 My last assignment, where's Luke? Chevrolet, Luke. Luke is gonna come up and he's apparently going to recognize the Army Mad Scientist program and prize and so forth, so Luke's gonna come up and at least tell us what the Army has in mind in the notion of mad scientist. So, Luke. Jack, can we get some overwatch on the two smaller compounds to the east? A.N. 41's voice came over the helmet comms but he was washing her face. She was speaking but her mouth never moved. The voice was completely computer generated but sounded just like her, crazy. Jack called up his B team leader and sent the team to a small, low wall about a quarter of the way up the slope that offered some frontal cover and good sight lines across the eastern side of the compound. The other two recently reappeared legionnaires split the small draw going up the slope on opposite sides. Each had a Q-pad in close proximity. Neither were looking at A.N. 41 as she made her way up the middle behind the boy. Jack was trying to figure out why the legionnaires chose to take this detour to check on this kid's two sisters when he heard a computer generated alert in his comms. Take cover, take cover. In the age of network sensors and weapon systems, everything happens at a speed humans are not built to manage. There was no bright hot light from the high explosive. There was no wine from quad copters and no barking report from machine guns. There was a feeling of over pressure and the sound of air being split by a projectile. Behind them, one of the vehicles exploded. Jack was still diving towards a large rock to his right as multiple things began to swirl around him. Less than three seconds had passed. Each of the housings on the back of the Q-pads had opened up and 41's Q-pad began fleeing countermeasures into the air at an almost impossible rate with a sound like a teenage girl's scream. It was terrifying. The eastern most Q-pad put three short range missiles in the air and the western most Q-pad revealed a monster 25 millimeter direct fire system under its housing and began blasting through a window more than 300 meters up the slope with incredible accuracy. Jack hit the dirt. Now seven seconds in, more over pressure and 41's Q-pad exploded. Jack suspected he knew the reason they were up against. It was exceptionally rare to bump into a mobile rail gun that accurate at that size and with that rate of fire. They had stumbled in to some trouble here. So that's an excerpt from the winner of our sci-fi contest. But first let me talk about quickly. Army Futures Command, next slide please. Army Futures Command was founded as a way to transform the army. As we move forward to a future operational environment that is highly contested across all domains the Army Futures Command is working to transform the paradigm of innovation of modernization to change the future army. Now a very small part of that is the Mad Scientist Initiative which is the program that I work under which spans across Army Futures Command and TRADOC in order to have a continuum of the future operational environment. And the way in which we look and envision the future operational environment is through a number of different ways. We have vehicles such as contests, writing contests, conferences. We recently partnered last week with the University of Texas, Austin to have a conference on the disruption and future operational environment. But another way that we look at it is through storytelling. And storytelling is one of the most important ways in which we can envision the future. I can give you a lot of white papers and research papers and all of it will be extremely interesting. But storytelling changes your paradigm, changes your viewpoint towards the future. And it allows you to contextualize what do the soldiers of that timeframe feel like? What does the equipment around them look like? What does the battlefield feel and smell like? So when we look at the science fiction writing contest, what we wanted to do was get a diversity in thought. This is a way to not only get some really new interesting ideas, but we're crowdsourcing in these ventures. So we had over 75 submissions from a variety of different participants. Some of them teachers, some of them real estate agents, some of them professional military officers. But what that offered us was a great variety of thought and ideas about what does the future of multi-domain operations look like? And we wanted to focus on a near peer competitor. So we used the fictional countries of Danovia and Otso. And what does that look like in the future? So through this contest, we also had judges which I wanna thank really quickly. A diversity of judges such as our senior judge, Dr. David Brin. We had science fiction authors who helped this judge such as August Cole and Malca Older. So we had a very diverse group. And through that, we were able to distinguish a winner that really we thought best portrayed the future of multi-domain operations and land war in the future. So without further ado, our winner was Colonel Jasper Jeffers. Now, Colonel Jeffers is commander of the Ghost Brigade. He's an active duty army officer. Previously, he was a joint special operations command innovation officer, but he served in combat roles in a number of infantry and Ranger assignments. And we are extremely thankful to Colonel Jeffers. He was able to win this contest not on the merit of his own career, but on the merit of this story. We stripped out all the names before they were submitted to our judges. So I just wanna thank ASU and New America for having us up here and having the opportunity to change the way that we're thinking about the future of armed conflict. Thank you.