 the National President, Skip Watansky. The Sierra Space Global Baritime Expedition will now be officially opened. Be careful, please. Now it's my pleasure to introduce the National President of the Navy League of the United States, Mr. Skip Watansky. Good morning and welcome to the Vice-Service Chief's update panel. I am Skip Watansky, President of the Navy League of the United States. This year, the Navy League is excited to celebrate the 52nd anniversary of Sierra Space. As part of the celebration, we would like to recognize our two and four star sponsors. Our two star sponsors are BAE Systems, BWXT, Orbital, ATK. Also our four star sponsors are Hunnican Ingalls Industry, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. Please join me in thanking these sponsors for their support. It's important that you walk around in these next three days during the conference and that the Navy League is hosting this. But we couldn't do this without the assistance and directions of our panelists this morning. Please join me in welcoming our Vice-Chiefs of the Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and the US Flag Merchant Marine. First, Admiral William F. Moran, Vice-Chief of the Navy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. General, I promise not to forget where you come from. General Glenn Walters, United States Marine Corps, assists a comment on the Marine Corps. Admiral Charles M. Michelle, United States Coast Guard, Vice-Commander of the Coast Guard. Mr. Joel Sabat, Executive Director, representing the Administrator of the Maritime Administration. And now I'd like to also welcome Bradley Peniston, Editor of Defense One, as our moderator this morning. Please be seated. Well, thank you, Kerry. And thank you all for joining us this morning. I'm here at National Harbor and around the globe watching the live stream on DefenseOne.com. And thank you especially to our panelists who join us in interesting times. Our nation is at war, though not with any peer competitor, yet still smaller wars and regional strife have our Navy sailors deploying for seven and eight months at a time. And those who would become peer competitors are advancing rapidly, gaining in size, in reach, and in technical and doctrinal acumen. Back home, we have a new administration, you may have heard, whose priorities and policies and even some key personnel remain, to a large extent, unclear. There was a draft budget proposal out, which would seem to boost the Navy and the Marine Corps, but which, at least in earlier versions, would have dealt an unprecedented cut to the Coast Guard. The administration's ability to enact its priorities into legislation remains unproven. And Congress will, of course, eventually pass a budget. Their recent failure to do so on time helps no one out. So it all adds up to a lot of uncertainty. And I would like to begin our discussion this morning by asking each of our panelists to talk about their approach and the approach of their services to our uncertain era. So then we'll keep the conversation going with some questions up here. And then I will open it up to your questions. So please get those ready, and then look for the folks with the microphones. And when you ask them, please introduce yourself and try to keep things short so we can get to as many people as we can. So Admiral Moran, if you will lead us off, please. Sure. Good morning, everybody. Great to be here. And I wanted to congratulate the Navy League on their 52nd consecutive session of the Sierra Space, but also on the 29 partners and allies that are present here at the conference. That's the largest contingent of partners and allies we've ever had here. So it just goes to show you the interest we've got in maritime operations around the globe. So Brad kind of spoke to this crazy time we're in. I know it's the end of March. Well, actually March is over, but March madness continues in April here. We are all struggling with trying to figure out which budget is going to spit out the other end of the process we're in. And I think we'll all talk to that in the Q&A. But when you look at where the Navy is today, it's exactly where it's been for the last arguably three decades, certainly as long as I've been wearing the uniform. Roughly 30% to 35% of the force is deployed today. It's around the order of 90 to 95 ships anywhere around the globe. That hasn't changed, and yet we're significantly smaller than we were when I joined the Navy a few years ago. But even if you just think about where we were on 9-11, 16 years ago, we had 320 plus ships. Today we're down to 275, and yet we're deploying 90 plus ships every year, every day. So when you do that math, the same level of commitment around the globe with a smaller Navy means you're going to wear out that smaller Navy faster than we had planned. Same goes for our airplanes, submarines, and every other component of the Navy. So growth is really important to us as we look into the future. But our focus in the Navy in the current budget cycle and where we look into the future where we want to be in 5, 10, 15 years down the road, we fully realize that we've got to make ready the fleet that we have today. There's no question that over the last 10 or 15 years driving that smaller Navy harder has made it harder to maintain the fleet we have. So all of us have testified to the challenges of readiness going forward. And for us it's to make hold of the 275 ships we have today so we at least have that size Navy going into the future. The second priority for us is clearly to make hold of what we have and keep the readiness that we achieve in the short run. So a lot of discussion about amended budget submissions and what we've asked for has all been top priority is getting fleet maintenance, especially for our surface fleet and our aviation component, in particular our attack air component of the Naval Aviation back in a better readiness state. Fill in some holes by procuring things we've long needed to make it easier for the forces we have today to operate and not lose any further readiness declines. And then the last priority is when and if we get a budget and we get some increases, we want to accelerate some growth in our force by building more ships and more airplanes so that we can grow the size of our Navy so we don't wear it out as fast. So when you think about the priorities for the Navy to simply to maintain readiness, arrest any declines we've seen over the last several years, fill in the holes with capabilities that we need to modernize the force we have and then to grow that force over time. So I look forward to the participation in the panel. I notice there's a lot of Navy uniforms out here. You guys check in my math and hopefully you'll ask some good questions. But I really do look forward to the panel discussion. So thanks, Brad. Thank you, Brad. Number one, I'm surprised you can tell who has what uniform out there because I can't see anything because these lights. But