 What I'd like to do for a few minutes is to offer some ideas that might help you frame how you think about the year. We heard a lot this morning about the idea that you are members of a profession, and it's that concept that I'd like to explore with you for the few minutes I have with you this afternoon. So why are you here? Why did the people of the United States and other countries that sent you here think it was worth investing this kind of time and energy in bringing you here? In 1985, as you know, the Congress decided that our officers were not as well-prepared as they needed to be for military service, and they passed the Goldwater-Nickels Defense Reform Act, and they introduced these additional requirements for what officers serving in joint billets would need to have. If you look at that for just a minute and then ask yourself, what assumptions were in the minds of the people who thought they needed to change officer development in this way? Why did they do that? I would say they assumed that as officers advance in rank, they need to grow not simply incrementally and in a linear way, but there are kind of quantum breaks in the level of knowledge and competence that officers need to have as they advance in rank. They also assumed by the PME part, the school part, that part of that development had an intellectual component that simply doing operational stuff of increasing levels of complexity was insufficient, they assumed, for the kind of development that officers needed to have. And so the conclusion was it was worth it to spend a lot of time and money investing in professional development for our officers. In most services, as you know, there are at least two schools people go to. The Navy is sort of an exception in that regard, but usually there's a command and staff college and then a war college in the other services. Now if you do the math on that and you figure the average salary in this room multiplied by the number of bodies in this room and ask yourself how much, how many resources are going into this effort? It's a truly staggering number. Think about that. Somebody thought this was worth a lot and that the payoff was going to be a lot. Now what I'm going to suggest to you is thinking that these are requirements is characteristic of something called a profession, as distinct from other kinds of jobs people do. General Dempsey says this just a couple of years ago, we need to renew our commitment to the profession of arms, we need to make sure we're attending to the trust component that Emma House spoke about so eloquently, that is the basis of the profession. And our fellow citizens have to be absolutely certain that you'll never betray the Constitution or violate lawful orders. Now what I want to do for the next few minutes is talk about the idea of a profession because there's a problem with the word. If you listen to military people talk about ethics, the words that what they like most are character, integrity and profession. But the problem is in modern American English the word profession is used to describe anything a person does for pay. So we talk about professional football players, we talk about professional cable installers. But what I want to suggest to you now is there's an older and richer concept of what a true profession is that comes out of the sociology literature. And drawing on this sociology literature has been the basis for a lot of rethinking of how ethics should be understood in our military professions. This all got started in the Army, for those of you in the Army you're probably familiar with the effort that became the future of the Army profession project back in 1999 that led to the creation of a Center for the Army Profession and Ethic at West Point. If you've never looked at their website I want to suggest you look at it. It's capecape.army.mil which stands for the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic. And what they've done there is they've created a whole series of training materials and written materials to be used by units to talk robustly about the Army profession. Suddenly the Navy stood up, the Navy Center for Leadership and Ethics here at Newport just on the other end of the base. And we're in the process of staffing that and figuring out all the things that that's going to do. So all of the services are addressing this. And Mocline was appointed because there was a perception that somebody at the sec def level needed to be paying attention explicitly to the state and the health of the profession of each of the services. The Joint Staff has a similar effort that's going on. So all through the U.S. military right now there's a buzz of discussion about how healthy is the profession. How is it going to be stressed as budgets go down, as numbers go down? What are the missions going to be? What kind of procurement are we going to have? All of these questions are in the air. And these are questions professions have to think about in a distinctive way which I'm going to talk about in a sec here. So historically in the West in the early modern period there are only three activities that in the sociological sense were professions. Does anybody know what they were? Medicine, law, clergy, bingo, exactly right. Medicine, law and clergy. Now if you think about those three and what they have in common that distinguishes them from all the other things people do. There are a bunch of dimensions that make them unique. The most important one is that