Thank you.  Well, good afternoon.

AUDIENCE:  Good afternoon.

ADM. MULLEN:  It’s great to be back – it’s always great to be in Newport, actually, as I come here, in many ways, it’s home because in the Navy and in my community, this is sort of where all the training takes place. 

And I guess it was quite a few years ago – didn’t seem like it – but right down the road here after I had command at the 05 level, I came in to be the director of the basic course for our new ensigns in the community.  And over the course of a couple of years of doing that, I probably had a couple thousand young ensigns that were here for a period of time and then went out to the fleet. 

And about a month ago – or two months– I guess early December, I was in Kandahar.  And I get greeted there by this Navy commander who no longer looked like an ensign and he came up to me just to say hi, and it was cold and we were getting in a little late, but he really just wanted to meet me and say hi and remind me that I had been here with him some 22 years ago right down here when he was an ensign and I was a commander.

And we chatted for a few minutes and I said, I’m sure neither one of us would have imagined that 23 years later – back in 1987 – 23 years later, or 22 years later, we’d be in the positions we were in:  he as a deployed individual augmentee in Afghanistan and certainly where I am. 

And what that does when I think about that, I’m constantly focusing on change and the pace of it.  And it just seems to continue to accelerate.  So if I took that 22-year period and fast-forwarded another 22 years to those same ensigns, actually, who are not very far from here, and you just wonder what they’re going to be doing.  And I think they’ll be doing a lot of engagement, a lot of different kinds of warfare and skill sets than we can kind of think our way through right now.  And it’s back to that pace of change – and in actually 1987, there were very few of us certainly with where we were focused and in my level of seniority could have found Afghanistan on a map. 

And I was reminded a couple nights ago this week, I made an appearance on “The Daily Show.”  Does anybody watch that?  (Laughter.)  I don’t.  (Laughter.)  It comes on too late for me.  But I was struck my one of the things that Jon Stewart did, who by the way has spent a lot of time with our wounded and their families in Bethesda and Walter Reed and feels, as he said on the show, so incredibly moved by our people.

But one of the – if you saw it the other night, one of the things he did was he Google-Mapped Yemen, and the line he used was something along the lines of, you know, Americans do their geography by looking at where we’ve most recently almost been attacked from.  And there’s a lot to be said for that because most people in this country would remember Yemen the last time when Cole got bombed in 2000. 

And that is not to say that an awful lot of us haven’t focused on Yemen.  It’s been a concern of mine for a long time now because of what it represents, which is the potential for, you know, a safe haven for al-Qaida, as does Somalia and as do, quite frankly, some other parts of the world that are ungoverned territories or ungoverned parts of certain countries.

And the reason I go back to the 22 years and where are we 22 years from now and what is our military going to be, and I know there are students from – I think you said 50 countries here.  And the time that you’re here, six months or 1 year, it’s invaluable.  I can’t put a – it’s hard to describe because I think it will actually come into play years from now much more so than in the immediate future.  And the relationships and the dependence and the connections that are made here are going to be critical for whatever kind of world we’re living in a couple decades from now. 

So there’s an inordinate amount of change which is occurring as we speak.  And when I come to the war colleges, I’m always looking at a pretty well-rested audience, an audience that is seeing their families possibly for the first time in some time, reunited with their kids; and then also an audience that has some time to think. 

In addition to building those relationships, hopefully, and with this many countries in the world represented – and this goes to my Yemen and Americans and geography piece – that particularly those members of the United States military and United States government would take time to learn as much as we can about the countries that you represent.

I have been driven for a long time by the belief that the world we’re living in requires us to understand problems from somebody else’s perspective.  And I see that to be the case more and more in everything that I’m doing. 

When I look at my priorities as chairman, I put them in sort of 3 areas.  First is the broader Middle East/South Asia challenge, and that’s first and foremost.  And I was recently just before Christmas – actually, on this same trip – I was in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq.

