 Good afternoon everybody. My name is Dr. Tom Gibbons. I work for our Associate Provost Jay Hickey and on behalf of our current Stockdale chair Dr. Pauline Shanks-Carran who's listening. I'd like to welcome you to the first in a series of leadership and ethics lose that we're doing Before we start those special thanks to Laura Cavallaro from the electives office who's making this loop possible We really appreciate all your support Laura. So thank you very much It's my honor to welcome Dr. George Lucas George is going to talk about his new book Ethics and military strategy in the 21st century moving beyond Clausewitz George is a good friend of mine. We talked together for a year when he was at the Naval War College But a little bit about George's background. He's a professor emeritus at both the Naval Academy and the Naval postgraduate school He's also served as the James Stockdale Chair of Ethics while working at the Naval War College and teaching foundations of moral obligation with me for a year a few years ago George has worked at several civilian institutions in addition to the Naval Academy and the Naval postgraduate school He's written several books And again, this is the first in a series of lose that we're doing related to leadership and ethics In a minute, I'll turn it over to George But if anybody has questions at all during George's presentation Feel free to use the chat function and record those and and ask the questions at the end without further ado I'll turn it over to my friend George Lucas Thank you, Tom and thank you all for joining us today and for allowing me to be with you. I usually follow on an introduction like that by Remarking as my late mother used to say this is my son who can't hold a steady job Um But that was my one claim to fame is the one Tom mentioned I guess if it is a claim at all is that I had the privilege of I call it hitting for the cycle teaching as a senior and tenured faculty member at well all three Navy senior educational institutions the Naval Academy the postgraduate school and the War College and of the two of those the first two who have tenure earning tenure and also the honor that's rather odd being pointed emeritus professor by the administration after retiring at both places, so I guess the relevant thing though is retired. So he's out of the classroom and out of the way and We can move on I myself have been moving on a retirement to try and gather thoughts together About the kinds of things all of us Professor Karen Dr. Gibbons Dr. Demi So many of us have been doing over the years teaching ethics and leadership in a military context at military institutions to Army officers and listed to To Navy personnel to Marines to coasties Coast Guard Personnel and that's been a great honor Over my career to be involved in doing that for something like 25 years before I retired and this book that Tom mentioned ethics and military strategy in 21st century as the old dude who's Gradually turning senile and going out the door. It was my attempt to Gather together some of the changes that have occurred over certainly over my career And really in the last just a couple of decades in the way Military personnel are educated the way they're prepared to fight wars fight the nation's wars What those wars are about how they're conducted and so forth and so on So that we can do an effective job in military and professional education including ethics education and leadership education The subtitle of this book is what I want to start with Because it's deliberately provocative moving beyond Klaus witz well, or The short nickname is just beyond Klaus witz the original title I wanted to give the book and of course that suggests that here we go another guy's coming to write an obituary for the great carlbone Klaus witz the classical the formulator classical war doctrine Modern war doctrine That's held sway for almost two centuries now and Those obituaries come and go from time to time and the people who write them come and go and Klaus witz remains So it's a formidable task and I'll say right off the bat that that's not what I want to do Is I'd either want to praise Klaus witz nor bury him instead? I would like to do something different which is to absorb him or assimilate him into this new context of war fighting and Military education that we work with now Before I do that it's worth saying a word or two about The way in which Klaus witz himself transformed The thinking at the time in the early 19th century about war he himself as you all will probably know since he's such a Famous symbol to military personnel particularly army and Marine Corps land-based Garrison forces, but To to everybody you mean this is anybody who wears a uniform and serves their country The defense of their country knows something certainly has heard the name and knows some of the famous principles of Klaus witz and As I say, it's very hard to think about moving beyond those because Klaus witz himself brought his experience as As an infantry officer in the earth infantry infantry men in the Prussian army fighting in the Napoleonic Wars and then Serving As the head of the Prussian military Academy My job he held until his death and the postures publication of this book on war So you all know about that story and know that he was an experienced Person on the battlefield as well as a tactician and a strategist and teaching those So influential he had his institution and in the process developing What we now recognize is the first sort of modern Theoretical foundation for understanding the nature of warfare Prior to Klaus witz it was You know war is the sport of kings or war is a scourge theologically speaking on Fallen and sinful human beings condemned to constantly live in quarrels and fighting and the