8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2. >> and all this week while congress is on break we'll have booktv in prime time on c-span2. tonight a look at shavery and emancipation, starting at 8:30 eastern with greg grandon the author of empire, and necessity, slavery, freedom and redemption in the new world. the story of the american maroons and david brion davis, the problem of savory in the age of emancipation. in booktv in prime time. president and ceo of northrop grumman, wes bush, says he is in favor of immigration reform so his company can hire overseas talent. he was featured speaker at the economic club of washington, d.c. where he spoke for about 40 minutes.

>> may have your attention, please? thank you. we're very pleased to have today as our special guest wes bush, who is the chairman, ceo and president of northrop grumman. northrop grumman as many of you may know is based in fall's church, virginia, and it's a company that is the fourth largest aerospace defense contractor in the united states. it's a company with about $26 billion market cap, and revenues approaching about 25 billiondollars and more than 65,000 employees and when our guest became the ceo in january of 2010, the stock was at a certain level. it is now up 116% since he became the ceo. so, very good. [applause] wes is, grew up in various places in the united states. went to high school in west virginia. he went to undergraduate mit. got a degree in electrical engineering and got a masters

degree in electrical engineering and joined the aerospace corporation which was entity affiliated with the u.s. government. later he went to trw where he rose up quickly and ultimately ran their aeronautical systems division which was based in england. then trw was acquired by grum -- by northrop, sorry, and i ultimately became a senior official at northrop. and at north he rose up and ultimately became the cfo, coo and ultimately the president and ceo as well. and july of 2011, the chairman of the board also. at the company he has done a great many things we'll talk about today to change the culture of the organization but he also increased the stock price as i mentioned. he is very involved in a lot of philanthropic organizations including conservation international, where he is a member of the board and he has done a lot to increase sustainability culture of northrop. he is very active in outdoors

related areas and was also associated with and chairman of the board of the aeronautical industry association board last year. so, wes, thank you very much for coming. >> thank you, david, thanks for having me. >> you've now been running this company for about five years. so how can somebody who is running a company for five years, as important as this company look so young? [laughter] and do you sell vitamins as well as other things? [laughter] >> i feel for the not to work with so many talented and smart folks in our company and in the national security community. i think that makes us all feel young and keep energized in what we're doing. it is a remarkable community to have the opportunity to work in. >> okay. right now we're facing an era where we're ending some wars and the defense budget is likely to come down. so how will northrop grumman and other companies like you deal with the fact that defense budgets are coming down? do you see your sales and earnings coming down or how do

you expect to handle this. >> we are in another one of our cycles. our industry is clearly cyclical. we've been through this before, of course. we're actually now several years into the decline, the current decline in the department spending and more broadly national security spending. i will tell you my pertiff and experience in our industry, there is always a tendency, everybody likes to chase growth. i think it is far more important to stay focused on what we do well and that really has been driving our thinking over the past few years, maintain our focus and make sure we're doing the right things to create value for all of our stakeholders, clearly our customers and our shareholders but also our employees as we go through a bit of a downturn. i would say focus is really the driving tout. >> do you think the defense budget of the united states should be coming down? do you feel, some people say because of sequestration we will be cutting too much out of the defense budget. what is your your view on that? >> i think we're in a very

different time today than we were back in the '90s, when the defense budgets came down. in the '90s we were just coming off the cold war. there was a perspective, and you can look back and ask if the right policy was put in place at that time, but nevertheless there is perhe can speculative we were -- perspective coming it cold war the threat profile was on decline and there should be less spent on national security. those two things went together and there was some logic to it. we're in a very different place today. i haven't met anyone in congress or clear any in the national security environment who would say that today the threat profile to our country and to oura lies is less than it was a few years ago and yet we are struggling to deal with a deficit environment. so we all know that defense, national security, has a role to play in dealing with that environment. but where we've come over the last few years has, i think, been unbalanced. the entirety of the budget

cutting that has occurred has been on the back of the discretionary budget which is a minority of the total spending, if you look at the total spending of the united states. so i don't think we have it in the right place yet. and to ask our customer community to continue to deal with the fullness of the threat environment, which is what they're being asked to do, but with far less resources, i don't think we've got that quite right. >> so in, that's your view, do you talk to members of congress from time to time, maybe they should increase defense spending? do you lobby a fair bit or not? >> our industry i think has been quite vocal on this topic. we really believe the nation needs to have alignment between strategy and investment. and that we're knot aligned yet today. so yes, there is quite a bit of work that we all do in terms of making that perspective known and to really support what our customer community has been saying in that regard as well. >> so do you meet with the president and the secretary of defense on these subjects as

well and does he, the president, seek your advice on this issue? >> i will tell you within the department, the secretary of defense, both the current secretary of defense and the last several secretaries of defense have been vocal and active with industry. i think they create one of the best partnerships between government and industry with respect to national security that i've seen the over the duration of my career in this industry. i think there is a really good partnership there. >> talk about your customer base. right now northrop grumman has sales of roughly $25 billion annually. what percentage is to the u.s. government. what percentage is to u.s. companies and what percentage is overseas? >> we're predominantly focused on the u.s. federal government. 6% of the sales last year were u.s. federal government but our international business is growing rather quickly. last year we were about 10% international. we expect that to grow this year. in part that is growing because the administration and those in the department of defense that

are involved in setting the strategy for how we support our allies, are taking, i think the right approach to encouraging a broader view of what we should be exporting to our allies. so, that's creating a nice opportunity for us to better support our allies around the globe and we're stepping up to that and making our company more global. >> if you say, go to a european country, an ally presumably, and i would like you to buy my products and they say i would like to buy them. you have to get the pentagon to approve that, is that right? you can't just sell? >> there is actually quite an approval process. certainly our customer, our direct customer needs to be very supportive of that. so the pentagonning needs to be strategically aligned with that capability being provided to an ally but state department, also has a voice in this process, as does congress. so there has to be an alignment across the political speck trump to make those things happen. >> aller in about years ago you built one of the most famous

bombers of all time called the b-2 bomber. originally there were supposed to being 130 of them built. only 20 some were built. they were a billion dollars a copy. what happened to the b 2 bomber? is it being used? is it effective today and is it worth the money we spent tore it? >> the b-2 bomber is clearly a critical part of the nation's force structure today. they are deployed and utilized as needed and high availability rate and we're very proud of that we're very, very proud of the program and what it contributed to national security. i think as you know there is a fram that the air force is pursuing today for the next generation of long-range strike. i think that is a really important program program for our country. certainly as a program we intend as a company to support fully. >> is this a b-3? >> you might call it a b-3, but it is next step. >> if you have the b-2, and had experience, automatically give you b-3, doesn't it work that

way. >> it's a competitive environment. [laughing] >> today a lot of your programs are ones you can't talk about. >> that's true. >> so what can you talk about on this program? [laughter] can you tell us of any great like, products you have that are are spying on other people? is there anything you can tell us we haven't learned before around know about these great programs? we won't tell anybody? >> not really. i can tell you some of the things we're most proud of right now. >> okay. >> we're very proud of our unmanned systems capability. we won the collier award for a product we dep straighted last year. for the first time ever we landed an unmanned aircraft on the deck of an aircraft carrier which was quite an accomplishment. you can see it on youtube, if you haven't seen it before, to see how this aircraft landed very precisely, very accurately on to the deck of the aircraft carrier. it is able to take off from the

deck of the aircraft carrier. it's a class of technology that is in its infancy that has the opportunity to grow dramatically in the future. >> president bush 43 landed on an aircraft carrier once and was your landing better than his. >> we didn't miss the wire. >> you don't like the word drone or do you like the word drone? many unmanned things could be called drone. why do you like to use that word. >> it's a popularlar termination -- terminology. we think it's a poor word of the things that make this work. our systems are truly robotic. it is not simply a remotely piloted vehicle. where someone is sitting on the ground with a joystick actually flying the aircraft. our aircraft fly themselves. so the class of technology in there embody as full range of aerodynamic technology as well as the computer science and the autonomy technology that goes into making something truly

robotic. >> and today, we have, a lot of troops that are coming home and presumably they don't want to be redeployed. we'll probably shrink the number of men and women in our armed forces. do you think that's a danker? do you think we can do some things with electronics now that we don't need many men and women we've had in combat troops? >> i could look at the national security strategy. i see it as having two fundamental underpinnings. first and foremost we have the best trained responsibility around the world. that is the core of the underpinning of our national security strategy. secondly we equip the men and women with the very best technology. and our strategy fundamentally relies on technological superiority. so i look at what we're doing with unmanned and some of the other things going on in the technology arena, really as a way of supporting our servicemen and women. your question about force