they deal with something that's absolutely essential to the society that they serve. So if you think about the values of European culture in the early modern period think about it. Education, health and justice. What is more important than those three things? So what makes them unique? They provide a service that is absolutely essential to the society they serve. They possess a body of highly technical knowledge and usually a jargon that only they speak. Someone once said all professions are conspiracies against lay people. But it's not really true. There's a reason professions speak in a jargon that nobody else speaks because they have a very precise knowledge of the thing they're dealing with. For me as a non-medical person you have an infection is good enough but the doc's got to know you have an infection with what particular bacterium because I got to figure out exactly what agent will work against this bacterium so a hand wave won't do it. I need to have some very precise knowledge about this. They make discretionary judgments about how to apply their unique knowledge for the best benefit of the patient. Now let me talk about this idea of discretionary judgment for a minute. If you go to the DMV, the DMV clerk has knowledge that I don't have. The DMV clerk knows for the non-Americans that it's the Department of Motor Vehicles. They know what forms I have to have filled out to get my car registered, where I have to sign them, where the stamp has to go and so forth. So they have a body of knowledge I don't have. But they have almost no discretion about how they use it. It's a bureaucratic thing. They know these things have to happen. But when I go to the doc and I say, it hurts here doc, what she's doing in her head is a very complicated thing called differential diagnosis. And there's no one way to do this right. And some docs are better at it than others because it's a matter of professional judgment. And as they get more experienced and better and as they continue to develop their body of professional knowledge, then they become better at it. By the way, back to the knowledge point. If you ran into a doc who said, you know, I do the surgery we're gonna do on you, the way they taught me in med school in 1985, I haven't read a medical journal since. You would say about that person, they are professionally unethical, right? Because it is their job to stay current in the best available medical knowledge so as to serve me, their client, as well as possible. Now the reason that's gonna matter for you is because you spend a lot of your life, because all of us who worked for the Department of Defense do, functioning as semi bureaucrats. A lot of stuff is routinized, a lot of stuff is bureaucratic. But the essence of what you do is not bureaucratic activity. The essence of what you do is professional activity. And so when you're confronted with a hard operational or tactical problem as a military professional, we expect you to use everything you've got to think about this creatively and innovatively. As Admiral House said, we don't know what the challenges coming in the near future are. The world's a kind of complicated place right now. One thing we're pretty sure of is the way we were configured, for example, to go to Iraq didn't work for five years and took the army about five years to figure that out. That's pretty slow for professional learning, for professional adaptation. We hope you can do better with the next set of challenges. But you know, all militaries struggle with, all professions struggle with us because you're brought up by people who teach you to do things the way they did it. And you come to value that body of knowledge and you come to value those platforms and you come to value that way of doing it. And it's hard to imagine that might not work any longer. But when you're faced with failure, then usually professions adapt, right? It would be nice if professions could think enough ahead of the problem that they didn't need abject failure to drive the adaptation. And maybe that's what this year's about for you. Professions have a high degree of autonomy. That is to say, they get to decide who's in, who's out, who gets promoted, who gets what's jobs. But they only get that when they're trusted. When the trust goes away, so does the autonomy. Let me give you a couple of examples. Think about what happened to naval aviation after Tailhook. After that, the Senate said we will micromanage your promotion system for the next, what, five years at least, right? Look what happened to accountants after Enron. Basically, their entire professional status got taken away. What is the argument about in the Senate right now with Senator Gillbrand wanting to take all sexual assault prosecution decisions away from the chain of command? What it's about is she doesn't trust that the profession can manage this. And therefore she would like to take away some of your autonomy. I don't mean to settle the question whether it's a good idea or bad idea, just want to point out that that's what it's about in its essence. It's about professional trust. Professions get to decide on standards for entrance and promotion. Who grades a bar exam? Lawyers. Who decides whether a physician is board certified in a specialty. Board certified physicians in that specialty. Who testifies it a malpractice trial. Doctors as expert witnesses. Because only they have the professional knowledge. Which is one of the reasons why, by the