 in the surface platform in the United States Navy, and so probably arguably the world. And we're going to get it there. It's just three years off. We've already deployed the surface warfare package. We're going to add a missile to it to improve its offensive potency. And the mine countermeasure package, mission package, we'll start undergoing operational testing in the Gulf of Mexico this summer. And it's going to work. We know that the sonar works. We know that the almonds works. We know that the airborne mine neutralization system works. And it's just getting them all tested and going through that to prove it to the world. So that's a littoral combat ship. A couple other things that aren't talked much about littoral combat ship, I think that's a big advantage for us that this ship is going to bring to the fleet. So if we go to the program of record, which is 52 ships, I'll do some math for you, hopefully not too bad. 52 ships, we have a 3-2-1 crewing concept, which you have three crews for two ships, for two hulls, and one of those hulls is always forward deployed. So you get, if you have 52 ships, 26 of them are always on deployment. If you wanted to have 26 DDGs always on deployment, you'd need 120 of them. We'd have to double the number of DDGs. If your cone is based, crew them and didn't rotate them. So you get in-man power savings alone with 78 crews, and that's 50 people plus 20-man mission package crew, save almost a billion dollars a year over the same number of DDGs. They don't do the same missions. They weren't designed to do. They're not designed to do the same missions as a DDG. They're designed to do mine countermeasures. They're designed to do ASW and the littorals, and they're designed to do SUW and the littorals. But what we learned on this deployment, which we didn't really know, we knew it, we proved it, this ship can do any of the phase 0 or phase 1 tasks that a $2 billion DDG with 300 people on it can do, because it's got the same helicopter. And it's actually got better capability to do boardings because that's what they're trained to do, the mission package on there, to get better ribs than the DDG. So we proved a lot of stuff that we knew about this ship on deployment, and I'm pretty excited about it. And last year I probably wasn't as excited about it, but I'm very excited about it. I think it's going to be what we need, and it's the capability, you know, I get four of these for the cost of one DDG. No, don't compare the missions, and don't compare anything else. But this ship is going to be able to do what we bought it to do, and it's going to be able to do a lot of other stuff that we knew it could do, but we didn't think about it at the time. So, next slide, please. Naval Surface Expeditionary and Warfare Command. It's funny, I sent a note to the C&R a couple of weeks ago, and this was one of the things in my vision state, and so he wrote me a note back, goes, hey, where is that physically located? I'd like to go visit that command. It sounds pretty good. It exists only in a proceedings article and in my brain. But we're going to get it, we're going to get it, we just briefed the two four stars last week, had a personal meeting with them, the three type commanders and the two fleet four stars, and we're moving forward on this command. So, what is it, what is about the command? Why is this important to me? And it supports war fighting first. It's important to me to have to support the C&O's tenet of war fighting first. There's no command in the surface navy right now that has a flag officer assigned to it who is tasked with looking at the development, training, and assessment of tactic, techniques, and procedures across all the missionaries in which we ask our ships to do every day simultaneously. We have an Air and Missile Defense Command down at Algren, and they do integrated Air and Missile Defense. We have a Naval mine and anti-submarine warfare command in San Diego, which looks at the undersea domain. We don't have a command that does SUW. We don't have a command that does EW for surface ships. None of these exist. So, this is not going to be a giant command. It's not going to be hundreds and hundreds of people, but it's going to be some pretty, pretty dedicated skilled individuals. And we're going to, there's going to be a lot of little tenets and a lot of little tenet commanders, weapons tactic instructors. We sold up from the aviators. We think it's a great program. And so, we have already started. We've made the down payment. We've graduated three classes of anti-submarine warfare weapons tactic instructors. And the second IAMD class or weapons tactic instructor has started up. The two warfare centers I just previously mentioned are the ones that execute those for us. So, why are we doing this? We have to have, and it goes back to my first priority. It's the development of our force. We have to have a solid methodology from 02 to 06 to develop warfare skills for the people we ask to go out and fight those ships. We have some unbelievably good tacticians out there riding around our ships. We do. But it's not by design. Some of it is by chance. It's by what ships they were assigned to and what that ship was doing when they were assigned to it. And maybe with the XO and the CO that ship's previous experiences were and how good they are at training. So, it's a very important concept for me to get back to my number one priority for the officers. So, there you have it. I hope it's going to be standard up in the summertime. We'll see. But it's going to stand up. I just don't know if it's going to stand up with a dozen people or what we exactly need. So, anyways, next slide. So, talked about kind of where we were. What are the issues? And so, I'm going to camp out on this one for a pretty good long time. I know we've got to do questions here in a little bit and I'm hard up against the big boss of the Navy. So, I'm not going to eat into his