the Marine Corps in partnership with the Navy has the same challenges in aviation. We have about 34,000 Marines for deployed at any one time. We have 23,000 west of the Date Line in the Pacific. We think we've got to handle on the counterterrorism efforts that are ongoing. And we're interested to see what demands are placed on that force. But we also are cognizant of the future and have issued and signed out a new marine operating concept that looks at the world in the future and it's going to look a lot different than what we're doing right now. We're going to favor getting into electronic warfare on the network, recapitalizing our command and control. We need more long range fires. And we have to get at, much like all the other services right now, some 20 and 30 year old vehicles and weapon systems that need to be replaced to fit into that concept. Your question specifically was how do we organize against a uncertain future? Financially, like all military organizations, we plan and we plan again and we plan again. Probably not the best use of staff time, but we will react to whatever the fiscal realities are at the time. We have plans to put these new capabilities in the Marine Corps. We will put them in no matter what. And if we have to give up some conventional combat power to do that, that's what we'll end up doing unless we get the resources to keep our conventional combat power where it is or grow it, because we have to be that kind of force for the future. We are a learning organization and eight years under continuing resolutions has caused us to plan that way. I would suggest that that's a very inefficient way to plan. Only planning for three quarters of a year at maximum for programmatic effort is not a way to run a big organization. But we do what we can and we will continually give our best military advice to those who control our budgets. Abram, Rachelle. Great. Well, thanks to the Navy League for putting together this event. I also want to welcome so many foreign partners and allies who I see throughout the room here I've worked with over my time as a vice commandant and prior iteration of the Coast Guard too. I appreciate your question about uncertainty. Uncertainty always seems to be the stock in trade for the Coast Guard. We're a pretty small organization. We get buffeted by all these larger muscle movements. So part of what our commandant's been talking about is to ensure that a small agency like a Coast Guard in an atmosphere of uncertainty is relevant. And the way that we've been doing that is by concentrating our efforts on strategic effects. And our commandant's been talking about our 4 plus 1. We have a 4 plus 1 in the Coast Guard. Some of you may know there's a 4 plus 1 in DOD 2. We've got our 4 plus 1, which is our Western Hemisphere strategy, our Arctic strategy, cyber, and then energy in the marine transportation system. And our plus 1 is our human capital strategy, which is all about developing and retaining that workforce that we need. In the Western Hemisphere, Coast Guard had a record year last year of cocaine seizures down the transit zone. Over 200 metric tons, which had been unfathomable earlier in my career. The good part about it is record seizures. Bad part about it is record flows coming out of Columbia. But there's a whole story to be told there on the regional instability and national security issues down there that erupt in things like border security politics and some of the other things. A lot of that stuff is all coming up through the transit zone on its way to our border and creating that instability that plagues our hemisphere and the Coast Guard right there in the middle of that fight. In the Arctic, unbelievable, last summer we had a 1,500 passenger cruise ship go through the Northwest Passage. 10 years ago, that would have been inconceivable to the Coast Guard unless it was an ice breaker and ice capable vessel. But this was kind of a regular cruise ship that worked its way through the Northwest Passage. That's just symptomatic of the changes that we have in the polar regions and up in the Arctic. And the Coast Guard is responsive to that. For those of you who don't know, the Coast Guard's role in the Arctic. We actually have been up there since the United States became an Arctic nation in 1867 when the Revenue Cutter Lincoln actually took the delegation that signed over the papers from the Russians and sent Alaska to take over Alaska for the United States. And we've been there ever since. But big changes in the Arctic. In the cyber realm, we'll leave that mostly to questions. All I'll tell you is Coast Guard uniquely positioned there as a member of the Armed Forces, as a law enforcement agency, as a regulatory agency, a member of the Department of Homeland Security, member of the intelligence community, creates all types of connectivity for the Coast Guard in the world of cyber. Lastly, in the world of energy, tremendous changes in the world energy flows. United States is going to be a net exporter of liquefied natural gas in 2018. Just think about the implications of that to world trade patterns, to geopolitical balances that are based around energy relationships, and the Coast Guard is right in the middle of all that. Lastly, on our human capital strategy, like I said, it's all about recruiting, retaining, and developing that workforce of the future. And I can tell you that is gonna have to be gotten right and it's on our radar screen. Lastly, I'll talk about major recapitalization efforts underway in the Coast Guard, our largest recapitalization program ever. The OPC was awarded last year. We're also building national security cutters, fast response cutters, and a whole bunch of fixed-wing and rotary-wing aviation, too. So a lot going on in the Coast Guard, and I look forward to your questions. Great, well, thank you. Mr. LeBard. Brad, thank you. Winston Churchill once famous, we said that anyone can give a good one-hour speech, but it takes a man of genius to give a good five-minute speech. I am not a man of genius. I intend to speak for less than five minutes, so I'm gonna stick to a script, if you don't mind. The nation relies on government-owned and commercial U.S. flag ships crewed by American civilian mariners who volunteer to serve in war to move our war fighters, equipment, and supplies whenever and wherever they need to go. As of today, there are enough vessels to meet national security needs. But the fleet of large commercial vessels declined substantially. The international fleet has shrunk by a quarter since 2012. The U.S. merchant marine no longer employs enough qualified American mariners to sustain a full sea lift for our war fighters. There are three programs that support our merchant marine. We need all three and more. Even combined, they are not adequate for our sea lift needs. The Jones Act ensures a U.S. flag fleet in domestic trade, including large tankers that employ the qualified mariners we need. The Jones Act also