 Good morning, everyone. I got one good morning. Thank you, on the front row. We've got to keep things moving right away, I suppose. That was a great talk in a good session with Barbara and General Milley. I was hoping to ask him about what he thinks of Donald Trump, saying the military's decimated all the time. But I can't tell you what he said backstage. So we're on to our next panel. This is called, What Will Define Future Conflicts, a view from the flag officers. Only one of what you can tell is there was a flag officer. The others are, he's still, that's right. The others are Sturmey that they were as well. And what we're going to hear I think is an interesting concept. So this group is partnering with Arizona State University to try to bridge that civilian military divide in an interesting way. And I'm going to let some of the panelists explain it themselves. And then we'll get into talking about how this applies to what's going on in the world today and get some questions from you all. But I'll do some brief introductions of who's up here right now for us. I have Lieutenant General Rusty Finley, retired, who was Vice Commander of Air Mobility Command, among other things. We're going to do the quick versions of these. Next to him, the man in uniform, Lieutenant General Robert Schmiddle, who is Principal Deputy Director at CATE, the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, which was mentioned in the earlier session. Previously Deputy Command Officer Aviation, going down the row. We have retired Major General Maggie Woodward, who was former Director of the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. And prior to that was Commander 17 Air Force. More importantly, had a pretty substantial role in the Libyan Air War, as we'll hear about on this panel as well. And then at the end, Lieutenant General Ben Freakley retired, who was Professor at Arizona State University, Professor of the Practice of Leadership, and a special advisor to the President of the University. Let's see. Army, previously, what's the best way to define Army? You see Commanding General, US Army Assessions Command. You ran for Benning, is that right? Before that. Yeah, at one point. 10th Mountain Division. Also commanded 10th Mountain Division. So you can go on forever with the bios of these folks. But so let me turn it over to you. And tell us about this program, this partnership with Flag Officers, what you're trying to achieve, and kick us off. Yeah, I'm excited. I just want to spend a few minutes just to give you some background on what the Flag Officer Advisory Council is at Arizona State University. And it, I think, goes along with the innovative nature of where Arizona State University's gone with Dr. Crowe's guidance and leadership. But it's, we've been in existence for about two years now. Kind of, Dr. Crowe and Ben Freakley were the guys who kind of put it together. But we're about 12, a dozen so, mostly retired general officers that come together three to four, five times a year, or as required to actually advise Dr. Crowe personally on some pretty complex problems and how higher education can play a part in solving what Kevin talked about here, the growing divide in our country between the military and the civilian sectors. And I don't have to tell this audience, I don't think where that's gone. But the fact that less than 1.5% of the nation has served since 9-11, by its nature, that makes that divide grow. To that end, what we're doing, I think, is some fairly interesting stuff and, I think, some important stuff. And I'll just give you a couple of examples. Arizona State University has established a public service academy. What this does is, I hope, and we're going to help them reach this end, is interest and gain some traction to get the college era of this time wanting to devote their talents to public service. And it's just getting off the ground. Actually, Lieutenant General John Goodman is chairing our working group on that. I'm on that working group. And next Friday, we'll be meeting again with Brett Hunt, who's been chartered to stand this up. But this is a pretty exciting thing, I think, to bring these young folks, give them a little bit of exposure to what public service is all about, and hopefully get them motivated toward that end. As she also has a global security initiative, the Flag Officer Advisory Council is helping with. And this is an initiative that basically is designed to tackle what some people call the wicked problems of the world these days. Things like cybersecurity, things like climate change, and et cetera. We've got a group of Flag Officers that are certainly going to help them try and move that agenda forward. And the final thing I'll mention is our part with New America and ASU in the Center for the Future War. And that's the reason we're here today. Certainly, near and dear to our heart, to talk about complex problems that, as we look forward, to make sure that the security challenges that we're going to face have an aspect of influence and trying to influence those and make a difference. We've written a paper. The name of the paper is It Called Action, Driving Change to Maximize the Strength of Our National Power. It's out there. Rooster Schmiddle, Lieutenant General Schmiddle is going to talk a little bit about that here at the outset. And then all of us are going to give you some experiences we've had that drove