And Iraq doesn’t get a lot of ink these days but I think it’s really critical that we ensure that we’re not going to – we don’t take our eye off the ball there.  I was encouraged in my visit that when I was in Basra and Baghdad and out in Anbar, the vast majority of the conversations I had with Iraqis were about economics and jobs and they weren’t about security. 

And someone described anbar as an area that was essentially for the military, you know, a shrinking, shrinking footprint.  I was there a year ago over Christmas.  And this year, the difference in anbar just between last year and this year and the leadership – security leadership – that has been generated as a result of, quite frankly, not just the long training pipeline and effort that had gone over there for a number of years but also the significant change when the Iraqis essentially took control of their own country and their own security on the 30^th of June, it invigorated them, it’s given them challenges, there’s no question about that.  But it’s also put them on a pace and given them direction that they know they have to move forward in a way because we’re leaving. 

But because we’re leaving, it doesn’t mean we’re ignoring Iraq.  We’ve got a good plan, the election’s obviously in March and we will start a pretty rapid drawdown in Iraq after those elections to get to 50,000 next summer. 

Obviously, we have shifted our main effort to Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Having been through that review last fall and really learning the lessons of Iraq in many ways and deepening our understanding of Afghanistan.  And I would argue that an awful lot of people in America didn’t really understand a lot about Afghanistan until last summer and through that debate.  And the debates and the deliberations were extensive and rightfully so because it was a major, major decision for the president.  And he is committing lives; he is committing lives and treasure to this mission – and it’s a regional mission, focused not just in Afghanistan but on Pakistan as well. 

And Pakistan is another country that we developed a significant deficit of trust with over the period 1990 to 2002 because of the sanctions that the United States placed on Pakistan.  And we’re just starting to rebuild that trust, quite frankly.  And it’s going to take a while.

Americans are also pretty impatient.  And it’s going to take a patience that sometimes we don’t have.  It’s going to take a patience to return that relationship to the strong one that used to be there with a country that is really critical and vital in that part of the world and has its own challenges, the extremist and terrorist challenges it has internal to the country, the numbers of soldiers and police that the Pakistani forces have lost, the number of citizens who have been killed.  And it’s a very serious problem.  And they have their economic challenges as well.

So a continued near-term – near- to mid- to long-term focus on that part of the world, I think, is going to be – continue to be an absolute imperative for all of us.  But it goes – it’s broader than that certainly, whether it’s Iran or Gaza or Hezbollah, countries which – Iran being one, still – state sponsors of terrorism.  We know that.  And we are mindful of, obviously, being a neighbor in Iraq and being a neighbor in Afghanistan.  And so the engagement there, the planning there, the understanding there takes up an awful lot of my time.

The second big priority for me is just making sure our force is okay.  I just came this morning from Vermont.  I am also in – about 50 countries here.  There are Guard officers here – I assume you’re Guard.  I haven’t met you, but – there are not just – and there are officers from every service of the United States.  And civilians in our government:  How many of you?  And other agencies? 

So this morning I actually went up to spend some time with the Vermont National Guard, the 86^th IBCT.  One of their battalions was essentially being activated and sent to Afghanistan.  And I went up to meet with them, meet with their families and, more than anything else, just tell them thanks.  And over 50 percent of that unit that we sent out today – I think it was actually 60 percent – had previously deployed.  And just that event itself and what the Guard has done – the Guard and the Reserve have done – in the United States since these wars started has been truly extraordinary.  And we could not, we would not have been successful in Iraq without unbelievable performance and commitment on the part of those in the Guard and Reserve as well as our other services.  And we will not be able to sustain ourselves without it.  So that’s one of the reasons I go.

The other reason I go is because I want to try as best I can – it’s pretty easy to isolate yourself.  In Washington it’s pretty easy to isolate yourself as a senior officer because many people would do it for you.  But I also go just to try to be amongst the families and the troops that are really the face of these wars.  They are the ones that are sacrificing the most.  And we should all be mindful of that.  No matter what our jobs are, there are different views based on whether you’re working in Washington or whether you’re working in Kabul or whether you’re in Helmand right now.  And staying connected with respect to those views and to ensure we’re aligned in these critical missions, to really get at this threat, which isn’t going away. 

