I'm guessing you're all here because you have a project that you're working on or looking to start one that requires building custom hardware. You've already done this before and are looking to either do this again or maybe come as a rate with someone else who's gone through the growing pains. Or you saw the name Virgin Galactic and it piqued your interest. Well, regardless of why you're here, welcome. We're going to focus on the steps that you need to go from project conception to having hardware and operating system that you need to support whatever desired software application you're creating. So I hope you find something interesting to take away from this. So let's go ahead and get started. So first of all, let's start off with a very important question and I'm going to assume that you're one of the people who's looking to get a new project moving. And the question here is, what is it that you're really trying to build? After all, building a logic system isn't usually the end goal unless you're doing a reference setup. But there's something else that you really want to be creating. Are you building a consumer device? Some Internet of Things monstrosity? Wait, what conference am I at again? Some appliance, a test harness, a flight computer. Knowing this, what you're building is really what's going to define the sorts of tradeoffs you make. And it'll be good to keep this in mind as you're going. So regardless, you want to keep your focus and avoid getting mired in tool creation as you're working in a small team by making use of these sorts of existing tools. So how do we start? What do we even do at this point? It can be daunting to find this starting point, so let's at least start from the basics. Hardware takes probably the longest time to revise of anything. Software in comparison is easy. So you want to get the hardware right as early as possible. And if you're lucky, if you're in the development process, the hardware hasn't actually been set or determined yet. So you can take the time to figure out what is actually needed. As someone who works on software, you're going to want to make sure to get as involved in discussion as early as possible because hardware designers often get buried in data sheets and forget about the software development time that is affected by the decisions that they make. And the last thing that you want is an interface designed by the hardware designers that doesn't work well with existing software interfaces. And so at least to get moving in the right direction here, you'll end up starting off with what vendors usually provide different reference boards to get started from which are intended to show off a lot of the features of the hardware they sell. Regardless of whether it doesn't actually fit your specific requirements, it's at least someplace to start. And I just realized I forgot to advance all the slides, so sorry about that. So one of the things that's going to affect what you need is depending on what your team's current level software expertise is.  But while that will affect your timeline, it doesn't really matter because if you're a small team and starting out with a new product and you're working with limited resources, you want to save time where you can, and that means starting with strong foundations. When you're a small team with limited resources, this is of paramount importance. Without building on the work of others, you'll be setting yourself up to fail. And unless you're buying a product from a completely new vendor, you'll realize that all of the projects that they have been created from what they've sold before have had other people using them and have had the chance to learn from past mistakes. So one of the ways you can make use of other people's errors and what's been learned from that is to make use of the vendor-provided software development kit and or more support package depending on the level of what it is that you're doing. And it's likely based on one of the following. Whether it's using Yachto embedded, OpenWrt, Buildroot, I'm probably going to annoy some people here by saying that it really doesn't matter because I know there's a lot of people in different camps. OpenWrt is obviously better for routers or Florian doesn't seem to be here right now or else I would bug him more about that.  All of these share some pretty common things and this is why it doesn't matter too much. They have a large amount of commonly used software and you can get started with that, but in all of these cases they're probably going to be missing specific things for whatever niche you're designing for. So you'll probably be okay. We're getting some of the core utilities or some replacements like Busybox or other things that everyone needs like NTP, but if you want specialized math libraries because you're doing a certain flight, that's not necessarily going to be built into whatever you're trying to use. But in all of these cases, it's pretty easy to add in additional packages. In fact, the designers of these want you to do that frequently. So while some of the more elaborate setups will give you... Yachto contains seemingly everything including the kitchen sink, all kinds of different graphic libraries and some of them are more minimal. There's at least some components that are not going to be available. And all of these things you're going to want to make your additions in a way that is going to be easy to port forward later. Yachto, for instance, makes this particularly easy to do with its layer system, which is probably the reason that some of the vendors use it. It certainly saved us a lot of time at Virgin Galactic being able to have internally use our own layer and use that to port forward as new versions come out. But it's a way that you can save some effort there. And really, you don't want to ignore these tools. The vendor has provided them for a reason, and even though it might feel like a toy example when you're just setting up a reference board and saying, okay, great, I can get this reference board working, how does that really translate to what I'm actually doing? But these tools actually will grow with your needs, unlike this toy toolbox. An enormous amount of effort has gone into building all of the build systems you use, regardless of how clumsy it might feel at first. And as tempting as it can be to try and re-implement something because you like this other build system better, you're going to end up repeating the same mistakes as other people and really not creating the product that you are trying to do. And again, another stumbling block here is Yachto in particular has some very confusing terminology in case people end up throwing around terms like Yachto, open-abetted, pokey, bit big, et cetera. And it can be a little off-putting until you've gotten familiar with what all of that's talking about. But you don't want that to be the stopping point there because one of the things that you really get from using whatever a vendor provided stuff is really support. You don't want to discount the amount that having a vendor support staff on your site can help. And I know how painful it can be sometimes to feel like you can be talking to your vendor and you get some first-level support staff and they don't know what it is that you're asking or whatnot, but it is still better than having nobody at all most of the time. And while there's a lot of documentation available for all of these projects, there will be questions that the documentation won't cover. And someone who is very familiar with your tools can help you learn them. And worse yet, sometimes bugs are deliberately left undocumented because the vendor doesn't want you to know about them. However, their support staff probably are very well aware of this. So some things to kind of watch for when you're selecting something that is in between what a vendor is doing is that, for instance, does a vendor provide thorough hardware and software release notes? Looking through these sorts of release notes can give you a really good idea of a vendor's communication level. Like, how do they communicate with you? What level of transparency do they provide? Do they provide access, for instance, to patch notes that can be extremely valuable to audit if you have the resources or the need to do it? You want to know the delta from whatever upstream software projects you're working from because anything that's different that the vendor has provided probably has undergone less review. This is particularly important if you're working on any sort of safety-critical systems. Is there any sort of direct support channel available? You want to go through a reseller. And your needs are probably going to differ because as a smaller organization, while it might sound better to have a direct support channel, it may be very well that in the case that you're working with an extremely large vendor that isn't going to listen to you or respond to you if you talk to them. I can think of a few off the top of my head that I won't name right now. And having a reseller that you go through means that they might have a lot more cloud to whoever the vendor is and be able to get you to the right support people faster even though it might sound more inconvenient. Sometimes it's the other way around. And next, how long is software support normally provided for a chip set? And not just the chip set. You also want to consider all the different components on the board and make sure early on that all of everything that you're looking for is actually support. And don't just consider the big stuff here. Really, it doesn't really matter if your SoC is supported for, you know, 10 years if some smaller chip on your board is only supported for the next two and suddenly there's no replacement that will fit in without having to do a board re-work. So now let's kind of go back into the common features of the sort of vendor provided SDKs and VSPs. Because you're probably thinking at this point what if I have custom hardware? This is all well and good for getting some reference board but we're making significant modifications to the hardware for our application. So how does this translate into building our own stuff instead of using an off-the-shelf turnkey solution? And, well, these reference designs are your friends. If you're a small team, I really hope whatever your design is that is based off of a reference design because if not, you'd better have some serious in-house expertise or you're going to fail horribly. But we're talking, I mean, this presentation is geared at small teams, so if you have that, you're fine. But in which case, what are you doing at this talk? You want to make sure to have a reference board first. I can't stress that enough. It's your baseline and especially since you won't likely have fully working hardware immediately, it's what you need to get started. At Virgin Collective, for instance, we started by getting a reference