 My name is Melissa Dalton, and I'm a fellow and the Chief of Staff here at the International Security Program at CSIS. Before we begin today, I wanted to share with you some of our building safety precautions. We of course feel quite safe and secure here at CSIS, but as a convener we have a responsibility to prize you of some of the instructions in the event of an emergency situation. I will serve as your responsible service officer in the event of an emergency. So should the need arise, please follow my instructions and I will guide you safely out of the meeting area. Finally, please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the emergency exit that is directly behind you. The way that you came in, you'd proceed out through the lobby and out through the front doors is the main way to exit the premises. And now I'd like to introduce Admiral Peter Daly, the Chief Executive Officer of the United States Naval Institute, our partner for the Maritime Security Dialogue to introduce our speaker and to kick off today's event. Good afternoon. We're very eager to get into this phase of this great partnership between the Naval Institute and CSIS. We're very proud to have Mike Conner here, Commander of the Submarine Force. Senator Conner's had that job since 2012. Obviously he's commanded at all levels. He served on four different submarines than commanded Seawolf SSN 21. He also went on to command Submarine Squadron 8 and Submarine Group 7 in Japan. And I think probably most of the people in this audience understand what that means, but Submarine Group 7 is the most forward, the most strategically and operationally important group command that we have. And at the time, his responsibilities covered the submarines operating in the Western Pacific and the submarines operating in the Central Command, Arabian Gulf areas of responsibility. We're very proud to have him here, as I mentioned, and his short tours. You know, I could go through a whole list. I think most of you are familiar with his bios, but I think the most important one to mention is that he was previously the director in the OPNAF staff for the submarine programs N87, now N97. And in that role, he really looked at the future and the programming for the submarine force, but now, since 2012, has had to implement it. So we're eager to hear his perspective and we welcome Vice Admiral Mike Conner. Well, thank you, Pete, for that kind introduction. And what I'd like to do for the next 20 to 30 minutes at the most is walk you through a general overview of our strategy for how we acquire and how we employ submarines going forward. And we believe very strongly that it's a good, healthy strategy. It imposes cost on our adversaries. It enables other parts of our Navy and our military and makes us all very much more effective. So it's not a submarineers out doing their own thing for their own reason. It's submarines that are enabling the joint force. So with that, if you go to the next slide there, Justin. And obviously you can see the slides here or on the sides. And there are basically six major lines of operation to the strategy. I'm going to start in the center and then work my way around this diagram we're talking about. But the first, and we'll talk about these things in detail, but for starters, it's all about owning the best platforms. Because submarines operate in this very ambiguous world and the superiority of the platforms from which you operate are what enables everything else. Because it's all about having capability, knowing you've got the capability, and having your adversary always wondering what capability you really have and where you might be employing it. So we start with the best platforms. There are parallels for that in surface and in aviation, some of which we rely on very heavily in the ASW world. But anyway, so that's tenant number one. Tenant number two is that we are a high-demand low-density asset. We call BEAT the enemy system. We're a little bit of a fortuitous position today in the submarine force because as everyone talks about anti-access and area denial issues that others have, the biggest impediment to where one of our submarines can go and project power from today is this thing called the 20-fathom curve. And outside of that, there are very few places that we can't get to and very few places that we don't go to whenever we want to. So the issue in the near term isn't so much where can we go? What can we do we get there? But in the future, we have intelligent adversaries and we fully expect that they will attempt to extend anti-access area denial below the surface of the water. And so it's important for us that we anticipate that that is coming, that we be ready for that to come. In fact, that we hope that it comes, believe it or not, because someone who's trying to do A2AD against a submarine force is going to spend a lot of money. And it's our sincerest hope that they do. And then after they do, that we will take their investment and make it essentially irrelevant or worse, make it something that we can use against them. Moving to the lower right, that aspect of our strategy, we call it protect our strategic assets. And what we define as a strategic asset varies depending on the world situation and maybe even the tactical situation. It might be ensuring that a carrier strike group is not vulnerable to torpedo attack from an enemy submarine because we attain near perfect knowledge in the relatively small area around the strike group from which the enemy can launch a torpedo. And then we force him into the sort of more generic, if you want to attack our surface assets, you have to use missiles to do that, which means