structure and size of structure, naturally after we've been involved in conflicts there is always a need to take the force structure down of the department is working its way through that today. but, i really don't see the evolution of the technology as a a complete replacement of people in any sense. there needs to be constantly the right mix, the right balance of human talent and technology for us to really oversee the technology. a strategy that served us well. >> today the equipment that you designed and your competitor designed is pretty complicated. it noise the like a videogame. so the people that are come into the military are they able to operate these things as efficiently as designed. >> it is interesting. the digital natives among us, those younger folks both constantly coming into industry and coming into the military, i would never underestimate their ability to deal with technology. it face nollnal what can be done

as we employed many young people into theater over these last number of years they invented what to do with many of these technologies in theater. they came up with new ideas. our servicemen and women actually using these technologies that have been provided to them, used them in new and different ways that had not been thought of as they were being developed. so i'm constantly impressed with what our servicemen and women can do. >> your background and what your company does is involved in something called spy satellites. some people might not call it that but let's say it is called spy satellites. are you surprised, i was, with all the spy satellites around the world they can not find the malaysian airlines? why wouldn't have some spy satellite seen something? does that surprise if you. >> like most things, you have to look at what you want to observe when you need to observe it. i would certainly say that this has turned out to be a very challenging problem from a technology perspective, finding

the aircraft. so we all hope it gets solved soon. >> all of us have soon google earth. >> amazing, isn't it. >> you can look at your house or something. >> yes. >> are spy satellites have better resolution than google earth or not? >> you will have to ask other folks about that one [laughter] >> okay, so, you are working your way up the company. did you ever expect to be in the aerospace defense industry at mit or is that what you always wanted to do? >> i always had my eye on the space industry. i've really been a part of that in my mind set and thinking since i was very young and aspired to be an engineer in the space industry. >> did you want to be an astronaut? >> i think we all wanted to be an astronaut at some point in our lives. >> i probably didn't but -- [laughter] i don't think i would have qualified but okay. the tang, the food, i wouldn't have liked the food but okay. so you rise up and you're rising, you know, meet or i

cannily up the company. on january 1 of 2010, you become the ceo and the first day you say i'm moving headquarters from los angeles to washington. was that a surprise to people? would they have given you the job if they had known you were going to do that? [laughter] >> i'm sure there would have been number of folks who would have thought twice about that. i will tell you we've had great support within our company. certainly our board and employees have been very important. the transition to washington has gone extraordinarily very well. the reason for it was fairly obvious. we need to be closer to the customer community. being in california was great, in terms of legacy of the company. we continue to have a very large footprint in california. we have an amazing technology, set of organizations there. huge installed capital infrastructure in washington and california. we needed our senior team to be closer to our customer community. that has worked out very, very well for us. >> do you spend one or two days

a week meeting with the pentagon people, talk about why your products are good or something like that? is that what you do? >> i personally and i would say more broadly our leadership team spends a lot of time in the pentagon. spend a lot of time in the offices of the other parts of the national security community as well as the other parts of the federal government. you know it is a team effort when it comes to national security. and we need to be actively engaged across the board. >> let's talk about cyber wear fair for a moment. i presume your company has something to do with it but you can't say but do you think we're winning the cyber wear fair game or world, but or are the chinese or others ahead of us? how would you rate us with other countries? >> we're clearly involved in cybersecurity. one of the cornerstones of technologies in our company. something we've been involved loaning before a term cybersecurity became a popular

term. our involvement came about through our work with the federal government and the need to protect the networks of the federal government. i am very concerned about this particular area in several dimensions. first it is an area where you look around the globe the status of the threat profile is pretty advanced. and i won't name countries or go into the fine details of that but it is a asymmetric. it takes a fairly small investment on the part of an adversary to put at risk large investments we have as a country. so we have to be very vigilant about this and i'm pleased to see even again in this year's president's budget proposal to congress that there is a large investment on the national security side for cyberdefense and cyber detection. my biggest concern as we look forward we really aren't yet to a place where we're thinking about the broader society impacts of cyberand business

stepping up to really seal with that level of issue and that level of threat. there are some constraints out there that are holding businesses back in many respects. part of it is knowledge and communication but quite frankly another aspect of it is legislation. one of the things that think one of the things in front of us as a country is get over a hurdle of legislation so we can do the things we need to do to be more effective in securing the cyber infrastructure struck in the country. >> there were reports that our government was able to tap into the computers of google, facebook, microsoft, things like that. was that a surprise to you or you can't say? >> i couldn't comment may or may not be happening with respect to other companies but i would simply say that with the world being so networked together that our country's ability to really have a presence in cyberspace and do the things we need to do

for the long-time security of our nation and our allies is really, really important. >> so as the ceo of our company, presumably people want to overseas see what's on your computer. so how do you make sure your mobile device and your computer, you might use at home is not going to be invaded by some foreign country? what do you do? >> we all spend a fair amount of time and energy on our company's cybersecurity. our company and other companies in the industry have made large investments in that arena and we know that is constantly changing. the threat environment that we're dealing with is constantly changing. so it is just a constant battle. just as it is for the department of defense and most of the federal agencies. >> but you must have some special way, is there anything you can tell us to do on our little computers comparable what you do to stop being intraded by foreign power? >> change your password often. >> okay.

there are, let's say, five very large aerospace defense companies in the united states, you might say. and over the last couple of years the pentagon has not encouraged anybody to make acquisition of each other. they want to have i guess what we have now but there were many more defense companies in previous years. now they have consolidated down but do you think as a result of the defense cutbacks we're likely to see there will be more consolidation among the large defense companies and do you think pentagon should allow that to happen? >> your observation is a important one. the large defense primes out there today and northrop grumman is one, were built through large-scale m&a and it really was a necessity that we go through that, really over the course of the 1990s and the early part of the last decade. there simply wasn't a level of budget to support industrial infrastructure that existed at that time. so consolidation was genuinely a necessity to enable our industry collectively to do the tough things we needed to do to scale

the infrastructure so we could more efficiently and effectively support our customer community and during that period of time the customer community was very supportive of it. those things wouldn't have happened without customer support. i would say over the last decade the customer community has been more focused on ensuring competition and that has dominated a lot of the thinking. as we go foreward it is kind of difficult to speculate what world events or other things might shaping the thinking and whether that might change. but i would say today the focus is on insuring competition. >> one time your company was going to merge with lockheed martin. >> yes. many years ago. >> do you think that could be allowed in the future? >> i wouldn't speculate. you know i don't, i don't see anything like that on the near-term horizon. in terms of, not just our company but our industry. >> okay. >> but the world continues to change around us. if history tells us anything, things continue to change and we all need to understand what that

means and be thinking forward on it. >> sometimes you divest things and you divested your ship-building business. >> we did. >> since it was divested it done extremely well on its own. some people are criticizing you saying why couldn't you manage it as well as it is being managed now. you must have read that criticism. >> i did. i was amused by it. >> why did spin off your shipbuilding business. >> first let me say we're incredibly proud. the ship bidding industry was part of the aggragation that occurred in the late '90s and early part of the last decade and started out a lot of logic to it why it would make sense for company like yours to ownership building. as time went on that logic proved not necessarily to be the case. it really did not turn out by owning shipbuilding that was a convenient way to apply our other capabilities on to ships. in fact often times our customer community really wanted to

separate those two things. it also became more clear over time the inhern business model in shipbuilding was different than the model we were using to create value in the rest of the northrop grumman enterprise and it was our assessment and i think time has proven that to be true, that these two businesses would fare better separated as opposed to being together. so that was the action we took on the premise they would do well. so i'm absolutely delighted with how this has turned out. >> you're in the aerospace defense business. as you pointed out, probably revenues coming from the customer are going to go down a bit so have you considered getting out of that business a bit and getting into other businesses or expanding beyond the aerospace defense business? >> i think that is often times what companies will do because people love to chase growth. i think it's a mistake. i really do. part of the learning that many of us went through in the '90s, it is actually difficult for defense companies to suddenly paint themselves as a

commercial company and try and pursue things in that direction. we're pretty good at partnering. so where we develop technologies and capabilities that might make sense to be applied in the commercial arena, finding the right partners is often a good business strategy. but, i think it is more important that we stay focused. that we use the capital that we're able to generate in our business, to create value through investing in ourselves and of course where it makes sense to return some cash to shareholders. that really has been the approach we've been using over the last number of years. i think it is working well for us. we're determined to keep that focus. >> as i pointed out earlier you do have a big interest in conservation an the environment and where did that spring from? >> i think it really came from growing up and enjoying the outdoors. my dad was someone who also and still is, loves the outdoors and i have two brothers and he constantly took the three of us out and went camping and hiking and rest of it. you are often times a product of