way, military justice keeps most of its internal questions internal to the military. Because there's a sense that as fellow members of the profession, you have unique ability to judge each other in ways that civilians might not be able to do so well because they wouldn't understand what you do in the same level of detail and depth. I think we've had public trust long enough. Individuals in a true profession are motivated primarily by an ethic of service to the client. They're more concerned with being effective than they are with being efficient. You expect them to fight mightily if they are being asked to do things that they consider professionally inappropriate or substandard in taking care of their client. So one of the challenges for all of you as we go through these lean budget times is to fight the temptation to just protect rice bowls and give a real no-kitting professional military judgment about what equipment do we need? How big does the force have to be? What are its challenges? And there's a line here between just predictable taking care of what you already got in a bureaucratic response to this and a real no-kitting professional response which is having really deeply thought about these matters. This is what we really think we need and that's gonna be on you. So that's the profession stuff. So when we say you're a member of a profession, if we mean it in some non-trivial sense, that is not just that you're paid to do it, we mean all of that, that you're in a social trust relationship with the society you serve, you have a body of specialized knowledge and part of your job is to keep extending that knowledge. So to be blunt about it, to be intellectually lazy this year is professionally unethical. It is on you to get better at what you do. And a lot of people have decided it was worth putting a lot of time and money into giving you that chance. So over to you, right? It's not something we're doing to you, it's an opportunity we're providing for you. So first blinding point of the obvious, professional ethics is different than personal ethics in several senses. First of all, you can be the nicest guy or girl in the world, but if you're incompetent, you're professionally unethical. I don't care how nice you are. It's not about nice, it's about do you know what you're doing, right? So that's the first test. Secondly, there are things that you are both permitted and prohibited for you that may not be prohibited and permitted for other people. Just take an example, if you're not a lawyer, it kind of strikes you as amazing the first time you hear it, that your job is to defend your client to the best of your ability, even if you know for a fact they're absolutely guilty. That just sounds crazy, right? But that is your job, at least in the American judicial system, which is adversarial. So you have a special requirement on you to defend your client. You're allowed to kill people with near impunity under appropriate circumstances. Nobody, no other group in the American society gets that permission. So that's a permission that you get that nobody else gets. There are things like, for example, many sexual things that are prohibited to you that are not prohibited to people in the society generally. And you can argue about whether those are absolutely necessary functionally for the military or not, but at least none of the current UCMJ they are, right? So it's different. What we expect of you as a professional is entirely, or not entirely distinct from, we hope you're a nice person too, but it's not good enough to be a nice person. And some things that nice people do are things that you may be permitted not to do under some circumstances. As we've already talked about, this is all grounded in this trust relationship. I get to play the old guide card here. I went to college in 1969. So those of you who have no any ancient history, you may remember or have read about what my freshman year in college was like. My freshman year in college was riots, campus town burning, the National Guard Bivouac on our quad for most of the spring, bomb threats and buildings. So I got an A in logic, for example, because I could never go back to class because of all the bomb threats. So my roommate who was a Navy ROTC guy had to take his uniform in a bag across campus of the Armory secretly because you couldn't safely walk in a uniform across campus. So the point of that is, if you don't think you can lose the trust of the society you serve, I'm here to tell you you can and I've seen it and it's really ugly when it happens. And it can happen faster than you think, right? It can happen faster than you think. So your fundamental responsibility, what makes professional ethics different than personal ethics is it is your job to be as ready as you can possibly be to meet the needs of your client. So as we heard this morning, that also means thinking ahead as far as possible. Now nobody's got a crystal ball and it's easy to get it wrong but your job is to try to be thinking especially during this year, what do you think you're gonna be needing to be doing five years from now? What do you think your service is gonna be doing? What do you think the world's gonna be requiring of us five years from now? These are all difficult questions. Okay, now let me turn to another subject. There's some barriers for military people to understanding what I'm meaning by ethics here. So let me just run through some of the problems. One is you like to talk