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now -- our free mobile app -- or wherever you get your podcasts. c-span. >> now, i discussion with army secretary christine moore about leadership in national security and key qualities of a leader. she also discussed ethics and building trust and gave an overview of what the u.s. army is doing to create a pipeline for more female leaders. this event was hosted by george washington university in washington, d.c. and runs just under an hour. >> good morning, everyone. i want to thank you all for being here and sharing the space with us. to begin, i would like to thank our cosponsors, the gender equality and international affairs initiative, d.c. consortium, security policy studies program, national

security studies program, and gw military and veteran services. i would like to begin by stating that it is on the record and questions at the end are welcome. saying is it is on the record and questions at the end are welcomed so today our conversation will center on the role of little and of in national security and the role of women in national security and international security and i-can think of no one more qualified to share her thoughts on this topic than secretary christine wormuth. please allow me to share some of her career highlights. she is the 24th secretary of the army. she was worn in on may 27, 2021 following her nomination by president biden and her confirmation by the united states senate. as the civilian leader of it

have united states army, secretary wormuthover sees the service's $1 5 billion budgets and is responsible for decisions in one million active guards and reserve soldiers. secretary wormuth has worked on defense and national security policy for over 25 years as a career civilian and as a presidential pointee. prior to her current role, she was the director of the international defense and security accelerate at the rand corporation, providing analytical support to the secretary of defense. she was the under secretary of defense for policy from 2014 to 2016, serving as the secretary of defense's tom advisor and representing the department of defense on the national security council's deputies committee. she also holds a bachelor of

arts in political science and fine arts and a master of public policy from the university of maryland. joining secretary wormuth for this conversation is our own alista ayres. dr. ayres is the first whom to serve as dean at tell cannot school of international affairs. she's an award-winning author with senior experience in the government, nonprofit and private sectors from 2013 to 2021 she was the senior fellow for india and south asia. dean ayres has been awarded numerous fellowships and has received honor awards for her work with the state department. she focuses on india's role in the world and the astralses with

south asia. her book request "our time has come" was published by oxford university press in january 2018 and was selected by the financial times for its 2018 politics list. dean ayres has worked as an interpreter for the national committee of the red cross. she received an m.b. from harvard college and a degree from the university of chicago. she has held the trilateral commission, the house jenld -- aagenda working group and the board of policy board of directors. in 2021 and this year the national endowment for the arts democracy announced she will join the organization as a member of the board of directors. with that, please join me in

welcoming secretary warmath and dean ayres. [applause] >> thank you, secretary, for making time to be here with us today. we are very excited about your lessons in leadership. as we were preparing to come in one thing that struck me about your biography was that you got your start in government through the pros -- presidential management program. before i begin the question i will ask you about leadership, would you say a few words about

your start and how the program facilitated your career path? sec. wormuth: sure. i am a huge fan of the pmf program and probably would not be here today if it were not for that program. i was fortunate enough to be chosen for the office of secretary of defense back in 1995. i spent almost a year at the state department. i was thinking about that as i drove over here. there was a special office they set up to facilitate the senate ratification of the first round of data enlargement. madeleine albright was secretary at that time. i got to see her a little bit at work, which is remarkable. and then i was very fortunate to convert into a permanent civil service position on my first spot in the pentagon was with an

incredible figure in national security. she was an early mentor of mine and has been someone who has been very helpful and from whom i have learned a lot over the course in my career. so i would not be here if it were not for the program. anyone interested in foreign policy or government service of any kind who are graduate students, i strongly encourage you to apply for that program. dr. ayres: this is great advice and i hope you take it to heart. here's the first question i was originally going to ask you and because we are here, we are really interested in hearing your thoughts and lessons on leadership. what do you consider the essential qualities of leadership, and how has that been manifested throughout your career?

