 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Gardner, thank you so much. Well, it's a pleasure to be back and thank you for an absolutely marvelous introduction. As you can see, I'm gonna put up a couple of images. I find that when I was in Europe as the NATO commander, people would say to me, you know, the most dangerous thing in the world is an American military officer with a PowerPoint presentation. It's probably true. These are simply meant to be evocative and to help us think through some of the ideas of challenge and opportunity in the 21st century. Gardner, that was a wildly over-the-top introduction. Thank you. Most people hear that and they say either, gee, I thought you'd be taller, or they say, well, you know, Stavridis, if you're so cool, why weren't you a naval aviator? And the answer is I was not a naval aviator because I had a very traumatic experience as a young boy. Next slide, please. That made it impossible for me to fly. So I actually, I briefly thought then about becoming a Submariner. You know, I had OK grades at the Academy and so I thought I went out on my first-class cruise and it was in the Mediterranean and they gave me the con of a submarine. We were operating up around Venice. Next slide. And that didn't work out well. Next slide. So I became a surface officer and I'm damn proud of being a surface officer. Next slide, please. Well, what I'd like to talk about today as the first graphic indicated is 21st century security, but I want to begin by looking back a hundred years ago and we're in that season of let's look back a hundred years ago and understand what happened. And it's good that we do that. This is a graduating class, much like the class will graduate under the admiral in the spring. This class graduated in the spring of 1914. That's when this photograph is taken. This is the graduating class at Saint-Cyr, which is the French Military Academy. If you will, it is the West Point of France. The graduates full of French, Elan, Audacity, they swore they would go into battle wearing their white gloves. And they did. By 1918, everybody in this photograph is dead. The class is lost in this war. This is 20th century security. And you would think coming out of this cataclysmic first world war, we, the big we, the global we, we would have learned. Next slide. We did not. This is an iconic image from the battle of Stalingrad, where 17,000 people a day were killed over a battle that lasted almost a year. Well over a million people killed at Stalingrad. First World War, Second World War. You can almost pick a number, but let's stipulate 50 million people are killed worldwide. Security failed us in the 20th century. And it failed us because we tried to create security by building walls. The iron curtain, the bamboo curtain, the Maginot line, the Schlieffen plan. Next slide. The Berlin wall. We tried to separate ourselves. We tried to build walls. My thesis that I will try to explicate a bit tonight is that in the end, in this 21st century, walls are ineffective. We need to build bridges to create security. Next please. So this thesis occurred to me on this day. I was in the Pentagon. The little red circle was my office in the Pentagon. I was a newly selected one star officer. Famously, it was a beautiful day in Washington, not a cloud in the sky. Went to work and saw the airplane hit the Pentagon. I'm here talking to you because the pilot's wrist was canted just slightly to the left. And as I picked myself up amidst all the fire and the smoke and stumbled out onto the grass out there and tried to help till the real heroes of that day came, the first responders. What was playing on kind of track two in my mind was the following. Here I was in the safest building in the world. I mean, think about it. You're behind these enormous concrete walls. You're guarded by the strongest military in the history of the world, in the capital of the richest country in the world. Was I safe behind all those walls? Evidently not. At this stage, I began to realize that 21st century security will present us a different set of challenges that I would argue we need to approach differently. So what I'd like to do now is talk about some of those challenges and then more importantly talk about the opportunities and the way that we can approach those challenges. Next please. So this is a hard part of this talk. This is a video, which you can watch if you can stand it. It is the result of a Taliban justice court. This is a man shooting a woman in the back of the head eight times. The voiceover says the following. The court has rendered its judgment. She is guilty of adultery. You must execute her because you are her husband. This is violent extremism. And we think of this as something that happens in Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq places a long way away. Let's go to Europe. Next slide. I was speaking earlier with a Norwegian naval officer who's here at the college this year. He knows this individual very well. Upper right. This is Anders Brevik. He is a right wing nationalist who blew up the government building. You see the result of that in the center of the slide. It would be like blowing up the old executive office building in Washington. Killed a handful of people. But far worse, Anders Brevik then took high powered rifles and went to a small island off the coast of Oslo where he killed execution style 75 young Norwegians between the ages of 18 and 24 at a political convention. Roughly what we would think of here in the United States as a boy state or girl state. A little bit older demographic. So 77 Norwegians die that day. Very young. That's a terrible day for any nation. I would invite the Americans in the audience to consider on a population adjusted basis. Norway has a population of 5 million people on a population adjusted basis. That's a day in the United States where 4,000 young people die in an act of violent extremism. Upper left is Anders Brevik in court. He was captured and