misery that causes and suffering and destruction of death Or it's all about national honor We can't let those guys on the other side our adversaries our enemies Dominate us or beat us or defeat us So there are all kinds of Unsystematic theories, but being a good German Klaus witz comes along and like German scientist or German philosopher sits down and thinks the whole thing through from the foundations and Establishes the idea that warfare is none of those things exclusively which has been associated It's not a matter of manliness and honor or the sport of kings or any of those other things so much as it's a political act It has political causes. It serves political purposes And the main thing is it represents a situation where whatever the political goals and aspirations of a country and its leadership may have Been if they have failed to attain those to a satisfactory degree They have to resort to the use of deadly force to compel their adversaries to their point of view and So it's the famous politics the continuation of politics by other means or by non political means So you might say Klaus witz did for warfare What Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton did for classical dynamics and physics put it all unified it all Systematized it all brought it together in a grand synthetic synoptic vision with a firm Scientific analytical foundation that could then be studied and taught and practiced in the battlefield as physics was then Systematically gathered all of its dimensions astronomy and mechanics and what have you all in a single unified Science under Newton under Newton's three laws and In fact Klaus witz himself isn't just the equivalent or analog of Newton and the element of warfare He is himself steeped in Newtonianism and those of you who've made the closer study of Klaus witz and they Of course of your military education will know that he makes extensive use of Newtonian Concepts physical concepts and talking about war Their metaphors they're not precise, but they're very much more analytically exact than anything that they replace so we talk about armies has forces or as vectors exerting forces on The political equivalent of centers of gravity. They may be national capitals or they may be national policies Or they may be boundaries or national boundaries or whatever that you're trying to change move reconfigure in some sense and you use force to move those things literally almost physically around until the arrangement suits the more powerful of the militaries involved and So we have the metaphors that that we associate with Klaus witz not just the famous politics by non-political means but Forces vectors political centers of gravity the fog of war all these kinds of concepts that we associate more or less symbolically with clothes vets and so how In what sense would we move beyond those in what sense would Those need to be replaced in the contemporary era if at all and so my proposal is not that we abandon Klaus witz or that we ignore or refute repudiate but instead we absorb and assimilate Klaus witz in the same way we had to do with Newton in the aftermath of relativity and quantum mechanics in the 20th century so with the advent of hybrid warfare war in the gray zone Professional militaries about which Klaus witz himself wrote a great deal that ours had been historically a volunteer and or conscripted army And now we think about all of these new forms of warfare one of the chapters in my book Is entitled this is not your father's war after that famous old Oldsmobile commercial, you know the car commercial that said this is not your father's old car This is a sporty new type thing. Well, unfortunately warfare is definitely different and sportier in certain ways and elusive and Problematic in many respects and we might wonder I think would be the right way to put this To what extent are those classical concepts of Klaus witzian war conventional war? Carry over into this new frame of reference just like we asked how much of Newton carries over into Relativity and quantum mechanics the answer is a great deal There are principles that don't change at all Newton's second law and the principle of war as Politics by other means for example probably carry right over unchanged. They're what the physicists would call Covariant principles or principles that are not changed or abandoned under a transformation of frame of reference But there are other things that do change maybe they don't go away, but they change their relationship to each other in physics you remember it's time and distance and Continuity and all those kinds of things get a real shaking down when we move into quantum mechanics or into Physics is very small or relativity the physics is very large and I'd say the same thing happens again metaphorically allegorically metaphorically. I'm sorry in in warfare when we carry our contemporary experiences of hybrid war and irregular warfare and terrorism counterterrorism and counterinsurgency and cyber warfare and Drone warfare and whatever it may robotics and artificial intelligence of all these kinds of things in the gray zone as the Pentagon likes to call it Including what I prefer to call soft war the war without or unarmed Conflict war without armed conflict like cyber war All of those kinds of things challenge our conventional notions of forces and vectors and centers of gravity And in particular then the thing I focus on as the title of my book suggests is a Thing that was on the outskirts the outside the edge the periphery of classical warfare namely ethics and morality Ends up at the center of everything in this new frame of reference Pause parenthetically to say that I just learned to my amazement and delight That the superintendent of the Naval Academy our new