sec. wormuth: one thing that differentiates a leader from a manager, i think a leader has to be someone who can guide people with all sorts of perspectives in a direction towards objective. and i think more characteristics i believe are very important in leaders are humility. i think it is very important. at again at a time when everything is changing, even if you are running a very large organization as i am now, it is really important to remember there are a ton of things that you do not know and that you

need the input from other people. i think authenticity is very important for a leader. again, i mentioned michelle flournoy, she is someone i greatly admire. we are very different people with very different styles. i realized relatively early in my journey in national security that is much as i admired her, i could not try to lead in the same way she does. we are just different people. i feel like if you are really going to be effective, you have to be true to who you are and lean into your individual strengths, you have to be authentic. i think people can smell when you are not authentic so it is important to have authenticity. another really important quality for leaders is integrity. these are some challenging times. but you have to do what is right

. you certainly have to try to do what is right. i think maintaining your professional and personal integrity is important. dr. ayres: as everyone here knows, this is women's history month. you are a history major. how do you see the role of women in today's armed services on the opportunities available to women in leadership and career advancement? sec. wormuth: i think there are more opportunities for women and certainly for advancement and to be leaders today than in any time in the past. and there are a few different reasons for that. it all starts in the beginning of the pipeline. if you do not have enough people of diverse backgrounds, whether it is women, people of color, different ethnicities, you want to get people early to come into the pipeline of your

organization if they are going to be able to gain the experiences and the leadership and maturity to serve in ever-increasing positions. i think at the department of defense, i came in in 1995. i was 25 or 26 years old. it was during the clinton administration. the administration had made an effort to try to bring in more women. so there were definitely women around me i could see in leadership positions. but since that time, a couple of things have really changed that i think have improved opportunities for women to serve in leadership positions. one is when ashton carter was secretary of defense he opened up all positions across all of the services to women. for example, there has never been an army chief of staff, a

four-star general who leads the army who has not come out of the combat arm. if every -- so every chief of staff has been from the infantry, my immediate predecessor was an aviator. women up until relatively recently were not allowed to serve in those branches in certain positions. that has now changed. i think that you will see over time, going back to my point about the pipeline, there will be more women who will have come through those communities that will gain the experiences to be able to serve at the highest level. for example right now, the four-star commander of u.s. southern command is aviator laura richardson. we have a division commander in the army, michelle schmidt. we have not had a lot of women

division commanders but that has started to change. the navy i think is very proud that the very first woman to serve on the joint chief is admiral frank eddie, a service warfare operator. so you are starting to see it change. the head of u.s. transportation command is a woman. you are starting to see changes. the other thing i think that has changed and is making it easier for women to rise up to the highest leadership positions is there are more resources to support women and families. when i think back to the group of women i started with in 1995, only a few were left and continued to stay in government. i thought to myself, why is that? a significant reason is they got to the fork of the road where they decided whether they wanted

to have children. it is hard. i have two kids, twin daughters about to turn 23. it is hard to work the kinds of jobs i had and raise my kids and be the kind of mom i wanted to be and be present in their lives. i was very fortunate to have a partner who was supportive of that. but it was challenging. we have done a lot more in government i think to make it easier for men and women to have families. for example, in the army we now have 12 weeks of paid parental leave. you can take advantage of that as a woman but also as a man. you can be birthparents or adoptive parents or foster parents. it has enabled people to manage the challenge of career and family a little more easily than was the case in the past. we have done a lot to try to support childcare and make

subsidies available so people can balance that. that kind of support is really important and can really make a difference in terms of women staying in the workforce long enough to rise up to higher positions of authority. dr. ayres: the challenge of childcare effects so many sectors of the economy but it is great to hear these examples coming from the military. we heard in the introduction how large $186 billion, extensive personnel, three 130 active-duty come up one million reservists? sec. wormuth: we have almost one million people in the army. active-duty is 452,000. garden reserves the remainder. and we have a very large number

of department of army civilians. we are an employer for civilians, you do not have to put a uniform on. dr. ayres: so a huge organization. how do you balance the need for maintaining traditional leadership and values and the need for adaptability and innovation at a time when a lot is changing psychologically, in warfare, it is hard to balance both i would think. can you speak a little bit to that? sec. wormuth: sure. the u.s. army has a very long history. we go back to before the official start of the united states of america. in an organization like that, culture and tradition is very important. there are many different ways that the united states army retains its culture and sort of brings people into our culture. everything from talking about our motto, which is this will

