In my view, our Constitution and the Bill of Rights are two of the most important contributions to our collective human experience. The men who debated and wrestled, word by word, over the contents of these two founding documents used great imagination and creativity.

As I reflect back on four decades of service in uniform, it is clear that the pace of change has accelerated significantly. Few things illustrate this more than when I compare my experiences as a lieutenant to those of today’s young officers. As a lieutenant, I used the same cold weather gear my dad had in Korea 27 years earlier. The radios I used as a platoon commander were the same uncovered PRC-25s from Vietnam.