 Good afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to be here to introduce Admiral James Stavridis. And it's really an introduction. He's a speaker who needs no introduction. People are very familiar with his body of work. People have read his books. People have followed his career. I had a delightful experience this afternoon having an in-depth conversation with the admiral and just understanding the way that he thinks about things, his inquisitive nature, the curiosity. It's no wonder that he's been able to put pen to paper and to produce so much written work to help us understand how he has processed his experiences and how he has documented the research that he has done. So I have a little bit of maybe a piece of information that not everybody in the room has. And that is once you've been the Sakir, the supreme Allied commander, when you leave, they name a street or circle after you on shape. And so many of us aspire as a faculty, as a military member, as a staff of this great organization for the members of the foundation who are here. Many of us aspire. But most of us don't get a street named after us. And so that is just one of many accomplishments that we can add to the list. The incredible breadth and length of experience in command, tactically, on staff, strategically, work with partners, work with allies, a deep understanding of our commitments, responsibilities, and alliances in the world. An incredible understanding of the international political economy, which is not normally how we think about Admiral Stavridis, but which he does have and carries with him both academically and now in practice. Sir, as we were having our discussion, I thought, because it's a little bit like an interview, when you have somebody so senior to yourself having a conversation. And I thought, wow, most interviewers, they ask you, what are the last three books you read? And so I thought, well, here's a guy who's documented the last 50 books he's read in a new compilation, which is just a fantastic example of how great his ability to share is in terms of pulling the pearls from among the many paragraphs that there are to choose from. It is my great honor today to introduce Admiral Stavridis. Sir, we look forward to your remarks. What a pleasure. Thank you. Wow. What a kind introduction and fabulous to be with everybody this afternoon. I kind of looked at the timeline. You know, I'm speaking late afternoon, August, summer on a Friday, and I kind of predicted maybe there'll be about 17 people in the auditorium. So I commend you for coming out. Admiral, Madam President, congratulations on your ascension to this important command. And also, I want to thank you for that very kind introduction. Typically, you know, when people hear that introduction and they actually see me, you know, they hear a supreme ally commander of NATO and commander of Southern command, and then you actually get a look at me. And they tend to say, you know, I thought you'd be taller. And then they often say if they're Navy people and they understand Navy career paths, they will say, well, you know, Stavridis, if you're really that cool, why were you not a naval aviator? You know, why were you not, you know, like a fighter pilot and goose and maverick, by the way, are coming back this spring? And truth be told, I desperately wanted to be a naval aviator. Truth. But I had a very traumatic experience when I was a young boy at an airport that made aviation really difficult. Enough about me. Let's talk about the world. And let's do it like a sailor looks at the horizon. Let's kind of walk around some of the challenges in this 21st century, and they are many. And then we'll talk about what can we do about it and how can we create a strategic approach to dealing with some of these challenges. So I'll try and tee that up and then we'll open it up for a conversation as this Friday afternoon comes to pass. So that'll be our plan. Let me start with one of these hinges in history. A moment when everything changes. A kind of temporal center of gravity, 9-11. It changes the world. It changes the course of history. That day will stay with me forever because that little red circle that you're looking at was my office. I watched the airplane hit the Pentagon. I was a newly selected one-star officer. I'd literally just pinned on a very proud of my first star. And little did I know that at the end of that day, I would be wearing a uniform that smelled so strongly of smoke that I had to take that first Admiral's wide band, came off my blues and throw it away. That's a day that will stick with you. And I mention it in the context of the challenges we face today from this kind of violent extremism. Here's the face of this, right? This is actually not al-Qaeda. This is the Islamic State. Let me introduce you to Rafiq al-Shatar. He became famous in Raqqa, Syria in 2016 when he executed his mother in the town square of Raqqa. And this is what we think of when we think of violent extremism, right? It tends to occur a long way away in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and Yemen. Well, let's bring it a little closer to home. Let's go to a very peaceful European country. This is Oslo, Norway. This is Anders Brevik on a terrible day some years ago. He blew up the government house. Think the old executive office building equivalent in Oslo. You see the result of the bomb there. That killed seven. Then he took high-powered weapons and went to a small island off the coast of Oslo where a political convention was in progress