Evening Lecture | Roundtable discussion with Janine Davidson, Lindsay Cohn and Adm. Bill Moran

Welcome and Happy New Year, everybody. God bless you all for coming to your U.S. Naval War College. I'd like to thank everyone for being here tonight. It's a special treat. Not only do we have the Honorable Jeanine Davidson, the Undersecretary of the Navy, but we also have our Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Bill Moran. And together, they're going to have a dialogue about civil-military relations. So it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's moderator, Professor Lindsey Kahn. Professor Kahn is a faculty member in our National Security Affairs Department, teaches both our core courses and a number of electives, including currently is teaching an elective in civil-military relations. Her scholarly research agenda includes a significant focus on broad aspects of this very subject tonight. And so, with no further ado, Professor Kahn. So I'd like to thank everyone very much for coming tonight. As the Admiral remarked, we have the pleasure of two very distinguished guests, and I will introduce them in just a moment. The theme for tonight is the two sides of the civil-military coin, military advice and civilian control. And we do have two senior administration officials tonight as we mentioned, the Honorable Undersecretary of the Navy and the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, who can speak to us from both sides of that coin. Dr. Janine Davidson is the 32nd Undersecretary of the Navy, responsible for all Department of Navy affairs to include Navy and Marine Corps integration, acquisition, finance, personnel, legislative affairs, and research and development. She also serves as the Chief Management Officer for the Department of the Navy. Secretary Davidson has almost 30 years of experience in military operations, national security policy, and academic research. Her noteworthy civilian positions include, but are not limited to, service as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Plans, Director for Stability Operations Capabilities in the Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, and as a presidentially appointed member of the National Commission on the Structure of the Air Force. She was most recently Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has taught national security policy and political science at Georgetown University, George Mason University, and Davidson College, no relation, and has written extensively on a range of defense issues. During her military career, she flew combat support, airdrop, and humanitarian air mobility missions in the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East, and was the first woman to fly the Air Force's Tactical C-130. Admiral Bill Moran is the Navy's 39th Chief of Naval, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, functioning as a Senior Naval Advisor to the Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations. He previously held flag positions as Commander, Patrol and Reconnaissance Group, Director, Air Warfare, and 98 on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations, and most recently as the 57th Chief of Naval Personnel. Prior to attaining flag rank, his operational tours spanned both coasts, and he commanded Patrol Squadron 46 and Patrol and Reconnaissance Wing 2. Additionally, he has held senior leadership positions as Executive Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, Executive Assistant to Commander, U.S. Pacific Command, and Deputy Director, Navy Staff. Please join me in welcoming our very distinguished guests. So civil-military relations is sometimes thought of as simply the art of avoiding coups. Samuel Finer's man on horseback. For others, the term evokes issues of public attitudes towards military personnel and military service. You might think of how the current thank you for your service situation compares to the treatment of returning Vietnam veterans, for example. But a classic and crucial focus of the field is the relationship between senior military officials and senior civilian government officials. This relationship, on first glance, appears quite clear. The military officer offers expert advice. The civilian official, accountable to the public, makes policy decisions based on that advice, which the officer then carries out whether he likes the decision or not. But things are, of course, not that simple. When a non-expert asks an expert for advice, he or she may have difficulty evaluating that advice. Especially if there is conflicting advice coming from other sources. When a military officer considers how to give advice to someone who is not an expert, but who is considering a large spectrum of other issues outside of just the military, should the officer attempt to tailor that advice to what he or she thinks will meet the decision-maker's larger needs? If a policymaker decides on a course of action the officer considers unwise, should the officer continue to dispute that decision? At what point does one accept that the civilian official's authority allows him or her to make decisions the expert disagrees with? If a civilian official herself has extensive military expertise, that's one thing. But how should a civilian official manage a relationship in which he or she holds the authority, but is dependent on the military officer for information? Our speakers tonight will hopefully be able to go into some of these questions for us, illuminating the realities and complexities of the civil-military relationship, and helping us, the voting public, academics interested in security and defense affairs, and military officers who will in future should be in these positions, hopefully help us understand both sides of the civil-military claim. Madam Secretary. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thanks, everybody, for coming out on a cool Wednesday night, and thank you very much to the entire faculty and to Admiral Harley. It's great to be here. I love coming up here. What we'd like to do is just sort of kick off a little bit with our own sort of personal experiences and a little bit of, in my case, a little bit of academic experience, and then kick it open for questions from you all, because what I think is important, and I think Admiral Moran feels the same way, is doing what we can to help prepare you for when you potentially are sitting in our chairs or similar ones in the future. So, for what it's worth, I came to this topic, this whole idea of civilian control of the military, not when I was an Air Force officer, I was a junior officer, but then when I went to graduate school, and I remember reading, as many of you probably have, about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it really struck me how President Kennedy was definitely looking for options from his military advisors, and not necessarily getting what he wanted. What struck me was that there was this very tense dialogue or debate, perhaps. The president had to consider things that the military hadn't considered. The military brought him options to do airstrikes, and he kept asking the same question over and over again, and they didn't really have the answer, which was, okay, so if we do that, then what? And then what? And they'd say, well, that's our military objective, and it was very cartoonish, in a way, from us, these days, when we look back at that. And at the scholarly level, we look at that case study, and we think if it hadn't, Kennedy gets a lot of credit for really pushing and really trying to find a more creative way, and even when he did settle on a blockade, he still did not actually understand, or he was not aware of the fact that there was just sort of a cascade of actions that he had put into place, just by saying yes, because the military had presented him an option, but they didn't tell him, okay, and then when you say yes, this is what's gonna happen, and this is what's gonna happen, and this is what's gonna happen. So he didn't really have a good sense of how things were gonna unfold, and it really struck me that that's kind of a dangerous situation to be in if you're president of the United States, and having recently been a military officer, I sort of really questioned how, I sympathized with the military guys who were saying, once you say yes, man, turn it over, and we'll get it done for you, don't you worry, on the one hand. On the other hand, I sort of thought, you kind of wanna know what you're asking these guys to do in a little more detail. So that was my sort of first eye opener. After grad school, the Iraq War happened, and I was, or I was finishing grad school, I don't remember exactly where I was, but on my way to my next job in the Pentagon, and I was thinking, kind of watching this thing, like many of you probably did, unfold on television, thinking, like knowing that Iraq was gonna fall apart, and knowing that we didn't have the right forces in there, and thinking, who made this decision? And didn't they ask that question? Like whose job was it? At what point in the whole process shouldn't somebody have been saying, okay, okay, okay, so we get to Iraq, and we knock over the country, and then what? You know, nobody asked the and then what question. And it sort of blew me away, just watching it on TV. Fast forward a few years later, and my next experience was when I was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Plans. And I took that job, I had that job from 2009 to 2012. And my job was basically to review and tee up for the Secretary of Defense approval for these work plans, me and my small civil and military team. And I was on the job for about a month when all it dawned on me that, you know, all of a sudden it was my job to ask that question. Like when they came in to bring the plans, you know, and they had whatever they were gonna do, whatever options they were presenting, that was sort of the role of me now that I was a civilian, to say, you know, and then what? And then what's gonna happen? We need to help the Secretary understand how this thing is totally going to unfold. And I loved this job because it was fascinating. It was also surprising to me that for three years that was very hard to have that conversation with the military planners. That even back then, and I think it's changed somewhat, but even back then, the concept that we were all taught of military advice was, this is my military advice, right? Or even maybe there's a couple options, but there were hardly ever more than one option. Because in order to develop a fully fleshed out option that you as a commander felt comfortable presenting to the Secretary of Defense and potentially to the President of the United States, you kind of wanna know that it's gonna work. And so in order to know that it's gonna work, you do all the war gaming and all the analysis, then it takes a long time, and then this is your option. You don't have time to do three options. And so that was problematic. The other thing I learned in that job that I think is relevant sort of at a career level, I had an interesting staff. I had half of my staff on one side of the office were Lieutenant Commanders and Commanders, O5s and O6s, and on the other half were civilians, mostly in their early 30s. And that was a bit of a culture clash. You can tell the officers coming in who, fresh out of the battlefield, many of them are fresh off the ship, you know, who are these kids? And why am I supposed to treat them as equals? Likewise, you had the civilians, you know. The only time they've ever met any of these senior officers is they're making coffee and they're in the cubicles right there with them. So the idea that they're senior leaders in the military, the idea of the military is very skewed because they'd only ever seen them in the Pentagon. So we used to have these conversations to try to bring them together. And those of you who haven't served in the Pentagon yet, this is what I would tell them. I would say to the civilians, you know, you gotta realize that these guys just came out of command. I think they had thousands of troops. Potentially, you know, this guy over here was skipper on a ship, commander of an aircraft carrier, 5,000 people on that ship. They're like big time leaders. I know they just make coffee and do PowerPoint slides with you guys every day, but you know, some respect and sort of ask them like, you know, what that's about, you know? But don't be intimidated by them either because you have something to offer that they don't have, which is what I would say to the officers who would kind of be like, who are these young bucks and why am I supposed to listen to this little girl or young man, whatever? And I'd say, you know, in the first 10 years of your career, like mine, I was learning to fly an airplane, you know? I never read Clausewitz or, you know, I wasn't studying the kinds of things that you waited to a war college to learn. These guys have been doing this for 10 years. They know the Pentagon. They know international relations theory. They know deterrence inside and out. That guy over there has got a PhD in, you know, Middle East relations. I mean, they actually, as a team, you guys have it all, right? So you've got to learn to, like, understand that. You know, a lot of these military guys have never worked with civilians in their lives. So that was an eye-opener. And then my final experience so far has been working with this guy for the last year. And civil-military relations in the service is a little bit of a different animal. You know, it wasn't planned. It wasn't operational. I mean, on a day-to-day basis, we're kind of like the COOs of the Navy. We're managing Giannulli's budget. We're dealing with the crazy bureaucracy, the third deck, which is what we call OSC, which is printed on the third floor. And I think what's helped us do this is that we openly talk about this stuff. You know, like, what's your expectation for the undersecretary? You know, what's your expectation, you know, for the vice chief? Remember, we actually did have a conversation where I said, I am not a commander, right? I'm not gonna try to tell, you know, the sailors, I'm not gonna get out on a ship and do the kinds of things that you should be doing, you know, but I'm a senior department of the Navy leader, and that's different. It's really hard to sort of draw a clear, clean line because, you know, when bad things happen in the Navy, we're responsible. But we definitely have slightly different roles. And so there are lots of different parts to this animal that we call civil and military relations. So with that, I'll wait and see what kinds of questions Bill can now say all the things that I got wrong. Not at all. I just want you all to remember that she said I should be out commanding sailors at sea. So as my senior civilian boss, I'm gonna take you up on that. Since I only have eight more working days in the Pentagon, tell me what I need to sign. Hold on, I got a whole list. So I want it to be known that I have done PowerPoint for Secretary Davidson. She demands a lot of PowerPoint from all of us. Tough boss. Seriously, great to be here tonight. Always love coming to Newport. It is, for a lot of reasons, the cradle of intellect and good thoughts, international, different perspectives. Inter-departmental. And I always love to get a sense of the crowd we're talking to, and so a quick show of hands, the international folks here tonight. Okay, great. And how about the number of military students that are post what