how you grow up and i certainly am. >> okay. so you tried to make your company more sustainable. >> yes. >> in terms of its products. >> absolutely. >> can you describe how you take aerospace defense company to make it sustainable? >> it is often kind of a quizzical look that i get when i talk about environmental sustainable. don't you make weapons? i think we all have a responsibility in this regard. if we think about any of our enterprises, whether we're in the defense business or any other business. i think we have a social responsibility. a long-term responsibility to think about sustainability, and to do the best that we can with the resources we have at our disposal to think about what our companies are doing both in the near term and long term. we are taking on what you might say are traditional things but i think very important things. we work hard on our greenhouse gas emissions. we set a goal five years ago to take out 25% of our emission intensity and we actually

achieved that in about three years. so our team really rallied around this and focused on it. we're working hard on reducing our solid waste and working hard to reducing water utilization. i will tell you one of the things has been to me the most satisfying about this is not getting other organizations to say, hey, isn't that great? northrop grumman is doing something good. what is most satisfying to me is how our employees rallied around getting this done. it unleashed a an energy and pride in our company that i thought might be there but did not expect at the level i've seem it. our ability to make progress as rapidly as we have is a credit to our employees who see this as something important. >> today, if the president of the united states called you and said you've done a great job running an aerospace defense company, why don't you come in to be secretary of defense, would you go into the government? you never served in government i think. many people who run aerospace defense companies have served in

government one level or another. do you have great burning desire to go into the government? i guess not if you haven't done it yet, but secretary of defense, would you ever consider that. >> i'm completely, 100% focused what i'm doing today. number one i love what i'm doing, but secondly i feel i'm actually able to make a difference for our country and working with the team that work with, working with the community, the defense community that work with. i admire folks who step up to take on public service. i always admire it and appreciate people that do it. i think you to a place in life where you think about those things differently. i'm completely focused on running our company. >> suppose the president called up said i have a problem in the ukraine -- do you have products or services i could use that could help me, what would be your advice about the rest of the board should do in ukraine? do you have any advice for him? >> i would stay out of providing

advice on that front. i would simply say it is important for our national security capability to be capable of supporting the president at all times. and everything that we're doing and i'm very worried that the vector we're on from a budgetary perspective is one that will undermine the president's ability over the long term, whoever is president at any particular point in time, to really do what needs to be done. so i think we've got an issue there that needs attention. >> can you look in the future, in other words, sometimes you're developing in the skunk works or equivalent product areas, new product that will be the future. >> yeah. >> so are there any great things in the future we could see five or 10 years coming out of companies like yours that will make our life better? >> yeah. i would say that the, part of the excitement of the defense industry is exactly that. that we are constantly working on the leading edge of technology. and our company, we have about 65,000 employees and a little more than half of them are degreed scientists, engineers,

mathematicians. this is a very technologically sophisticated enterprise. . . we're determined to continue to make it that way. >> at m.i.t., very talented engineers are people that came from another country, from china

or india or other places in the world, and get a degree here. are you able to hire these individuals if they're not american citizens for your type of company? how do you deal with that issue? >> we are able to hire some foreign nationals but not many. it is challenge. i think broadly it's a challenge not just for our defense industry, where the clearance issues sometimes become more complicated. i think it's a challenge for all of our industry, that we are educating so many bright people in our country, that we aren't able to keep in our country. so, i'm a strong proponent of getting on with it, with immigration reform, and enabling us to take advantage of the amazing educational enterprise that we have in our country to help continue to grow our economy. >> what do you see as the biggest single challenge for your company going forward? the defense budget or other things you worry about the most? the biggest problem. >> the biggest challenge is talent. our enterprise runs on the brilliance of the people who work in it. both in terms of folks in our

company and in terms of folks in the defense department and the other elements of the national security enterprises, and it is a tough battle for talent out there today. i think that there's sometimes a misperception that because the economy has been a little tough for a few years, that it's easy to hire people that you need, and when it comes to getting the best, they have a lot of opportunities, particularly when it comes to getting the best out of american universities, which continue to be among the very best educational enterprises on the globe. so talent over the long term is the challenge. >> you're losing these engineers to google, facebook, or hedge funds or private equity fund? >> it's not so much about losing to. at it about getting them when we're out there recruiting, and quite frankly, i think many folks have studied and understood what is happening from a stem education perspective. we're not graduating as a nation enough stem qualified stem

graduates to support the demands we have today, and hopefully as our economy starts to tick up, that demand will continue to grow and we've got to get more through our pipeline. >> when you -- you went to high school in west virginia, went to m.i.t. were you intimidate when you got there and thought, wow, there's a lot of brilliant people? or not as smart as you thought they were. >> anyone who walks in the door at m.i.t. and isn't intimidated isn't awake. it's a fascinating environment. an environment i absolutely loved, and lots of incredibly smart people and folks who are just naturally talented at asking tough questions. so, i really enjoyed it. >> you have become more prominent in the bins world, have they come after you at m.i.t. for donations? >> we all do what we can to help. particularly when it comes to education. from my perspective, the opportunity we have as a country to continue to stay ahead,

relies fundmentally on our ability to keep higher education. we need to work on k through 12 as well. we have to keep higher education at the forfront, jean. >> when you deal with congress do they toward your programs? do they understand what you're talking sunset are they really don't quite get it? >> i think there's always a mix. those who serve on the committees that are focused on our issues, i find invest the time and energy and have the natural curiosity about what is going on from a committee perspective. they really do understand it. there's always a rampup when new members of congress come in it takes a while for any person to get your arm around the complexitieses of the national security. i would say often times when we're talking to members who are not involved in the national security committees, they are not inherently as fluent in all

the issues and it takes some dialogue. i would say across both parts of congress, both the senate and the house, and both parties, there's a strong interest in national security. >> do you see any threat that foreign governments and their defense contract are have any chance of overcoming the major defense contractors in the united states in terms of capabilities? do you see the american companies still dominating this world for a long time? >> i would say our industry is becoming more of a global security industry. there's a lot of partnering going on between companies based in the u.s. and companies based in our allied nations. we are working to expand our footprint internationally, and very appropriately, many of the internationally based defense enterprises are working to expand their footprint here. so i think of our industry as a global security industry, not just domestic security industry.

>> now, today two other large companies are based in washington aero space defense, head by women. general dynamics and lockheed martin. so, do you feelike you're part of an affirmative action program, being a male running an aero space defense company? or not affirmative action, that your company is happy to have you as the ceo. >> i am really proud of the progress in our industry in that regard. it wasn't that long ago that if you had suggested that the defense industry was a good example of diversity, you would have gotten a round of laughter, and very appropriate, because we were not. we have made great progress and not only have some terrific women ceos in our industry, and they -- they're absolutely terrific -- we also have outstanding women executives at all levels. if you look inside northrop

grumman, half of the people that report to me are women. we're a better industry because we have been working so hard on diversity and inclusion. are we perfect? absolutely not. i actually give a lot of credit to our customer community. this is an area where the dod, i would say before the industry side of it, that really began to think hard about this. dod was thinking about and it our customer community has worked hard on diversity and inclusion. so we all have a long way to go here but we're making good progress and i'm proud. >> so you're in your early 50s. and you have a long way to go. do you have any plans to stay for a certain number of years in your current position or ten more years or have any plans? >> i'm having so much fun at what i'm doing, i haven't really thought about that from a long-term perspective. as long as the board will have me and i'm having a good time doing what i'm doing, i hope i

can continue to help create value and help support our national security. >> if you do leave, have you considered the higher calling, such as private equity or something like that? [laughter] >> gosh, no. not right now. >> okay. >> not ruth now. >> thank you very much for your time. >> thank you, david. thank you very much. >> let me give you a gift. [applause] >> oh, my goodness. that's beautiful. thank you. >> thank you very much. [inaudible conversations] >> an update on the boston marathon. american meg -- has won the boston marathon.

