Welcome, everyone. Hope you guys are enjoying the second day of the summit. So I'm going to kick us off. My name is Seth Fox. I'm the VP of Operations for Selenia. I'm here today with Brad Vaughn, who is our VP of Delivery, and Francesco Paola, who is our CEO. Quick special announcement about Francesco. Today happens to be his birthday. So when you see him around the trade show, make sure you wish him a happy birthday. That'll go a long way for me, actually. So just a quick bit about Selenia. We're a professional services and software company with a focus on accelerating the adoption of cloud computing. We work with enterprises and service providers around the world to help them with that. Our focus, however, goes beyond just the technology. When you install a solution like OpenStack, to really take full advantage, you need to focus on people and process as well, and we help our customers do that. We have experience and understand how enterprises adopt infrastructure and work with them on a regular basis. We've also recently announced a tool called Goldstone, which is preconfigured to understand OpenStack and help you. It's a tool for cloud operators to help them really manage their infrastructure over the long term. So what we're seeing and hearing from customers, I think a lot of people are talking about this stuff at this event. Agility is a key focus. People need to be able to innovate. They need to be able to compete. And OpenStack is a tool to let them do that. What our customers are telling us things like, by using OpenStack, our developers can focus on what's needed, and that's the customer. Focus on the customer facing applications. I was actually talking to one customer that actually found OpenStack a useful recruiting tool. They were talking to their developers and they were actually leaving because they wanted to go somewhere to build elastic applications and work on this type of infrastructure. So not only were they unable to hire new people, some of their best people were leaving to go work in those types of environments. Openness, that's a pretty easy one in this environment. When you see 4,500 people, 1,000 developers working on a project, being able to take that power and bring it into your organization is a great benefit for anybody no matter what size your organization is. Cost is always a big factor. You want to lower the total cost of ownership. The real way to get there is kind of the harder part, which is the operational efficiency. If you're going to take this type of infrastructure into your organization and you're going to give it the standard IT process, that's really not going to get you the cost of ownership that you need. So getting that operational efficiency is really key to success of making your OpenStack deployments useful long term. So who's using OpenStack? We look around, we're going to talk today about the top 10 auto manufacturer that's going to be sort of the focus of our project planning exercise today. But yesterday we heard from Wells Fargo talking about how they're using OpenStack. PayPal's in the process of moving the bulk of their infrastructure onto OpenStack as well. They're also a big contributor to the project. So financial service is a big player here. Telecommunications, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon are all using OpenStack in multiple forms inside their organizations, whether it's for their public cloud services or their private infrastructures. From a SaaS perspective, ConcurTalk actually in Hong Kong at the last summit, some of you may have been there, about how they're able to enhance their expense product by using the OpenStack platform. HubSpot and Workday as well in that space. eBay, obviously you're working with PayPal as well, moving the bulk of their infrastructure onto an OpenStack platform. Film and media, digital film tree was in Hong Kong. MLB was talking this morning and Walt Disney Company was there yesterday talking about how they're getting involved with OpenStack. And then the government, NSA and many other groups, they're not telling because obviously exactly what they're doing with OpenStack, but they're all taking advantage of it. So really a wide range of industries are adopting this platform and really making it work for their business. And then the other thing that's really critical to making sure that it's successful is the ecosystem. You can see it on the Expo floor. There's a lot of companies out there building solutions around OpenStack. You have OpenStack in the core, maybe you need training services from Selenia or you need something to manage your VMs from Scalar or high performance storage from SolidFire, right? There's a lot of different solutions out there to really round out your OpenStack solution. So the ecosystem is in full swing to really make your solutions work for your business. So with that I can hand over to Francesco who's gonna take us through. Thanks, Seth. So today we're gonna talk about planning your OpenStack project. The way we're gonna do that, we're gonna give you a fairly detailed example of some of the work that we've done recently with one of our automotive customers. Before we start there, I wanted to make sure that you all understand that when we talk about an OpenStack project or a cloud project in general having been doing this for four years now, I was previously with cloud scaling before starting Selenia, is the fact that we've seen a lot of organizations dive into cloud without really a purpose. And ultimately part of the reason why those engagements fail is because they haven't really thought through or are not really driving cloud based upon the business strategy of the organization. So specifically you have to justify the investment from a business perspective. You need to also understand and ensure that you can embrace OpenStack environments into your legacy IT organization. There's no point in building out a POC or a pilot and then letting it run in a closet. Ultimately, you invest in OpenStack, you invest in cloud, you invest in running applications in a distributed fashion, giving you much more agility than you can get today, et cetera. But ultimately you have to take into account not only your legacy IT infrastructure, but also your operational capabilities. You also want to choose the right architecture for the business. We'll see later on, we'll give an example of an OpenStack cloud that supports a Hadoop big data analytics cloud. But ultimately, not all clouds are created equal, right? So I think the district providers are doing a good job of trying to create architectures that are actually specific to workloads that actually can scale with your needs and your growth. But one size doesn't fit all and you have to do the analysis and the assessment to make sure that your architecture can scale with the business and support your business drivers.  And that includes governance, looking at your organization's organizational skill sets, looking at your processes to ensure that you can not necessarily map legacy processes of procurement, for example, or provisioning onto a cloud environment. And that is independent of whether it's OpenStack or something else. So today we're gonna talk about building a car cloud. Actually, this is one of the top 10 automotive manufacturers in the world. They had several challenges. One was it takes, as you know, the product lifecycle for a car is three years and their IT deployment lifecycle was three years as well. And so they couldn't really live in that kind of an environment, especially when their competitors that were coming out with fairly interesting customer-facing solutions in the car, they were able to take data that was being generated by cars as well as internal and external systems structured and unstructured and coming up with very insightful type of information. And so they needed an environment that would facilitate that. They also, obviously that environment didn't adapt to the rapid change in technology. And as they were bringing in more and more of their legacy partnerships, they were seeing that they were trying to understand, well, if cloud is supposed to save me money, why am I paying more for infrastructure that you say is virtualizing my environment when in fact it's not giving me any advantage? They also had massive amounts of data. Massive amounts of data being generated, like I mentioned, by multiple sources. It was sitting in an Oracle database in places like Irvine, California and parts of China and Europe as well and not really being addressed or managed. And they saw their competitors actually making fairly good, insightful decisions on product prioritization as well as impacting R&D and quality. And so they needed to be able to harness that power as well as sharing information across the business units. One of the things that we looked at in planning this engagement was to make sure that the platform that we built and architected enabled business units to share data. So really looking at providing data as a service, a data as a service platform across the organization. And then finally, bringing OpenStack in again, like I said, as a catalyst to enable standards across the organization, especially with a software development life cycle. So we talked about the business drivers being a very important aspect of the investment in cloud and what they saw were the following. It really was around open innovation. It wasn't just about getting the agility that OpenStack provided across the organization. It was really helping with developing open innovation. Using, can we build, could we build a cloud platform based on OpenStack that gave support to a wide range of applications across multiple business units, centralizing the management and operational functions to save cost and time and enable agility. There was also the analytics piece, right? Can we gain insights and competitive advantages from the data assuming that the platform could render the information to my data scientists. We talked about data as a service as a goal across the organization. That was actually one of the drivers of how we architected the solution to make sure that it could not only be accessed within the local market, but also globally by its subsidiaries as well as third parties. We talked about agility. Real-time was another important point. So real-time data is being generated by cars all the time. Assuming they could address the cost factor of dealing with the telecommunications providers of transferring that information, they could