time. So, what are we doing about some of the things that I was talking about? And I could go on for hours and hours on all the stuff that we're doing. But we're fighting it. Just talk about the naval surface and expedition and warfare command. I think it's going to be a good step for us to get standard tactic techniques and procedures out there on all the ships. Have the tactics that are up to date. We don't just leave it up to captains of the ships to try and figure it out, looking at certain supernet pages to see what the latest and greatest thing is out there. Simulation strategy. So, I talked last year and I think, I'm not sure if we showed a film or not about some of the... So, there's a couple of elements to this. There's tactical simulation and then there's simulation that you can use that's very, very high fidelity to train watch standards. And we've done that. We're doing it in the liberal combat ship program and I think it's got wide application for the force. For the virtual reality training, think along the lines of the PS4 or the Xbox 360 stuff, which my 20-year-old son spends like most of his time of his life doing. It's very... Imagine a guy sitting there with a... But then he's walking through the spaces and pipes start leaking and if he doesn't turn the right valve, the leak gets worse and then a chief avatar comes in and chews out and all this kind of stuff. So... And the valves and the panels and the locations and the operating procedures are what it is on his ship. It's not just some general, this is a ship. So, when he walks onto his ship after doing this sort of training in a sea school, he's not going to be wanting what stuff is on his ship. He's talking about where that is. He already knows where it is because we've made him do it 20 times and you can do a lot of damage in a simulator without hurting anybody or yourself and you can make a lot of mistakes. You don't want to flood a space on a ship just to learn proper valve line-up. Okay? So, anyway, that's what we're talking... In the simulation strategy, when you get into tactical training, we need to have a place, a shore and a float that gives us realistic threat representations in a couple of areas. Surface sonar text. We're investing in both an onboard trainer that's going on some later versions of the Alpha... of the SPQ 89 is going to be way more robust than it is going to provide pre-realistic training for our surface sonar text. And we're also going to do a similar shore trainer in the fleet concentration areas. It's going to be an integrated air and missile defense and a submarine mortar trainer that mimics the DG with the one which is the predominant number of surface combatants with those two capabilities. So, that's what we're doing and why are we doing that? Well, it gives us... You know, it's all integrated, it's all related, okay? So, when the ship's getting modernized, ship's sitting in the yards, I'll use any of the ACB-12 which is the baseline nine. It's about a year long to get that done and so the crew doesn't have a combat system available to them for way over a year. So, to get really rusty and it takes a long time to get them out and it eats into the combat capability of the fleet because it takes a year to modernize them and it takes another six or eight months to just get up to speed to get back into the training cycle. So, with high-fidelity simulators, you can do those sets and reps that you need to do in both combat or down in the interim to improve yourself. So, when you do get on the ship, you're ready to go and you're not doing really, really basic stuff. You know, burn 50,000 gallons of gas a day at whatever the price of gas is to do that. So, that's one of the simulation strategies. It's comprehensive, it talks about tactical simulation and virtual rally training. Offensive lethality, this has been an issue for me for my entire career. We need to improve the offensive lethality of the surface force and there's a number of ways to do that. In the future, the far future, like 2020's timeframe, we're talking a pretty big emphasis on energy-based weapons, lasers for defense and offense, rail guns, high-speed microwaves, and we've got to invest more in soft kill also so we can free up more space in the missile launchers for offensive weapons that are filling them up with six or $10 million defensive weapon systems. So, that's a big issue for me and it's a big issue for Tom Bootton sitting back there as he's got to pay for it. But, sustainable excellence, the middle pillar there. Modernization through modularity. There's ways to build ships so that you don't have to cut them in half and stretch them and improve the combat and take them offline for a year and a half or two to improve at their halfway point in their life or combat capability. If you're smart, if you do things right, you can build these long-lasting universal interfaces so when you develop a new software and a piece of air, you have built the ship so it's got a hold and the side of the ship to take the old stuff out and put the new stuff in or in the front of the ship to pull the launcher out, put the new launcher in. Those are the types of things that the flexible modular design effort that N96 is doing and N95 is also thinking about it too for the next class amphibious ships and Dave Lewis is kind of leading the charge over there as a PEO ship. So, some good work going through there and I think, and again, will it help anybody here in the fleet? It won't help anybody in the fleet in probably the next five or ten years but when our kids are standing up here as you know, I don't know if my kids aren't going to be Navy, but anyway, maybe one of your kids will be standing up here someday and they'll be able to talk differently about how modernization occurs and how quickly we can do it and how we do it's the same or more with a lot less people on the ships than we do right now but you got to do the