supports a peacetime shipbuilding industry, so our shipyards and superbly trained workforce stay in business during wells and military shipbuilding. Two programs support the U.S. fleet of ships in international trade. The maritime security program, which many of the guests here today have participated in, directly supports 60 ships with military value. These are the first commercial ships that are called to the colors in a conflict. MSP and cargo preference sustain 81 ships, only 81 ships under the U.S. flag combined. These are the only two programs the U.S. government has to meet the legal requirement for a, quote, substantial, unquote, portion of our trade to be carried on the U.S. flag. Those 81 ships combined carried by revenue, I'm sorry, by volume, less than 2% of America's imports and exports, barely 4% by value. We rely primarily on the 97 large ships in the domestic fleet and the 81 international ships to employ enough mariners to activate and sustain a sea lift. And that activation includes bringing 1,300 qualified mariners off the beach, mariners who are employed in rotation in the commercial fleet, but are not sailing at any one time. We need 1,300 of them to be available within 96 hours to crew up our sea lift fleet and to activate the federal ships. MARAD, the maritime administration, is developing options for the new administration to address the mariner shortfalls. We are working closely with our Navy partners in the military sea lift command and with the U.S. transportation command. As the transportation commander, General McDew, noted in testimony last week, it is past time to recapitalize the 61 ships in the government-owned sea lift fleet. These ships average 39 years old and are increasingly difficult to keep in operation. Three-quarters of those ships are owned by the maritime administration. Looking ahead, transportation secretary Elaine Chao has directed the department's modes to focus on future technology challenges. MARAD will become more engaged in efforts to address commercial cyber vulnerabilities. Even if the military can be hardened against cyber attacks, the transportation and logistics system that supports our military breaks down if our commercial partners, maritime, aviation, and land get hacked. A second related challenge for the Department of Transportation is the safe operation of autonomous vehicles, drones, cars, trucks, and ships. There are those who say we will see fully autonomous ocean-going cargo vessels in a little over a decade. More conservative voices say it will take decades to develop the technology and international protocols. Either way, we have to start considering the implications of such a dramatic change. That's the thumbnail view of MARAD. Brad, I look forward to the questions. Very good, thank you very much. Thank you all. Let's start with readiness. If all of you could give me a thumbnail glimpse of where your service is now and what the impact of a full year continuing resolution would be. This is coming up, the debate is coming up within weeks. Congress needs to act or in some way. What would a full year CR mean to your services? Admiral, you wanna start off? Start with me, okay. Well, a full year CR for the Navy implies a lot of things, especially now that we've gone almost two thirds the way through the year. We spent the free cash that we have to do things like deploy and operate and do maintenance. So if we don't see a budget by the end of April, the end of this month, and we go into the full year CR, we're gonna have to defer a bunch of things. Principally, number one, you gotta pay people. Number two, you gotta keep bringing people into the Navy because people are retiring from the Navy, so those things are kinda you must do. You can slow down the number of people you bring into the Navy a little bit to make up for some of that, but every time you slow down a sessions, you create a bubble in your hydraulic system that will eventually reveal itself somewhere downstream that always is a negative impact to the force. If you don't have enough cash to put ship maintenance availabilities under contract, we'll have to slow that down significantly. We'll have to slow down steaming operations around the globe where we've got folks deployed today. We'll have to slow down flight operations in those same locations. We'll have to slow down training in our fleet replacement squadrons who are training new pilots to come into the fleet, which will mean potentially manning gaps in squadrons around the fleet. So there are huge impacts here to not having a budget at the end of this month. So the closer we get to that and the longer we spend our money approaching that, the steeper the cliff becomes as you go beyond April into May and into June. So the longer we wait for that budget to show, the harder it's gonna be on the fleet in the last quarter of the year. Admiral, you've described current readiness as the deployed forces are great, good to go, but if you had to back them up in a larger contingency, it would be difficult to support that team out there. What would the impact of CRB on that second wave? Or would it even affect the first wave forces? Most of the impacts on a year-long CR in 17 will show up in 19 because of deferred maintenance delays in training. We can live off of some of the readiness that we've accumulated over time, but you run out in about a year where you're really starting to feel it. Obviously the levels at which we can talk about here are pretty broad, but the impacts in 19 will really be felt, and that's why it's so difficult to talk to the American public about readiness impacts because you don't feel it right away, you feel it, you're writing checks, you can't cash down the road, and that's eventually gonna show up in a year, year and a half. Thank you. General? So for your CR, we will maintain our forces forward to your point, the ready bench, if that's what you wanna call it, that'll be affected. We view, and we're actually linked with the Navy because if they can't get some of their amphib ships into the yards and get them ready and pop out so we can train on them, that's training lost. And what a CR does really, a full year CR would do is it takes away training time. And once time has passed, you can't buy it back, you can't double down, you can't make a Marine train for 120 hours in a week because he lost 40 hours for the last two months. I mean, you just can't do that. It takes time to recover. I think the cumulative effects over time of CRs, particularly a year-long CR would be just as the vice said, we've experienced that when we got sequestered back in 2013. People say, well, we ain't gonna be testifying this, but we got sequestered, we got shut down, and we're seeing the range of effects started last year and this year. Well, how did that happen? Well, we didn't buy the spare parts and the spare parts take a couple of years to make. So the spare parts we should have been consuming in 16 and 17 should