really harness the power of real-time data centrally to make real-time decisions for consumers in the vehicles themselves, whether it was navigational requirements or whether it was lifestyle requirements. And then finally, cost. Ultimately, cost was not the primary driver, but cost had to be the third or fourth objective, knowing that it would come if we got the agility that was required as well as the openness and the ability to share information and data across the organization. So let's talk about the logical architecture. Really, the architecture that we designed was, again, to make what we call the car cloud as the strategic enabling platform. So it was just, it was more about building a technology platform that could provide services. It was really more about enabling internal lines of businesses across sales and marketing, quality service and R&D, allowing them to share the information as well as external consumers and third parties and government agencies to actually share in the usage of that platform, contributing to that information flow that could then be used by the organization to make insightful and intelligent decisions. Again, like I said, whether it was a product decision, whether it was a customer service decision, or a competitive positioning requirement. We also had to make sure obviously that we were linked to enterprise IT. And one of the things that we'll see later on is how we structured the cloud group, what we call the cloud competency group was that in order to successfully deploy something of this scale in an organization of this size, you can't rely on incubating it within enterprise IT. We really had to externalize it and extract it from the infrastructure from the mothership, incubate it externally. But at the same time, we needed to be linked with the enterprise IT organization from a support perspective, process perspective, integration perspective with, for example, their legacy data warehouse systems, which would feed into the car cloud itself. And so one of the things that we had to do was work very closely with the enterprise IT organization. The implementation roadmap, again, one of the things that we found was having, again, made mistakes in the past was that if you try to do a big bang approach, especially with technology as complex as an open stack, specifically running workloads that required fairly high performance requirements and fairly high scale requirements, was a fact that we needed to start small, and we needed to start small in order to prove the concept, both at a technology level as well as a business level. So we started with a POC, which Brad is gonna go into in detail. The POC was really focusing on validating the car cloud on open stack against a legacy appliance for the same use cases. And in order for us to test that we have to define metrics and KPIs upfront. And that's really, really critical, especially when you start making investments in these environments, you have to not only define the objectives, as we talked about, but also have to look at the metrics that you're measuring because that's gonna be critical in order for you to convince your executives that this solution is the right way to go. Phase one, once we validated the POC, was really more around a pilot. Again, incremental steps to slowly demonstrate the value of the cloud, essentially Hadoop running on an open stack. And specifically around a single rack deployment, we expanded the use cases that Brad is gonna get into in detail. We actually, again, had very specific metrics we needed to measure. And then using that information, justifying the investment and scaling out from a single rack deployment to a 10 rack deployment over the next six months. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Brad and he's gonna give you some details about the POC itself and the pilot results. Thank you, Chesco. So you can see here, this is a picture of the actual POC environment that we were using for this particular customer. A key point when we've presented this slide we've all talked about this environment before is there is a continuum we look at as far as adoption of open stack. And the key, we talk about adoption of open stack because it isn't a product. You're not buying something that you're going to ship into the environment and install. It is something that affects both up the stack and the operations process and everything that Chesco was talking about. So there is a step before this where you could do technology evaluations. So you don't necessarily need a half rack for that type of environment. That's where a pack stack and all in one installs and those sorts of very light evaluation environments come in. The key with this investment is more you have to bring the organization along in their understanding of the technology and their understanding of the value in steps. And those steps have to be connected. The amount of investment of time and money has to be connected to the quality of the proof. And that is the key to this particular step because the proof in proof of concept is essential. So what you do to actually prove the value of the environment is really linked to how much you're going to go about investing in your project at this particular point. So you can see here, as Chesco mentioned, we had a number of different use cases and we looked through them with the customer and evaluated those workloads. Key things we look at obviously is trying to engage the application owners for those particular environments because what we're looking at in these environments, as you'll see later, there's a lot of testing that needs to be done. Generally, when we're porting applications, particularly if we're looking at existing applications, then there's going to be some customization and migration. So whether that's SIs that have worked with those apps or actual business unit development teams or IT development teams, we need to engage a lot more people at this particular point in the process. At the technology evaluation phase, that can be a couple of IT engineers in IT just downloading and testing out OpenStack itself. Once we get to this phase, it's a much more complex environment. In proof of concept, we still stick with predominantly core OpenStack. We're not layering in a bunch of monitoring tools or other environments around it because we're trying to keep the cost and complexity low. That way we can execute quickly and we can get to the next phase quickly. You can see the notes on the bottom, RDO, it was straight Hadoop, KVMs on CentOS and Quanta, very light, very quick solution to get in place for this particular customer. So what we did, as we mentioned before, as far as the use cases, you can see in this particular project plan, says a reasonable amount of work upfront and the real variance in executing the POCs or what really affects the timeline is that first half or the first segment where you're doing the analysis, which actual use cases you can use, which of those actually have test cases or test harnesses to actually validate and prove the concept and how you go about documenting what is going to be the valuable outcome of the proof of concept. So that can really affect the very first part of the project. The next part, the part that often gets a lot of attention is really the one that we find we can execute fairly consistently within the two to four week period. And that is basically just install and config of the environment and basic integration work. And then you can see that the largest consumer of time in the POC is actual execution of the tests. It is not a product, so we're going to be doing iterative testing around tuning to make sure we get the maximum possible benefit from only environments, but there are setting up test cases. There's a lot of different organizations involved in executing those tests. So you can see selecting the tests, how many you do, how complicated they are, is really going to affect the cost and timeline for doing this sort of POC. So in the middle, what really, some of the things that people think should be fairly easy, but trip up, the majority of POCs is on the left of this slide, and that's really around equipment. You should, we should think in nowadays that equipment should be a fairly commodity-based thing to get together, but unfortunately in enterprises, it can be challenging to get the stuff in the door through the purchasing processes, implemented, rack stacked, tested to a basic level and operational. So you need to be very careful to that when you're doing your project planning, make sure you have that sorted out. Other discussions that happen next are really around the software and the data, which distributions or which code we're going to use. In the POC, it's less of a concern around the actual distribution because you do plan to actually rebuild this environment. It's not something that's going to persist into production. So you can go with very cutting-edge code. You can go with less-than-package distributions. It really depends on the requirements of the customer. The distribution supportability is not the critical factor, unlike what we'll see in later planning phases. What is, however, as we said, is we really need to test with real applications. So either we're doing tests on applications that exist today, or we're doing side-by-side testing with an alternative deployment method. In the information we give in this presentation, we will focus on the outcome of particularly a side-by-side evaluation. But when you're looking at the application software licensing, he'll install, he'll customize it. Who's got the testing tools? He'll do all the testing, install, and configure, and particularly for large data sets, particularly if you're looking in the consumer space, getting access to consumer-based data sets is very challenging. So we have to look at whether we're doing data substitution or cleansing of data for the testing process. Those sorts of things take time. You just got to go through and go through the process. And finally, we find in most enterprises, security is a separate organization. Often an afterthought when talking about things, so you need to make sure you pull those guys into the conversation early, or it is going to bite you halfway through the process, particularly when you're using data sets, okay? So get it in early, get the pain over with having those discussions. We have found quite happily that we can deal with all privacy and security discussions with those organizations. It really just