tried. He's apologizing. He is apologizing to the forces of right wing nationalism for not having killed more people on that day. So this is violent extremism which flows through our societies. And of course the group du jour is, next slide, the Islamic State. This is James Foley, brave journalist. I was at a ceremony where his parents were given an award recognizing James Foley's courage in covering these extremely, extremely difficult Syrian setting that we face today. This is the Islamic State. Next slide. And I worry about them for a number of reasons. One is because they have a plan and it's a plan that involves rebuilding a caliphate. You can read all about it on the internet. And we should pay attention when people tell us their plan. I don't think this is going to come to fruition, but it is a thinking organization that is growing and adapting. Next please. And it is also the most dangerous violent extremist group because upper right money. It is knocking down probably between three and five million dollars a day in a whole series of very creative enterprises that run from oil smuggling to human trafficking to selling artifacts to capturing huge amounts of cash to extortion schemes. This is a very creative and innovative group. Point one. Point two is branding. They are genius level at taking this symbol, this black flag and creating a global brand using social networks, using excellent advertising techniques, using superb recruiting. This is a very capable group. So these violent extremists, I think, are one strain of the challenge that we face today. Next please. We also face challenges from nations that live outside the norms of international law. This, of course, is the flag of Iran. This is a Sahil 2 missile. It has a range of about 2,000 kilometers. It can range from the capitals in Europe today, fired from Northern Iran. We are at a mildly, mildly positive moment. At least we're in negotiations with Iran, but I'm skeptical of how successful they will be. And we just extended the deadline again. So we have Iran, which is of concern. Next. And it's not only a ballistic missile, weapons of mass destruction concern, but here at the War College, we worry about it in a maritime context, of course, the Strait of Hormuz. Next. And also because they're innovative, they're creative. They're building these swarm fleets. They're creating these mini submarines. They are very, very clever, innovative, and they are not bounded by many of the norms that other states face. But they're not the most dangerous nation in the world. Next. North Korea is. North Korea today has nuclear weapons. Next slide. Has the ability to deliver them at range. And worst of all, has a young, untested, untried, highly emotional, and medically challenged leader. Not a good combination. And next slide. I don't think Dennis Rodman is going to solve it for us. So we ought to worry about nations like Iran and North Korea. Next please. And Syria. At the moment, we're consumed with the Islamic State. We need to continue to focus on the real danger that the Syrian regime plays. And it's not just in Syria. Next please. I wouldn't want to over stretch this 100 years ago analogy, but you can sort of think about what's happening in the Levant as somewhat like what was happening in the Balkans in 1914. It is a place of extreme destabilization with great power interests and high regional tension. Look at the flags around the eastern Mediterranean. These are nations that have a great deal of tension amongst themselves. Exacerbated by discoveries of rich hydrocarbon reserves. And oh, by the way, on the left side of the slide, you'll see the flags of really big nations. This is India, Russia, the United States, and China. And you can just make out those numbers there. That's India four, Russia 12, the United States 12, China two. These aren't soccer scores left over from the World Cup. These are the number of warships from those nations operating in the eastern Mediterranean on a day I randomly selected last fall. This is a very tense regional structure underpinned by the concern of the collapse of the Syrian regime and increasingly the potential collapse of Iraq. Next, please. We now turn to Europe. And this is a map that I think a year ago not many in the audience would have spent time studying and thinking about. It is, of course, Ukraine. Next, please. And it began in the Maidan series of protests. Next, please. And here's what it looks like today. This is not a treaty. This is not a ceasefire. This is a war that's going on in a very constrained area. Several thousand people killed. Rockets, artillery, small arms, ambushes, frontal assaults that is replete with Russian military activity embedded in the center of it. This is as challenging a situation as has existed on the European content in a security context certainly since the Balkans and possibly since the Cold War. Next, please. And the problem is that the strategic terrain is not that map I showed you of Ukraine. The strategic terrain is right here. It's the six inches between Vladimir Putin's ears because that's what's driving this. So we have to be very concerned not only about the violent extremists but also about nations that are acting outside of norms of international law. Very concerning. Next, please. We should continue to be concerned about Afghanistan and I would argue the most concerning thing in Afghanistan today to me is not the Taliban. It is this crop which is poppies, heroin, opium. And let's set aside the morality of the use of heroin or cocaine for that matter. Let's set that aside. What I worry about is the money. It is the profit that comes out of this that destabilizes governments and creates fragility in these extremely weak nations. Next, please. And of course here in the Americas we worry more about cocaine than we do about heroin. Now this is a photograph of a high-tech Navy vessel that's capturing a drug runner. The bad news is that the high-tech Navy vessel is the one