defend, to all of the heritage of our various units, the lineage and history of units that people belong to is always emphasized. at the same time, we are very focused on being innovative and on adapting. right now in particular i would say the u.s. army is undergoing the most profound transformation in probably the last 40 years. we have spent obviously the previous 20 years focused on counterterrorism. we have been pivoting to a much more focus on large-scale combat operations, thinking about adversaries like russia, the pacing challenge of china, and to be ready for that we have to be innovative. so we are looking at how to bring artificial intelligence and machine learning into the army. using the weapon systems that

use directed energy and lasers and high-powered microwaves. we set up a command in 2018 called army futures command which we chose to headquarter in austin, texas as opposed to it in washington because we wanted to immerse the command into a part of the country that has a lot of startups and high-tech. so i think you constantly have to strive to be innovative and keep up with the times, but also remember to stay grounded in your lineage. i was reading a book by robert bates called the passion for leadership and he talks about not only his time as secretary of defense but also chancellor of texas and i meant university, which have -- texas a and and which is my hometown. he talked about the chancellor of the university as it transferred from being an

all-male institution where they were all cadets to being broader, excepting women, he made the decision not everyone had to join the poor. but he retained the corps of cadets and growing up there, it is an important part of the texas a and m culture and he was very wise to keep it even as the universities -- university focus brought into. it speaks to the importance of staying anchored to the things that make your institution unique. dr. ayres: as you think about leadership, how do you think about building an ethics and accountability into leadership? can you speak a little bit about that? sec. wormuth: sure. i think it is very important. i think leaders need to have integrity. we all need to have integrity as professionals and whatever field

we go into. particularly at a time i think we are you see a lot of declining trust in institutions here in the united states. so to me it speaks to more than ever the importance of having a culture of ethics and accountability. in the army, we try to create that culture of accountability and a lot of different ways. west point military academy has the motto duty, honor, country. there is a very strict honor code at west point. there is a lot of emphasis at the academy on character, leadership, integrity, ethics, accountability. but of course west point only produces about a quarter of our officers. the others come from rotc

programs around the country. but i would say at every level with our leaders, whether they are lieutenants or jr. ncos, lieutenant col.'s take battalion command. we take command of battalions and there is an emphasis in those courses on ethics and accountability. we do the same thing for our baby generals, when they become one star generals they go through professional military education and part of that is about accountability and ethics and we talk about how the more senior you become, the more you are operating in a fishbowl, the more you need to hold yourself to a higher standard. but i will be honest, there is

certainly a perception in some parts of the army that there is a double standard. that there is a perception that we struggle with accountability. and certainly come very recently i made a decision based on some credible information to suspend a four-star general. that is a very significant step to take. we do not do that very often. and there is an investigation and that has to proceed and i do not want to say much more about it given that the investigation is ongoing. but we need to hold ourselves accountable and there is a perception in some quarters that ncos are held to a different standard than officers, that officers will sometimes get a slap on the wrist where an mco is more severely punished. i think it is very important again in this time of declining trust in institutions that we

demonstrate not just in words but in deeds that we are an ethical institution and we do have rules that apply to everyone and that we hold everyone accountable to the rules and standards. dr. ayres: a quick follow-up for some who might not know, nco's noncommissioned officer. how does that differ from other officers? sec. wormuth: officers and noncommissioned officers, when a young american and less in the army as a privates, you can be promoted over time and become a jr. noncommissioned officer. we have first sergeant, sergeant first class, staff sergeant all the way up to the sergeant major of the army, the highest enlisted ranking person in the army. it is often the nco that teaches our first lieutenants how to show them the ropes when they first come in and are in charge

of groups of soldiers. so the ncos are very important parts of the army, the backbone of the army. something that differentiates us from any other military around the world and also i would argue gives us a comparative advantage compared to the russian army which does not have an nco corps. but they tend to be the working class, the blue-collar part of the army as opposed to maybe the officer part which you could think of as white-collar. at that again speaks to sometimes the perception that there is a double standard for how they are held accountable compared officers. dr. ayres: let me come back to the question of leadership. students sometimes come to me

