 It's an honor to introduce our first keynote speaker, the Honorable Secretary John Lamont. Thank you very much, Admiral. I'm sorry you didn't use the introduction that my mother prepared for you, but this is something that's really deeply ingrained in me because one of my most embarrassing moments in my early career was when I was working for Henry Kissinger and I introduced him to an audience like this, not as distinguished. And I said, and it's my honor to introduce my boss, Henry Kissinger, a man who needs no introduction. And so, at the end of it, he grabbed me and he said, Lehman, don't you ever do that again. Don't you understand that we who need no introduction are the ones who crave it the most? So let that be a lesson, Admiral. So this is really a very meaningful occasion for me. It says, as Yogi Berra used to say, deja vu all over again because 40 years ago today, I was in this audience as Lieutenant J.G., invited by the then, not as eminent, but very eminent Bing West who's here with us today. And I was thunderstruck by that event because the main speaker was the most senior person in OMB, the assistant director of OMB for the new administration that in charge of defense and national security. And he announced from this stage that the Navy had no longer a major role to play and had to accept the fact that the Navy was a secondary player now in national security. And their only real role of importance was to convoy ships across the Atlantic in the event of a Soviet invasion. And that all aircraft carriers were obsolete, they were just targets that all surface ships could not survive that. And to me, my concern was that the audience was gonna storm the stage and tear him limb from limb. But then my concern turned to deep concern when the students of the War College who were all around me, I noticed were sort of hang dog and saying, yeah, I guess he's right. And I mean, I couldn't believe the fact that there was no uprising against this outrage. And so it was then that I decided really, you know, we gotta do something. We've really got to end this drift and this growing defeatism in NATO that somehow the Soviets are the tide of the future and Daytona is the only way we can deal with that and we've gotta continue to cut the forces and especially the Navy. And so I was able to be part of a kind of renaissance that began right then and there. And it was a bipartisan renaissance. You may, some of you of my era may remember the Committee on the Present Danger. This was really primarily pro-defense Democrats who organized a really a movement around the country to turn this around that we've gotta end this defeatism. We've gotta restore the sense of mission for the country and rebuild the military because the diplomacy and quote, soft power, which was then very trendy is nothing without military force behind it. So that began a renaissance that really in its most important intellectual part took place right here at the war college. Those of you who are here perhaps for the first time should not underestimate the historic importance of this place. It is really the crucible in which our successful national security policy has been forged for the last 100 years. And no time was more important than during the Cold War. The Cold War was won right here at the National War College. Make no mistake about it. And what happened here during the late 70s was a perfect example of it. At the time, Bing West headed up an effort called C-Plan 2000, led by the Chief Naval Operations and the Secretary of the Navy. The Navy then as now was blessed with really strong and visionary leadership, Jim Holloway as a CNO and Graham Clayter as Secretary of the Navy. And they were able to build a bipartisan consensus that the Navy was the heart of this resurrection of American leadership in the world. And to jump over a lot of history, C-Plan 2000 became the basis of an entirely new approach to national security that converted the then Republican candidate for office, Ronald Reagan. He went to school on the documents and the studies from the War College here. He really got to understand and grasp what a forward strategy could do and could be offered only by the leadership of the Navy. Of course that's not ignoring the forces, the land forces in Europe and the importance of the balance in the North German plane and so forth. But Ronald Reagan truly believed that it was time to add to containment a rollback pressure. Not an invasion because he or triggering a conflict, but he truly believed we could then win the Cold War without war. He was famously asked during this period in 1978 in a press conference, he was asked what is your view on the Cold War? He said that my view of the Cold War is very simple. We win and they lose. And he believed it. And so the C-Plan 2000 was the basis of an option that was presented to him in which his administration could restore the credibility of NATO, rebuild the Navy and take advantage of the fact as he believed and all of us that were advising him at the time believed that geography gave us an inherent advantage that the Soviets could never cope with. Yes, NATO had become obsessed by the strength of the Soviet the Warsaw Pact internal lines of communication and what did they need a Navy for? And so what do we need a Navy for? Well, the counter to that really was that the