becomes an education process on what security in an open-stack world actually means. So in the POC we did one particular test case. So we talked about a number of different use cases. And what you'll find when you're doing your POCs, one of those use cases will shine above all others, okay? And that will be because of the quality of the result as far as the impact it has for the business and the verifiable or the validity of the actual test results. In this case, it was looking at particularly that some telematics data and doing this particular map reduce effort on millions and millions of rows of data being streamed on from the cars. And we had a side-to-side test with a legacy environment that just happened to be on site, trying to be deployed at the same time. So it was picked up as a use case. We did an alternate deployment on the open-stack environment. And you can see, as far as the cost of the environment, we had 125K versus 1.2 million worth of legacy hardware. A bit of services, three weeks worth of services. The two weeks was actually for the legacy appliance was actually engineering effort on site for them initially. And the reason why they're less than our effort is particularly they didn't have a lot of option of actually changing their environment, okay? So they couldn't reconfigure and reconfigure in their testing process because they didn't actually have the engineering talent to do it on site at the time, okay? That came much later when we get to the pilot. But what you could see is they couldn't actually complete the test. They couldn't get it done within, and we're talking two or three days of running. They couldn't actually get it done whereas the open-stack environment using Pure Hadoop, we did it in 40 minutes on a half rack of equipment, 125K. So that was a pretty impressive result for them, surprising both for us at the time and also for them. So one thing that did for us, because you can see it's very stark result, right? It's very obvious result. And what that did is meant we went from POC to pilot very quickly, okay? And the more quantitative you can get on your results, the faster you will go through the adoption process. If you spend a lot of time on, you know, strategy is important to lead the engagement, but as far as getting the actual investment dollars at any particular time, quantitative results is the king. So we went into pilot, and basically the service that we offered, obviously we did architecture, installation, training, and porting more apps from existing environments to the car cloud. We went from doing it off-site to an in-house data center for the customer. And the reason why we did it off-site with the POC was purely because we wanted to get it done quickly. You know, speed, get it turned around, show value quickly. So we did it the least path of resistance. Whereas as you get to the pilot environment, you're now looking at something that is a candidate for production, okay? So it needs to fit into the environment that it's going to exist within production because you plan to scale off that, okay? So the architecture has to be production-ready architecture, okay? It needs to be commissioned and go through that process, so there are some things we'll talk about in that space, but it needs to be architected well and it needs to be in an environment that can go into production, okay? We engaged a few different BUs for a few different other use cases. In this particular case, the first step was a full rack. The only thing we really want to say about this is really, you still need to keep it standardized and simple, okay? We had two profiles of nodes, basically compute nodes and storage nodes. We stuck with Qwanda because the customer was very happy with the POC result and so we went into the pilot result with the same types of equipment. We do need to watch out about the networking. We need to make sure we have suitable networking for both IPMI and all the other connections that we need and 10 gig where we're shipping a lot of data around the place. But that's pretty much all we want to say about the rack. It really, the standardization aspects of it are the most important. People will quickly ask, so do we need to use Qwanda? Does it need to be that type of equipment? There are some definite benefits in the Qwanda-style equipment, but as long as you've got standardized, usually an enterprise will go with a vendor that they have a relationship with. Software components, so when we get to the pilot stage, we're starting to layer in other types of tools and technology, okay? We're still not really into full production environments, so we're not really going with absolutely everything we need, but we're starting to build in things like Scala, for instance, where we're looking at interfaces for clients, things like Ceph, and then we've got Galera in there for the HA-type capabilities. We've got our Goldstone product that we launched this week was in this customer for doing some of the monitoring and ZabEx in there as well. So we're starting to layer tools and technologies that are more production ready. Key being, we're still in pilot. We're trying to keep the cost down, so you'll see a lot of these things are still unsupported or evaluation versions, but there are supported versions available and the path to the supported version during the commissioning of the environment into production would not be a challenge, okay? So here we're looking at more production ready, but we're still keeping the cost down. We expanded the testing, so previously we were looking very specifically at the results of those applications that were gonna give us the benefit. You can see here we're starting to look at more broad operational environments to make the environment more applicable to the entire of their IT. So you can see we did some VMware testing, we did some Hyper-V testing in there. We did a lot more testing and validation of the environment using Tempest for supportability. We did a lot more testing of throughput to looking for performance bottlenecks in the actual OpenStack environment. So a lot more lower level testing involved in this, but we also did the application testing on top of that. So we did a lot more non-functional testing as we got into pilot. And because the environment is mirroring a production ready environment, non-functional testing makes sense, okay? If you were in a POC environment in a half rack, you're probably not going to get the same results for your non-functionals. Skills is an important part as you're taking through the adoption phase. You start off with your technology evaluation, it's probably one engineer downloading some stuff and putting it on whatever box they have available and that's good. Few of those and you've got some nice reference points for comfort with the technology and tools that are involved. As you go through POC and become more production ready, you need to start with more specialist skills, okay? You need to start also from the point of view of engaging the production teams that are involved in those particular things. So here we look at compute, storage, networking, starting to bring in specialist skills in those particular environments and then connecting them together with people who have OpenStack skills, okay? That's part of the transformation of the operational environment is to start connecting those people together. OpenStack specifics, which often come from companies such as Selenia with the existing legacy, it's horrible to call some things legacy because they're not that old, but with the existing environments and the existing skills and technology. So how do we go once we got through the pilot? The legacy appliance company, which shall not be named, but you come to our booth and have a chat if you want about it. They had some time to think about that. We had, what do we have about four to eight weeks or something between POC to pilot? So they had some time to hammer away trying to tune their environment, as did we. So we went to Cloudera on the Hadoop environment. We expanded a little bit of the types of tools we were using for some of the analytics. You can see the use cases expanded. We weren't just doing one particular type of data analysis, but all these things shared a common pattern. It is like, we are talking about a common infrastructure, so there should be patterns as to the types of services and analysis tools that are needed to do this type of work. But we expanded the number of use cases to give the customer more comfort about the applicability of the results to their business. So what you can see is from these results, few different types of analysis down the left-hand side, a bunch of sizes of data there to give you an idea of scope. But you can still see we're looking at a 3x to 10x type of performance value for this type of test. One of the questions that often comes up in this slide is really about why are we doing Hadoop in a virtualized environment? And I sort of mentioned it before that the legacy appliance had some real trouble reconfiguring itself for performance. What we were finding when we were doing this sort of analysis is we really wanted to change the profile of resources that were available to the solution as far as the size of the nodes that were being used and the number of them in any particular analysis. For us, that could be done in minutes, and then rerun tests. For them, it was a matter of really starting to pull things out and re-plug things around the place, which was taking them hours and days to do. So we could run a lot more tests of a lot more different profiles in a lot shorter period of time. And that was really the value of the virtualized environment.  