superintendent Admiral Sean Buck I Haven't met him myself yet. I just know of him and learned the other day that he had asked to leave At least part-time leave the administration building where the soup has always sat since Certainly since I got there and probably from time immemorial and what's now known as the Larson administrative building He wanted to move out of there not full-time But a couple of days a week and establish a satellite office across the yard in the Stockdale Center As a matter of fact, I was honored to find out he's going to be in my old office that I abandoned when I retired and He's got a nameplate the desk over there and Sir why I wrote to him just this weekend. I said sir. Why are you doing this? I mean, it's it's a great morale booster for the people at the center and my old colleagues and leadership ethics and law and so forth Who will feel there more at the center of things if you're there with them? But what led you to do it and he said well, this is the center It's at the edge. It's at the periphery. But what you do over here particularly in military ethics I believe says the new soup I believe this to be the center and the heart of the naval academy and the naval academy's mission indeed the navy and the naval services National international mission and I want to be a part of it. I want to learn more about it I want to develop my own capacity as as a leader and a thinker and In in the course of doing that. So I'm making the shift a couple of days a week Well, good for him and that's I think a post-claus wits. He ended shift. It's the sort of thing I'm suggesting that it's impossible to take this stuff too seriously Um, and that change of perspective is very different from the perspective of clouds wits himself Uh, who is a very well not only in newton, but also in philosophers like immanuel kahn in particular German philosophers like that are difficult to read just like claus witz is Uh, he he was very knowledgeable, but he did not believe That what we customarily think of as ethics, you know, nice people and benevolent feelings and kindness and gentleness and truth telling and what have you along on the battlefield Because it would just get in the way of doing your job It would discourage and dishearten you and perhaps lead to inefficiencies that would actually Paradoxically lead to a Enhancing or a magnification of the time spent in war and the suffering inflicted by war Ethics, he famously said has no place on the battlefield Well, now we say it's at the center of what we're doing on the battlefield And having said that we certainly, you know, then done some kind of a relativistic transformation of classical conventional warfare And its relationship to to conventional morality Into this new frame of reference that we're working on now And the rest of my book tries to flesh out exactly how that works both with cases and with discussions of concepts um and I'll mention a couple and That'll probably take me another. I don't know 10 or 15 minutes and then I'd love to Shut up and listen to what you think about all this because I will say and address what I think might be skepticism on the part of some and they hear this say well Yeah, we know how important you're never going to find anybody who doesn't say That ethics and military ethics are important, but the saying and the doing Are not necessarily the same thing And the paying of lip service Which most senior leadership is willing to do and if you ask they will say oh, yes, I can't imagine anything more important But they won't do what our superintendent is doing. They won't put it at the center of their own lives or their command philosophy Or commander's intent in quite the same way They'll think that we should talk to the chaplain about ethics or we should talk to the jag about ethics And those are good people to consult those are we have some of those people here at the lecture today But uh I keep telling them as often the chaplains and the lawyers do, you know, sir or ma'am The chaplain is not the moral advisor to the command and the Jag is the legal advisor not the moral advisor and can only give you advice on what you can can't do He or she and the law Status of forces agreements and so forth can merely state what is tolerable behavior They can't solve moral dilemmas that you'll encounter on the battlefield and you will encounter them all the time It's the commanding officer Who is the moral advisor to command? and if you believe that in this new framework That in turn calls for something that I discuss in the book, which is a very different philosophy of general professional military education Then here to form we don't just focus on strategy and tactics and equipment and technology and um Politics and international relations. We do do all those things, but we also have to understand moral reasoning Moral principles We need to know the limits of the law so that we can challenge the jag with the right questions Don't just tell me what I can get away with doing Just tell me how the law works and whether it addresses the concern I have that we're involved in something That maybe we shouldn't be doing Or that we'll regret having done And give me the wisdom to understand when that is So in the book there are stories of people who did that who had that wisdom Who had that courage and strength that goes beyond just simply Following the rules or being obedient, which is very important, but not the only thing By the by advertisement speaking of military obedience its limits and its problematic parameters uh, my colleague professor current is a Wonderful book on military obedience with the naval institute press That discusses these ambiguities you should look at that and uh The again, it's one of these concepts that we