on top in the photograph. As most of you know, the bottom is a semi-submersible submarine. I spent three years at Southern Command kind of chasing these things around. These are very capable. Admiral Guillermo Barrera is here from the Columbia Navy who is an expert in this area. This is a vessel, this particular one, diesel-powered, twin-screwed, excellent communication suite, crew of three, range of about 2,000 kilometers. When we caught it, it had 10 tons of cocaine. Street value $150 million. It cost $1 million to build this in the Colombian jungle. That's margin. $1 million to construct it carrying $150 million cargo. So again, it's this theme of innovation and we're not going to build walls that are going to stop this. Next, please. We ought to continue to worry about piracy. We have improved off the coast of Africa on the eastern side, but we're seeing piracy now popping up on the western side as well as in the Strait of Malacca. So in addition to the other things we've talked about, piracy will continue to play a role in the maritime world. Next, please. And we ought to worry about migration. Every year, 200 million people migrate. That's the population of Brazil. I don't worry so much about migration, migration. These are mostly good-hearted people trying to find a better set of economic circumstances for their families, but I do worry about the routes, the slipstreams in which drugs, weapons, cash, and at the really dark end of the spectrum, weapons of mass destruction can move. Next, please. And with all that we've talked about, we haven't even touched Asia, which is bubbling like a cauldron. If you have not read this book by Robert Kaplan, I highly commend it to you. Probably his best book since Balkan Ghosts. It is a book that, in very concise ways, unpackages the challenges today in this very tense region. And in my view, next, please, it's not about a collision between the United States and China. It's a collision between China and Japan is, I think, the really worrisome part of this scenario. China is rising, as nations will do, that have those kind of capabilities. But that rising China will meet next, Shinzo Abe's Japan, which is a nation that is more assertive, is more aggressive, and is more willing to meet China's challenges. So in addition to the North Korean problem that we talked about a few moments ago, we also have this potential collision between China and Japan. You may have seen earlier this year when Prime Minister Abe at Davos, and I was there, said that China and Japan today remind him of Germany and the United Kingdom in 1914. That is a very concerning analogy for the Prime Minister to make. Now, the good news is several weeks ago, Prime Minister Abe and President Xi had a handshake at the APEC. I don't know if anybody saw that particular handshake. It was probably the worst handshake in the history of handshakes. One was here, and one was here. They could not have been further apart. They wouldn't even look at each other. But that's better than it was earlier in the year. Point being, this cauldron is bubbling, and it's not just China and Japan and North Korea. It's also the tensions in the South China Sea. So this, in my view, is the dog that hasn't yet barked in international security challenges is East Asia. Next, please. Ebola. I think we have more or less dodged a bullet here in the West, still extremely concerning, particularly in Sierra Leone. These are faces we've come to know, patient zero. A couple of the American nurses who treated him, Spanish nurse Ebola itself. We're lucky because Ebola is not transmittable in the way the Spanish influenza was, again, about 100 years ago. During that 1918 influenza in three years, 500 million people were infected on a global population of 1.8 billion. 100 million people between 50 and 100 million died. So that kind of pandemic, I think, needs to be part of our chain of concern. Next, please. And will it turn out like this? I hope not. This was a very bad movie, but one of Brad Pitt's lesser roles. But this is a very interesting book. This is about a zombie infection, but the techniques used to deal with it paint a pretty stark picture of what the world would be like facing a serious pandemic. Next, please. Cyber is actually the top of my worry list, having rolled out a number of very concerning security issues in this 21st century. Cyber is at the very top. These are the flags of the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Republic of Georgia, all nations that have undergone cyber attack. Georgia will go down in military history as the first nation to be simultaneously kinetically attacked, bombs, tanks, soldiers and cyber attacked. Georgia will not be the last nation to face that. So there are national concerns in cyber. Next, please. There's a spectrum in this cyber world that runs from nuisance to intrusion to surveillance, manipulation of data, destruction of data, all the way to the very dark end of the spectrum. Next, please. There's a commercial aspect to it. 100 million passwords and accounts hacked between Home Depot and Target. I could have put Sony up there, who had their entire computer structure destroyed, probably by North Korea. Next, please. And the cyber crime comes out of a variety of nations, not government-sponsored, probably, but criminal gangs from these nations. Next, please. And it is beginning to touch our strongest and largest financial institutions. 