 Well, good afternoon. So just so I understand demographics a little bit, although I was at your convocation. So senior course, folks, just by a show of hands. This is kind of to wake you up to, OK? And then moving your arms might help a little bit. And the junior course, the intermediate course, OK. Maybe an even split, perhaps. And then I know there are some, so the international students, raise your hands. If you're international students, OK. Well, that's good for the most part. You've spread yourselves out. That's good, not too much tribal activity yet. I'm sure that will take a little bit of time before that. And then I know there's also faculty and staff here, if you could raise your hands in case you need to move your arms, too. OK, all right, great. Thank you. Thanks very much. And thanks very much for the introduction. Emeril Howe, thank you for sponsoring this at the very start of the academic year. What I'm going to do is I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking to you also about the profession and your role in the profession. And largely what I'm going to talk about, we've learned about Western behavior. And I'll try to point that out when we know research has pointed us in a particular direction. I'll try to point that out. So some of you who aren't coming from Western cultures can make some sense of this. But I want to give you the historical context because a lot of what we're seeing today is not new. And so from that, I'm going to kind of bounce back to the time. The last time I am an odd example of how one gets professional military education, not by my design but by the subject of the detailing environment, I earned my PME credit from the Brookings Institution as a legislative fellow. So really, the last time I was in a military academic environment was in the Naval Academy a few decades ago. So I know that the vision up here, if I were to put a slide up here and kind of picture of me, I would put a Brontosaurus or a Tyrannosaurus rex up there. And so I get that. But when I was at the Naval Academy, I had a very profound experience and not for the reason that any of you would come to mind immediately. So I graduated in the early 80s. I started the Naval Academy in the late 70s. And I was very, very fortunate that our Vietnam prisoners of war were coming back. And many of them, presumably, were either at the Pentagon and always looking for excuses to get out of the Pentagon. Or maybe they were up at Bethesda taking advantage of the treatment that was there. But we had a significant population of former prisoners of war who would talk to us. They would talk to us at social gatherings. Sometimes they talked to us in the academic environment. But we were fortunate enough to have Admiral Stockdale, a former president of the Naval War College, talk to us on a couple of occasions. And many, many others would talk to us. So we had the added benefit of the folks that were there about the time I was of being surrounded. As a matter of fact, one of our battalion officers was a former POW. So when they talked to us about the code of conduct and when they talked to us about ethics, it was not about compliance. And I will kind of end with an Admiral Stockdale story that I hope will be impactful. They had a significant impact on the entire brigade, not just by what they talked about, but by their presence. They caused us to talk about the profession without beating us over the head about it. They shared our experience. And one of the things that we've found in behavior is that one of the best ways, there's a really important reason for education and training and understanding your role inside the profession, but listening to people who you see as a moral hero and listening to bosses tell stories about what they've done and what they've experienced is one of the most impactful ways to leave an impression on people that actually helps people modify their behavior in a positive way. So I encourage you in this 10 months that you have in front of you, really get to know the staff and faculty. They have a wealth of experience that you can learn from. And some of it will actually be in the classroom. So there are some who say that today's generation have lost the moral code that those former POWs talked to us about, that somehow the proliferation of information has had some inversely proportional effect on the psyche, making today's generation, whichever one that is, and there's probably mine and yours and they're probably different, but there is a tendency for commentary to say that today's generation is bereft of morality. So there are historical precedents for some of these discussions, just so you understand, this might not be the first time that somebody said that. In the 1600s, okay, I'm not gonna go year by year from the 1600s, so stay awake, bear with me. But writing about the laws in early 1600s, the common thought in the day, that dancing was gonna have some horrible effect on society. While that was happening culturally, you had Alexis de Tocqueville talk about democracy in America. His book, Democracy America, noted that the overriding concern of these legislators is the preservation of moral order and good practices in their society. Thus they proceed continually to penetrate to the heart of man's conscience. So at the same time, de Tocqueville reminds us of our own intolerance, right? So we have one hand, we have legislators very concerned about the heart of man's conscience. While at the same time, what are we doing? We are taking a woman who's accused of uttering immodest words or allowing herself to be kissed, was whipped and then told to marry her quarter. 