you can go online and get one. You don't have to go to a lawyer, et cetera. I don't wanna belabor the point, but professions have been under pressure. And military professions are not an exception to this. When I was serving as the chief of plans at the height of the Cold War in Europe, 80 to 84, we were deploying the Pershing missile, had a very high CEP. We finally convinced the Soviets that we could attack the second echelon effectively and that therefore their war plans were going to be significantly ruptured with much less probability of success than they had supposed up to that time. When I was serving over there at that time, in the land forces in Europe, there were seven military professions. How many are there today? By my judgment, probably two. What happened to the other military professions? There are today obedient military bureaucracies. The tension between bureaucracy and profession, bureaucracy one. In some cases because their parliaments wanted it to win. They wanted a much more highly controlled, less expensive, less expensive military. But my point to you is professions die and military professions die. How do you measure if a profession is dying? I've already given you the clues earlier in the presentation. Go to the two internal jurisdictions. Are they creating new expert knowledge? And are they embedding the knowledge in humans to practice? When you go inside a military institution and study it and see that those two things are not happening, folks, you are not looking at a military profession. You're looking at a military bureaucracy. So, downsizing have their own risks. Next chart, final chart. It's a bit presumptuous on my part to come in here and say, well, if the Navy is gonna be a profession in 2020, here's what you need to focus on. But that's what I was asked to do. And I'm perfectly delighted to do that. Because frankly, it's not all that different than what I've been working on for the Army and the same things I know the Army has to do. Yours may be a little different culturally. However, here are the big issues. The first thing you have to do as you come out of the 12 years of war and start this build-downing is you've got to check your expert knowledge that you have the right knowledge for the future. Remember, the stewards of the profession are responsible for the performance of the profession 10 to 15 years down the road, not next year. If the stewards of the profession are shooting at 25 meter targets, they're in the wrong business. We need the stewards of the profession shooting at the 100 meter targets. So do you have the right expert knowledge for warfare 2020? Are you set for cyber? Is your leader development strong enough? That's what professionals focus on for the future. The right expert knowledge developed into the right people. And then you will have a profession. The other thing that professions find very difficult to do is to throw out old knowledge. Why does the Army need a finance corps? Is there any institution in America that really has a hard time paying its people? It can't get that job done? We still have a corps dedicated to finance. Now I'm speaking in little tongue-in-cheek here because in the last four years we've changed the finance corps and they are not paying soldiers anymore as you all well know. We're all paid by OSD now, by the DFAS, et cetera. And our finance corps has become an adjunct of the acquisition corps and it works primarily in the financing and the fiduciary responsibilities of contracting. It is a professional corps. It is contributing to the profession. But I only use that as an example to help you understand what functions are you now doing with uniform people in a department of Navy that's not expert? It should be thrown out. You're gonna downsize so much you don't have time to have people doing non-expert work. Second, you've gotta develop leaders. Notice those first two things come right out of the jurisdictions of professions. Are you tending to the internal jurisdiction of knowledge and are you tending to the internal jurisdiction of leader development and then lastly you must maintain the trust of the people? As I showed you from the data, we have difficulty. Hierarchy organizations always have difficulty. We have data going back to the Westmoreland study in the 70s to show that in hierarchy organizations trust is always difficult. It must be earned by the senior leaders. The EF Hutton, you have to earn it the old fashioned way by your behavior and by your actions. So maintain the ethic, maintain a meritocratic culture and my final point, control military entitlements and that's going to be difficult. Major challenge to your future professionalism. So what are your questions?