So the environment really needs to be configured for lots of different things all the time. They are a very, very large company. A lot of research scientists, a lot of scientists in general, so they will need that sort of architecture flexibility to be able to change things around. So that's it. I'll hand back over to Francesca to talk a little bit about the operationalization after the pilot. Yeah, I won't take too long. I wanna leave time for questions. But one of the key areas of success for any open-sac deployment is around what I called creating a cloud competency group. And really, that means structuring a group and incubating a group outside of what I mentioned, the enterprise IT environment to make sure that cloud technology, processes, governance changes can be absorbed well into the environment and then spread out across the organization. And so in this particular case, we made sure that we set up a cloud steering committee that was comprised of business unit executives, IT executives, as well as very specific levels of engineers from within the organization that could drive the strategy and the flow of applications that could be deployed on the cloud. One important aspect of this was also building an application architecture and onboarding team that basically set the standards across the organization for architecting solutions to be optimally deployed within the open-sac cloud environment, whether it was a big data application or a mobile application or whatnot, but ultimately having that centralized group that helped to guide development teams across the organization to architect applications to run effectively on the environment that we build was critical. Obviously, in this particular case, the big data analytics piece was a major component of it. And so they built a pool of data scientists cross-LOB data scientists that could ultimately guide the performance requirements as well as the query requirements for the application. And then finally, cloud infrastructure engineering and operations. Really, creating an operational team that was focused on managing the cloud, monitoring the cloud, and then expanding that team initially with third-party resources from outside the organization as well as helping that organization build out that capability by helping them to hire and train those individuals to ultimately manage the cloud infrastructure. And so whether it's a company the size of an automotive manufacturer or whether it's a smaller enterprise, you need to look at this and creating some sort of an incubated cloud competency group to really help accelerate the adoption of open-sac within the environment. Some of the outcomes of the pilot, what we learned is that Hadoop on open-sac works really well. In fact, you can continually tune it to make it perform significantly better than legacy appliances that are touting their capabilities, which frankly we showed you what the results were. The capacity plan for the cloud was really driven by the workloads and the use cases. Again, we used the analysis that was done at the application level in the business units to really drive the scale-out requirements of the cloud. One of the things that we found is that we went with a single solution for block storage, but we found that we had, in the next phase we're going to be re-architecting the storage component to create a tiered storage solution. And the reason why we're doing that is because we're tailoring the environment to those specific use cases. So standard block storage, iSCSI for a little bit better performance, and then SSD for high performance requirements as well as targeting very specific use cases in the mobile arena. We talked about Goldstone, which is really a platform to give you monitoring and management visibility into open-sac clouds, and that was the first deployment over at the customer. And then ultimately, what we talked about before, the cloud competency group is really the next phase, we're going to be expanding that out to make sure that it could be enterprise-wide and not just focused on the incubated group. Let me just go to the final slide, and then we can open it up for questions. So really, when we talk about implementing open-sac clouds and the success of open-sac projects, yeah, technology is one aspect of it, but ultimately, you really need to look at how do you reconfigure parts of your organization, how do you introduce new skill sets and capabilities, how do you enhance governance and automate some of those policy requirements so that you can facilitate the deployment of cloud as well as the management of cloud. So one of the lessons learned over the course of many, many deployments is really incubate. So isolate then extend to the broader organization with the CCG as well as with the cloud itself. We talked about the competency center, focus on the culture. I mean, really, cloud requires a different mindset in terms of deployment of applications as well as management of operations. So you really need to work with your client and bring in experts. Don't necessarily try to do it yourself, but bring in experts to help you reconfigure the organization for adoption of these new technologies and services. You really want to also align for business agility. In other words, move to iGile but recognize that iGile is a mindset and not a solution. So it's really also about bringing in the right expertise to enable that transformation. And then finally, governance. I mean, really, you have to look at the governance models and make sure that you adapt them for being able to take advantage of what an OpenStack cloud can bring to your organization. And with that, I'm gonna open it up to questions. I think we have five, 10 minutes. So. Hi, I'm Jonathan from TD Ameritrade. How do you keep the internal IT organizations? You talked about incubating outside of the IT organization. And I presume that's because you don't wanna get locked into the legacy mode of thinking while you're trying to create something that's absolutely brand new. How do you, at what point do you engage those internal resources and get them to calm down and realize that there is a future for them with the cloud technology? Well, you have to start right at the beginning, right? So when you talk about building an incubation group, I mean, you really wanna make sure that you have representatives and participants that have the right, not so much mindset, the right skill sets and capabilities, make them part of that group. Cause ultimately you're gonna want champions to go back out into the organization to make sure that they can articulate the benefits of what you're doing. And so I would start by incorporating them as early as possible. And then also working with the teams internally to make sure that it's not seen as a skunksworks project or it's seen as an isolation. You wanna communicate your successes as well. So I would say one, bring them in early and two, communicate the successes and make sure that you can articulate how this ultimately is gonna fit into the existing enterprise organization. And one final question. I'm sure you've done this at multiple locations, but what would you say, just to get an idea of where things could go bad?  So a few things. One is not including the right groups in the organization. And when I talk about the right groups, I'm talking about having worked with financial services organizations before and healthcare organizations. It's really around, you don't want audit compliance and legal to come in and shoot something down because you're not only building a distributed environment, a private cloud behind your firewall, but in some cases you may also be bursting out to the public cloud for whatever reason, right? And the public cloud may be secure and may be specifically targeted at the financial services industry. But ultimately, what goes wrong is not necessarily in the technology is ensuring that you bring in the right parties into the decisioning process, especially audit compliance and legal and risk management when it comes to regulated industries and also non-regulated organizations. I would just also add that dealing with theory as far as in your testing and your POCs and evaluations is an immediate route to failure. So if people are trying to test applications that don't exist today or applications that they would like to do in the future, they're not your first choice and you won't get the value easily demonstrated to allow the continued funding to keep moving down the path. Any other questions? All set, thanks very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you.


Good afternoon and welcome to this public session of the CSS Williamsburg Forum. We'll be talking about Egypt this afternoon, and in particular, we are talking about the military in Egypt and the role of the military in a democratic Egypt. For those of you who are not familiar with the role of the military in Egypt, the military took power in 1952, ended the monarchy in the name of purging the system of corruption, and then ruled Egypt until Hassan Mubarak stepped down in February 2011. The military did not officially rule Egypt. Generally, the military led from behind the scenes. There were generals in suits who were the president of Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser was a colonel. Anwar Sadat was Abdel Nasser's vice president. Hassan Mubarak was Anwar Sadat's vice president. And Egypt had a history of essentially military rulers from the time of the revolution in 1952 until the time of the revolution in 2011. One of the most contentious issues in the future of Egypt has been what is the role of the military in this new environment. The military had been sacrosanct because the military had established the system and the military had been walled off from the system. And now one of the things that Egyptians talk about actively is should the military be subject to civilian rule, should the military by virtue of its national character be above politics. And those are some of the issues we're going to discuss with our distinguished panelists.  