300 years after that, okay so I'm gonna skip to three centuries, women earned the right to vote in this country. So you can see that there's a little bit of historical context for maybe the end of society is not right on the brink. So many at the time thought that the amendment to give women the right to vote would lead to problems, I'm sorry, that actually happened, how many years ago today actually? There was then the amendment that said we could drink alcohol. And we were also thought back that in the 1920s that drinking alcohol was gonna be a great cause of mis-spent youth. Well those men and women would go on to be called by Tom Broca, a journalist and news broadcaster, wrote a book called The Greatest Generation. Those same people, we thought we were on the brink of society falling apart because they were drinking. Anyway, in the 1950s it was rock and roll. What is it today, right? Is it social media? We've heard everything in this country from failing school systems, parents who work too much, parents who helicopter too much. I doubt using history as our teacher, I doubt that we're failing. So last month I had the really rare opportunity, General Odierno for the Army students in the class. Raise your hand again, this is another test. Okay, General Odierno invited me to the Army Profession Conference up at West Point a couple weeks ago. General Odierno brought in his two, three and four star commanding generals along with their sergeant majors. But it was very interesting, Dr. Cook just talked to you about the Blackhearts book. We got to meet the private first class who's now a civilian and the staff sergeant who actually reported that activity to the chain of command. And they were eloquent. They were unbelievably articulate. So they were part of the 101st Airborne, 500 and Second Infantry Brigade, members of the platoon. Again, that platoon was responsible for raping an Iraqi girl, killing her and her family to cover it up. So the young private first class and that cape.army.mil website that Dr. Cook mentioned, his testimonial is on there and I'm just gonna give you a snippet of it. But this young private first class was a product of working parents. He was a product of the internet. He joined the army under some circumstances. He, before he deployed to Iraq, he set himself some left and right boundaries on what actions he was willing to take. When the behaviors of the members of his unit was outside those boundaries, he went to a staff sergeant who was a friend of his in the platoon that was not his zone and they were able to report it outside the unit. Again, as Dr. Cook said, Jim Frederick and Jim Frederick's the author and Blackhearts is the name of the book. I would commend it to your reading list. But these two, one former soldier, one current soldier, talked to the two, three and four stars and don't get me wrong, they were a little bit nervous, okay? Cause they were talking to the army leadership and myself and a Brit, right? So there's a room of 200, four, three and two stars, myself and a Brit. They discussed their reactions when they get to talk about this, about when they talked about the climate that existed that allowed a unit to participate as a group. You know, and as Martin said, it wasn't just, they didn't just wake up one day and act this way, there was a progression of activity that got them there. But when they talk about the experience, so this private first class took an amazingly morally courageous act to turn those folks in because him reporting, turning in his platoon was, took an act of moral courage that would be, any of the rest of us would be hard to pass that test. But he did. And when he talks about it, it's very interesting when we talk about behavior and what's acceptable socially and what's acceptable in our group, it's very interesting, he still has people who call him a traitor. Luckily, none of the two, three or four stars did. Because I asked afterwards, I said, what kind of feedback did you get? And it was overwhelmingly positive. So that's a good thing. But this PFC, okay, a product of today. So I think, and I'm sure you all see this, that there is great reason to say that we're not failing. As a matter of fact, the staff sergeant who's still wearing the Army uniform, he stood on the stage and said to all the two, three and four stars, he said, hey, the Army's perfect. He said, it's us humans that are flawed. And his point was, and he, I mean, he said it, General Odierno and the Secretary of the Army sitting there in the front row. He said, we're flawed. And he said, you, me, all of us, we're flawed. He's right. But the reality is that in each generation, men and women develop along a spectrum of morality. Some behavior is innate as psychologists and neuroscientists are teaching us. Some behavior is, in fact, environmental adaptation. Some of its choice, some of its instinct and a better understanding of these forces can help us prepare for an uncertain future. So I wanna talk to you today for the next couple of minutes of how we recognize and manage our flaws. I know you don't have to tell anybody at home, especially your kids that you have flaws, but you do. But what we expect from the profession to help us and what we as professionals owe our institution. So the profession, as Martin talked about before me, isn't something, if you're wearing a Navy uniform today and I won't speak for the foreign students, but in the Navy of the uniform of my country, we didn't grow up listening to people talking about the profession. In the Army, General Dempsey wrote a paper in 1988 that talked about duty and its responsibility to the profession. You can Google it and find it, it's fantastic. But the Army, maybe not a lot for the last 12 years because they have had to retract some of their students from their participation in forms like this, but the Army's been talking about the profession for quite some time. When I was appointed to this job nearly five months ago and I first started reading about the papers that General Dempsey had written back when he was trade-off commander in 