at it been one year since a bomb attack at the finish line killed three people. members of congress are tweeting about the race. delware senator tom carper says heart felt congratulations to the first american man to win the boston marathon in over 30 years. california representative scott peters says, congratulations to san diegoan for winning the boston marathon. an inspiration to all, and congresswoman shelly from west virginia says, good luck to the runners, including 59 west virginians participating in the boston marathon today. we stand together. here's a look at tonight's primetime programs on the c-span networks. c-span, discussion about the future of free speech with first amendment authors and scholars in a debate at the national constitution center? philadelphia. here on c-span2, booktv in primetime focuses on slavery and emancipation with three author who written on the subject. and american history with a look

at ronald reagan, his 1964 speech in support of gary goldwater's presidential campaign. all that tonight on the c-span networks in primetime. >> we should have finished al qaeda in 2001. our general who was there, but more than just the general, i think all of us, think back, we attacked on 9/11, 3,000 americans died. more americans than died at pearl harbor, and we had al qaeda and we had osama bin laden trapped in some mountains called tora bora. we didn't finish them off. then we let them escape over the other side of the mountains because we said, that's pakistani territory. oh, wait. think for a moment. can you imagine during world war ii, when we had won the battle of midway, which changed the entire war against japan, he

sailed across the international dateline in the pacific and attacked the japanese. destroyed their fleet. 1942. he went across the international dateline. supposing he had turned back and said that's the international dateline and japan said if we don't cross the international dateline we'll take this part of the pacific, you take that, and we'll live happily ever after. we get to mountains in the middle of nowhere and allow al qaeda to escape? makes no sense. our entire country had become more legalistic. we should have again and finished it right then. >> this month, booktv z book club selection is bing west's "the wrong war." live, sunday, may 4th, look for our next in-depth guest, luis rodriguez, gang member turned author and poet. his work included the

award-winning "always running" and "it calls you back." booktv every weekend on c-span. >> georgetown university hosted a discussion recently on evidents to help war veterans transition to civilian life. the event included opening remarks by colonel rich morales. after his remarks, a panel with retired military veterans who run organizations that help veterans find jobs. georgetown center for public and nonprofit leadership hosted this event. it's two hours. >> good morning. good morning, everyone. i'm kathy -- i love this -- i hate it when you have to do that and say it again. everyone say good merge so thank you. i'm kathy, i direct the center for public and nonprofit leadership at the mccourt school for public policy at georgetown university, and on behalf of all of us, welcome.

we're thrilled you're here, and as you can tell from the title of this forum, from nation building to community building, capitalizing on the strengths of our veterans here at home. what we'll focus today on, we think its incredibly important and i'll tell you why in a few minutes from my personal background -- we're focusing on talent and assets and leadership of our veterans and their families, and what they could bring to our organizations and our communities. again, talents and assets. and what they offer to our community. so this has become a very personal issue to me. since 2004, i've had the privilege of teaching more than 100 men and women, active duty and veterans, officers and enlisted in all branches of the armed services. almost all of them did tours in iraq and afghanistan or both. a few are here today, and if you

don't mind, not to embarrass you, if you have ever been in any public leadership class or you have been in our nonprofit management certificate program, please raise your handment. thank you for coming. i asked you do to do that, when i said i taught you, it's a misnomer when i say i taught you and them. you all have taught me far more about the men and women in the service of our country than i could ever possibly teach you. i saw in you all the attributes of courage, respect, discipline, responsibility, compassion, and collaboration. not to mention strategic thinking and ability to adapt, and that is something that in the nonprofit sector we call multitasking. most of all, without exception, my military students demonstrate what you all know, the ethic of

service, service for the public good. i see in your all and others the qualities that i would want in my employees: community volunteers, public servants, business leaders. i want others to see what i see. and i want our returning veterans and their families to recognize their service is valued and needed here at home. so we have in our audience so many individuals, in all sectors, two share this goal. for example, we have the mayor, of alexandria, the assistant secretary of labor, the executive directyear or miriam's kitchen in wbc. the vice president of student affairs, and many, many other dignitaries. so thank you so much. we are especially fortunate to have colonel rich morales,

executive director of join forces, who would like to welcome you all with a few special remarks and a note from the first lady. thank you, rich, for coming. [applause] >> good morning and thank you for the kind invite and for the mccourt school's leadership. it's my privilege to be here today with you and grateful be the early morning speaker this lead off batter. the army guy is not running the ship. i'm just the warmup act for the talent here. on behalf of -- biden and mrs. obama, my bosses, we have commander carol point from the office of the first lady here today. it's a pleasure to be here. a group which i call the usual suspects and others out here. people would often wonder, well, if you're meeting the same folks in different buildings, what is

the value of talking to each other? that is not really what happens. all of us have the ability to focus at one opinion, and -- said what we're here to talk about is the leadership, the capability of our returning veterans. moreover when we get together with the usual suspects, some of you in this room, we happen to engage others in the conversation. that's what i hope to do here today is talk about what is the framing idea of what we're here to do. so this forum aligns well with what we try to do with joy -- joining forces. before i took this job i at any time know what it is. we tried to work through what is it that the country can do by joining with the private sector, joining with groups like yours to help veterans re-integrate into society to help military family and transitioning service

members. we do it through three priority pillars. the first lady said we could try to boil the ocean. we're not. we look at employment, we look at wellness, and we look at education. all of these themes will be reflected today up here on this stage. but before i say much more -- i do have a hook here so i will not go over -- i want to tell you more about the people that we're here to better support. the americans we have committed to help. and while i'veed a ha forrest gump career, some say i can't hold a job and are they're probably right -- not including my time in the gulf war, serve time as a u.n. peacekeeper, in 2009 i capped what was a long stretch of deployment in the combat. i pent 1,100 0 days in dom bat in 12 to 14-month stretches. what i go to do there is see first hand the amazing talent we have in the u.s. military.

i'll tell you about one of them. army specialist ramos. ramos was the person who i owe my life to at least three times. let me tell you one. he was assigned as my driver in 2003 in iraq. he were rolling through rpg alley. i almost asked the question why? rpg is a rocket propelled grenade and we found out quickly why it was called rpg alley. we got blown up. i'm not up her to toll you a war store. home here to tell you a va story. we took a lot of fire, lots of it. our windshields cracked and we all made it out and we did that every day. so, while that might be the end of the story that we survived a tough day, let me tell you the rest of the story. the night before that incident,

a big thick piece of pullet proof glass came in. the crew decided to put that in after a long hard day. the night before. some of you may say that up sos like common sense, could save your life. the reality is we had again day after day with -- could have decided to do that another day when they were less exhausted. that's not what happened. young specialist ramos decided, this our job, our mission, this is what we do. they put that in and their quick thinking -- they warn waiting for some major or sergeant to tell them to do something. this is young leaders at the lowest possible level getting things done, and in this case it saved his life and certainly saved my life. so i think about specialist ramos when people have this notion that veterans, as they transition out, are somehow robotic, waiting for somebody to tell them that would do and they'll sit there until that happens. that's not the case. so, in specialist ramos, this guy with a big huge smile, he didn't think it was any big deal. saving my life for sure and

saving his. just doing his job. my point here as we think through -- i challenge us to us think through what veterans bring not just to to the organization but what they bring to communities. for some of that re-integration into the real world it's tough. so anyone who can do that. jump out airplanes, withstand the pressure0s military service you think would be absolutely ready to re-integrate, and they are, but we want to make sure we understand their needs and more importantly we want to make sure we capitalize on their talent. so that was one quick story. i'm mindful of the hook. i want to tell you what i think-under shining examples. on the employment front, i can rattle off all manner of companies and organizations about i'll talk bat few. the big ones like wal-mart, they hire any veteran that walks in the door. the blackstone group that owns hilton and others, have made big

huge commitments. starbucks. ten thousand veterans really focusing on military spouses and i'll pause for a second. i starred to get the hook. the criticism there as well, mill tar spouses don't want to work at coffee shop. sure, they do. we want to provide them the opportunity to have a full spectrum of options where they can be employed. so the fact that america's leading companies are making commitments, making tangible employment commitments, is something we applaud, and i got a long list. please go on our web site. last i'll wrap up by saying in the education and wellness front, one of you out here in the audience today, happens to be a big defense contractor, sponsors a school in aberdeen. aberdeen went from being a fairly medium performs school to one of the top performing schools in maryland, and in the country, through the namath --

math-science initiative. the private sector partner is were k through 12 schools to create better environments and belt are outcomes for military children. 13 times pass rate for the ap exam. therefore, more likely to go off to college. you say, how does this relate to veterans? taking care of military veterans and their families is crucial to create those conditions and that environment for them to thrive as they re-integrate. and that is done in partnership as a shining example of partnership with me private sector. others on the wellness front. i know that american hospitalization association, we work with nurses, i speak to university presidents, college -- community college presidents, in short -- and i am short -- you are doing a lot to step up to the plate. today you'll have the specifics. i'll close by saying that on -- i'm very fortunate to serve in the white house. want to close with some remarks from my boss, who is currently in china, and i -- this is from