So let me make it shorter and more pointed. General Anthony Zinni, a retired four-star Marine general, a distinguished 35-year history serving the United States, was I think the sort of archetypal commander of CENTCOM. And I got something from the guys in the Special Operations Command, which had a title on it, You Can't Surge Trust. And as I have gone through the Middle East for the last 25 years, one of the things I hear over and over is the admiration and trust that General Zinni's former colleagues have for him. So he is here today to talk about his view of Egypt and more broadly of the militaries in Middle Eastern countries, which he knows as well as anybody. It's less of a eulogy, right? Yes, it's less of a eulogy. Good, excellent. Although I'm getting closer to the eulogy. To your right and my left is Dr. Ahmed Derag. He's a member of the Freedom and Justice Party Executive Board and Chairman of the Freedom and Justice Party Foreign Relations Committee. He was previously Secretary General of the Freedom and Justice Party Chapter in Giza. He also served as the Secretary General of the Constituent Assembly that wrote Egypt's post-revolutionary constitution. He was Vice Chairman of the Cairo University Professors Association from 1999 to 2007 and received his doctorate in soil mechanics and foundations. From Purdue University, a master's degree in soil mechanics and foundations from Cairo University and a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Cairo University. He's a professor in Cairo University College of Engineering and a partner in an engineering consulting firm from 1987 to 1988. He was a senior engineer for Urban Associates in Orlando, Florida. Can I stop you for a second? I'd like to add one more point here. Okay. Sometimes I would disagree with him, but he's my friend, so I like him. He likes me, but sometimes I disagree about many things. Hopefully, today, we'll not disagree. Okay. You just heard from General Samach, the former Army General and Intelligence Officer. He's Chairman of the Gomhariya Center for Political and Security Studies and a member of the Egyptian Council on Foreign Affairs. He joined the Egyptian military in 1965, the same year that General Zinni joined the U.S. military and participated in 1967 and 1973 wars against Israel. He served in Egypt's embassies in the United Kingdom, as Minister Plenipotentiary in North Korea as political counselor. All the interesting parts of that tour I'm sure we'll get afterward. Since retiring, he's been working as a security expert, giving advice and participating in discussions with local and international media organizations. Mansoor Hassan, former Chairman of the Advisory Council for the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which was the interim military leadership in Egypt after the Revolution, had nominated General Saif Ali Azal as its vice presidential running mate. So we have many, many years of experience, terrific judgment. What I thought we would do is we would start off with all the participants talking for about three minutes, just to try to open it up. I will moderate a discussion for some time. You all got a pad of paper as you walked in. If you have questions, if you would write the questions on the pad of paper, they'll be collected, they'll take them up, and I will try to group them to help facilitate an open discussion. So, General Zinni, you spent more than three decades thinking about militaries and civilian governments in the Middle East. You look at Egypt now. How should we see Egypt now? Well, let me talk from the military perspective. Because I think it's very important to understand what the U.S. military, Egyptian military relationship has been. I think everybody here knows that from the 1979 peace agreement, several things happen, the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. One was the demilitarization of the Sinai, and the agreement there would be a multinational force, and the United States commits a reinforced battalion to that. It's been there ever since the agreement. At that time, what I think most people don't realize is the Egyptian military made a commitment to move from their Soviet roots training, equipping to a U.S. model. That was a big decision, because it's a major way of transferring in concepts and doctrine and equipment. And that commitment was very strong, and it was very difficult to implement. In the course of time, of course, with the U.S. assistance, the military has come a long way, has really adjusted to a Western, particularly U.S. style of operations and equipment. Oftentimes, people look in some of our political leaders about the support we give and the amount we give and wonder why we give it and think it's still a relic of the agreement between Israel and Egypt. And they don't realize what benefits we get in our relationship with the Egyptian military that are not tied to that. When, right the year after the 1979 agreement, President Carter created the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force in Tampa, Florida, out of the old readiness command. It was to become, three years later, the U.S. Central Command, a unified command. President Reagan made it a unified command and upped it. Carter did that because he feared the Soviet influence or even possible Soviet direct invasion into the Gulf region and into the Middle East. And he created and obviously articulated the Carter Doctrine that we would not accept that and we would be prepared to react in some way. And that RDJDF and CENTCOM was designated to be the insurers that that wouldn't happen. And we had several missions. One was obvious to ensure the free flow of energy resources from that region, but also to ensure access to the region and freedom of navigation. If anyone looks at the map of the world, you'll see and understands the major trade routes from the Strait of Malacca to the Strait of Hormuz to the Bobbleman Deb at the base of the Red Sea up through the Suez Canal. That is a critical lifeline for trade, not just energy and oil and natural gas, but obviously a trade route that is critical to the world's economy. And Carter and subsequent presidents wanted to protect that. And also the mission of CENTCOM was to help try to ensure stability. Now, with that came the relationship military to military and the security assistance programs we ran. It was a major security assistance program we've had with the Egyptian military. What have we gotten from that? The Egyptians sent a division to the First Gulf War to be by our side when Saddam invaded Kuwait. They sent a brigade to be by our side in Somalia. And obviously the interoperability, the training together, based on the same doctrine, that made it much easier to operate with them. And from a CENTCOM or Central Command point of view, that was a major commitment and a major ally to participate in that. With the creation of CENTCOM and the RDJTF, it was an understanding that we could not get access to that region if we didn't carry with the major military force without Egypt. It was considered, as the term I heard when I arrived at CENTCOM, the keystone. Without the access through the Suez Canal, the overflight rights, basing rights in Cairo West and elsewhere, we could not flow forces to meet an emergency in there to reinforce our forces. That has always been forthcoming from Egypt. We've always had a quick response on the need to get our planes and some of the bases, particularly Cairo West, priority in the Suez Canal. In addition to that, like most areas of the world, training space is very difficult to come by. And we ran it in the time when we were concerned about major thrusts into the Middle East or Hegemons in the Middle East that might cause problems. We were concerned about a place to train that had the contiguous air, land and sea space that we can operate at a scale that we needed to practice. The Egyptians provided that. And the largest military exercise in the world, Bright Star, was conducted every other year. And actually it was to the advantage of our European forces, European command, because they were able to participate and of course they didn't have that kind of maneuver space and that kind of agreement to provide that kind of training environment anywhere in Europe. I'm going to end this up because I think that people think that the $1.3 billion is some sort of gift that just arrives. First of all, much of that is done in kind with U.S. equipment, U.S. training, officers and NCOs that come to U.S. schools. I just lectured at Maxwell Air Force Base at our Air Command and Staff College and Egyptian officers in there as they are in every one of our military schools. That involvement, that close cooperation, that close relationship has been critical to us since 1979 in accomplishing our military missions and the relationship officer to officer has also been very close. I watched as the events took place, you know, obviously in 2011, I watched very carefully on the reaction of the Egyptian military and of course I would say compare what happened there to what happened in Libya and what happens now in Syria with their military. I think they remained very restrained. I think they were interested in making sure that everything turned out in a way that was in the best interest of the people and resolved itself in a way and it's still resolving itself that makes Egypt come back to be a prosperous country, one with the kind of democracy that we appreciate and as John said, the military is figuring out its role now and I would not want to break that tie at this critical moment between the US and the Egyptian military. It's been very strong. We've been on battle fields together. They've given us everything we needed to respond to critical situations and been by our side when that happened and I think it's important to get through this and work with them to find out what that right level is involving an emerging Egyptian political system in society. Thank you. Thank you, John. I feel kind of protected sitting here in between two veteran generals and gives you a feeling of security that sometimes we lack. When you talk about the military in Egypt, you talk about a very deeply rooted and very well respected establishment in Egypt. The Egyptian military has traditionally been probably the most sustainably respected establishment in the country. As General Zayn indicated after 1952 the military has been in control of running the country which many believe that led to a lot of the problems that we are going through right now. Nevertheless, this did not really deeply affect the status of the military for the Egyptian people and the role of the military after the 2011 revolution was very much appreciated by the people. There was a feeling that the military protected the revolution established a smooth transition between the era of the ex-president to the new era. There is a little problem that the military stayed in power a little bit longer than they should have been after the revolution which led to few mistakes or some mistakes basically because the military are not very well trained and well geared to getting too much involved into the political life of a country like Egypt particularly after the revolution. As a matter of fact and this is not just my view, this is the view of most of the top military people in Egypt that this hurt the image of the military in Egypt so it was a deep desire that the military really get out of this political dilemma back to the role that the military should really have been doing and this is happening right now. As a matter of fact I believe, most Egyptians believe that this is happening at a higher pace than what you would see in other countries that passed through similar conditions. We've been very thoroughly trying to study experiences of other