vulnerability of the Soviet was 360 degrees. They could be threatened from all points on the compass and it was time for the United States Navy to lead NATO to rub this in the Soviet face by getting out there building the forces and exercising them in a way that would make no mistake that if they were tempted to exercise the Brezhnev doctrine and invade in Central Europe that they would lose and at sea they would get their ass kicked. And that was Ronald Reagan's phrase. And so the interesting thing was the Navy had been cut back so far it was down to really below 500 ships and shrinking and the budgets were really totally inadequate but worse than that everything was cost overruns and the bureaucracy had more or less taken over the system and there was great pessimism. What was adopted by Ronald Reagan and his advisors, both Democrats and Republicans this was truly a bipartisan effort. Scoop Jackson and John Stennis in the Senate and Charlie Bennett in the House and this was not a purely Republican effort. And if you go back and excavate a few documents like the 1980 Republican platform and you put it side by side to the War Colleges Sea Plan 2000 you will find word for word because Ronald Reagan insisted that this formula for reasserting the strength of NATO at sea and from the sea be his major plank and that is what he ran on throughout the election. So when the administration came in the program was already laid out it had been costed out. I was sworn in on the 5th of February two weeks after inauguration and a week later presented the budget amendment and the budget supplemental including the reactivation destroyers and frigates 1052s and some of the early 963s reactivating the battleships which everybody was what, what is that? And a major program to build the 600 ship Navy and with it was the simple logic that this is not a number pulled out of the air it's derived from each calculating each of the geographic areas where our vital interests were truly threatened and calculating the force structure that was needed to be able to prevail in the event of conflict and that program in its simple logic was presented and was promulgated and the strategy to carry it out was totally unclassified and that was something we all felt very strongly about. There have always been top secret code word documents in a vault somewhere which were the war plans, the strategy. What good is that? How is that deterring anybody if it's secret and nobody knows it if you don't have that particular clearance? So Reagan really truly believed we'd want no secrets we are a few secrets but we are going to tell them exactly what we are going to do and we're going to show them that we can do it and they cannot and they cannot match us. And so Reagan in one of the meetings during the transition said, well, you know, what can we do? We really want to do something that shows them right away that there's a new game in town. We can't wait, you know, people, I'm reading in the paper that a 600 ship navy will take 20 years to build and it's that's not what I want a signal. And at that time I had been designated for the, for the Navy job and I said, well, we've got a deal, such a deal for you. It's called Ocean Venture 81. And for 20 years, the NATO navies had exercised in August and September in an exercise with the names changed, but they were some version of Ocean Venture, Ocean Safari and so forth. But they were boring, rowed practice sessions of convoying. And for 20 years they were prohibited in going north of the GIUK gap and because that would provoke the Soviets and upset de Tante. And so we said, look, we can give you a show that will be a thunder clap to the world. It will strengthen our allies, we'll be delighted, the Soviets will be a Gog and we can do it in August, just eight months after your inauguration. And he said, oh, that's great. Let's do that. I said, there's one caveat. You can't tell the Army. But we said seriously, this, you know, NATO ignores the Navy. They think we're only for bringing beans and bullets and shape headquarters has very little naval presence. And so they don't pay any attention. We don't have to clear the upwaters for the exercises. So we're not disobeying anything, but if we submit ocean venture in our new mode to the joint process, it'll take five years to get through it and it'll leak. And of course, still less can we run this through Brussels. So you gotta agree to let us do it Navy Air Force only because the Air Force was very much integrated into naval operations at the time. We had actually, during the transition, negotiated an MOU with the U.S. Air Force to outfit the B-52 Hs to be able to shoot harpoons and what was then a program which died, an anti-ship Tomahawk version or really outcome version, the Griffin. And so they were built into all of the planning, the Air Force, B-52s, tankers, AWACS, and F-15s. And as we implemented this after the inauguration, there were assignments. So we had naval aviators and controllers on every AWACS that were operating. We had across assignments with our Allied Air Forces and navies and it was truly integrated. And so he said, okay, go ahead and do it. Go ahead and do it, but I don't wanna see it leaking. So ACE Lions was appointed a second fleet, a very aggressive surface warfare officer. Again, one of the things I'm delighted to see is that CNO has reactivated the strategy subspecialty. This is reactivating because it disappeared when the Cold War ended and because nobody thought we needed strategy, but it has now been reestablished and I was delighted that CNO had a couple of hundred. Many of you are right here who have been up here developing that subspecialty. Well, ACE was one of the fathers of that subspecialty back in the Cold War days. So he drew up the OP plan with Bing West and others to instead of going out and crossing the Atlantic and doing various ASW exercises, his plan was to go out and turn left and go through the GI UK gap and take 84 ships, four aircraft carriers and go up and start practicing, striking the Soviet strategic targets in the White Sea and the Kola Peninsula. And he was also a master in covering deception. He had for years been developing and working with NRL on how to hide the aircraft carrier by building decoys that could go waiting for cloud cover, which in August is always available as the hurricanes come across and sending a destroyer equipped with special equipment that could put all the noises of sonar and so forth of a battle group into the water, all of the microwaves into the air to totally spoof the satellite surveillance and the Soviets always put up a RORSAT radar satellite to cover our exercises. And so to make a long story short, when all of the fleet assembled in the NATO standing force and so forth came to Norfolk and they launched out a kind of like Admiral Nelson before Trafalgar called all his commanders to the Blue Ridge and tore up the op orders and said, here are your new op orders. And the decoy went southeast and the RORSAT was changed its orbit to cover the exercise in the mid-Atlantic while the whole task force went at full speed under the cover of a hurricane that had been passing through. So it was clobbered for a month. There was no clear skies at all and they blew through the GI UK gap with 84 ships and Jerry Tuttle, who was the battle group commander had come up with a pretty cute plan which was through Intel, they knew that the Soviets were having their own exercise up off Murmansk. And so he launched a flight just north of the pharaohs a thousand miles around the Cape and to Murmansk. Four F-14s, four A-6s, four K-6s and air force tanker support. A thousand miles, the first the Soviets knew we had anything in the Norwegian Sea was when this flight went through at 500 knots through the middle of their exercise, 12 miles off Murmansk. It rocked them back. I mean, they didn't know. This is so far outside of their ken that we got a lot of interesting traffic. A lot of interesting traffic. It, by the way, some of the most interesting actually came from Saqqor because they were as surprised as the Soviets. But anyway, that's a lot of history. But as Kissinger always says, history doesn't repeat itself, but it sure rhymes. And we're rhyming today with that period 40 years ago when there was a long decline of the size of the Navy in a sense of its mission, when there was a coming together of first-rate leadership in the Navy and where there is an opportunity because on the hill, just as we had a bipartisan, strong leadership in the committees in the Senate and the House, we have the same today with Thornberry in the House and John McCain in the Senate who want the Navy to reassert their role in leading the national security deterrence and restoring it. So we have real opportunity today that's very similar. And things have really come together very well indeed. Since that time, by the way, 36 years ago, by the way, I was on this stage again. I don't look that old, do I really? But we announced the new strategy and the title was Hail to Return of Strategy. And it got a lot of attention and it was amazingly popular on the hill. We were able, of course, both C&O and I and the commandant spent a third of our time on the hill selling this, but it was simple. It was logical and it was unclassified. And it was exactly the way we were gonna fight the war. So we did these exercises every year, started in the Pacific in 82 following the Ocean Venture in 81. And again, the heart of it was here at the War College. We had this virtuous circle where after Ocean Venture 81, we had a hot wash up, came back, we had 100 OEG ops analysts from C&A out with the fleet, spread through all 84 of the ships, really evaluating what worked, where the detections were, where the Soviet subs got through, so that we weren't gonna delude ourselves. We had lots of hard data what worked and what didn't work, where the holes were, what systems we didn't have and needed. So that analysis came back here and was worked over and we had one of the most valuable pieces in this virtuous circle was that Admiral Hayward, C&O had established the SSG, the Strategic Studies Group. These were bright young commanding officers just off their major command tours, submariners, aviators, destroyer drivers, intel and marines. And they would be given, okay, here's what happened, here's what went wrong, this is the valuation. And working with the faculty of the college here, they would brainstorm how to fix what went wrong. Of course at the beginning a lot of this was bluff because we didn't have ages, we didn't have the CWIS, we didn't have the Square 32s, we didn't have the systems that were really needed to