the first lady: i'm pleased to send my warmest greetings to all those gathered together to discuss efforts downtown way to re-integrate and engage. for our military veterans into our communities at home. as a nation, we owe a debt of gratitude to america's heroes. and i believe that each of us has a role to play in supporting our veterans and their families. that's why dr. jill biden and i started joining forces, a nationwide initiative that calls on all sectors of our society to mobilize and make real commitments to support veterans and military families. everytime i meet will military veterans and their families i'm in ah -- in ah -- in awe of their service. not only while they're in uniform but long after they've come home as well. i'm always in awe of their considerable talents and strengths that to the veterans bring home with them. we must capitalize upon the strengths as we focus on

re-integration of our veterans into the communities of ours across the country. this is why it's so important, as we continue to provide forums like the one today at school of public policy, center for public and nonprofit leadership, that are your hosting today. so we can serve our veterans as well as they have served our country. thank you again for all you do for our veterans and they're their families, and i wish you the best. michelle obama. thank you. [applause] >> a lot of you already have -- we also put the biofor those of you who might not know him, and when i talk about the talents of the folks i have met and the major gifts i would say, what an influence. thank you for your leadership and your vision. before i go on just a couple things. those in the back, there's some

people there want to have a seat, please do. the other thing is, our commander, greg gadsen just joined us and he was one of my former students, too, so thank you for coming. i also have an announcement i promiseled i would say. for those of you who are interested we have a hash tag guvforum. if that means anything to you. guvetforum, if that means anything to you. so on with the program. we selected a moderator, dr. irene trowel, based on her exceptional accomplishments. her experience in many areas, including the military, government community, academia, her biois in our program so i'll

only highlight a few points. she is amazing. never met her before but i am glad i have now and hope we'll be working together in the future. so, a little bit about dr. trowel-harris. a former director as the center for women veterans in the department of veterans affairs where she served as a white house political appointee for two presidents. prior to her appointment she served as director of the va's office of inspect 'er general's healthcare inspections in wbc. the served 38 years in the u.s. air force and air national guard, retiring as a major general in september 2001. i'm going to go on. she's done a variety of things you can read about but i just want to say something that really resonated with me. she holds a bachelor in health education from new jersey city university, a masters in public health administration from yale university, and a doctorate in

health education from teachers college at columbia university charter member of the women's memorial which is where we're all here now, and in december december 2013 she established the irene trowel-harris endowed lettership fund at the american nurses foundation. we're tremendously fortunate to have her lead us through this conversation. please welcome, dr. dr. trowel-harris. [applause] >> good morning. >> good morning. >> from nation building to community building, capitalizing on the strength of veterans here at home. as u.s. forces present in afghanistan is reduced and the military is drawing down, increasing numbers of talented

veterans and their families are returning to communities across the nation, communities that need the skills, creativity. leadership, that our veterans have to offer. the forum today has four goals. first, expand networks, and information sharing across sectors, to better re-connect veterans and new leaders and communities to the discussion. number two, change the narrative from a focus on struggles to a focus on veterans' strength and contributions. number three. share lessons and promise and models and practices across sectors. nonprofit, private, public. from national to local levels.

to improve veterans' re-integration into our communities. and, four, promote action by broadly disseminating promise and models and best practices to organizations currently working and engaging veterans in their families and communities...

see the value straight positive attributes. yes there are challenges however we can help deal with as a coordinated effort. throughout this, keep in mind the contributions of the spouses they do not wear that uniform. this today brings together a renowned panel of local leaders, veterans and civilians to discuss efforts under way that caused communities to reintegrate and engage better and in the life.

i would introduce the panel starting here. jim and air force veteran, the president of the warrior project. jim has expertise in managing a model program with a mission to enhance quality of life. this capitalizes on the augusta region of the body to contribute to their families. this includes warriors currently serving, veterans and members. a navy veteran, chairman for wounded warriors has focused on several companies and nonprofi nonprofits. he found many including the warrior foundation and the crash

retreat for military veteran families and virginia. james burke is unique in that -- jim's work is unique in that the healing and rehabilitation process and this strives to keep them together, the family and the military person together. next: doctor debbie bradbard is clinical psychology at research and policy for blue star families. debbie has expertise on the military mental health issues that impact veterans and military members. she has been successful in the results of the blue star family life star survey to make policy changes and has a unique understanding of the challengi s

military spouses face when returning to work. and on the end, mr. ross cohen, high airing our heroes. the expertise in managing hiring our heroes. they are hiring 500,000 in the program. he is the founding rector of the service nation. it's a initiative that was launched with the support of the first lady michelle obama and doctor joe biden. i encourage you to read the biographies in the printed program. now we are going to have opening remarks from each panel member. each panelist will share his or

her her perspective on a couple of ways in which the challenging skills of the veterans are being used to contribute to our community through jobs, volunteerism, civil engagement and other initiatives. they will go in order. thank you. [applause] thank you very much. we are deviating from the schedule going backwards. i'm happy to be here. thank you to georgetown university for having the vision to put this together and kathy for organizing it. more importantly, i want to point out john in the front and a student of kathy who started

to make phone calls and you currently work for alexandria. it's vitally important and they wanted to know who was out there and what they were doing and how they were having an impact and how you can bring it all together. the conference is into the discussions are based on john's energy and focus and so i want to thank him for that. i want to thank my panelists for being here. one contributes a great deal to the military veterans in the community. it is not everybody can do everything. not everybody can do everything. one of us can do one thing. in augusta we focus on 13 counties and the focus is on outcomes, not just doing but

outcomes. the measurements are how many homeless veterans can we get how was totally get the veterans in the jobs that turn into careers where they are happy. we look at education, we don't just look at education as the school but as graduation rates. we look across the community and you have to understand we are 13 counties, two of them are primarily urban, the other 11 are oral counties in georgia and south carolina. when you talk about a demographic it is a pretty broad demographic. one of the largest army installations in the united states that has the largest microsoft school believe it or not outside of seattle washington and fort worth.

so there is a lot of talent, but you have to find the person who needs the help number one, you have to know who they are, you have to know who can provide other services and how you can connect them to the services and then you have to follow up. i think everyone out here i think everyone out here will agree that if you find someone that is about to be homeless but it's not their only issue in you are not going to solve the problem. you're not going to solve the issue you have to look at the strength of the individual. so what we do is we do it holistically. on her fourth month rent the question is why. is it a job come is at education committee said a lack of financial knowledge and literacy come is a family relationships, what is it, because it's not

that you can't pay your bill. the house isn't the issue. it's a bigger issue and i would tell you that here's a fact. we have more nonprofits per capita than any other city in the united states. you think 46,000 nonprofits is big we have more than any other city in the united states. and we can solve just about any issue that is a basic issue, housing, food, safety, access to healthcare especially because the health care in the community. what we have a difficulty with is the national nonprofits that are contributed to. it's the sustainment of data that can take care of the basic needs like every community does for citizens, not just veterans, but for citizens.

it's when the well comes in, the department of defense and have the va, the department of labor. it's the wounded warrior project and the operation homefront. those big nonprofits that say i can partner with you. that's the key to the success that we have in the community level that we all have to work together. i came out of the department of defense. i worked major war plans from a unified commands there is a supportive thinking. they are the ones who own the ground and what's going to happen with it and then they bring all those resources to them to make sure that they succeed overall and then there's the big vision. this is no different.

our view is that kennedy is the support of thinking. we have the boots on the ground and we know what we need and how to go after it. but we don't have the resources to do it. i see the national groups, the folks that are watching on television and that will read in the paper, they are the supporting. they need to come to the communities and say how can i help you. when they come into augusta georgia to do a great job of cleaning up after a terrible ice storm that hit i didn't want to find out about it after they left. i wanted to know when they came because then i could help them by connecting them to my community resources. that's one example. we have looked throughout the nation. we are a model.

the focus needs to be on the military veterans and their families. what can you do for them and how can you move these resources together so that you're focused on that single point coming off an organization, but the point is the single point of the veteran. we have been fortunate to partner with the project but not in the biography. something that came out about eight months ago and they asked us to go up to 30 other communities over the next five years and to help them through funding and advice do the same thing that we have done and in doing that our goal is to bring all of you that are outside of the beltway or inside off manhattan together and focus on a single point which may be charleston or washington, if maybe the panhandle of florida.