with questions about next steps and career pathways in life. i know mine has not been linear. can you speak a little bit about challenges, leadership challenges you may have faced in your career and have you overcome them? because pathways are not always that everything works out well the first time around. sec. wormuth: first of all, some advice. i think it is very useful to have a five-year goal you are reaching for, to have a vision for where you want to be five years from now. but they were so many variables and kinks in the road that i think you cannot really plan that far ahead. and if you try to plan five years ahead you can sometimes get locked in and miss opportunities. so i have found for me as my career has unfolded over time that being open to the unexpected can be handy and at a

lot of times can accelerate your career. i'm looking at jennifer, we were colleagues at a think tank in town and one of my big breaks in my career was i had the opportunity to serve as executive director of the jones commission, which congress set up to look at the iraqi security forces in 2007 when we were in the middle of the war peered i am not a middle east expert so who knows why i was asked to be the executive director of the thing that i said sure, i will do it. it exposed me to a whole bunch of different issues and people that i would not have met had i not been ready to take advantage of that opportunity. in terms of leadership challenges, i can give a couple just from my current position as

secretary of the army. coming in is the first woman to be secretary of the army and as a person who has not served in uniform in the army was a big challenge. coming into that role and being positioned to be effective as the secretary of the army, i had to earn the trust of the army, both the uniform side and the civilian side. it was a challenge. and i think the way i tried to meet the challenge if you will is first, prepare, prepare, prepare. some folks in the army, some leaders in the army knew who i was or maybe i had worked with some of them when i was under secretary of defense for policy, but many of the senior leaders in the army did not know me and i'm sure might have had some skepticism about me. so the way i tried to earn their

trust, one of the things i did was to demonstrate that i was capable and competent and knowledgeable and a big way i did that was by preparing. preparation will serve you well, no matter what you do. another way i tried to earn the trust was to listen, to show that i did not know everything and was not coming in with an attitude of there is a new sheriff in town and i will show you who was boss. i took some time to learn where the army was, what the senior leaders thought were the big issues before i came out with my own set of objectives. again, i think another way to meet the challenge was to be humble and to seek out the wisdom and advice of the people

that were going to be my most senior cadre of leaders. another leadership challenge i have had a secretary of the army was maybe deep into my first year it started to become apparent that we had a very serious recruiting crisis. it was not apparent when i stepped into the role. but i started, my spidey senses started going off 79 months into the job -- 7 to 9 months into the job. i had to dig. when you are at the very top of organizations, people do not want to tell you bad news and the army has a culture of, we are very mission oriented, no one likes to say we have a big problem. so my first challenge was just a surfacing the information to figure out just how significant the challenge really was.

the second challenge was figuring out, ok, what are we going to do about this? what is the first wave of things we will do to try to fix this problem? the army has had recruiting challenges every now and again but a lot of what we are experiencing here is really different. different than recruiting challenges in the past. figuring out what immediate steps to take to try to turn it around was a big challenge and very important to demonstrate that we were taking steps to help with recruiting because we have to maintain the trust and confidence of congress. if they do not see us taking action to solve a problem, they will solve it for us. and then the third part of the leadership challenge, i have found, is after we took the first steps to try to help

ourselves, for example we created the future soldier prep course which is an academic boot camp to help young people who did not quite score high enough on the test we administer. it was very successful. we tried a whole bunch of other things. some were successful, some were not. it became clear to me with all of the changes we made in the first year of the recruiting crisis that it was not going to be enough to turn it around and get us into a position where we would be able to recruit enough young people. we are getting smaller and smaller. so working with the current chief of staff, i had to figure out what is phase two of the transformation of recruiting. i found i really had to drive that process and roll up my sleeves and dive into figuring