a lot about integrity and professionalism and those are important but an area I've been reading a lot in in the last few years is moral psychology. They've been a vast amount of experimentation in moral psychology and the bottom line of that research is character is not nearly as reliable as you think it is. That situational factors have a lot more influence on how people actually behave than anything that's intrinsic to them as individuals. I'll just give you one simple example and I mentioned the book at the bottom of the slide. There's a guy named Dan Ariely who gives wonderful TED talks and he wrote a book called The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. I lent a copy of this book to Admiral Carter, the previous president and I never got it back because he fell in love with it. And I think Admiral Klein I think has been using it quite a bit and has been talking to him. He did a study on cheating and the study was done at Carnegie Mellon University and the study was this. Students come into a room, they sit down at a desk and there's some math problems and there's an envelope of money. They're asked to solve as many math problems as they can and then pay themselves a given amount for each math problem out of the envelope, tear up the answer sheet. So it's perfectly obvious you could cheat if you want and leave, okay? Now in this default condition, he actually has a way of knowing whether they're cheating or not, at least a statistical way of knowing. Most people cheat a little. They pay themselves one or two problems more than they solved. Why didn't they take it all? They could have gotten away with it. He says, he thinks that the factor, everybody's got what he calls a personal fudge factor. You're willing to bend it a little bit but you don't wanna feel really awful about yourself, right? So you're willing to drive five miles over the speed limit, but probably not 20, you know? I mean that's a good example of a personal fudge factor kind of thing. Then he doesn't, the further experiment is this, he puts an actor in the room. And the actor, as soon as the researcher leaves the room, he says, I've solved them all, takes all the money and leaves. And the question is, will the presence of this actor increase or decrease cheating in the subject population? What do you guess? The answer is, it depends what sweatshirt the actor wears. The research was done at Carnegie Mellon. If the actor wears a Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt, the cheating goes way up. But if the actor wears a pit sweatshirt, the school on the other side of town, it goes way down. So what this goes to show you is what your in-group is perceived as tolerating, is gonna signal acceptable behavior for you in a way that will absolutely trump whatever your internal character might be, right? Now we all know this in practical terms, right? When you go to a new unit, you start figuring out how do we do it around here, right? And you don't wanna be the guy who says, no, no, no, the way you're supposed to do it is this way, because then you'll look like you're a jerk, right? So you try to kind of conform with what's going on around you. You don't wanna be the bad guy, right? So if you look at some of these big scandals, like Fat Leonard in Paycom, I guess when we get to the bottom of it, it's gonna be a sweatshirt explanation. That people went to Paycom and it turned out that's the way we do things in Paycom. We've been doing that way forever. And you could try to change it if you want, but then you'd be the odd guy out and people have been doing this for a long time. Everybody around you's doing it this way. And so you conform to that standard. So what that goes to show, the way the sociologists write about this is, it's not just about good apples. It's also about the quality of the barrels you're putting them in, right? Another example would be the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, right? Anybody who'd ever taken Psych 101 has read about the Stanford Prison Experiment, right? Or some undergraduates at Stanford were put in roles of being either guards or prisoners. These are fellow students, right? Just undergraduates at Stanford. The guards were so abusive that they had to turn it off after a weekend. That's how bad it is if you give people that kind of power over each other. So here's an idea, here's a question. Let's take some poorly trained National Guard MPs and leave them alone in a prison at night. What could possibly go wrong? But if you think that, then you think, well, sure, these are bad actors and we'd probably have to punish them when we have to do something about it, but don't people who put them there have some responsibility? Shouldn't they know something about what's likely to happen when you do this kind of stuff? Doesn't that broaden our sense of who's responsible for what a little bit? There's an excellent book by Jim Davis called Black Hearts, has anybody read this? Highly recommended, the subtitle is One Platoon's Descent into Hell in the Iraqi Triangle of Death. This is a book about that unit in the 101st Airborne that formed a plan to rape an Iraqi girl, kill her family, burn down the house and then cover up all the evidence. This actually happened. They've all been tried at this point. What's wonderful about Jim Davis's book is he cuts this in really thin salami slices. He doesn't talk about the night they did it. He talks about the six months that got him there. You