he gets a smaller warhead and we reduce it to within the overall integrated air and missile defense problem. But a strategic asset might be something else. It might be one of our SSBN patrol areas that we want to have continue to have the confidence that we have today that those ships are invulnerable. It might be undersea infrastructure. I think oil and gas and increasingly think trans-oceanic fiber and think about the economic penalty we would pay if those types of communications were interrupted by an adversary either during war or during the road to war. There are a lot of scholars in here. There's some great work done by a professor from the Army Staff College out in Fort Leavenworth where he talks about this Russian strategy of strategic operations to defeat critical infrastructure targets. And they're putting a lot of thought into things like power infrastructure, oil and gas infrastructure, and communications infrastructure. And some of the key nodes in those systems reside under the ocean. So we need to look at how we ensure the continuity in those areas. In the lower left, we talk about getting on the same page. We have our own unique set of information that we use in the undersea. Some of it comes from our submarines themselves. Some comes from these integrated undersea surveillance systems. Some comes from satellites and surface ships and so forth. Some of it's actually unclassified and comes from things like the automatic identification system, the AIS system that a lot of the merchant traffic uses. And our challenge is how do we integrate all of this in one picture and have everyone that we talk to during a time of conflict be sharing the same picture? And it sounds like it's easy, especially if you have your Google map and you can turn on the traffic and the roads and all that. To do something that simple across the many classification and programmatic boundaries that we wrestle in the DOD is a lot harder than turning on the streets on your Google. And what is of particular frustration to me as I go out and seek industry help solving problems like this is that I talk to people and they say, well, we kind of have something that does that. But they do it for a three letter agency or something like that and not for us. And so to know that doing that sort of thing could be done very easily if we could overcome the administrative and programmatic boundaries as we can do a lot better. Which leads to the final line of effort which is written across the back there, get faster. I'm going to talk today a little bit about some of the specific programs and technologies and that sort of thing that we use. But at the end of the day, you know, 10 years from now, 15, 20 years from now, we won't win or lose based on any one specific program or capability we develop. We will win or we will lose based on the pace at which we can introduce new capabilities on our side that change the game plan as well as react to things that the adversary does. And we live in a world right now where the technology cycle runs two to three years. And we navigate a world in which the acquisition cycle runs between about six and 20 years. And you can't win in a three year technology cycle if it takes you 20 years to implement an idea. And I really need help from influential people like you to persuade the system through which we acquire what we use and open up the boundaries of programs, open up the definitions of milestones and that sort of thing so that we can stay as adaptable on the front line as the pace of technology would allow us to do. That is usually important and we're really going to solve that and win or we're not going to solve that and we're going to lose. Okay, next slide please. So what is owning the best platforms mean to us? In our case it means continuing this very successful program called the Virginia class submarine that Senator Warner helped us put together. It is the best submarine in the world, clearly demonstrated to be so against all comers I might say, and we need to make it even better. And we need to make it better by taking this wonderful platform and improving its payload capacity so that we can carry a lot of the other technologies that we're developing into the places that they're needed. And we're proud of what we have done so far. It is, to my knowledge, the only major acquisition program in the entire Department of Defense that consistently delivers on time and under budget or I say ahead of schedule and under budget. And while we're proud of that, we're a little bit nervous because success sometimes leads to complacency and we're raising the rate at which we deliver the ships. And frankly we fully understand that if we don't continue to deliver with that type of budget and schedule performance that maybe a lot of the friends that we have that support us in delivering those things right now that maybe they won't be with us. So we can't afford to get sloppy. And while we continue to deliver that platform, we need to make it better through this thing we call the Virginia payload module, which will give us that additional capacity. Whether that be for Tomahawk missiles or whatever follows a Tomahawk, whether it be for large diameter unmanned undersea vehicles and so forth. There's a whole bunch of things coming that we need to be ready and adaptable enough to handle. And then we need to make it even better in its acoustic performance. It's very, very good right now, but we have some formidable adversaries coming down the line. And we now understand that we have the physics and the processing capacity to make the next great leap and so on. And we're going to do that starting with the USS South Dakota. And then the other big program in the lower left and I guess the size of the picture reflects the size of the program. We're going to start recapitalizing our SSBN force, which is the backbone of the naval leg of the strategic triad. And we're going to build 12 ships. We're in the technology development phase. Now we're going to start bending metal in 2021 and we're going to replace the current fleet of 14 with a fleet of 12. And it will be a significant investment. It's a build that comes around once every 40 years and it is falling upon our generation. The 40 years is up and it's time to build that and we will. Okay. Next slide. So I'd like to talk now about, now that we've passed the platforms, talk about how we make each one more valuable. And so this is the grow longer arms piece and there's an underwater component to that and an above water component. The underwater component is to increase the effective range of our torpedoes from the 10 or so miles that we have today and get that out past 100 miles, 100 mile torpedo. I challenged some folks to come up with a propulsion method to do that and we found it. And then someone else came to us with a propulsion method that will get us to about 200 miles, which is good. So what happens when you have a 100 or 200 mile torpedo? Well you start thinking about your whole picture of the world changes when you do that. You start thinking in terms of what is the bearing and range from my ship to the target. And you start thinking in terms of geographic coordinates. And the bosses that we work for start thinking of torpedoes as underwater tomahawks because they can go to the appointed place at the appointed time. They can be potentially redirected. And although it's our job to get them to the fight, we might easily hand over the terminal homing of one of our torpedoes to somebody else who happens to have better information at the time that that torpedo is going to do the last leg of its journey. It's pretty exciting stuff. It creates all types of new opportunities for us to integrate this torpedo weapon system with other forces, especially our brothers and the strike groups, but maybe even beyond that. Very exciting stuff. But in between those two things, there's another thing that we call, first of all, we call what we do today, we're calling it the lead bullet. Yeah, it's about 10 miles. And then we're calling this next step up is about, we call it the silver bullet. And that is shooting things over the horizon from your submarine without any outside assistance using an unmanned air vehicle, a very inexpensive unmanned air vehicle that you launch from your own ship that looks over the horizon and it tells you what's going on, you need all those rules of engagement so that you know you're engaging the one you want to and no one else. And again, another very promising technology that has been demonstrated already. And then we call this very long range weapon, the golden bullet, which, given that it's geographically driven, isn't restricted to open water. It can go in the harbor, it can go up the river. It can knock on the door of the tunnel that has whatever the tunnel might have. So there's a lot of things we can do with that. And with that, we'll go to the, I'm sorry, let's go above the water line. Most of the ordinance that we've used in the last 20, 30 years has been the Tomahawk land attack missile. And many folks, including my buddy Jim Colgary in the back there, remembers when we carried the Tomahawk anti-ship missile. And we always knew that that missile, if we shot it, we knew it would hit something. We just didn't know what it would hit. And that was because we had a missile whose kinetic range was greater than the range at which we could effectively command and control. But our ability to command and control has improved dramatically since then. What we haven't done is acquired the weapon to allow us to utilize that. So we're looking in terms of a multi-mission weapon that can be used against a land target or a target at sea. And that's very important to the submarine force because, you know, we can't decide before we leave San Diego what fight we're going to fight. And we have to be able to adapt from one fight to the other. And there's work going on right now to take some of the technology exists to add for a small cost an anti-surface ship capability to our land attack missiles. So what's so important about that? Tom's not all that big compared to a torpedo. But here's what it does. It forces an adversary who thinks that he might have a submarine somewhere within a thousand miles of him. He has to adopt an air defense posture. And therefore he has to carry defensive weapons. And every slot he fills with the defensive weapon, he will not be filling with an offensive weapon. Furthermore, he has to maintain air defense radars up. And that helps all of us in a variety of ways to track where he is. And if he wants to do that at a sophisticated level between ships, he has to maintain data links up to keep all the ships on the same page. And that provides all kinds of other opportunities for us to do things that are very difficult to defend against. So it's not just the kinetic piece. It's the ambiguity of where is the submarine versus what could he do to me. This is how we take these things together to really increase our deterrent value and also our kinetic capabilities in time of war. Next slide, please. Okay, we call this piece Beat the Adversary System. And if we had anticipated anti-access area denial with some years of foresight, we probably would have done a few things differently. So as we stand here today and as we look at anti-access area denial potentially going under sea, we have a brief window of time in which we can prepare for that. And we're using that window of time. And the goal is very simple. It is as the adversaries invest in their ability to find submarines through acoustic means, optical means, radar means, and so forth. We will provide him with many, many things that look very, very good on their equipment. And we will put them after the investment is done right back in the same position where they are today was. I think I might have something I can't really tell, which always leads to the same thing we do right now. I can't really tell. I think I'll drop a bomb on it because that's what people do. It looks good, feels good. I have a target, at least my criteria, I'm going to bomb it, which is exactly what we want them to do. And we want them to do that over and over and over again, only to find out that all that ordinance hasn't changed their strategic position one iota, which will lead them to realize that many of the things that they're attacking must not be real. And that is, we think a key to how we get people who decide to go kinetic, how to come back off because they realize that it's a losing proposition. Because the whole time they're doing all that will be inflicting significant damage on their forces. Okay, that requires us to have, again, acoustic radar and cyber countermeasures. And I'll leave it at that in this group. Okay, next slide. This is all about protecting things. It's very, very hard to have perfect knowledge over a huge area of ocean. It is entirely feasible at reasonable cost to have near perfect knowledge over a select piece of ocean. So that requires some coordination between ASW forces and keeping areas clear so that our strike groups know where they can and where they cannot have freedom of maneuver. And then the strike group commander can match where he has freedom of maneuver with where he needs to be to do his mission. And we will keep those forces very much in the game. And again, as I said before, there are other things that are also very important that we know what is going on around them and we're going to maintain the ability or grow the ability to do that in many, many cases using unmanned systems. Okay, and the next page, I've talked to that somewhat already, but that is pulling together everything from the most exquisite national technical means down to unclassified information, sharing it amongst all of our key decision makers allowing us to rapidly converge on decisions in a short period of time, looking at the same picture so we can facilitate that conversation. And next slide. So I want to dwell on this one a little bit. This is, I think, this is the Washington, D.C. battlefield. So if you look in the outer ring there, you can see that's our platform programs. And, you know, we're in the nuclear submarine business and platforms of that complexity necessarily take many years really over a decade to design and build because of the level and types of technology and because of the types of exquisite safeguards that we need to ensure that are part of that process at every step of the way. And we're pretty good at that, actually. And we want to sort of keep that going about the same, but it also requires a constant level of effort, for example, to sustain our strategic deterrent. We have to stay on the path that we're on right now and we can't afford any bumps in the road due to things like sequestration or other, you know, budget battles here. We need to have a predictable future for our industry partners so they can acquire the materials and the workforce for the long-term commitment that is shipbuilding. That's how it has to happen. We can help them through things like block purchases of submarines so they have a, they and their suppliers can work their future. We can't do 10-year programs with one-year uncertainty in funding. In the next circle, the yellow circle, is where we start talking about vehicles. And in many cases, the vehicles have to work to a single-digit years' timeline. We have to make them change to impose new quandaries for our adversaries. We have to make them change sometimes to adapt to the quandaries that our adversaries present us. And we can physically do this. I mentioned before we have some issues with J-SIDS milestones, so we have to define our programs right. We have issues in the testing arena. You know, we did a software change not too long ago to make sure we could accommodate a new threat that was presented to us. And we got that change done in about five months, along with some significant in-house testing. But the external testing regime that we go through wanted us to do 165 in-water shots to prove that this little software change we made in one segment of the program was good to go. 165 shots, that's almost a year's worth of training shots for the submarine force. We can't do business that way. We have to leverage modeling and simulation. We have to have people who are knowledgeable in software to recognize that this module does not affect all those other modules and we need to keep that pace of change going. We also have to learn how to define our programs. I learned a lot by studying naval aviation and this little change they made to the Hornet that turned it into the Super Hornet, which of course is in effect an entirely different and vastly superior aircraft in every respect. So we're following that lead. I make no apologies for it as we do our heavyweight torpedo restart, it's what we're calling it, so we can sustain our weapons inventory and that restart is going to open our production line, but that production line will