countries that were subjected to long term military control and everybody agreed that there should be a transitional period from the military era to the totally civilian era of at least not less than 10 years, if not even more. I believe this is happening at a higher pace. The first step was established after the Constitutional Decree issued by President Morsi in August of 2012 that established the right positioning for the military and that was supplemented by what we provided in the new Egyptian constitution and I'll definitely address this later in the discussion. I believe that we are going through a very good transition in this respect and there are very few points that we love with time that will lead to a very good status of the army as it should be really. Thank you. We are talking about an army for the largest Arab country in the region maybe the most respected army with a lot of experience, five wars of course nobody wants war but that's the reality that the Egyptian army is the only army in the Arab world, Middle East plus Israel of course and in Africa as well the only army went through five wars five wars was a lot of wars you get experience out of that the reason I'm bringing this point that the Egyptian army has a lot of experience which is not available to many other armed forces not only in the Arab area or in Middle East I went through this I went through two wars as you know we transferred the lessons and the experience to the existing officers because all of us are out of the service now but what I want to say that it is the most respected army in the area the role of Egyptian army is not only locally actually it's locally, regionally and internationally up till now locally because they have to defend the country and domestically and we've seen what they did in the 25th of January and on the 28th of January when they went down to the streets and I'm going to talk about that now and regionally as well they're still playing a good role when it's needed the United Nations is really giving tasks every now and then to the Egyptian army right now we do have peacekeeping forces in Darfur in Sudan with the blue berries as well as we do have the army because I'm out now they do have a hospital military hospital in Beirut Lebanon up till now helping the Lebanese for the medical services sometimes you know the clashes and all these things and issues going there so sometimes they have lack of medical services that's why the military Egyptian army went there and they have their own officers doctors and other stuff helping Lebanon for that so that's what I call a regional service and up till now they're still giving that when it's needed because they know that the army can do that I'm not talking about the Egyptian people I'm talking about the local they played that role before they went to Kosovo they went to Congo they went to Bosnia and Herzegovina so yes it is well known internationally regionally and locally it is up a very professional armed forces and I'll actually when General Zaini mentioned that the Egyptian forces when they wanted to free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein and I'm happy that General Zaini mentioned that so we are talking about one kind of our armed forces one kind of army at least in our region it's not like any other army with the help of the United States giving the army, the Egyptian army the latest technology of weaponaries and training joining training and technical support and spare parts ammunition all this kind of stuff the army will maintain the level needed at the region and at the area that's why I'm happy that General Zaini as well mentioned the 1.3 billion dollar military aid to the Egyptian army since 1987 they started that of course you know that that was part of the Kambi David March 1979 agreement and since 87 Egypt is starting to receive the 1.3 billion dollars and people now are talking about cutting of that or talking about maybe cancelling that I think it's going to be a big mistake if the Americans do will do it and Egypt is the second largest actually country receiving this kind of aid from United States the first one is Israel with 2.4 billion dollars in 2008 George W. Bush signed his administration signed an MOU understanding with Israel to increase that to 3 billion dollars as of 2018 but in the same time they did not do that with Egypt and we say okay leave it as is we're going to be happy but don't touch it there is a debate for that now I guess and is that helping as well United States I guess yes because according to our statistics this 1.3 billion dollars it's only actually you have to use it in the states with the equipment, military equipment made in USA so it creates according to our statistics more than 10,000 jobs a year for American citizens so everybody is benefitting out of that it's not only Egypt is benefitting out of that but the Americans are definitely benefiting out of that strategically they benefit something else that the most respected army in the area is using 80% of the Egyptian army forces equipment and weaponry is made in USA and 20% from some others including Russia, China and all this kind of stuff not a lot of China anyway so by doing that by keeping the aid you still creating more jobs for the Americans you're still providing the best army forces in the region in the Arab world, in Africa, in Middle East with the American equipment as well as the other strategic cooperation like joining training and others so it's a mutual benefit for everybody the point of increasing that is out of the question I don't think Egypt wants that but decreasing that is an issue so hopefully they will not do enough for the aid but again the strategic operation between the two countries is essential for both of them why America wants Egypt why America wants to ally with Egypt why America wants to help Egypt to make sure it is a stable country I believe it's many many items but let me concentrate on two items only first item as Janel Zini said and I fully agree with that Seoul's Canal is a very important pathway from east to west to east why it's important now it is important for everybody to go through the Seoul's Canal carrying crude oil or carrying commodities carrying military aid whatever you need that definitely with the threat of Iran if Iran threatening USA as we see now in the area I think you need the Seoul's Canal badly why because you have to move your aircraft carriers from west to east again to be able to retaliate against Iran if Iran will throw some missiles or rockets against the American basis in the Gulf as well as in the south of Europe so retaliation will not be from the States it will be from a navy as well as aircraft carriers from the Gulf and Seoul's Canal for that secondly Egypt has which is very important to the States has a mutual border with Israel and Israel is a main alliance to the USA so keeping the border with Egypt quite keeping the border in a safe way that relaxes the entire region not only Egypt but that gives a more relaxing kind of atmosphere to the entire area definitely America will benefit out of that many other items but let's concentrate on this oh sorry then I think it's I have more but later on thank you very much one question is to focus on the Egypt piece which Dr. Darragh started with the internal piece one of the things I think a number of people were surprised by in the Constitution that was promulgated in the early winter was the fact that the military retained certain privileges which some people thought the military either wouldn't or shouldn't have in a more democratic Egypt as you think forward to a democratic Egypt in the long term what should the relationship be between elected civilian authorities and unelected civil servants protecting national defense in the military I'd like both of your perspectives okay let me start by explaining a little bit of what was being put in the Constitution about the military and its role and the points that some see as still extra privileges for the military that shouldn't have been there for in a new democratic era number one it is stated that the Minister of Defense has to be from the military as has the case been for more than 60 years of course this is this may not be the case in many democracies but if you look at the case of Egypt particularly this has been the culture not just for the military but for almost every aspect of of human life for example people would not accept a minister of higher education who is not a university professor people would not accept a minister of health who is not a doctor I did meet an Egyptian minister of education who was a major general who'd never graduate from college but that's a separate and all ministers were coming from military background that's different and he was a tank guy to boot anyway that's right but this is a general culture now and we still I'm afraid that we still lack the class of politicians that are able to move between different ministers being in charge of different ministries like in parliamentary systems for example this is number one to make this transition not just for the military but for all kinds of activities the second issue is related to the budget yes the budget it still is still one figure in the Egyptian budget but this is now announced the draft budget has just been submitted to the Shura council and everybody knows now the military budget it is around 30 billion Egyptian pounds 10% increase from last year's 2.5 billion dollars that's right about three times as much as the military US 8 to Egypt so this is a known figure and it should be discussed within what's called the national defense council the national the composition of the national defense council by the constitution is civilian and half military and it is chaired by the president who is definitely a civilian which means that there is a reasonable amount of civilian overlook of the affairs of the military not just the budget but even things like how the army is ready to perform its duties and so on and so forth in your mind is this a transitional status or is this what the status should remain in the future in my mind this is a very good step within the transition and it is yet to be defined how to achieve a better overlook of the civilian because if you look at who is represented in this national security national defense council you would find the speakers of both chambers of the parliament you would find the prime minister find the president it is stated that the president can invite whoever is