know, what was going on in the unit? What did people above them, and by the way, people above them knew there were problems with this thing. They knew there were problems with where they were. They knew there were problems with the leadership and the platoon. They tried to do some things, and nothing was really effective. But what it shows is that these things don't just happen one bad night, right? And it's not one bad person. Another problem for understanding ethics in a professional sense is we so often identify in the military ethics with law. And this is understandable because, you know, we all get an annual ethics brief, which is how to use your rental car and how to turn your travel frauds and so forth, right? And you don't need to poo-poo that, so it's important, you need to know it. But a lot of people, if you push the button, say, let's think about ethics, they think I need to talk to my Jag. But I think what you're gonna see is an awful lot of hard ethics problems have little or nothing to do with Jags. There are much more subtle problems than that. Even in war, there's a tendency to identify the ethical requirements with the laws of armed conflict. And again, I don't want to dismiss at all the importance of laws of armed conflict and getting your opp-law Jag talking to you. But you're still gonna have to make decisions once you've listened to the Jag, right? That the Jag is not the definitive answer to this. They work for you. This is Ariely's book I already mentioned. We wrote a paper, our little group, collectively, for Admiral Carter called Ethics in the Navy that's kind of gone all over the DoD now. It's a pretty good paper. It's in the core curriculum now, so you'll be reading it this year at some point. As I said, it's gone to all of the other services, which is kind of weird, right? The title of the paper is Ethics in the Navy. So why did it go to all the other services? You've heard the expression in the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king? I think it's the Kingdom of the Blind problem. Nobody else had this or anything like this. So the paper, while it's pretty good, and I think we have some pride in authorship and as as Admiral Carter, it also shows that this conversation isn't happening to the extent that it needs to be happening in the other services. And I'm sure Admiral Klein will tell us more about that. Okay, so a couple of takeaway points. A person who is honest, loyal, and diligent, but incompetent, is professionally speaking, unethical. A person who is intellectually lazy at keeping current so that they have the body of knowledge that will prepare them to best serve the requirements of their client, such a person is professionally unethical. Failure to adapt, failure to anticipate and evolve the profession is unethical. You know, military organizations are kind of amusingly conservative about some of this. Anybody ever been to a cavalry army ball? How did the cavalry guys show up for the ball? What are they wearing? Stessons and spurs, right? They've all got horses on cavalry bases. That's just because they like to keep their old stuff. You know, I mean, they all do that. And that's fine if it's just kind of for fun and an homage to tradition and so forth. But when it comes to the point where it's no longer working for you, right? It's time to move on, right? When you can demonstrate it's not working. Okay. So, PME assumes there's a developmental path. And that as you go through this path at different levels you need different stuff. Is this true of ethics as well? I'm gonna argue that it is. The environment you get in as you advance in rank is characterized by this acronym, VUCA. It was invented by Carlisle Army War College, both Olynda and I used to teach there. And on day one, the speech you get is, welcome to VUCA, you. Because we only have the senior college at Carlisle, so they're all 05s and 06s. Most of them just came out of the Italian command, right? So the Army would say it's time to get your head out of the motor pool by which they mean, you know, you've been a colonel of armor, a colonel of infantry, that you spent your whole career up till now in those communities. But guess what, that's over. And the environment you're gonna go into now is totally different than that. So what are the acronyms? It is volatile. A term borrowed from chemistry. Things that evaporate quickly. The simplest way I like to say it when I talk to the major commanders is, the chances that you'll be doing today, which you thought you'd be doing today are virtually zero. Something else is gonna happen and you're gonna need a very subtle skill, how to deal with the volatility without just chasing volatility. How to decide how to focus on what's important as opposed to what appears to be urgent. On the other hand, if you don't pay any attention to the volatility, if the urgent thing really is urgent and you don't pay attention to it, that'll bite you too, right? So where do we teach you that skill? To know when to be focusing on the urgent and when to be focusing on the important. It is uncertain. By uncertain, I don't mean that you don't yet know enough. I mean that you're never going to know enough. And if you're only comfortable making decisions when you have a high degree of certainty, you probably won't do well. I worked for an Army two star at one point who was the most indecisive person I've ever known at that rank. And I was complaining about it one day and the