2008, 2010, it took a little bit of a learning curve for me to make some sense of this language of the profession of arms. And while I'm certain that I was educated on Huntington while I was at the Naval Academy, it was not a book that I kept on my bookshelf. But when I did do some reading to catch up on it and there are many, many who have followed in the path of Huntington, but adapted Huntington who wrote over 50, 55, 57 years ago they've adapted Huntington for today, right? So Huntington, if any of you have read, how many, okay, so how many, when I say Huntington, Samuel Huntington, how many have heard that name before? Okay, okay. So Huntington's definition of the profession of arms was very exclusive. As an example, Admiral Howe would be a member of that profession of arms. I would not by virtue of what I did in my aviation specialty. I did not manage violence. Admiral Howe has done that. But when I started reading about the profession of arms in the Navy, we put it into the basket or the bucket of leadership, good old-fashioned leadership. And when I say old-fashioned, I really mean timeless, all right? And you'll have many of these experiences in the 10 months to come. And certainly you've probably heard about some of these timeless leadership lessons in the past. It's interesting, L.P. Hartley, a novelist, describes the phenomenon of people talking about that which they grew up with as the past is a foreign country, they do things differently here. It doesn't have to be that way. Much like the generational discussion I began with, each generation deals with ethical challenges of their time, I dealt with them, you too will deal with them, probably in a little bit different fashion. The challenges are different in the details, but again, for a little bit of historical context, Aristotle labeled the same sensation he talked about the mind, the heart, and the stomach. And I know probably all of you have heard of Aristotle, so no need to raise your hands this time. We talk about it today, we talk about desire and reason, we talk about intuition versus cognition. So you kind of get some examples. So if the challenges are similar, the people haven't changed all that much, what has changed? Well, the profession has changed, it's adapted. As Dr. Cook mentioned, a profession has to adapt for it to really call itself a profession. But the rate of change I would offer to you has gotten faster and faster. Again, with the profession, five months ago, had you said that term to me, I would have thought about how being a professional aviator had changed. New aircraft, increasing automation, different missions, more complex missions, more missions, more adaptability. But that's only a small part. Certainly, we'd like naval aviation to be a big part of the future, but what I'm talking about is Huntington's profession of arms and those who followed Huntington. That is, the higher calling that each of us has responded to, whose distinguishing feature in the US military is the oath we take. It's this calling that Dr. Cook and others point out has elevated the military to a social trust profession. Because we all, in the US military, each and every one of us, expertly apply ethical knowledge on behalf of our fellow citizens, and let me turn that around, we actually ethically apply expert knowledge on behalf of our fellow citizens. It is that which Dr. Cook expounded on, the characteristics of a social trust profession, because it is a critical component of ethics. The American people expect, and they demand, as Admiral Howe mentioned in his opening comments, that we ethically apply expert knowledge. The American people want to be able to trust us, and as Admiral Howe talked about, they also expect a degree of transparency so that they can trust us in a little bit of the old Cold War trust but verify mentality. And the reality is that the American people don't want to sit here and day after day read reports about the military, but when something doesn't look right, they want to be able to get online, they want to be able to talk to us about what we do, and it's definitely not the way we're wired, that is to be transparent. At the Pentagon, I think elsewhere too, but certainly in the Pentagon, when people think about ethics, they really think about what I would call the floor, which is compliance. We have, that is the basic, basic part of ethics is compliance, and you start with compliance, but you definitely move up as you improve as a professional. I don't, and I don't think the American people think that compliance is all they expect from us. They think of it again as one of the slides that Dr. Cook put up. They think about the law of armed conflict, they think about the code of conduct, thoughts that speak to our values. A former, as I said earlier, Admiral Stockdale, a former president of the Naval War College, he wrote that we realize that laws must delineate a floor in our behavior, a minimum acceptable level of ethical standards, and that moral standards should be set on a higher plane. In the Naval Service, we have no place for amoral gnomes lost in narrow orbits. This is still Admiral Stockdale. We need to keep our gaze fixed on the high-minded principle standing above the law, duty, honor, country. So that's what Admiral Stockdale wrote a few decades ago when he was president here. Part of the reason you're here in Newport this year is to broaden your thinking. And the wonderful part about the very diverse student body here is that as everybody said today, General Rodriguez, Admiral Howe, you will gain by diversity of thought. You'll be exposed to differing views, no matter your views on the strategic effects of sea power, there is a commonality of ethics in what is right and what is wrong. As a profession, we need to spend more time talking about what right looks like over emphasizing what you should not be