76 million JP Morgan Chase accounts surveilled, not manipulated, not destroyed, simply surveilled. Did it come from hack-a-vists, upper left? Did it come from Russian cyber crime? Was it straight stick gangs? We don't know. We don't know. But the point is about cyber, that it runs the spectrum from national security to commercial to financial and critical infrastructure. Next. And it has a very personal component to it. Jennifer Lawrence, her pictures innocently sent to her boyfriend, distributed globally. And, you know, there's a reason we call it the cloud. You know, it's not the vault, Jennifer. But the point is, in this cyber world, the issues cross all of those sectors of our lives and our boundaries. So cyber, I think, is maybe the most concerning of all, particularly in terms of defending our critical infrastructure. Next, please. Environment is a challenge, especially at sea. Next, please. Inequality, some would say, ought to be at the top of our worry list. Next, please. In Europe, it's always this feeling of rolling a boulder up the hill. Productivity and demographics are slowing the European economies. And here in the United States, next, it's political gridlock. And next, a sense of isolationism. Those are the two things I worry about here. Next. So right about now, you ought to say, wow, Jim, that's quite a saga of challenge in this 21st century. What should we do about it? What do you think? Next. What are the opportunities for us? Next. So let's start with this. We ought to listen better. We ought to listen better. This is actually an air defense system from about 80 years ago. The soldier is listening for incoming aircraft. You know, as an aside, I showed this slide in Berlin. You know, the Germans are very sensitive about surveillance. And the first question was, Admiral, that black and white photograph, was that an early NSA listening device? This is metaphor. This is to evoke the idea that we should all listen more. Before we leap into action, which is our national proclivity here in the United States, we should listen more. We should understand what the people, the nations, the organizations, the alliances across the geopolitical divide are saying. And what do they mean? Next, please. We should do what you do here every single day. You'll be happy to know, Admiral, whenever I talk about what we should do, I show a picture of the Naval War College because I think this is an iconic institution. This is a place where we build intellectual capital that all of the young mid-career officers in this audience and senior enlisted will draw on through your career. And what else is in that photograph? It's a bridge. It's a bridge. Think about the bridges you build here in the year you spend amongst each other, amongst other nations, with civilian agencies, interagency. I hope over time to see more private sector actually involved here. So we ought to be listening more and we ought to be doing what is done here more, which is to build intellectual capital before we leap into action. Next, please. We are going to learn languages. And here I'm really speaking to the Americans in the group. The Department of Defense, this global organization of two and a half, two and a half millions of people, two and a half million people operating in the global world, 8% of us speak a second language, 8%. It's so ineffective. This is a Canadian corp role that I knew in Afghanistan. He taught himself to speak Pashto during his deployment there. To know another language is to know another life. And particularly as the next generation of Americans come along in the security business and in our national life, we ought to be learning additional languages, starting with Spanish. Today, 15% of the national population speaks Spanish as a first or second language. By mid-century, that'll be 30%. We are well on our way to being a bilingual, bicultural country. Learning languages is a way to build bridges. Next, please. And we ought to do more reading, not just the wonderful books that we read at a place like the War College. The Mahan and Sun Tzu and Klausowitz and Geopolitics and History and Biography. Terrific. Read that stuff. Find time to read some novels. You can learn an awful lot learning about other cultures through their literature. Here's some books I've read in the last year or so. Orphan Master's Son, a picture of North Korea. It's a page turner like a Charles Dickens novel set in Pyongyang. If Charles Dickens had ever gone to Pyongyang. Matterhorn about the U.S. experience encounter insurgency in Vietnam. The Circle, which is about an organization, if you can imagine it, the National Security Agency aside. It's Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter all combined into one organization called The Circle. It's a novel about why you should be concerned about what the NSA is listening to. You ought to be terrified of what the social networks reveal about you. And the Afghan campaign about Afghanistan. Not the current campaign, not the NATO campaign, not the Russian campaign, not the British campaign, but the first campaign in Afghanistan, Alexander the Great's. You can learn more about Pashtun culture in that novel by Stephen Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire, many of you have read. By reading fiction, you can touch and build bridges and learn about other cultures. Next, please. And in the nautical vein, some other terrific books. If you haven't read The Bedford Incident or seen the movie, in today's world as the Cold War kind of bubbles a little bit, worth going back and reading. So the point is, as we do our reading and our thinking, we should be spending time doing not only the classic works, but also things that touch different societies and different ways of thinking as well. Next, please. What's the U.S. role in all this? I think the U.S. still has an incredibly important role to play globally. I am not a declineist. I think the United States has a strong political position in the world. Leave aside your views about the president, today's president, one way or the other. Look at that photograph from a recent G20. Everybody turning to the president of the United States. So there's political strength. Our economy still very capable. A strong military, good demographics that are rising. What's that in the middle? Fracking, exactly. Energy, self-sufficiency, I think, is on the horizon. So I think the United States has a strong role to play. But there are other nations with whom we can build powerful bridges. Next. And I would go long on India. I would go long on India. We spend so much time when we talk about geopolitics discussing the United States and China, the European Union. It's like India is this kind of nation that isn't mentioned all that frequently. This is a nation of today 1.2 billion people. By mid-century it will overtake China as the most populous nation. A couple of months ago, 738 million people turned out to vote in the largest democratic event in the history of the world. They have a dynamic new leader. India also is a nation that is well positioned to build bridges because it can operate with so many different nations very effectively. Next, please. Alliances still matter. NATO matters as an alliance. 