Very recently, certainly representative – the Detroit incident on Christmas Eve.  And if you back that up to the Headley case or the Zazi case or the five Americans who were picked up recently in Pakistan and the innumerable other situations that have been prevented by a very large – sometimes cumbersome but much more integrated bureaucracy that has been focused on this threat since 9/11.

And that threat continues.  And it sort of goes back to where I started with Yemen.  And there are an awful lot of people focused on Yemen now, but we’ve been focused on Yemen for a significant period of time and we’ll continue to support them and help them.  And they’re a country that certainly has their challenges and we’re working hard to give them the support that they ask for as they address this threat in their own country – a sovereign country, I might add for emphasis, because people ask me – the question comes up:  Are we sending troops into Yemen?

And the answer is we have no plans to do that and we shouldn’t forget this is a sovereign country.  And sovereign countries get to vote on who comes in their country and who doesn’t.  So an awful lot of – and we’ve asked – (audio break) – to get back to the health of the force.  In addition to this unit this morning and how well they represented the Guard and really our men and women in uniform, they represent all of those who serve and who have deployed so many times.

We are about to launch our fifth deployment for our major units since 9/11.  So our BCTs in particular.  And this is six month, eight month, 15 month, 15 month, 12 months.  When you sit down and do the math, you almost can’t get much time at home.  And one of the ways I try to keep my bearing correct on this is to think if I were a 10-year-old boy and my father had gone off to war in 2002 and I just went off to college and how much time did I get to spend with him.  And it hadn’t been a lot; it hadn’t been a lot.

So our families have been unbelievably supportive.  They have been resilient, but they’ve also been stressed as well.  And while it’s going to get better on the Marine Corps side here over the next couple of years – I’m sorry, over the next year.  We’re going to, on the Marines side, as best we can tell, we’ll get to a point here by the end of 2010 where the dwell time – the time you spend home – will be twice as much as when you deploy.  And we won’t get there on the Army side probably for another couple of years, probably ’11 or ’12 based on what we understand right now.

We have taken steps to try to fix that in terms of increasing dwell time.  We have added end strength to both the Army and the Marine Corps – and the Army has added another 22,000  soldiers temporarily over the next couple of years.  But those 22,000, as I’ve learned, people ask me, what is going on in the Navy?  And the honest answer is, I don’t know.  I come to Newport to find out what’s going on in the Navy because I spend a lot of my time on our ground forces. 

And I can tell you a lot more about what’s going on in the Marine Corps and in the Army than I can with the Navy and the Air Force.  That doesn’t mean I don’t know anything about it; I do.  But – (laughter).  For those of you that are writing, I – (laughter) – say that to make a point – (audio break).  But these 22,000 are just – all they’re going to do is help us eliminate churn as we try to get units ready.  There has been this huge scramble sort of beneath the visible line to get soldiers into units and ready to go.  And we have been doing it now for a number of years.  So this 22,000 really is designed to reduce that churn, if you will.  And we look to it to do that.

So a tremendous amount of focus there.  And the last thing I’d say about that part is, focus on those who lost their lives, their families, those who have been wounded visibly and the invisible wounds and making sure we have leadership support more than anything else and good programs.  And, quite frankly, too often I find that we have a plethora of programs.  I want to know which ones are working.  I don’t need any more programs.  I need output.  I need to know if they’re impacting on families, on members in a positive way.  And if they’re not, we should get rid of them.

So we’ve invested a tremendous amount in that, as we should, to make sure they’re okay for the future.  And the other thing with families of the fallen, I have found, much to my chagrin, that these young – in many cases, in most cases, these young widows are very anxious to stay connected.  And there is not a natural lifeline for them once the uniformed member is gone.

