 Ladies and gentlemen, Marines and Sailors, we are proud to be here celebrating the successful completion of this year's command dog exercise. I am incredibly honored to be part of our long-standing alliance with the Philippines, which remains strong and capable. Command Dog was a bilateral exercise with the Philippine Marine Corps that is an annual exercise that we conduct with them in order to just continue to build the bilateral proficiencies and efficiencies across both of our forces. The command dog exercise brings us the opportunity to work together. Through this exercise, the American forces were able to go here and conduct training together with us. Teamwork is very important, it really needs to fight side by side with one another fighting a common enemy. It gives us the opportunity to have an increased presence of the American forces, thereby having an active defense posture in the Asia-Pacific region. We were able to do amphibious raids with reconnaissance, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, basic infantry tactics with our Philippine Marine Corps brethren. We want to make sure that we go into battle with someone we know, and by coming to these exercises and conducting these exercises, we're able to do that. We build a rapport together so that if conflict ever occurs, we know how to react and we can do that effectively together. Constant training, constant identification of things that don't work now allow us to identify the things that will work in the future. Marines have always deployed. Usually they've always deployed with their rifles and with whatever else the Marine Corps has given them to be successful in the fight. With today's technology and with the advances of what the Marine Corps is doing with force design, we have been able to develop capabilities to provide the Marines that they're deployable with and makes them more lethal of a force.