have been put on contract in 13 and 14, but they weren't because we're out of money. Like every other service, we do have to assess new Marines. We bring in 35,000 new Marines every year and get rid of 35,000, we're the youngest force. If you can't do that, or you get them through recruit training and there's no place to train them because you don't have the money to train them, then they're not ready when you need them on that bench to go forward. Rotational forces are a unique problem set to look at. The ones who are forward are going to be ready. And then what you'd really like is their replacements to be ready about three or four months before they deploy. That's perfect, then you'd like the force after that. That's the depth to dwell. If you have a one to three dwell force, you can manage it. If you have a one to two dwell force, it's very difficult to manage and a full year CR just further exacerbates it. And people forget that the world changes frequently now. We were seeing UAS threats in the Middle East right now that we had not seen last year, which meant we didn't program for it last year, which means if we have a CR this year, we can't use the money and counter the threat. And that's a challenge. Roger, thank you, Admiral. Well, we suffer from the same effects mentioned by my colleagues here, but Coast Guard was already pretty much skinny down here over the past few years anyway. We've been funded below the Budget Control Act levels for the past four years. Really took some hits during the sequestration time. I was giving an example. Our reserve force was skinning all the way down to the smallest size since the Korean War. And if we do have a major contingency, that concerns me greatly. That's just kind of symptomatic of where the Coast Guard stands here now. One other part I want to put out about this uncertainty that the Continuing Resolutions introduces for major capital acquisition programs, these create real problems. I'll give you an example. We are trying to get the initial construction money for our new heavy polar icebreaker, which is going to replace the Polar Star, which is the nation's only operating heavy icebreaker, over 40 years old. And we're just kind of keeping it together with Band-Aids and stuff like that. If we get a full year CR that throws into uncertainty, the recapitalization that fleets and they push us further out with this very old craft and the ability to recapitalize that. So nothing good comes from any of this stuff. Introduction of uncertainty, a lot of this stuff is avoidable if we could get the certainty so that we can plan for it. And it puts a small agency like the Coast Guard really into a bind. Echo what my colleagues here have said. From the sea lift side, certainty is a huge factor. When and how, for example, the vessel is going to be recapitalized. In the meantime, a couple of the big challenges that we have under Continuing Resolution, one is, and we all face this in different way shapes and forms, but for us, we're looking at, again, a fleet of sea lift ships at average 39 years old. By definition, the cost of maintaining those vessels will go up every year as those ships get older. Under Continue Resolution, your budget does not go up every year. And so readiness is affected. That's number one. Second issue we have ties also to the uncertainty is when and where can we get new construction? I've talked about the need to recapitalize the school ships, but for sea lift, we require, we rely almost entirely on the Federal Academy at King's Point and the Six State Maritime Academies for the officers that we need. Those State Maritime Academies in turn rely on federally owned training ships. The three largest schools each have challenges with their training ships. Two of them have training ships that are over 50 years old. The oldest is due to age out in December of 2019. And the third largest doesn't have a large training ship and needs to find a way to get one. Under Continue Resolution, you have no opportunity to try to get procurement for those kinds of vessels. So that's a second issue that we have. Okay, great. Interesting point, General, about the fact that enemy UASs, UAVs, unmanned aircraft, things that Pabius buy at the local store and then outfit to be deadly, it's these kinds of threats that actually are changing within our national ability to create a budget to deal with them. The cyber world as well, which a few of you have alluded to, is the same sort of thing. There are new techniques, new tactics, new doctrines evolving very, very quickly. Now, I know that everybody has plans to deal with this new area of warfare and for some time, of course, the naval services have always operated in the electromagnetic spectrum, but these days, things are moving so quickly and have such great, solid, lethal effects. I wonder if you could bring us up to date on where your service is on the networking side of things. You wanna start, I had to put you on the spot, Mr. Sabat, do you wanna talk about your side? Feel free to put me on the spot because I'll have less to say about this than anybody else. So, Department of Transportation, we look at the safety side and this is something that we're going forward in a lot of areas that's brand new. We've just cracked this on the aviation side coming up with standards for drones, which had to include cybersecurity. Going forward, we know we're gonna have to do more as we develop the safety standards and the department establishes safety standards for automobiles, for trucks and we're just wrapping our arms around the fact that we're gonna be having to look at the same thing for vessels, although that will be in terms of safety requirements, that will be an issue for our Coast Guard colleagues to be wrestling with. All right, so our comment just signed out our Coast Guard's first cyber strategy and has three basic lines of effort. Defend our networks, enable operations and lastly, protect critical infrastructure. Defending our networks is all about net-centric warfare, for lack of a better term, how we ensure that our systems are able to operate. I asked my operators out there, how many of you guys could do your job without networked IT and nobody anymore raises their hand and says they can't, they can do anything without networked IT. You gotta have that and it's gotta be reliable because it's a mission-centric platform. It's a mission-critical platform. Are you practicing without it? Are you practicing for when the network goes down? Yeah, so very interesting. So the Coast Guard network, we're part of the dode and the DoD information network but it's kind of grown up over time and we have all these stove-pipe systems that frankly weren't a much better, more cohesive architectural framework and we're actually working on that in conjunction with the rest of services in order to get that done. But I would like to get to that higher level of sophistication so that we can actually operate in a degraded or