colonel I worked for who was a mutual friend of Alinda's and mine who was an infantry guy, I said, I can explain it to you. Mike's view of the world is if you knew the Army officer's branch, you knew all you needed to know about them. And so Mike said, well, think about it. He's a cavalry guy. I said, yeah, so. He says, well, think about what those guys do. They drive around the battlefield, they acquire information, they passed other people, then decide what to do with it, right? And that's what he's doing. He's driving around, trying to get more information, but he's never gonna be able to decide with it. It needs more information. So if you can't decide on conditions of uncertainty, then you become paralyzed. It's complex. And by complex, I mean something different than complicated. Military people are really good at dealing with complicated problems. You deal with complicated problems or breaking them down into small pieces, having tiger teams work on them, figuring out each of the little pieces and then maybe reassemble the whole thing and you solve your complicated problem. Complex problems are different than that. You don't necessarily know what the end state is. You're managing through an environment where you can't break it up into little things. And if you insist on applying a linear decision process to a complex problem, you may think yourself in a perfectly linear fashion to total failure. So when have we got you prepared to think about complexity and to be comfortable with complexity? And lastly, it's ambiguous. You don't necessarily know everything that's going on. One thing I certainly notice a lot when I travel outside the US in cultures I don't know well is it's very clear to me that people in this culture think thing X is very important and they want thing X to happen and I have no idea why. And I don't understand why thing X is important and I don't understand whether I ought to give them thing X or whether I'm being played. I don't know. And I probably not gonna be there long enough to figure it out. So I had to somehow handle this ambiguity, right? As you work in more complex environments with people outside your service, with other agencies, with other cultures, this level of ambiguity just continues to grow and part of our year here is to help you try to be comfortable with VUCA. Another problem, if you think about how military organizations try to fix failure, they usually do what I call the holy trinity of fixes. You fire the leadership, you mandate new training and you issue a new policy, right? And those three things in some combination are supposedly the universal fix for every screw up, right? So the assumptions underlying there is that it was the leader's fault. Or we didn't tell them, right? Or we didn't have enough policy. But there are a number of problems with this. First of all, if you do this over and over again, what do you get? An extremely bureaucratic organization. An extremely bureaucratic organization. Back in the early, in about the year 2000, the army was shedding captains at a high rate. And there's a brilliant guy called Lenny Wong, Dr. Lenny Wong down at Carlow and went out to study it. And their assumption was that captains are leaving because the housing is too small and the pay's not really good. What they found was that wasn't the problem. The problem was if you took the mandated training schedule for a company commander in the army and you laid it against the calendar, there wasn't enough time even to do mandated training. Let alone to do any kind of leader development or exercise in any creativity. And that's why they were leaving because they joined the army to be leaders and they just found the bureaucracy was eating their lunch, right? But the other problem with this is sometimes the holy trinity really doesn't get to the problem. Here's a very simple example that I saw up close and personal when I was working for the army. When Eric Shisaki came in as chief staff of the army, one of the first things he did was ask Carlisle to give him 10 kernels to figure out how to fix the army readiness reporting system. Why was that? He says, because I know for a fact, I have no idea how ready army units are today. And the reason I have no idea is because we have a culture in which it's impossible to report below C2. No matter what the real deal is. And so if you ask yourself is the lonely O3 company commander who's falsely reporting a C3 unit to be C2 lying? Well, in the ordinary sense of the word, of course they are. They're deliberately, intentionally stating something to be true, which they know isn't true. If that's not a lie, what's a lie? But on the other hand, it's a stupid way to look at it, right? Because until somebody with enough stars on their shoulder fixes the system so that it's safe to be honest, the behavior isn't gonna change. So these are systemic failures that drive this. So one suggestion I would make when you see screw-ups in your own organization before you leap to the holy trinity fixes, you might take that extra second to ask are there systemic things that drive this behavior? And if there are, do I either have the authority to change them? Or can I talk to somebody who does? And maybe the answer to all that's no in case you're stuck, right? Now, of course, I understand that. But it's dumb to think that these three things are the only source of your problems when we know systems drive behavior and we know from the social science literature