 Good morning, everyone. Hello, I am Dr. Gina Palmer from the College of Leadership and Ethics. It's my pleasure to be your emcee for this portion of the program. Our first panel is Women in Combat moderated by Admiral Lars Saunas. Admiral Saunas retired from his position as Chief of Royal Norwegian Navy in 2017 and is now CNO Distinguished International Fellow in International Programs at the Naval War College. He served as the head naval section of the Norwegian Defense High Command and the Norwegian Defense Research Institute. Please welcome Admiral Saunas. Thank you, Gina. And thank you for being our Zoom moderator today. And today we are looking into a really, really important aspects of women, peace and security and that's women in combat. So I hope you out in the Zoom land will follow up and post your questions in the chat and Gina will look it up in the Q&A so we can have that dialogue also virtually and also for you the audience to make notes and be ready for your critical questions. I know the student's body will always have critical questions for our experts today. So going back, so it struck me that, most of us thought that the cultural aspects was the most important barrier for having equal gender role in the military. And I would say if you talk about women in combat, that's actually putting it on the spot. And nowhere else will you find those barriers more frequently raised than around combat positions. But we're also happy to have three services represented here today from the Army, Air Force and Navy and the services in the United States being a Norwegian are very different with regard to gender implementation and history. So I remember being a submarine commander in the 1980s when we had first women on Norwegian submarines. And I think we had our first submarine commanding officer in 1994. And in 2015, we actually had 1400 female conscripts competing for special forces qualification in Norway. So women has been included in combat operations as long as I've been in my service, I'm really old. So I even retired. So I think it's at the same time I had to reflect when I was the chief of the Navy that we are still struggling with the same barriers, the culture, the values of integrated women, whether it's sexual harassment, whether it's a male dominant environment and culture. We like to call it women add their perspective that makes us more efficient in operations. But we are also forcing women to include the male perspective. And I think that is not always the right thing to do. And today you will hear about that from our panelists. You will also hear about the discussion about physical collocations in combat. There are different perspective on that too. And you will hear about that today as well. And you will hear about diversity in gender to accomplish a more efficient operations as well as how the gender perspective has been assessed as a meaningful participation in the US force. So if you think about all these things, I've been trying to promote a gender neutral perspective for a while, but at the same time, I'm accepting that I was wrong because women have a different perspective and challenges in combat. And men have another different challenge and perspective in combat. But unless we start listening to you and include both genders in that dialogue, we will never solve that problem. So that is why it is so important to have honest dialogue about how much do we accept women in combat operations? How much should they accept of the main dominant culture? How do we man value the feminist perspective into your operations? You have seen in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and Norwegians go there too. That is highly valuable. So with this short introduction, I would like you to think about something while you're listening to my panelists. What is the woman unique perspective? How do we ensure women's meaningful participation across services and also integrated with allies and partners? I think you can think about questions around that. How can we best break down the cultural barriers regarding women in combat? Both from a female and male perspective. We look at masculinity as the third gender. It's called by some tactical feminitis. And I'm questioning myself, what does that mean? How do we as men appreciate that? And do we really accept to have a gender-neutral assessment to meet combat challenges? I think it's important to ask this question because it is challenges for women and it's challenging for men to be in combat positions. And we should be honest about it. So with no further due, I will introduce my panel. We will have major Lauren Ward from the U.S. Military Academy. Talk about military masculinity, tactical feminitis and the third gender in Ashley's war. We've also heard the frailty myth, the case for gender-neutral physical fitness assessment practices among the United States airmen by Dr. Madalena Burgac and Lieutenant Colonel Stephanie Frioli from the College of Professional Military Education at Maxwell Air Force Base. We also hear from Ms. Antonietta Rico about women, peace, and security and defense objective one, assessing women meaningful participation in U.S. Army combat arms units. And last but not least, by Commander Sara Woodwell, our own military professor at the War College talking about advantages in cyberspace needs more than the nerds. So the word is hand over to you, Lauren and eight to nine minutes. Thank you. All right, good morning and thank you. As I was introduced, my name is Major Lauren Ward and I am an instructor of English at the United States Military Academy. And so I'll begin today's panel with a perspective on women in combat found in a book, Ashley's War, The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield by Gail Lemon. My presentation is not a consideration of the U.S. Army's use of the all female cultural support teams in the war on terror as a strategy, doctrine, or