 Hello, I'm Admiral Jamie Fogo, Commander in Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO, and the Commander of the United States Navy's Sixth Fleet. Baltops is the premier maritime exercise in the Baltic Sea region, and I am so pleased to have the opportunity to lead the exercise in its 43rd year in my role as Commander of NATO's High-Ratingness Maritime Battle Force. As a junior officer on submarines, I sailed these waters before, and now I couldn't be more pleased to be working with this grand formation of air, maritime, and land forces and commanding from this mighty flagship USS San Antonio. Even more important than the size and combat power assembled for this exercise is the truly great team of professional men and women who operate and service these ships and aircraft every day. They are the ones who deserve all the credit for the success of this year's exercise. Some things about this exercise are enduring. The invitees have always been the professional armed forces from allied and partner nations who are committed to maintaining security on their borders and in the sea lanes that connect their nations to one another. They come together during the exercise to train at a high operational tempo, which challenges their crews to become better operators, prepare to sail together, communicate effectively, and smartly execute their missions. And there is a common commitment among them to operate in the same professional manner that has come to be expected in the Baltab series of exercises. This was apparent to me right away when I met with my team in Tallinn, Estonia, for the final planning conference a couple of months ago. My Strike Force NATO headquarters has a very special mission. We exist for the purpose of integrating U.S. Navy carrier strike and Marine Corps amphibious formations into a NATO-led operation. This year's Baltops was a terrific opportunity for us to train the staff for that latter mission and to work with allies and partners aimed at improving our collective interoperability in that very specific mission set. There should be no doubt that they are interoperable. You simply could not execute a formation sailing maneuver on the first day with the magnitude of this year's exercises if our navies weren't able to maneuver and effectively communicate. But this year's exercise boasts a level of complexity and jointness that sets it apart from any other Baltops in the exercise's 43-year history. As you look across this year's flotilla of ships, you'll notice two things right away. The first is that we filled the horizon with gray hulls as we pulled out of Gdynia Harbor on a sunny morning. Nearly 50 ships from over a dozen navies took part in these maneuvers to demonstrate how professional navies operate. This formation was planned and executed under the lead of Her Majesty's warship Ocean. It was a fantastic day and all the ships achieved everything they needed to achieve. We got the photographs and more importantly we got the formation and we got the exercise off to the right start. So Baltops 2015 started with every ship being formed up within a few hundred yards of each other. The second is the presence of four large amphibious ships which contain forces from the Swedish Marines, the Finnish Yeagers, the United States Marine Corps, Royal Marines and U.S. Army Airborne Rangers. In these ships were dozens of armored vehicles, assault craft and rotary wing lift, maritime attack and close air support helicopters that enabled our force to project power from the sea onto the land. This year's Baltops went through a fundamental shift in concept when I tasked my NATO headquarters to take on the role as officer directing the exercise. They put particular emphasis on keeping the standing NATO formations intact and giving them key roles as task group commanders within the force. These forces are high readiness groups that operate under the command of my good friend Vice Admiral Peter Hudson, Royal Navy, Commander Allied Maritime Command. These formations patrol and guard the sea lanes and engage with navies throughout the Euro-Atlantic region. Standing NATO Maritime Group 2, commanded by Rear Admiral Brad Williamson, has operated his task group from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean to the North Sea for almost a year. They represent the gold standard of interoperability for the Alliance and I'm privileged to have had them under my command during this year's Baltops. My strike force NATO team set about building an architecture on the Afloat Command Platform that would allow us to command the force in the same way we would direct allies in an operational campaign to include installing from scratch a NATO secret wide area network onboard the command ship where you now sit, a platform that is not traditionally used in a command ship role. That's how we would command an operation in real life and we always emphasize that you must train as you would fight. The combatant husband force train direction training is without any argument the most important phase of the exercise. This is where the task groups form up as cohesive units and individually and collectively accomplish their training objectives. The return on investment in this year's Baltops has been outstanding. Out on the high seas, while the amphibious forces were conducting their integration training and rehearsals, the surface task forces conducted numerous air defense, gunnery and disarmament refer, and maritime interdiction activities, which increase in complexity throughout the week, from one ship versus one submarine to entire task group formation defending against a simultaneous air surface and surface threat. The land forces, of course, use this time to familiarize themselves with the tactics, techniques and procedures of the landed forces from other nations and services. And the mine control measure units from the standing NATO maritime control measures group and the Valtram, which comprises nearly half the force, began to week program to search for, detect, classify and neutralize losses of training mines using some of the latest remotely piloted vehicles to accomplish their mission. This year's Baltops has been deliberately complex and hopefully a rewarding experience for all who participated. One of our many objectives, in addition to ensuring that every participant got the training they desired, was to provide a relevant, realistic and hopefully challenging tactics to test and exploit all that we had learned during the training phase. The strike form NATO headquarters and all the supporting Baltops planners put a huge effort into planning this, and for the first time, this included separate scripting conferences held apart from the series of main planning conferences to develop a realistic set of exercise injects for the training audiences. For execution, we stood up a robust exercise control cell in Glücksburg, Germany under the direction of strike form NATO's chief of staff, Rear Admiral Royal Kitchener US Navy. We used a scenario similar to the one we used last year in exercise tried in Jaguar 2014, focused on deploying a maritime battle force into the Baltic region to respond to a developing crisis, perhaps best described as a maritime focused VJTF. This phase tested us as a whole headquarters and tested our abilities to command and control a force in phase zero operations and to conduct an amphibious operation against an opposing force. The combat enhancement and force integration training period paid off. We seamlessly reformed off the coast of Rewelunda as a battle force at the end of this phase and whilst the mine countermeasures vessels cleared the amphibious operations area off the Udská range, the remainder of the force conducted a transit across the Baltic sea screening the high value units against air, surface and subsurface threats. After conducting raids into Poland to extract role players holding critical intelligence about the enemy dispositions on the land, our staff worked with the commander amphibious force and commander landing force to execute a combined air sea amphibious insertion to retake an airfield that had been seized by hybrid forces. Out in the deeper water our cruisers frigates and destroyers provided defence in depth keeping the sea lanes open and providing protection from hybrid and conventional maritime and air forces. In the air our fast jets offered both combat air support and combat air patrols. We'll learn many valuable lessons during this exercise that will have application for ball tops exercises in the future and more importantly will be applied by the units that disperse after Kielewagen. The relationships that have been formed among the participants will endure for many years and contribute to the future collective security of the Alliance and the Baltic region.