that environment and context is at least as important as personal character. And unless we think about environment and context, we're not gonna get at it. Okay. Here are the statistics on detachment for cause. There's an AV guy named Mark Light who's down at Carlyle. He published this in the Naval Warcraft Review. Notice the numbers there. In November at the Ethics Symposium, we will have Admiral Wisecup talk to us who just retired as the Inspector General for the Navy. He's written two major reports on detachments for cause in the Navy. They're interesting and they're depressing. First of all, 85% of the detachments are for personal misconduct. They're not operational mistakes. They're not other kinds of misconduct. Personal misconduct. And most of the misconduct is, if it weren't so sad, it would be kind of funny. If you read the stories in the Navy times, I don't know what these guys have done. But the other thing that comes out of the studies, they all knew what they were doing was wrong. They all knew if they got caught, they'd get in serious trouble. Although they always, they all underestimated how much and how much it would mess up their lives. And they all wrongly believed nobody else knew what they were doing. Almost without exception. So as you rise and rank, your web of obligations gets a lot more complicated. You know, when you're in a, say a department head in the Navy, you've got your department and you've got the XO and the CO and that's kind of your world, right? But if you go to the other end of the scale, ask yourself what does CNL worry about on any given day? The current administration, the Congress, foreign partners, the Navy 30 years from now, operational stuff going on now, the budget, which of those is important? How do you decide on a given day or which one I'm gonna choose to be thinking about? And by the way, do senior leaders get it wrong by focusing on stuff that turns out to be less important than the stuff they should have been thinking about? Of course they do. But where did they learn to do that? When did they learn to figure that out? When do we help them learn to figure that out? So this is the War College mission. Now, if I've been successful, I want you to look at the War College mission and tell me what you see in there that sounds like what I was calling professional ethics. Anybody see anything? What did I do? Sorry. Got the language about trust and confidence, right? What is strategically minded mean in this context? Do you think? I know it's the first day, but really. Sorry? What's good for the service? What's good for the service when? Future, right, future. Expect technical and tactical competence, that goes without saying, right? Here and now, that's the operational stuff. Here's some more. Part of the mission is to help CNO do this stuff. Anybody want to weigh in verbally? I hope, is it obvious? Pretty much. Everybody be seeing stuff here? Okay, I'm seeing ahead, so I'll go, I'll proceed. To get better at doing your stuff, right? That's the ongoing improvement of professional skill that we were talking about. We heard this morning from the general, you know, we've got to think about power differently than we had in the past. It's not all just, not necessarily all hard military power. It may be partnerships, it may be capacity building, it may be all kinds of other things. We've got to be creative about how we think about what are the instruments of power that you can bring to bear. And part of your job now is to broaden your aperture from the specific platforms and tactics that you've grown up on, which are necessarily kinetic focused, to these broader strategic kind of questions about how this is gonna work. Okay, I could have written this, right? Adapting the profession to emerging challenges, ensuring the highest possible competence and maintaining the bond of trust between the military and the society that it served. This is, General Dempsey gave this testimony a little over a year ago, but I really like it. So even though it's slightly dated, I'm going to use it again. This was his Senate, our services committee testimony. Now think about that Einstein quote. Have you ever watched a group of military officers put in a room and told they were supposed to solve a problem? What happens? Immediately start trying to generate solutions. Immediately, right? There's not even a moment's hesitation, just for sure, we're right on it, right? What Dempsey is saying, try the other approach. You got an hour. What's the best division of your time? Maybe 55 minutes thinking about it is more important than clinging right into thrashing around on solutions. And by the way, we just bought you a year to do it. So enjoy it. You have more than 55 minutes. You got 10 months. He says, we don't have the ratio right. We plunge in before we reflect. And our leader development paradigms really haven't changed. We're still doing the same old stuff. But it's a mark of insanity to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. You're going to get the same result. So you got 55 minutes. You got 10 months at Newport. Welcome. And just for your information, if you go to YouTube and you put Naval War College Ethics in the search block, you will find the last five years worth of ethics symposia so on many, many topics. So if you're interested in seeing what we've done in previous symposia for almost six years now, it's all up there. So unless, are there any questions? I know it's.