policy, but rather this is concerned with how we talk about women in combat, how we share stories. And so I turn specifically to this book. In doing so, I offer a rhetorical analysis that is an analysis of the triangulation of author, audience, and message with a particular emphasis on the audience as described in Aristotle's on rhetoric. I argue that despite the celebratory nature of Lemon's narrative, the rhetoric of Ashley's War continues to instrumentalize women's bodies and stories, reenacting many of the misogynistic tropes that continue the marginalization of women in male-dominated spaces. Counter-intuitively, this is actually a necessary precaution for Lemon to ensure the broad appeal of her book to a polarized American public and to sell the idea of women in combat. This book is a 2015 biographical narrative of Ashley White, the first member of a cultural support team to be killed in action in Afghanistan in 2011. It is a third-person account that is focalized mainly through the perspective of Ashley herself, reinforcing Lemon's own objective of sharing the true story of women in combat and bridging the civil military divide between those who have been there and those who have not. As a celebration of women's abilities on the battlefield, this book is empowering, offering an example of what women in combat can look like. The women of the CSTs necessarily embody both their own femininity as well as military masculinities, by which I mean the set of masculine-coded actions that signify the necessary skills to succeed in male-dominated spaces such as the military. I draw this conception of military masculinities from remarks evoking Theodore Roosevelt's Man in the Arena speech made at Ashley's funeral, saying of Ashley, she was the man in the arena. From context, this slip in gender markers between the feminine pronoun she and the masculine noun man did not mean to imply anything about Ashley's gender identity and is solely looking at her performative actions, calling to mind Roosevelt's position symbolizing U.S. martial masculinity at the turn of the 20th century. Ashley has ascribed the ability to embody highly desired masculine actions, implicitly the acts of competitiveness, aggression, decisiveness, combativeness, and most importantly, action, while still maintaining her static, essentialized feminine identity. This liminal space between masculine and feminine is termed the third gender, stemming from the first report on the viability of all women engagement teams in Iraq in 2010 and reiterated by Lemon throughout her book. The common trope of the have it all narrative appears cemented in U.S. strategic documents as well as these bestselling books as women are, quote, accorded the advantages rather than the disadvantages of both genders, end quote. Despite its lauding of women's achievement, Ashley's war also recreates the CST's instrumentalization of gendered labor. Following Arleigh Hochschild's definition of emotional labor, scholar Elizabeth Miesach calls attention to the, quote, instrumentalizing of essentialized femininity even as the spatial and gender divisions of labor were destabilized, end quote, by integrating women into men's spaces. We might also use Kate Mann's more irreverent term for affective labor, kermongering, the disproportionate expectation for women to be caring and nurturing. As an example of this, Lemon narrates the scene of an individual Rock March event in the CST selection process, wherein the women rallied around a struggling teammate despite explicit instructions that they, quote, were on their own, no talking allowed, end quote. Once the women went into action, they were disciplined for not following proper protocols, though some maintained that the Rock was actually a test of the women's ability to stay together as a team when something went wrong. In fact, this is a crucial application of the US Army's warrior ethos. I will never leave a fallen comrade. But there's a clear understanding through the scene's shifting narrative focalization that the warrior ethos might apply differently here, including the frustration of the all male instructors. The scene depicts women heroically bucking the system, outwitting their instructors, and proving that the empathetic kermongering is in fact a worthwhile martial action despite the latent messaging that women are in fact treated differently here. Lemon seems seemingly avoids criticizing this latent misogyny because her project aims to persuade those most resistant to the idea of advancing women's opportunities in the military without garnering the fierce opposition that is characteristic of the social media age. To capture the sense that women had to tactically assume the role of subordination here, I alter Gayatri Spivak's conception of strategic essentialism to become tactical femininities, to reclaim ownership of the strategic aims that drove both the CSTs and this book, Ashley's War. My hope for this term is that we can come to see women in the military free to choose their own presentation of masculinity or femininity, including in their choice of career path. And as it returned to my roots as a literary scholar, I have to call for a careful examination of the language we use to tell the stories of women in combat to varied audiences. As Lemon notes on Twitter, stories matter, but how we tell those stories matters just as much. Finally, in a rhetorical analysis, we ought not to forget the extra contextual element of timing. Lemon's book is first published in 2015 in the period of time between Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's 2013 instruction to the services to open combat roles to women and the 2016 deadline for service implementation of that policy. Now that in the US Army, women have indeed graduated Ranger School, been assigned to ground combat units and been assigned to our combat arms branches, we might refocus our discussions on the ways in which these programs, CSTs and Ashley's War, represent a moment in the history of modern warfare where women tactically assumed this position of support nation in order to push for the real strategic objective, equal inclusion in all military roles for which they're capable. Thank you. Thank you, Lauren. And now we will be joined on a virtual by Dr. Magdalena Bukac and Lieutenant Colonel Stephanie Freyoli, who will talk about the case for gender-neutral physical fitness assessments and practices among the United States airmen. The floor is yours. All right, thank you so much. I believe I'm sharing my slides. So I'm just waiting for those to come up and a good audio check. Perfect. Thank you. Good morning. As a quick disclaimer, the views here in our own and not reflective of the Air Force. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Stephanie Freyoli and my co-author is Dr. Magdalena Bukac. Our paper titled The Frailty Myth, the case for gender-neutral physical fitness assessment practices among United States airmen, pulls its cause from several documents and policies. First, in 2013, the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff announced the rescission of the 1994 Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule, which restricted assignments of women to occupational jobs in direct ground combat units. In 2014, after the decision to eliminate the rule, the National Defense Authorization Act directed the establishment of empirical-based gender-neutral physical standards before opening any restricted occupations to women. The Act also gave the services until October 2015 to demonstrate that such measures were in place. Additionally, the 2022 Air Force Manual for Physical Fitness States. Every member should be physically fit, regardless of age, grade, gender, or duty assignment. In this very sane document, however, the Air Force Fitness Assessment requires female airmen to perform fewer repetitions and slower runtimes on all events compared to their male counterparts. Furthermore, in 2022, the House Armed Services Committee approved an amendment to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to create gender-neutral fitness standards for combat arms positions. This bill does not specify what jobs this will apply to. Services will determine whether roles like aviation, security forces, or common support roles within combat units will be covered by this fitness mandate. Despite all of this, the Air Force has yet to adopt these standards. There is no open-source data as to why, but when the Army scrapped its plans to use similar physical fitness tests for all of its soldiers in 2022, reasons pointed to political pressure after early numbers of significant female failures. Today, the fitness assessment for men consists of cardio-respiratory fitness, muscular strength, and core endurance. Members may choose any combination, one per component, for their fitness assessment. Comparatively, the fitness assessment for male airmen consists of the same components, but with faster run times and high repetitions required for all other events. Although the female fitness assessment standards have improved over the years, they are still a gender-normed version of male physical fitness standards. For instance, in a 2012 interview, several female Marines concluded that it is simply not reasonable to expect the average woman to perform the same exercises as men due to a genetic predisposition for weakness and other physical shortcomings. This quote clearly showcases that even women are prejudiced against other women in terms of strength. The reluctance to incorporate gender-neutral fitness requirements into the Air Force is aided by the prevailing perception that very few women can perform to men's standards. As a result, women are assumed to lack the ability for such a feat. However, events like running, push-ups, and sit-ups are skills, and skills can be learned and perfected with practice. In contrast, an ability is a relatively stable trait with biological growth and maturation processes, which remains unchanged by practice. If this is the case, then it is safe to assume that women have the ability but lack the skill. Fitness comes with time and practice, and women are as fit as men in relative terms. It was not until January 2014 when the Marine Corps began offering a pull-up option for women. In 2018, around one-third of female Marines still opted for an alternate exercise, the Flexed Arm Hang, instead of performing the pull-up. The Corps' reluctance to adopt gender-neutral standards may suggest a psychological aspect of the frailty myth that is harder to overcome than the physical. This should come as no surprise as the frailty myth has been systematically institutionalized in American society and made a smooth transition into military culture. Gender conditioning, gender stereotypes, and the resulting perception of women's innate weakness continue to play a crucial role in making decisions about the scope of physical fitness tests more so than the lack of strength training and practice. Furthermore, the frailty myth, in addition to fostering learned weakness, has affected women's sense of competence. The absence of a pull-up requirement for female Marines on their PFT appears to be enough to convince some men and women alike that pull-ups are virtually unattainable for female Marines. If the Air Force Fitness Assessment Test remains in its current form, suboptimal female fitness performance will continue to be institutionalized. What you see on this slide is a picture of the first female to graduate from the Air Force's highly demanding combat control school and earned her coveted Scarlett Barré. She had to transcend her gender in order to pass the school. Let's give others like her a fighting chance by initializing the following solutions to gendered fitness standards. To us, the solution seems simple. A fitness assessment metric