that's where the veterans have gone. i live here. i know that. they go home. for most of the part they go home. that's where we need to follow them and engage at home. i'm going to do one pitch also. we are having a symposium in may in augusta georgia and i will have handouts appear we need to bring community groups who don't have a clue at what homefront does and i want to bring operation homefront to augusta to say they can help you. learn about it from the person that runs it. the intent of the symposium is

sent to throw information that you. it's for you to know who to go to in the community that can help directly. let me just round that out. over the last 18 months we virtually eliminated homelessness. the last point in time we reaffirmed the six. we have a 90% graduation rate for the veterans we are engaged with and college, 90% graduation rate. we look to optimize the jade bikg.i.benefits that they gradu. in the last six months we had 117 on employed or underemployed veterans. and we didn't do it. we know the veteran and we know their outcome, but we didn't do it. they went to hiring the heroes and the job fairs and all the

other services but the leave it or not there was not the only issue when they came back to the community so we just brought of the other solutions to them so that they could succeed and that is what we need to focus on is how to bring everything together on a single point in time. i look forward to your questions. [applause] >> jim does have them all program but i can't believe he brought up an ice storm in georgia. [laughter] may be first of all thanks for

putting this together. i am a graduate in georgetown and it's always great to see the university take the lead thank you for allowing me to be here. to give a quick background i'm a retired navy officer and i retired in san diego in late 2002 and started a small counterterrorism company that i came back home for. i'm a washingtonian and i came back to alexandria and i remember going through tap class and about leedy that was giving thithe best job in the reintegration training in how to tie your tie she said the average veteran has three to

five jobs so i started thinking why. as i put the company together i think what i came to know is that the change is fairly significant. we have a structured life in the military and it isn't that way in the civilian world at least in most small companies. so i hired my first officer who got into the business when he retired and i selfless and we are going to put a company together that looks just like the military. we are going to pay on the first and 15th and give them 30 days of leave including on the weekend, which you don't get in the military. we are going to pay them better than they've been paid in the military and give them a mission. and when i left the company i sold the company and we had 500 employees and the first 300 of them i sat through every single

interview. there wasn't an employee at least for five minutes in this due process. and i'm not going to say i am an expert at hiring veterans but i hired a 500 the company has over a thousand of the cult support the watop supportthe war effortd afghanistan and other parts of the world. what i found is when i left the company we haven't lost one veteran. the only people we were losing in the company is what i would call the traditional support personnel and that's because maybe they couldn't integrate with us which was a little bit different. i can't say the same for all of the companies because the average industry is 15 to 20% of turnover. we didn't have that when i left this company, and i think one of the reasons was that we tried to make this transition to move as

smooth as possible and that doesn't happen in every case. i was here in dc and we had our first amputee and he called me and said listen i can't be there. i know you're in dc. would you go to the hospital and meet his family and i said we would be happy to. we went to the hospital and laying in bed as an amputee, the first one that i have ever seen and i calmed down myself and i've never seen that kind of construction though i had seen it in the landline community with the survivors and it was the first person that i have seen and i said to him where is your family and he said that they can't afford plane tickets to get here. they are trying to get the dogs in the kennel and they will be here in a couple days. so i got my wallet and my cell

phone and we got to the mother on the airplane. he was a young soldier. i thought because i was in the first bill it would be the first and the last because i thought that it would be over in six months. we did it even more times before we started a small foundation that was cold of the wounded warrior foundation. and i got to know about 227 or so severely wounded amputees and personnel the last 12 years now. we continue to try to do things in this foundation that we were taking care of in the wounded and we had an old legacy that took care of the memorial at the air force base at last year emerged because in the nonprofit space, resources are very tight

so we merged them together today to create what is called the warrior foundation and we have a few missions because a lot of the military lives in poverty and of the scholarships and other things that we do. in 2010 when i left my company by wife and i started and it just happens to be the worst years in afghanistan and we started bringing families out to blue on virginia. we noticed how imported it was for the families to get away from the hospital barbecues. we had one bad stay with us for a week. healing is important because it is hard to transition if you are in pain. so we saw what was happening and then we figured what can we do to make this better and we have 200 acres worth of land and we

never really did much with it we said why don't we donate that and let the families that need a break because they are in bed for about 90 days and outpatient for about a year. i have an amputee that has been there and has done 74 surgeries. so this is a long time and when you're in the hospital it's always a good thing as you can tell. we started down the road of building a few cabinets in the community and one of my honorary board members said we can't do this we need to open this up to all. we did that and made that decisioit made thatdecision in a beautiful retreat with four cabins, a big lodge in one of

the lead therapist in the audience will tell you what we call nontraditional is better off for thousands of years at the pharmaceutical companies they have a lot more money. what i learned to transition its the narrative that has to be discussed. i come from a long line of entrepreneurs and i thought i better educate myself so i went to the executive course and we have a philosophy called hire for attitude and training for skills. one of the things is skill based training and we heard it this morning from both kathy and jim a little bit about the fact there are schools that aren't

necessarily vocational in nature, the kind of things companies want to hire for some as you think about what they bring the organization, think hard about this training for skills because we could spend a little bit of money on the skills training that you can't fix the attitudes. the last thing i want to say because community service is important when you say the 1% of the country everybody immediately start thinking about the 1% of 12 and i'm telling you right now money doesn't make you happy. it solves a few problems but it doesn't make you happy. 1% serves the country and when you think of 1%, that's what you need to think about because this is the 1% that will come home and change the nation and around the best companies in the world

and it will be your best employees but you have to give them a chance and make the integration back into society as fair as you can. what we do at the warrior foundation, we don't have 13 communities although we have nations staying with us and going through therapeutic healing but we feel very strongly that you've got to be healthy to reintegrate and that's what we hope to do is offer those kind of services. when i was in her class the best definition of leadership and she will probably kick the leader not remembering who said it but it somebody that can get people to places they normally wouldn't get on their own and i think that's what military warriors to every day on the battlefield. thank you. i look forward to your questions. have a great day. [applause]

>> i wanted to echo the comments. thank you for having me today. i really appreciate kathy and john for having this panel. i'm really pleased because i'm here to represent military families and i come from a military family myself. i am going on 19 years as a military spouse so this has been a journey and i ended up accidentally. i told some of you exist story earlier this week that when i married my husband we went out on a blind date and i saw his car and it said [inaudible]

and i thought why would anybody named their child infant? no wonder he goes by herb. this is and where i expected it to end up and identify anything about the military when i married him obviously. so i'm very pleased to be here. i came from an academic family which is why i didn't know a lot about the militaries of a school like georgetown having a panel like this is very meaningful to me personally because it means the country is taking an interest in this issue so to have all of you here in the room talking about veterans but also talking about military families is extremely important because even ten years ago military families were not a part of the narrative. i'm going to call you out on

joining forces because the leadership at the highest level has brought military families into the conversation. i had a speech written out i was going to say i'm going to talk about something a little different than our guest and i didn't expect everybody but families of today so i am pleased about that. i am going to stray away from the speech i had to set up because some of the other panelists covered it so well but what i want you to walk away with today is when you think about veterans and service members, they all have families. you cannot think about the service members in isolation and i think that somebody used the word holistic. we want to think about veterans and service members holistically and we are talking about strength today. part of the strength of the

military veterans or their families so we talk about them as being civic assets. their families are assets to the military members and a volunteer at a high rate. within the blue star families alone we had over 2500 volunteer hours last year. our organization is not just that organization. it's happening exponentially over the country. military family members volunteer in their communities and we find that the family numbers rates are high here and that is what makes them great community members. when we see the disaster happening to my military

families are going out to help. servicemembers are going out to help, and we don't highlight that enough and so that is a part of the narrative. ..

>> reaching out to the community ad highlighting our strengths. and i think a lot of people have talked about we need to change the conversation, because the stories we hear are about poor military families. they all have ptsd, they aren't getting jobs. and that is part of the narrative. we don't want to dismiss that, but another part of the narrative is that they bring strength to their community. they are great leaders. they are, they volunteer at high rates, they have leadership. we want them in government, we want them at the highest levels in our corporations, and ross is going to talk about that in a minute. but we also want to think about the military spouse and the military family member. one thing i want to highlight is we talk about the military/civilian divide and the strengths that families can bring. we have about 80% of our military children are in schools out in the community.

and one of the greatest things we can do to bridge that divide is having those kids there k and also having military service members and their family members teaching in those schools so that there can be an interface. and the same thing happens on college campuses. so the benefits that military service members and their families receive through the g.i. bill helps those families and the veterans be on college campuses. so discourse like this can happen. and so those two communities are connecting is and having a dialogue, and those strengths can be pronounced in an environment like that. and that happens on, at the lowest level with our kids in schools. and i want to, i don't think that's a point that comes out enough, and i want to bring that up. the other thing, and i know ross will touch on this as well, military spouses have challenges, excuse me, related to employment. they're employed, their

unemployment rate is about 26%. and so when we talk about hiring initiatives, we also want to include military spouses in those initiatives. military spouses have the same kinds of strengths that veterans bring to the workplace. they have leadership skills, they have communication skills. they're used to moving around, so they're flexible and they're adaptable, and they can enter a group very easily because they're used to doing that. military families move about two to three -- every two to three years, and those are assets when they go into the workplace. we want employers to see that. and so we've partnered with the chamber of commerce and highlighted some of those issues. we're doing a lot of that work at blue star families and in partnership with the chamber of commerce because we want to highlight those strengths. excuse me, i'm losing my voice.