doing. The wrongs that have been committed, we frequently find ourselves talking a lot about those. Instead of, and as Martin pointed out, acting on the standard military fixes, we need to have conversations amongst ourselves about what right looks like. By highlighting what right looks like, the profession continues to evolve. Let me give you a couple of concrete examples. George Patton. I don't think there's probably nobody in the room who hasn't heard of General Patton. Is that true? If you've not heard of General Patton, don't go to me. I'm not a historian. Talk to one of your folks in an army uniform. Brilliant commander, World War II, all right? But even in World War II, he harbored what today would be a toxic environment. What was acceptable then is simply not acceptable now. Was Patton any more successful than George Marshall, another American military general, or Martin Dempsey? I would say no. An evolving profession is one that survives and thrives by seeing change as an opportunity to broaden your thinking and your experience. There is a bit of a moral imperative for us to evolve. Because we serve society, as Dr. Cook pointed out, and it's the nation's values and rights that we defend, not our own reputations. That means that as society places new emphasis on what they value, which is its constitutional right to do so, we defend those new values. We do so within the bounds of good order and discipline, but that cannot be as used as an excuse not to change. Rather, good order and discipline must be used as an opportunity to shape change. I've seen this evolution in my time in the Navy. It's funny, my speech writer wrote my short time in the Navy. I don't know about you, but three decades maybe compared to 300 years is a short time, but in my time in the Navy, drunk driving. When I came in the Navy, we were still in a place, societally and in the military, where drunk driving was something that you just didn't talk about if somebody received a DUI and they didn't hurt anybody. There was an ability to just walk away from it. It wasn't documented. There wasn't a requirement to document. And as society came along, so did the military. And today, as a flag officer or general officer, for all the right reasons, if I committed a DUI, even if there is no visible harm done, I have done that. I have negatively impacted the reputation of the Navy, the reputation of the military. And today, it would be also a negative reflection on the Secretary of Defense. So regardless, a lawyer would go into court and say she didn't harm anybody. I would tell you, not that I would. Not that I would drink and drive, because I don't. But I would go into court and I would accept the crime, accept the guilt for the punishment that I was owed. That was not where we were 30 years ago. So it is an example, it is an example of how society and the military changed over time for the good. And I will tell you that lots of people at the time, the conversation was, well, why do we have to let him or her go? They have a brilliant future ahead of them and they have already sacrificed a lot. And I suspect you have heard that conversation yourself in your time in uniform. The rate of change. The rate of change is greater today than it's been in our lifetimes. And it offered that many of the issues we've seen in each of the service has as much to do with failure to adapt to change as it does to 13 years of war. In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis by Dr. Jonathan Haidt, and that's Haidt with A-H-A-I-D-T, he uses the metaphor of an elephant and a rider. And it's really instructional to talk about the elephant and the rider because he's referring to the two parts of the brain that economists kind of figured out 10 or 15 years ago. All right, so I'm in the Navy. We are a very platform-centric organization. The Air Force is pretty close to us in that respect. The Army and the Marine Corps are very different. You are much more people-centric in how you think about things. When you see pictures of the Navy, you usually see pictures of ships. Probably a special warfare community better than the rest of the Navy about that, but you see pictures of ships and aircraft and submarines. When I walk down the hall of the Pentagon and the Marine Corps Corridor, I see the largest globe and anchor that's probably on the face of the Earth and two Marines. All right, so in our very systems, engineering approach to many problems, when somebody tells us there's two parts of the brain, there's the intuitive or emotional side of the brain frequently attributed very strongly in women, and the logical, rational part of the brain largely considered to be dominant in men. So when we talk about the elephant in the rider, guesses as to which the, is the logical side of the brain, is that the rider or the elephant? Okay, rider small, about my size, elephant many times larger. Any guesses? The logical, rational part of the brain is absolutely the rider. The intuitive or emotional side of the brain, scientists know, first of all, is the more dominant. It's faster. The intuitive side of your brain works three to 10 times faster than the logical side of the brain. So what Dr. Heit says is that our intuitive mind like the elephant and rational mind like the rider, most of the time, most of the time the elephant adapts to the changing path. But for a few, the grass that defines the path isn't high enough, so we try to train the rider, right? And this is kind of the military fixes that Dr. Cook talked about, right? We fire people, we do train, train, train. When we're training, are we training the intuitive part of the brain or the logical part of the brain? Exactly, exactly. Thank you for those of you who are still awake. So we try to train the rider, but so imagine the rider pulling on the ears of the elephant in a crisis, the elephant's freaking out, right? So