parts and pieces of what this paper, what generated the paper. So Rooster, over to you. OK, well, thank you very much. So as we think about the, we came together to think about the future of war and to think about what we could do as a panel of Flag Officers with our experience, what you're going to see and read in the paper are discussions about the need for strategic vision about the need for intergovernmental approaches and interagency kinds of things, sort of a holistic, a whole government look at the world. And what I would like to do over the next couple of minutes is just sort of set the stage for you about why we think this is so very different and why it needs a different approach. And then each of the panelists will give you some of their experiences and some of the details of how we applied this. So the first thing I would tell you is that, and these are my beliefs, some of them have come from Michelle Foucault and Giles DeLuce, but they're effectively, I think, a very accurate way of looking at the future. So war, I would suggest, it has become an internal institution in the state. War is no longer just raw battle. It's no longer just violence. It is actually institutionalized in the states to the extent that I think we could more accurately talk about inverting Klausowitz's dictum that war is policy by another means. I would suggest that it is in fact just the opposite, that policy is war by another means, that we are in this constant state of conflict, of war. And it affects and permeates everything that we do in society. So if you think for a minute about the language that we use, right, and Wittgenstein is very good on this and he said, the limits of my world are the limits of my language. So what do we talk about? We talk about the war on drugs. We talk about the war on cancer. We talk about trade wars. That, the use of those metaphors informs the way that we view warfare as something that I would suggest is not another. It's not something else that we do besides peace. It is the defining characteristic. And I think along those lines, it's important to understand that the dichotomy between Victor and vanquished is not clear. It's not stark. It's certainly, if you look back in history, you would find great reason to be skeptical of that. At the very least, it's temporal, it's localized. What we ought to be talking about is not who won or lost, which is kind of the conversation that I think it doesn't really add value to this discussion about the societal changes that are occurring. But what we ought to think about is who became stronger or weaker because of this kind of interaction. And it is, in fact, the nature, I would suggest, of the relations both between states and within states. So for example, here, where does world, an example of how it permeates society, it leaves its mark on our society through the intermediary of the military institutions. So we are the manifestation of how society views warfare in the extent that taxes and recruitment and the things that society is required to do in order for us to be able to have, to be a military and to perform those missions. The downside, I would suggest, or the danger is that we tend sometimes to focus too much on tactics and platforms and we don't focus enough on the larger sort of holistic strategic issues and the critical thinking that goes behind answering the question, so in order to do what? Or so what comes next after I do X? How do I translate that particular tactical action into some kind of operational or strategic end state? So along those lines, I think that as we look forward to how we would think about warfare between here and into the future, I think it's important to understand that we have entered a society of control, right? That everything that we do is controlled, a 24-hour news cycle, the ubiquity of our staying connected on iPhones, et cetera, et cetera, that the important thing in the future is not gonna be a barrier, the physical barrier that keeps you out of another enclosed space, it's gonna be the code and the computer that runs that barrier. So we've gone from having bureaucracies that are entrenched that are where the power flows from to the power flowing from bits and pieces and bits of RF energy and the quote, normalization of surveillance. And if you think about that as a means of control and the last thing I would leave you with is that as we look forward, it seems to me that what this portends is that military action, warfare, societal organization at large, we ought to be striving for things like higher transaction rates for more rapid turnover, for continuous modulation as opposed to discontinuous modulation. For instance, the way we plan wars in phases, phase zero, phase one, phase two, phase three, that going forward, we ought to be thinking about this in terms of a continuum, if you will, of conflict, that there is no time of peace between this. We are in a state of war and to quote Gersimov, it is literally, wars in the future will not be declared. They will simply be an increase in the level of violence so that there's this sort of low level level, if you will, of violence that is going on all the time. So that's kind of the mindset, the thing that framed the way we were thinking about this. So now I will turn it over to the other panelists to give you some of their experiences and insights that would relate to how we got to this notion about a holistic approach, about the need to break down the silos of agencies, wherever they happen to be, and this continuous approach and look at the way we think about strategy going forward. Thank you, General. Before we get to the examples though, let's clarify for the audience a little bit about the paper you mentioned and your recommendations. So, there are three recommendations in them and if I recall, one, you want more strategic thinking, you want greater focus on the whole of government approach and breaking those silos, as you said, but also the whole of society. That's correct. So let's, if you can think with those three pieces in mind and give your examples, we'll come back to some of those solutions, including you guys that said, putting a lot more focus and power at the National Security Council to empower that group to become a, that strategic thinking body that you're arguing is missing right now. Well, I think Libya is a really good example in that it's easy to see the political quandary that somebody would be in, as we're looking at tens of thousands potentially being massacred in Benghazi and our requirement to protect those individuals and balancing that against the fact that we're already engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan and we're stretched pretty thin and our country, our nation is war weary. How do we balance those two competing demands and the pressure coming from our European allies to help support their commitment to Libya? And I can understand the compromises necessary when those are thrown out, but the problem that we see is that when you compromise, you can't compromise on the strategy. And the strategy, I believe in the case of Libya at the time was compromised. When we're given lead from behind and be prepared to hand over to NATO as the strategy to plan to, that becomes, that's not a strategic vision and that is one of the big points that we think is absolutely critical when we're gonna engage military force. I think sometimes in Libya, as we came out of that conflict and we met our tactical goals, one of the things concerns I had is that our joint force airmen do such an incredible job or so talented that they make the application of air power look low risk, easy, and relatively inexpensive and in that case it's a little bit too easy to apply. But I think we always need to keep in mind that when you're applying military force, you really need to realize that that is a significant catalyst for change and you have to plan and you have to have in mind what you're gonna do with the chaos that follows that. And I think that's where we're left with in Libya right now. We took the tactical tasks that we were given, we asked for more strategic guidance, that wasn't really forthcoming. So in the absence of that, the military will always fill in the gaps. We did what we needed to. We were told we're not seeking regime change and in fact we were given specific orders to not attack certain targets because that looked too much like it would be seeking regime change. But we always have to plan for a longer view. And when we ask the question what then, we need an answer when we're making our strategic decisions. And in this case, I think that wasn't really the case. We wouldn't get the answer to the question what then. And I think what we're seeing currently in Libya, unfortunately, is the chaos there is a little bit of a response to that. You can also roll in the other two pieces of what we talked about, the whole of government, the whole of society solutions that would be necessary if you're gonna commit to something where we're gonna apply that military force. Both of those other two principles have to be applied. And in this case, I think because we were trying so hard to do this with minimal, as we said, minimal involvement to lead from behind, those weren't applied and we were left with the chaos that follows. Really quick overview I know, and I'll be happy to talk to questions afterwards for more detail, but I'll hand it off now to General Freakley to talk about. I'll go next. Okay, Iraq. I was in Iraq, 2005, 2006, and then went on to SENTCOM for two years after that. And despite our better efforts, I think what, and this is kind of the statement of the obvious, because most of the folks in this room have studied it, so it's not gonna come as a surprise to you, but trying to get the whole government approach to solve the problems of Iraq and move forward was very, very difficult. And it was difficult from a resourcing standpoint. We had the lines of operation. We had a governance line of operation and economic line of operation, a security line of operation, a communications line of operation. Military took care of the security line of operation. That was not a problem applying the resources to that. But it's like Maggie said and others have said, you always need to ask the question, then what? So when we stabilize Iraq, then what? And the country's not gonna move forward unless they've got a representative or a functioning government. And trying to bring American power and forces, i.e. other departments in to try and help. It wasn't that they weren't willing to do it, although in some cases maybe that was the case. They just didn't have the wherewithal and we didn't have the wherewithal as a nation to make that happen. And it's still lingering with us today, isn't it? So a whole government approach, some way