board from the vendor and getting an application working there with some of the required features set. And that means that we can only worry about developing for any sort of newly-ed stuff later rather than trying to do everything at once. And this has allowed us to save enormously on development time. So once you actually have the hardware that you're planning to use, even if it's only in the early development stage, you can at least start doing comparisons between the reference boards. And you'll want to keep track of these differences and note the impact on your project. The more things that diverge from the reference, the more work that you've got cut out for yourself. And the more important that this checklist becomes. So you want to write everything down. Or, better yet, use an issue tracker. This seems like it should be obvious, but you'd be surprised how often this doesn't exist. Especially in hardware design land. So you want to at least have something, whether you're using something like JIRA, Red Mine Track. It doesn't really matter what it is. Get it in there. For instance, what we do is that all of these sorts of differences get turned into feature tickets with subtasks as we need to have them. So that way we don't lose track of them whenever garbage is changed. And you can put together an established process to do this. And it also helps out to start planning out the schedule to work on each of these changes. And gives us an idea of how long it's going to take to work on each of these items. These sorts of time estimates can give a sense of what impact would be if any of these change, which is particularly likely at a small organization. And this lets, in other words, letting you really reduce, cut down on scope creep, that most dreaded of two words that you'll ever hear while you're trying to meet deadlines. And because the last thing is you want software development time to be the surprise in the chain.  And so... Sorry. So once you have your reference design for comparison, you're going to want to take note of some of the specific ways in which your actual board diverges from the vendor reference. For instance, if you have a similar board schematic, then there isn't too much change, except for any sort of added peripherals. You're likely to at least have the same process or memory as the reference board. You might go up and down that, but it's going to be pretty similar. But it's very common to have, for instance, a separate, a different setup for storage and most other peripherals. And something that more closely matches what your program needs. And you're probably not going to see as many changes, even though you'll probably be reduced from what the first iteration is. But presumably you're building something interesting. There's going to also be at least a few sensors or controlled interfaces connected, whether directly to this board or through some more indirect means. And to get a little more specific about what you'll have to do, you're going to want to figure out where each piece of hardware is connected. So whatever pin setup that you have, you want to be able to alter, chances are you're not going to use the same setup as whatever the reference design is using, either because your hardware designer has decided that it's much more convenient to do it this other way, or it's actually impossible for them to route it similarly to the way that was done because of things that need to be added for your application or just because it may be some cost-related reason. But what it comes down to is most SOCs support multiple configurations, and the reference boards often just don't have something that fits what you do, because they really are trying to show off different features of the board rather than, you know, make a final product. So once you've taken down all of this, what you're going to want to be doing is updating the device tree on most device tree platforms, board files, and others to describe what the hardware is that you do have. And while the details of updating that are pretty out of scope here, the reference design is going to have one, and you're pretty much going to be basing it off of that to just describe where your design differs. And then once you've kind of gotten that in, you can update, add in whatever drivers that you need for your added peripherals. And this is where getting involved in the hardware development process early on can really help, because you can work with your hardware designer to make sure that to find out exactly what sort of peripherals they're adding, whether there's any sort of upstream drivers already available in the other kernel version, and really find out then, does the kernel version that you're planning on basing on already have drivers for that? Are you going to need to backboard them from a newer kernel release? How difficult is that going to be? While in an ideal world, you would always be working with upstream, as if you're following what I was saying earlier about using the software provided by a vendor in order to save yourself time, chances are you're not going to get exactly the latest. So you'll want to make sure that you have that. It's a little bit... You're going to have more work cut out for you if you're doing more cutting-edge stuff. And on that note, you're doing a lot of kernel hacking. You're going to want to use a separate kernel repository if you diverge significantly from the reference, so basically having your own downstream tree. And the reason for this is that while all of these build systems provide a method for adding in patches on top of different packages, if you're adding in a bunch of drivers, this is rapidly going to become unmaintainable. Because as good of a tool that Quilt is, for anyone who's used it before, it's nowhere near as capable as actually using a tool that's designed for this purpose. And you'll end up spending a lot more time doing that than just using a tool that's good for that. So once you've done all of this and finally put together a system that supports the hardware you need and whatever else, you're going to actually... And whoever's working on the application side, if it's not you, has already been taking some time to work on the parts that they can in the meantime. You're going to want to start integrating that into your main build system. And this is obviously hugely dependent on what it is that you're trying to build. But most interesting applications are... There's a lot of common features here because most interesting applications have some number of dependencies between them. So you're going to want to note whatever compile and run time dependencies you have. And in the likely case that you're building something that shouldn't require user interaction to start a program, you'll probably want to be creating a service that starts up when it's intended or possibly even read starts itself when it goes down. Also we're thinking about early on is how it is that you want to deploy. For instance, for us at Virginia Galactic, one of the key things that we follow is test as you fly, which means our one of our goals is to minimize differences between use and development versus production, which is for us the flight environment or working on a test stand. And that means that in this case we actually don't want to have differences between what you have in all parts of your deployment. But if you have a different case where, say, you know that your target system is going to have a smaller amount of memory or storage space than what you're using for early bring up or for debug, then you might want to have multiple different builds, one for development and one for production, or just provide a setup that's easier to use for debugging. Essentially taking advantage of whatever options the build system provides that can help improve your workflow. And particularly note examples that these build systems can provide for making a package repository that your target machines can grab from. I know that at least both OpenWRT and Yachto make this pretty straightforward to create the package repository. I think OpenWRT is mostly O-Package and Yachto seems to be able to use whatever you want, whether it's RPM or O-Package or something else. But at any rate, you can use that in order to get your other developers moving faster. Speaking of packages, though, none of these is really a substitute for instituting some simple best practices. So now that we've kind of got all the things put together for how you want to build up your system, some things that you want to do is to use version control. Another seemingly obvious thing that seems to fall by the wayside when it comes to build systems, because it seems at this point that a lot of people have accepted that version control is a reasonable thing to do for a lot of application software, or working on the kernel or anything like that. But then when build systems, it turns out that people are like, oh, I received the tar ball or a zip file. Clearly, that's the fine way to do things. Let's just make copies of directories. I can't emphasize enough that not using a version control system is asking for trouble. You don't want to fall into that trap. Your teammates are going to make mistakes, and you're going to want to make sure that you have something to come back to and be able to figure out what went wrong and when. But even better than just using version control, because anyone can just throw things in a repository and do have something that's nearly useless, is use version control like the upstream project does, whether you're working with open embedded or open derivative or whatever else. And that usually means making small modular commits, reading the commit log to find out how they've done this in the past, because all of these projects have had people learning from the past mistakes, essentially, and put together an established process for doing this. And doing acting like upstream helps in a lot of ways, because you also get to benefit from possibly pulling in new changes from the upstream project and making that easier, or pushing back in the other direction, which can be a hard sell sometimes, especially if you're working in an industry that traditionally hasn't been doing this. Which can lead to this question, which I mean, people give entire talks on this, I'm sure there's at least one here. But it's like, why is upstreaming important? And at the high level, it boils down to you get reduced maintenance costs over time. It pays dividends if you do it sooner, because importing local changes required to support whatever hardware you're creating becomes a lot easier. You start seeing higher code quality, because when you've got more eyes on the code, upstream reviewers are going to know the code base better than you probably, if you're working on a small team with only so many areas of expertise that you can have, and can tell you how to improve more specifically