for young people between the ages of 16 and 24. Kind of what we in the United States would think of as boy state or girl state. He killed 70 young Norwegians that day. That is a horrific act of violent extremism. And by the way, it has nothing to do with radical Islam. It has to do with political manifestos. Shall we bring it a little closer to home? This is Charleston, South Carolina, an iconic African-American church where the seven worshipers were gunned down by lower-right Dylan Roof in an act of racial extremism. How about a year ago at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worshipers killed because they were Jewish? Or how about last week El Paso, Texas, where a group of Latinos were attacked by an avowed white supremacist? My point is this kind of violent extremism permeates many societies, including our own here in the United States. And we need to think of it in that broad context. When I dive in deeply, I worry about all of those, but I do worry about the Islamic State in particular. And here's a news flash. We have not heard the last of the Islamic State. We've had a pretty good campaign that has pushed them out of much of their land, if you will, between Syria and Iraq. But they will continue to haunt us for two principal reasons, both of which you see in this image. They are very, very good at branding, at advertising. The most downloaded image on the worldwide web two years ago was the black flag of the Islamic State. And secondly, upper right, because they're a money-making machine. We've never seen a terrorist organization this efficient in that regard. And again, we've taken some options away from them by pushing them out of territories, but you've got to think of it like we do about forest fires in California. We can put out the blaze. We've kind of done that. There's still a lot of embers on the floor of the forest. We have not heard the last of this group. And by the way, we ought to be particularly concerned about them, not only because they are experts at recruiting, proselytizing, branding, and they are superb at making money. But thirdly, they have a plan. It's a caliphate. Now look at Spain. I don't think Spain is going to be called Andalus anytime soon. But when an organization is this creative, this capable of inspiring others, and this venal capable of executing your parents in a town square, we ought to be very concerned about the Islamic State. So my first challenge for us as we think about this world is this violent extremism, which certainly exists in parts of radicalized Islam, but also exists in many other societies in many other ways that we need to collectively begin to create solutions as we deal with it. What else? We ought to recognize that there are nations that live, shall we say, somewhat outside the norms of international law. You will recognize the flag of Iran here. Some of you will recognize that Sahil 2 missile alongside it, a long-range ballistic missile. We're going to continue to see Iran push the edges of activity in the Middle East. And our problem as we look at Iran is we fail to understand their history, their culture, their ambitions, which are distinctly imperial. The bottom graph is not, at the present time, a look at Iranian influence in the Middle East. That's what you might have guessed. The map at the bottom shows the greatest extent of the Persian Empire 2,500 years ago. The flags on the upper left are those of Darius the Great and Cyrus the Magnificent, alongside the flag of present-day Iran. We think of Iran as kind of a middle-sized, annoying country in a very unstable region. The Iranian self-view is that they are inheritors of an imperial tradition, and it is no coincidence that everywhere in that old Persian Empire, by the way, I'm Greek-American. You'll note Greece was never conquered by the Persians. Everywhere around that periphery, we see the Iranians pushing in every capital, in every region. We need to be concerned about it. And let's take a quick glance at the Middle East. Flags again, Saudi Arabia, bottom left, Iran upper right, parked in the middle of this tinderbox is Israel, our friend, ally, partner. And of course, bottom right is the crown prince who pushes hard against Iran. I've met with him on several occasions. He's a very dynamic leader who will continue to spark this set of conflicts, Sunni, Shia, religious disagreement, alongside geopolitical disagreement. That's important when we look back through world history, where we find instances of religious conflict. Think of it as a threat stream and geopolitical competition. You know, it's like in Ghostbusters, you don't want the streams to cross. They're crossing now in the Middle East. And sometimes people say to me, well, you know, Admiral, how long is that conflict going to go on in the Middle East? And I say, well, many of you in this room will be of the Christian faith. We've seen this movie before in Europe, in the wars of the Reformation, Protestant and Catholic religious disagreement, geopolitical competition, England versus Spain, Belgium becomes ground zero. That's why Belgium today has a French Catholic speaking south and a Flemish Protestant speaking north. How long did those wars go on? Well, we call it the Hundred Years' War. It actually went on for about 150 years. And you can make the case that it flickers on in Ireland today. So we ought to be very concerned about Iran. And of course, parked almost on top of that scenario is the humanitarian crisis in Syria. This, of course, is Bashar al-Assad, war criminal. He's