to work on those mechanisms and processes to apply this vast power we've got in this nation and all facets of our government to the crisis of the day or the problems of the day or the war of the day is something that I think deserves, it's had thought before, it deserves more thought. Deserves more thought and hopefully some action that could drive us to do a better job of that. And we've got a lot of lessons learned that we can apply. You just heard Libya, we can talk about Iraq all day. Ben's got a few that he wants to relay now as well. Well, I had the opportunity and the honor to serve as a combined joint task force commander in Afghanistan from 2006, 2007. My wingman Chris Miller sitting right there, the command of the air component element of that. And our challenge was in our paper, we're calling for a return to strategic vision and getting back to articulating strategic in-states by the National Command Authority. And we were operating along like Iraq with some lines of operation, reconstruction, governance and security, but to what end, what's next if we achieve that, what would follow to General Smiddle's point about what's the framework in thinking about what you're trying to achieve. And this body, New America, Arizona State University, the media members and the great thinkers that are in this room, we need to drive our country back into thinking about strategic vision and develop from our society strategic thinkers. Our point on a whole of government is we have a great capability, diplomatic, politically, informational, economically and militarily to make change, to be the disruptor that General Woodard talked about. But we have yet to, since really you could argue Desert Shield, Desert Storm, we have not blended and used all elements of our power in a coherent fashion to achieve a strategy. We have not kept political pressure or economic pressure or even informational pressure on our adversaries. We created the social media ideas, but they're being used by Vladimir Putin and Baghdadi far better than we are. And part of it goes to if it takes nine years to get a pistol approved, how long does it take a message to be able to be released by the United States government as a tweet? A lot. The National Security Council today is 400 people, 400. So our challenge in Afghanistan was we did not apply whole of government, the 21 USAID folks that were in our joint task force, 17 of them were contractors, and didn't know how to apply aid power in concert with military and strategic objectives. Our diplomacy, again, did not keep pressure on the region. So we're calling for a return to a whole of government solutions, a return to reaching out to our societies, getting like-minded universities like Arizona State University into the fight. Nangarh province in Afghanistan has 342 growing days a year. Wouldn't it be useful if a land grant university provided agriculture advice to Nangarh that grew longer and employed more men and women and kept them out of joining the Taliban? What a good idea. But we couldn't get that done, although we tried. And so what we're driving towards revision of the National Security Act and revision of the National Security Council, if Nichols Goldwater could compel, compel the joint forces to work together, how can we have legislation and an administration that rewrites the National Security Act, reworks the National Security Council to a light, fast-moving, strategic organization that provides strategic policy options to the president, which then coordinates those options to fruition. There have been calls for this, but we're calling for a driving change and pressure on the government to reform the National Security Council and bring whole of government and whole society together to reach our strategic instates that we have to get back to. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack here. And I'm, so. I think if I- I want to talk more about pistols, but Mark told me he covered that, so I wouldn't allow it to. I think you'd like to have the money and time that they've been afforded to pistols to do some of these programs. So let's recap. This is an era of constant conflict now. There is no more peacetime, no more phase zero. It'd be great to have a whole lot of non-military help to achieve the objective of basically putting down conflicts, ending them, creating peace. It's not only great. If we're going to bring our military size down, which we're doing, the other parts of the government cannot be downsized. They've got to be enlarged. The military has to be applied to be the disruptor that Maggie talked about. And then state and others are going to have to come in with USID and be the what's next phase because the military is not going to be able to do it anymore. So let me tell you what I heard. And then I want to start spreading out to questions. You know, start Libyan in Iraq, the idea that it would be nice if there was an end state beyond that. I've heard in the last few weeks, several, or the last few months, several of either the chiefs or the chairman himself saying, we could go into Iraq today. We could go into Libya and hit the camps today. It'd be great though, if we had a government ready for us at the backside and we were doing it at their invitation. We want the diplomatic side to get Libyan in order first. So when they're ready, at their invitation, or at least with a nice blessing, then we'll go in