technology before you pull the people off. That's what you got to do. Condition-based maintenance, I already talked about it so I won't go a whole lot more into it but I think it's an investment that we got to make on the Legacy fleet too because if you can control the time and place in which you do maintenance on stuff because you got a better idea of the condition instead of doing it when it flies apart and you do a C3 cash rep on deployment or in the middle of an engagement, I think you can get your ACBO up for the warfighter without spending a whole lot more money because there's not a whole lot more money to be spent. So we've got to, I think we've got to do some investments in condition-based maintenance for the rest of the Navy to help us out. Commonality, you heard me talk about variance reduction and commonality. Admiral Courtney was not enough to sign a letter to all system commanders to entreaty them to think about it in their current modernization plans, how to reduce the amount of variation that we have by either contracting the amount of time it takes to do modernization if you, I'll use the tack hand as I use that as an example and it's not against tack hand but we have a program that replaces 10 tack hands a year and we do. We have made spare parts for the legacy tack hand for a long time and it's all that kind of stuff. So it's going to take us until like 2026 or something like that to replace all the tack hand and attend. So do it all in six months, get every ship and fleet done, we're looking at that, I don't know if it's possible but that's the sort of stuff that when you develop a modernization plan you've got to think about because there's quite a big cost to having two logistic trains and two schoolhouses and two NECs in track. All this kind of stuff adds up to wasted effort and detracts from our ability to put war fighting first. So that's when I talk about Connolly Invariance Reduction, that's one of the things that we're talking about. And then future ship designs, can we come up with, if we need a drive train and we come up with a drive train, if you need a bigger ship to go faster, you just add another drive train or a third drive train or a generator, whatever the smart guys that in the AP community and the ED community those are the sorts of things we have to do because there's not going to be a lessening of the demand for the surface navy over the next 50 years in my opinion. As a matter of fact I think the demand will remain what it is and we're pretty hard pressed right now to meet the demand signal out there. The optimal OFRP, which Admiral Gortney is going to talk about tomorrow is going to try and help us do a little bit better job in that and making us more of a supply based model than a demand baseball than we are right now. So I'm not going to steal any of his thunder because he's going to talk about it for about 45 minutes but that's another effort that is underway to kind of get us to this war fighting ability and sustainable excellence. It's making sure we do the availabilities at the same time and we get our training time that we need and we deploy when the day we said we were going to deploy and we come back the day we were going to come back so there's some levelness in people's lives. Hold us over time for the last column there. The surface master plan this last fall there's been a lot of work going on by a number of three years and we finally got the they're on the supernet so I can't give you the website because they're classified but with the surface master plan is it looks across sort of like the readiness kill chains on how long is the ship going to last what do we got to do to get it to last that long what modernizations do we got to do and when in the employment cycle do we have to do that modernization to get it to expected service life and when the replacement ship comes on when do we got to get that thing going because we don't want to have a three or four year capacity gap like we do right now in a particular class of amphibious ships we don't want to do that because it's making the ones out there work way too hard to meet the present so we're going to do that the readiness kill chain stuff I like it so much that we've expanded it to the surface to shore connectors I think it's a great way to think about things because again it gets into the why are you there it's not just this readiness snapshot it tells you why you're in that readiness snapshot it makes you take a deep look and it makes you connect everything together because you can't there's no one you can't just throw a bunch of money in the P pillar and say we're done fixed just wait ten years it's not that way they're all very interconnected and one thing leads to another in each of the pillars and so we organize the surface warfare enterprise to take advantage of that by making you know the P pillar and the E pillar and the S pillar and they all do their work and then when they're all done they go through for current readiness they go through him and for future readiness they go through him and him and 96 and 95 and I'm going to go for those of you who couldn't see them sitting here as the current readiness and so they integrate the work of all these pillars to make sure that we're putting investments in a balanced way to both support current readiness and to make sure that we have a pretty good idea what the resources are going to be ten years from now are we doing that? And finally I talked about I won't discuss any more development of our senior leadership that's both Austrian enlisted we've got to invest more in that to make sure particularly in the enlisted course we've got if we want the chief to be the tech rep we've got to give him the sure duty jobs that improve across his career that improve his ability to become the tech rep he's got to work on this stuff when he's a shore there's a lot as we work our crews very very hard particularly in the maintenance