 Thank you. Thank you. It's like, you know, the new year is here because SNA is here. I've always been admired how the, you know, the surface Navy Association plans this right in January, you know, the budget's about to come out, you know, what's going on with this and that. Well, this year, ladies and gentlemen, we don't know much, but we'll talk about that. We'll talk about that. And it's great to be back. So I said, hey, where the heck was I last year? I was in Brazil looking with their chief going over their nascent nuclear submarine program, which, by the way, is the real deal. It is on a path. It will be here someday. And literally, we were on the Amazon, you know, running from Anacondas and Piranhas, checking their drug program. Actually, their counter drug program is they patrol the Amazon. So what a difference a year makes. Throughout the holidays, I don't know, you all have a good holiday? Pretty good holiday? Not so bad. The world kind of behaved itself for the most part, and we kicked the budget to January, so that was pretty sweet. Vice Chairman had a big part of that, so give him a big shout out for that. Those of you that wear a uniform anyway. But the deal was people were saying, oh, man, it must be awful, you know, you got to put up with all this and that. So if I could tell you anything today, I got the best job in the world as far as I'm concerned. Every time I go out to sea, and we were out there around Thanksgiving, we're out in the Truman, out on the Gettysburg, out in the Boxer. There may be uncertainty in this town, but there is no uncertainty on our kids out there on those ships. And I'm not kidding, I'm not making this up. They were all full. In fact, maybe they felt, well, it must be bad to be you. I'm okay compared to you. But the fact of the matter is those kids were very happy. So I went out and I showed them, I said, hey, these will be your fire-resistant variable coveralls, and they were very excited. In fact, my son said, I wish I was back in the Navy. Those will be here. In fact, they're delivering now to the baton, as well as the George Herbert Walker Bush. So I'm glad to be here with surface warriors here. My son was one, as I kind of mentioned. And there's nothing worse than a retired lieutenant on your butt all the time saying, what's going on with my Navy, Mr. Law School guy here, which it gets worse as he gets another year in law school. When I was here two years ago, I was really complaining about him, but it's less now. He's paying his own way. So what I want to talk about is a future of surface warfare, just a tad on that, focus areas for me in 14. And a little bit of a thing about a topic called quality of service. I think you may have introduced that, but I'll give it where it's coming from me. And then Shortney Gorton will be here tomorrow. He's going to talk about another aspect of that in greater detail. But by my bed stand is 1812. I'm a little late getting through that, but it takes me a while to get through books. And every time, you know, I feel kind of, oh man, the weight of the job or whatever, I pick that book up. If you haven't read it, I really commend it to you. 1812 and start reading about how our legacy and those people that got started in our Navy, surface warriors, and how seamanship tactics and expert gunnery can do a lot with a huge Navy and kind of turn the nation around. It's an amazing thing. If you say, well, what else you got, Greenert? I say, well, I'm also reading a book because I kind of spread them around. I've got a ton of them here on this iPad. It's a book called No Lost Cause, which is about how Columbia turned itself around under President Rebate. It's a very interesting book, and I commend that to you. And that's all from the CNO's reading list for today. And I move along. You guys, the surface warriors have been the backbone of the Navy as I just alluded to from our birth. And it was war fighting first that got us the 1812, the War of 1812. A lot of what we wear today, a lot of what we say today, a lot of our traditions come from that very thing. 201 years ago today, the USS Chesapeake captured Her Majesty's ship, Hero. And it was four months later that the Battle of Lake Geary and, of course, Captain Lawrence, and Don't Give Up the Ship, and all that took place. So, again, great legacy. We've evolved to what is now the most capable Navy in the world. People say, once again, they say, well, man, you guys got all these challenges, and we do. There's no question about it. We got a lot of challenges. But where would you rather go? And I talk to a lot of service chiefs out there, a lot of them, and I think I'd rather be where I am than where they are despite the challenges that we have. So let's see where we are today. Maybe you say, oh, not this again. Hey, man, it's going to be here to my end of my tenure. We look at where we are, all right? Where we are. Warfighting remains first. I review this all the time. We've got to operate forward, and we are, and we've got to be ready. Those remain the tenants. They'll be there. Twenty years ago, you may not know that, we had about 100 ships forward, and we had about 360 ships. Ten years ago, we had about 300 ships. A little over that, we had 100 ships forward. And today, we have much below that, you know, my folks being, by the way, I haven't seen my A.A., my deputy A.A., my speech writer for like three, four hours. Are they here? That's where they said they were going. I'm getting anything done all afternoon. They're swows. I'm drunk on swows in my front office, I mean, so. If you see, if you see Jesse or Derek, Jesse or Rachel, would you tell them that I thought about them sometimes? Okay, hey, all right. How about that? Okay, good. Jeez, I'll tell you what. Where was I? Oh, yeah. We weight average these, so this guy has the holiday in it, and so my point is on the norm, it's about 100 ships, and this will ramp back up as we finish deployment. But it's surface warfare ships. They make up the majority of those ships that are forward. I know it, you know it. And I would tell you, those at the tip of the spear are getting it done, as I've said before. The surface force fleet vision that Tom Koepman put up, I read it, I read it twice. Tom and I have talked about it. I talked to the surface warfare officers. I think it's one of the most coherent and well thought vision that I've seen from the community leaders, and I don't mean that badly. I mean, it's good for what Tom has done, and I urge you, if you haven't read it, to read it, because it's not just a bunch of pablum. It's got great detail, and I think you guys will do well by following it. It's got important missions and new ships involved in it, and I want to talk about that in just a minute. How many of you have seen Captain Phillips? Pretty cool movie, you see that, yeah? It's a swole movie. There you go. Good job, Pete. So, here's a different take. So I'm there with my swole lieutenant retired son, watching the movie, and the camera backs away right at the end of the movie, and you know, Tom Hanks is in there, it's all done. Good job, and my son goes, wow, check that out, all those ships. And I'm looking at it and saying, yeah, it appears that we have an armada to take care of that little orange boat. Because I think we had the Halliburton, I don't remember which FFG was there, the Boxer was there, the Bainbridge, and I recall there was another ship out there, I don't know where it got, I don't remember that, but I'm thinking, I wonder if people think we have that many ships to chase pirates, because we kind of don't. And I said that, I don't know what message that is, and so that brings me to what I'd like to talk a little bit today, a little bit of our narrative. We have innovative new platforms coming in, in this community as a group with the rest of us. We've got to bring these things in. Next first one up, this is, you know, our favorite, right? The freedom, this is the freedom. She did a good job down there. We wanted to shake her down, find out what this means, get this concept doing. We're writing about it, you've got to write and talk about it, and you've got to talk objectively and deliberately about where we're going with this program. But it's a real deal. It ain't like we got ones these Tuesdays. They are going to start coming at us, and we've got to accept it and move this along. So important aspect, Fort Worth is leaving here soon. I've been pinging that twice. I was done in Indonesia here in December at an International Maritime Seapower Symposium, and in May, the Singhs and some others said, hey, don't be pushing these things at us too fast. We need to kind of figure out how that is. And now they're going, so why is Fort Worth coming so late? And I'm like, really? And the Indonesian chief said, I want this thing in Jakarta, I want Fort Worth. Can you put it on the list? I want to be up on the top of the list. The MOZ, Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian Navy, he wants it too. This ship really resonates with areas of the world. Next, the sister ship. The other one. They're doing the one before, the monohull will be doing a lot of the conops early on. This ship will be doing a lot of the systems, the mission package. And my view is, and I think our collective job is to bring that mission package in, capability into the fleet and demo it as soon as possible. So I've been pushing on my folks and some of you who have worked this. We're going to do the airborne line, airborne laser mine detection system. Bring that out into the Gulf here this spring. Fossey Miller is ready for it. He's excited. He wants to coordinate that with the international mine exercise so we get real data on these systems and how they work. I think we need to move ahead on that. Next, please. The mobile landing platform, the Monferport, she's ours, and this was her and her sea trials. I'm looking for better pictures, but you get the picture. It's big. It's got volume. It's got persistence. Imagine what we could have done with this in Operation Domion there in the Philippines or any other HADR or a host of others. She's going on deployment and there are adaptable mission packages we're working on and it isn't just go haul it. We don't have the luxury of floating piers and we didn't build this for just that. Next. That's her out there kind of doing, some people get, if you're in the chamber of commerce, you go, my God, it's sinking. You say, no, actually, that's what the deal is. Next. So the Lewis puller. She is beam built. She's about half done and I have not looked at the tables and the