28 nations. 52% of the world's gross domestic product. Next, please. In Afghanistan, the idea of coalitions, I think, have been proven. 50 nations have contributed troops to this coalition. Next, counter piracy. These are French special forces capturing pirates off the coast of Djibouti. They were landed there by a Danish helicopter that had been refueled by an Italian frigate with a Portuguese maritime patrol aircraft overhead based on intelligence provided by Iran. I mean, this is a coalition very loose. Look at all the flags involved as well as NATO and the European Union. Coalitions like alliances are ways we can build bridges. Next, please. And even in a small sense, in the Mediterranean, these are the nations that are involved in NATO's Mediterranean dialogue. So these kind of loose coalitions, partnerships, and alliances are bridges and are part of and ought to be central to our strategy of creating security. Next, please. Here's a very small coalition between the three Baltic states who are coming together to buy LNG tankers to wean themselves from Russian natural gas. Small coalition with a commercial basis. Next, please. Do we still need a strong military in this world of building bridges? You bet we do. But maybe we ought to look at some other parts of that. Next. Now this is a really bad movie, Ender's Game. In fact, probably no one actually saw this movie. But it's based, of course, on a brilliant novel about a cyber force, a cyber force. If you go back 100 years, we had an army, a navy, and a Marine Corps. We didn't have an air force. We started operating in the air and eventually we recognized the need for an air force. Today we have an army, a navy, a Marine Corps, and an air force. We don't have a cyber force. I think it's time to start thinking very seriously about the idea of a cyber force. China has one. Russia has one. We have cyber command. That's not a cyber force. And I think it's time to really begin thinking about that. Next, please. We ought to continue to focus on unmanned. Next, please. And we ought to remember that in the end it's all about the people. This is Michael Murphy. Many of you will have known him. Many will have seen the film, Lone Survivor. This is the real Michael Murphy. Today his spirit is probably in that Arleigh Burke destroyer sailing behind him. I think that cyber, unmanned, and special forces are the new triad. And the synergies between those ought to be part of our approach in this 21st century. Next, please. Okay. So there's Hugh Jackman. My wife says that any good presentation has a picture of Hugh Jackman in it somewhere. There he is. What's important is what's on the left. It's the human genome. The price of sequencing the human genome is falling like a brick through the air. It will afford the opportunity to do what's on the left. Human performance enhancement, human life extension, significant energy from biomass, synthetic crops. All of this will come out of the revolution in biology. This is a long conversation, but in this 21st century, as we build these bridges, we should recognize that a great deal of what will be innovative will come out of the world of biology. Next, please. We ought to do more of this. When I was at Southern Command, we sailed the hospital ship Comfort, the Mercy Sails in the Pacific. These are terrific platforms. They're international. They're interagency. They're private public. They are powerful forms of strategic communication. Next, please. And we ought to do innovative things like this. These are Afghan police officers who are reading books. And you ought to say, well, that's strange. I thought I read somewhere that Afghan police and army were largely illiterate. And you would be correct. Young Afghans in their late 20s and 30s did not learn to read in great numbers because the Taliban withheld education from them. Okay. So why are these Afghan policemen reading books? And the answer is they're in literacy training. We are teaching them to read. We, the United States, NATO, private public partnerships, we're teaching them to read. We have taught 600,000 Afghans to read. And you know, in Afghanistan, if you can read, you put a pen in your pocket. And other people can see that and know that you are a literate person. When these Afghan soldiers and police officers complete the literacy training, we give them a pen at the ceremony when they graduate. And you should see the look on their faces when they put that pen in their pocket. That's a bridge. That's a bridge to civilization, the ability to read. Now, they're not going to go off and write complex legal briefs anytime soon. But they can, they can read at a third to fifth grade level and continue to improve and use their cell phones and connect with the world. Next, please. We are continue to work on this on building bridges between genders. Here in the West, we're better at this than we used to be. But in many parts of the world, we have societies who are trying to achieve 100% of a society's potential with only 50% of a society's population. So at the Fletcher School where I am today, we have a robust program in the role of women in creating security. Next, please. We got to worry about the Arctic. This wonderful seminar that I had a chance to meet with earlier today focused on the Arctic. The