what you'll need to change before they'll accept it. And honestly, the one to really sell to your higher management is that it's actually just really good, low-cost, positive PR, because after all, your organization is benefiting from the work of others, and it's just kind of the right thing to do to also give back to the community. And really, ultimately you're using software that is built in collaboration of a whole bunch of people, like a lot of them who are here. And if your organization isn't involved in this process and your competitors are, you lose out on an enormous opportunity to really get involved in the direction of the project in a way that is beneficial to you and your company and whatever it is that you're doing, while anyone else who's using the same thing gets to take full advantage of being involved in this process. And over time, the cost to maintain these local changes, if you're not involved in this, is going to add up substantially. I know one project that I was involved in a few years ago had a comparison between a few different groups, one of which was heavily involved in an upstreaming process and one of which was not. And the time delta between the upstreaming process was on the order of months. So you want to be involved in that. And speaking of local changes, you're going to want to take steps to make sure that upstreaming is easy to manage and one great way to do that is to set up a build system for your build system or a continuous integration system to handle these sorts of things. So it doesn't really matter what tool you use to do this, whether it's Jenkins, Buildbot, or whatever, you want to have something. Because especially with fewer eyes on it, it's going to be in a small team, it's going to be easier to make these sorts of mistakes. So you want to be using an option to use local mirrors for whatever build system you're using. Because you don't really want to be dependent on any sort of third-party sites and say one website goes down and your build breaks. It's not really what you want. So doing things that way can really help. If you take advantage of whatever sorts of shared caches your build system provides, this can also really cut down on build time and reduce the time that developers are waiting to find out, hey, when I made this change and I submitted it, did it work? Is this ready to be reviewed? And there's just an enormous value that you get from having working automated builds. You can make sure by doing this that there's almost never actually any broken builds. Because if you don't do that and you end up with broken builds, it's going to make it a lot harder for anyone who's tried to track something down and tried to use bisect to solve a problem and found out that a whole bunch of builds during the bisection process failed. I know you're pain. And because bugs will be introduced if you're trying to move quickly and you'll waste a lot of time tracking down the problem if a bunch of commits don't build. You want the history of what you do to work for you, not against you. And for tracking down bugs, that's really the only way to do it. And lastly, deploying to a TFTP server using this sort of setup can make sure that everyone on the network on whatever network you're using can easily boot the latest version and save time that way. And finally, the last common sense item that I'm going to add here is to do... Make sure you're doing code reviews for this. For some reason, this is also a common blind spot when it comes to build systems. Usually it's considered obvious that code reviews are necessary for applications and kernel development. But a lot of people seem to feel that distribution build system recipes, scripts and so forth, and everything associated with that are somehow merit-special exclusion from this. But if your operating system build system doesn't work, it doesn't matter if your application is perfect. Your product still doesn't work. And another selling point is that the overhead for doing this is pretty low when you're working with a small team, less than five people. Code review can go pretty fast this way. But if you start getting large teams with diffusion of responsibility, in some ways it's good because you have more people to do reviews, but in the other sense, it starts meaning that the volume just starts increasing, and it can be more difficult to figure out who should be doing what. And if you're going to be doing reviews, you want to make sure that there's at least common standards that everyone's aware of, whether this is going to vary by project, of course, but if you're making patch modifications to, say, Busybox is going to be different than you're making a patch modification to the kernel or for GLC or for, you know, one of the different math libraries. So you want to use whatever code style is appropriate for that. So you want to streamline this process using various checklists and scripts. Anything you can automate is good, whether there's things like checkpatch available for the kernel and just really make sure that the scope is recognized by everyone involved who's doing reviews. So in summary, if you're putting together a NE system, you want to make sure that you're involved in the hardware design early on as a software developer, so that way it reduces the number of surprises for everybody. You want to make sure to use whatever reference boards are available and use that to determine how much delta and figure out how much work there is to do and how long it's going to take and use the vendor SDK because they've already tested it out with most of the setup that you have, even if it's not identical to what you're building. You're going to want to use version control because that's mentioned, history should work for you and not against you, and you want to work with upstream projects as much as possible because that's just going to save you time in the long run. And if you're trying to build a successful project over several years, you want to think in the long term. So that's all I got with that. I hope you enjoyed it and it should be off to a good start. Anyone have any questions? Yes, please. I've seen both. So the question was, if someone is upstream, do they typically go through their vendor or elsewhere? I'd say it depends on whether that vendor has a habit of moving things upstream or not and whether they're interested in being involved in the process, but it's definitely a case-by-case basis, at least in my experience. Anybody else? Going once? Going twice? Okay, great. Well, thank you all for coming. I really appreciate it.


Well, good afternoon. I'm Professor John Jackson and it's my pleasure to serve as the coordinator for the issues in National Security Lecture Series and as your emcee for today's event. For anyone just joining us, I want to reiterate that this series was originally conceived as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. In the years over the past four years, it has been restructured to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees and colleagues throughout the Naval Station Newport. We will be offering 15 additional lectures between now and May of 2021 spaced about two weeks apart. An announcement detailing the dates, topics and speakers of each lecture has been posted by our public affairs office. Each event will consist of three parts the scholarly speakers presentation, a question and answer period, and then a brief pause before we proceed to the family discussion group session. This final segment is a primary interest to family members residing here in Newport, and it will feature guest speakers from various support activities and organizations here on base. Okay, enough background and admin. Let's now proceed to the main event. This afternoon, we are pleased to welcome Dr. Sarah C. M. Payne to speak about why Russia lost the Cold War. Some have argued that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, but recent research suggests a more complicated story. Together we will explore both what others did to the Russians and what the Russians did to themselves. Sarah C. M. Payne is the William S. Sims University Professor of History and Grand Strategy in the Strategy and Policy Department of the U.S. Naval War College. Her degrees include ABA and Latin American Studies from Harvard and MIA from Columbia University, certificates from both the East Asian and Russian Institutes, and MA and Russian from Middlebury College, and a PhD in History from Columbia University. She is the author of numerous award-winning books and articles, and is one of the college's best known scholars and most popular lecturers. As a reminder, during the formal presentation, please submit any questions you may have using the Zoom chat function. Dr. Payne, over to you. Okay, I'll try to share my screen. Okay, does that look good? So, John, is my screen shared properly? Yes, we see that at the top of your slides are cut off. All right, how about, is that better? That's much better. Okay, so now I'm off and launching. Thank you very much for that warm introduction. It's a real pleasure to be here. And my purpose is to fold. First, I'm going to give you the promised lecture on why Russia lost the Cold War, but also I'm going to give you a little window on the curriculum that goes on at the War College. This used to be part of the senior level course. And one of the most valuable parts of that curriculum for the strategy and policy department is the counter argument of anticipating your smartest critic and how you counter their argument to what your idea of how the world works. So today I'm going to give you a tour of the counter arguments and for those of you who haven't taken either SMW or S&P, this might be helpful. And some would argue and answer this question, why Russia lose the Cold War, they say Ronald Reagan, he won the Cold War. Except this picture looks a little cordial for all of that the Gorbachev's and Reagan's look awfully friendly. But anyway, Reagan was a man of words and deeds. He made memorable speeches. And here's one he made before Parliament in 1982. The regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy, but none, not one regime has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bannets do not take root. And then a little bit later here he is in Berlin, standing before the Brandenburg Gate, then a locked gate on the Berlin Wall, but long a symbol of German greatness. And he calls out General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, tear down this wall. And who can forget the evil Empire speech that he gave in Orlando, Florida to the National Association of Evangelical Christians, who gave up a day in Disneyland to hear it. Reagan was also a man of deeds. There had been a military buildup that had bung on under Carter in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but Reagan really increased that. He also did very aggressive patrolling of