mark miller, say a couple words. >> great. i'm dr. mark mirror. i wanted to thank dr. owens, president who have done a wonderful job organizing this event and several others that we've done here and also lindsay markel. we do events on history that have relevance to today's issues. we've been hosting an average about one event per week since we were formed nine months ago and we particularly like to bring in people who haven't necessarily been heard inside the beltway. there's a tendency as i'm sure a lot of you know to recycle the same speakers and so we were able to bring in our speaker from california and she's -- though she's well-known has not actually spoken publicly in d.c. before. this is the first event we've done on this subject, certainly one i think that is very relevant to military affairs because it's not just a cultural issue but one of military capabilities and readiyness and people on both sides of the debate contend that their policy is better in terms of maximizing u.s. military capabilities and we do see a lot of history involved in this discussion.