think is just tried and true and we know exactly how it works and yes, sir The commanding officer said it I believe that that settles it and so forth. Uh, it's not quite that simple Uh, and there are all kinds of ambiguities and nuances and dilemmas that one faces in the context of obedience in the military that are addressed in that wonderful book and Seek her out seek it out and uh examine this Okay, end of that sidebar and commercial and back to the point that there are all these people Whom both she and I talk about In different ways in our respective books who are exemplars of this kind of thing One famous one of course is uh much discussed and very controversial seal team 10 Starting with the fact that There's all these special ops people don't wasn't seal team 10 There was another team by another number, but we even have a statue in a memorial to the the four Uh members of that particular Seal team who were engaged in the famous tragic altercation in Afghanistan in 2005 Captured by the lone survivors book describing it. Uh, petty officer Marcus Luttrell Loan survivor in 2007 and the talk you'll find or rather the chapter you'll find about this in my book was actually began its life at right then in 2007 as an address to the cadet wing at the air force academy About what were the new challenges that they would be facing in leadership and ethics in this transformed environment? and um All these events. I mean, I think the like the weekend before I gave that talk initially the um Folks at Penn State at the football game had had paused to pay tribute to uh, lieutenant Michael Murphy Murphy Who had just been awarded or had had conferred upon him the Medal of Honor posthumously? um For his decision-making and leadership in that context and there was, you know skepticism and cynicism about that is that face-saving? Uh, did he really deserve it and my argument was yes, he did because he intuitively reasoned his way and let his his men including petty officer Luttrell So the right decision at a terrible terrible cause But I raised questions about what would have happened had they done otherwise And whether it would have turned out the way Murphy himself. Sorry the way petty officer Luttrell and and many in the special ops community think Uh, say well, how how would that work out for you? You know, which of you was going to kill the 14 year old shepherd who was only crime? Was herding sheep in his own near his own village in his own land How was that supposed to further your purposes and what was very clearly? poorly designed and deeply flawed mission to begin with uh And you know raises sort of deeper questions that we have to ask ourselves before we readily say, uh, yeah, yeah just kill them all Um, and also wonder what happens when you do things like that um What are the challenges there and Murphy? successfully negotiated those and I argue led his Little contingent in very difficult circumstances to do the right thing And try that they might they ended up paying a terrible price but it suggests what both the Importance and the difficulties are of maintaining a moral compass in such vexed circumstances Another one that I think is really characteristic of how things are just not just changed but convoluted in bizarre ways Is in that chapter I mentioned called this is not your father's war Which began its life as an address to nato on the 60th anniversary if you know to address to them That was privileged to be of And I kind of let them have it because those are diplomats, you know and folks with nice ties I hope this is a nice time Anyway, they were The people who do all the um, they were not the the fighters in nato. They were the bureaucrats in nato the diplomats and Brussels and so forth coming together to celebrate their 60th anniversary and I sort of said to them do you guys actually know what it is? Your organization does Do you know what we're asking them to do for example in afghanistan? and I told the story off the bat of A woman if you googled her name Name is paula loyde with one l o y d If you googled her name you would see a picture of very attractive young woman dressed in her camis next to an afghan villager you know around kandahar I think and You would then find out that she's deceased and The interesting thing is is not that she was a staff sergeant army Lost her life in afghanistan many many tragically have done that The thing was that she was not your conventional soldier She was a staff sergeant. She was wearing military combat fatigues But she was in fact an anthropologist a graduate of wellesley Had a master's degree And was there as part of what was then called and still called the human terrain team working with a brigade combat team and reconstruction team in that area Trying to dialogue with villagers and find out their needs and their practices and their customs and Avoid giving offense and to try to do things that needed doing and so forth And she her death came as a result of her service in that capacity She was not wearing her head was not covered and she was doused with gasoline by a local villager instead of playing Uh and died several months later We don't know why the villager did it but we do know the customs and This is a surprise because he didn't live to tell the tale or her friends and and fellow personnel Killed him as soon as they found out what had happened to her Which was itself a separate problem So the question is well, what in the heck is this person this social scientist if you will doing in brigade combat team in this rather difficult situation to begin with Such that it would bring about her death and the death of several others who were doing what she was doing more or less the same time And so you tell the story of the development of the human terrain system and this woman being recruited for her expertise in Uh central asian cultures and languages and trained for four months at fort leavenworth and then deployed in in a human terrain team to work with soldiers and marines deployed in afghanistan to help them with these Cultural problems they were having in a way. It was a brainchild of then deputy marine commandant Jim mattis Who said, you know, we need our soldiers our sailors our marines to understand the human terrain very much as they understand the geographical terrain in order to fight effectively and win this war and that system Was brilliantly set up by one of your fellow professors. I don't know if she's on the line with us this afternoon or not But uh professor munt gummering like fate who is there at the war college now and is I believe the athena Professor i'm not sure exactly the title that she holds That over in the you know strategic studies area of campus across from spruins hall and she was Really essentially if you look at the history of this program begun in the mid uh 2000s the odds She was the uh the founding director and organizer of this and chief proponent So if you want to find out see if you could find professor mcfate mitzi fate And talk to her about the human terrain teams and the effect they had on The conduct of the war uh in afghanistan But this woman lost her life doing this and is memorialized at at least at what was their training center in port leavenworth And I just you know, it's like what the heck You're you're going to get people like me um younger versions of course Stick them in a uniform give them four months of training and send them off to a combat zone Um, is this a good idea? Does it work? Professor mcfate would have you know much to say about that and has recently edited a book that deals with the sort of impact and significance of the human terrain system um But uh, this certainly is not anything that carl von claus of its would have envisioned or planned for Or would have talked because a lot of what the hts teams did is You know morally motivated if not morally focused On the well-being of the people Of the locals whom we're sent to serve and protect as part of the military mission And the success or failure of those moral components of the mission is in turn central to the success or failure of the military mission And its political goals as well. It's my point in this chapter and there are various other examples of this Holy unconventional kind of thing that's been going on all around us for the last few years Transforming the way we think about in fight war many of you listening uh here who are now Students at the naval war college If you had we're on the ground in afghanistan or iraq over the last any time over the last decade and many of you would Would have had that experience you probably ran into these folks And wondered i don't know what you thought of them good or bad or wondered who they were or what they were doing there Or that you found them helpful, but there you go. I think that Another thing is military contractors When I got to the naval academy In the 1990s we were deeply in the midst of fighting wars of humanitarian intervention in Somalia and Haiti And failing to do so in rwanda and so forth and those famous the wars of the 1990s were largely humanitarian interventions or the failure to intervene militarily and When the military personnel got to the war theaters they'd find that there were you know start more Contractors in the battlefield than there were military personnel And that some militaries from you know, especially from Underdeveloped countries were using their own militaries as contractors and leasing them out to others to help pay the salaries and the costs of Having and developing and equipping a military. So there's a very convoluted and crazy kind of situation and yet There was no preparation in our military education at the naval academy and later I learned there's none at mdu There was none. There was one course at the national defense university at the time um And none at the postgraduate school or at west point or anything about military contracting And yet it was one of the main features of war in the 1990s and certainly a huge feature during the first Gulf War And continues You know to this day to be a feature of warfare How can we be sending people in uniform working for the you know as public servants over into the Field of combat and have them not know who these people are how to interact with them Of course now they do. I mean this has become famous over the years, but at the time I started Working at the naval academy. There was nothing of this in the curriculum And so that turns to another topic I take up in in the book that if um If this transformation of warfare is occurring all these weird things and all these sort of moral features to political goals and to Military combat What are we doing To educate our men and women in uniform and prepare them for this and if the answer is well not a damn thing which it was in the 1990s and early 2000s hardly a damn thing for this Features conventional postmodern if you will features of warfare we're sending them out ill-prepared and that the preparation of men and women To fight these complicated wars Is as important a mission as their training to handle firearms to endure physical hardships to successfully pilot aircraft or to pilot drones unmanned Inhabited aerial vehicles, etc. We put out we give them all these other skills And capacities We need to give them the human terrain system business taught us. We need to give them capacities for Intercultural awareness and communication And we need to give them capacities for moral reasoning And we need to acquaint them for how those things are going to be applied In the field of conflict when they're deployed And they need to do it before they get there and not wait for them As often as pointed out of you know, if we if we make ethics part of the center of conflict and I have to stand there Wondering what the moral thing is to do. I'm going to get shot um, so you don't You don't wait till you get there any more than you wait to learn how to fire a rifle or operate a cannon or fly a plane until you're actually in the cockpit or or in On deployment, you don't wait till then you do it now. What are we doing answer? Not much and it isn't very good So that called for a whole new concept of military professional education including ethics education and leadership training that would equip people to be more Able to reason in the battlefield like lieutenant murphy did but not do it by accident not do it on chance But be systematically prepared just like anything else in our military training to handle this In advance case studies practices laboratories reading reflection discussion argument these things needed to be part of our education and not just rote learning of military history and international relations and engineering which is the kind of stuff we were doing and talking about old wars like World War two and uh and Korea From vietnam to the present all this transformation has been going on and and we are constantly behind the power curve I argued in getting ready for it that Responsibility for the rest of us, you know that this was my point to the nato folks as well That you know if if we're asking all of you to do these kinds of difficult complicated things for us We need to have done much better job than we do for you to get you ready And we're not doing it and shame on us that new field of endeavor we gave the name A name taken from classical just war theory, which I want to say a few words about in conclusion And um We talk about use adbellum the justification for going to war use in bellow all the stuff about how we conduct ourselves Our troops in the field um law of war and so forth There was it had been much fuss over use postbellum in recent years over reconstruction and reparation and Rebuilding which is what again human train teams were helping our brigade reconstruction teams do in afghanistan um This new area of military education was well Everybody's got to be ready before they go not after they get there and have to learn on the job So to speak they need at least to be prepared to be shocked and to be challenged And the importance of making the right decisions and the impact of making the wrong ones in the form of moral injury and post traumatic stress and the kinds of things that happen to people who make terrible mistakes or Fail to realize the gravity of situations they're in And what is that called? Well use ante bellum would be the latin idiom for that the preparation Before going to war prior to war And of course we've always done this and clausowitz was running a military academy after all but Have we thought about that as a moral responsibility? to not send Our combatants into conflict without having adequately prepared them not just with the mechanics and nuts and bolts of using weapons and Dispensing deadly force, but also what happens to them what challenges they'll face as human beings How they are to conduct and comport and think about themselves and each other The leadership that they should exert officers to enlisted and so forth All of this is a huge area that is kind of haphazard or was haphazard and we need to think about more carefully Okay Maybe one more thing And then let's wrap this up the the lecture part and that would be Just for theory itself the kind of thing by the way that we used to not talk about until maybe somebody got a promotion to senior command and sent off to a war college and then in the course of international relations you'd study When nations go to war or what reasons they have that are better or worse than others As well as what responsibilities you have as a commander For the behavior of your troops in the field We used to reserve that theoretical stuff moral stuff if you will for the senior commanders the few in the brown But what about everybody else and how important was it that the rank and file enlisted and young officers at military academies and ROTC units and so forth Well, increasingly it's become important to say well, even if they don't make the decisions to go to war They need to know why the decisions are made the way they are And they need to know what are the criteria by which those judgments are made And I ought to be able to judge whether the war they're being asked to fight is Has fulfilled those criteria And be able to interpret that to the men and women under their command who are wondering why are we here? What are we doing in a civil war in vietnam? What are we doing helping afghanis? against the taliban Why you know what businesses of this of ours you need to be able to effectively interpret that to understand all of these What we're thought to be kind of high level abstract theoretical considerations They're not that at all. They're the nuts and bolts of basic moral and political reasoning about Conflict and how we handle it and what we think of adversaries and What we're willing and unwilling? Permitted and not permitted to do in the pursuit of legitimate otherwise legitimate military ends So this is increasingly, you know, just war theory taught in Undergraduate curricula as well and to some extent in lesser ways to enlisted personnel That enlisted gap if you will an education is a huge area of concern Continues to be one for me and continue to work on it providing and provide materials You have the army's center for professional the army professional military ethic Cape