killed 600,000 Syrians on a pre-war population of 21 million. He's pushed 14 million out of their homes, displaced either internally or 7 million of them pushed outside the country. Population-adjusted numbers. This would be a moment in the United States where 100 million Americans are pushed outside the country into refugee camps. This is an enormous humanitarian crisis with a geopolitical overlie because of the conflict between the United States and Russia in a region that is already predisposed to an extreme level of disagreement between players. And what does it all result in? Right there. Waves of refugees. Again, 14 million Syrians displaced, 7 million outside the country. Those streams moving through the near Middle East, some coming through Libya into Europe, roiling the politics. And who's the winner in Europe? Right there. Putin continues to be engaged for a variety of reasons in Syria, one of which is the destabilizing factor. And our problem in dealing with Vladimir Putin is we keep looking for the strategic terrain somewhere on a map to deal with Vladimir Putin's Russia. The strategic terrain is right there. He's a unitary leader and we need to understand him and what drives him and how he was created and what are the levers of power that he wields and how he tries to influence not only our democratic elections but those in Europe. All of that, all of that is part of the set of challenges. How about close to home? Venezuela. Venezuela is becoming not quite a Syrian level conflict but certainly one which is rising in tempo and heat. Probably three to four million refugees pushed outside of Venezuela now, increasing the burdens in nearby Colombia and Brazil. All of this here in the Americas. We see the challenges of trying to push Nicolas Maduro out of power but doing it with our allies, doing it with our partners, doing it with economic sanctions in ways that we hope can ultimately restore rule of law in that very troubled country. So that's a glance around at some of the nations we ought to be worried about. But how about Asia? Let's turn our gaze to the West. By the way, if you want to read one book to get a snapshot summary of the challenges, particularly in the South China Sea, I recommend Robert Kaplan's Asia's Cauldron. And what's happening in Asia? What's the Uber story? It's the rise of China, of course. These are Chinese ballistic missile submarines. You see the Chinese fleet expanding in capability. The age of its ships is dropping as they build new ones. Their first significant indigenous aircraft carrier is out on sea trials. China is coming. That doesn't mean we are inevitably headed for a war with China. Many of you will have read Graham Allison's excellent book, The Thucydides Trap, about the tendency in world history for again and again, scenarios that posit an established power facing a rising power often lead to war. Graham looked at 16 examples in the last 2,000 years, going back to the Peloponnesian Wars when Athens and Sparta folded that scenario into the geopolitics of that moment. And it led to a world-changing war. The last time it happened was about 100 years ago. Great Britain established power, Kaiser's Germany rising power. World War I. And you can drop a plumb line to World War II. Graham would say, we can still avoid the Thucydides Trap, but it will require deft diplomacy and the creation of a strategic approach to China. And we have several major disagreements with China. The ones in the headlines tend to be trade, intellectual property, somewhat cyber and cyber conflict, a kind of shadow war that goes on. I would argue the one I worry about the most is right here. It's the South China Sea. Many of you will know the South China Sea. I would guess many have sailed through it. It's a big body of water. It's about the size of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico combined. And China claims it as territorial seas. This would be like the United States claiming the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico as a territorial sea of the United States. To buttress that claim under international law, they are aggressively building artificial islands. Why? Because if you can make the case that you own an island in a body of water, you have a 12-mile territorial sea. You have a 24-mile contiguous zone. You have a 200-mile exclusive economic zone. Put enough of those. Even in a big body of water, and sooner or later those ink spots tend to come together. This is a preposterous claim under international law. I spent five years as the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the law of the sea. This claim will not stand. It's already been rejected in the international court. So China is trying to change the facts on the ground. Why do they want this so much? Hydrocarbons. The one missing card in the Chinese economic suite is hydrocarbons. And the South China Sea is full of billions of gallons of oil and trillions of square feet of natural gas. And oh, by the way, 40% of the world's trade passes through it. It is a fundamental anchor piece to one belt, one road. So this, I think, will be the most challenging problem we have to deal with with China. Now, there will be others. Another place it tends to come together is the fight in cyber and the use of the 5G networks. So all of those challenges that I've mentioned, trade, intellectual property, 5G, South China Sea, cyber, all of those will be push points between the United States and China. Now, how does North Korea fit into this? Kim Jong-un. He's well-named. He's unpredictable. He's turning out to be a pretty good negotiator, card player, bluffer, just like his father, just like his grandfather. He was raised in a shark tank. As you can see, he's morbidly obese. He's addicted to opioids. He's got a really bad haircut, which I think is kind of holding him back. But he's got nuclear weapons, probably 50 of them. He's got the ability to deliver them relatively short range. Over time, we have to find a way to stop his ability to deliver these weapons. We can talk in Q&A about some ideas to do that. But here's my point. In the U.S.