 We have up on Holley, and when this event stops, if you would like to run down to 1803, we have actor, comedian Rob Riegel doing a meet and greet, so we hope you stop by 1803 and meet Rob before he ends his meet and greet. We appreciate what the Association of United States Army does for the Army, the total Army, through educating, informing, and connecting, as we see right here at AUSA's annual meeting. Thank you for being part of this program. Now I will turn the floor over to the president of the Women in Military Service at American Memorial Foundation, one of AUSA's distinguished senior fellows, and I'd like to say also my friend, Chief Warrant Officer Five retired, Phyllis Wilson. Thank you, Pam. And for anybody that's standing in the back from where I'm up here, there are lots of open seats, and this is a two-hour panel, so please, if you're looking for a place to sit, take that opportunity. Yes, the Association of the United States Army is proud to provide forums like this one throughout the year that broaden the knowledge base on Army professionals and those who support our Army. AUSA will amplify the U.S. Army's narrative to audiences inside the Army and help to further the Association's mission to be the voice for the Army, support for the soldier. Of course, we cannot do this alone. AUSA relies on its members to help tell the Army's story and to support our soldiers and their families. A strong membership base is vitally important for our advocacy efforts in Congress, the Pentagon, and the Defense Industrial Base, and to the public in communities across the country through AUSA's 122 chapters within the United States and eight countries overseas. If you are an AUSA member, thank you. And for those of you Army professionals who are not yet members of your professional association, we encourage you to join AUSA by visiting the membership booth, number 307, in exhibit hall A, or you can sign up online at ausa.org slash membership. Now, it's my distinct honor to introduce to you our first speaker, the Chief of Staff of the Army, General James C. McConville, sir. Well, thank you and thanks for inviting me to say a couple opening words. And those that know me, I am very, very passionate about people in the Army. And we are in a war for talent. And when I think about the Army, it is people. They're our greatest strength. They're our most important weapon system and every soldier, every family member, every department of the Army civilian and every soldier for life matters. And as we take a look at ourselves, we're in a very challenging recruiting environment. We've talked about those type of things. But we have opportunities to offer young men and women, unlike any other place. And so what we wanna do is make sure we're taking advantage of the talent that we have in the military. We have to retain not only soldiers, but families. And so we have to be very, very aggressive about that. And we have to manage talent differently. You know, at least I have three kids that are millennials that serve in the Army. So I get pretty candid feedback on, you know, how well we're doing. But, you know, they want us to compete for their talents. They want us to recognize that they're not interchangeable parts in an industrial age system. And I believe the young people today, they want purpose and they want us to recognize their talents and they want us to give an opportunity for them to grow. And the Army's absolutely the right place to do that. And, you know, you've got a great panel here. They come all walks of life. They get some great insights. But what we have to do right now, one thing that I appreciate having a recruiting crisis near Army, we're calling on that right now and we're coming out and saying that is, this is when you can make change. This is when you can do innovative things to change the organization for the future. If we're doing things in the personnel business that are 10, 20, 30, or 40 years old, then, you know, we're not moving forward. And we need to make that change. And we need to go out into the civilian sector and show young men and women why they should join the United States Army. You know, right now, 83% of the young men and women that come into the Army are coming from military family members. 44% come from JROTC. So we need to expose young men and women to the opportunities in the military. And only 23% are qualified to come in. And the Secretary and I have been very clear and I wanna remain clear, we are not gonna lower standards. To me, quality is more important than quantity. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna invest in American youth and we're gonna give them an opportunity. I think some of you are aware that we've set up a future soldier prep course at Fort Jackson. And I think that may be the way we do business in the future. We've already had about 1,000 kids come through that process and it gives them an opportunity to beef up their ASVAP scores to get into physical condition and the initial results are very, very impressive. 75% of the kids that are coming that were barely meeting the standards are doing extremely well. The other thing I was really surprised to see, not only meeting the standards, some of these kids are really exceeding the standards. They've finally been given a structured, disciplined framework to learn and also to work out. And they're losing two to 6% body fat and they're up in their ASVAP scores. And then when they're going into initial military training, as some of you know, they're actually being moved into leadership positions, which for a lot of these young men and women, they probably haven't ever had that opportunity. So it may be the future for us. And the numbers, you know, you might go to the assessment course and that may be a way we give a lot of people an opportunity to serve. And then quite frankly, if you're not fit for the military, the army's not for everybody. And you know, it's hard to tell until you get young men and women there if it's the right thing for them. But you know, before we invest a lot of time and resources in them, is we give them a chance to come and try out. So we're going to do that. The other thing we have to do, and this is for our recruiters, is take advantage of the technology. You know, we're still doing a lot of things in an industrial age manner. Our recruiters are spending too much time doing paperwork and we've got to do a better job of that. And we've got some systems that are coming into place. And then once we have soldiers in the army, we have to retain them. We're investing in them. And what we want to do is manage them by their knowledge, skills, and behavior. And even, which is blasphemous, the army is understand what their preferences are and maybe even let them go do what they want to do if the job fits that. So we're going to do that too. And I just talked to Kaki today. I had a chance to talk to the CEO and Ipsay is coming, you know? And that's going to help us, you know, move into the 21st century when it comes to managing talent. And the thing about talent management is, you know, we basically manage officers and NCOs by two variables. This is their rank and this is their MOS. That's not the future. We need to know all their knowledge, skills, and behavior. And one of the best examples I've seen of that is a young specialist medic down at the software factory who codes at the PhD level. We would never know that by his MOS or his grade. And we have so many talented soldiers, especially in the National Guard and Reserve that bring incredible talents to us. And we got to be able to manage those and we got to be able to play them in that position. So I'm excited about what we're doing in talent management. We're going to compete. We're going to be the best at managing talent. So everyone wants to serve with us. Everyone wants to stay and everyone wants to join the army. And I look forward to hearing having this panel. They're going to give you all the answers and they're going to tell you how to make this happen. So thank you. Thank you, sir. Now I would like to introduce our panelists to you. First, I'm going to be going from your left to right. General Gary Ambrido, the commanding general of the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command. Ms. Julie Boland, the United States Chair and EY America's Managing Partner. Major General Johnny K. Davis, the commanding general of the United States Army Recruiting Command. Ms. Stephanie Miller, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for military personnel policy. And Dr. Bruce Orvis, senior behavioral scientist of the RAND Corporation. At this time, each of the panelists will take approximately three to five minutes for opening remarks. We'll start with General Brito. Hey, thank you, Chief Wilson for the opportunity. And I'm sure I can probably speak for many of the panel, all of the panel members as well, that we share the same passion that our chief has for the people in our Army. And I would argue and suggest that modernization of our talent management systems and how we manage those three important pillars of end strength, recruiting, class of sessions, attrition and retention, deserve as much focus and modernization as it does in modernizing our equipment in the Army, whether it's a new tank, new helicopter, what have you. And without that, we really won't, but we'll continually fight this war on talent. And the chief mentioned many of the environmental factors that we're talking to. So one month into command, very excited about being part of that and helping to manage the people for our Army as we continue to have the best Army that our nation needs to continue to continue to fight our nation's wars. And again, very important. The chief did mention a near term challenge and I prefer to flip that into an opportunity that we're having in recruiting and it's no secret that we did not meet our recruiting numbers this year and a direct impact on our end strength. But we're still a very combat ready Army. We're gonna turn this ship in an opportunity for us. And I won't get into some of the other comments that may be made by following our panel members, but lots of opportunity to do some innovative thinking on both how we run our recruiting enterprise internal to TREDoc and very thankful for the assistance of the bigger Army as well. And I'll just highlight a couple of things that are helping us in the recruiting lane. I'll talk a little bit about the 21st century talent management that the Army has been doing for a couple of years and will continue to do as we modernize as well, then turn it over to a fellow panel member very cognizant of the time. But I would like to mention the full Army really DOD support to turn in this recruiting challenge into a very effective opportunity. And one thing we've started doing just recently will continue to do is alignment with our fellow commands that are supporting TREDoc. Specifically, I'll give a couple of examples and work with my battle buddy in Force Calm where he's aligned the corps and the divisions with the five recruiting brigades, plus one, our medical brigade as well, across the nation so that we can showcase our Army, educate those who have a propensity to serve or even those who more importantly don't have a propensity to serve to include their parents, principals, and others to show how great this Army is and the 150 plus jobs and opportunities that it can offer. That's with Force Calm doing the same with the Centers of Excellence across all of TREDoc, my battle buddies in USOC and USAPAC as well to reach all of the states and territories and the future soldiers that may want to join the Army and increase that propensity to serve. And once joining the Army and the Chief highlighted the future soldier prep course, all great things to boost and give additional opportunities for academic proficiency and physical proficiency as well, which feed into the high quality of every single soldier and leader and our civilian professionals in some aspects as well and that there'll be no wavering on the quality. And very quickly in a 21st century talent management, I know this is not new and I would offer a team, this management is not only limited to our military uniform, we have over 280,000 civilian professionals supporting an Army as well and all these initiatives are very well nested with our Army campaign plan as they should. So as the Chief mentioned, utilizing KESBs to help manage the knowledge, skills, behaviors and preferences of our leaders in the Army can highlight a few great programs where over 3,500 have gone through our command assessment program of which has been tailored for command sergeant majors as well and some of the civilians work in the acquisition corps. Chaplains and others have experienced it to identify the very best leader who deserves the privilege of standing in front of those young men and women and civilians that serve our great military and that's just but one aspect of it. The marketplace and others, again, giving options, giving talent, giving preferences to the talent in that we're competing with the civilian sector and we need those great quality soldiers, leaders, civilians in the Army as well. So I look forward to entertaining your questions throughout the day and again, very honored to be on this panel, thank you. Julie, before you jump in, I wanted to make sure everybody in the audience knows this is gonna be a question and answer