the Soviet Union, and he funded anti-communist groups wherever he could. And the Soviets took the bait, and they matched the United States symmetrically of dollar for dollar on this big defense buildup. Beware of symmetric strategies. The Soviet economy was one seventh that of the combined Western and Japanese economies, and it was bankrupting at the time the CIA estimated that the military was taking up about 20% of the Soviet budget. After the Cold War, they thought maybe it was 40 to 50% or possibly up to 70, 75% if you took into account all of the infrastructure and the military industrial complex that went with it. Beware that in comparison, the military share of the US budget was less than 8%, Japan less than 2%, even Nazi Germany, it was at 55% expensive. So Russians have thought very deeply about what happened to their country, not only how they lost the Cold War, but how they lost the Empire and indeed life as they knew it. In the afternoon, I'm going to be quoting a whole variety of Russians so that you get their take on it. And here you have Valentin Fallin, who was the Soviet ambassador to Germany. And he said, look, the American strategy of our exhaustion in the arms race, it produced this crisis in public health education, you name it. And then because the Soviet Union had all these tensions with China had to spend money in that direction, the arms race plunged the Soviet economy into a permanent crisis. Meanwhile, Reagan is busy funding anti-Soviet movements, most particularly in Afghanistan. And here you have Georgiy Abatov, he was the top Soviet expert on the United States. And he said it was quite clear that the Afghan war was most advantageous for the United States. We got our Vietnam and we began to understand this. So here's Gorbachev telling the Politburo in the spring of 1986, the Americans are betting precisely on the fact that the Soviet Union is afraid of Reagan's missile defense. That is why they're putting pressure on us to exhaust us. Correct. So someone made the argument that the United States victory in the arms race guaranteed victory in the Cold War. Go Reagan, that's one explanation. But I'm going to give you a whole other set of external explanations of what others did to the Soviet Union. And then I'll move on to internal ones and what it did to itself and some overarching ones. And I'm going to start for the external explanations with Presidents Ford and Carter. So those who disagree that it was all Reagan's handiwork, another group of people could argue, no, no, no. It has to do with what happened under Ford and Carter. The Soviets for years had wanted to hold a European wide conference to confirm their expanded borders as a result of World War Two. And for a long time, the Western Europeans were uninterested. But after a while in the 70s, they were sick of all the drama and they were wanted to hold the meeting. The United States was still not very interested, but we went anyway and this produces a 1975 Helsinki Accord. Now the United States insists that it include a whole variety of human rights provisions. Didn't think they were important, knew the Soviets wouldn't enforce them, but stuck them in there along with the Europeans. Well, unbeknownst to the United States. Dissidents throughout the Eastern Bloc and human rights activists in the West ever more vocally began demanding that the communists live up to the promise of liberation. That communism is supposed to deliver versus the democracy that actually is what they produce. And this dissident movement took on a life of its own within the Eastern Bloc. And here you have Robert Gates, who was eventually the head of the CIA and then the head of the DoD, said the Soviets desperately wanted this meeting. And it laid the foundations for the end of their empire. We resisted it for years. Only discover years later that it had benefits beyond our wildest imagination. Go figure. So some would argue that Jimmy Carter's human rights campaign was incredibly successful. Because it resonated most profoundly among the Eastern Europeans who were denied the political rights that he emphasized and here is his commencement address at Notre Dame in 1977 where he said, We have reaffirmed America's commitment to human rights as our fundamental tenant of our foreign policy or draws Americans together is a belief in human freedom. We want the world to know that our nation stands for more than just financial prosperity. We're bigger than that. Pavel Palashenko, who was Gorbachev's English language translator, thought Carter's human rights campaign was really important. Because by emphasizing these rights, it led Russians, particularly elites in the positions of power to think, yeah, their country needed to be more open, more humane and more democratic. And here you have Foreign Minister Shevronadze talking to the Communist Party members at his foreign ministry in 1990. He goes, the belief that we are a great country is deeply ingrained in me. But great in what? Size, people, arms problems, lack of rights. And what do we who have virtually the highest infant mortality rate in our planet take pride. It is not easy answering the questions. Who are you? Who do you want to be a country which is feared or a country which is respected, a country of power or a country of kindness? So, if you look at what other Russians thought about this, you have the Russian journalist Vitaliy Nektenko saying, look, the Soviet Union just didn't make it because of this undemocratic ideology. And Alia Grinevsky, a Soviet career diplomat, is making a parallel comment that Communist ideology is associated above all with the Soviet Union. It's rejection created this vacuum, which determined its ultimate fate. And then you have Buddy Sielson, who is Gorbachev's successor, who said no one wants a new Soviet Union, right? And they invented it. So, some would argue that it's the human rights clauses of the Helsinki Courts and Carter's subsequent human rights campaign that destroyed the Communist belief and communism. And that's why the Cold War ended the way it did. Another president, another counterargument. Others would argue that all the rest of this is nonsense. The real story is that Nixon played the China card. Others would argue that Mao played the America card. Either way, in this really quite dangerous border war in 1969, the Soviets approached the United States government and said, would it be okay if we nuke them? And the United States said, no way. It would not be okay if you nuke them. And Mao got it. The one that wants to nuke you is the primary adversary. And great minds think alike, and Nixon and Mao both wanted to cooperate with each other to bring down the Soviet Union. And a result of China's animosity, Russia had to militarize its very long border with China with these fully mechanized nuclear armed forces. Well, imagine if the United States had to do that with our long Mexican and Canadian borders. It would be bankrupting and the Soviet economy was a fraction of ours. So this spelled all kinds of trouble for Russia of strategic overextension. So some would argue that U.S. cooperation with China, fatally overextended the Soviet Union, and that was that. All right, one could make an umbrella explanation out of all of this discussion of presidents to say from Nixon through Reagan, each successive president president. President, excuse me, opened up opera opportunities for succeeding presidents so that you start with Nixon. He plays a China card which subsequent presidents play ever more deftly. And then you get forward with the Helsinki Accords and then Carter is going to open that aperture. And then Carter begins the military buildup that Ronald Reagan finishes. And together, this allows the United States to deal with the Soviet Union from a position of ideological and military strength. For those of you who think that U.S. farm policy is inconsistent, at least until terribly recently, it was relentlessly consistent for the duration of the 20th century in the initial decade of this one. Political parties, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the central objectives of our farm policy was free trade democracy and get rid of the communists. It was just agreement on those subjects. So you could make a counter argument that the presence Nixon through Reagan produced the cumulative presidential effects to defeat the Soviet Union and that's the real explanation. Others would say forget about all these, these individuals, the real key was this military platform, the submarines. Why, because the Soviet Union was put on a very dangerous first strike posture because it believed it could not guarantee a second strike. And what happened is under President Carter, a graduate of Annapolis and Submariner. We started having a very aggressive submarine policy where we were patrolling outside of their sub bastions. And the Soviets didn't think they would be able to get off a second strike. So here are some Soviet comments about this Marshall Yazov said for them the Americans the main means for atomic attack is the fleet. And then you've got Bolden here, a big longtime aide to Gorbachev saying the most powerful strength of the United States is its navy and Russia can't get one of those. He can't afford it in its geographical position is not great to deploy one in more time. So here you have Marshall Akhrameyev who would commit suicide at the demise of the Soviet Union. He was in the United States in 1987 and he told his host, we're surrounded. And that's why we're concerned. We know you know where our submarines are and we don't know where yours are.  