And we owe them for than that.  We need to make sure we’re in touch with them, to meet their needs; that may be minimal or it may be a lot, but I think we need to do that.  So I would ask you in your leadership roles to make sure that that’s going on.

And then the third big piece for me is obviously the rest of the world.  And there’s a big world out there and it continues to evolve and we will continue to have challenges there.  Can’t do this alone; got to have friends, allies, partners, coalitions.  Whatever they might be, we need to have them in the world, and I think that’s something that’s going to be more and more the case, come 20 years from now.

So when I talked earlier about – and I can go all over the world for you.  I mean, I can go to the Pacific; I can go to Africa; I can go into our own hemisphere, where we haven’t spent enough time, in my view, focusing on making sure those relationships are strong.  And for us in the military, that’s culture, that’s language.  Those are tours in other countries.  And we have to have career paths which would support those tours.  And in most cases in our services, that has not been the case.  And we need to change that, in terms of what we value because of the importance of those relationships.

So those who get assigned in the attaché world, and how does that happen?  And I actually pay attention to that because of the impact of that attaché and his or her team wherever they are.  And if we don’t pay attention to that, those assignments get made at a very junior level in our organizations and those individuals can deliver tremendously or they can really hamper a relationship.  And in some cases, they can actually break a relationship.  So that’s another huge challenge that I also want to make sure I’ve got my head up, not just focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq and the Middle East, because there’s a lot going on around the world and other places, as well. 

And then lastly, I’d just talk about – I’d talk briefly about budget.  We’re going to roll the QDR out here shortly.  The ’11 budget is coming out shortly.  We are, both in our country and I’m reminded of this again this morning, when the jobless rate continues to be sustained at 10 percent – we’re in a time of real economic challenge in our country and globally.  And so what does that mean for the military?  Among other things, it doesn’t mean that the money’s going to keep rolling in.  It’s just not going to happen. 

It is my obligation, my responsibility, to articulate the needs of our military with respect to meeting national security requirements.  So the QDR is going to set up, certainly, a view of that.  The budgets, in the end, though, as Gordon England, who was most recently the deputy secretary of defense – in the end, Gordon used to say, we are what we buy.  And that’s a true statement.  And we’ve worked hard to try to rebalance ourselves, to get more and more irregular warfare kind of capability there into our kit, if you will. 

That’s not – we’re not walking away from conventional, but we have a real need to be balanced.  And in all of that – so I don’t anticipate the money is going to go up.  In fact, I anticipate it’s probably going to go, in the next couple of years, in the other direction.  And so what does that mean for us?  And where you live, every single dollar counts.  And we have to put the resources where we need them, and we’ve had an ability to do that, certainly, over the last several years because the budgets have gone up so dramatically.  But I think it’s unrealistic to think that, that’s going to continue; it just isn’t.

And in particular, the people side of this, which I’ve emphasized greatly, as has Secretary Gates – you want to get it right for the future?  Make sure we’re okay with our people and their families.  And the families have taken on an entirely – a much more robust and critical piece of who we are because of what we’ve asked them to do.  They’ve always been such, but what we’ve asked families to do, and the fact that they’ve done it – they are, at least in my experience – they are in the center of who we are from a readiness perspective.

And we don’t think about it that way; we need to because if they’re not ready, we’re not ready.  And we need to think about it more than just during a deployment.  You have to start a readiness approach with our families from the day they join, and that they understand as much as possible about our military and what’s available to them, so that we can sustain ourselves.  So we’ve emphasized that a lot.  And in doing that – not just the family side, but out of the money that we get, some 60 to 70 percent go to people.

We’ve got health-care costs that are going high and right for a program that I consider to be a gold standard for our country.  And we’re just not going to – none of that is sustainable.  And I’ve got to be able to operate; I’ve got to be able to resource people; and I’ve got to be able to buy stuff.  And it all comes out of the same pot.  So there – you know, I have growing concerns with respect to future budgets, in terms of making sure we match our requirements and our resources well and making sure that every dollar we have goes where we need it. 