so those are some of the best practices i want to bring out today. a lot of those are being represented here. thank you. excuse me, i'm coming down with a touch of a cold, so -- excuse me a moment. so i'm very pleased that all of these organizations are integrating families and, again, what i want you to leave with here today is that every time you hear "service member" and every time you hear "veteran," i want you to think military family. we cannot think of them in isolation. when we think about veterans and service members -- or, excuse me, service members in their transition process, their families transition with them. and so if we want to make a successful transition out of service, we need to think, well, what's happening to those families at the same time. and so again, holistic.

i think in terms of best practices, that's what i want to leave you with today. [applause] >> good morning. my name is ross cohen. i am the last after an august lineup of speakers, i will promise to keep my remarks as short as i can so we can get to the questions and the discussion. first, i do want to say thank you to dr. kretman, secretary kelley and all the other folks who are here. it is a great group. and i think there's a reason why hiring our heroes and blue star families works so well together. like debbie, after most of my remarks have been stolen by the previous panelists, i'm going to adjust fire a little bit. [laughter] a couple of, sort of just comments on a couple of the

things that i heard. and, one, in the opening remarks by dr. trowell-harris, one of the goals today is changing the narrative, but that is really a big part of what the chamber tries to do. so quick, quick 30,000-foot view of what it is we do at hiring our heroes, we are a program of the -- so back a second. the u.s. chamber of commerce is the world's largest business federation, and it represents the interests of the business community large and small here in washington and around the world. and we at hiring our heroes are part of the u.s. chamber of commerce foundation. now, the program began and our president/ceo, tom done here -- tom donohue talked about this a lot. mr. donahue was traveling around the world meeting with ceos, and the conversation would often times come around to the military, and he would hear from ceos, from chamber executives, i want to hire the military, i want to hire veterans, i want to hire military spouses, i don't know how to do that.

and so the chamber began this program not as a charity, but the chamber represents the business community, and we started this program not as a charity, but as a service to the his community. to the business community. technically, for a purpose of any lawyers in the room or finance, we are a charity. so -- [laughter] please, don't tell our teams we said that, we are a 503c3. [laughter] been 501(c)(3). the program started up three years ago this week with a simple job fair working in partnership with the department of labor and vets and the chicago land chamber in chicago is, this is not a hard sell. for all the reasons people have talked about, i'm not going to go into that. i did have the privilege of serving in the u.s. army, and i deployed to afghanistan. and so for all the reasons that everyone who's on this panel and who's spoken today knows, this is not a hard sell to businesses. this is something that businesses want to hire veterans and military spouses, they want

to be able to do it intelligently, and they want to be sure that they're understanding, that they're understanding what it is thai getting and what -- they're getting and what it is to look for which isn't always an easy thing. when i enlisted in the army, i already had a college degree, and people asked me why didn't you go in as an officer? i didn't know what the difference was. and for those or who serve, there is a small difference between being enlisted and being an officer. la. [laughter] sirs, ma'am. i didn't come from a military family, i didn't understand the military until i'd opinion in it. just like any culture, if you don't know that culture, you are not going to be able to understand it. and so what really excites me, and i think to the topic of really to jim's points about partnership, what i am excited about and the few folks in this room have heard me talk about before is we are not just talking to ourselves in the same room. yes, a lot of those conversations happen, but it's been a series of kind of

concentric and growing circles with a huge, huge hat tip to the office of the first lady and dr. biden. but in the past, you know, several years and going back and, obviously, there have been folks who have been doing this, folks like the legion and vfw have been doing this for well over a hundred years. but we are including more and more of the country in this conversation, and it is, it is happening. the progress we need to see is happening. we're not there yet, but you have four u.s. presidents represented from the points of light institute, clinton global initiative, the president george w. bush center which just launched and, of course, the joining forces effort who are all actively engaged in this space. you have the business community represented by the chamber of commerce which is 102 years old actively involved, mental health officials, the entertainment community through got your sticks. you've got more and more sectors of the country figuring out how they can get engaged and what they can do and be smart about it. and it's not easy. it's a big country, and, you

know, if the team is coming to augusta, they're going to want to get there as quickly as only possible. we're getting better at moving and communicating with each other to make sure we accomplish objectives and we're not spinning our wheels. i think department of labor released a report yesterday about veteran unemployment. it continues to get better for post-9/11 veterans. for overall veterans i want to say it's 6.6 which is down from 7. and so a lot of work to do, but it is getting better. and i think the more conversations that we have like this and then we take back to our communities bring more folks back into the space, and we can just continue to drive forward and make progress together. and it's very exciting. i've heard secretary perez from the department of labor say this is the only issue he sees in d.c. where even is on the same page. the question is tactics and how we get there, but there is no, there is a unanimity and a unity

of force and effort and energy to succeed and to make sure that we really are repositioning this greatest generation, this new greatest generation and their families to really nation build and to, and to make america a much rich every place for their experience. thank you. [applause] >> want to thank our panel members for this great presentation. you can see some of their expertise. what we're going to do now is i'm going to ask the panel members some general questions, and in of them may answer these questions. but next what i'm going to do is ask them some specific questions about their area. so the first few questions any panel member may answer the question. first question, how do you leverage and share national

labor resources to support communities in veteran and family reintegrationing, national resources pulling together as a team. >> so can i take that one? >> yes. >> okay. from a community level, as you saw on any bio, i worked at special operations command, and then i worked up here for the chairman. so i got the view from, i got the view from sort of an operational level and then to a strategic level my wife, who's a military spouse or who is a military spouse, but she's also military, medically retired, so i'm a military spouse too. [laughter] she got sick. and had to leave the military. and because i was traveling so much, i had to -- we -- she moved home so that her parents could take care of her.

and so anyways, so we moved back to augusta, and then i got the chance to work at this really small community level, rural augusta warrior project. so i knew, i knew what was up here. and i knew what was needed down here. at the local level. and so i was in a distinct advantage from other community programs who don't have the experience to know all that's available in washington, d.c. and pick up the phone and call somebody at the va because you've been working with them for the last four years, right? and so when i looked at it and said -- so i started to reach out to my friends and say, hey, can you help me in augusta, can you help me in augusta? i've got this guy, can you help me in augusta? and then i started to go, i went out to greenville, south carolina, and they didn't have that perspective. they were absolutely struggling, struggling to provide services to, within the means of their

local community. and they said, hey, here's my rolodex, call this guy. for this one call them, call them, call them. and so how do you do it? it's very difficult for those national organizations and federal agencies that are in the audience, you can't possibly know who's in the community. you can't possibly know all the communities and what they're doing. there's little turtle, guy's name's turtle. no joke. vietnam veteran, runs a program in myrtle beach, south carolina. and he does a great job. he has no clue who you are. and you have no clue who he is. but you can provide great services. so there needs to be a nexus. and that's what i, that's what i see is missing, is this, is a clearinghouse. i want, i don't want to call, i don't want to call eight people in the va or eight people in dod just to find out who to file a form, because what that does, that amount of time that it takes me to do that is time away from helping somebody boots

on the ground. so i want one phone number. of somebody who understands who i am, knows what i need. my job is to package the information for them. but i want one touch point to access the va, all the va. i'll consolidate the community. i need somebody to consolidate the national. so how do you do it? it's really difficult. it's definitely not what you know, it's who you know. thank you. >> thank you. i think the clearinghouse idea is really a key point there. the next question, for veterans who return to school, what should higher education institutions do to help veterans learn, reintegrate and succeed? debbie? >> i'll address that. and first thing i want to say is we want to talk about veterans and military families because --