commensurate with a woman's size would shatter the misconceptions. An Air Force Fitness Assessment testing relative strength and cardio performance to size would make an airman responsible for their body mass and send a more gender-inclusive message. Hence, a gender-neutral fitness assessment would require all airmen to lift their body weight and the force required would be relative to their size, making a gender norm fitness metric unnecessary. One popular equation that measures relative strength is called the Wilkes coefficient or Wilkes formula. The equation measures the relative strength of power lifters despite the different weight classes of the lifters. While there have been some criticisms of the Wilkes formula, this model from the powerlifting world might offer a potential solution to the problem of gendered physical assessments. Another popular formula is called the Sinclair coefficient, a mathematical equation designed to determine who is the best male or female lifter across any age group and weight class. While the Air Force Fitness Assessment is not a powerlifting competition, lessons can be garnered from how other sports measure performance. Another possibility is using alimetric scaling to grade relative strength and cardio performance. Alimetric scaling refers to the changes that take place within a species as size changes. It has been widely accepted by a significant number of Olympic lifting and CrossFit research communities as a proper way to scale performance. Additionally, it has been validated in a host of populations, including high-level football players, has solid theoretical support and seems to work well when comparing performances across different sized athletes. Furthermore, studies have shown that women can adapt to training the same way men can. This supports the conclusion that women can train to perform at the same fitness standards as men since few differences exist in the quality and responsiveness of men's and women's lean mass. This reinforces the idea that strength and endurance come with practice in our learned skills rather than innate abilities. To begin deconstructing the frailty myth, we recommend non-gender specific early physical education to start to give women a fair and equal chance later in professional military life. In conclusion, female frailty is a myth. We argue that while lower physical standards for female airmen may seem like a good thing, the success of all airmen, especially women, depends on successfully implementing equal and fair standards of physical rigor without accounting for one's gender. Thank you. Thank you, Stephanie and Elena. That was a lot of good talk for thoughts. And now we'll move over to the Defense Objective 1, assessing women's meaningful participation in the US Army Combat Arms Unit. And I'll hand the microphone over to Antonita. Thank you for having me on the panel. So I work as a Women's Peace and Security Advisor for the Peacekeeping Stability Operations Institute in the Army. I'm a contractor and my comments reflect my professional and research experience and do not reflect the views of DOD, the Army or PKSOI. So women have participated unofficially and officially in the defense of our nation and every American complex since the Revolutionary War. Restrictions on their meaningful participation have existed just as long. Official structural barriers, which included policies that ban women from serving jobs like the previous ground combat exclusion policy or policies that inadvertently disadvantage women. Unofficial barriers included sexist attitudes and beliefs and gender bias and harassment by fellow soldiers and leadership. The Department of Defense WPS plan, which we've talked about in this conference already, Defense Objective 1 talks about allowing for the meaningful participation of women across the development and management and employment of the joint force. It notes that meaningful participation is both critical mass and decision-making power through an organization structure. I see that more as an outcome of women being able to meaningfully participate in their day-to-day job that leads to more women staying in the military. So they will reach critical mass and eventually leadership positions. So to reach that outcome, we must eliminate those day-to-day barriers that women face to meaningful participation. In the IRC report, they noted that one of the biggest barriers, sexual violence is the leading barrier to women's meaningful participation in the military. So I'm gonna go a little bit into the gender integration study regarding combat arms. But before I go there, I'd like to say, combat arms jobs were open to women as a result of military necessity. It was a recognition of the reality in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fact that there was a huge capability gap on the ground without all male teams. And so the integration of women in combat arms jobs is also important in so far as meaningful participation because the ban on women being in combat arms jobs has long been seen as one of the most important barriers because most of the general officers or flag officers in leadership positions disproportionately come from combat arms branches. So moving on to the gender integration study prior to 2016 when women first went into the training pipeline for infantry and armor, training and doctrine command conducted a study called the gender integration study released in 2015. It identified five key barriers to successful integration which are up there on the slides. And in general can be equated to barriers to meaningful participation. So in 2016, when the first women in combat arms entered the infantry and armor training pipeline and went to for bending for iBullock and aBullock, an independent research team consisting of Dr. Megan McKenzie out of Simon Fraser University in Canada and retired colonel Dr. Ellen Herring currently with women in