heavy forum, so start thinking about your questions because as soon as they finish all of their opening remarks, if anybody wants to come up to the microphone and start asking the questions, we'll be ready for you and if you don't have any, we do have a few that I will get started to get your collective thoughts flowing and be ready to answer those questions so go ahead and down, Julie. Great, well first of all, thank you all for inviting me to be here. It is a pleasure, I've been looking forward to it. I actually did quite a bit of research and talked to our EY team getting prepared for this and I will tell you it is a pleasure to see how parallel our values are for our organization at EY as well as the Armies. In addition, some of the challenges and opportunities that we face, so thank you, I'm looking forward to learning from everyone up here and sharing some best practices. So let me just start and I think, we'll probably all say something similar but it is an incredibly dynamic labor market. Ever since the pandemic, a couple statistics we've heard, there are two jobs out there for every unemployed person. So people who are not working have multiple choices and we've seen, at least within our organization, a lot of change and a lot of turn because of those choices. And so it's required us and a lot of our clients to step back and really say, okay, how do we do things differently? How do we reevaluate? How do we pull apart? How do we understand what the different generations are? How do we be adaptable and how do we make sure that we innovate around recruiting and retention? So just to level set a little bit, EY, you'll see some of the parallelisms. So EY is a $45 billion global organization. We have about 365,000 people around the world. Last year alone, we got 4 million applications and we hired 160,000 people, 62% over the prior year. Now, we had to fill in some gaps. We had to fill in some gaps because we had lost people to some attrition. But the order of magnitude by any stretch of the imagination is incredible. And so as we kind of were looking, we're saying, what are the things we actively did and that we actually really changed? And so if we think about recruiting a retention because retention is just as critically important, really saying, making sure in recruiting, we had a multifaceted approach that we were looking and really sourcing a pipeline of candidates who had the skill sets and capabilities and competencies at the standards we need. So how did we multifaceted? How do we break down barriers? And how do we think about resourcing people differently? And then in regards to retention, making sure from a compensation of benefits, that's one thing and it's important to be market leading, at least market competitive. But also what's the culture you're trying to create? What's the culture of care? How do we care for our people and make them feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves? And so it kind of goes to your point on purpose. How do we bring our purpose to life? And so our purpose at EY is called building a better working world. And that really resonates. The average age of our workforce is 28. So we've got a multi-generational, but we're also attracting in our brand is we think about that our clients, like our clients on campus and our clients in high schools, how do we brand ourselves? And so as we think through that retention, it's bringing that purpose, how do we foster a culture around diversity and inclusiveness? And that's part of who we are as a firm. So I'm looking forward to the questions because I think we can go into some very tactical details on how we do that. But I just wanted to kind of share the complexity of our organization. Strategic talent is probably the number one thing that we talk about. And I think similar to the comments that you made earlier, the same thing with our clients. We spend a lot of time with the C-suite and this tends to be the number one strategic matter that they're facing. So I look forward to speaking to all of you and hearing from everyone else. Thanks. Well, well, first of all, thanks chief. My name is Johnny Davidson. I am your U.S. Army recruiting commander and I've been in command six days. And, you know, I love it because I think every day I get a lot of folks who want to help me and I appreciate that. And I'm sure by the end of today I'll figure it all out. But hey, let me tell you what I see from the trenches. So I have a wonderful, exceptional team of recruiters who are stationed all around this world. They're not all in the United States. Every zip code has a U.S. Army recruiter who is responsible for it. In addition to that overseas, Japan, Micronesia, Guam, you name it, U.S. Army recruiters, wherever they are, that's the U.S. Army. And I've listened to them. And I'll tell you, and based off what we've seen, there's a lot of headwinds out there and they're seeing it. These men and women are seeing it firsthand. Given the civilian job market, as you mentioned, ma'am, you're absolutely right, it's tough. Qualification requirements, negative perceptions, fear of harmful behaviors. But let me share with you what I'm hearing from the recruiters and when they get out as they begin to talk with their communities, which they haven't really had access to in two and a half years. So think about that. Now they're reintroducing the United States Army back into the communities. But what they've said to me is, sir, most importantly, the public does not know our army. And so I need to share that with you because that's coming from the trenches. I also asked each and every one of these men and women within the command, I had eight simple questions. Hey, if you were the commanding general, let me know what you would change or tell me about your living conditions, wherever you are. Remember, these are sergeants and their families who lived on an installation, selected for recruiting, and now are in Bozeman, Montana. Think about that. So after two or three PCSs, now they're remote, they don't have commissary, they don't have a PX, they don't have the hospital. So everything they have is remote to include paying copays, tolls. I can go on and on. So this is impacting all of these wonderful men and women. They are us and they're out there representing the United States Army. So I sent out an eight-question survey within 10 days, I received 44,000 responses. And what they've shared with me, and I'll just share this with you and then I'll pass the mic on, was, hey, sir, we'd like you to really focus on the following areas, and I am, I'm listening to them. Sir, support and resource us. Sir, talent management. Create the positive climate. This is what they're telling me and I wanna share this with each and every one of you. Reduce stress on a recruiting force. So that is something they've asked me to do. Sir, look at training. So remember, we have a large contingent, about 155 of master trainers. So we have to look at, hey, do we need to bring them back in post-COVID as we introduce our army back to our communities and retrain and recertify and redeploy. And then, of course, increase access, and that's where I would ask everybody's help for all of these men and women representing your army. Help them gain access, and I can explain access based off a follow-up question. And then the last thing, sir, drive positive change. We're, this is an opportunity. The way we move forward now is the way we can change an industrial model and recruit for the future and really change the way we do business. So I need your help and not, again, these are the 44,000 responses for these men and women in a recruiting force, and I'm listening to them and now I'm sharing that with each and every one of you. Thanks, I look forward to your questions. Thank you. My name is Stephanie Miller. I'm the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Personnel Policy and appreciate being invited by AUSA and the Army to be a part of the panel. We've had the pleasure in OSD to work with all of the services, but truly, the Army most closely over the course of the last year as we tried to adjust to the headwinds that all the services are facing. And I will say that as you heard from General McConville, the Department of the Army leadership is all in on this issue, you hear it from the other panel members, and really see some innovative practices coming out of USEREC, Cadet Command, TRADOC, G1, ASAM and RA all the way up to General McConville Secretary Wormuth, and it is encouraging to see such an all in spirit to try and adjust these challenges. Our responsibility at OSD is to try to provide lift to their effort, to try to clear barriers, understand the landscape, and then to help work with Congress to potentially gain additional authorities or to modernize the authorities that we have such that we can be more adept at what we do. We're very pleased to say across all of the services that we recruited about 170,000 American young men and women to come into the military. And we're excited that they're about to join their brothers and sisters in arms, but we have a lot more work to do. And this past year, the only service that actually met both their active and reserve component mission for recruiting was the United States Marine Corps. So Army is not the only service that's facing this challenge, it's all the services. And in many respects, we thought, well, we just need to get through fiscal year 22, we're gonna turn the page, it will be in fiscal year 23. But for those of us that really work these problems every day, we'll say that fiscal year 23 is looking just as challenging, if not more than 22. All of the services are headed into this recruiting year with probably some of the most shallow debt pools that they've ever had, and the market dynamics have not significantly changed. And one of the biggest challenges we have is just that propensity to serve. We strongly believe in looking at the information that we have about the market that we're trying to recruit from, that they're really driven by a passion for purpose, relationships, and a clear path to success. We strongly believe that whether it's the Department of the Army or any of the other services, we offer an opportunity to meet those requirements head on in all three of those areas, and it may sound trite, it's not that they're necessarily saying no and no, it's just that they don't know KNOW about what those opportunities are and how we can meet their drive for passion, for purpose, for relationships, and a clear path to success. Some of the things that we've been trying to do at the OSD level, particularly in working with Congress, is taking a look at some of those authorities I mentioned, particularly in the areas of marketing and advertising. Our existing authorities are largely based on kind of a 1990s telephone book model, directory level information. We do a lot, both internally and with our strategic marketing and advertising partners, to work creatively within those authorities, but really what we are able to do on a day-to-day basis is nowhere near what you see coming out of the more sophisticated marketing and advertising that you see particularly from Silicon Valley or Chicago or Boston or New York. We're really a blunt force instrument in many respects and what we're able to do and we're looking to be able to be more of a precision deliverer of our messaging and our strategy. If you work with a generation that we're trying to recruit from or you have them in your family, you know that they are very market savvy. They're very attuned to filtering out the messages that they're not really interested in. They're very sensitive to what they feel like is not organic content and they have the ability to tailor the content that they are seeing to a greater degree than we've ever seen. Just think about your own viewing habits on a day-to-day basis, whether it's Netflix or Amazon Prime or ESPN Plus, there's no marketing content whatsoever. And so we have to work harder than ever to make sure that our marketing and our strategies are getting in front of people where we count success in a matter of seconds. The other thing that we're trying to do is work with our kind of board of directors across the river, if you will, is to take a look at our existing authorities for money, whether it's appropriate to still try to approach some of our appropriations as one-year appropriations or would it be better to do two-year appropriations for certain program lines aligned to the Assession and Recruiting side of the house? Because with that then we can actually do earlier market buys, we can get better advertising placement, just might be better for us all around. The other thing that we're doing is asking for more support to kind of get a foothold back inside of the local communities in our high schools. What we've seen in terms of looking at the data is we've really kind of stepped away from that high school market. Part of that is kind of losing that connective tissue with them over the pandemic years where they were largely operating remotely. And part of it is just because there's a heightened focus in our public and private institutions nowadays with the focus of really getting young men and women onto secondary education opportunities in colleges and universities where sometimes going into an enlistment path in the military is looked upon as not having achieved the level of success that we may have, that may have been kind of drummed into them. One of the other things we see within this generation that we're recruiting from is many of their own parents are first generation graduates of college themselves. And so for them, particularly in some minority or diverse populations, they see not going on to a secondary education opportunity is not being successful. We certainly believe that going into the military, whether it's an officer path or an enlistment path is going to drive you along a path to success that includes a lot of different education opportunities. And we need to do a better job of making sure that we are explaining that not only to youth and to influencers. So I think that there's a number of things that we can do in terms of taking a look at our past practices, our current authorities and better understanding collectively with Army and the other services, where we want to go and then helping at the OSD level to get from point A to point B. While at the same time making sure that we're sustaining the high quality that we know that we need today and in the future to meet our combatant command and other operational requirements. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm happy to be here. I want to thank General Gervais for inviting me to the panel. I was given a bit of guidance on two areas to talk about. So I will touch on that. The first is some thoughts on strengthening recruiting and the second is on the design and assessment of marketing and recruiting programs joined on the analytical background. So let's start with general market expansion and to echo something that General Davis just said. There's ample evidence from survey that youth and influencers know very little, shockingly little about the military services and service in general. So one thought with support and some survey did is to push basic information to youth and their influences on the considerable breadth of jobs and training that the Army offers to pique their interest and to get them then more interested in following up and learning more about service. There's also been interested expressed in further penetrating the college market. Something to be aware of there is that there are different subpopulations who would need different types of programs to attract them. So for example, program to appeal to recruits who are willing to defer a college until after service that could be used with the post 9-11 GI Bill in the same way that the Army College Fund used to be usable with the older GI Bill, which was something unique to the Army at that time. Perhaps a program for those not willing to wait to help them work a year or two towards an associate degree. So they would do that between enlistment and going on to active duty. Increase use of marketing programs for those who are willing to enroll and attend classes while serving such as the concurrent admission program. And for those who already have some college, the thought is to expand the loan repayment program with lower caps on the amount that's repaid but less stringent eligibility criteria, which are pretty strict right now. In terms of optimizing recruiting resources, analysis suggests over the years it's suggested this that the Army has over relied on enlistment bonuses. There are reasons for them, you need them. But they tend to be overused relative to marketing. And that has a very significant effect on costs in the amount of recruits that are produced. Another area is to try and use analysis that we're aware of to help recruiters improve their productivity. That could be, for example, accounting as fully as possible for the difficulty of recruiting in local submarkets and taking that into account in recruiter assignments and missioning. We can also increase, let's echo something, you just said data-enabled outreach and CRM that would require some relief from restrictions on government use of those approaches. And we can think about adding enlistment options. So one example would be an enlistment approach that offers a menu of options to prospective recruits where they're trading off non-monetary and monetary options that gives them greater ability to get packages that they want but it also winds up saving recruiting resources at the same time. Because the bonuses offered with these non-bonuses options as supplements are smaller than standalone enlistment bonuses. We need to continue working towards strengthening marketing ROI. That means continuing the regular assessments that the Army Enterprise Marketing Office was doing where it's looking on ROI in terms of leads, appointments, and contracts. It means increasing the detail, the granularity of the data that's collected on the marketing outcomes to better distinguish which tactics are actually the most effective ones from those that are not, their issues with the data. And we also need to understand how different tactics affect outcomes differently in either different geographies or by the sociodemographic characteristics of the leads and contracts that they generate. So some would generate different types of leads and contracts than others. We can use experimental variation in spending levels across marketing tactics to try and pinpoint their causal effects. And we can use what's called quasi-experimental designs in local marketing to try and distinguish events and activities that are consistently effective from those that are not and do more of the former, obviously. In designing programs, marketing, recruiting, we have a variety of analytical approaches available to help us do that well. Focus groups and survey data. The concerns there are a sufficient number of groups and sample size and appropriate composition relative to the target population. Past research results are generally available and you can find ones that are appropriate for a new program that might be considered. And there are simulation tools that are also often available. They can look at, for example, the effects of changes in the accession cohort characteristics on first-term performance and costs or the optimal allocation of recruiting levels and a mix for a given accession requirement instead of economic conditions. In assessing effects, again, a variety of measures, attitude and propensity change. We need pre- and post-program start data to do that. We need representative samples. Multivariate analysis of outcomes such as leads and contracts and both quasi-experimental and experimental designs for those approaches, which produce some of the most accurate results you need before and after results for when the program started and you need balanced test areas and comparison areas. The difference between quasi-experimental and experimental is you can do quasi-experimental after the fact of the program to try and pinpoint what you got out of it. Experimental requires front-end, so it requires lead time and more setup time to get the answer. Last, some additional considerations. The data you need to evaluate a new program, is it routinely collected or is this going to require a special effort that's going to require more setup time? Let's make sure we're measuring causation and not correlation. There you need balanced test and comparison areas and controls for confounding factors. And then are you measuring attitudinal or behavioral outcomes? You have to understand what the relationship is between the two of those. So, for example, you have to consider the relationship of a change in attitudes of propensity and what that actually translates to in terms of enlistments. It is not one-to-one, it is much less. So, the enlistment rates of people who say they come in are far from 100%, much lower than that. And the negative attitude of propensity group is so large that it historically has counted for at least half or more of the enlistees. So, there's a difference between measuring attitude and behavior and we need to be sensitive to that. And I realize this last half was technical, so I'm sticking with the area I was asked to address. Apologies. I never like statistics, I'm just saying. But I do want to know, I want to feel of who's in the audience right now. Anybody that's been involved in recruiting, please stand up. Ouch. Okay, we're going to have fun today. I'm hopeful. Thank you very much. And we appreciate the hard work and when General Davis was speaking about this, I have never personally been carrying a green sheet or any of those kind of things, but you're right. The stressors that we place on our recruiters is tremendous. And I think that's one of the things that we do have to find a way to get at. So, the microphones are open. If anybody has a question, well, he's ready. There we go, come on down. I picked the right seat and everything. We're front-loaded, come on down. Yes, sir. Yes, my name is Matt Siegel. I am a retired reserve colonel. I had three and a half years active duty, 25 years as a reservist, served from company committee and up to Pentagon and White House staff. So, I've got a background. I'm the ESGR Employment Outreach Director for North Carolina and a previous chapter of a Military Officers Association of America chapter. Also in my civilian career, I spent 28 years with this little company I may have heard of called McDonald's. And I worked in Asia, Europe, and the United States. And the last group that I said this to ask me when the McRib was coming back, okay? But that's really, really not my purpose. But if anybody wants to talk about that, we can do so after this is over. Anyhow, when talk about recruiting and using soldiers for life and so on and so forth, for example, in medical recruiting, through AUSA and some members of AUSA, word got to my wife and I that they were looking for a way to get into medical schools because of COVID shutdowns and all that other stuff. And it turns out we knew somebody who was, we arranged a meeting and we were able to get them into medical schools to recruit. That's an example of the small kinds of things we can do. Army recruiting battalions in the past have had community advisory boards. They come and they go depending upon the commander, okay? What we did about four commanders ago was we actually raised funding to bring recruits who were not going tomorrow, but had signed on and their parents in for a dinner and a speech. We raised funding for that. Unfortunately, next year the JAG had a different opinion on how we should go with that. One other thing I do is I'm a test administrator at MEPs part time. I go into high schools all the time and I also administer tests at MEPs. I think MEPs should be in meetings like this. They're not here. They need to be. They really need to be because they're an important part. We deal with recruiters all the time and so that's a good thing to do. And the chief said we have to get innovative and we really deal with these shortfalls and there are just so many ways we can do it and what I would say to you is reach out to soldiers for life like me. We don't sit on committees and things like that. We're just out in the communities doing the work. We can help you any way we want. The last comment I would make is look at the labor participation rate. Not so much the unemployment rate. That keeps going down. We can help raise that up so people that we don't reach maybe would be potential candidates for the military. Well, sir, first of all, thanks. And thanks for your service. And one thing I wanted to add and there was three great cameras but let me we touch on each of those. And let me tell you, this is what keeps me up at night and what I plan to do. I just finished pinning personally pinning a note that will be the key article for the Army Echoes magazine or pamphlet that goes out to all Army retirees. It'll go out one November to all 1.5 million. And you will see my message. It is very direct specific. I'll give you access to the Army Careers app. But more importantly, I want all of them to take the next seven to 10 days and move to the closest recruiting station that you can locate right in the map and offer your assistance. One to access the other to education. So that's one. Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with the CASAs and all AARAs to talk about that community leader access. You and I are thanking the same thanks, sir. And it's on my mind, but I can't get it out fast enough. And I'm trying to move very quickly with each step. That is going to happen next. And then I will pin a, I'm almost finished with my note to all general officers and retired officers with instructions for each one of them. And sir, everything you've said, I've captured, but essentially we are, this is, we're taking the step forward to educate and connect and then create more access. Yes, sir. If I could just add to that. First of all, thank you for being a test administrator. And while maps may not be in the room at an OSD level, we do have operational responsibility for all the maps. So which maps are you at? Raleigh. Raleigh, okay. So being a test administrator is so critically important. These are the folks that go into high schools and actually administer the ASVAP in high schools and then often help facilitate post-test interpretation and other aspects of the program. And actually where we still see a foothold inside of high schools, it's usually our test administrators because they've formed long-term relationships with the local high schools and there's a level of trust. Three next week. Great, so glad to hear that. Because as you all know, recruiters are so important, but in essence, we are turning over recruiters about one 30 year in terms of coming in. And so it's establishing a relationship almost every three years with a school and a high school and administrator, whereas the test administrators have often had those relationships for even in some cases, decades. And so I completely agree with you that there is value in making sure that we're partnering with our test administrators. We're partnering them with our recruiters to make introductions and to, you know, to gain that level of trust and where there's more recommendations from our test administrators broadly on how to get that, you know, access back into the schools. I think that's a really good point. I would make one comment on that. When I do a test administration, the last thing I say in a high school is there anything else I can do for you? That's, those are my words walking out the door and so they're never out of our mind. One last one, Matt, if you get more than you wanted today, this is awesome. We are being innovative with our soldier for life transition program as well. A job assistance, a partnership with the businesses as well, they're giving job opportunities for those soldiers either retiring or getting out after their first assignment. And I think you can well appreciate, you know, that makes them a great ambassador for their time and service in the military and go back and talk to family members, bring a soldier in. And that's also just exiting the service whether 20 or not with some level of dignity and respect. And that's important. And as you mentioned, it takes a very innovative thought also. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Carlos Riquea Diaz Podestardes. The reason I'm greeting you in Spanish is because we have more diverse country and we're gonna become even more diverse. So my question is very simple. I've been a member of what's called HALO, which is the Hispanic American Leadership Organization. When I got to law school, I was a member of HALSA, NALSA and BALSA, which is the Black Law Student Association, the Hispanic Western Association and the Native American Association. I'm also a McNair scholar and a president of LULAC. The reason I mention all of those chapters and organizations is because not one time was there a government recruiter or a military recruiter. I'm a former infantry officer via OCS. And after living in the military, I promoted to military spouse. My suggestion to you is that we have so many programs whether it's minority or women programs that we are not tapping into. I'm a former dean of a college and I never had problems recruiting people because I know lots of folks who know lots of folks and who belong to that organization or to that group. And they went in there and recruited for me. And that's how I've been successful. Just because you send someone to an organization that doesn't mean they're gonna identify with the people you're trying to recruit. Don't send a cat person if they're a dog person or vice versa. We all know how we feel more comfortable. So I have to get going because I have to get my child. But my suggestion is that send people to those organizations, upper bound. They will do the work for you. Use them. Look up different organizations in your communities. The ones I'm most familiar with is the minority communities. I've never had a problem recruiting folks. So I leave you with that because we're not utilizing those wonderful resources out there. Sir, and I very much appreciate those suggestions and we totally concur with you. Not only from a policy perspective, we'll deal with that, but just connecting with those soldiers who may or may not want to join in apropropency to serve. Somebody you're comfortable talking to, someone who can relate to you, your family conditions, the whole bit. So I concur with you and certainly something we're taking on both as a big army through our sessions of recruiting task force, which is assisting us at the Department of Army level within trade off. And I won't get into, I know Johnny can probably talk to this in detail on how we're gonna do it at the street level, the kitchen table level with all the communities that you just mentioned. Thank you so much. Great suggestion though. Thank you very much. Don't be late picking up your kid though. No, no. No, no. Hi, I'm Yvette Busico. I'm the Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. I work with all of these wonderful colleagues on the stage. And I just wanted to add on to what General Burdow said, we are working closely with our civic organizations. In fact, the Army had a center of excellence at the National LULAC convention in Puerto Rico, just a couple of weeks ago, I see the Sergeant Major in the front who was there speaking on our behalf. We have BAEA, we have a lot of connective tissue with those civic organizations. So I wanna assure you that all that we are actively, we have in the past and we are gonna continue working with those kinds of organizations in the future. Mr. Beach, the DASA for E&I, Gordane Inclusion, and also he is the Principal Advisor to the Secretary of the Army, reports to her through the MNRA and works very closely with those organizations each and every day. So we are doing that. I don't have a question. Thank you, ma'am. Sir. Thanks to everybody on the panel and everybody in the audience, quite frankly, for your leadership, your passion, and the specific line of effort that you're responsible for in terms of not just recruiting, but retention and opportunity. And I think, as I heard Ms. Miller allude to when we talk about opportunity, we're also talking about transition. And so addressing, sir, as you framed, not just the challenges, but the opportunities. My name is Miguel Howe with the Aurelian Group, but more importantly, I'm a soldier for life. Having spent 25 years in infantry and special forces, but perhaps one of the most impactful assignments I had was as the Commander of the Southern California Recruiting Battalion from 2008 to 2010. So not quite the same market environment that we face today, but nonetheless coming out of the surge, a challenging time. Flash forward to 2013 when I retired, and I had the honor to be selected to serve under President Bush overseeing his transition programs for military service members transitioning military and our veterans. And at that time, the crisis was veteran employment, particularly for our junior enlisted without a four year degree. Flash forward 10 years, that is not the crisis, now the crisis is recruiting. But it was striking to me, having spent times on both of those issue areas, that we're really good at attacking those problem sets in different pillars, but I came to find it's the same people, it's the same centers of influence, it's the same issues in terms of tying together that continuum of purpose, belonging, and opportunity. And I loved how the Chief framed it in opportunity like no other, be all you can be. And so my question is, how are we thinking and approaching the issue of recruiting, but tying together the full life cycle in terms of service and retention, and then the transition? Because the success across all three are really integrated. Thank you. I'll start and I'll pass it off to my battle buddy, Johnny. And I definitely don't want to oversimplify this because this is very complicated. And first of all, Miguel, thanks for your service, both in uniform and continued interest out of uniform as well, very much appreciate that. But part of it came to just really understanding the total environment. And as you said, from a future soldier at his kitchen table, all the way to when they transitioned from our OCPs to a suit and tie, and all that needs to be put into this. So I would offer up and definitely an approach that we've taken now. Mrs. Busico mentioned that the task force support we're getting at the Army, Mrs. Miller clearly represents the OSD level support, also reached out to academia and others. So that we understand this and our civilian professionals as well representing the civilian market. But to put it back in my current terms though, and operationalized in this solution, what are you doing and what can we do in the strategic space? What can we, needs to be done in the operational space and the tactical space as well. Not to say that the operational approach is a solution to everything, but we're the Army. And that's how we solve problems. And this is a tough problem. And we do hard stuff in going to get it done. But the players and all of that is not only just uniformed as well, a recruiting command, working with academia, working with the principals, working with the hospitals. As I just mentioned, our policies and programs for transition for life, to get at this thing and get at it quickly before it impacts the readiness of the Army, which we're not going to allow to happen. I know General Davis and I don't wanna steal this thunder is very much taking some very innovative approach looking internal to our recruiting enterprise, which is large and understanding the landscape, understanding the problem. Do we need to attack the, I'm sorry, look at the, how we market differently and I would offer yes, both locally, nationally and down at the strategic level as well. And based off one of the questions we had also, our reach out to those that we may not have in the past to give that opportunity to continue to serve whether it's one enlistment, 20 years upon retirement and transition with dignity and respect. Johnny, I've taken way too much, but I would like to give you our thoughts as well. First of all, thanks, sir. That's a great question and something that has been certainly on my mind because why we're beginning to really see ourselves in this environment given the challenges and it's really opened our eyes. So when I think about the ability to penetrate down across the communities, we have a bunch of agencies that exist but we didn't really synchronize them. So that's what I'm, what you just said is something I am personally involved in in terms of how to fully utilize levered soldiers for life. Local marketing, our social media, our partnerships. One of things, a big thanks to the chief was partnering a active duty division with each of our recruiting brigades. So example, the 101st Airborne Division is directly linked with our third recruiting brigade. This has never happened before in history and what we have to do with that small brigade is really leverage all of these wonderful assets and really be able to have an impact in that brigade area of operation. And don't forget, bring in school superintendents, CASAs, ARAs, I mean, I can go down the list. So when I think, I call it the super summit with all my teammates. If you execute an event is the super summit involved and have, just like you said, VSOs, how do we bring everyone together to maximize our wonderful impact wherever we are? So thanks. And I'll just add briefly, because I know we have other folks who wanna ask questions but on your point about transition, I think at an OSD level, it's something that we're very attuned to. It's not survey data that we collect. It comes from someplace else, but there is some indication that military members themselves are less likely to recommend military service to the youth in their lives. We've seen that metric increase. And I think for us, it's very important to make sure that in a transition that it's a positive experience so that they don't leave for whatever reasons that they're choosing to leave or it's a full retirement, that that process is a smooth process, it's positive and that we are potentially even showcasing opportunities we still have to stay connected with the military, whether full-time, part-time, even outside the USA jobs, very strict confines. We are committed to that so much so that we're actually looking at right now our transition assistance programs oversight within OSD is within our readiness division. We're actually looking at moving it to my division as kind of a personnel life cycle approach. And so I think your point is extremely well made because it does come full circle. Thank you so much. I'm confident with this leadership. We have all the capabilities, just tying it all together as you said, sur-operationalizing and activating all of our networks. When we look back at 2030, I hope we look back at this panel and look what we as an Army did. Thank you. Thank you. Quickly, many of you may have question cards, blank cards that you can fill out. If we do not get to all of them, we will be collecting these and we will be sharing them with the panel asking for them to provide their remarks and comments and we'll get those pushed back out at a later date. So don't be hesitant to complete the cards at this time. Yes, sir. Please go ahead. McCarly, Mark McCarly. Upon my retirement from this great Army, I returned to home a record and found myself a commissioner of my small city. And within that array of civic leaders, a good number supported junior ROTC and lamented the fact that it was very difficult to locate junior ROTCs within the school district. Some attributable to political issues and others attributable to resources. And so with that, the question has to be, is the Army prepared to direct greater resources toward that invaluable program? And before General Davis answers that question, I have a note of gratitude and commendation for something you and your staff did with