>> right, yes. >> and one thing i want to add about that is right now the g.i. bill is a transferable benefit. service members can transfer those benefits to to their family. and why that's important is because spouses often have gaps, long gaps in their resumé. they may, they may be professionals, for example, and go for years not working, and they need to return to work. when that veteran or that service member is transitioning from service, having that spouse have education and and a career helps that veteran transition. so that's the first thing i want to say. but having those veterans on a campus, i think, changes the discourse, and it allows a conversation to happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. and so, first off, having

veterans and service members on campus is a important part of changing the narrative because at a cocktail party those conversations don't happen. they happen in the context of an academic environment often. ask so schools can -- and so schools can support those veterans and family members by having student veteran organizations, by integrating services on campus, by publishing articles in journals that academics read so that there's an awareness that we have veterans and military families on the campus. i come, as i said, from an academic family. there is not a lot of awareness on a lot of these campuses that these folks exist. >> ma'am? >> thank you. yes. >> ma'am, i'm sorry -- [inaudible]

i got a chance to talk with -- [inaudible] and so this is a larger point. i applaud the panel for really identifying the challenges and the problems and especially with the narrative. and so what we need to fight for is the people in the middle. the highest managers that don't understand what their leadership and organizations want them to do. in other words, the ceo says i want to hire veterans, but the hiring managers are uneducated to hire for attitude and train for skill. >> right. >> and the colleges, a lot of times these standards to get in these top colleges are preventing the veterans from

getting in. so i would propose that we look at veterans in a different way so we can get them into these colleges and set 'em up for success. that's my comment. >> thank you. thank you very much. our next question is as the military begins to draw down and increase the number of veterans return home, what is the most important thing we must do to reconnect veterans and families to the community? >> sure, i'll, i'll address that. you know, and i think that has been touched upon a little bit by an earlier remark. but i think it really is, ultimately, and this gets to the point the colonel made about translating ceo down to hiring management. and be my expertise is in more

of the employment sector. but it is, ultimately, an issue of communications and an issue of, you know, you talk about the 1% who have served in the past 12 years who have developed extraordinary skills, the military families who have served beside them who have also developed extraordinary stills. but if there's two pieces to this, and one is the hiring managers, the employer, the country needs to try to understand -- and i think they are, and i think we've come a long way as country -- to try to understand what do those skills mean. how does that affect me if i'm a hiring manager and i'm being told something by a ceo, but i've got to put, you know, fill slots very quickly at large capacity, you know, i'm sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place unless i can understand. so one of the things at the chamber that we really focused on a lot the first two years was trying to, was trying to talk to veterans. and i'll talk about military spouses in a second and teach

them how to brand themselves to employers. we these to talk to the employers directly as well and create tools that are really geared towards employers and hr managers and recruiters and line, the line men and women who are making the hiring decisions to say these are what you should be looking for. here's other people in your space, in your sector you can talk to. so i think it is communication on the side of the employers and the country at large, and they have to understand and, you know, put their hand out halfway. and then on the other side, you know, we've been, i've been to, you know, the chamber, we've hosted close to 700 job fairs in the last three years, well over 20,000 men and women have been hired as a direct result of those fairs. but the reason why we're doing more and more, additional sort of a suite of programs is you'd walk into a job fair, and i'd look at someone's job resumé, and it would say iraq 2006. that's not helpful to anyone, and the veteran, you know, wouldn't -- didn't know, wasn't

told, it's understandable. and the same side, we're also -- so the set veteran has to understand that people are going to say we support the troops, we love veterans, but they have an obligation on themselves. it's not just, they have to know how to talk about themselves. on the other side, one of the things we realize and we're very excited, we're actually launching a new initiative at camp pendleton, california, next week, and it's called career spark. it's, basically, a resumé tool kit directed towards military spouses so that a military spouse who might have a resumé that has years of gaps in work, you know, because they're moving and it sort of looks like a hodgepodge, but they actually have been doing incredible work as extremely -- and debbie can talk about this more eloquently than i can, but translating volunteer skills into resumé bullet points that hr managers can understand. so working closely with blue star families, supported from to toyota, so it's a free service for all job seekers and employers, but creating a way

that military spouses can think about their own service in the military community in a way that employers will understand. so i think it is the biggest thing we can do is make sure that the skills that have been developed over the past decade-plus and more are understood both by the country, but also by those who have developed the skills. and it's not enough for just one side to think they understand. both sides have to come together. >> i'd like -- >> thank you. >> if i could -- >> sure. >> you know, just from a community level, you know, when i moved throughout the military, you know, you talked about your moving and transitioning, when i moved throughout the military over 23 years, when i pcs'd somewhere, i always had a sponsor. the day i got out of the military, when i left the military was the last time i had a sponsor. there was no sponsor on the other side. there was no community who said, hey, if you coming back -- you're coming back to me, just give me a call. i'll tell you where to get your

haircut, where to get your car fixed, where to get a job, i'll tell you where to get all these things that you always had a sponsor. don't live here. if your kids want to go to this type of school, live over here. if you want to get this job, live over here. you guys are all nodding, so you know what i'm saying. that doesn't exist on the other side of a dd form 14. and what i'm saying is that we have to figure out how to, how to empower communities to develop programs that can integrate everything that we're all doing here, all doing here and bring it all together in one. not a competition of national nonprofits or l.a., new york, washington -- it's got to be at the community level. the second thing i want to point out, the biggest employer in the united states is small business. and small business is throughout, is in the small communities. and they don't necessarily hire -- they hire on a resumé, but they hire on a reputation.

and so it's important for communities to build reputations with their local communities. and i'll tell ya, we get job offers from our local businesses, big ones, bridgestone, easy go, club car, international papers. and the mom and dad store down the street that isn't part of a larger group, they're just looking for an employee. a reliable employee. and they'll call us and say, hey, i'm looking for one employee, and we'll send them fife people. not a thousand people, we'll send them five people who meet their standard. so, again, it's about relationships. of you have to know who the veteran is, and you have to know who the customer is that needs the can veteran. and you have to connect the two. all the community is is a broker between those who have the need and those who can fill the need. thanks. >> thank you. the last general question is, how do we reinforce the narrative of veterans' strengths

to community leaders? you want that one? >> sure. [laughter] >> i think, you know, changing narratives is never easy. ross mentioned got your sticks and, you know, the entertainment industry. and john and i were talking this morning about this whole concept of this, you know, maybe going the wrong way in the sense of creating a narrative that people feel sorry for veterans. and i think that's dangerous in a lot of ways because, you know, there's a lot of great the stuff going on in the country and making sure that happens. i can just give you one example. and jim talks about small, rural america. i'm in rural western louden

county, but louden county itself is the richest county in the united states and very populated. but our sheriff's very proud because he just put 15 marines and soldiers through the sheriff's academy and hired them. so i would consider the sheriff in louden county to be a community leader. and i also consider places like new york and l.a. and washington, d.c. communities because there are veterans. i group in mount -- grew up in mount vernon, virginia. we were the only nonmilitary family in our whole community. so i think changing the narrative, number one, is hard, and it needs help from hollywood, it needs help through documentaries, it needs help -- and i don't think we've done a great job yet of telling the positive side of the story. i think we continue to tell the, oh, woe is me story, and that's not good enough to change a narrative. because it just keeps going down and down and down. and that's the one thing as i look at the war winding down that always has concerned me, how do you change it so that we

know this 1% is really the 1% that we can rely on for the future be of our nation? -- the future of our nation? because, you know, i've to got a quote in my e-mails that says, and i can't read it right now, but it's something about -- [laughter] george washington said that, you know, the next generation of war fighters are basically dependent on how we treat the priest generation of -- previous generation of war fight beers. and i grew up, you know, i grew up, like i said, in mount vernon, virginia. every one of my neighbors were vets, and i remember reading -- i was a newspaper boy. i can remember reading newspapers that vietnam vets were getting spit on. we have not done that to this generation. we have treated this generation of war fighters very, very well. and now what we've got to do is make sure that we don't create a pity party and change that narrative through a storytelling process of how great this

generation will be. because otherwise we're going to be sitting here five years from now talking about a draft. >> thank you. what we're going to do now is ask each panel member a specific question in their area. this then we're going to move quickly, because we want to save time for the audience to ask questions. the first question is for jim. a lot of information for military, veterans and their families who are transitioning to civilian life. from your perspective, what are the greatest opportunities for a community to assist military and veterans and their families in transition? >> thank you, general. so i think i've to answered the question a couple of times in my responses to previous questions. but how can a community assist, you can only help those that you know. and so it's important to know who the veteran or the warrior

or their family member is who's in the area. and they need to know who you are. so at a local community level, we're trying to get the word out. yesterday we signed an moa with fort gordon that is phenomenal. and the garrison commander came to me and said you guys own the community, and i own the post. we need to figure out how to bridge that so that you can get on post and i can get into the community. so we signed an moa to assist the garrison at fort gordon with transition services for all military veterans ask their families to come -- and their families to come off post. and that in itself is huge. the other partnership is the va. you know, i don't have a community partner stronger than the va. we went to, my team went to another group, and we sort of did this question and answer thing of who were the strongest, who are your strongest community partners. every onef