out how we were going to more profoundly transform recruiting. luckily, i knew i needed to find the experts. so i basically reached out to a lot of different places and found experts. that is just a few examples of leadership challenges i have had. dr. ayres: i did not know about the recruiting crisis so it is interesting to hear you talk about this. you are still working to overcome this? it is ongoing? sec. wormuth: absolutely. when i came in as secretary we were 480,000 people. now i'm 452,000 people. usually about 60,000 soldiers leave the army every year. a person signs up for four years then leaves. we were retaining at a very high level. a lot of those who join the army make a career of it. but 60,000 a year go and do

other things. the first year i was secretary of the army, we only recruited 45,000. last year we recruited 51,000. this year we have set the goal of 55,000. and we have positive momentum towards that. but if we are losing 60,000 every year and only bringing in 50,000, the size of the overall army gets smaller and smaller. so we really need to get back to a place where we are recruiting 65,000 a year. that is a very large number when we have record unemployment, it is a very competitive job market, we have the g.i. bill but starbucks also offers college tuition, a lot of companies offer better health benefits than they used to. and they is declining trust in

institutions. so the number of young people who are inclined to consider military service is getting very small. only 9% of young americans say they are open to the idea of military service. that is a very small percentage. dr. ayres: looking externally, what do you think the leadership challenges are for the united states looking ahead? how should we address them? sec. wormuth: there are i am sure a wealth of challenges we need to think about as we look out. but two that really strike me, one, artificial intelligence will profoundly reshape our society, i believe. in ways that none of us probably in this room can really foresee. so i think leaders of

institutions across the board have to be thinking about what the changes will likely be, how can we make sure we are positioning our institutions to reap the positives that can come from artificial intelligence also trying to protect our institutions and society from the darker things ai could enable. i think that is a challenge because in many cases, people in senior leadership positions are not very knowledgeable about ai, about the technology behind it, about how to talk about it, how to think about it. i personally am trying to get smarter about ai because i think it is a requirement if you are going to be a leader of a large institution at this point because it is really going to shape our world and you can see

how we are struggling already to think about government structure, regulation. the biden administration has put out an executive order about artificial intelligence and we have policy in the department of defense that says above all else we want to pursue ai in ways that are ethical. but congress i think is grappling and struggling with how to think about regulating the brand-new phenomenon. so i see it as a huge challenge. the second really big challenge i think for leaders as we look outside our institutions is how to address all these challenges, whether it is ai or the war in israel or what is happening in ukraine, when our government is so dysfunctional and when we are all trying to lead in an environment that is the most

polarized i have ever seen in my professional lifetime. at a time where the threat in the national security domain is profound, our institutions are really struggling to come together to find solutions. i see that every day. i am getting ready to go and do my budget hearings in a couple of weeks, general george and i will testify in front of four different committees. the degree of partisanship is very high and it is hard to bring people together. so i think i might just look at how congress is struggling to pass the ukraine supplemental, which is profoundly in the national security interest of this country. passing the supplemental is not an altruistic thing to do just because we are being nice to ukraine. it is about our national security interest. i see the dysfunction and

partisanship as a big challenge that leaders have to figure out either how to overcome it, how to bring americans back together a little bit, or how do we lead in an environment that remains as partisan as it is today. dr. ayres: last question before we open it up to questions. what advice would you offer our aspiring national security leaders here as they think about their own paths ahead? sec. wormuth: first, follow your passions. i was saying to a professor, i have been blessed throughout my career that most of the time i pretty much loved every job i have had. and not everybody feels that way about their work. so give yourself some time and space to pursue what really drives you, because i think if you love the work you are doing,

your chances of being successful in that work goes up. i would say try to get in as quickly as you can, whether you are an undergraduate or graduate, when you leave the elliott school, try to jump into something where you are able to roll up your sleeves and start working in the area where you are. and like i said, be open to change. some of the best things for me careerwise have been things i did not expect to happen. and i think sometimes when you push yourself to get out of your comfort zone, like i said, when i became the director of the jones commission, i was not a middle east expert. it meant i was going to go to iraq in 2007 in the middle of one of the most violent periods. my mom was not super psyched about tha