no, probably the rider's not gonna be successful changing the direction of the elephant. So instead, we have to have the conversation to help grow that path for the elephant so the elephant knows the right path to follow. We have to show you what right looks like. You have to have the conversation about what right looks like, and you have to do that with each other in this environment where there's not the pressure of do I make the right operational decision today or not. The notion of the path we lay out comports with data that my staff has pulled out. In 1970, the Army conducted a study that really the results would not be much different today. Back in the 70s, the Army was concerned about the diminution of ethical conduct in Vietnam. Their conclusions were to increase the study of ethical conduct to discuss ethical challenges more openly and force the standards of ethical conduct. The approach worked and it still works for a period. But what we're trying to do is institutionalize ethical conduct to place moral competence on the same plane as tactical or technical competence to make it stick. And I think Jonathan Haidt has it right when he says, we need the guidance of both ancient wisdom and modern science to get the balance right. So that's what we're focusing on our efforts at the Secretary of Defense's level and there's some fascinating work being done by economists, psychologists, neuroscientists. I was an oceanography major, I was none of these majors. But they understand more than we did 15 years ago about how we process information which drives how we act. Daniel Kahneman, another author I would commend to you, he wrote a book, Thinking Fast and Slow. And Daniel Kahneman, by the way, wrote the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002. And his book about thinking fast and slow talks about the two parts of the brain and his buddy Dr. Haidt started the elephant in the rider conversation. But Dr. Kahneman was one of the first to describe the process in terms that all of us, okay, not the neuroscientists, that all of us could understand. So science has confirmed what we've figured out, that we're imperfect professionals dealing with ethical challenges in a society that is readjusting norms at an ever-increasing rate. Where does that leave us? I think the environment I just described provides a view towards a solution. And I use this term imprecisely because we're not gonna solve these issues all at once. We're gonna equip leaders with knowledge about themselves, how they make decisions and about how others make decisions. Make no mistake, economists are using what they've learned about how we make decisions to influence how we spend our disposable income. I think that we can use this type of information to help us make better decisions on a routine basis. We'll also increase transparency of the organization just by virtue of the fact of how we share information today. Notwithstanding security, I was brought up in the nuclear command and control world. I get upset, this is different. This is about talking about how we make decisions. So we wanna make it more uncomfortable for those who live outside our norms, who don't live up to our values. We wanna be transparent so that those people kind of rise outside our norms and then we'll learn about leadership across the services for everybody's benefit just by having the conversation. So again, Admiral Stockdale, he wrote the Ford when he was president, he wrote the Ford of each Naval War College review. Many of those letters in the Ford's were turned into the book The Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot. Okay, aviators of all services in all countries, aviators, raise your hand. Okay, how many of you would describe yourself? Okay, so if you're not fighter pilots, philosophical pilots, how many of you would describe yourselves that way? Yeah, I didn't raise a couple of you. Okay, a couple of you who are not wearing this uniform anymore are wearing different uniforms, right? And so perhaps if you called yourself philosophical pilots while you were wearing the uniform of aviators, I commend you. I did not, I would not call myself a philosophical fighter pilot. Admiral Howe, no pressure, okay? But one excerpt in particular that I wanna close with to give you to take away. Admiral Stockdale wrote, to lead, leaders will face the need to be moralists. Not as those who sententiously exhort men to be good, but those who elucidate what good is. A moralist can make conscious what lies unconscious among his followers, lifting them out of their everyday selves into their better selves. Admiral Stockdale spent a year at Stanford in guided reflection before, before he was captured as a prisoner of war. His guided reflection was in philosophy and he writes in one of his books, A Vietnam Experience. He said, yeah, the Navy just sent me to Stanford that didn't really tell me what to do. So being the classic, the lover of classics that he was, Admiral Stockdale decided to study philosophy. But he sought out and found a mentor who met with him every week and kind of gave him reading assignments, okay? Sound familiar? It was this year in particular the philosophy of Epictetus that he credits with helping him endure his time as a prisoner of war. The profession has provided you this year to reflect on your past and on what I hope is a very bright future. The profession has provided a staff that is eminently qualified to take you on this journey. As professionals, you owe the profession the commitment to your studies to ask hard questions of this staff, which we'll start here in a little bit, and of yourself. You owe it to the profession to transcend your everyday selves into your better selves. And at this point, I'll now turn the microphone over to Dr. Linda Johnson, who's gonna talk to you about your next year as well. Thanks. Thank you.