Arctic is going to be one of these hinges in global geopolitics. It'll either go very well or very badly. It'll either become a zone of conflict or zone of cooperation. I'm hoping that it can become a zone of cooperation. It has the potential to do that. Next, please. And the social networks. Now you're looking at this thinking, well, what are those? Are those fiber optic cables or sea lanes of communication? This is the world according to Facebook. There's 1.4 billion people on Facebook today. If it were a country, it would be the largest nation in the world. Then it's China and India and the next largest group is Twitter. Then it's the United States. These social networks are where we can move our ideas and our messages. And our ideas are good. They're sound. Our ideas are democracy, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, gender equality, racial equality. These are good ideas. We execute them imperfectly, but they are profoundly good ideas. We need to move those ideas in these social networks because I assure you the people who do not agree with them are using these networks every day to do their ideas. And people say to me sometimes, you know, Admiral, we're in a war of ideas. That's not quite right. We're in a marketplace of ideas. Our ideas have to compete and we have to move them and we've got to get into these social networks to do so. Next please. So I'll wrap it up and I'd love to take a couple of questions if we can or comments. This was the photograph of the year in 2013. And it is chosen, was chosen from 100,000 submitted photographs. These are migrants. They're in Djibouti. And they are reaching with their cell phones across the border, Somalia, Djibouti, trying to find a signal, trying to get a signal, which we've all done that, maybe not in Djibouti. But think about what this picture tells us about our world today. This is the bridge. This is what people want. They want to be part of this larger world. They want to connect. And it's hard. It's difficult. It's challenging. This photograph for me is a metaphor for a world in which we are not going to be able to build walls and shut these people away. We have got to bring them with us. We have got to connect them. We've got to use all of the tools that we've talked about tonight, smart power, soft power, occasionally hard power. Next please. And if you'll permit me to conclude on a couple of naval notes, things will go wrong. We will have bad days. We will have policies that fail. We understand that. Next. And the seas will be rough as we implement all of this. These are challenging times we live in, certainly. But I would argue, next, that there's hope. So much of what I read today is discouraging and downbeat. And yet I think if you really look at the trajectory of history and where we were a hundred years ago, about to embark on a near apocalyptic series of World War One, World War Two, and almost destroying the world in a cold war, we are improving. We are moving. We will have accidents and mishaps and difficulties and challenges. But we are moving. Next. I've talked a lot tonight about soft power and about building bridges and connections. I would not want anyone to leave this auditorium tonight with the slightest shred of doubt about the ability of the United States military to do this, to deliver ordinance on target, to conduct prompt and sustained combat operations at sea. That is the mission of the United States Navy. In Title 10, we're very good at this. We can launch Tomahawk missiles. We could be a lot better at launching ideas. Next, please. So here's the money slide. You know, life is not an on and off switch. We don't have to either be in a war or simply use soft power. Joe Nye, who's probably the real expert on all this at the Kennedy School has said that soft power without the ability to use hard power is no power. That's probably right. But it's not an on and off switch. Life is a rheostat. You get to dial it in. And that balance between hard power and soft power, finding that place on the dial, that's smart power. And that I think is the theme I would leave you with tonight as we try and build bridges. Next, please. Last slide. So this is Wikipedia, which is this amazing body of knowledge, the largest collection of knowledge ever assembled. As I'm sure you know, it is not collected by 12 really smart war college professors locked in a room writing all those articles. Wikipedia is created by all of us every day, 10s of 1000s of people input knowledge into the wiki and every day millions of people draw it out. It is the perfect metaphor for the fact that no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together. No one person, no one alliance, no one educational institution. No one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together. The vision statement of Wikipedia is very powerful. It is a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge, a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. My thesis for us is by collaboration by building bridges, we can create the sum of all security in the 21st century. Thank you very much. I've been very pleased to be here. Next, please. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I would, with your concurrence, take two or three questions. Fine. Who would like to make a comment or a concern or in the question, sir? Thank you, sir. And great to see you, Mr. Secretary. First of all, I just read a novel which is called The Ghost Fleet, which is set 10 years from now. And the hypothesis of the Ghost Fleet is that China and Russia will collaborate. And the book is very reminiscent of Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising. It's a portrait of a global confrontation between the United States and a Chinese Russian alliance. It is a chilling book to read. And it also projects from where we are today. And it projects a continued rise on the part of China and Russia in their capabilities and a moderate rise in our capabilities. So it really posits your point. I commend it to folks. It's called, again, Ghost Fleet by Peter Singer. Sir, I think that we still very much have the ability to maintain our relative advantage against both China and Russia. But it will take not only a continued robust level of US defense spending, but working with and encouraging our allies to spend along with us. And let's just do the numbers real quickly. So the US spends $600 billion a year on defense and the Europeans spend $300 billion a year. And the Japanese, the Australians, and the Koreans spend about $100 billion a year on defense. Today, the Russians spend $80 billion on defense. The Chinese spend about $150 billion. So we are outspending them significantly at the moment, collectively, as an alliance system and structure. But what's worrisome, your point, is that their technologies are improving rapidly and their level of defense spending are rising very quickly. So the key is for us to maintain a robust investment in R&D, an alliance structure which leverages not only NATO, but our Asian partners, and to continue to invest in our people, which is, I think, the fundamental advantage we have over both China and Russia, who will continue to be conscript militaries. It is time to be very watchful. We're at a pivot point. If we don't pay mind, we are going to find that that very robust advantage we enjoy today is going to be potentially very even field of play in 10 years. And that's the theme of this novel, which is a pretty good way to look into the future. Others, yes, sir? Yeah, I think if I were going to do a full presentation on US military capability and where we should make investment, I would, in fact, include space. I tend to put it as part of the cyber system, but your point, the physical set of relationships, particularly in low earth, are crucial. No question about it. And again, it's an area to the Secretary's question. It's an area where we are starting to see real slippage in our ability to maintain a significant level of domination. And that will be very challenging in the 10 years scenario that we were just talking about others. How about someone over here? Yeah, Tom, how are you? Excellent. I'm glad to hear that. Good. Thank you. Thank you for your tuition dollars. Okay, yeah, I have I have written over the last year strongly advocating strengthening the Ukrainian Armed Forces. I'm in complete agreement with that and strongly on record for doing so. And I've criticized the administration for not doing so. In terms of Ukraine, we should do four things. Number one is we should continue globally to condemn the actions of Russia that has to happen. Number two is we need to reassure the NATO partners, the Baltics, Poland, Romania are deeply concerned as they watch this. Number three, your point, we should strengthen the Ukrainian military. And number four, and this is on the other side of the ledger, we cannot afford to stumble backward into a Cold War. The agenda we have with Russia is larger than simply Ukraine. So the trick is, while opposing Russia's actions in Ukraine in Georgia and Moldova and Syria, we have to find other places we can have open communication and have zones of cooperation, like the Arctic, like counter narcotics, like counter terrorism, like counter piracy, there are areas we can cooperate. In the example you raise, I'm in complete agreement, we should strengthen the Ukrainian military. Sometimes people say, when I raise that, they say, Well, that would be really provocative and destabilizing. And my response to that is compared to invading a country and annexing Crimea A and B, I think it's actually, it would stabilize the situation because it would create deterrence in that strategic terrain in between Vladimir Putin's ears. Others. Yes, sir. Please. Yes. Yeah, I do. As always, there are winners and losers in the energy world. For nations like Russia, whose economy is not quite a one trick pony, but let's say 60% of Russian revenues are tied in one way or another to oil and gas, clearly a big challenge for Venezuela, a country that is in decline anyway, due to bad governance, a huge challenge for Iran, a challenge. There are some winners nations. In fact, Europe generally is a winner, because they tend to import a great deal of oil and gas. There are some nations, of course, like Norway and Spain that have some exports. The United States, a winner because it creates less dependence for us. Even even as price drops, it's still a winning scenario for the United States. So winners and losers, the real key to watch is the collapse of the ruble alongside the collapsing oil price, I think has the best possibility, along with arming the Ukrainians of creating deterrence to Putin. So in addition to loving it when I pay less at the pump, I think there are geopolitical positives for us as well. Others. How about someone over here, sir? Hey, please use microphone. Wow, it's the voice of God. Hi, Chip. Admiral, you, you cited the deplorable condition that only 8% of the two and a half million DoD folks in the world speak a language. DoD. The US Navy rolled out the cooperative strategy for maritime seapower in 2007, which would seem to imply that we would do something more about learning languages to be more cooperative. My three related questions are, one, who besides you cares about this that's in authority, since the emphasis in the school system seems to be on more science, technology, engineering and math, not on languages. Two, what are we doing about it? I'm not aware of any incentives of pay, advancement, assignment for language skills. And three, what are the prospects of a cyber changing this other than just wringing our hands? There's actually more good news than you would expect here, Chip. First, there are fairly new basket of incentives for and they're not huge amounts, but for learning a second language and particularly when you're in a billet that requires the use of the second language, the numbers of those billets have been