needed to discuss issues related to what is being discussed in the council no matter who he is so this is a reasonable within a transitional period I believe this is a very reasonable overlook and we still need to define then let's say 10 years how this can be improved maybe even more discussions in the parliament within national defense committees or things like that the third issue is related to the trial of civilians in front of military courts and this has always been a problem in Egypt particularly during the last 15 to 20 years a lot of people suffered from that and it has been the request and the aspiration of people to get rid of this problem together in the constitution it is clearly stated that no civilian can be tried should be tried in front of military courts unless committing certain acts of aggression towards the military the good point is that who defines these acts of aggression is it the military or somebody else actually in the constitution it stated that this should be defined by a law is to be issued by the parliament that is by the representatives of the people in a way the representatives of the people would establish what is considered to be an aggression act against the military again this is this is a very good progress I mean you do not find somebody being tried in front of a military court because of his political views or political activities definitely during the transitional period there has been some mistakes a lot of people were tried in front of military courts but that was before the constitution was issued I believe this is over now in Egypt the general has been writing notes I just want to have this more of a dialogue he wants to see it so what we have heard is for a transitional period this is okay this is going to be a continually moving target as Egypt's democracy unfolds over the coming years in your view is that the right perspective and should there be limits on civilian oversight? let me start by a few remarks and then I'll come back to this point which is actually going to answer the question as well in regard of the civilian minister of defense in Egypt it's very premature I don't think now we are ready for that I don't think the officers would accept that because I doubted very much that we do have the caliber of course Egypt is 92 million people and maybe we do have a lot of people knows about army but not to lead the army not to lead the most important army forces in the area now and it's a habit now and it's a rule that the minister of defense is a field marshal or marshal whatever but to come and bring a lawyer with all respect to lawyers or engineer to that I think it's going to be odd a little bit now and I don't think this will be accepted by the army and I know what I'm talking about I'm very close to the army and I know what they are thinking about maybe 20 years from now maybe I don't know but right now it's not the right time the national defense council which is actually one of the points in the constitution it's 15 people 7 military and 8 civilians including the president so they have the majority if they want to say no at any time for anything and the army didn't interfere in that they said fine why not it's Egypt at the end of the day but again the majority between the civilians not between the military I just want to highlight this point the civilians in front of military courts maybe Dr. Amr said there is no definition how can you put a civilian in front of the military court now I think it's clear if you kill an officer like what they do every day in Sinai now then you have to go to the military court if you injure one if you shoot one and injure one if you go and shoot an RPG in one of the barracks which happens every day and now then I don't think this guy has to go to a civilian court and tell him come and let's see what you do because actually the judge himself we will not know what is going on there what is the barracks looks like what is the RPG looks like whatever so if you go and break a barracks and steal a gun again you have to be in front of a military and this is everywhere by the way so it's definition is very clear and I don't think the army now wants to see any civilian in front of any court because of the headache of it so they are not running after it they don't like it, they don't want to do it period so this is from the for this point in regard of what was your question John you were going to answer now the question is whether there should be limits on civilian oversight are there things that are beyond the purview of civilian oversight in your judgment I guess so, I don't think there will be a limit now but I think it's going to take its time and it will come by itself later on but there is no demand for that now, there is no need to do it today that's what I am talking about to do it being having unlimited civilian oversight yes, I doubt it very much yes, I don't think people will accept that now and even the army doesn't want that one of the things that the U.S. military has done over time is to build up civilian expertise on military affairs and one of the things General Petraeus was in many ways a pioneer on is engaging with civilians to explain what he was doing militarily to build public support for his military strategies is that something that you in your career saw as something people either understood they had to do in Vietnam and then built is that something that came out of the the new media environment in Iraq, I mean where does that piece of trying to reach out to civilian expertise so the military has understood where does that come from well, first of all, I would disagree a bit that I don't think we get that right you know I'm part of a region where I'm responsible for U.S. engagement with the militaries in the region part of my job was to work with the militaries to try to bring them to a point where they understood their role and function in a democracy now they may not have had a democracy this is the regional militaries these are the regional militaries they may not have had a democracy at the time but this is in the hope that they progress toward that and they're prepared for it when I was in the European command when the wall came down we immediately went into Russia and the republics and to Eastern Europe and we actually had a number of our generals over there trying to work with them in this actually it was very confusing the first meeting we had in Moscow the NATO generals the Dutch generals stood up and told them why they needed to unionize their military and a democracy and we choked him and got him off the stage so there's different interpretation combat training comes in I want to say one thing that's critically important here for a society to be stable the institutions the political, the economic, the social institutions and the security institutions all have to be viable and responsive and coordinated unfortunately when we are involved in a nation our participation is not coordinated so for example I may be making progress on the military side and maybe there's not that same progress on the political side and in order to punish the political side they'll sanction the military side I've seen this happen dozens of times for example I saw it in Kenya I saw it in Turkmenistan where we had a commander of the forces that cleaned up corruption cleaned up some of the things that were going on in the military, his level of progression toward where we wanted was here while the political was here and so our political genius decided to sanction the military in effect we did this to Pakistan after Charlie Wilson's war and we paid a big price for that in the end so what we need to do a better job is to pull it together it's so easy to focus on the military side and say well if they're not progressing to where we want them economically, politically and those institutions let's grab the military and you could lose progress at where you're going none of us are perfect many of the militaries we work with are not where we want them to be it's a long process for example, their officers come to our schools and you have to educate two generations or two decades where the officers to begin to realize at the top that maybe something is sticking I had the commander of military in one country that I won't name I was under tremendous pressure to take over the government and he got me aside privately and he told me one time I just cannot do it I will not do it and he smiled and he looked at me and said you guys trained me too well and I can't do it I wish we saw more of that sort of thing again this military, the Egyptian military I talked about the relationship with the US and the benefits we received I just want to emphasize one point that the general talked about they are often the number one contributor to keeping missions and if we are creating that culture in their military, remember also what he said they are the biggest military in the region and they are the largest Arab country I just came back from the Middle East not too long ago basically in the Gulf and everybody talks about Egypt because if Egypt goes wobbly the whole region goes wobbly if Egypt gets this right it will be a model and example for the rest to follow so it's too easy for us in the questions to find fault but you've got to look at this in terms of where we are what we gained over time not to lose that momentum and how to build on that in this tremendously sensitive transition period they are going through at all levels, the government, the military the economic system and in the short term there will be some decisions that maybe we are not happy with and need to be ironed out in the long term but maybe we can't eat that elephant all at once and sure people are impatient to get it there and I think that we have to have that patience and continue that support doesn't mean that we don't point out things that we feel need to be done better and need to push for commitments there but this is too important a relationship too important in the region for us to pull away from this it has all sorts of implications not only on the Arab-Israeli relationship but within the Arab world in the Muslim world and also just basically for the economy and stability of the region because when things go wobbly there it extends out almost globally thank you I want to pick up General Zinni mentioned Pakistan which in many ways evolved into a system where there were parallel military and civilian structures what is the Egyptian read how Pakistan's evolved what parts of Pakistan's experience are worth emulating what parts of Pakistan's experience must be avoided at any price we'll start with the general okay let me first correct a little piece of information in the beginning mentioning that the army was ruling the country for 60 years continuously that's not correct from my point of view 1952 when the army created the revolution or call it Kodita call it revolution whatever and kick out the king of the country King Farouk until 1954 they formed a cabinet government 60% of those were uniformed officers 40% were completely civilian after that 1954 until now the army did not form a government at all few members sometimes one or two one minister of defense another minister of military production usually but he is civilian as well he used to be an officer then he takes his uniform off and then he starts to join the cabinet as a civilian man but we haven't seen for the last 25 years for instance 7 or 8 officers in the army we haven't seen that you mean the cabinet probably 60 to 70% thank you very much 60 to 70% of the provincial governors a large part of the business community that was maybe during the late 80s beginning of 90s but after that yes maybe four or five of them and up till now we insist I like to see the hard and difficult governorates governed by an army officer ex-army officer ex-army officer like Sayinay for instance Sayinay now is not very stable so northern Sayinay, southern Sayinay I don't think a civilian governor will be suitable for that now when you're talking about west of Egypt Matruh which is again the border with Libya and you know what's going on in Libya what's going on in the border with Libya I don't think a civilian governor would be suitable now anyway this is what we're talking about but we're not talking about Cairo, Alexandria or something like that this is not anymore under the army ex-army officers but even the new ones we're going to have some new governors next week within a few days 10 of them or 8 of them will be changed and people now we would like to see ex-army officers and those governed rates because they are the suitable people to run it so it's not matter of they want to go to get the job what is the job? I mean it's a governor I think I'm a general ex-general I like to be ex-general more than be governor now it's not a really good job to do believe me it's not really the right one to do but anyway Pakistan exactly the example which we can look at and do it because it's a mixture between both now the army mentioned clearly many times from the Field Marshal C.C. himself or the spokesman of the army many times and you can see that in the internet and their sites that they will not touch the political life of Egypt period they don't want to be involved anymore in the political life of this country of Egypt they learned a lesson in the 18 months with the SCAF the Supreme Council of Army Forces and I don't think they want to see that now I can confirm that to you now and to everybody so the Pakistani example is not really the one they are looking for because it is mixture between uniform officers and civilians which is not going to be the case at all in Egypt whatsoever I can guarantee that you will not see a retired general or officer in the cabinet unless he is minister of defense or running the country somehow this is over retired officer retired officers and as I mentioned in some places like special government rates like this one but you won't see a retired officer minister of education as I mentioned or minister of whatever no you won't see that again you don't want it retired general running I personally don't want to do that your political career is over is what you are telling me now well the last election people are asking me to do it and my family said don't do it I am not saying that it is a tough job now in Egypt it is not an easy job to do it is not a nice job to do believe me being away of that is much better now when you asked me about Pakistan I remembered about a year ago I was in London I met one of the ex-generals in Pakistan and I asked him what can we learn in Egypt from your experience and he said I can tell you one sentence look at whatever we did and please don't do period that was it so I agree with General Asif Ali Azar I don't think it is a legal at all in Egypt but I do disagree with him on one issue we are not talking about for the last 60 years we are not talking about it is not just the issue of military people taking key positions no but the military people were taking the key position which is the president and that was confined within the military establishment it was known since Nasser actually before that Nasser then Sadat then Mubarak and actually the project ex-military ex-military but but anyway I mean the military had this idea and actually this in a way helped a little bit because there was a kind of rejection to the idea of inheriting the presidency to Mubarak's son within the military so that helped but the overall culture of the military of deserving to be to have this position by an ex military that was the culture over the last 60 years and when when Sadat wanted to bring a vice president he appointed Mubarak he brought him from the name he was not retired at that time he was commander of the Air Force and he brought him to be a vice president to prepare him to be a president and that was was the norm so this is the difference of course it's not this is I mean I'm sure that this is over I mean everybody agrees in Egypt nobody in Egypt wants this any longer neither the civilians the military and I've been talking to a lot of senior and people who are still in service you know some of them are in staff right now and they say very clearly that those the political forces because now there are some calls from some of the political forces to get the military back to power one of them told me that this particular people two months ago were leading protests against the military asking them to step aside so and and they say that being in the political life damaged the image of the military very much and really did not allow them to to concentrate on what should really be done by the military I'm going to ask one more question and turn to you so if there are people on the sides with questions and if you could hand them to people in the aisles we'll get to them but the other country in the region that people think about is Turkey a country where the military has played a different role in Turkey's political evolution over the last eight decades or so what are the lessons one should draw from the Turkish experience maybe Dr. Draghi is starting the generals there are a lot of similarities between the the Turkish experience and what we used to have in Egypt again but again we the people in Egypt because we the change happened through a revolution we were ready even more than Turkey to change from this military control into a total civilian control very quickly and actually that remark I understand that remark was even made by Prime Minister Ardoğan when he was once in Cairo and he said that that change happened quite impressively within a very short period of time so I guess that the involvement of the military in the political life in Turkey has damaged all aspects of life in Turkey and once this started to change we see the development that is really taking place right now in Turkey and of course this is partly due to the leadership leadership of Ardoğan and the AK Party but also it is partly because they are changing very quickly into a real civilian democratic state rather than one that is democratic on the surface but deeply controlled by the military to be fair there are also some who argue that it was the awareness that the military was in the wings that constrained democratic actors and led to a genuinely some would argue genuinely some would argue not really genuinely democratic Islamic political party and absent the knowledge that the military was not only ready but sometimes had come in to protect the national interest that Turkey's political and economic evolution had not gone nearly as well absent have the sort of national consensus that the military helped nurture in general well again the Turkish example is not really like Egypt I was talking about uniformed officers were running the country involved in the political life every day controlling the entire civilian life and when Ardoğan came he changed that but we're not talking about the same case at all in Egypt the other point is the people in the street they were split again some of them they need how they want at least the military people to stay and that happens in a few demonstrations and riots in Turkey during that time and others they want to change which is normal that people with and people against again the issue is not applicable in Egypt at all we are talking about an army who doesn't want to touch the political life of the country who doesn't want to run the country anymore whatsoever and the issue is they are ready to help whenever it's needed domestically, locally if the president or anybody the people of Egypt want them to come down for a certain mission they will come down for a certain mission but without touching the political life without running the country and I will stop in that just briefly I would just say that Turkey is an example where the military felt they were the keepers of the values that Ataturk had espoused and only they could be the protectors and even when they had governments that were in there in charge they did as you said John Hover in the background ready for a move and I think that what has to change in these environments is the political the development of the political institutions and the parties have to be seen as also keepers of the values and the things that are important for the security and well-being of the nation and then some trust has to be given to the militaries as they evolve away from this and I think this has happened in Turkey and now we'll accept it may be a bumpy road but it's not worked out and it's never in anybody's best interest to have military rule in the long run it's not productive we see that south of our own borders that's almost a cyclical event when they take over governments it never works well and so that trust, that evolution that understanding that the other institutions in the society should have equal responsibility for the values and the kind of society you want as I think where they all have to go eventually and the Turks I think are there just about completed