And then lastly, I’d say that these wars are going to end, and I think it’s important that we ask the question, so what’s next?  And what kind of force are we?  And who’s doing that work?  And this takes me back to well-rested, playing intramural sports, coaching soccer – you know, all those things.  But you have some time, in this year, while you’re here, to do some thinking.  And for those of you that have come from hectic jobs where you didn’t get to think a lot, don’t forget that those of us that are still out there – you know, the time to really sit and think is pretty precious.  So you have that this year and I would hope you take advantage of it and take on some tough, strategic questions, like what’s next and what does our military need to do to be prepared for what’s next? 

And you always hear – and I think you will continue to hear it – we’re very much about, too often, fighting the last war.  The wars we’re in right now are the last war, as we look to the future.  So 10 years from now, how much of what we have learned informs us about what we’re going to need to be able to do in the future?  And in my view, it’s not a set piece.  We’re not going to be able to match it and say, this is where we are right now and this is going to work for the next 10 or 20 or 30 years.  It’s just not going to happen.

And when I think about things like cyber; I think about space; I think about boundaries, borders – things that people just ignore; the resources that aren’t there; the growing population; where economies don’t work; the instability that’s associated with that.  What does all that mean and how do we, as a military, fit in?  And it’s not just about the military because it’s also about the rest of our government and, quite frankly, the entire interagency in governments around the world. 

We had, just a specific, just the other day, in Somalia, where the al-Shabaab, which is a growing terrorist organization, cut off the World Food Program in Somalia.  And so that is of great concern because over an extended period of time, the potential for a humanitarian crisis is pretty significant.  And there are these challenges in lots of places. 

So in your spare time here, I hope you would be spending some time thinking about some of those questions for the future because they’re big questions and I think it’s going to get a whole lot more complex in ways that I don’t understand than the opposite.  And to go back to where I started which is 22 years ago when I was a commander right down the road here, I had no idea that we’d be living in the world we’re living in. 

The other thing is we don’t predict very well about where the next crisis is going to break out.  So how do we prepare for strategic surprise?  And how do we think about that?  And this goes back to sort of rebalancing our overall portfolio, which we’ve done, with the best military that I’ve ever served with and make sure we get it right for the future.  Wherein your lives, where are those best junior officers now?  Where are those best NCOs?  And how do we make sure they’re trained, educated, promoted, assigned where they need to be? 

And I’ll leave you with this.  One of the things that I’ve put in place in my own life is this – you may have read something about this – this Af-Pak Hands because time is a real critical factor in Afghanistan and Pakistan and I need people whose ramp-up time going into these two countries is absolutely minimal.  That’s language, that’s culture, that’s previous tours and experience. 

And so I’m very focused right now on getting a cadre of some seven, eight, 900 individuals that are going to be focused on – do tours in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  And when they come back for a year or two, they’re still working those issues; breaking the service paradigm of, that isn’t, you know – that wasn’t in our career path – so that when I take a top-notch performer and do that, and the promotion board comes up and I’m – you know, I’m a big believer in “ducks pick ducks,” and that doesn’t look like a duck to me no matter how good the record is, and so I’m not going to vote that we promote him.  We’ve got to promote those kinds of people and we’ve got to have systems that – people and leaders that recognize that to make sure that – this is my top priority right now. 

I am losing people almost every day in a fight.  There should be nothing that’s more important, quite frankly.  And I’m enough of a pragmatist to know that this isn’t going to happen overnight because we have systems and we need to do some certain things to make it happen.  But this is a completely different way of doing business than how we’ve done things in the past.  And I don’t have a lot of time, as I indicated.  The clock’s ticking.  So I need people that have the experience, that aren’t going to take much time coming back up to speed and that are delivering on the mission immediately. 

So those are a few thoughts.  I’m open to what’s on your mind.  Yeah, no, please.  You’re not going to come up here and ask it, are you?  (Laughter.)