respect to recruiting. And of course, talking about the Army and its impact, you opened the aperture for 1,800 retired general officers and flag officers to make contact with both your senior ROTCs and your junior ROTCs. Now we are infusing, this is from TIFFCON, the flag and general officer organization. Some of you will of course matriculate to that organization upon retirement. And we are infusing those general officers and some flag officers into the JRTC to high schools for the purpose of explaining the Army message, foreign policy discussions and of course, reaching out for the big purpose of recruitment. Well, first of all, sir, thanks. And I know I'm in recruiting command now, but I did depart Cadet Command. So I'm very familiar with junior ROTC. So there is discussions about expansion. And let me just set the stage, let me provide context. So the program was initiated in 1916, is really stood up in some of the states in the Southeast, Florida, some in Georgia, Louisiana. And it really blossomed from that over the last 100 years. So about 70% of our junior ROTCs are sitting in the, what is the Florida up through Virginia through Texas. And that's where, so there's not equal distribution across the United States. So there's a request to expand depending on decisions, I don't wanna get ahead of our Army senior leaders, but up to 50 schools a year for five years, which would impact, first of all, we wanna place them in areas where the Army's not and impact up to 300,000 additional students. So I mean, as you know, that's ongoing. But it is, it's just to give you an idea. When you think about, let's say, Georgia, there's more JRTCs in let's say Georgia than there are in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota combined. So, thank you. Hello, everyone. My name's Mark Mansfield. I have a question about brand and culture. A comment came up earlier about recruiting in this economy and how important culture is in that economy. I currently work for iHeart. I'm a new position specifically dedicated to helping military service recruiting. I'm a strategist dedicated to helping you guys. I spent five years in the Army, boots on the ground, so I'm in a unique position to be the person on the other side of the table when friends and family are asking, what do you think about my son or daughter joining military service? I find myself in opposition to my wife. I find myself in opposition to other family members defending what I love, what everybody in this room loves, right? There's no lack of passion for those of us who have served and believed in it. But when you think about brand, the Army is one of the largest brands, advertising brands in the world. Budget is not the issue. Culture is a big challenge. And the problem with brand, when you're not constantly thinking about it, is the consumer marketplace takes over that brand for you, right? And the loudest voices, what social media has taught us is the loudest voices in the room are the trolls. Social media is an echo chamber for complaining and for whining and for elucidating problems. I know having been in the military for five years and now have a successful career outside of the military that the military set me up for more success than I could have thought possible. The reason I joined is I was in the same position as most recruits are in the bulk of recruit talent that we're looking for. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I grew up in a small town in Western New York. I could pay for college and try to figure it out, then end up with some debt. Or I could take the adventure of a lifetime and map out what happens next, right? But I knew that if I took the step to the army, I wouldn't have to worry about what the next three, four, five years held. What I didn't think about, but I tell all the people that I mentor now because I continue to mentor people transitioning out, particularly first and second tour, is that there is a ton of opportunity that the army prepares you for, that nobody's talking about. So back to my question of culture and brand, as we look to the next five years, brand takes a long time. Brand is a long tail initiative engagement. Are we thinking about building a brand that principals and teachers and parents and aunts and uncles can be proud of so that we service members who are standing up for why someone should join, there's a strong enough brand presence behind that that says, yes, bad things happen, but look at how many people we employ. Look at the amazing things that have happened. Look at all these people who have graduated out of even one or two tours and are changing the world. Sorry for the long question. I'll begin. I'd like to, ma'am, go ahead. I've talked too much. No, no, you have no, you have not. I'm looking like, I was just, I was gonna add on to that because I think the question's really important. If you think about in two aspects, one is how do you use data, right, to figure out what all your stakeholders think about, right, so I think sometimes we underestimate data. What we're doing with a lot of our clients is using that data, holding focus groups or stakeholder groups, making sure we truly understand what people are thinking about a brand, right, so I would just encourage using that data. I think the other, it's interesting, we talked about this a little bit earlier today as we were preparing, is the, you described as opportunities, we do the same thing as a firm. A lot of the reasons why some of these young folks out of college come to work at EY is because they know whether they stay for one year or whether they stay for a lifetime or retire, we are preparing them and developing them and training them to be the leaders in corporate America and I think that's really important because that you can have multiple careers, like you could have multiple careers in the Army too, right, multiple careers within EY and there's an attractiveness. We don't, I mean, sometimes people walk in the door and say, I can't wait to be a partner. Others are like, I know it's gonna be a great experience and so we as a firm really focus on that experience because we want them walking out the door, one being advocates to potentially their clients and then they become alumni and I will tell you I'm amazed at all the alumni here. It's such a valuable gem and just how do you mine it and how do you use that for referrals? So it struck me because the data I think is really important to understand what people are thinking and not assume, you know, and then secondly, it is a tremendous opportunity to say how much you learn and how much you give but also, you know, what's next? So I just wanted to add that before you talk. Oh, thank you, Julie and spot on and one, thanks for your service and we can really list you if you'd like to come back in, no problem. But- Sir, I think I can sign that waiver too. You can do that, we're under 30. But you really highlighted some great points and we mentioned in the opening of the comments that this crisis also gives us the opportunity to one, as you just said, clearly communicate not only those future soldiers that may want to join and learn more about it but the parents and coaches, they're everybody else that the influences that can speak to it as well. So yes, I'm very positive that our senior leaders in our army are looking at an army brand as well and it won't get ahead of the senior leaders. I learned that early in school but also messes all the positive opportunities to the soldiers that may wanna come in and their parents as well. Some of my team has heard this already but I gotta tell the one. I was actually approached by a future soldier before who just wanted to be a cook, period. So shared with them, yeah, you can come in and be a cook, there's 149 other jobs you can do also and get you certified at the culinary arts school. That's the army runs, didn't know that, did not know that. And if you wanna be a cook and jump out of planes we can do that too. I say that jokingly but that offers the opportunities that should be shared. And lastly, partnering with our other commands are helping us to showcase those opportunities and abilities. Well, the young specialist that's done it, the lieutenant, go back to your hometown and share that as well. So I really appreciate what you said, especially from the perspective of being a soldier and a civilian now that sees it from that end of the kitchen table. Thanks. General Davis, you mentioned you got more help than you can handle right now. To that end, I'm here for you if you have thoughts, questions, bringing military service and advertising experience we're here to help. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you guys. I mean, I'm watching the time and I wanna make sure we get all these questions. I'm gonna actually take two questions here. So the first two on this side, if you'll both ask your questions and then the panel will address. Thanks. Thank you for setting the stage for me. Hi, I'm Francis. I retired in 2012 after 30 years. Oh, I'm sorry. I retired in 2012 after 30 years. I was Sergeant First Class and then retired as an officer in the Army Nurse Corps. I was one of the few and lucky select of those who were pulled out of retirement for the COVID mission, kinda helped reset my thinking. And I have a few things and I'll try to keep it straight cause he said a lot of them. So on day one of AUSA, I went to the women's forum. Unbelievable, Phyllis included. And I just sat there and I looked at them, these women and what they had to say. And I'm like rock stars right across everybody and everybody in this room, everybody here. Who sees us? And I'll get to that. So one of the comments that they made was 22% of the force is female, which is fabulous. But 85% of the force comes from the family members of our military service men and women. So again, I say, how can we have the rest of our country and the world see us for who we are today? And so that takes me to the most far reaching platform that influences and entertains and enlightens people to see us for who we are in today's army and the army of 2030. That's the film and television stage. That's, I remember a young lady saying to me in the airport cause I was in uniform and she said, she wouldn't leave me alone. She just had so many questions. She said, the only way I know about the military is through army wise. I met her mother. She said the same thing. And so I know personally that film and television can change the projectory of our life. I watched Private Benjamin in 1980 and in October and November I raised my hand. It was because back then, I didn't wanna be defined by the man that I married. I needed my own life and I went out. And so I just feel like people need to see the diversity what we're doing and I just think it's all amazing. So my question to you is is there a plan when you look at film and television cause what was it, 12 Strong was the last army movie out. Top Gun had huge recruiting. If you have a plan, I'd love to hear it. If you do and you don't, please let me help you or be part of it, I should say. I can start. Hang on, hang on, hang on, ma'am. Oh yes. Question number two, come on up. Let's ask another question. And we're gonna have to roll these in together. My name's Second Lieutenant Lady and I'm from New Mexico. And originally I came up, though I addressed the Army National Guard panel for recruiting retention yesterday and I came up with a different question that I had today or suggestion thing for consideration that a major general came up to me and asked me to reiterate what I did yesterday and what a major general tells a Second Lieutenant to ask a question I will. And so the question that I posed yesterday for the board, though it was already acted upon quickly was as an E5, I worked for recruiting retention for years as an E5, I ran the state's retention program and so I have a passion for retention. In tutoring about 100 applicants to pass the ASVAB and as you probably know, and if this is outdated information, I apologize, but they did a pilot study in about 1980 where they got their initial test pilot group of thousands of people together and that's how they set their mean, right? And so they took everybody together and said, okay, that's where 50 is, it's not 50%. And then they repeated that study in 1997 and with the same number of people to do the test on and then they reset that mean to the new 50. So since 1997, if that test has been recreated then it's not anywhere that I can find. What has changed since 1997? Now my third grader has handed a calculator, meaning I've actually tutored honor roll students that do not know their times tables. We have professionals in the community I've tutored that do not know their times tables. This is actually the only test, the ACT, the SAT, the GED allow you to bring in a calculator. The GRE has a four function calculator on the computer. And when you go to the ASVAB website, then it says there is maybe a situation in which you will have had to have known your multiplication table and to have been successful. We are talking about modernizing the army for 2023, but this is antiquated and I've spoken to many combat arms and non-combat arms jobs and nobody has said that their mission has failed because they did not know what eight times seven was. And so with that, now I will say already Major General Bissell was assigned to work with me on this and I submitted a white paper to her this morning. So if you see that come across I would ask for the consideration and if nothing else to put together a new way to set that medium, that 50, that mean. And of course I'd also say that if you were worried about for example artillery or something that where you think it would be necessary, if you put a four function calculator on there, you could code it to where every time they tap the calculator you would also be able to factor that into their score. So there are options, there are workarounds. And then what I actually came up here to say is that in the National Guard, and forgive me I started in the reserves and then I moved to the Guard so I don't really know the active side of things. But in the Guard, I have done now analysis of over a thousand interviews of people that have left and or were planning to leave or why they would stay. And I found commonalities, I analyzed the data and I submitted it up to my leadership. And people are leaving because of two things, National Guardsmen in order to be content need three things. They need a leader, a friend and a job or a purpose, and so they're leaving because either they did not find the leadership that they needed and or they did not have the purpose or the job. Despite what anybody thinks about the younger generation, they actually don't wanna get paid to do nothing. And so when they sit on their phones Saturday and Sunday, I was in the band, so I was tasked all over the state. So I didn't even know that there are people sitting on their phones. And so now then when I'm in the Armory and I see that and then I see why didn't get out because I don't mind that I signed up and I'm not with my spouse or my children but now I'm not with my spouse or my children and I'm not doing anything. Couple that with my colleague, Captain Jewel and I walked around the AUSA, the exhibit hall and we found all of these phenomenal tie-ins that the guard is unaware of. I've served for 14 years, you served for nine years. We didn't know half of what was down there in the exhibit hall between in membership to the YMCA. They'll record you reading books to your family members. They'll give you tutor 24 seven, all these things that I designed the retention brief for the state of New Mexico and I didn't know. And as well as possibly even tying in spouses into credentialing assistance. All these things that we have opportunities to do that could create that purpose. And so to make a short question long or a long question short is that I would ask or request an acknowledgement of perhaps teaching leaders, you know future leaders like myself, current leaders to empower their E6s. I mean, NCOs, right? You know, if your squad's sitting around, here's six training binders, pick one, go do the things, play capture of the flag in the motor pool. Let's see if you still know how to plot an azimuth. But then I think we'll see some of that retention. They'll understand they'll have the Y of the purpose to raise the right hand continuously. Thank you for your consideration. Well, I don't know about you guys, but I take 50 second lieutenants just like that. Oh, that's amazing. I'll need a job at some point, ma'am. Come find me when you're ready. So two things. Are we looking at using entertainment industry for branding and for purpose? And second, the ASVAB and retooling the kit. So I can start just on the, to first thank you for your service. And very proud of the growth and the number of women that we see serving over the last several years. And I think this weekend is the 25th anniversary of the Women in Service Memorial. And that's a huge accomplishment there. And a lot of work done by General Wilma Vaught to make that successful, so we're very proud of that. Completely agree with you. I think that oftentimes, and our data proves this out, that a lot of people's perceptions about what military service is or isn't scoped by television and media. There is a very active division of the department and all the services are a part of it that is actively engaged with the media entertainment industry. But of course, we can advise, we can recommend, we can say, hey, if you make these changes, then we'll potentially partner. We don't always control the outcome. And that's challenging. And so what we have to do then is to try to balance that with making sure that to somebody else's point that we are getting our messaging out there and we are establishing our brand so that we're not letting other people do it for us. And part of that is a layering approach. Because we know that a lot of folks are driven away from the prospect of serving due to those misconceptions, then you really have to start there because before they can even really start to say, well, I wanna join the Army or I wanna join the Navy or I wanna join Army Active versus Army National Guard. You have to get them past the prospect that I'm going to become injured, homeless, assaulted, have traumatic brain injury through this active service. And so what we're trying to do through a layering effect is try to make sure that we have advertising content that just addresses some of those misconceptions by modeling the positive outcomes that we see in service to just get them even thinking about, oh, this might be something I'm interested in doing, followed by robust marketing and advertising strategies from each of the services, most notably Army here that says, and now that you've kind of thought through, well, this might be something for me, now it's here's why you should join us. Here's why you should join Army and here's all the things that we have available to you. So there's the partnership on the entertainment side plus what we need to do to make sure that we're addressing those misconceptions. So that's one. Moving on to number two because these are very widely different topics on the ASVAP. So OSD is responsible for the ASVAP and we do continuously review it and we actually have an external board of experts that are not affiliated with DOD whatsoever and includes psychometricians and other folks from the corporate board and other organizations that run the SAT, the ACT, other standardized testing programs. And I think that there's often this misconception that today's ASVAP is the same ASVAP from 1980 and that is not true. It's constantly evolving, it's constantly being revised, we change out components of the test and we do look at kind of the norms. You're right that the last time it was normed was 1997. Our board, our external board, did a recent review in 2020 to determine whether or not it was necessary to norm it again and based upon national test scores across the country, not DOD data, Department of Education data and state data, there had not been a significant shift in education outcomes from 1997 to 2020, which is interesting. We do think that there is still value potentially and maybe working with those that conduct the national studies post COVID to make sure that they look at that again, which would then subsequently inform whether or not we need to do a norming process for ASVAP. Part of that could include looking at whether or not it's appropriate to include a calculator. You're right, the other tests do include it, not on all math components, but usually one or two. And then the other ones that don't include the math components because we want to see if you have some level of mental math ability. ASVAP is, the math portions are largely based on ninth and 10th grade math. And we want to make sure that you have some of those fundamental basics. We also want to make sure that you understand even how to use a calculator. Folks have probably heard me say before, it's important to know those kind of math principles before you can apply them even with the use of a calculator. So one of the test questions on the ASVAP is what is the square root of 27 divided by three? If you know that you need to kind of work it with your order of operations and what steps you do first, you're going to get one answer, the correct answer. Most people who are not necessarily familiar with how to use a calculator are gonna work that problem left to right. They're gonna hit square root, 27 divided by three on the calculator, and I think you get an answer of like 0.333, which is the incorrect answer. So you need to know how to do your basic math principles before you can even apply a calculator. And frankly, what we find is in some of our applicants that may have had lower education opportunities, their school systems, or their individual school may not have been as strong, that's not something that's being taught to them. And so our concern is that in introducing a calculator without doing the necessary work to understand how best to do that, then it could actually have an adverse impact with ASVAP test outcomes. And so all of this is something that we think through continuously to make sure that the ASVAP is providing a level of outcome to determine are they the best fit for the jobs? And I think that there's a lot of times an expectation or a misunderstanding that the ASVAP is somehow an academic test. And while it's built on academic principles, it's really an employment test. It's really designed to correlate whether or not we think that you will perform well in basic training in first term of enlistment. And right now the current test does. But there's always a need for constant re-examination and potential improvement. And to your point, if the national norms indicate we need to do that, we'll do that, and as part of that we'll take another look at whether or not it's appropriate to include a calculator. Yes, and if I can may, I'm a numbers person, if I may add on to that, to follow up with your point, if you don't know how to solve a quadratic equation, putting the four function calculator won't help you. If you don't know how to dissect what's important in a problem, in the problem solving portion, that's not gonna help you. And said, if it's kind of an equalizer, if you understand how to do a quadratic equation, or you understand how to divide, multiple digits into each other, then it's more of an equalizing factor to negate the time, not that you don't know how. And then the other point is again, when you take norms of the entire country to decide whether or not a test, the norm needs to be adjusted, then again, I would consider the actual population that is likely to be the most affected by adding a calculator. And make sure you're not taking the top percentage of the echelon that if they're gonna get a 92 GT score, then it didn't matter. But for the people that it does matter, and since we're in an organization that releases cat fours, then again, this could be an equalizer at some point. So thank you. Thank you, sir. This question is actually really more designed for Ms. Bowland to answer, hopefully, and be able to offer us some opportunity to look at talent in a different perspective. So EY has taken large strides towards integrating neurodiverse talent into your company's regular operations. As the Chief has asked us to kind of look at talent differently, how do you think the Army might be able to leverage neurodiverse talent into the future? Thank you. So this is an engineer in due to my heart. At one point I was a chair of a board called Achievement Centers for Children, which actually had children across the spectrum. So what we did a few years ago is we started looking at our business and what our clients' needs were. We were looking for a lot of talent around technology, data, and how to use it. And we, it's hard to find. I mean, I will tell you, there's, we could hire more cyber specialists, more technologists, but we can't find them because it's a really hot skill. So what we started doing, and this is kind of part of our whole recruiting, is where else can we find those skill sets? And we tapped into the neurodiversity population. And I will tell you, not only has it been the right thing to do for our clients, I mean, they perform brilliantly around some of these incredibly technical, data-driven projects that we work on, but I will tell you, we have changed people's lives. We have changed people's lives, people who couldn't get jobs before because of their, you know, of the neurodiversity. We actually, they have professions, they have careers. And so I will tell you, it's something we experimented and we piloted, and now we have multiple neurodiversity centers around the country. And we are tapping into, they are finding innovation around some of the projects that we do across the board. It is, it's incredibly proud moment for EY to have really kind of pioneered that. Thank you ma'am. Sir. Gil Sanborn, I'm a civilian aide to the Secretary of the Army in Northern California. The acronym CASA, and this is the panel I've been looking forward to for four days because I spent about 95% of my CASA time on this issue. And of my waking hours, about 90% of that is spent on CASA work, so I love doing what I do. I'm also on a civilian side, I'm pure civilian crisis manager. And I've seen this coming for 14 years since I've been a CASA just in slow motion. And the term used previously was the civilian military divide, but now we look at it as 91% and 9%. So I'm the poster child for the 91%. And I look at that 91%, not in terms of the kids, but all of the people who get between us and an intelligent conversation with students. It's the parents, it's the educators. And I'm in Northern California now, Marin County cover the Bay Area and points north, and I tell the recruiters, this is the Mount Everest of recruiting challenges. But what I found from my experience in Connecticut, and thanks to General Ham, who choppered me into Schweinfurt, Germany, when I was looking for a unit to adopt, and it was the Dagger Brigade, 4,300 soldiers, and then I brought my whole town in to support that unit and learned a tremendous amount. Fundamentally, what the opportunity is in terms of connection and access, which is what I focus on all the time, is that direct personal connection and interface with people in uniform. Let me narrow my question down to the fact that that access has to be developed on a grassroots basis. And the national media coverage really has more downside than it does upside. In other words, people pay attention to the negative stories, but they pay attention to stories that are local to them, involving soldiers or activities that are local to them, I think in terms of changing their attitudes about the military. My question is, and what I found is that there is a gap in terms of coverage and relationships with local media, TV stations, newspapers, et cetera, because what I see in the recruiting side is the focus there is on media buys. It's not in terms of planning stories. And at the aqua level, it's a national focus. And to me, the opportunity that we have is developing those local media relationships, which I do as a constant effort, and I did it with Fleet Week, we're involved in Fleet Week in San Francisco, just collecting cards and collecting those relationships with reporters who are oriented toward these kinds of stories. So question to you all is how we're basically reorient ourselves in terms of this crisis so we get better local media access. Yes, I'll start and the others may have some, but agree. First of all, thanks for your support as a CASSR and all that you've done for many years. I love it every single day. And Depp, we want to leverage assets like yourself to help us influence all those markets and all those corners and all the streets. But in looking at the crisis we've had, have seen that there's some opportunities, both the national marketing and how to message that and the effect in local marketing also. Part of its budgeting, which we're working through, no assistance, well, I won't say no assistance required, but not put it at this level, but how can we better leverage marketing and the message that might resonate in Peachtree City, Georgia is different than Boise, Idaho. And also talking and working with people like yourself to talk to those influences, to just share the 91% as you mentioned so perfectly with all those soldiers they want to join, the coaches and parents. So yes, it is part of our renewed innovative focus for recruiting in sessions and we know we need to get at this because it did not work as well as it could have or it would have the 9%. Well, and this doesn't require dollars because what we're doing is developing those relationships. So it's free, it's just a question of cultivating the relationships. Definitely, it's gonna happen and we're gonna leverage that as well. Anybody else wanna talk to that issue? No, sir, I agree 100%. I think access is very important and when I think through the local media and sir, I know we work together very closely, especially in your area of support and thanks for your help with the access is really how to further relationships for both influencers in the area, social media and then there's another part to this, those tangible things like the RPI and PPI which are the nice glossy pamphlets that talk about, hey, service to your country or what's the US Army all about or what they call PPI or the backpacks and the big water jugs. That's, in my mind, that's local brand placement. When I walk into my room or office, I see my big Army coffee cup and it just reminds me each and every day. So you're right, you have to think through all of those in terms of how you really penetrate the local zip code because I can tell you by zip code where we are witnessing success and I can tell you over time it's going up and down but what I'm trying to figure out is the why and it does the local marketing, does the relationship, does those things that just talked about play and impact and bringing that up or down. Right, and I said generally we refer to this as like earned media and we've tried a lot of this. It's a challenge and perhaps you and others can help us is that there's not always an interest from local media to actually air it. It's not exciting, it's not necessarily dramatic. These good news stories that help get out the word about how military service is a positive experience or from a local, somebody that is from that local hometown and what they've done and so even recently we were trying to place an op-ed about the value of military service and couldn't get primary media outlets to run it as an op-ed. So we do need your help and that of others to kind of signal to local media outlets that you're interested in hearing and seeing this content such that we can probably get our foot in the door. What I've found is what resonates is when people in uniform help civilians, particularly saving lives. We had two recruiters who were in the Tan Fran Mall, two shootings, I was with the company commander, I said we need media on this and the next night we had five TV stations covering it. So and then with the fires in Northern California bringing engineers down from JBLM, the focus is on how do we sell those stories because when people who are civilians may have a negative view about people in uniform but if they save their life that changes instantaneously and those are the types of opportunistic situations we need to exploit. No we're short on time, Erica Ford from EY. I'm an Army brat, my dad was an intelligence officer, was born on Fort Benning, that's when I met my mom, two one year tours in Vietnam, Metavec pilot, pilot after that. So I grew up very much in the culture and there's certain things about how I go to my day to day, like I have a hard time not saying yes ma'am, or yes sir, even in the job that I have and the role that I have at EY, I just, it's just that my defaults. There's so many things about culture and teamwork very much is very much ingrained in me from how I grew up. One thing that I notice from the Gen Zers, which I know is the folks we're focusing on recruiting, there's two things. There is this individualism, there's definitely a focus on purpose and wanting to help people but there's also a focus on individualism, what's special about me, what do I, what, you know, why should I be here, why should I invest? And at the high level, that can feel incongruent with this idea of army as one. And so one question I have, so it's two-part question, one question is from an outreach perspective and even thinking for EY, do you come in as a team or a very team focused organization? How do you balance that when you're recruiting folks from that bracket? Then the other piece of it too is that there's this sense of always wanting change, you know, and not wanting things to be settled, but there's a lot of gift that comes from, you know, you can do a lot of change within the army but there's a big gift that comes from that as well of predictability, being on a path and that kind of thing. So just, and the last thing is the language. I don't know if you've ever sat in a room with 18 to 25 year olds. I'm 44 years old, pretty smart. Sometimes I have no idea what is going on. And so, you know, with that in mind, you know, with the army and the culture it's so strong, the language. So I sat here and I understood what was being spoken about and at the same time there's like an accessibility because when you're talking to an 18 year old it's not that they're not smart or they're not educated or not eager but they might use words that the recruiter might be triggering for the recruiter because they don't understand. So when you have those factors flying around whether you're recruiting for a big place like EY or Army how are you factoring that in into your strategy? Those are really great points, well made. It's interesting, we collect a lot of focus group data and whether it's at an OSD level or a service level we preview and test run a lot of our content and it's always interesting to see that feedback and kind of what resonates with them or not. I think one of the points you hit on is kind of what's in it for me? You know, they're driven with purpose and I think in many ways they are, you know, they do a lot of community service. They really do, you know, they're focused on how to improve the situation around them or the community around them but at the same time it's often kind of on their terms or what's of interest to them. So how do you balance that? We've also seen in our data kind of this trend to entrepreneurism, you know, that's what they're interested in. I think part of that is driven by like the TikTok and the YouTube era where there's a view that if I just make my own content, if I just do this and I will be successful and I kind of control my own destiny and then how do we respond to that? I think there's a lot of ways that military service and Army in particular, you can choose your own adventure because there's so many different varied paths and we have to do a good job of helping to explain that to people in terms that they understand and that can be challenging but one of the ways that we've found that to be successful is kind of showcasing both success in service and then also their ability to pursue their passions outside of service. There's this mindset and the data demonstrates this, that there's this view if I join the military it's all or nothing. My life is gonna be 100% Army all the time. I can't have a dog, I can't have a family, I can't go hiking on the weekends and we know that's not true and so some of the most successful media campaigns we've seen in Army or the other services is ones or ones that help model being able to be successful in both and meeting your passion in both dual tracks and then also once we've kind of captured that interest then even start having conversations about well what component is the right fit for you? Is it active? Is it reserve? Is it national guard? And that's sometimes hard to do but you're right, we have to do it all usually in 30 seconds or less and then in a language that they understand that speaks to both altruistically what they're interested in but then also what's in it for them. And I think that Army does a particularly great job of that and in seeing some of the new content that they're also planning on air I think it will really hit the mark in that way and look forward to your feedback. If I could just follow up on that briefly. On the front end, getting back the idea of showing them the many, many different ways that they can serve all the different types of jobs and training they can get coming in. And then also from their enlistment options that could be designed to get them having a sense of more ownership and what they're putting together and of course once they're in for their professional development as they go along making sure that they continue along a track that's appealing to them, we should also help with retention. I think just to add to that on the retention side I think the Army talent management market does a really great job of being able to give members kind of a greater sense of ownership of what that journey looks like. And that would be hard to necessarily showcase and advertising content but I think in terms of having a positive service experience then I think that that definitely pays dividends. Can I just, I know you're anxious to get going. So first of all, well done on the branding. She's got E-Y yellow on, so well done. But I think to your point, so Gen Z, I mean this is, it's a topic we're doing a lot of research on and encourage people to really just thought leadership around Gen Z because it is an incredibly important question is how do you balance that teamwork which in our world is really important with that sense of, we hire people that have high intellectual curiosity. And so when you start talking about upskilling and some of the creative things you can do several years ago because of that desire and demand to continue to expand their business acumen. We set up something as simple as called E-Y badges. There's 250 badges you can do. You can't do it in two hours. It's actually pretty fulsome of a process but you can get a badge in AI. You can get a badge in data analytics. You can get a badge in leadership. You can get a badge in diversity and inclusiveness. So there's 250 topics. Some are more expansive than others. You can have bronze, silver, and gold. But it's, one, it's a measure of pride and showing that you've got some specialization and skill sets that are gonna serve you well not just this moment in your job but it was just a creative approach to figure out how do we do that balance, right? Teamwork's important but we know each of you individually may have different perspectives and wants and needs for your own career. Hi, Dave Grant from SmarterBase. Great information on recruiting. I wanted to get a question in on retention and so just curious, I read in the paper a couple days ago I think it was a quote by a general client that said while recruiting was down I think it was by 14 or 15,000 retention actually surpassed expectations for this