-China relationship, Kim is actually potentially a point of cooperation. Both the United States and China have a strong interest in avoiding a war on the Korean Peninsula. No one wins that war, just like nobody wins a trade war. And in the end, if we are going to find a resolution to the challenge of Kim and nuclear weapons, all roads to Pyongyang lead through Beijing. We have to bring the Chinese into this. So it's an example of the fact that although we will have plenty of challenges in our relationship with China, we will also find ways we can cooperate with China. And it's important we do. That is the strategic approach we should take with China. Confront where we must, South China Sea, but cooperate where we can. That's a pretty reasonable strategic approach. So let's shift our gaze. We've talked about violent extremism. We've talked about some national actors we ought to be concerned about. Let's talk about some transnational challenges. What crop is this? Poppies. How many of you have been to Afghanistan? President of the Wurkha, Drana PRT there. Afghanistan. Much of the challenge there derives from this, this photograph taken there. And of course it's not just poppies, opium, heroin. It's also cocaine. This is actually a pretty hopeful picture. I think we took this photograph when Ambassador Patterson was the ambassador in Columbia as a matter of fact. I think it's one of the speakers here. This is a very hopeful picture. This is a drug bust. The US Navy vessel capturing a drug runner. Here's the bad news. The high-tech US Navy vessel is the one on top in the photo. The one on the bottom that looks like Batman submarine. When we caught that thing, it had 10 tons of cocaine in it. Let's kind of do the numbers for a minute. 10 tons of cocaine. Street value. Boston, Massachusetts. $150 million. 10 tons of cocaine. $150 million out. What went in? Cost them, this was built by Drug Cartel. Cost them $2 million to build it. Crew of three. Carrying costs. Call it a million. So 2 million for construction. A million. Carrying costs. Call it 5 million for the coke. Ballpark. $10 million in. $150 million out. That's margin. That's profit. If you went to business school, that's EBITDA. Here's the point. I want to just kind of park the moral question about whether or not people ought to use heroin, cocaine. Kind of up to them, my view. But what I worry about is the money, the profit that goes to finance violent extremist organizations that undermines fragile democracies in the Americas. So we had a worry about that kind of transnational activity, which by some measures, global economy, $80 trillion, some measures will say that this is a $500 billion to $1 trillion business. Now I'm going to answer a question I got a lot when I was Supreme Allied Commander. People would say, hey, Stabritus, you know, you got a lot of problems over there. Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, piracy, dealing with Russia, fractious allies, a lot of problems. What keeps you awake at night? And the answer is none of those things kept me awake at night, because I felt we were pretty well prepared. We had a plan. What kept me awake at night is cyber, cybersecurity. These are the flags of Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Georgia. Georgia will go down in military history because they were the first nation to be attacked simultaneously, troops, tanks, rockets, bombs, kinetically, and with cyber. 2008, they will be only the first and far from the last. All the other nations here have undergone a significant cyber attack in the last five years from Russia, which is very good at this. This is the cover, by the way, of the Russian Cybersecurity Manual. And if you know anything about Russian culture and history, you'll know that the most iconic image is this, St. George and the Dragon, St. George killing the dragon. Coming out of the dragon's mouth are bits, ones and zeros. The Russians are very good at offensive cyber operations. And do you think we're vulnerable here? In every dimension, as we've seen, our political democratic process, our finances, but the one we ought to worry about back to what keeps you awake at night, Stavridis, is the grid. And you ought to read, if you have not, this book by Gretchen Bakke, the grid. And let me illustrate why I worry about it if I can with kind of a tale of two scientists. So work with me here. Let's imagine that I can snap my fingers and bring back any scientist from history. So I'm going to snap my fingers and I'm going to bring back Alexander Graham Bell. What did he invent? Telephone, very good. So I would say to Dr. Bell, Dr. Bell, great to have you back. Let me show you what a telephone looks like. Kind of looks like a deck of cards, except this telephone can communicate point to point anywhere in the world. It can access all the world's knowledge. It can play any symphony ever recorded. It can take photographs. Dr. Bell would look at this like my basset hound