expanded. The OpNav staff has appointed Captain Lee Johnson, USN retired SCS is in charge of this. There's a small cadre of people who continue to press it. You're correct to say that STEM gets a lot of emphasis and it should for a lot of obvious reasons. But I like to think the human mind can both comprehend calculus and Spanish. It just is not that hard. And so I'd say there's a little more than hand wringing but not a huge amount. And I will continue to carry this message and we'll see how the leadership unfolds over time with it. I'm confident that as the United States continues to be multicultural and multi linguistic, there'll be more connectivity in this regard. At the moment, I'd give us kind of a C minus in this area, but stay tuned. Thanks. Yes, Admiral. Admiral. Buenas noches. Buenas noches. Cómo está usted? During the time that it was outcome, I was witnesses of how you were building bridges through the Americas. One of the many actions that you were working was the changing of the organization of South Com. How did you came up with the idea? Why? And how do you think it's going to be the future of that idea? Gracias por su pregunta. What Admiral Barrera is talking about is that from 2006 to 2009 at US Southern Command, I got rid of the traditional J1, J2, J3, J4, Napoleonic or Prussian staff code, whichever group you'd like to give credit to. And I put in place instead a system that was I thought optimized for the missions that South Com does. South Com blissfully is not in the market to invade countries, does not have to worry about moving huge standing formations. Fundamentally is not in all probability going to conduct significant combat operations in the Americas. What does South Com do? It does disaster relief, humanitarian operations. It does a great deal of counter narcotics work. It does intelligence information. It is the smallest of the geographic combatant commands. And I thought it would be useful and functional to have an organization that focused on those kind of missions, as opposed to the traditional war fighting ones. I think it was fairly effective during the period of time I was there. My successor chose to revert back to a traditional structure. And people said to me, Well, gosh, isn't that outrageous that he changed it back? And I said, Well, no more outrageous than me coming in and changing it, you know, it's a staff is designed to support the commander and the commander's views. And so I was very content with that structure. When I went to US European Command, I chose to remain with the traditional structure because you come has more of a combat set of potential roles. Africa calm has continued to use a hybrid system, I would say, which focuses on international interagency, private public cooperation, strategic communication, soft power, smart power. I think that's appropriate for Africa calm. I think a better model for South Com would in fact be that. But we'll see what the next commander thinks is he or she goes into command. Thank you. I think we have time for one more question. Yes, sir. Major Eric Cahill, United States Marine Corps. Sir, you kind of alluded to the problem of drugs. And in reference to our prohibitive policy, and are going on 50 plus year war on drugs. How do you see the future of drug policy in reference to one, an opportunity to provide better security and number two, being more congruent with our ideals of liberty, people making choices for themselves. Yeah, absolutely. As I said earlier, I would suggest that we sort of take the moral issue for a moment and just park that. And what I worry about with narcotics is not whether or not people choose to use narcotics. As a personal matter, I'm relatively unconcerned about choices people make in that particular world. What I do worry about is the margin. It's the profit. It's the money that comes out of it, which is uncontrolled and creates corruption, creates these drug trafficking routes over which other substances, weapons, cash, weapons of mass destruction can move. And above all, it undermines fragile democracies, notably in Central America at the moment. So what should we do about it? I would say we ought to approach counter narcotic work in kind of three dimensions. And first of all, I hate the term war on drugs. It's a completely failed image. And we're not in a we're not in a war on drugs. Most of the people using drugs are victims themselves. There are three components to dealing with the challenges of narcotics. It's at the source, which is creating alternative lives for people who are growing coca or growing poppy, creating crop substitution, eradication is controversial. I think it has a role to play. But I'm much more tuned with crop substitution. So approaching the supply piece of it in that sense. And I think this is where soft power can be very, very effective. On the demand side, it's it's about treating people who are using drugs and either changing the marketplace by reducing demand, treating those who are involved in it or legalizing it, which I think is a conversation worth having, frankly. And certainly, we're about to see marijuana broadly legalized in the United States. We ought to see what happens with that. And then take a look frankly at cocaine. And then what's in the middle between supply and demand? That's transit. That's where the military tends to be involved. That's where these slipstreams occur that really worry me. And there we ought to be working very hard to find these routes, reverse engineer them and shut them down. Not so much because of the cocaine that moves on them. But because of what else could move on these routes, and also because of the margin, the profit that they generate. So those are the three things you should be doing. And our failure has been, we tend to focus too much on the transit zone and not enough, my view on the supply side or the demand side. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure being with everybody tonight. Thanks a lot. Thank you.