survive, but we pretended we did. And by 85 we had them, they were out there, the Soviets could see them. And so the SSG every year would come up with some really interesting ideas because these were not just armchair strategists, these were operators who were in an environment, an intellectual environment here that was unique in the world. And so they would take some of the things that they recommended we test out and it was built into Bing West's global war games which took place every summer here. And the scenarios for the war games were modified by the experience of the exercises that had come through. And then what worked in the war games, new ideas, new approaches, new tactics, we then incorporated in the op plans for the big exercises that would take place in the fall and the cycle would go. We did that for six straight years. And out of that came a lot of interesting and innovative tactics but also a lot of requirements for the palm that affected the palm preparations. And there was no doubt by 1985 it culminated, I think in 85 and 86, because one of the key new tactics that we incorporated was putting the carriers in the fjords. Because up till then everybody said you can't do that. You can't operate the weather's lousy, it's too confined, you can't operate an air wing. Well, we did. It came out, it was an idea that came out of the SSG. So we tested it first in the Eastern Med and then took it into Ocean Safari and we put America into West Feward. And I flew one of those strike missions in 86 and it was the scariest flying I've ever had to do but we proved that you could operate a full air wing and the Soviets could not lay a glove on it because they'd send a SSN in to sanitize it, then put the carrier in, close it with captor mines and not once in any of those exercises was a Soviet aircraft at TU-95 or a badger able to paint the carrier. They didn't know where it was. And so it was impossible to target and they ran strikes 24-7 right up to the, some of them went up around, right to the Soviet border, some of them went through the mountains and up to the Swedish border. But we proved to them because the Soviets were there as strong as we were. They had their whole fleet in amongst the exercise and they could see we could do it. There was nothing secret about this strategy. We showed them what we were going to do if they triggered something and it culminated, we learned this afterwards from Intel sources and from actually some of our counterparts in a conference in Oslo about 10 years ago when we were in a warming phase with the Soviets and they said basically in those six years, the longest they were able to keep their fleet intact and operable was one week. And that in after the 86 Ocean Safari, they formally, the general staff, sent a demolish to the Politburo saying, we cannot defend the Soviet Union unless you treble the Northern Fleet and Northern Air Forces budgets and do it right away. And Gorbachev jumped on that and used that as the reason to really start negotiating reductions with Reagan. And so regardless of what other revisionist historians may say, the end of the Cold War was helped in no small way by what happened right here in this war college. The Navy's implementation of this forward aggressive policy where they believed and made the Soviets believe that we would win at sea. And that would make a land war impossible. And now it's time to do it again. We can do it. The program is right there to be done. We can reactivate ships. We can extend, we can do slaps and silos as well as building in a sensible competitive way, going back to the way we did it in the 80s and 90s and truly build a 350 ship Navy and do it so we get the benefit of it now the way Reagan did right away. Because you get 90% of the benefit just by making it undelibly clear that you're doing it. Reactivations, that you're not gonna have to wait 20 years for a 350 ship fleet, that you do have a strategy that you're gonna start to implement right away. This is deterrence. And you get that benefit of deterrence almost right away even as long as you're serious and implement and fund that reassertion and rebuilding. So it's a really exciting time. And I am so excited because we do have the leadership today to carry it out. So usually I end up depressing everybody in the audience. So let me, I better shut up and stop there if anybody has any questions. Sure, we need the duty ensign, I guess. Good morning, sir. Colonel Scott Heath, from the United States Air Force. Last night, the Secretary of Defense and the chairman testified on the House of Armed Services Committee that the next fiscal year or so, they're focused on balance and bringing the readiness back into balance and then start to build, if we have continuous disruption in the budget cycle, how do you see we get past that in order to build the Navy that we're talking about? Well, you know, this effort has take place at many levels. The most important thing is that to start with, we in the maritime forces, and I include the Air Force and parts of the Army in that, have to get our own thinking straight. As long as we know what our strategy needs to be, we don't have to await the interagency cycle to take action or to implement it. There is a problem. I mean, after, certainly we have an administration which has campaigned on rebuilding the military, but then they set up a budget that's only 3% growth and that'll barely keep up with inflation. So Congress, and we have to work with Congress to show them the path that we can do this and we can do it responsibly. It's not gonna, you know, the waste and the overruns that are a constant of doing business through the system. As you know, the Navy did Polaris, new submarine, new missile, new guidance system, new stellar inertial, new warheads, new everything, new fuel, new ejection system from the back of an envelope to the George Washington's first deployment in four years. Today, if we follow the system, it's five and a half years to get a requirement paper, just the paper, through the joint system. So, and the fact is the whole country has been afflicted by this huge constant growth of bureaucracy which has been a dead hand on a lot of activities in this country and no more so than in the Pentagon because, you know, at the height of the Reagan administration we had the 594 ships and 20 Army divisions and 35 tactical fighter wings and 200 bombers and 100 attack subs and we had 450,000 full-time bureaucrats in the Pentagon. And today, we have a half to a third the size of that force, eight Army division equivalents, 275 ships, 15 tactical fighter wings, 72 bombers, but 970,000 civilian FTEs. And so if you try to do anything through that system, you can, as we say in New York, forget about it. So what we have to do is do what's right and in the Obama administration, the Pentagon, they showed how to do it. I'm not universally an admirer of the Obama administration, but what they were able to do with the emergent requirements for the combatant commanders with MRAP and 100 other different programs shows the way, ignore the FARs. It takes, if you follow the FAR, it takes 22 and a half years to get from initiation to first deployment. That's crazy. And so, you know, you've got to judiciously find the path to common sense. You've got to give your people the authority to hold them accountable and keep them in the job long enough so that you can hold them accountable. There have been, I think, 14 project managers for the F-35, which one do you fire? So we know what has to be done. And you can do it as long as you have the backing and keep tight the armed services committees on both houses and the appropriation subcommittees. And, of course, you have a secretary of defense who gets the problem. And then you can get waivers, you can cut through, you can cut out most of the bureaucracy and do things in four years instead of 22 and a half years. Thank you, sir. Could you comment on what China is doing with their navy? What do you think their intent is and what armed forces are doing to respond to that? That's a pretty big question. I was very struck about five or so years after I left the government. I was invited to China by the Minister of Defense and spent a day brainstorming with their war college equivalent people. All of them educated, by the way, at Stanford and UCLA and Caltech and very articulate and sophisticated people. And basically the message was, look, why are you abandoning the Pacific? We haven't seen a carrier in Hong Kong in four years. Why are you leaving? You're totally dependent on the seas more than you are for our resources and our commerce. And you're creating a vacuum. And if you continue, we are going to fill it. There was no gamesmanship. It was just very straightforward. And that's the way they see it. Now, of course, there are other ideologues that view the U.S. as a major threat. But the real professionals there don't see the U.S. as an existential threat. But they do see a vacuum as an existential threat to them. And so that is why they are asserting and building and now have adopted a doctrine since my conversations with them of more thought through with the near waters and the far waters and the island chains and so forth. And they aim to be able to totally dominate that against whatever threats, including whatever the U.S. can. I think they're 20 years away from acquiring the capabilities that we have. And one of the great advantages we had during the Cold War was the Soviets had a system of copying our technology. And that was a curse for them because it meant that because of our innovation that they were always 5, 10, 15 years behind in what they were deploying. You know, their MiG-29 has our F-18 radar in it because they knew with confidence their spy network could steal the plans for the F-18 radar and they always were able to do that. But today it's different. Today they don't have the ponderous Soviet system. They have a very free enterprise almost, an innovative system. And their cyber intelligence enables to get right into what's going on in the labs. And so they're keeping much closer to us in technology, but we still are better. It's much more innovative. It's in part of our culture. And so we'll always be able to use the agility of our economy compared to what the Chinese or the Russians can do. So we've just got to recognize that. And the threat to that agility is this constant growth of bureaucracy which means that the new computers that we're sending out to the fleet are 10 years behind. That's bureaucracy. It just takes so long to get things through. So I'm still pretty optimistic. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Roger, thanks.