looks at a wristwatch. It just wouldn't make any sense to him. Why? Because we've moved so far. Goodbye, Dr. Bell. Now let me snap my fingers again. And here is Thomas Alva Edison. What did he invent? Light bulb, very good. He also invented the grid. He built the first grid in a city block in New York in technical terms. He discovered that you can run electricity in parallel. That's what enables grids. So with Thomas Alva Edison, I would say, Dr. Edison, let me show you the plans for the grid of the United States of America. And I would roll them out for him. And he would say, yeah, source, transformer, step down, wires, step up, transformer, load. Yeah. Got it. I can work on this. The point is, we have invested enormously here. The grid? Not so much. We had to worry about that in the context of cyber, along with the cyber criminal, financial, all the other things we talk about. So all of it, that whole tale of woe I just spun out for you, has a geopolitical context. One of our most significant problems today, the United States, is the way our best pool of allies and partners are pulling apart. And we're very fortunate. We have allies, partners, and friends all around the world. Marvelous ones in Asia. Terrific growing relationships in South Asia, with India. We have extraordinary relationships in Latin America and the Caribbean, Colombia. But that concentration of Europe, the European Union and NATO, you feel those centrifugal forces pulling at it. To the North, Brexit. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and a vowed Brexiteer. To the South, Italy. Bottom right, you may not recognize Prime Minister of Italy, Montehi's pulling, pulling against Brussels. To the East, we see Poland. We see Hungary leaning away from some of the norms of the European Union. And to the East, excuse me, to the West, the United States, kind of leaning back from some of our relationships in Europe. Centrifugal forces. It ought to worry us a great deal. And at the center of it, that's Emmanuel Macron, the President of France. Popularity low. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany. ought to be the heartbeat of the European project coming out of power. All of that ought to concern us. And what's our problem here in the United States? Gridlock. Our political parties cannot achieve reasonable compromise. We have an anger industry that is pulling us apart. We are losing the capacity to negotiate in rational ways, not only between political parties, but even between branches of government. All of that ought to concern us. Well, right about now, you ought to be saying, whew, I wish I was having a beer somewhere. Come on, Admiral, what do you think? What can we do about it? That's a pretty rich menu of challenge, right? So I'm going to show you a picture of what I think is the most important thing we can do to create security and stability and move our nation. And you're imagining what that next slide is going to be. And I bet some of you are thinking it's going to be an aircraft carrier coming right at you. No. The number one thing we could do is this. We could listen better. We could listen better. This, by the way, is not Photoshop. The officer in this photograph is a Belgian, and he is listening in the 1930s for incoming aircraft. It's pretty innovative for its time. But I put it here today as metaphor. We need to listen better. And we need to listen not only to each other. That would be a good place to start. But we need to listen better to our allies, partners and friends. To understand Kim Jong-un, we ought to be talking to our South Korean friends. They understand him in every dimension in ways we never will. If we want to understand how to solve the problems in Venezuela, we ought to be listening to our Colombian friends who understand it deeply. When we want to operate anywhere in the world, the first thing we should be doing is listening to our allies, partners and friends. And thirdly, and this is the hard part, folks, we need to get better at listening to our opponents. We need to understand why China believes that they ought to own the entire South China Sea. They have a, from their perspective, a coherent historical narrative that goes back to the 15th century voyages of Admiral Zheng He. It doesn't hold water in international law. In my view, but we ought to understand why they think it does. We ought to understand why Vladimir Putin truly, deeply, madly believes that the Crimean Peninsula is part of Russia. That's why he simply cleaned up a problem there. We need to understand and listen to our opponents. Doesn't mean we're going to agree with him. Again, confront where we must, but cooperate where we can to cooperate, we need to understand, to confront effectively, we need to listen better. What else can we do? Well, we can read more. And here I'm speaking to the students. A, congratulations on coming to a premier, graduate-level institution. You are hand-picked to come here. Congratulations. Secondly, you are about to receive an enormous gift. And it is the gift of time. You are going to have the opportunity to read not only what this marvelous faculty will direct you toward, but you will have time to read on your own, to build your own education. And reading is the most powerful way you can do that. Here are some books I've been reading lately in the context of today's world. Bottom right, the jungle grows back about the soft withdrawal of America, our nation from many parts of the world. The jungle starts to grow back. Trade wars? Do you think you can win a trade war? Hey, we've seen that movie. Go back to the 1930s. Read up on the Holly Smoot tariffs. The book Peddling Protectionism will kind of walk you through that. And there were certainly other factors involved. But at the end of the day, we thought we could build trade walls, win a trade war. 1930s, how'd that work out? Well, we cracked the global economy and you can drop a plumb line from that to the Second World War and the rise of fascism. Or bottom left. You want to understand how the social networks are being energized today, both in military aspects, but also in political interference. Check out Peter Singer's Like War, the weaponization of social media. I'm going to also put in a plug for the economist. People ask me a lot. You know, there's so much fake news out there. Where can you get the closest to unbiased reporting? There are plenty of places. The one I like is The Economist. And I'll tell you how good The Economist is. First of all, it's almost 200 years old. It's a weekly. So it's neither comes out every six months or every month. No, it comes out every week, but it's also not the breathless 24-7 news cycle. It's kind of in the middle. And also, it doesn't have bylines. There's no bylines in The Economist. There's no ego engaged in the writing or the reporting. It's a very good publication. I'll give you a very practical example of it. When I was both the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and the Commander of U.S. Southern Command, every morning, knock, knock, knock, 10 o'clock in the morning, seven days a week, I would get a binder. It was the President's Daily Intelligence Briefing. Same intel the President saw. And I would dutifully power through that thing. Every week, I read The Economist. And I mean really read it. Circled things, tore out pages, kept the old ones really absorbed it. Overlap, President's Intelligence, Economist, about 90%. It's a very good publication. So my point is reading. And by the way, for this audience, I'd like to think that if you're at the Naval War College, you'll do some reading about the oceans and how they have impacted the world and how so often these maritime battles become hinges in history. So along with listening more, we can build intellectual capital by reading more. What else? We can cherish our values. They are the right values. What are our values? Democracy, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of education, freedom of the press, gender equality, racial equality. We execute those values imperfectly. But they are the right values. And they come to us both from the West, from the Greeks, they come to us from the East, they drop through the Enlightenment. That's the young Voltaire. They come through our founding fathers. We see them in many global leaders like Angela Merkel today. Those values matter. And they must be part of our strategy. What else can we do? How about alliances? Allies, partners, friends. I'm a former NATO commander. You know I'm going to put in a plug for NATO. 29 members, soon to be 30. I'm confident Macedonia will join the Alliance. 29 members, 53% of the world's GDP. 3 million men and women under arms. Active duty, almost all volunteers. 4,000 military aircraft, 800 capital ships. The world has never seen an alliance as capable, as rich, as militarily prepared as NATO. But I would argue in today's world it's not only these formal alliances, but it's also coalitions. Allies, treaty allies, but partners and friends are part of these coalitions. This happens to be a smattering of flags from the coalition against the Islamic State. There are 77 nations in this coalition. This is how we will operate in the future. And finally, we the United States need to be prepared to find and deepen our relationships with nations that are perhaps not treaty allies and perhaps have not been historically aligned with us. But how about a nation like India? This is the golden temple of Amritsar, sacred to the Sikh faith. India will surpass China in population during the coming decade. Their economy is growing. They are a democracy. Their governmental language and business is conducted in English. There is much to align us with this massive democracy. When President Bush went to India, he said, I bring greetings to the world's largest democracy, from the world's oldest democracy. There is a natural alignment here that I think would be valuable for us to explore. So allies, partners and friends need to be a fundamental part of our strategy. By the way, how many here are non-U.S. citizens? Many of the students will be. Welcome. Welcome for this year. What else can we do? Okay, I admit it. There is an aircraft carrier in that picture. We do have to have a strong and capable military. But we need to be smart about what our military looks like and how we employ it. And I would argue we'll continue to need some level of these traditional platforms, but your military will look a little different going forward. Anybody see this movie? It's a terrible, terrible movie. I highly do not recommend it. It is a wonderful novel about leadership, but it's also about a cyber force. We are creating here in the United States a space force. I think that is a good move. I would argue we need a cyber force even more and even more quickly. And I'll illustrate it by saying, let's go back 100 years ago. What were the armed forces of the United States 100 years ago? Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard. Armed forces of the United States. Three of the four in the Department of Defense. We didn't have an air force 100 years ago, right? Why? Because we barely were flying airplanes. It took us 50 years to figure out that, yeah, we need an air force. Now we have an Army, a Navy, a Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and of course we have an air force. 50 years from now, military historians are going to look at us in this year, 2019, and say, what were they thinking? Not to have a capable cyber force. That's coming. You will also see more unmanned, a lot more unmanned from space to the aviation world, to the surface and below surface. You will see much more unmanned because artificial intelligence will unlock the capability to use it highly effectively. And thirdly, you'll see special forces. This is a Navy SEAL, Michael Murphy. Michael died in Afghanistan in 2008 where he was the recipient of the Medal of Honor. If you want to see his story, you could either watch the film, which is a very good film, Loan Survivor, or read the book by one of his fellow SEALs. It's about a mission in Afghanistan that goes terribly wrong. And Michael is faced with a very hard moral choice. I put him here for two reasons. One is to make the point that along with the high tech unmanned, the cyber, the traditional forces, we're also going to need those special forces. Highly trained, extremely elite. But secondly, I put Michael here to remind us of the fundamental fact that for all that high tech kit at the end of the day, it's all about young men and women who volunteer to protect us. We'll need all that in our armed forces. And you'll see them, I think, doing not only the war fighting piece, not only the deterrent piece, you'll see more of this. Soft power. This is a Navy hospital ship. When I was commander of Southern Command, I was lucky enough to deploy those beautiful hospital ships throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. They are an extraordinary part of our nation's capability to influence others in positive ways. And I'll tell you a story. When we sent the comfort to Nicaragua, to Managua, Nicaragua, which is, excuse me, to Corinto, Nicaragua, coastal city, it is in a bay that the United States mined during the Contra Wars. We sent the hospital ship there and they set up clinics all over the pier and on the ship. And I was lucky enough to go to one of those clinics and I saw a young mother who had walked for two and a half days to bring her son to the eye clinic of the comfort. And she described to the doctor, my son, you can't see everything in the distance, looks like he is looking through water, she said. And the doctor quickly diagnosed it and the doctor took a pair of little tester glasses because this little boy had simple myopia, like a third of you do, near-sightedness. And she dropped those glasses on this little boy. He might have been seven years old. And the boy looked up and everything you could tell was so clear to him. And he turned so excited to his mother and he said, mama, veo el mundo, mom, I see the world. Multiply that times 800,000 patient treatments in Latin America and the Caribbean does that help create security? Yeah. And let me tell one other soft power story from my days as the NATO commander, I went often to Afghanistan and I had a problem, I had many problems but I had a particular problem with the Afghan security forces trying to train them because by and large they could not read. Why? Because the Taliban withheld information from that generation. These are Afghan national police, by the way. And so I was whining about the lack of literacy in Afghanistan to Ambassador Richard Holbrook, who was the U.S. envoy to the region. And Ambassador Holbrook said, well, Stavridis, why don't you teach them to read? I thought, well, okay. And that's what we did. We created a massive literacy program that continues to this day. These young Afghan recruits that you see in this photograph are illiterate. They are in literacy class in this photograph. And let me tell you something about Afghanistan. If you can read, read, you take a pen and you put it in your outer pocket like this so other people will see you and know that you read. When they graduate from this literacy training, we give them a pen. You should see the look on their faces when they put that pen in their pocket. It's a very important part of what we do in Afghanistan. We've trained 800,000 Afghans to read and write. Third grade level. That's the break-over point where you can continue to read and improve. So, your military will do both the soft power and the hard power things. Well, let me wrap up and then open it up with a couple final thoughts. In addition to all that I've spoken about, I think a crucial thing we must do is strategic communications. And to do that effectively, you have to be in this world. And you're looking at that and you're thinking, okay, retired Navy Admiral, these are shipping lanes, no. Are they airplane routes, CAO routes? Nope. Are these fiber optic cables under the ocean? Nope. There's too many. Only 250 cables carry essentially the entire Internet. No. This is Facebook. The world according to Facebook. The brighter the white, the higher the concentration of Facebook users. The tell, if you're a poker player, is that China is dark because China screens those social networks. They have their own social networks. They want that data. That's big data. Data is oil in today's world. We've got to be here with our values. That's a good news. 2.2 billion people, by the way, are on Facebook. There are a billion people on Twitter. These are the most extensive bridges ever constructed to bring humans together to communicate. That's all the good news. Here's the bad news. I'm also showing you the command and control network of the Islamic State. This is where they recruit, proselytize, conduct operations like the one last Easter that killed 250 people in Sri Lanka. We need to be in this world because I assure you our opponents are Russia, China, edging at our democracy, undermining protesters in Hong Kong, the Islamic State conducting operations. And people say to me, yeah, Admiral, I get it. You're right. It's like it's a war of ideas. No. It's a marketplace of ideas. We have to compete in the marketplace. We cannot be so arrogant to think that the beauty of our values is self-evident. They are not. We have to explain. We have to communicate. We have to mix it up with our opponents. And we've got to do it at scale in this world. And we also have to do it one V one, one on one. This is me as the NATO commander. I'm Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. I'm talking to the Supreme Commander of the Russian Armed Forces, General Nikolai Makarov. I always liked General Makarov. He's a man of normal height. This was actually a very important meeting. We were looking at the Arctic, talking about de-conflicting our submarines. Pretty important stuff. And after the meeting was over, Secretary Gates called me up, my boss, best boss ever. And Secretary Gates said, Steve, read us. How did the meeting go with General Makarov? And I said, sir, it went incredibly well. We saw everything eye to eye. My point, and I do have a point, is we have to not only move our ideas at scale, but we have to move them personally. That's why our diplomats are so important to us. You know, the entire U.S. Foreign Service is smaller than the crew of a nuclear aircraft carrier when the air wing is embarked. Dollar for dollar, person for person, they create a lot of security for us. Personally, we got to be able to do both. Strategic communications. Well, let me wrap up, and then we'll open it up. And I want to make a point here. This is a Tomahawk missile. It flies 1,500 miles. It's on its sixth generation. We've used it countless times. It is so accurate we can choose to fly it through that door or that door. We are very good at this. We are very good at launching missiles. And we need to be at times. We need to get better at launching ideas. And if I could summarize it, I'd say we have to do both. Our strategy has to be capable of using hard power. We're not going to negotiate a solution with the Islamic State. We're going to break them. But so often, the long game in avoiding conflict or ending a conflict is that mix of hard and soft power. It's not an on and off switch. It's not a binary choice to employ our military in combat or to park it in a barracks or tie it to a pier or put it in the hangar. It's a rheostat. It's a dimmer. You get to dial it in between hard and soft. And when you hit that dial right, you have the best chance of effectively creating security. That's what some have called smart power. Lastly, because no presentation in Newport, Rhode Island is allowed to be done without a picture of Alfred Thayer Mahan. Everything I've talked about today, I would summarize by saying we need a strategy. We have to have a national strategy. Mahan talked about that in his classic C-Power. I stole the title for a book of mine, but we need a strategy. And I would argue our strategy needs to incorporate the elements of what we've talked about here today. International, interagency cooperation, private-public cooperation, strategic communication, holding on to our values, listening better, reading and understanding history and culture. All of that needs to be strategically applied, both in individual scenarios, our relationship with China, and in a grand strategy for the United States. So as I wrap it up, I'd like to answer the phone, please. You can see who's calling. That's $50. I'd like to wrap it up with a thought on service. Because, let me ask it this way, how many people here are veterans retired or on active duty in the military of the United States or the military of their nation? I'm going to see a lot of hands go up, right? Thank you. Thank you for your service. People say that to me a lot. Thank you for your service, Admiral, and I appreciate that. I spent 37 years in the military. Here's my final point. There are so many ways to serve this country, or anybody's country, certainly in the armed forces. How about our diplomats, our CIA officers, our career civil servants, our police, our firemen, our emergency medical technicians, our teachers? If you're a teacher in South Carolina teaching in a packed classroom in a rural county, you're making $32,000 a year. You think they're serving the country? I do. Peace Corps volunteers teach for America, volunteer for America, and their equivalents everywhere. My point is, for all of us, we should be thanking all who are serving, and we should be encouraging our countrymen in whatever country we represent to serve together. I think that is part of how we meet the challenge that I feel we face in the United States today, our gridlock, our anger, our inability. If we put our shoulders together to serve in the broadest sense of that term, I think we have the best chance of creating real security for our nation and for those of our allies, partners, and friends. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure being with you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.