and base in the level training it's very very hard work and it is it's hard to get a you have to work hard to be good and to take a ship that has to be ready on the flip of a GQ switch to go to war it's not there's nothing else like it in the military than being on a naval ship at sea on deployment you have to be ready to go to combat on zero notice and it takes we've got to make that's on the one hand but on the other hand we've got to make sure we're not doing stuff that is not of value to producing and providing so we're doing a lot there's a lot of efforts that not on the slide and reduction of administrative tracts we're doing too many assessments is the PMS system about right do we need to fix it yes and all those sorts of things so because at the end of the day the quality of service and that's a combination of do you have the right spare parts you know is your peer can you walk down your peer without falling through a hole in it do you have parking place do you have the IT bandwidth that you need to do your job it's all this kind of stuff you know and did you join the Navy to do this job and is that what you do on a day to day basis where we got you doing that for just a few weeks out of year and the rest of the time you're doing something that you didn't imagine you'd be doing those are the sorts of things that we have to go after in the long term and make sure we got it right so with that do you have any questions or comments or anything along those lines that's good he beat you to it and he's just walking up to the mic good afternoon Admiral Lieutenant Wilcox and First Lieutenant USS Fort McHenry down a little creek I don't think there's just one here hopefully that hasn't said man I don't want any more offensive weapons I like the ones I have and I don't want any more and I see that you've got that up there's one of your points being that it takes so long to develop new weapons systems especially for a new platform can we expect to see a rapid bull time like the Mark 38 mod deuces any more capability in the immediate future especially with regard to maybe not so much lateral but open ocean I think what's your definition of immediate what's a timeframe I'll see you in the next four or five years there'll be if that's your yes there's going to be we're going to improve the capability of existing weapons systems and new capabilities that we're feeling right now that we're not here before seen as capability for certain missiles and so yes we are doing that there's quite a there's a lot of interest in this I'm not the only person interested in this the CNO is very interested in it and there's ways to rapidly feel and when I use the term rapid it's not like we walk out the room and I walk up to some guy hey let's get that missile on the ship and it's there the next day that doesn't happen an idea and competing it in RFPs and all kinds of stuff because we have allies out there that spend lots of dough on pretty capable surface-to-surface weapons systems out there and we look at those and there's other services that have weapons out there that may be easily modified for our own use that will increase the lethality of our ship so I think you'll see some changes in the in the next four or five years would you agree with that Tom? yeah thanks sir Sir Lieutenant Commander Chris Wolf from Surfland on the topic of the naval surface and expeditionary warfare of man how do you intend on leveraging our current surface tactical development group based there on Little Creek in order to fold them into that or is that part of the process that's developing this that'll be part of the remaking of that capability we've got to make it more robust than it has been in the past sir and you know there's a bunch of and there's going to be a lot of cooperation in-suk I mean some people say hey describe it like top gun well top gun is is the method by which you produce a really good air-to-air combat aviator and then there's strike you that produces a really good aviator that can drop bombs and stuff like that and it's sort of that concept it's to start you know developing you know picking out really hot running officers at the 0203 level and start developing them but you know we're talking you know the in-suk is going to be all of the you know depending on what class of ship you know anywhere from 11 to 14 different warfare areas because sometimes you're doing them all at the exact same time and we have to make sure that we provide the background and the training and the equipment to make sure that you're able to do to to use these very expensive warships to the best of our ability so it's going to include that there's the COAs on how we stand it up are still up in the air and it would be premature for me to discuss them here sir I have no more names first off I applaud you on the the spectrum that you're covering here with the warfighting ability and stand up of NSUK so that each of our JOs gets you know versed in Ender's game and be able to attack that Kobayashi Maru problem as they're faced with it during their careers and also that aspect there's you know we've got some politics at play in here we've got the sustainability issues with sparing which you've touched on and NAVSUP's inventory control points making sure we've got the right sparing and integrated logistic support and I just wondering if you could talk on that that tail aspect a little bit more how you're working with N4 or so on that because sparing is a big problem across all the DOD right now yeah N4 the chief of supply global logistic supply they're all in the surface war for enterprise and they're in that supply pillar and that's what they do on a daily basis and we've made some great progress I'll tell you the global logistics force guys when we started doing the RKC stuff discovered that you know we had parts that we needed but they weren't in the right place to quickly get so we've moved a lot of parts around the world here in the last year or so the supply guys have and we underfunded a couple of parts accounts for a couple of years and it takes a while to catch up because sometimes you lose industrial base if you only got one person making that thing and you take a one-year holiday that people can't stay in business just on the hope that we'll start making that part again so yeah I mean we look at it I mean it's one of the pillars it's one of the things we do every day is to figure out do we have the right parts do we have enough money to buy the right parts and are they in the right place at the right time so yeah and we work across all of the various stakeholders that are responsible for that thank you and one follow-up on LCS it's the Latoro Combat Ship are we really pushing to make her an open ocean war fighting platform and does she have the right bandwidth to support those capabilities because as I recall we were studying all sorts of issues with the the metacentric height if you installed SHF antennas etc. will they have that bandwidth capability to really be able to perform open ocean the ships are designed to fill warfare capability gaps in the Latoros to conform SUW in the Latoros to conduct mine countermeasures in the Latoros and they can do open ocean mine warfare anti-submarine warfare there's nothing that will prevent them from doing anti-submarine warfare both in the Latoros or out in the open ocean and you know and certainly because of the design of the ship where we're able to upgrade them relatively rapidly once we get the mission package or the mission module that might go with the mission package upgraded because of the way we've designed it from the keel up the interfaces you plug it in and you know hook the track and hit the button and whatever you got installed in the box whether it's a missile ray gun whatever hits what you want it to hit and so yeah they could do that and bandwidth is relatively easy I mean we make rapid leaps in technology on weight and space and bandwidth on a yearly basis so I don't worry about that one too much I think over here now Mr. Roebas thanks for the update on freedom and your assessment of her deployment and where if you could comment on where our independent stands how she's coming along what are her immediate future plans that you can talk to sure about the confidentiality and you know where we how you feel about her material wise that sort of thing she's coming out of a post downshake post shakedown availability in San Diego right now and then she's going to later on in the spring she's going to transit around to the Gulf of Mexico and you know she's going to be gone for a long time don't call her deployment because she's in home waters and she'll be doing mine countermeasure mission package development testing and operational testing for Brian about the next year right yeah into 15 she's been she's been you know now she hasn't been on a 10 month deployment so hadn't got the the shakedown that the freedom has but it's been you know it's Ellen $2500 we got them on you know a bunch of ships MTU diesels are behaving very nicely the whole mechanical is going well and you know the combat systems you know we haven't shaken it out yet so we've got probably have some work to go there I'm pretty satisfied with how it's going when we get done with the testing and we start the Coronado's coming around here we commissioned them and I think first first week in April we'll start building the numbers up and then we'll be able to send more because we wanted to go out in groups of three that's two's and three's and four's and operate together that was the operational design so I'm going to take one last question because I know the second after it starts in four and a half minutes I have a lot of a lot of hair I say if I'm a destroyer man thank you for being with us today and thank you for being so candid you began by acknowledging that there are readiness deficits in the surface Navy I lost track could you could you just put a fine point for us for us on that what are the top three readiness deficits in review the top readiness deficit is the correct number of people with the correct skill sets and experiences on the ships that's my top readiness degrader right now and it managed itself in a bunch of different ways we do a lot of cross decks in the service community and we do them as ships get ready to go out the door on certain skill sets that we don't have enough of and there's lots of different reasons for why and it's the school length and bonus structure and what's the civilian job market all that stuff what does that bring to bear so that's the number one thing and that's why it's my number one party in the long term to fix that because if you got the right number of people and they really know what they're doing on how to operate and fix they're all and amazed by the ability of our sailors throughout my entire career to to really take nothing and make it into something and but we get you know my responsibility is to make sure we give them the tools that they can do that number two number three number two number two is the amount of money we have for modernization and maintenance we have a pretty big holiday deficit position from 2003 to 2008 time frame in which we have to invest heavily to I don't some people use the term reset but it's to do the maintenance that we that we skipped that we didn't do and you know when you skip it for four or five years it gets way expensive to do it it's not the same so when you make a decision and execution you're not to do something and decide to do it four years later then the resource sponsors got to pitch in about three times and you know those are very complex and I think the number three would be commonality and getting to less different kinds of systems because it helps out the first two so thank you very much okay thank you everybody I appreciate it I know the second half is coming on