bill's not done, but if we get what we requested, we'll be able to transition that previous to look like this and a float forward staging base. All right. You can see what's on there, two 53s on there, but we're looking to, we need to have MV-22s on there. I would love to be able to use it with an F-35B as a lily pad. We'll see. We'll work it. But for now, this thing is designed to support mine operations, obviously, airborne operations, obviously, special forces operations. We need to embrace it and figure what we're going to do with this. Imagine this sitting around off of Somalia, off of Yemen where we could support. Days and days and days of operation. Next please. All right. She's leaving tomorrow for deployment. Amagourtney wrote me a summary and said, okay, we're all ready to go. Adaptable packages. She's headed for U-Com for a month, AFR-Com for two months, come back for an upkeep and then down to South-Com for four months. And Sinclair Harris has a great, great lay down of what he's going to do. Klingen knows what he wants to do with it and he is AFR-Com and U-Com. So what she'll do, in fact, you go to Captain Phillips. My view would have been when you back away at the end of that, she did it. She could take care of something like that. And why not? Fast, adaptable. I'm not going to put you through all the other kind of pictures that I have, but we need to learn about this ship and what we're going to do with it. We have 11 of them coming. Two more will be coming this year. Two more. And then one shortly and about a year from now, the other one. So we'll have four, about a year from now, three on deployment. All right? So we've got to move out on doing that. Next. Oh, here she is. The Zoom wall. Okay? So we're going to commission her soon. And if this is a little bit of a representative of where we are, not underway yet, but not tied up to the pier, not stuck in the dry dock, not stuck on the way, this ship is moving along. And we need to conceptually grasp the capabilities and understand the capabilities that this ship will bring. A lot of it is special access and a lot of it isn't. And imagine what this ship can do in the Western Pacific. And my view, it fits in perfectly. But we'll be bringing the ship with Deliverance 16. It's pretty much on track. A lot to do. First of a class. Very, very modern. A lot of stuff we're putting in. This was part of the transformation piece. But again, this community, we've got to decide what we're going to do with this. So that's kind of platforms. We'll move on to some capabilities we're bringing on. Next, sending her out this summer. I think all of you knew that. What can we do with it? What do we want to demo with it? I'd love to bring some drones out, maybe some of those training, you know, high-speed ships to see what it does. But directed energies in our future. Next, a demo on a joint high-speed vessel for the rail gun in 16. We are moving ahead with that. I was over at the Naval Research Lab recently, they tell me they view the technology to be moving along appropriately. We need more demonstrations. It's about power, repeatable power, and the barrel. And making sure we don't, it literally smoked the barrel. That's hot when that high-speed projectile goes through there. Most of you know what I'm talking about anyway. No more than what I'm talking about. So this is really a big deal for our future. Not just gunfire support. It's well beyond that when we get there. Next, kind of a little bit of back to the future. We needed, in my view, more lethality in our PCs. So folks went out, and so we put a griffin on here without too much cost. The Congress helped us out. Thank you all very much for those of you that might be in here. Many of you were part of this, and now we have a quad pack on those that are out there. We're bringing two more of the PCs out there, which will bring us to 10 out there. So they have a decent gun that's repeatable, accurate. This quad pack, we want to test these out there, not just test them. We want to do proficiency firings in the fifth fleet, and we're on that track to do that. So, by the way, that's obviously two different ships, as you can see there doing that. Okay, next. The classification of this room precludes me from going into too much detail. Those of you that need to know or in the know know that we've got a future with this thing. It's a remarkable missile, and can do more than it was originally kind of conceived for. It's in our future, and I look forward to that in a host of areas. So weapons, platforms, they're different. I'm not saying we're moving to MLPs, AFSBs, JHSBs. Hey, that's the thing of the future. I'm saying it is an augmentation to our fleet matching capabilities and in places that we are now using $2 billion each of ships, perhaps, and other things that we can do better to resonate with and use the taxpayers' money and what we should be using our ships for. So more on that, and we've got to keep the press on. We've got to integrate and embrace the platforms, develop the con ops, tailor the ship to, as I said before, to the mission and the operating area. Now, in operating forward, if you will, we've got to get some places going. I've alluded to a few of them, but let me get to the point. Two of the DDGs are going to Rota this year. The