and take care of business and come out because we don't want to be there. General Neller himself said, I don't want to be in Iraq one day more than I have to. We could do it, but I don't want to do that anymore. I think one of the things when I was in Iraq, one of the things we always said was, we want the Iraqis to want it as much as we want it for them. And I think that's probably some of what he was getting in. So here's the question. The problem is that, I'd like my girlfriend to have the same attitude, but you can't force them to want you, right? So, isn't this a very US-centric way of solving the Middle East problems? I'll just throw that out there for one second. What I was gonna get to was the idea that the US needs much greater coordination and resources from the non-military side, from the diplomacy, from the flints. I came to Washington in 1998, and I've heard this every year since 1998. And I remember at a point there was a time where it was a Democratic Congress, it was Barack Obama in office, and Hillary Clinton at the State Department, and Bob Gates at the Pentagon begging for this. And not much happened. And at that moment, if nothing could happen, why do you think you're gonna get traction now? Where do you start? Do you start at the top? Does it have to be the new administration, the new president, someone in that White House makes their priority? Or is it on the bottom, or some combination, I guess is what you're gonna tell me, of getting the American public involved somehow? How do you do that with an all-volunteer force? Getting a whole of government better involved, changing political ideas, preparing for either Clinton, president, Trump, president, whatever the options are that are out there today. What's your plan of attack now? Where do you start? Well, the start is what we're doing today, I believe, is we really wanna raise the discourse. We wanna raise the level of understanding about how important the strategic vision and that whole of government piece is, and that obviously it's not something we're gonna achieve overnight just because we say it needs to be done, but we do think we need to talk at a higher level, and we really need to think in the long-term rather than be reactive. We need to be proactive and go back to the old days of having a very broad, overarching strategy that carries across the globe, and I'll hand it on. It's gotta be in forums like this, it's gotta come from America, but it also has to be pressure on our Congress to create a Nichols Goldwater-like Act for a whole of government solution. We've gotta go ask the veteran members of the Congress, were they happy? Were they satisfied as they served in the military? Did they achieve the strategic goals that, or did they see the strategic goals achieved that they were tactically trying to influence, or would they like to see change? They can help drive the change. We've gotta get the nation re-involved. If we could be the nation that were the architects for the Second World War, if we could be the nation that used a team to counter the Cold War, if we could be the nation that, if you told me as a major, that on my left flank would be a French division, on my right flank would be an Egyptian division, and Desert Shield, I'd say, that's not gonna happen, but it happened because we used a whole of government approach in bringing others into it. It's not a U.S. centric, it should be, but we have to have our whole house in order first, but it's gotta be pressure from the top and the bottom to create change, and not just having a good idea, because people do write about it, and then that's the article for the day, and they walk away, there's gotta be constant pressure to create the change. I guess what I'd say is I live in Phoenix, Arizona. Lucky you. Since 1998, most of the people in Phoenix, Arizona haven't been reading about this, haven't been hearing about this. Certainly inside the Beltway here. It is a regular topic of conversation. I think what, and again, not to be too polyandish about it, but I think starting at the grassroots level, something like the Public Service Academy that ASU has got going in trying to get some of these young men and women that aren't inclined to serve in uniform, but could be possibly interested in helping to solve these kind of problems. Is it a tomorrow kind of solution? Probably not, but if we don't start talking about it, if we don't start working at it, in forums like this, and then take it outside the Beltway to some of our public universities, such that we get some of the young folks that are coming up and inclined to tackle some of these kind of problems, we're gonna be stuck in the mud, we've been stuck in from 1998, and we're gonna go to another conflict, and we're gonna have this vast array of resources and power across this government that is gonna be applied in a disjointed fashion. So I think maybe if we understand that there are some sort of seismic things that are happening in the way societies view governance and the way we view warfare, and perhaps the way that we're thinking about the military application of power is in need of revision. That the fact that we can apply force from one side to another in sort of a direct linear fashion, maybe we ought to think about that. Maybe we ought to understand that part of what we're talking about here with the Disconnective Society is a result of the all-volunteer force. It's