but i took the leap and it was very useful. so i would say be open to serendipity and try to push yourself beyond your comfort zone sometimes. dr. ayres: let's go ahead and open it up. i know we have a lot of questions here. we have someone with a microphone so we can make sure everyone online can hear us? i saw a hand go up over here. yes. >> thank you so much for coming. it is an honor to listen to you speak. you talked about ai and counterterrorism. what is your line between protection of the people in the u.s. and what defines privacy? sec. wormuth: that is a good

question. privacy is obviously very important and i think one of the things that sets us apart as a democracy is that as citizens here, we are entitled to quite a bit of privacy. i think that is something we have to think through very carefully when we look at how ai and machine learning is transforming so many things. we have to continue to hold up the value of privacy and preserve that, because i again, i think all of us want to be entitled to some fundamental amount of privacy. i do not know exactly how i would draw the line, but for example, i think it is very important that only the fbi and law enforcement community can surveilled american citizens.

and they have to get warrants to be able to do it. we have a system of laws that govern that. i know sometimes there is suspicion and a lot of debate right now but we have a very robust legal policy framework that is set up to enable our law enforcement to do his job while also preserving privacy and i think as we go deeper into how ai may give us new tools we need to continue to preserve that system of laws and policy. dr. ayres: i saw a hand go up here. we have the microphone coming. >> thank you. i found your comments about building trust impactful. i am a graduate student here. you talked about the can-do attitude of the army to always accomplish the mission.

as a leader, how do you assess the operational tempo or capacity an organization you are part of sets limits in terms of understanding, trying to accomplish the mission, push the organization forward but then also understanding they have a limit? is it a combination of instinct, talking with the force, and how do you understand capacity of the organization you lead? sec. wormuth: i would say all of the above. first of all, sometimes i think the can-do mission first attitude can be a little bit of an achilles heel. i have tried to encourage my general officers to be really honest with me about how much

strain there formations are feeling because sometimes i think culturally in the army we have a tendency to be like, i can do anything, it's ok, i'm on top of it and then the wheels come off because humans have limits. organizations have limits. so i have encouraged my general officers, i say to them all of the time, speak truth to power. be honest about what is happening. i travel around a lot. mainly inside the u.s., i visit various army installations. i was that formerly fort hood in texas and just at fort knox collecting our new warrant officers who will be recruiters and everywhere i go, i have a chance to talk with soldiers and i do not have anyone in the chain of command in the room. it is just me and the soldiers and a notetaker and i use those sessions as an opportunity to try to get truth.

a lot of times ground truth about how are you really feeling between the strains of training and deployment and what have you. certainly i rely on my brigade commander to give input in terms of how much strain is on the force. it is something i worry about. because of the size of the army and it is contracting a bit, the demands on the army and what we are doing around the world are not reducing. so there is a fundamental tension between how much more we can continue to do if we continue getting smaller. that is why i am so focused on solving the recruiting crisis but it is also something general george and i really tried to surface the issue of strains in

terms of how many deployments, how rapidly are the units going out and doing things, we tried to make sec. austin very aware of when we feel like the latest requirement for example to go over to gaza and set up the pier to provide humanitarian assistance, we tried to inform the secretary about what are the trade-offs in doing that. there is not a silver bullet but we tried to get a variety of input to help us give a sense -- get a sense of where we really are. >> thank you for coming to speak with us. dr. ayres: the microphone is on its way. >> my question is about force planning in the indo pacific. sec. wormuth: so many people think there is not a role for the army in the indo pacific and it is just the job of the army,

air force, marine corps, space force. but in fact i think there are a couple of different important things the army will do in the indo pacific. let me start with one of the most important things i think of the army is doing in the pacific is strengthening our deterrent posture. it is critical because the best thing for all of us and china is to avoid a war there, deter a war, be able to, and the army is very important to doing that in a couple of different ways. i think a big comparative advantage for the united states and the pacific is our network of allies and partners. i am sure president xi has noticed when russia invaded ukraine, the united states did not respond alone to that. we had the nato alliance, a broader coalition supporting ukraine.