cook will be there in February, just about a month from now. Pete, is that about exactly right? You're going to be there, right? Ms. Secretary will be there, Secretary Mabus will be there. Later in the year, we'll have the Ross there and then the Carney next year. So by next year, let's say we'll have two there and then shortly after that, all four in Rota. Very excited. Two PCs to Bahrain this summer. I mentioned that before and that will kind of close that initiative to get the PCs out there permanently and you saw the lethality piece. We are still going to put little combat ship in Bahrain. The Bahrainis are ready to support. We're doing kind of surveys there and see what kind of mil-com will take place, and that's our plan as we move out. Little combat ships to Singapore. I mentioned that. That is going to pace and we will continue on that effort. And as I mentioned, the joint high-speed vessels, after we get the first foregone, then we'll transition, if you will, to the distribution worldwide and they will spend most of their time overseas. They will be more forward station than rotating through there. So that's kind of the operating forward piece. Let me touch on a few focus areas in the Q&A. I put out my position report in November. I'm not going to drag you through it. Go read it. It outlines the things that we talked about a year ago and where we are on those. So I laid that out there. But the focus areas for 14, for me, will be Electromagnetic Maneuvera Warfare. That's a tough acronym, E-M-M-W. Shortening tells me there's not enough vows in it. We need to get a few more in there. So we'll work on that. But what does it mean to a surface warfare officer? How about safety protection and the means to protect yourself? Because we ain't going to be able to shoot down everything that's shot at us and getting out into the electromagnetic spectrum, understanding it and jamming, spoofing, and defeating by other means is the way of the future. We got to learn how to do that. We have to understand the spectrum from the gamma rays up here to the radio waves down there. You say, really? Do I? Yeah, you have to do that. You're going to have to do that. We have to know where we have our radars, where we have our comms, where we have our Wi-Fi, where we have all that stuff that is spewing energy out into the air. We have to know our signature. We don't know it very well now. We think we turn everything off and everything is silent, and we've actually done some objective measurements and we're not silent. And when we're not silent, we're being targeted, and that's the facts. And if somebody's developing a new cruise missile and they're shooting it at us, we'd be better off jamming it, spoofing it than trying to go find something that can keep up with it, and that's the way it's going to be. So we got to get on board on this thing. The Fleet Forces show they bought it. We're going to do it. We're going to move out on this. The George Bush just did their comp. 2X doing many deliberate MCON, if you will, exercises. We're going to continue to move in that. Undersea domain, Mike Conner gave me the road ahead. I'll get out more on that, but it's when we're going to have an autonomous underwater vehicle, where it's going to be and in what year, and more on that as we come out ahead. Marine Corps Navy integration is a focus area this year. We will continue to support Don Blitz and Bolt Alligator. That is the fleet exercise of amphibious operations. You saw some of the platforms that are going to become part of that expeditionary footprint. They're on the edges. They're not joint forcible entry. That's not what I'm talking about there, but they are a part of what some call the new normal. Persistence at sea, able to go in and do anything from embassy protection to a high-value unit, to a high-value individual, whatever you want to call it, targeting to just response in embassies, whatever it might be. But more on that, and we're going to take a more focused view and have a pretty adult conversation at our headquarters and Marine headquarters on where we are in our amphibious ships, readiness, operations, the Global Force Management Plan. As we've looked closely at our carriers and our carrier strike groups, we're moving right into the ARC process of that. And lastly, the Arctic Roadmap. And I got a little display here. This is from John White, his take on the ice line and the airs. Hopefully you can see this, but it's from 12 to 20. And these tracks here, hopefully you can read that, are our best estimate, that is the science community, on what sea routes would be open and when. And if you look at this, six weeks, north of the sea route, look at that draft, 41 feet, transpolar, two weeks, deep ocean transit. So that's good news. If you're a Merisk individual, you say, okay, I know when I'm open about 2025 and in the Northwest Passage is very complicated. So the question is that, generally speaking, how viable is this? When will it really be viable? To what degree? And is it threatening up there? And who's the threat? What's the threat? And what do we got to do with it? And so I've thrown all these questions out. We have a much more deliberate approach to it. But there's a lot to be answered. It's not like the next gold rush, I don't think. But it is an area we need to understand. We need to take a look at and decide what does it mean to us for security, for maritime security, freedom of navigation, and global force management. So we'll be looking at that more closely. Sexual assault will remain an initiative that is of high importance. I am very satisfied with our strategy. We are making progress, and it is actual, tangible progress in the directions we need it to go. It's a simple four pronged approach. Well, the approach is simple. The execution is very hard. But it's about prevention, and it's about victim advocacy. It's about getting investigations done right, proper, quickly, and it's about holding people accountable who conduct it or sexual harassment. But I'll tell you what, it's commander's business, folks, and that's the command climate. And we can only train so much. We can only keep driving at home, and we've got to get down to business and get accountable for the climate on our ships. And that's the spectrum from sexual harassment through sexual assault. We're going to have to do this together. It remains an important matter in this next year. So quality of service. As we've been talking, actually, for a long time, the McPon and I have said, you know, how do our people feel with regard to their compensation as we've been studying compensation retirement? Do they feel they're being compensated on? McPon, other studies, all that. And it kind of comes down to saying, you know, in general, what is the quality of our folks' service as they're out there, and what does it mean to them? How do they feel about being compensated, which we would kind of say their quality of life, their pay, their housing, their education, that would be tuition assistance and the other things. Child care. In fact, they have a fitness center. You have parking. The things that they get delivered, if you will, for coming to work and how we compensate for them for that. And then ultimately, retirement. But the other side of that is when they walk across the road and they're on the pier and they go on board the ship, what's the work environment like? What's the quality of their work? Is the pier broken down? Is the ship rusty? They don't have good needle guns if they have to do that. Do they have a proper supervisor? Has that supervisor been trained? Do they have maps? Do they have tools? Can they do PMS? When they go to pull the part out of the bin, is it there? It's the quality of the work that I'm not very comfortable with and I think we've kind of slipped in that. I'm looking for opportunities to get that quality of life and that quality of work together so that the quality of service is more in balance. And we'll be talking and working on this in the future. Not necessarily part of that. It's not really an equation. It's kind of a component here and understanding of that service is the idea that we have an FRP, a fleet response plan. I think it's been reasonably successful defining how we get together and how we go out and operate and prepare our ships. Some have said, you know, see, when I took the watch, you get to get rid of this thing. It's not working anymore. I said, give me something better and I get crickets. I'm looking on this to make this right. We think we have a really good idea and Bill Gordon is going to talk about this tomorrow to you in more detail. He and I have talked about it a long time. I've talked to the chairman about this thing because we've got to get the COCOM follow on to the demand, if you will, the request. That is beyond the Global Force Management Plan, the request for forces under our control. But we need, this plan is designed to give us a predictability to give us a cycle that we feel is broad enough and if you will, broken down enough to have the time to do the maintenance, to do the training. But we've got a man up to do that. We've got to make sea duty a primary centerpiece of that. So we'll look at sea pay for that regard. We'll look at sea pay premium. We'll look at who goes to see the most and are they compensated right. We'll be looking at all that as part of the minimum FRP as we go here to the future. More on this tomorrow, I will shorten you. I don't want to steal all this thunder, but I want you to know this. It's been under review for a long time in the department. It has been socialized outside the department of the Navy and I support it and I support what Fleet Forces is doing to a great degree. So if I were to close, which I will here right now but I find my closing pithy comments here, I would say simply our mandate is presence and we've got to be for where it matters when it matters. You know that. We've got to focus on that operating forward aspect of it. We've got to integrate and embrace these new ships that are coming in here. The ancillaries and make them work and make them a part of the scheme of the equation. We have to optimize our fleet response plan. We can strike the might balance with our quality of service. And in the end, you all know this, but it's our sailors and our civilians who are our shipmates that are asymmetric advantage. Go back to the book, 1812. It was the leaders and the sailors back then that made the difference. They weren't all that big. So thanks. Let's take questions and talk about what you guys want to talk about.