a result of some decisions that we made about the way we're gonna construct the military, and what we expect the military to do for the country. And so we are seeing the results of some of that. I think too that understanding that there is, in fact, there are some very big changes of foot in terms of the way that societies view their populations, the way that states interact, and make no mistake about it, a state is a thing like ISIL. It has state-like behaviors. It has control-like behaviors. And maybe backing away from this thing and thinking less conventionally about how to apply the conventional things that we have, the platforms and the tactics that we have today, and to think about coming at this from a different standpoint, which is why I made the comments. It's not just computer stuff, although my time at Cyber Command has convinced me that there is some there there, but it's this whole notion of the way we think about planning, the transaction rates, the constant turnover, that kind of thing is, and just trying to get more people to understand that so that when we go into things like this, with our eyes open at least, famously General Dempsey used to say that he used to love quoting Einstein, who said if we had a problem, that how would he solve the problem? He knew the world was gonna end in an hour. He said, well, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about it, and then the last five minutes I'd act. Well, I would suggest that we do just the opposite. We immediately start to act, and then 55 minutes later, we go, holy cow, the world's gonna end in five minutes, and we're not there yet, so. Oh, then what? Yeah, then what? So it's kind of those things, and to Ben's point, it's talking about it in forums like this, but I think it's our willingness in uniform to be more open and more unconventional about the way we see all the pieces of the society and of national power coming together. Well, we're at under 10 minutes, so I see some hands, and we have a good amount of hands. Excellent. I saw this one in the front. First, get a microphone. Do you have a microphone? It's coming up in the middle right here. That's right. Thank you very much. Gordon Bayer, Army and State Department, retired. In my view, the State Department is not particularly capable, and worse, not particularly willing to support America's wars with reference to the National Security Council, staff and policy formulation. The Deputies Committee meetings these days usually have more people from the National Security Policy staff at them than all other agencies combined. I would appreciate comments on my observations. Here's what I'd say with respect to the State Department and my experience in Iraq. Some of what you said is my experience was true. Secretary Rice at the time said, hey, we're gonna send our best and brightest from the State over to help solve this governance problem and help the Iraqis move forward. We got some really great folks. Most of them were 30 to 35 years old. Not very experienced, but really motivated. Would have been nice to have, I mean, we had seasoned Mideast diplomats there, but they needed help from other seasoned diplomats to solve the big problems we were trying to solve with the Iraqi government and help them work their way through it. Most of those people, unlike the military, when they told me, you're going to Iraq and you need to be there in two weeks, those people got said, we'd like you to go to Iraq and they said, I don't think so. There was some of that going on. Now, I say this right off the get go. The people that we got over there were motivated and great individuals trying to help solve the problems. The ones that came. We ought to distinguish between the functions that we want the State Department to perform from the agency itself. I think that's probably a healthy thing for us to do to understand better. What is it that we wanted and expected them to do in terms of the functions with regard to the larger operation and then deal with the agency? Is this, I mean, I don't disagree with what you're saying, but it just may be a way for us to try to get our hands or our head around what it is that we want from them. We ought to be able to articulate that with us in uniform. Part of the National Security Council reform that we would advocate for is a great reduced, much smaller, faster, more agile, more adaptive, when General Smittle talks about transaction rate, they ought to have a high transaction rate of getting things done. As I said in my remarks, having 400 at the NSC now is a little bit bureaucratic. There are a lot of hands, but we have one hand that gets precedent here. Emery is dying to remark on what was asked. I can imagine what she's gonna tell us. Yes, I am. So I do feel a need to set the record straight with respect to the state in Iraq. It is important to remember that Paul Bremmer tore up the State Department's plans for Iraq, right? It's not that, and it doesn't mean that everything went perfectly and it doesn't mean there aren't problems. There are, but that was as much a problem between a political appointee and the State Department as it was between the State Department and the military. I just wanna remind everyone of that. Agree. Okay, but also I did wanna just say one thing because I wrote about this recently. I was asked, what is the single, if you had to make one change in national security, what