international security and myself assisting began collecting that data on the experiences of those first women officers. So it was 22 women officers, but infantry and armor and we followed them for five years. So a preliminary assessment of this data is I looked at this database to identify specifically barriers to meaningful participation. So in order of precedence, these are the preliminary findings. Number one by far is gender bias reflected in attitudes, beliefs and behavior by male soldiers. Number two, physical performance barriers and really physical preparation performance barriers which are still ongoing. Number three, reliance by the army units and male soldiers and leaders on women's emotional labor. So gender bias as a barrier was expected and identified by the GIS study as well as physical performance and preparation. Both of these factors are barriers still ongoing in infantry and armor that need to be overcome. However, for this presentation, I'll focus on talking about the last factor which is not really talked about and the army may not have anticipated. So what do I mean by reliance and women's emotional labor and why is it a barrier? So I'll talk about the leader's first policy which I do wanna say was rescinded finally in November of 2022, but it relied for the first five years of integration on women being a role model cadre. So the rule required that two women leaders be assigned to an infantry or armor unit first before the unit could accept junior enlisted women. But who were these leaders? Well, these leaders were brand new lieutenants. They were meant to teach men how to interact with junior enlisted women, help prevents sexual assaults, act as advisors to the junior enlisted women to help them navigate this immensely complex terrain of being the first to integrate combat arms units. And all of this while this junior lieutenants were themselves trying to navigate integration and also learning how to do their job as infantry and armor lieutenants. So real quickly, other examples of additional emotional labor the women are doing includes men of their units relying on the women to report incidents of harassment even though they themselves see the incidents, relying on women to ask needed questions during briefing so they don't have to ask the questions, turning to women to talk about emotionally stressful situations they're facing that they do not feel they can safely talk about to other men. So this is a barrier to women's meaningful participation because this task can be emotionally taxing to the women themselves, but it also takes a chunk of the time which they could be using to accomplish their military tasks and it affects their reputation because they're the ones asking the questions or bringing up the issues. Additionally, while creating a psychologically safe environment is really great for their units. This leadership style may be penalized in officer evaluation reports that may focus more on accomplishment of technical tasks. So these are questions that we need to be asking. I do wanna touch on a couple more barriers that have emerged in the research. A big one is that the women are under a microscope and I think that was obvious. It puts undue pressure on them to perform well but it also results at least according to the preliminary data. And what appears to women being scrutinized more for counseling or UCMJ than their male peers. And I'll give an example. So there is, I think on a certain regular basis officers gather to talk about high-risk soldiers, et cetera. And so one of the incidents that came out of the interviews was the leaders discussing the idea of informally counseling one of the enlisted women for what the chain of command viewed as promiscuity. But yet when the question was asked, are there other men in your unit who are just as promiscuous, it was like, yes. So why aren't you counseling them? And so this is an emerging barrier identified that really bears more scrutiny in the available data because everybody is watching this first women. Are this women facing more negative administrative actions like UCMJ that men would not get? I'm almost done. No time, so. Okay, great. So men, another of the barriers was men walking on eggshells around women. This was identified in the GIS study. But the women interviewed said that men were afraid of false, sharp accusations. So they avoid the women. This has both social and professional implications. The data highlighted especially often NCOs. So NCOs would not make corrections of the women which was not only detrimental to unit cohesion because the enlisted men were resentful but it was also very detrimental for the women's own professional development because you got private PFCs and they're trying to learn their job but then the NCOs are not correcting them because they feel they might be falsely accused. But on the flip side, women in combat arms especially enlisted women in this unit are facing sexual assault and harassment as reported by the women officers during the interviews. So I will say sexual assault is an issue. The army at large continues to grapple with and so it's also present in this infantry and armor units. Finally, I would like to briefly highlight two more interesting preliminary findings and that's the concept of family support. In the army, we often say the spouses are the backbone of the army and the military structure counts on spouses being primarily wives who support their husbands and this is especially significant in combat arms but what happens when that spouse is male? What are the implications of that for both how the army does family outreach before the women themselves? And I'll just quickly say it's not in my remarks but let's talk about men who are wounded in combat arms traditionally we think of the caregiver as the female spouse and if somebody wants to ask me a question after this I'll go more into it but so what happened to an infantry and armor woman who's wounded in combat arms? So who will be their caregiver and will it be their male spouse? And so the other concept I will talk about before I close out is exclusionary inclusion. This term was identifying data out of the Israeli defense forces and it's also found in the preliminary research here in the United States that we've done. So I will give one example from the data it's an incident of enlisted infantry women being placed in the rear hatch positions of a striker. So I don't know how much you know about strikers is an infantry carrier vehicle, nine-man squad, two crews. So the rear hatch positions is the two soldiers observing. So typically these two rear hatch positions are reserved for soldiers on profile because when you dismount into an objective and you do a mission the two rear hatch positions stay in the vehicle. And so in this unit what was happening when they went to a training exercise the women were being put in the rear hatch positions and they were not being allowed to dismount and this was very they're moralizing for them because they joined to be in the infantry they want to do dismounting patrols. So that's another thing that's emerging in the data exclusionary inclusion that we need to look more into. So the army has made significant progress in removing institutional and structural barriers to women's meaningful participation within combat arms much progress remains to be made in regard to social, cultural, gender-based barriers. And so identifying barriers such as the ones I've talked about is the first step in order for women to meaningfully participate in combat arms we must understand the barriers they're facing day to day and discuss solutions. So the promise of meaningful participation for women which by the way why do we care about meaningful participation of women because it makes our units more effective. So in order for that to happen we have to look at these barriers, eliminate them so that can become a reality. I will leave with one positive preliminary finding the women officers who were most able to meaningfully participate in the roles. And in this context is they were able to actually do their jobs day today and be successful where the ones who reported having a great senior NCO either a platoon sergeant or a first sergeant who was accepting of the women in combat arms and worked with them not against them to ensure that the women officer who was the platoon leader or a company commander ensured the success of their unit. So thank you. Thank you Antionita. Wow, that was interesting to see the book when you produce the paper and we'll be looking forward to reading more about this. So our last but not least is Commander Butwell who will talk about how a cyberspace need more than nurse. The Florida source. Thanks Admiral. So as he said, I'm Commander Sarah Butwell. I'm a Navy Cryptologic Warfare officer and my career is focused on signals intelligence and cyberspace operations. I'm gonna talk about cyberspace and how military actions in cyberspace work better when planned and executed by a team than that lone hacker you might have seen in the movies. All right, so when I say the term hacker what do you picture? Is it someone like this or hoodie guy? Definitely this guy. And you can tell these guys were up to something. But how about her? She's operating a bomb and those were used to crack codes in World War II. This is Genevieve Feinstein. She wanted to be a math teacher but ended up working for the Army Signals Intelligence Service stationed at Arlington Hall outside DC. In 1940, she discovered patterns in the Japanese purple code that allowed her team to build a machine that decrypted Japanese government messages. With most able-bodied women going or men going forward to fight women filled combat support jobs back home. And by the end of the war over 5,700 civilians and 2,200 military personnel worked at Arlington Hall for the SIS including Ann Cara Christie there on the right an English major who eventually worked her way to become deputy director of the National Security Agency in 1980 the top civilian position there and a job only one other woman is subsequently held. Daddy Blum also worked at Arlington Hall in the NSA. She pioneered the use of computers and crypt analysis moving the NSA away from bombs and towards high performance computing. She coded in Fortran before it was publicly available and ran NSA's computer operations organization. And Elizabeth Smith Friedman here with her husband William she majored in English literature with a minor in applied sciences while also studying Latin, Greek and German. She and William studied cryptology at an early think tank and formed the core of the US code-breaking effort in World War I. William went on to run the SIS for the Army while Elizabeth worked for the Coast Guard when World War II kicked off her unit identified German spies in South America and exposed fascist coup plots and secret weapons deals between Germany and Argentina. This work of coding and decoding building machines and mapping radio networks and constructing the mathematical, repeatable frameworks underneath it all built the foundation of what is now cyberspace. And it used contributions from a wide range of people with different educational backgrounds pulled together to gain an information advantage and win the war against fascism. 80 years later, we've made some progress in opening computing to a wider swath of the population but while women have increased their share of degrees in a number of fields the number of women getting computer science degrees peaked in 1984 and is holding at about 21% today. Industry surveys say that women made up about 24% of the cybersecurity workforce last year. This is an industry that Bloomberg says had had 600,000 unfilled positions in the US last year. The Navy tracks fairly consistently with industry the information warfare community as a whole the officer community runs about 21% female and enlisted community about 23%. When you break down the enlisted specialties the cryptologic technician networks rating our cyber operators is 15% female. And that compares to cryptologic technician interpretive those guys who go and get intensive training in a foreign language and do analysis in intelligence, 35% female. So increases in female representation in law school, med school and college in general tracks with the sense that women tend to gravitate towards jobs that involve working with and helping other people. Computer science professor Carnegie Mellon found that women that left the program there reported feeling inadequate because they came in with less prior computer experience than men. And there was a sense that if you didn't work in school all day and then go home and code all night, you wouldn't be a real computer scientist. Some people have hobbies and friends and they should be able to code too. Colleges that established quality introductory classes find better retention in computer science programs in general and not just with women. Cyber security company Fortinet ran a project where they applied artificial intelligence to thousands of cybersecurity job ads and resumes. And they found that in ads for corporate chief information security officer positions 17 of the top 20 skills employers want are what they consider soft skills things like leadership, planning and communications and building relationships across organizational boundaries more so than tactical technical security skills. Shifting from business to the military we have similar need for technology operators and leaders and both the people that code all night and the people who want to work across stovepipes. And I've gotten this far without defining cyberspace. So I've got an abridged version from JP3Tech12 in the top bullet there. We think of cyberspace in three layers the physical network of equipment and cables and signals in a spectrum the logical network of codes and protocols and the cyber persona layer that digital representation of a user group of users. So my dad doesn't have his own Facebook page he uses my mom's and that's a thing to consider when engaging with that particular cyber persona. At the bottom of the slide is a depiction of a cyber kill chain. So from an offensive perspective it's steps to gain access to and cause effects on someone else's network. From a defense for a defender it's what to look for to prevent that from happening. So this model works at the tactical level but it's missing some things when it comes to a joint operation. So that highly trained on that operator that hacker that he conducts reconnaissance he or she conducts reconnaissance against logical or physical infrastructure that an intelligence team has identified through any number of sources. Weaponization sure capability development requires a very technical skill set but someone needs to be able to explain that capability to the boss and explain that it complies with legal rules of engagement and that they've analyzed potential collateral effects and the risk associated. So the same with the delivery of that capability that that operator is gonna pull back data that someone needs to analyze maybe one of those language analysts. It needs to get enriched with other intelligence and use to inform decisions and future operations. So the operator doesn't decide if that particular bit of cyber infrastructure is terrain we wanna establish persistence on that installation step, the leadership does that based on recommendations from the bigger team and the greater context of the effects we can generate from that position. The operator on the keyboard executes the fire but it's on the order and at the timing and tempo determined by the operational staff according to the plan. The plan built by a team that took the commander's intent analyzed the got approved objectives, analyzed the mission and the adversary, identified the effects likely to achieve those objectives, got targets approved, work with a fire cell to identify a cyber capability as the best weapon solution then synchronized it with actions in the air, sea, maritime and space domains and got execution approvals, all those things you're learning in JMO. That's a lot of information to process and cross organizational work and we're dealing with actions that may require the approval of the president or the sector. So you really need to do your homework at those diverse perspectives on that team to think through and explain how those actions on the network impact systems and the people who use them or rely on them because fundamentally warfare is about people. So yes, let's try to broaden the pipeline and encourage people who don't think they're technical to study computer science and let's get people who understand other cultures and languages and people who understand marketing and teach lawyers about data centers and cloud computing so that they don't fixate on physical locations and target review and find people who can take technical concepts and break them down to something even a pilot can understand and approve because we need a lot of different perspectives and talents to gain success in with and through cyberspace. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. That was fantastic. And now it's up to you, the crew here to be fantastic and ask the right questions and the critical question that Sarah asked us to do earlier today. And it just reminds me of a presentation to see what is combat positions today in sort of the competitive world that we're all in. It's also interconnected. And I think these panels also show that there are cross-services reflections and learning that we all can take with us into our own services. And I think I saw on your faces that many of the points that was taken here was familiar to you. Isaac, you see some smiles here and there.