even denied type environment. I mean, if you're gonna rely on those mission-critical systems, they better be reliable under any type of circumstance. So those are the type of things we're gonna have to be able to get at because it's a dynamic world, just like you identified there. In enabling operations, huge opportunities for the Coast Guard there because they're a law enforcement agency, intelligence community agency, an armed force and a bunch of other things on how to actually make our operations better. And then the last piece I wanna bring up is kind of unique to the Coast Guard. We actually have the regulatory responsibility for the safety and security of the nation's maritime transportation system. Does that mean shipping, ports, waterways, all that type of stuff and there's huge role to cyber and cyber reliability out there for an industry that is international just in time, highly reliant on automation and all the things that come with, all the goodness that comes with automation but they got all these vulnerabilities too and how is a regulatory body to be able to get at that. Part of the way we've been trying to get at this entire set is to leverage our unique positioning within the federal government. So we've seeded folks throughout different critical parts of not only DOD but also other parts of the federal government. For example, for those of you who don't know, the J7 at US Cyber Command is a Coast Guard Admiral. The J6 of the Joint Staff is a Coast Guard Vice Admiral, the only Vice Admiral ever assigned outside the United States Coast Guard, at least in part because of this unique view of this problem set that we bring into the fight. So lots of opportunities there and lots of challenges in the world of cyber. Great, thank you. General. Like every other service, we are increasing our cyber footprint. We have a growth path every time I turn around. That growth path, that goal seems to extend farther out. The challenge is gonna be can we train them fast enough and get the capacity we need and all the capabilities because you're right, the capabilities required are gonna turn quickly. The great news is, and I was just up at Fort Meade visiting, we have great Marines up there doing cyber operations but there's not enough of them and probably end up having to build more. Our Marine Operating Concept and Force 2025, which is our view of the capabilities we'll need in the future, makes one fundamental change. It gets rid of our Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters group and changes into a Marine Information Group or cyber reside. And we have to push cyber capabilities down to a lower level because distributed operations in the future are gonna require it. To your point, if we can't guarantee it, then we have to be able to operate without it. And yes, we are trying those things. And I think a lot of how we train now and going in the future is gonna be critical that we do force on force. So that we get a thinking enemy with capabilities that we can get to those points and develop the techniques, the techniques and procedures to be successful in that environment. We ran a piece on Defense One recently. The headline was cyber war is now just war. So it is part and parcel of everything. Admiral. Yeah, I just add, I think we're all on the same boat here. A lot of discussion about competition around the globe. This is an area where competitions every single day the fights on, whether you're talking administrative cyber capability, whether you're talking battle management, C2, or you're talking tactical warfighting network capability. All of those areas are very, very important to how we operate the fleet in the future. So they take a lot of work, all the efforts that these gents talked about where we're arm in arm with them to try to both have the authorities to defend and to be able to use those networks and the electromagnetic spectrum writ large. But also how to use it to advance our capabilities in the future, which we obviously can't talk about here, but it's an important part of our strategy. Right, but I think one thing that we have talked about and we can talk about is the need whatever we do in developing new standards, it's both for us and for our commercial partners, it's the importance of exercising and practicing in a great environment. We used to say, we're gonna go to war the way that we practice. And we saw a little over a year ago, there was a commercial airline that had and it may not have even been a hacking incident, but a failure of its reservation system. They had a plane in place of how to do it manually. They didn't have to, but they didn't exercise it regularly. And so they discovered that they were dispatching aircraft at about 10% of what their normal capability would be. That's not a system that would serve us well in wartime. Yeah, you know, this advancement in cyber and networks and information is really a blessing and a curse. We were, Second Sea Lord and I were talking last night about this particular topic in that the strength of mariners for years and Marines to include it to be part of this were that we knew how to go over the horizon. Yeah, I know you're a general and I'm an admiral and we'll get along. But we, you know, the strength that we had for years was to be able to go over the horizon and operate. We knew what commander's intent was. We knew how to, what our missions were and we were able to do it, whether we had comms or not. For the last couple of decades at least, we've seen explosion of information available, bandwidth available and we've operated that way and trained that way. Now we're finding ourselves training in the other direction because arguably those things won't be there in a big fight. And so how do we continue to train our young Marines and sailors how to operate in that environment? It's a tough problem. The good news is, for Admiral Moran and I, he probably couldn't have trained us that way 35 years ago. But the young people coming to the service now, they're savvy on this. So finding it, I find it very refreshing that some of these young folks coming in are very well aware of the capabilities out there. So it's not a stretch to get them to train this way, but you have to, but also to your point. And I got the airline 10% piece. There's another component, the American public has got to be willing to pay more for their ticket to maintain that capability to go without the reservation system because that's what really is. Yep. Let's talk ships for a little bit. Everybody wants more ships, obviously. We need the sea lift, we need the ice breakers, amphibs and all the big Navy ships. Admiral, you've said that should the Navy be granted the plus up that the Navy argues that it needs, the first priority would be to get destroyers and subs and carriers. Can you talk about why that's the priority and not say the amphibs that your Marine colleagues might want? Well, when we looked at how we could accelerate our