now moved from west point out to a 411 worth Um an excellent initiative on the part of the army navy has something similar at the war college We're trying to think through how to reach everybody Not just the the few in the proud who get promoted to 06 or From 05 to 06 and get sent to the war colleges late in their careers We want everybody in the professional Community who are practicing the professional arms to know as much about these things and embody them in the work they do and the Values that to which they adhere And the pride that they feel in uniform and their their mission as is possible so that's just war theory and there's some kind of abstract theoretical discussions in the book about what that is how it evolved Uh And They aren't the kind of portrayal that is often given that it's a unique kind of reflection I try to relate this to the kind of reasoning that all of us do all the time about difficult moral decisions that are usually Involved making exceptions to the rules that generally seem to hold for all of us um When to kill when thou shalt not kill for example Or when to let die when you're supposed to save or when to Lie when you're supposed to tell the truth or when to blow the whistle And turn and betray as it were a colleague or an institution if they're engaged in malfeasance So when do we do these things? Well only if there's a really really compelling Case the situation whose moral gravity is so Enormous that it overrides things like loyalty and truth-telling and whatever it may be that you're making an exception of yourself for So, um, I try to show people how we all have experience in doing this. It isn't just diplomats and Senior commanders and the joint chief's staff and so forth senior general officers It's all of us. We do this and if we didn't know anything about it, we'd invent it for ourselves In just this way because these questions are fundamentally straightforward questions that we ask ourselves about any grave Exceptional serious moral decision we have to make Do I have a good reason have I exhausted all the alternatives? Is there anything I haven't considered? Will the damage whatever i'm about to do be greater than the damage that's being done that i'm trying to stop for Avoid or whatever and so on and so forth. Does it matter how I go about this? What are the means by which I should carry out my exceptional moral act? So I talk about that a bit and some concepts like last resort that are part of that tradition But I end up finally saying In the book and I say anytime I get the chance talking too much as I usually do But winding up by saying look um what we want is to avoid What I call in the final chapter of the book forgetful warriors You want to take a page out of playdough's republic? pages actually That many of you will have read when you were in high school and maybe college And maybe didn't think that much of or understand all that well at the time But look back at them with me at the very end of this discussion and think about what Socrates is trying to teach these young men around the table with him Who would after being taught? be soldiers in the Athenian army Or in the future they're envisioning they would be guardians in a ideal state in which those people were chosen Because of their character and their intellectual capacity and their devotion to duty They loved the state more than themselves And would be willing to lay down their lives to protect it We would need that And we would need them not to forget who they were not to turn on their fellow Citizens not to use their force against them or to betray them Um Or endanger their lives We would need them not to be forgetful in the sense that we use the word An english gentleman will use the term forgetfulness When he's remonstrating with someone who's lost their temper and has gone berserk and is Cursing and swearing and carrying on sir. You have forgotten yourself Uh, that's kind of stuffy But there's a very important sense in which forgetting oneself is a very serious and grave problem And analogically speaking we forgot ourselves Uh during the lie in the massacre Lieutenant Callie and his troops as the Person who stopped that massacre chief warrant officer thompson whom I discuss said it When asked later, why did you land your helicopter and point your rifle at Your fellow soldiers who were killing civilians in me life What made you do that? He said we'd forgotten Who we are we'd forgotten what we came there to do And what socrates sells his young charges we need to have Our soldiers our guardians remember who they are and what their mission is they must not forget Uh, so recollection and memory are as their themes and philosophy of playdough are also Themes in the military academy he envisioned in the military education. He was giving to citizens of the republic That would call forth the highest elements of their character their devotion Uh, and the performance of civic duty to the welfare of this for the welfare of the state Well, this is the sense in which ethics and military strategy have sort of gotten transformed in the making and I think are to be thought of in a new way after claus witz You don't throw out the old but we keep it in a new frame of reference in a new context In which these kinds of considerations including soldiers memory And encouraging that through our military education policies become among the most important things that we do And that i'm proud to say my colleagues at the war college Who kind enough to invite me and attend today are busy doing and that you all as students there are Encouraging yourselves to do So again that I thank you for this chance to be with you and Look forward any questions or comments. You may have on this project or anything else. Thanks very much