No Navy. Admiral Trost his host said that really the inability of the Soviet Union to maintain its defensive capability and to match the US Naval force. Ronald Reagan with six ships short of a 600 ship Navy that the Soviet Union just couldn't do this and this tank their economy. So someone argued the United the the Soviet Union could not counter technologically or financially the US submarine threat to its retaliatory nuclear forces. So war termination was the only solution for them. Okay, these are all naval explanations naval spelled with an e ie staring at one's own. They're all about when the United States did or didn't do the education at the Naval War College is supposed to open students horizons to think more deeply about the other side. What are Soviet goals, limitations, etc. And when you get to reading Klausowitz our big guru on conventional warfare, he emphasizes the interaction of war warfare. It's not just one side and the other side's a potted plant there's an interaction going on and you need to understand understand the other side deeply. So now I'm going to turn to a variety of internal explanations and here's Arnold 20 be one of the greatest historians of the 20th century who argued that civilizations died from suicide, not by murder. And the external explanations of the murder, what other people did to the Soviet Union, whereas the suicide are the things that they did to themselves. And here is internal explanation, number one, which is the Soviet Union didn't collapse because it lost the Cold War it's because its empire collapse collapse that did it in. And the West had been all worried about the so called domino theory for most of the Cold War the ideas one country fell to communism. Oh my goodness, all of them would fall. Turns out the domino theory actually applied to the communists, because once there were Democrat demonstrations for democracy in one Warsaw Pact country, the infection spread to the others. And their leaders no longer had the stomach for the kind of violence it would take to retain power and it just busted the Warsaw Pact. Indeed, demonstrations began throughout they were throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from 98 to 99. They were in the Soviet Union, their people were demonstrating for freedom and in Eastern Europe people are demonstrating for freedom from the Soviet Union. And the people are really taken with Gorbachev's idea of glossnest openness and stroika economic restructuring. Very uncharacteristically the Soviet Union did not intervene militarily in these demonstrations rather Gorbachev encouraged both political and economic reforms because these countries were facing not only political unrest, but also crumbling economies. And the reforms began in Poland, Poland had long been a scene of successions of unrest in 1980 81 workers hit the streets and they formed solidarity which became nationally and internationally known organization it was the only independent bubbling up from the bottom opposition organization in Eastern Europe period. And then the polls get themselves the government gets itself into an even worse problem in 1987 the economy. The living standards have declined by over 3% and the proceeding five or six years and the government is in a real economic bind it raises food prices on February 1 1988. And the workers hit the street and the government is so afraid its economy is going to go into free fall. So it offers the illegal labor organization solidarity a place at the bargaining table and there's a little complicating factor in Poland which is the Roman Catholic Church, an institution of enormous legitimacy and a partiality for solidarity and a pope at that time, who was Polish. So the government offers solidarity the deal is if you call off the demonstrations that are the strikes that are crippling and already a crippling crippled economy will bring you into these political talks and solidarity agreed and a year later. They convene what become known as around table talks in February 1989.  When you make mistakes are going to be itty bitty mistakes so you go first will learn from you. But if we make mistakes. They're going to be really really big and with serious consequences got that one right. And if you think about as these talks are going on. And the elections are a wind up being held in June. And the Communist Party thinks that it's got the laws sufficiently rigged that they're going to be okay think about this is happening in June, literally the day of the elections is the day that Deng Xiaoping in China decides he's had enough of his demonstrations. And he sends the tanks in and just kills tens of thousands of demonstrators doing that. By the way, the communists are still in power in China, the polls take a different route, but undenounced to the Polish Communist Party which they thought they'd rigged it solidarity wins every single seat for which it could compete. And for those party designated seats solidarity organized voters to check the box called none of the above, which they did. And it just destroyed the legitimacy of the Polish Communist Party and real elections were on their way. Four months later, equivalent demonstrations break out all over East Germany. And it's about the time of the 40th anniversary of East Germany, and the Germans don't send out the tanks. Here's Leipzig 70,000 demonstrators are out and about. And within a week you have over one in a third million Germans demonstrating in 210 places. Again, demanding democracy, no tanks sent in. Why? The Germans here had already been canned in mid October, because it was his ruinous economic policies that had wrecked the economy. He was living off of debt and spending and money that he didn't have, but the alternative would have reduced East German standards of living by 30%. And well, the Ponzi scheme eventually ran its course. So Honecker's out. November 7th the Council of Ministers resigns. The next day the Politburo resigns and then what's left of the government the next day announces new travel regulations, but it doesn't say when they're going to go infect or how they're going to be enforced will enter fog friction and chance. This guy, Gunter Shabowski, East German Party, Communist Party official, he's holding a news conference about asked about the travel regulations. And instead of admitting he didn't know the answer to the question, he winged it. And he said, ah, these travel regulations, they are enforceable. They're, they're, they're happening right now. Well, crowds of East Germans headed off to all the six gates on the wall of the of Berlin. And the border guards had a choice of just killing all these people, or opening the gates, which is what one of them did. One set of border guards, they opened the gates and the crowd poured into East into West Berlin. And a pivotal decision had been made a pivotal decision like the elections in Poland means there's no going back to the way they were. Things were within the week, 9 million East Germans visited the West that's over half the population and within the month. There were 1% of the population emigrated to the West. And here's good old Gunter Shabowski gone. Gee whiz, we never had a clue that opening the wall was the beginning of the end of us. Ah ha. So, some, the Russians apparently were very surprised. Many members of Gorbachev's administration at this kind of reaction among the satellites to Soviet rule. We have this parliamentarian and scientists who's got a good sense of humor, Yuri Rizov saying all of our former satellites by compulsion cast off from us as fast and as far as possible. And they have Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly Kovlyov saying, and there was no confidence whatsoever that if the East Germany armies out there and their Russians in the room, it's unclear who they're going to shoot us or the demonstrators. They're saying for the Poles and the Hungarians. Well, great. If you have allies like this, who needs any enemies. So, some would argue that unrest in the Empire forced the Soviets to forfeit the Cold War. Okay, another possibility say look, the reason why the Russians lost the Cold War has nothing to do with any of this other stuff. It would have been fine if the satellites had been healthy, which they weren't.  And look at all those tempting green places. They're all about to become independent and they're really, really sick of Western colonizers and enter the Soviet Union with an eradication plan for the West and there were many takers. They went forward to the 1980s with all of those pink places. And wow, the Soviet Union was on a roll. Except here's the hitch. In the mid 70s on there was a global recession that meant that such allies were much more expensive to have commodity prices tanked including oil, which is a big spending. That's a big source of Soviet revenues, but it also meant the exports of the Soviet buddies here. They're their value a tank and therefore they needed all kinds of extra money and this really hurt Angola, South Yemen, Nicaragua and other places. And oh, don't they sound familiar. Yeah, these countries are still a mess from their dalliance with communism. So Russia could ill afford these non performing pals. And the problem gets worse, because at the same time, Russia's own nationalities had had enough of this crumbling economy and they want independence and the problem is they want independence all at once. And the Russia can't doesn't have enough troops to deploy to all these places at once. And the unrest and the among the nationalities have begun in 8485 with student unrest and Eucudia, which is in the Far East and Kazakhstan, which is in the south middle. And by the time you get to the late 80s, there are ethnic hotspots wanting out in about 70 plus places. So some could argue this Soviet Union bankrupt itself in the third world while ignoring its own internal third world of nationalities who simultaneous revolts down the empire and forced it to forfeit the Cold War. Here's a completely different explanation. The problem with the Soviet Union wasn't any of this political stuff. It was all about the economy. That was the problem. And if you look at Soviet economic statistics, they did pretty well in the in the 50s as they're recovering from World War Two, but things get really bad, particularly in the 70s and 80s, so that by the time for the decade proceeding when Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Soviet growth rates for from one to 2% less than the United States for this, this proceeding decade and the compounding effects of that are really, really significant.  In order for subunits to get their inputs in order to produce things, they had to lie to everybody about what they had on store, etc. Or they'd never get their inputs or people take them away from each other. And therefore, no one in the Soviet Union either the subunits who are actually producing things or the government had good macroeconomic data on labor, capital, what are the value of inputs, what are the consumers actually want. As a result, everyone was grossly misallocating labor and capital, but unaware that they were doing so, until it had metastasized into a crisis. Bad news. And here you can look at what happened to Gorbachev, he comes in at 85 and just look at his economy here, it takes the big nose dive, and it doesn't bottom out to 1998.  And here you have Marshall Yaza saying, look, we simply lack the power to oppose all of these flourishing NATO powers, we had to find an alternative to the arms race. Anatoly Atomishin, who was a Foreign Service officer, argued that Russia's crisis began with the departure from self isolation, that the economy, Soviet economy was literally exhausted from the monstrous arms race militarism enemies with half the world. And here you have Gorbachev telling the Central Committee, we are encircled not by invincible armies, but by superior economies and he repeatedly said that living this way any longer is impossible. So some would argue, hey, the Soviet army, the Soviet economy, excuse me, lost the Cold War. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a very, very famous book about the fall of the French monarchy and then the ensuing French Revolution and he said that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform and of course that's what happens under Gorbachev. And people of all political persuasions in Russia agree that Gorbachev's role was pivotal. And Gorbachev made a number of incorrect assumptions and one of them is that history is always forward to communism, never backwards to capitalism. And here you have the KGB head of foreign intel saying the thought never occurred to him that it's possible to withdraw from socialism that of course is exactly what the Eastern Europeans did. Gorbachev also misjudged the sentiments of the neighbors. He thought that the clock began on his watch and people would appreciate his role in liberating Eastern Europe. Well, for Eastern Europeans, the clock started a lot long time ago under Stalin when he occupied them and shot their governments and other people. So here you have Anatoly Chenaya, foreign policy advisor to Gorbachev who's saying, Gorbachev thought that bringing freedom to the Eastern European satellites would lead them to adopt socialism with a human face. He made an enormous mistake, but because these countries brutally turned their backs on us. Oh really? If this is brutal, what pray tell was Stalin? And Chenaya continued the politics and connection with our former friends were totally unexpected for us. Really?  The United States intervenes in civil war is the world over. And then we dump in billions of dollars of aid evenly and people don't like us. I don't see why the Russians think they're so special. A third false assumption. Gorbachev believed that if the war saw pact is all then surely NATO would solve. And that if the Comic Con and that's the Soviet trading organization within the Eastern Bloc, if that thing was no more, then the European community, the predecessor of the European Union would be no more. He didn't get it. Things organizations by compulsion and those that people want to be in dissolve for different reasons. And there was a fourth saw for a incorrect assumption. Gorbachev assumed the United States would take a continental powers very dim view on strong powers, strong independent powers.  And so he figured the United States would want to divide in Germany, and that would be okay so he goes off for vacation, while all those Eastern European strikes are taking place poor life choice, because at that very moment. Chancellor Cole of West Germany and President Bush in the United States were coordinating and how to create to reunify Germany make it fully sovereign and fully in NATO. Other members of Gorbachev's entourage people had supported them later blamed him they said look, he made these foreign policy mistakes or function of it is domestic policy mistakes and they led the whole Soviet Union to collapse. And as Vlaizimir Lukin, an expert in the United States said Gorbachev was no dungshelping and then you have girl are bought off the big expert in the United States, who attributed to the stupidity of the leaders, angry man about all of that. So someone argue with suicide by mistake the big bozo was playing with pack plastic bags and stuck one on his head. Well, Lukin continued his observations about all this and he said in the West they love Gorbachev because everything took place so easily, easily and cheaply basically that way, but only for you for us it was expensive. And I will give you another explanation that it has nothing to do with Gorbachev sins of commission of all the mistakes he made, but rather it's a sin of omission about what the Red Army didn't do. But after was all over there were officers who said we should have done the Tiananmen solution just send in the tank tanks blow people away, and that would have solved things. So someone argue that TTD, an acronym I created just for you timely tank deployments would have changed the outcome of the soul of the Cold War. Others would say no no no, the problem isn't about Gorbachev leadership or the military's leadership it's about this guy's leadership. And that person was Gorbachev successor and he did two things. He amended the Constitution in 1990, which removed the Communist Party's leading role, which meant that all sorts of other parties could compete and get rid of it. And then he, Gila Russia and Ukraine signed the Biala Biala Bozha Accords in 1991, and that dissolved the Soviet Union formally, and this allowed the nationalities to flee the lease and the leash and the Soviet Union was no more so other people blame him. So if that if that's what you believe it was suicide on purpose. I'm not going to give you a couple of umbrella explanations one of them is the reason is why the Soviet Union lose it's because of all of the above is inevitable such a mass. The opposite answer to this question is no no no it took all of the above the best the West where a barely one in one the Cold War so I'm going to start with all of the above, you could argue that the Soviet Union had so many problems. It was just a matter of time before it tanked, and it does the cumulative mess was too much for it to survive so the whole thing is inevitable. And there are people who believe this Yuri Rizhov who is truly is a rocket scientist. He said look it's the rottenness of the system that's why it went down and here's a journalist, Japan off who says look I think that the genes of this disintegration were contained in the genetics of this governmental political formation.  So, according to this way of looking things the Soviet Union was destined to lose. Others would take the opposite view it's not quite so not so fast that basically it took the confluence of all of these events to win the war Cold War on Western terms and this is what Deputy Foreign Minister cover the office set thought. Thus, all factors merge internal ideological economic military in order to end the Cold War to arrange for the Cold War's funeral feast in other words the West barely one if you believe this one. Another one takes a twist on that one and says, not only do you need all the factors, but you needed the simultaneous. Probably having these two gentlemen on an office helmet Cole of West Germany and George Bush of the United States to conduct successful Cold War termination. If you look at Bush seniors CV, it's incredible he's one of the most probably one of the most qualified people to ever occupy the presidency. That is an incredibly young veteran of World War two, and he just keeps on moving he's the US representative to China when they're opening relations director of CIA VP for eight years. He's an amazing man, as is his German counterpart, Chancellor call who was the longest serving Chancellor in Germany, since his illustrious predecessor, autophon Bismarck, and the two of them worked out cold war termination without the East Germans love to travel. And while West Germans could had long been able to travel to East Germany East Germans had not been easily able to travel to West Germany why, because they have it had a habit of staying. And in the late 80s, more of them were allowed to travel, and you might ask why and the answer would be money, because Cole decided to win the cold war by buying up each tourist one at a time. And what he did as our whole series of transactions to get these people out. So in 88 East Germany eases eases travel trends restrictions and then West Germany pays them half a billion Deutsch marks for the privilege. And then later, later in 1989, hungry opens its border to Austria right Austria is not part of the Eastern bloc so if Eastern, East Germans can get to Austria their home freight to get out of the communist clock. And West Germany gives hungry a half a billion Deutsch marks. And then in November of 89 coal offers his 10 point unification program, and also pays the Soviet Union $100 million in food in a crumbling crumbling economy that really needed food. But the demonstrations just kept continuing and putting the pressure on. And this is when Cole and Bush decide they're going to fast track reunification why they're afraid that Gorbachev is going to about to fall from power because of the spiraling economic and political crisis. And they have to finish things off before that happens. But there's certain problems with this. So Gorbachev is absolutely against having Germany in NATO, let alone having a unified Germany in NATO State Department experts want to go slow. This guy Hans Dietrich Genscher, who's the foreign minister is really skeptical about Germany joining NATO and he's terrible why because he belongs to a different political party from Chancellor Cole and therefore cannot be fired. And the French and the British are deeply fearful of German unification so push and cold have a division of tasks. He's busy reassuring the Soviet Union and cutting them checks. And he's working out a financial unification. Communists are clueless about finance. That's what got them into all the trouble. And they're thinking we have to worry about military problems. Well, wrong instrument of national power. This is not going to be a military unification of Germany. It's going to be financial and it goes right under the Soviet radar. Meanwhile, Bush is working the diplomacy with the western allies. He's going to delay a bunch of previously scheduled meetings as long as possible so that events in Germany progress as far as possible why because he doesn't want particularly France and Britain to get in the way of reunification. And both of them are playing Bush and Cole are running a tag team diplomacy this so fast Gorbachev can't keep up with it. So in February of 1990 Gorbachev agrees to unification. Here comes the big money. Cole promises 5 billion George Marx, then Gorbachev agrees that states can choose their alliances, i.e. whether or not to join NATO. And this is when the US offers nine assurances and concludes a trade agreement that Gorbachev really wanted. And then you get in 19 July the German Economic Union goes into effect. And this is the unification by stealth. It's going to take money out of the East Germans hands because it's the Deutsche Mark that that comes from West Germany. That's going to be the currency for both of them. And then you get the London declaration inviting Eastern European countries to start forming warmer relations with NATO. And if this is in return, the G summit G7 summit agrees to study rapid rapidly get going with aid for the Soviet Union. So then you get Gorbachev agreeing to Germany, a unified Germany within NATO membership, but in return, Germany confirms its borders with Poland, and Germany pays 15 billion in aid to so Deutsche Mark aid to the Soviet Union. And he pays for all kinds of housing for these repatriated Soviet soldiers. Why you may ask, he doesn't want them running a coup against Gorbachev when they get home put them in a really fancy apartment building they'll be busy buying furniture. And in 1990, in September 1990, the treaty on German unification goes is signed. The Polish border is a big deal. Why because Stalin