similarly i believe we have a very strong network of allies and partners in the indo pacific and the army regularly exercises most of the countries in the indo pacific, the service that is strongest among their militaries, is the army. the philippine army, the indian army, the australian, we have very strong relationships army to army with all of those countries and through those exercises, we are able to demonstrate combat credible forces that i think the pla pays attention to. some of the new weapons systems we are developing we have actually been bringing over to exercises in the region and i think it gets noticed. so one important thing the army does is hopefully tried to strengthen deterrence so we do not have any kind of conflict. if there were a conflict, i think the army would be key to setting up and securing the

staging basis for the air force so they can launch fire, for the navy and marine corps so they can resupply, refuel their ships. we have very capable air defense to protect staging bases and i think it would be a very important role in the army. we also i think will play an important role in terms of long-range fire. we now have the capability, mid range capability, that allows us to launch missiles from the ground that are able to hit mobile targets such as ships. just as you have seen ukraine push back the russian navy and the black sea using long-range fire, the army has systems now to be able to do that. i think that is a very important contribution we will make in

addition to the long-range fire that can be provided from fighter jets or surface ships. so i could go on and on but that is a couple of things. dr. ayres: there is a question here. >> thank you, secretary. i am a recent graduate from gw and work in a small d.c. consulting firm. my question is about what you said earlier on the qualities of a leader that are important to you. you said having a vision and being able to articulate it is the most important quality for a leader. could you perhaps share your vision of leadership with us, and how it came to be, how you fostered it and what inspires you to lead? sec. wormuth: sure. first, let me clarify, i was saying i think a leader has to have a vision for that

organization to be able to guide everyone who was in that institution forward. so it was more a vision about the organization that a vision of leadership itself. as secretary of the army, my, we are undergoing the most profound transformation we have had in 40 years as i said earlier. we have to transform from a counterterrorism organization to an army that can engage successfully in large-scale combat. that means changing force structure, weapon systems, but also we have to do all of that and take care of our people at the same time. it is a bit of a cliché in the army to say people are our most important weapon system. i had heard that when i was in osd long before coming to the army.

but i have come to understand it is really true. really true. the army cannot do any of the things i just talked about for example in the indo pacific without the soldiers and if we do not take care of our soldiers on the families, they will not stay in the army. so that is kind of my vision for the army. in terms of a broader philosophy i would say about leadership, again, i think, i do not think there is one single quality that is the most important. i think there are a handful of qualities that are really important. i think obviously a leader has to want to serve. you have to believe in the mission of the organization to make the sacrifices you have to make as a leader.

a lot of times as a leader you have to make unpopular decisions. if it is very important to you to be liked, i do not recommend you take on leading a large organization. if everyone likes you, you are probably doing it wrong. so like i said, you have to want to serve, you should be authentic, have integrity, and have humility. one last thing i would say in terms of philosophy of leadership, i believe leaders to be effective have to be lifelong learners. you have to be continuously taking in new information, learning new things, if you are going to be able to stay one step ahead and continue to add value to the institution you are leading. dr. ayres: i think we have time for one last question. let's take an online question.

would you read it? >> with the present online please share your question with the room -- with the person online please share your question with the room? ok, back to the room again. [laughter] i cannot access the q&a from here. dr. ayres: i cannot either. we will follow up. we will go to the side for the last question. >> hello, i am an undergraduate student here at gw. i have a question for you. you said you joined the army as a civilian. what inspired you to join the army? sec. wormuth: i had the opportunity throughout my career

to work with all of the services, i guess except the space force because they are so new. all of the services have unique attributes and wonderful attributes. i think fundamentally what drew me to the army when biden administration asked me if i wanted to serve, as you can probably see, i am an outgoing person. i like people and as i thought about all of the services, fundamentally the army is the most people oriented of all of our services and i think i was drawn to that. i think i was also drawn to the fact that so much of my professional career was spent during the wars in iraq and afghanistan and i had a lot of opportunity to see the army downrange and to know what it can do, to know what our soldiers and families sacrifice, and for all of those reasons i was very drawn to the army. dr. ayres: