 Imagine we were exactly a hundred years ago from today trying to do an event like this on the future of war. If it was 1915, we would have invited many of the same level, same kind of distinguished speakers that we've been joined by. Just back then, if we were to be joined by the head of the U.S. Army, it would have been Major General Hugh Scott, who had actually joined the 7th Cavalry right after Custer's last stand and spent most of his career fighting on the western frontier. Or if we would have invited the chairman of what was then the Senate's Armed Services Committee, in this case it was the Senate's Conference on Naval Affairs, we would have heard a speech from Benjamin Tillman, a senator from South Carolina who was nicknamed Pitchfork Ben, both because of his advocacy of agriculture and that he once threatened to impale President Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork. But if we had a chance to do a do-over of a future of war event in 1915, we likely would have gone a bit younger. We would have wished we had gone a bit younger to capture the true changes that loomed for warfare. Maybe we would have wished we had invited someone like Theodore Spuds Ellison, who had just been named the Navy's first aviator. Or maybe we would have gone up to West Point and heard from some of the young officers from the Class of 1915, which meant we might have heard from a young Dwight Eisenhower or a young Omar Bradley. It's with that in mind that we're delighted today to be joined by someone who represents the next generation of both the who and the potential what of the future of war. Originally from Bismarck, North Dakota, Midshipman Zane Markle is a computer science major at the U.S. Naval Academy doing research on applying artificial intelligence to malware detection. He also serves as president of the Naval Academy Cybersecurity Team. And upon graduation, Zane will be among the first group of Midshipmen to commission directly into the Navy's information warfare community. Zane, we are honored and delighted to have you join us today. Thank you. I've been asked today to reflect on the next generation of cyber war. Of course, I don't have decades of strategic experience like some of you, nor am I a seasoned veteran with war stories from the virtual trenches to share with you all today. I'm a senior at the Naval Academy who has been chosen to become a cyber warrior in the near future. All I can offer is my own unique take on what cyber security means to me. For me, the internet has always been ubiquitous. My Google search history tells me that I usually perform over 50 Google searches a day. I have never known a time where the internet has been any less integral to my way of life than electricity, water, the newspaper, or a telephone. In fact, it's replaced those last two. Growing up this way, the internet was just as real a dimension of my world as the physical world. So it seemed just as reasonable to me that people could be harmed by cyber attacks as they could be harmed by land, sea, or air attacks. And I faced the idea of cyber attacks early on. One late evening in eighth grade, while reading an article in Discover magazine, I learned about botnets and how they had turned hundreds of thousands of computers into remotely controlled slaves. At the time, imagining some malicious hacker controlling my computer from afar was just as horrifying as imagining I'm controlling my parents' cars. In high school, I learned that the original article I'd read actually had greatly exaggerated the prevalence of botnets. But I also learned just how easily any motivated person could seize power through the internet. Anonymous, this unorganized group of mostly young adults with modest computer educations, repeatedly made national headlines as they easily hacked into websites ranging from Mastercard to PayPal to the Church of Scientology. More importantly, these people pulled off their pranks with impunity. Then, near the end of high school, news broke that a virus called Stuxnet had actually physically destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges. Again, the attackers never faced public retaliation. I graduated high school with the firm impression that any computer controlled device could be hacked and that defense and law enforcement institutions were powerless to stop it. None of this was on my mind when I enrolled at the Naval Academy. Again, I didn't even believe that cyberspace was something that could be secured, much less suspected that the Navy had recently created the information warfare community for that very purpose. Yet, later that year, my freshman cybersecurity course opened my eyes to the seemingly impenetrable world of hacking. In my favorite lesson, everybody got to hack into the course website. It was astonishingly easy. Yet, just after this, my professor showed us that it only took a five minutes or so of extra coding to make the website completely secure. Now, I knew that real situations required more sophistication, both in terms of offense and defense, but suddenly it didn't seem so absurd to imagine that a Navy could operate effectively in cyberspace. That same year, I read about Alan Turing, an English mathematician who, besides founding this little area called Computer Science, served as a code breaker in World War II, a profession that is in many ways the predecessor to the modern cyber warrior. Turing's efforts saved millions of lives and played an integral pivotal part in our victory against Germany. I was just as amazed when I read about Turing's U.S. Naval counterparts who's efforts to hack Japanese codes played an equally decisive role in our victory in the Pacific War. These stories convinced me that cybersecurity would have an equally essential and decisive role in 21st century conflict. I decided that if I was going to have any shot of having a major positive impact in the world, it would be as a Naval Information Warfare Officer. Back then, there was no path for Naval Academy graduates to commission directly into the Information Warfare community. I simply had faith that cybersecurity was important enough that an opportunity would eventually present itself, so I prepared as best as I could in the meantime. My classwork proved indispensable. Math and Computer Science provided the theoretical foundation. My research has brought me to the leading edge of cybersecurity research and ethics has challenged me to think deeply about what's right and wrong on the battlefield. I built upon this education through my experience with the Naval Academy Cyber Competition Team. Cyber competitions are increasingly popular events around the world in which teams compete in events designed to test the skills that are necessary for real cyber operations. Naturally, technical skill is essential for success. I've spent countless hours practicing cybersecurity techniques with my teammates. However, after having competed in over 10 rigorous multi-day competitions, I've seen that it's leadership and teamwork that make the difference. Earlier this year, I competed in a competition in which competitors were drawn from the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, West Point and the Coast Guard Academy, and we were randomly mixed and divided into teams comprised of members from each academy. In this event, we scored points both by hacking websites owned by the other teams and by keeping our own websites secure. My team organized quickly. Those of us with more experience took informal leadership roles, but we maintained a very flat organizational hierarchy. Some leadership was necessary to make sure that we stayed coordinated and could tackle bigger problems as a team, yet the organization that we had ensured that everybody had the freedom necessary to hack effectively and quickly. After several grueling hours, my team emerged as the clear winner in the end. Talking with other teams afterward, I concluded that most teams had roughly the same level of technical skill overall. We owed our success to our superior teamwork and coordination. Although I have not yet joined the information warfare community, my preparations have given me an idea of how cybersecurity will evolve in the coming years. First, I want to stress that cybersecurity is not a problem that we are going to solve in the near future. In fact, cyber attacks are going to grow in strength as new devices, including even cars and homes, become more connected and computer-driven as part of the Internet of Things. Cyber attacks are damaging enough when they just aim at communications and data, but hackers could force these new devices to take physical actions which could ultimately prove lethal. In the military, the ships and submarines in the Navy depend upon more computer-driven systems than any other platform and any other branch of the armed services. Of course, these systems help make the Navy more effective, yet they are each potential targets for cyber attacks. For its own safety then, I predict that the Navy will have a leading role in developing U.S. cyber capabilities. This year marked a significant step forward when the Naval Academy selected a handful of shipments to commission directly into the information warfare community, but the community will eventually need over 100 graduates a year in order to be effective. That said, because cyberspace is so interconnected, no single organization can effectively defend it. I believe that groups from each branch of the military, as well as the government, will ultimately have to operate in unison in order to protect the U.S. from cyber threats. My final observation is that strong technical capabilities are not enough. Just as a great marine sniper is characterized both by good marksmanship and a strong sense of who he can and should aim at, we need wise leaders who can make the right decisions about what to target in cyberspace. Policy makers must take care when setting the rules governing cyberspace, both in war and peace, and warriors will need to make prudent decisions in complex situations. Indeed, just as my grandparents' generation had to learn how to conduct war with industrial-age weapons, and my parents' generations had to avoid the perils of nuclear war, the great challenge of my generation may occur in cyberspace. We must strive for battlefield effectiveness without sacrificing our humanity. Thank you.