moved Poland way to the west and it took up a third of what would have been formerly German, a third of what had been the size of Germany before it's not the normal thing to do to a country. As a result, there have been I think 10 or 12 million refugees to a million of whom died. They didn't survive the trend of leaving Poland. And so this is a big deal that the Germans agreed to these new borders. But a month and a half before the unification treaty is signed good old Saddam invades Kuwait. And this is a real problem, because Iraq is a very important Soviet ally that owes them 10 to $13 million. That's a lot of money for the Soviet Union, which is broke. And it becomes Oh, now what do we do you don't want to tank call Cold War termination over this little event. So Gorbachev is cooperating with the United States. He sends his special envoy, you have getting Primochov and three trips to bag down the first one. Primochov secures a release of 3000 Soviet hostages the next trip he gets all Western girls released and the third trip he isn't so lucky he's there for the bombing. But imagine the US bombing campaign. If with every bomb, human shields go down with it. Well, Russia takes this off the table. And here's their thinking about it. This is Sergei Tatysenko is an age of Foreign Minister Chevrona. He said, look, we knew the United States was going to be doing something about Kuwait. So we wanted to funnel it through the UN. Why, because the Soviet Union has the ability to veto on the UN. And there was a division of roles he said when the Americans asked us to work with the Chinese we told them same thing. Are you going to be better off running things through the UN we've got veto or not and oh by the way you can extract some concessions for not vetoing which is what the Chinese did. And then you have Anatoly Kovlyov, the Deputy Foreign Minister is saying look, what I told the Americans essentially is stay out of Iraq by all means liberate Kuwait, but you're not going to cross this line. So for those who wonder why the United States stops the first Gulf War at the 100 hour mark, this is yet because to do so would have alienated the Russians and might have derailed termination of the Cold War. And for those who think Saddam was was the prize. No, he wasn't. He's not a prize. He's a piece of work. The prize is winning the Cold War on Western terms and not going behind beyond the coming for a point of victory to a tank all of this. That might have pleased Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher or President Francois Mitterrand, why they neither one of them wanted to unify Germany because it would relegate their own countries to a secondary status in Europe. Francois Mitterrand eventually came around and he became really essential in negotiating the Maastricht Treaty, which puts together the European Union, combining Eastern and Western Europe together, and plays a very creative role on that. Margaret Thatcher never came around. She was arguing Germany will be the Japan of Europe but worse than Japan. I guess she hadn't been to Japan lately. The Germans will get in peace what Hitler couldn't get more and her plan was to leave Soviet troops in Germany indefinitely. Well, imagine if that were the case, right? Dealing with this wonderful piece of work, right? We're lucky today that another great Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, has a country that is large enough to deal with the likes of Russia as it goes crazy taking Ukraine and threatening the Baltic states. So it's lucky that that did not happen. So Bush promised Cole that when the whole war was at this time that I won't beat my chest and dance on the Berlin Wall. Both of them agree they weren't going to humiliate Gorbachev. And also beyond humiliating him taking credit for doing such a masterful job terminating the Cold War. Why? Because it would have probably led to Gorbachev's overthrow even earlier and also it would have led to an earlier accession to power of the hardliners, which wouldn't take place for another two days, two decades under Putin. And this bought Eastern Europe two decades when the Soviet Union's not bothering them two decades for the glue to set as they integrate themselves politically, economically and militarily with the West. So for Bush it was no crowing and it was also no second term. He was defeated in 1992 and the last Soviet troops would not leave East Germany until 1994. But Bush is going to go down as a great president for what his work on terminating the Cold War. But as Anatoly Atomishin argued about who ended the Cold War, it's difficult to deny that the Soviet Union was the one to end it. And Edwin Meese who was a counselor to Ronald Reagan and also his attorney generally said look the Cold War began because of the Soviet policies and it ended in a sense because of Soviet policies. You see here pictured Gorbachev receiving the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his liberation of Eastern Europe. So when you all are thinking about the question why did Russia lose the Cold War? I hope that you will come up with a more complicated answer than Ronald Reagan did it all by his his lonesome. So that concludes what I have to say for you all. And I think I've successfully unshared my screen and let me know if there are any glitches there. Nope, I think we are good. Sally that was a very quick trip through something we could spend years studying, I'm sure. So we only have time for a couple of questions. Let me pass at least a few of them to you. First, to what extent do you think modern Russia has learned the lessons of USSR's downfall? Oh, absolutely. And China's learned them too. They both learned them. Putin is trying to re-put together the empire. Of course he doesn't understand economics. That seems to be a continuity in Russia. But he's busily trying to reinvent the empire. And he's not about political reforms and openness, which is what Gorbachev was all about. And then China's looked at it and they analyzed it very extensively. And one lesson is, forget about the political stuff, just stick to economic reforms. And another one is about nationalities. Russia had all these separate nationalities. China's in the process of homogenizing them, which helps explain the genocide that's going on to Uyghurs. Over. Very good. Another question, what is the risk of a future Russia-China block challenging the U.S. and NATO by 2035?  But really, China and Russia are their own major enemies. They have this long border. They dislike each other intensely. Russia is scared stiff that the Chinese are going to take a good part of Siberia. And most recently, I think with the Sino-Indian border issues, Russia has been siding with India, providing military equipment, which is sending the Chinese orbiting. They don't like this. So they're both into negative sum worlds, which is all about, you'll notice that Russia and China don't have allies really. And it's because they're, it's always about taking things from other people. And what the beauty of the West is if you have functioning economies and economic growth, you can have a positive sum alliance system where everybody is making money and interesting in enforcing the rules that everyone benefits from. So I don't think you have to worry long term about Sino-Russian alliance. In the library, if it ever reopens, I've written a co-author of my husband, a China textbook that discusses all this in detail that they have pretty awful relations historically. Over. Very good. Another question. To what extent can similarities be drawn between USR economic difficulties and US's issues with a huge national debt? Oh, I think for those in the military, military power is a function of economic power.  And what gets a lot of third world countries into trouble, they have small economies, they have ambitious foreign policy agendas, and then they blow all kinds of money on the military. And it just, it precludes economic growth. And it's a problem for them. In fact, China did quite well for many years under Deng Xiaoping focusing on all these economic reforms and making money, increasing the size of the economy. But Xi Jinping is busy killing the goose that glade the golden egg. In our own country, we need to stop hating each other and get together and work on fixing our economy. We have Americans right now who are hungry, children. It is incredible in our country. And we're squabbling with each other instead of getting together and getting the kids fed. There's something wrong with us and we need to fix it. And being mean to each other is not the answer. Very good. Are there lessons that can be learned to help China implode? Is there anything we can do to move them in a direction that perhaps would lessen their power? I don't think you want China to implode because it just becomes a bigger mess. What you want China to do is gradually to reform. And obviously it's not in that frame of mind. And this is what the beauty of containment is. It's what the beauty of alliances are. It's the beauty of all the wonderful international officers who come to the war, the Naval War College, they represent the global system of rules-based international relations. And I think the answer is working to strengthen our allies, ourselves. China is an instant alliance maker. We should be helping. Already there's more cooperation among Japan, India, Australia, us, Vietnamese to be in on that. And more international organizations in Asia to help hold the peace. And you're going to have to wait out the Chinese. It is too big for us to shape and make them do much of anything. So put up the blast shield. They don't get to trade on equal terms if they're busy doing cyber attacks and stealing all of our stuff. And work on fixing ourselves. If we don't fix ourselves, that is the absolutely number one thing. Fix the United States. Then work with our allies and try to set up a blast shield around China. And then they're so busy destroying themselves. They have so many problems. It is incredible. It's not going well for them, deservedly so. Over. Well, an interesting comment here says, what an engaging marathon through history, your spoonful of sugar delivery makes the history go down. I think that's a tribute to. Oh, Mary Poppins. That's it. Any last minute comments that you'd like to share before we wrap up. Oh, take advantage of your wonderful education at the war college. You have such terrific classmates, colleagues, spouses, the works, take advantage of it all. I know it's hard in this. We're all locked up environment, but you can do zoom things with each other and just take advantage of it all and understand that you own the faculty. All of us are an email away and just email us we and after you graduate email us where we're around for you. So it's been a pleasure being with you and happy figuring out all sorts of good things that John Jackson's got up his sleeve for you. Thank you, Sally.