be tied to an innovation effort that will parallel what we do with the combat systems on the submarines where every other year we come up with what we call a technical insertion and in the years between that we do a software change so that we can continuously evolve but keep the program name the same. Similarly, if we're doing things like unmanned air vehicles which is really, you could say it's really an imaging system to support the way the submarine operates, well our combat system has an imaging subsystem so the worst thing we could do to move quickly would be to define the unmanned air vehicle as a new program rather we should define it as an extension of the combat system it's a technical insertion so to speak and I'm not doing this to be devious if I was I wouldn't be telling you all I'm simply looking at what is the capability I need to deliver and what are the hurdles that I have to face and how can I overcome those hurdles and that's why we come up with some things that just might not make sense that we didn't deal with that whole picture is this making sense here? Okay, and then on to the right the timelines get shorter and shorter because sometimes we need to do a software change very quickly you get a new radar, we get a new countermeasure and that sort of thing and as we continuously learn working with the SEALs we're doing some pretty good work with them recently with them helping us with our unmanned vehicles because we're working on long-term on these fancy things that put the vehicle in the water and get it back but until that day comes we have Navy SEALs the most adaptable ocean interface in the world they chuck them out of the dryneck shelter and then when they come back we put a buoy up and they catch them and we bring them back in but in the process of that interaction we have they say well if we can put this thing out they have a bunch of other stuff they'd like to put out through that same dryneck shelter so as we compare notes with each other we learn a lot from each other Okay, next slide I'd like to talk briefly in case you think that this strategy is PowerPoint deep as we say about just a few things that we've done recently to show how quickly we can innovate if people let us and so we have this thing called the fleet modular autonomous undersea vehicle which we're doing missions with as we speak and we didn't create this program out of whole cloth we looked around at what the academic world and the oil and gas industry were doing and we took some vehicles that worked just fine and we adapted them for our purposes and they're very good, very reliable they have thousands and thousands of mission hours on them before we even started using them and then we looked at the unique things that we need well one things we need is the ability to do high speed data transfer through the water so we've got some folks to do some work and had some good success recently with high speed underwater laser modems so what does that mean to me? well it means if I launch an unmanned vehicle from a submarine that cannot recover it I can get the information that it determined on its mission even if I don't get the vehicle back I get the most important thing which is the information and the right-hand side there you can see a torpedo you can see that it's modular and in the lower right you can see one of our developmental engines that gives us more than 100 miles of range in the center you see a dispenser where one vehicle can drop many many payloads the payload in the picture is an acoustic training device that we can program for the we'll just say the type of sound that we want and we can put that where we need it it can look like us, it can look like somebody else it's good stuff in the lower left not all the way to the left but there's a couple of pictures there that show the thing floating in the water I want to tell just a short story about that for my entire life I have wanted to have a periscope decoy just so I could mess with people I think and I had this idea that there would be this thing that we would launch out and be a vehicle and the mass would come up and go down and I went up to Newport, Rhode Island to the undersea warfare center up there and I asked them if they could build something like that and as kind of words as they could find they said we could but that would be really stupid not their exact words but I caught their drift and it was stupid they said because in a much more elegant fashion we don't need to have a periscope we need to have something that looks like a periscope to people who are looking for periscopes and so what it really came down to is can you give the right radar return at the right times it might make someone think hey there's something there I don't see anything, must be a submarine it's gone it's back again that's the types of decisions that people go through when they decide that there's a submarine out there and maybe even they need to make it look like it's moving a little bit not too fast, just a little bit and then the real brilliance began when the guy from Newark who got the project before he did one piece of work is he called his buddy in Ohio at the Air Force Research Lab and he said you got something like this and he said I do but it looks like it's going 600 knots and but not to worry that's digits, we can change that and next thing you know the card gets dropped in FedEx and a couple of short time later we have something working on a boat in Rhode Island and about a month after that we have that thing in the buoy that you see floating off the San Clemente Island and I won't say whose radar display that is it's not ours and it looks pretty