we would call O5 command, your first command, post O5 command, how many of them? Okay. How many pre-command? Assuming you're all aspiring to command something someday. How many pre-command? Okay, so we're split pretty good. Let me tell you my journey. Having never sat in your seat prior to command of anything, and I got to War College 25 years into my career, so I got a master's at a much later date than you're supposed to. But that is the Navy, isn't it, for all the Navy folks in the room? I mean, you have to scrap and crawl just to get up here and get to be part of a year of study. So that's the Navy. The Navy's got some work to do on that, and we're working on it. So my experience with this discussion on civil relations almost immediately devolves into civilian control, in my opinion. And I don't mind getting into those conversations or that discussion tonight. But really, it's a two-part discussion, one about relationships, and one about the law. The law says civilians control the military. So I'm not sure there's much of a discussion to have. But there is a serious discussion to how you build relationships to make that work well. And so that's where I would focus it on. And I'll be perfectly frank with you, like most of the Naval officers and probably other services in the room, I never gave a thought to this topic at all until I got to war college, almost, at least on a theoretical side. In a practical side, I never really got to experience it until I was about the 20-year mark in my career. And that is because operational in my whole career, for the most part, out flying airplanes, operating all over the world, and one staff job in the Bureau of Naval Personnel at a young age, but even there, it wasn't about civilian-military relations at all. And when you're an O5 commander in the fleet, you're working with sailors, and you're working with yards, and you're working with depots. You're not really working in the structure of signal relations like we're talking about tonight. So immediately after my command tour, my first job was, by serendipity, I was selected to go out and interview, competitively interview, for a job out at Pacific Command. When I found out I was the only person in the package, I knew the competition was gonna be tough. So all I could do was screw it up, right? And so I get out to Pacific Command, and my boss at the time, a wonderful guy, a Rhodes Scholar, very intimidating because he was brilliant, he had a photographic memory, he still does, he's a dear friend and mentor of mine, Admiral Denny Blair, who started grilling me in my interview. It wasn't, hey, Bill, how you doing, where's your family from, where'd you grow up? It was, hey, what do you know about the Joint Staffed Force? And who named me two Undersecretaries of Defense? I'm failing this interview, so I'm gonna lose to myself tonight. And literally got out of that interview, and of course, long story short, he selected me for the job, and there was nobody else available, apparently. And so Deputy EA at Pacific Command, in that front office, there's the Commander, there's the O6 Executive Assistant, and then there's the Deputy, and then all of the Staff Directors underneath. And within a few months of being in the job, Mahimi Maru, Greenville Collision, off the coast of Hawaii. We got thrust into a political-military discussion. A very tragic event, a tough one for arguably our strongest ally in the Pacific at the time, and continues. Very, very, very challenging time for my boss, who had to balance across the whole spectrum of relationships, not in the classic sense of civilian-controlled military inside the Pentagon, inside the structure of defense, but inside the State Department, inside how the NSC is operating, trying to balance the messages and the impacts to the relationship. My head is spinning because that's not an operational discussion so much as it is, what are the potential impacts on the future of our relationship with a key ally? If we had to go to war in the Pacific, they gotta be there with us. And those conversations thrust me into this sieve-mill relationship that I was not ready for. Within a couple months of that, guess what happened? EP3, Hawaiian Island, remember that? And within a couple months of that, what happened? 9-11. So within nine months, we had three major events that were all international in scope, all challenged our ability to navigate through relationships with allies and partners around the globe, and challenged me to understand how to give my best support to a boss who's dealing with all of that, dealing with Secretary of Defense, a new administration, relatively new administration, and all the challenges that go with how do you support the Joint Chiefs, how do you support the combatant commander echelons below that structure, all the way through. So it was an amazing time. My 39 months at PACOM, as the DEA, and then my last 18 months in the job were as the EA at Admiral Fargo, we took over not long after. We were a rocket ship, we went by in no time. And finally, Admiral Fargo let me go to Major Command, where I took my experience at PACOM, thinking at the strategic level, and had to immediately figure out how to get back down to the operational tactical level. But with always a mind towards, or an eye towards, how my teams were gonna operate forward in a very politically charged, tough environment, whether you were in the Pacific, or in many cases, the squadrons I was commanding at the time were in the Middle East, supporting that effort. So it was a very challenging time for me, operationally, but I always found myself thinking about the political-military discussions that I had at PACOM, when I was part of it. At least I got to sit on the sidelines of this. And then, two years go by in a heartbeat, in Major Command, and I get the Bureau, those great guys in the Bureau that we all love dearly, don't we? They called and said, hey, you're going to War College. And I said, War College? I got 25 years in the Navy, why am I going to War College? Because I don't need to go to school. No, you're going to War College. You got to get that joint thing, you got to stay competitive. So I went to National War College, where I got a wonderful introduction into civilian-military relations, because half of my classmates were State Department, FBI, industry, or at least in the CISCOMs. We had a wonderful class, and a wonderful mix of people. Civ-mil relations, again. We had guest speakers at the time, like Lieutenant General Petraeus. Lieutenant General, Lieutenant General, all these combat warriors, and many of my classmates had been three or four times back to Iraq and Afghanistan. So we had a clash of right and wrong in our minds about whether the civilian authorities got it right, and whether the military guys and gals got it right or not. And it was a fascinating year. And then shortly after leaving that job, I ended up in the Pentagon working for Admiral Mullen, his EA, as he began to transition to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And what did we talk about? We talked about civ-mil relations. High on his radar was trust and confidence in the institution of the military by the American public. Because remember, this was 07-ish, right before the surge. That's right when you came into the building, and those debates were raging in 07 and 08. Admiral Mullen, Admiral Ruffhead, and then I found myself in the middle of civ-mil relations outside of warfare, and deeply embedded in program. And that's a whole nother world of building relationships, and building relationships with our civilian friends in OSD, in Navy, and other places. So this whole discussion about relationships is really where I think we need to focus our energy. And how do you deal with that? If you're like me, and many of you probably are, you're not, your first exposure to this is when you get that first assignment to, by the way, I have a photographic memory too, and I remember every one of you that raised your hand. And I'm gonna look you up, and we're gonna bring you to the Pentagon, or at least Washington, D.C. And then you'll never like me again. But seriously, your first real exposure to this idea that you've gotta build relationships with our civilian partners in every organization, not just defense, will become very apparent. And you gotta work through this. My sense is that when we talk about, and Secretary Davidson discussed this, best military advice can often be viewed as a cop-out. We're having to really intellectually dive into the issues and have conversations, deep, tension-filled conversations about topics, and they can be small and very large. And I found myself in the middle of all those, from about the O5 level all the way to where I am now. And it's hard, but it's all about getting to know each other. And appreciating the fact that we all come from different places and different experiences. I don't often get to work for a 25-year-old Undersecretary of the Navy, but I am. And her experiences in the Air Force and in academia and in OSD have taught me a lot, made me think differently about how I approach problems as the Vice Chief, and then provide my insights. I won't say best military advice. I like to just say, hey, if you wanna talk to me based on my experience and my insights and how I feel about things, then we're gonna get along just fine. But if you try to box me into the Samuel Huntington model of we are only in this category, which is what we often get accused of when we're in the Infantry, then the civilian side doesn't get us. And Jeanine talked about that really well. On the flip side of it is, we can't come in with our own guards up about who we're working with on the civilian side. And so you just gotta work through it. It's a human endeavor, and it's one that I think if you really dive into it, no matter what job you have, you're gonna find that your experience is that much richer at the end of the day. So I really look forward to your questions and getting into this in whatever shape or fashion you like. Thank you, sir. If I could just follow up on something that you said at the end that you mentioned that giving your best military advice is sometimes viewed as a cop-out. If you could expand a little bit on what you think about when you are trying to give your best military advice, and also if it's different when you are advising, for example, the PACOM commander, or when you're advising a civilian secretary. I guess I can honestly say I've never sat there and said, I'm just gonna give you my best military advice. Because my experience at War College was I walked away from that conversation more often than not thinking like, we're just copping out of the conversation if that's what we're gonna say. If we're gonna finish it with, well, I gave you my best military advice, that has never worked for me. So I would tell you that no matter who it is, and this goes to my grandkids too, we sit there and we talk about this, we debate things. And if I feel like I'm losing on the losing end of that conversation, then I probably haven't got enough information to win that conversation. And I will walk back to my cubby hole and take it all in and take a deep breath and say, okay, was I wrong? And if we're not willing to admit we're wrong on important topics that we deal with every day, then we're probably never gonna get it right and we'll always end up in that box of, this is my best military advice. So I try to avoid that as much as I can. Yeah, so more of a conversation than a sort of here are your options, what are my orders? Well, I've been very lucky that I've never worked for somebody who got so energized that I felt like I was in more than a debate. I always worked for people who were very calmly taking my input and I got to listen to theirs. And more often than not, they were right and I was wrong and I learned. Secretary Davidson, I would love for you to talk a little bit more about how you view your role as a senior civilian in the service secretary position. How do you approach that role? Do you see it as a bridge? Do you see yourself as sort of an advocate for the service to hire civilian authorities or as a translator between the top and lower down? If you could talk more about that. Yeah, it is different in the service space. I think that I'm a little bit of all of the above because it depends on the issue, right? I one time asked a retired fourth star who I respect a lot, a retired admiral, you know, when I first came into the job, what do you think that the military expects from a new secretary or a new secretary? And he said, well, we expect you to do the things we can't do, make us do the things we want to do, right? So things like, you know, integration, you know? I mean, that's probably a good thing. You know, on a day to day basis, he said, you know, we're gonna wake up every day and we're gonna keep doing what we're doing and we're gonna operate the force and we're not gonna be, you know, as the chief of naval operations, we're focused on the warfighting mission. And sometimes there are things you need to do. And so recognizing that and being the one that can push for that, even if it's unpopular at first. Sometimes that comes from Congress. We haven't talked about that, but there's a whole other civil military dynamic that is Congress, you know? And we see that a lot as an undersecretary because people often say that the undersecretary position is like the COO of this ginormous enterprise and the secretary is the CEO. But imagine if you were running an enterprise that has $170 billion budget, 900,000 people, sailors, marines, family members, and your board of directors was 535 Congress people up on the hill. But that's pretty hard. And so a lot of times, in my perfect world, and I don't always get to live in my perfect world, but in my perfect world, I would be working very closely with the senior leadership. I would be deeply engaged in the strategic conversations that they're having in places like this, the OPMAT staff, where they aren't just like, hey, we're working on the strategy and we'll show it to you when we're ready for you to sign it off and send it over to OSB. Like, that's the last thing I want. Some leaders may want it that way. But I feel like I want to see it at different stages, just like people want to see war plans as they're being developed. Because, and I have encountered some naval officers who are like, yeah, you know, we're not ready yet, hasn't been approved by the CNO yet, we'll let you see it when it's ready. And my answer to that is, you're kind of missing out. You guys should take this kind of as a tip. You should be brainwashing all those people on the secretariat staff. If you bring them in and help them understand how you took this journey and why you think you need this many ships, or why you think it's time to come up with a new operating concept, and why you think you need to have this kind of a thing in the budget for this year. If they are like, on your bus the whole way, now they're your advocate. Like, now I go up to the Hill with the Admiral, or I know people he doesn't know out in the think tank community, and now they're singing your tune, right? I mean, it is all about relationships. My point is, getting into that intellectual journey, sort of shoulder to shoulder, then makes it more likely that I am an advocate, as opposed to, hey, I'm here, I'm from the outside, and you guys need change. Sometimes it'll be like that too, but I think that my perfect world is the office.