would you make? And I totally agree with you about the size of the Security Council staff. But I also think, and I welcome comment, but the most important change I would have liked to have seen was the National Security Council designating a lead agency on every initiative. Because what happens is they convene and you meet, but nobody's in the lead and then they don't have bandwidth to convene again. And then we all collude on not doing anything until they finally get around to calling us back. And they don't wanna designate a lead, but ultimately you gotta say somebody's in charge. No, we think just like Nichols Goldwater established combatant commands that didn't exist before and gave them authority, power, and responsibility, we would hold the National Security Council needs power, authority, and responsibility, not only internationally, but domestically, to bring in the Council of Economic Advisors, to bring in the Homeland Security Council. We threw $80 million at Flint, Michigan. Is solving the water there, which is tactical, hugely important because these people are suffering, are citizens, but is that the beginning of our infrastructure failure in potable water for our population, or is it just one and done? But where's the strategic view of our infrastructure and where we invest as a country and how do we get our academic institutions, think tanks, and others behind thinking about this so we mobilize, hold up society, and solve it and move forward. But the NSC should be the coordinating and authoritative entity that provides the advice to the President, gets the policy approved, and then overwatches it, getting enacted. Okay, this gentleman here, and I'll say within five minutes so let's try to keep it brief and maybe we can cycle through a few more questions. I'm Harlan Oman with the Atlantic Council and Business Executives for National Security, and I commend your noble effort, but it's not gonna work in my judgment for a very simple reason. The issue is not a continuous war, it's the change in politics. The diffusion of power has not only gotten rid of the Westphalian system, but it applies here in Washington, and the size of the National Security Council staff, 8400 is close to 800, quite frankly. Unless you can deal with the change in politics in which White Houses have become successively more controlling because they're untrusting of the various bureaucracies and so forth, you have to understand the change in politics to be able to get your message through, and I would just ask the panel to consider as you try to do this. Virtually every other think tank in town is doing the same thing. Unless you understand how politics has really changed and has changed dramatically, unfortunately these messages are not gonna get through and the nation will suffer in my judgment. Thank you. So, Harlan, you're absolutely right about the control issue. You know that societies of control, which I would suggest we are evolving into, control by individuation as opposed to mass, right? So you don't have a mass of people in a factory anymore. You have individuals that are on merit pay, that kind of thing. So that is a way of control. There's no question about it. You drive down and you do the kinds of things that we were just talking about. Why is there not a lead agency? Well, because there's a lot of individuals that you can control better in terms of trying to get that message out. And I think too that we are not, naive enough to think this is gonna change overnight. What we were trying to do is to pose some issues that for people to think about, ultimately, you're absolutely correct. It ultimately is a political, it's an organization that supports the president. But we just thought there were ways we could do that more efficiently and effectively. So the question really may be, how do you operate inside of a control society now that you've recognized that you're there? How does that deal with a bureaucracy when it runs into a bureaucracy from a legacy society, if you will. Well, we're at the end of our time to wrap. So I'll thank the panelists, so just recap the idea that, again, with constant conflict, reshaping the government, reshaping society, getting more folks involved, not to mention it's 2016, and trying to engage everyone in the political process as well. I wasn't surprised to hear that this is the paper that this panel came up with. I'm a reporter on the Executive Editor of Defense One, by the way, and thanks to the New America Foundation, we're one of the media sponsors. And you can read all the future of war columns on defenseone.com, that's my plug. But I'll go back to what I said in the beginning. This is bubbling up from the services, from the four stars. I've heard the comment on the Marine Corps, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley said it before, others have too, that boy would be great if the end state was a little more known before we send our guys in, in places like Libya, which is bubbling in the news again right now, or, you know, Mosul's fine because the government of Iraq is there, but we all know Raqqa's next, and there is no government of Syria there to deal with yet, so what comes next? The services are asking for something more from the government, and we'll see if this time around they get a response. So thank you to the panel, thank you to New America for joining us today, and have a good day, everyone.