shipbuilding program, we looked at what's working, what's going really well that we could rubber stamp and keep moving at higher numbers. Where are the yards have capacity to build those ships? And then also what are our national priorities? Our national priority is to replace the Ohio class submarine. We have to get that capability. We're already starting into that program. We have to keep it on pace, because those wonderful submarines run out of life here at 42 years at the end of the next decade. So it's a really important piece of our shipbuilding program. SSNs, the forecast in the future is for us to get down lower than we've ever been in a very long time. So they're a priority and we know how to build Virginia class submarines really well. And at a price point that we think we can afford to keep building. Clearly we want to, if we're going to grow the force and get to a 12th carrier again, we're going to have to move the centers from five to four and perhaps even tighter than that. So that's going to put a strain on our shipbuild, our public yards, because that's where we do that work. And then clearly destroyers that's a DDG 51 program is a good program. We continue to build solid ships out of that industry and amphibs as well. It's not like it's an either or. It's just those are our priorities. And then we've got to look at our logistics capabilities. Very old ships that if we don't start investing in our ability to bring new capability, new ships in our logistics force, it's going to cause problems down the road. Not you. I generally want to make the case for more amphibs. Yeah, absolutely. I have a secretary of Navy and chief of staff or chief of naval operations said 52 is what we need on a daily day basis. So we're on pretty solid ground to get there. Very enough. Unless he wants to say 53 today. Aviation. The Marine Corps now has a brand new aviation plan going forward, both for procurement and for maintenance and for logistics. One of the centerpiece, obviously, is the F-35. And you've talked about needing F-35 carriers and the whole new ways of doing your business that that will make possible. Can you talk a little bit about that and the current wear on the hornets and the carriers? Yeah, so I mean, it's not real rocket science. I hate to say it that way. But the legacy hornet has been a wonderful aircraft for us. And it's served three or four decades worth of value. But back when we designed that, it was really the second aircraft that was built out of plastic. It wasn't built out of metal. And the engineers knew a lot when they built that aircraft on how to build a fiberglass aircraft that would last what we asked them to build it for, 6,000 hours. So they did. They built one. If you compare and contrast that to older aircraft that were built out of metal without the engineering and the vibratory environment, the load environment, well-known back when we built those aircraft, we over-engineered them. And then when we needed to extend their life, we found it easy. We just put some more metal on there. We made them stronger. The metal are just new. And we could get more life out of them on an aircraft like the F-18, A through Ds. We built a 6,000-hour aircraft. Then we got to the point where another new program in place and quantities needed more life out of it. And you found out it got very, very expensive. And you set a goal, a stretch goal. If you think about it, getting 9,000 or 10,000 hours out or something was designed for 6,000 hours, you would expect that to be expensive. And it is. So the proper way to get out of any old iron, if you will, is to buy new iron. But we need the budgets to do that. So we're getting out as quick as we can. And the Navy's hopefully will get their E's and F's on track. And maybe some legacy can come our way. We're working on that. But it forces you to change the aviation plan periodically to stand down squatters that you just don't have the aircraft to man up. So that's the position we're in right now. So General Walter raises a very good point about for most of our recapitalization issues, I like the phrase old iron, replacing it with new iron. Your earlier question was on the sea lifts. You talked about the sea lift side as well as the Navy ships, the warships and the amphibs. We have the reverse problem for sea lift. The laws it's currently written requires any recapitalization of the sea lift fleet to be done US-built ships. There are not anywhere close to an adequate number of old US-built ships that you could bring into the sea lift fleet. So from our perspective, we want to recapitalize the sea lift fleet. We have the opposite problem, which is right now the law would require us to get new metal. When in fact right now, if you look at the global market for ships, this is the right time to be buying old metal and converting those ships in the US shipyards to meet our sea lift requirements. Interesting. You mentioned the F-35, the Navy's EFs. The president has famously said that the F-35 program is too expensive. He said that he's working with Lockheed to get the price down, but he also suggested that Boeing might want to pitch its advanced Super Hornet, and so Boeing is doing so. How does the Navy view all of this? Well, the Navy's been pretty clear. Our program of record for a long time has been a carrier air wing that has a mix of Super Hornets and F-35 Charlie's. And that mix is two into two squadrons of each to make up the air wing. So we, of course, like the Marine Corps, would love to have seen the F-35 sooner than we have. But the fact is it wasn't ready in time for that transition. So we've had to buy more Super Hornets to replace the ones that we're using up. Again, just like our ships, we're eating up the fatigue life on our airplanes faster than we had programmed, given the last 15, 16 years of conflict. And that has taken its toll on the age of those airplanes. Not the calendar age, but the fatigue life age of those airplanes. So we are very much sticking to our program of record. We want to get to a 2 plus 2 mix. But it's taking us longer than we had hoped to get there because of the amount of life we've expended on these airplanes and delays in the programs to get there. And to General Walter's point, we have not had the budgets to support buying new metal for the last several years because of other competing factors. All right. Admiral, you mentioned UAS program. I know that the Coast Guard has released an RFP for UAS to operate from some of the new cutters. What's the concept there? I believe the Coast Guard's tried out the Scan Eagle, tried out the Firescout. Want something a little different? Well, I think we want different ideas and still kicking the tires on our small UAS that we want for the larger deployment. So that's what you're seeing out there. We're still kicking the tires as to what's available out there in the market on small UAS. I think actually the more interesting thread on UAS is what our commandant kind