good and so anyway but this is the type of thing we need the creativity to do and implement quickly and those types of decoys they cost a little less than $3,000 so if I can make people drop million dollar torpedoes on $3,000 things that look like submarines we're on the right side of this asymmetric business and when you leverage that with the ambiguity of do I have a submarine or not and the capability that you must worry about if there are submarines in a certain place this is how we start getting to this deterrence conventional deterrence theory where we can make an adversary realize that the cost of going to war with sea with us is going to be severe is this making sense to you? okay and then next is really just to drill down on this fleet modular AUV which starts with something the oceanographers used is a program already so we add a few things to their program like the laser comms to download the information better batteries you know we had a bad experience a few years ago with lithium ion batteries on a submarine we've got projects to make sure that the technology gets better industry is helping us you know Elon Musk wants to put a huge lithium ion battery in everybody's garage so now I'm going to have this huge test bed you know if houses don't start blowing up all over the country in the next two years we're going to know that we have mastered some lithium ion battery technology so you know and we need to have an open enough mind to say that if that is good enough to put in your house it's probably good enough to go in an unmanned vehicle okay next slide so that's it at a very high level we think we have a strategy that is coherent, that is effective that measures with the larger needs of the national strategy and with that I think Dr. Hickson are going to sit and take any of your questions thank you have a question sir? well first I would be remiss if I didn't thank Lockheed Martin for putting on this event with us today and of course to our partners at US Naval Institute and Admiral Daley in particular by Samuel Conner those were fantastic remarks and I just want to get your sense just starting off we have an announcement just yesterday of a new CNO nominee he is a submarineer second in a row we've heard a lot from you this morning about really the creativity and the incredible asymmetric advantage that submarines offer us any takeaway there in terms of how the Navy might be thinking about its future that it's going back to the well if you will in terms of the submarine force and maybe how the submarines figure into the overall Navy picture? sure I wouldn't read I think some people might read the selection of Admiral Richardson as being CNO as a submarine force victory or something like that it's a victory for the Navy period he is not parochial he has spent the last three years working on submarines and aircraft carriers he spends time working on the overall effectiveness of the Navy mission some of you have seen some of the work he's done on working to just sort of polish up the character of the Navy to make sure we focus on integrity so we really do you know when I'm the submarine force commander I'm an advocate for the submarine force but the last time I worked with you I was doing overall war fighting Admiral Richardson does overall war fighting so I just wouldn't read the warfare pin of the Chief of Naval Operations I wouldn't read too much into that because he's not going to neglect the surface forces he will not neglect aviation and mine warfare he will do his best to strike the right balance and effectiveness not based on warfare community well since you answered that so politely I'll push you on the same topic a different way how well do you feel in your current position advocating as you say on behalf of the submarine force with the attributes of the submarine force as you laid out today in terms of the asymmetric advantage that the force offers how well do you think that message is heard and understood beyond the submarine force I am paid to be a shameless advocate for the submarine force but I believe our message is being heard on Capitol Hill we have good support from the especially the House Armed Services C-PAR subcommittee they have invested a lot of their time in learning what we do and how we do it I think a lot of you have seen where Chairman Forbes is very much invested in what is the Navy's strategy I have sat down with people like him and others on the committee to go through this to have a dialogue about it and what they really want to know is they want to know that we have a strategy and as I said before we're in a point in time where we're in a state of anti-access airy denial we're almost everybody in a position of responsibility who has studied the problem has war game the problem recognizes the value of what we do so that is helping us get good support so I'm very thankful for the support that we get and you mentioned this brief window in which to get in front of the problem there are many pieces to that from technology to con-ops obviously the funding what worries you the most in terms of the confidence level that we can exploit this window I think the same word everyone else has is that we will have a predictable budget environment through which we can make the proper investments over time and so we are lucky in that our construction program for the Virginia is healthy we're coming up on the growth years of the production program for a higher replacement so if we don't have stability in defense budgets and overall national budgets that are viable that's not going to happen as we try to introduce new capabilities which we believe are necessary to stay ahead to sustain our dominance if every time we come up with a new idea it gets run through the filter of well this is a new start and although we gave you some funding this year and the total numbers are right the method by which we gave you the funding doesn't allow new starts if there's no new starts there's potentially no new ideas and if there's no new ideas we lose that's the message I'd like to get across you spoke quite a bit this morning on the theme of innovation without necessarily using that wording and certainly working on using creativity which you did use as a word to work through operational problems that's a theme that secretary Carter has been out to silicon valley on certainly we've had deputy secretary work talk about the third offset strategy you know what are the lessons that the submarine community can bring to others not that others don't have lessons themselves but what do you think has been successful in terms of the ability to be creative and stay on top of operational challenges and where are you looking to do better the poster child that I would say for how you create an environment that enables creativity is the thing we have in the combat system right now it's the technical insertion slash advanced processor build strategy where every year we invite people from industry who think they have good ideas to propose those ideas to the folks at naval sea systems commander the integrated warfare systems director in particular and then what they do is they compete the ideas they compete the technologies and methodologies and they pick so it's got kind of this venture capital feel to it and then when they pick the thing that works they hand it over to the integrator who integrates it within the system and that's how we've been able to have a long period of rapid evolution in the combat system we don't do that everywhere as I mentioned we're bringing that into our torpedo world the surface combat systems are bringing it in I've been working this for a while now through what they call the ACB program and it's having a similar impact there so we know how to do this we just need to make sure we create the environment to do it that we don't define a new idea as a new start and then that we look at how much testing is required versus how much is desired by the system until every bureaucrat is happy not necessarily the same thing very good I'm only going to ask one more question because we have a great deal of maritime knowledge in the audience we want to leave time for them to ask questions as well also yesterday which was a busy day a secretary Mavis was up at the naval academy gave a talk and he spoke at one point in his speech I believe his phrasing was something along the lines that all insignia are now available to women with the exception of the Trident and of course we've got the enlisted we've had officers now we have enlisted women coming through submarine billets can you just briefly talk about where you are in that process and milestones sure we have somewhat over 100 women officers in the submarine force now at every stage whether it's initial training on their junior officer C tour that completed the junior officer C tour and they're now working a shore we're just now I'm happy to say starting to get some of those women to agree to stay on for a department head tour so so it's going well the average woman that we have in the submarine force the average woman is an above average performer which actually makes sense if you do the math and look at how competitive it was for the number of women who applied to get in the number of slots we had available they're supremely talented and the experience we've had with them at sea has borne that out we're just now at the cusp of enlisted women in submarines and we just had a selection board about two weeks ago and let me just describe the process a little bit a lot of study lessons learned from other communities that suggested that when you want to bring women into a group you should bring them in a way that no one feels alone and isolated which is easy to do a sailor on their first C tour can feel alone and isolated anyhow and so what we're trying to do is we're bringing in we've just recruited a group of very outstanding senior enlisted women who have multiple C tours of experience that will now go to the submarines and then when we bring the other women in from the training they will have this senior mentor who can explain to them that this is a part of life at sea this is okay or hey this is not okay and you should not put up with this and we think that this will go a long way towards increasing the confidence that they have the safety that they feel on the ship it really does make a big difference to have a mentor if you're a young woman it's very good if there's an older, more experienced woman that you can talk to about whatever you want to talk about so that's the method behind it we did that to a certain degree with the officers by bringing in supply officers who had at least one, maybe two C tours and so we're looking for the same results here okay, we're going to open it up to the audience, we do have a microphone so if you raise your hand if you have a question we will walk the microphone to you we ask you to tell us your name and your affiliation if you have one this one right here Bjorn Egenberg in Naval Attaché for Norway Norway is in the process of buying new submarines and for Norway it will be the kind of Ohio replacement equivalent so what kind of role do you see for a conventional submarine in the future what can the allied nations bring to the table regarding undersea dominance in the future? I think we should look at complementary capabilities the Norwegian Navy submarine force is renowned for their ability to operate in the areas in and around Norway which are uniquely challenging as you know and they're suited to be a smaller submarine than what we have they don't have to go as far to get to what their mission area would be so that opens up conventional opportunities maybe supplemented by AIP and so forth so I think there's a lot of as we work with allies we should look at things like that when we look in the western Pacific we have some skill sets from fight to fight our Japanese partners have conventional submarines that are very very good but there's some areas in and around the western Pacific that they're very well suited to where they don't have to cover the distance that we do so I think it's important that we be complementary that we be compatible one of the big challenges of NATO is if you go back to my staying on the same page slide communications is a big challenge enabling our NATO partners to communicate with the speed with which we do but in a fast moving fight anything we can do to communicate as quickly between countries as we do within the US would be very very helpful so all the way in the back there thanks it's Tom Shanker with the New York Times appreciate your comments today Admiral can you look at Russian capabilities and the assessment of their submarine fleet in the Pacific and western Pacific what are their priorities for investment what are you most worried about and what do you need to counter thank you so you know Russian capability after a long holiday is coming back they have some very good platforms in their Severed Bensk SSGN it's fairly quiet I would say it's very quiet and they're back into the with their Doge Rookie SSBN and their Bulava missile system they're on the cusp of a continuous at sea strategic deterrent something they fell off of for many years and you're going to see we think we're going to see part of that of the Doge Rookie class show up in the northwest Pacific pretty soon so that's an area where they've been pretty slow for a long time out there but they're coming back another on the aisle Admiral Hyde, Tate Nerkin with IHS Janes thanks very much for your comments today at the end you mentioned the FMAUV as a critical vehicle for execution of this strategy I'd be curious when your broader comments about unmanned systems and unmanned undersea systems in particular but there's an enabler of the strategy that you've articulated and also as a challenge that you may face in the undersea environment as these systems proliferate so the unmanned vehicle is both opportunity and challenge I think the proliferation of unmanned vehicles will go geometric in the very near future as the ability to execute the autonomy as we can execute that autonomy with more confidence as we make incremental improvements in power density and so forth and we learn we get a little more skillful in using the power density that we have sometimes we think that we always have to be driving through water and we need to measure our endurance as how far we go or how fast we can keep the screw turning in many cases it's about getting to the right place and staying there and then coming back maybe and so as we learn to adapt our tactics, techniques and procedures to the capabilities we have as we evolve new capabilities I think you're going to see a huge opportunity there this is all happening in parallel with the types of packages that you might want to carry on an unmanned vehicle you can do things with smaller and smaller devices that take less and less power over time and so that is also increasing what we can do so there's a huge opportunity here the parallel is most of what what you can imagine to do pretty much anyone can imagine to do it and the barriers to people doing some of that stuff are relatively low and so we need to keep in mind how others might use them and that gets back to that very dynamic field of play where we can't be figuring out what to do over periods that take many, many years we have time for one more question I have one right up in the front here Sir, Major Ted Zagroniski on the Army Staff at the Pentagon I have a question for you about sort of the broader thrust of the presentation that you made today in an interesting set of desired future ways and means and I'm curious to what extent you believe as you cast sub-force capabilities into the future does this sort of necessitate a thoroughgoing reinvention of how the U.S. Navy applies its seapower under the waves or are we looking at submarines essentially doing what they do now thank you I think what we see coming is the submarine will be doing things that either only can be done or that we're only willing to do with a man loop for example and perhaps maybe backstopping a bunch of other devices maybe we'll be spending a lot of time getting unmanned devices to the fight because we have lots of power density and energy and we can get them 99.9% of the way to where they have to go and then there's some places even we won't go and so we would send them in for that part I don't see the unmanned vehicle replacing the submarine there are far more things that we need to do than we can possibly do with the submarines we have and with the submarines we could possibly expect to build so that requires us to look at other ways to do it with these more disposable technologies either because of cost or risk so that's pretty much how I see it by Saddam O'Connor you've been very generous with your time today it's great to see you and it's great to see what you're doing for the Navy and for the country so thank you all please join me