Hello and welcome to the session, I am Deepika here. Let's discuss the question which says, A dietitian has to develop a special diet using two foods P and Q. Each packet containing 30 gram of food P contains 12 units of calcium, 4 units of iron, 6 units of cholesterol and 6 units of vitamin A. Each packet of the same quantity of food Q contains 3 units of calcium, 20 units of iron, 4 units of cholesterol and 3 units of vitamin A. The diet requires at least 240 units of calcium, at least 460 units of iron and at most 300 units of cholesterol. How many packets of each food should be used to maximise the amount of vitamin A in the diet? What is the maximum amount of vitamin A? The diet requires at least 240 units of calcium, at least 460 units of iron and at most 300 units of cholesterol. How many packets of each food should be used to maximise the amount of vitamin A in the diet? What is the maximum amount of vitamin A in the diet? So let's start the solution. So here we will first formulate the linear programming problem according to the given conditions and then we will solve it graphically. Let X and Y be the number of packets food P and Q respectively. Now according to the question, a dietitian has to develop a special diet using two foods P and Q. Now each packet containing 30 grams of food P contains 12 units of calcium while each packet of the same quantity of food Q contains 3 units of calcium and the diet requires at least 240 units of calcium. So we have 12X plus 3Y greater than equal to 240. Now this is a constraint on calcium. This can be written as 4X plus Y greater than equal to 80. Now again we have each packet of food P contains 4 units of iron and each packet of the same quantity of food Q contains 20 units of iron and the diet requires at least 460 units of iron. So again we have 4X plus 20Y is greater than equal to 460. Now this is a constraint on iron or this can be written as X plus 5Y greater than equal to 115. Also each packet of food P contains 6 units of cholesterol and each packet of food Q contains 4 units of cholesterol and the diet requires at most 300 units of cholesterol. Now this is our first constraint. This is our second constraint. Also we have 6X plus 4Y less than equal to 300. Now this is a constraint on cholesterol or this can be written as 3X plus 2Y less than equal to 150. Now obviously X is greater than equal to zero and Y is greater than equal to zero. These are non-negative constraints. Now according to the given question we have to maximize the amount of vitamin A in the diet. Now each packet of food P contains 6 units of vitamin A and each packet of food Q contains 3 units of vitamin A. So total amount in units of vitamin A is 6X plus 3Y let Z is equal to 6X plus 3Y hence the mathematical formulation of the problem is maximize Z is equal to 6X plus 3Y Now this is our objective function. Let us give this as number 1 subject to the constraints 4X plus Y greater than equal to 80, X plus 5Y greater than equal to 115, 3X plus 2Y less than equal to 150, X greater than equal to zero and Y greater than equal to zero. Now let us number these constraints as 2, 3, 4 and 5. Now we will draw the graph and find the feasible region subject to these given constraints. Now we will first draw the line representing the equation 4X plus Y is equal to 80 corresponding to the inequality 4X plus 5 greater than equal to 80. Now clearly the points 080 and 20 0 lie on the line 4X plus 5 is equal to 80. Therefore the graph of this line can be drawn by plotting points 080 and 20 0 and then joining them. Now let us take A as a point 080 and B as a point 20 0. So A B represents the line 4X plus Y is equal to 80. Now this line divides the plane into two half planes but we will consider the half plane which satisfies two. So we will consider the half plane which does not contain the origin. Again the equation of the line corresponding to the inequality X plus 5Y greater than equal to 115 is X plus 5Y is equal to 115. Again we will draw the line representing the equation X plus 5Y is equal to 115 on the same graph. Now clearly the points 023 and 115 0 satisfies the equation X plus 5Y is equal to 115. So we will plot these points and then join them. Now let us take C as a point 023 and D as a point 115 0. Again C D represents the line X plus 5Y is equal to 115. Now C D divides the plane into two half planes. So we will consider the half plane which satisfies three. So the half plane which does not contain the origin satisfies three. Again the equation of the line corresponding to the inequality 3X plus 2Y less than equal to 150 is 3X plus 2Y is equal to 150. Now clearly the points 075 and 50 0 lie on the line 3X plus 2Y is equal to 150. So we will plot these points on the same graph and then we will join them. Now let us take E as a point 075 and F as a point 50 0. So EF represents the equation of the line 3X plus 2Y is equal to 150. Again EF divides the plane into two half planes. We will consider the half plane which will satisfy 4 that is which will satisfy the inequality 3X plus 2Y less than equal to 150. So the half plane which contains the origin is the graph of 4. Also X greater than equal to 0 and Y greater than equal to 0 implies that the graph flies in the first quadrant only. Now let us take the point of intersection of the line X plus 5Y is equal to 115 and 4X plus Y is equal to 80 as a point M clearly the coordinates of MR 15 20. Again let us take the point of intersection of the line CD and EF as the point N. Now clearly the coordinates of point NR 40 15. Now let us take the point of intersection of AB and EF as the point N. So the coordinates of point L are 272. Hence the shaded region in the graph is the feasible region satisfying the all given constraints. Now here the feasible region is the triangle LM with coordinate of vertices as 272 15 20 and 40 15 respectively. So we will evaluate Z at each corner point. So we have the coordinates of the corner points 272 15 20 40 15 respectively. Now we will evaluate Z at each corner point. So at the point 272 Z is equal to 6 into 2 plus 3 into 72 which is equal to 12 plus 216 and that is again equal to 228. Now at the point 15 20 Z is equal to 6 into 15 plus 3 into 20 which is equal to 90 plus 60 and that is equal to 150. Again at the point 40 15 Z is equal to 6 into 40 plus 3 into 15 and that is equal to 240 plus 45 which is equal to 285. Hence maximum value of Z is equal to 285 which occurs when X is equal to 40 and Y is equal to 15. Hence the amount of vitamin A under the constraints given in the problem will be maximum if 40 packets of food P and 20 packets of food Q are used in the special diet. The maximum amount of vitamin A will be 285 units. Hence the answer for this question is 40 packets of food P and 15 packets of food Q maximum amount of vitamin A is equal to 285 units. So this completes our solution. I hope the solution is clear to you. Bye and have a nice day.


Grand Rapids reached out to the veterans in their community by hosting a career fair made specifically for their needs. Reporter Cheryl Moore tells us why we could be seeing more events like this one in the future. The first step is walking through the door, then a handshake and an exchange of a resume. The veteran career fair is a way for employers to get together as well as the job seekers to network and develop a report. This career fair in Grand Rapids was tailored specifically to men and women in uniform. It's meant to do more than just find them a job. It's finding a job that has a purpose. Our main goal was is to provide jobs that gave great benefits, better paying jobs. More than 20 agencies from all over the state were at the event today, hoping to employ vets with unique skills you'd only find in the armed forces. Veterans bring a wide variety of skills anywhere from basic communication skills, leadership skills, motivating others. They want to be outside, they enjoy those types of roles. That's what our job is every day. They do have that understanding of what it means to do ready mobilizations and be prepared. Responsibility, they know how to work under pressure, under stress, they have a sense of duty. And not only were there jobs, there were also agencies that are meant to help veterans by providing them with unique services. We can provide services to help someone finish their GED, any form of adult basic education to improve skills for employment. Helping people develop resumes and finding a potential on the job training site. Job fairs like these happen often in the cities, but this was the first one in Grand Rapids. Organizers say there's a good chance it will not be the last. Statewide, it's a fantastic initiative to bring about these career fairs and career workshops for veterans and get the interests of those veterans. Being here in Grand Rapids is reaching out to rural Minnesota. In the cities, you might see more events like this, but here in rural Minnesota, it's a little bit more difficult for veterans to attend. Reporting in Grand Rapids, Cheryl Moore, Lakeland News. The DNR Yellow Ribbon Committee hopes to bring another veteran's career fair this time to Bemidji in the near future. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.