past year. And so it made me curious as to are there goals for retention, average, you know, length of service is the goal to increase that over time and also what are you seeing as the major causes of people not staying on or maybe retiring early or moving out of the force early? And it's particularly one's causes which you think there's some leverage to reverse that, to extend the length of service would be my question. Thank you. Okay, well I'll start on that one and you are correct. We mentioned three pillars up front of our sessions coming in, recruiting, retention and attrition. And over the last year, historically high retention was great. Historically low attrition, which is also great and you identify the recruiting challenge that we're working with. But what we have seen once a soldier's in and they have some of those opportunities that are offered to them, the purpose as well, have all boosted a desire to retain. You'll re-enlist and stay in, it may be in the same job, promotion opportunities are another job. So all of those are things that we're looking at in the innovative approaches for retention and even want to bring in more but at some point you do need young enlisted boots. So we'll focus there also. I would like to highlight something that's not a totally new initiative but it's definitely boosted over the last year or two is an exit survey. Like why did you get out? And it's also identified in their transition program. And it may be, I just wanted an opportunity or I'm ready to go to college, which is great. But if something else comes back, feed that back into the system on how we would like to improve quality of life and opportunities for those that want to continue to be retained. On the attrition issue, I know you didn't ask this specifically, but from the time someone goes through basic training, sponsorship and transition to their first year of assignment, that path needs to be pretty fluid in maintaining the quality as well because he or she is probably going to retain also past their first assignment. So all that's factored in as well. And given all of this holistic look, these innovative approaches, yes. What more can be looked at with retention whether it's the enlistment times, the enlistment windows, bonuses that may come with it or just additional opportunities. You're an infantryman today, which I recommend you stay. Bad joke. Other opportunities as well that you could go into and to really boost all opportunities when those three pillars that I mentioned, the recruiting piece, retention piece and attrition piece all feed into the strength that an army needs. Thank you. Anybody else? Okay, thank you. Thank you. I do have one question here. I'm going to, it's directed mostly towards Dr. Orvis with Rand. And I'm sorry, I suddenly got a tickle in my throat. How can we better utilize simulation tools such as the recruit selection tool to affect change in recruit characteristics? So the recruit selection tool followed up everybody who came into the army enlisted between FYI one and 11 for six years. Looked at quite a variety of their characteristics and saw how that played out in various forms of attrition or problems, the rates of problems they got into in the first term. It can be modified also to look at retention and it had a cost element also. So if you're thinking about looking at eligibility criteria, this can give you a sense as you're thinking about designing a program of which things look like they can help you and which things look like you don't want to go there. And some of the surprising things about it, sometimes you might get, let's say an increase in attrition to a certain extent, but the amount when you put it together with recruiting resource model, you're saving resources. Even though you've got to bring in and train more people at the end of the day, it's more cost effective for the army. So that can be used as you think about the simulation tool can be used in designing programs that deal with eligibility. Thank you. At this time, we're gonna be moving to closing comments, closing remarks. I'm gonna start at the far end, Dr. Orvis and we'll come back towards me. And I won't put you through the glory detail on the analytical side this time. So the first area was strengthening recruiting. And we talked about expanding the general market that people know very little about service. There's a wide variety of things they can have as jobs and get trained in, benefits and pay, they have concerns that are not founded. And we talked about trying to appeal to different college market subgroups to increase penetration of the college market and the fact that different subgroups, those that take classes while they're serving, those that wanna do it before, those that do it after, they're gonna require different kinds of programs that are tailored to their particular interests. We talked about increasing the usage of marketing relative to enlistment bonuses and that of course needs to be done in accordance with the size of the accession mission and the difficulty of the recruiting conditions because one size does not fit all, you get different mixes that are optimal. We talked about leveraging analyses to help recruiters increase productivity. So we talked about some research would suggest that if you account in more detail for the difficulty of recruiting submarkets, basically the mission boxes. So we're talking about high school grads, one to three alphas, senior alphas and others. If you do that in an area, it gives you a better way of deciding how many recruiters ought to be there and what the mission ought to be so it should increase productivity. Although USREC does a pretty good job at that I would say historically. And then we talked about strengthening marketing ROI by getting better granularity in the data so we know which tactics actually are better than others and the outcomes of tactics, different tactics or associated either with different effects in different geographical areas and they attract different types of recruits. We wanna know that. We could also use that to help shape how we market and what the accession cohort would look like that's attracted by the marketing. On the analytical side, we talked about different techniques that are available for program design and assessment, focus groups and surveys, past research results, simulation tools. We talked about assessment. You can look at attitude of propensity change for some programs. That's what you're trying to affect or different types of analysis like multivariate analysis of actually the additional leads or contracts that are produced by a new program. And then we talked about experimental and quasi-experimental designs, difference being everything's a balanced test and comparison area but quasi-experimental can be done after the fact. We've used that to look at local marketing ROI. Experimental designs, they're harder to set up they require more lead time and effort. And then at the end, I touched on some analytical considerations making sure that if you're going to evaluate a program you try to use data that are routinely collected you don't need a whole new effort for that that you make sure you're talking about causation of programs not just something that's associated and really do something else. And the difference between a change and the attitudes we talked about propensity has gone down over the years. We talked about change and propensity as relates to actual change in enlistments. And the comment there to keep in mind is that is not at all a one-to-one relationship because people's plans change. And if somebody who tells you they think they're going to enlist several years later depending on what measure maybe 40% of them enlist maybe it's half that much. It just depends on what measure. And most people are down in the negative propensity group. So that's where most of the enlistments are actually coming from. So you can't forget about them and only focus on the people who are already attracted to service. Thank you. Next year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the All Volunteer Force. And so as we look across different periods of time where we've had a hard environment to recruit in, you look at what the best levers of success were and we've really talked about all three of those today. It's principally recruiters, incentives and then marketing and advertising. And I hope you can get a sense from the conversation and the comments today that the department and your army in particular is really vested in looking at those three areas and what they can do differently and what they can do better. And hopefully you've also gotten a sense at how OSD and department senior leadership are prepared to give lift to those efforts. But I think the other thing that you heard from all of us is that we do need your help and we do need the partnership with the communities to make sure that we're getting our message out not only to youth but also to influencers that we can tell the army story better, we can tell the department of defense story better and that hopefully we can start to broach these headwinds that we've experienced over the course of the last year. Thank you. Well, first of all, thanks. And what a pleasure it is to be here. And let me tell you, I think you all know I'm all in even though I've got a week under my belt. But what keeps me going first of all is I love, you know, services at Great Nation but more importantly, you know, of my children of modest daughters deployed right now, another daughter, one daughter army, one daughter Marine, one daughter JRTC, bottom line, I want to make sure that I, you know, whenever called upon to deploy that you have all of the men and women to your right and left so that when you need to depend on them you're not putting an extra weight in your rucksack just due to demanding losses. So this is something that keeps me going and I want to make sure that we really get out there and share our army story, share our, you know, the value proposition of service to this wonderful nation, incentives and bonuses. And, you know, lastly, let's just mobilize all of our great VSO, ARAs, CASAs and really get out there and share this gap from, you know, the two and a half years of, you know, missing the army story. So thanks. Well, I'm totally changing my closing comments from what I was originally after this conversation. I will tell you it was fascinating. So one thing I learned today, I did talk to a couple of former veterans who are now my colleagues and I'm very proud of them. They're actually working with many of you in the audience and I learned that I think we're really good at recruiting but one of them told me that they had to find us we didn't find them. So it's a continuous process. I think that's probably words of wisdom for all of us. There's always, it's a journey that we're on. But I think the conversation today was really interesting to me because we talked a lot about branding, the importance of branding around recruiting but also using data and really truly understanding who your stakeholders are. But the thing that struck me the most is the power of the story. I will tell you, I was struck by every person who came to the microphone has a sense of pride and it really, really represents the Army incredibly well and they tell a story and it's that power of story. I would just encourage all of you to tap into that. We're doing that in different ways around diversity and inclusiveness and we've got a couple programs out there which are kind of showing our culture of belonging and our culture of care. But I'm telling you, it's palpable in this room and I think you should all be really, really proud of that. And last but not least, thank you so much all of you for including me but most importantly for your service. All the great key points have been made. Definitely want to thank the distinguished and diverse panel members for this and I want to thank you for your inseriousness about this. So your thought provoking questions. A lot of good things here. If you're in uniform, you're a recruiter. So help with the effort. I'm sure the Chief would say just that. But more importantly for those who have served or are supporting us, castes and others. This is a big total team effort and we will not succeed and we will succeed at this. We'll turn the challenge but in order to deliver that Army for 2030 and get ready for 2040, we'll continue to be innovative in our talent management approaches and we will turn this recruiting challenge to an opportunity that we'll continue to march forward on. So thank you for your support and again, total team will get this done. Thank you. Thank you all. Again, I would like to thank the audience for taking the time to asking the really tough questions and offering some pretty solid solutions as well. And to the panel, thank you. And on behalf of the AUSA President, General Brown, there is a small token of our appreciation for AUSA at each table side, that's your gift and we made sure we played with the right rules. So if there's anybody in here, the cost was not cost prohibitive just to be certain. So we appreciate all of your time today. I don't know whether any of the panel members can hang around if anybody has additional questions. I'll be here and happy to take them under advisement and we'll get them back to the rest of the panel if you have additional questions. Thank you all and have a good afternoon.