of walked out at the last state of the Coast Guard address, where he said that there is an appetite in the Coast Guard for advancing our land-based UAS capability. If you're not aware right now, we're essentially in a partnership with Customs and Border Protection on a Predator B program. They call Guard In. We have been for a number of years. But I think the commandant is interested. I think we've kind of learned the lessons from that program. And he's interested in actually expanding into land-based UAS. Now we've got to find budget headroom in order to do that. And I've got a bunch of other competing recapitalization priorities. But I think the Coast Guard is finding that the land-based UAS, with the long dwell times, their additional payload capacity and things like that would be a nice complement to the smaller shipborne systems. Shipborne systems are nice because you can take them with you. But they're penalized because you have to launch them and recover them from a ship compared to a land-based UAS. So I think we're ultimately at the end of the day we're going to get down to a mix of the both of those type of platforms to fulfill our mission sets. But we're very interested in both of those and the capabilities they bring into the fight. And again, all that's got to reside on reliable networked IT and all that backbone that we talked about before. Right. All right, let's widen the aperture a little bit and look at the whole world. Admiral, you like to talk about how we're dealing with a world of increased complexity, a more complicated world. Competitors are growing more sophisticated. Their reach is growing. Their weapons are getting better. When you look out over the world at large, what concerns you most about our enemies and potential enemies? Well, I think there's a lot of reason to be concerned about the combination of what we call the 4 plus 1 potential adversaries that are out there, right? They all come at it from a different vantage point. We have to be ready for any one of them at any point in time. And we're constantly engaged in the terrorist fight that we're in, supporting, enabling both our Marine brothers and sisters on the ground, but also all of our other forces. So it's really the size of the Navy that concerns us right now, because we are wearing out a small Navy fast. I mean, it was, I mentioned it at testimonies a month and a half ago. They were the smallest Navy we've been in 99 years. That seems to have just kind of passed a lot of folks and not really thought about it. But the Army can talk about their size, the Coast Guard's their size, the Marine Corps their size. We're all getting smaller in a more challenging, more complex world to the point you raised earlier, Brad. I think, technologically, some of our adversaries are moving faster than we are. CNO talks about this quite a bit in terms of we've got to pick up our pace to how we design, build, and acquire capabilities if we're going to outpace the adversary. If there's one thing or two things that we've always had an advantage of as a service, it's been our technological prowess and our people. I have no doubt that our people continue to be an asymmetric advantage that we'll always take advantage of. But on the technological side, folks are catching up to us when we talk about air to air, air to surface, air to ground, capabilities. Those ranges are getting pushed out. I used the analogy a couple of weeks ago about how college basketball has changed from going from no arc to having a three-point arc to now you've got Steph Curry shooting from half-court and being pretty good at it. We need a few Steph Currys in our inventory here. And that's what we have to design into this. If we're going to extend the reach of a smaller navy, you've got to distribute it wider and you've got to be able to communicate and operate from that distributed position. So those are the technologies that we're going after. How do you extend the reach of the air wing, the carrier strike group, the amphibious strike groups? All of that has got to work in an environment where the enemy's got potentially more reach than they've ever had. I know that the new aviation plan calls for a distributed concept of operations, which would seem to be the same sort of thing, extending the reach of the Marine Corps. The more problems you give a potential adversary, the more he has to think, the more he has to think, the less certain he will be and the more advantage will come your way. Distributed operations is a way to go. And we're going to need advanced basing. Look, gone are the times where we have large formations of people, American servicemen, Army and Air Force, split around a globe. We don't have access to those anymore. It's becoming, in my opinion, more of a maritime problem set if you look at where we're concentrated on. The maritime problem set means you need a larger navy. You need the ability to get advanced bases established to be distributed. You need to give the adversary a complicated solution set to include the weapons that we have in there, long range fires, taking things that you would normally consider standard conventional capabilities. And you have to give them more options, make it so it's not just ground to ground. It's ground to sea. It's ground to air. And that's where we see some growth. A lot of people come in and brief me about all these great little capabilities that they have right now that are actually game changers and these wonderful technologies. But I also challenge ourselves that, or I challenge them when they brief me on it, and say, how do you defeat it? Because if we don't develop a capability that, in parallel, develop the ability to defeat it on the assumption that our enemies will have something like it in the future, then we're behind the power curve, then we'll just reach parity. We don't want parity. We want to be in an unfair fight to our advantage. I just want to make that clear. Admiral, how do you use the world of threats? Your busts are up, but that means the flows are up. The transnational groups are acting more like networks at network speed. Southcom has talked a lot about the need to react at network speed. What's the Coast Guard doing? Yeah, so a lot going on. We deal with the whole world of threats, but since you brought up kind of the counter network operations for transnational criminal organizations in the Western Hemisphere. Concerns me a lot. Columbia and cocaine production is up, I think, 238% over the past three years. Our common eye just flew down and met with President Santos of Columbia to express our concerns regarding eradication efforts in Columbia, and the message was received there by President Santos. But all that, Columbia is the main supplier of cocaine to the United States. For those of you who don't know, cocaine only comes from three countries on earth, Peru, Bolivia, and Columbia. Columbia is our supplier, and unfortunately we are the, and remain the largest consumer of cocaine on planet earth, and those poor countries that happen to geographically exist between the nation of Columbia and the United States are really put through the ringer, and that includes Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, some of the most violent countries on the face of the earth who are subjected to this trade that works its way across the hemisphere and rots states from the inside out. So lots of concerns there from my perspective on the production side, but just like you mentioned, increasing sophistication of the traffickers. Folks know that traffickers now can operate fully submersible and semi-submersible vessels. That should scare the heck out of everybody because that type of craft, the level of sophistication prior to these narco-traffickers getting hold of the technology and the money in order to do it, only nation states would have been able to do stuff like that. But you have these TCOs that are actually in some ways even more sophisticated than the nation states that operate in the hemisphere. Completely ruthless. They'll use whatever tactics are necessary, corruption, murder, whatever, in order to kind of rot the state from the inside out, and that mountain of Colombian cocaine production is of great concern to the Coast Guard. So while we get better and better at our game, they get better and better at their game every single day. And while we've got to go through budget hearings and sequestration and CRs, they just put the cash on the table and they can buy whatever technology is available out there without any type of spin cycle or anything else. So very nimble and very worthy adversary. All right. Want to add your view? Sure. Well, first I'll start out with one thing that doesn't worry me. So for Sea Lift, since the country was founded, we relied on a model, we rely on a commercial merchant marine and volunteer civilian mariners to crew those vessels whenever we've needed them, whether those vessels were federally owned or commercial. That model has served us well in the past. And as long as we continue to have enough qualified mariners employed, I believe it will continue to serve us in the future. The challenge is to ensure that we have enough mariners. At the height of the Second Gulf War and the War in Afghanistan, we had a little over 100 vessels were mobilized for Sea Lift and we had in rotation about 10,000 qualified mariners, mariners with unlimited tonnage or unlimited horsepower credentials. Today, we only have 11,000 mariners with those credentials who are actively employed. So we have enough to activate but not to sustain a long-term Sea Lift. We'd like to have by the model that we use about 14,000. So for me, the first challenge that I look at is how do we increase the size of the US flag fleet so that we're employing about 14,000 unlimited tonnage or unlimited horsepower mariners. Two ways to do that. One is an expansion of a program like the Maritime Security Program, bringing in vessels not just for the military value but also because they employ the mariners that we need. There's ways to do that but they cost money and that competes with every other federal and potentially every other military program that also has needs. A second item and one where we don't know where the administration is going but on trade policy. So Congress members, Hunter and Garamendi have a bill that would require a certain percentage of energy of LNG and oil exports to go on US flag ships. Adding US flag ships adds to the mariner pool. That's a good thing. If you look at the trade between the United States and China, the bilateral trade, that employs about the equivalent of about 400 ships a year. So if a quarter of that trade was to go on US flag bottoms, you've solved our marriage shortfall. You've more than doubled the size of the international US flag fleet. Now that trips over a whole lot of international trade laws and regulations and agreements. Don't know that the administration wants to go that way but that's another way of tackling that problem. But then the second issue and one that my uniform counterparts have touched upon is the changing nature of warfare. Since World War II, every one of our war plans for sea lift has been able to assume no attrition which is a polite bloodless way of saying that we know that we will dominate the seas and that our commercial vessels will get through. In the conflicts of the future, I don't think we can guarantee that. And so we need to have a model and we're going to have to have the capacity of both in vessels and in mariners to address the fact that in future conflicts, we may suffer losses. Thank you. All right, we're about ready to open it up to the floor for questions, so get those ready. Let me ask one more question of you gentlemen. On the topic of uncertainty, we've got budgetary uncertainty, we've got technological uncertainty, we've got the uncertainty of what our enemies and adversaries may do. We've also got this global environment that is changing. It is warming. There are more dangerous storms. Admiral Michel, you described what happens when the ice pack recedes, you get cruise ships and other vessels showing up where they never did before. There are those in the new administration who deny that climate change is happening. The military has been very clear that it is happening, is taking steps to react to this and to mitigate its effects on our ability to do what we do. Can you talk a little bit about what your services are doing new this year that perhaps you didn't do in the past? Yeah, sure. This Admiral or that Admiral? I'd go ahead, you, you Admiral. You have two choices. Admiral Michel. Well, I can't talk specifically about climate change worldwide, not all that, but I'll just take like up in the Arctic as a Coast Guardsman, there's a lot more water up there than there is ice, and particularly during the summer seasons, and that allows people to engage in resource exploitation, engage in things like the cruise ships that we talked about before, and all that's of concern to the Coast Guard. But there's also a number of impacts to our citizenry up there. So there's a village called Shish Mareff. There was just a CNN piece done last week on them, and these folks are gonna have to decide whether they want to leave their village and their heritage there to move somewhere else because the sea ice is receded, so the storms come in and they rode the island away. So there's a bunch of different things happening up in the Arctic and as a Coast Guardsman, that increase in human activity and the dynamics that come with more water than ice create demand signals for the Coast Guard, whether it's for search and rescue, marine environmental protection, fisheries work, all that type of stuff. By the way, I just mentioned one piece up in the Arctic. There's such a change up there. We actually established an Arctic Coast Guard Forum. It's a woman like in existence on planet Earth. It's got all the Arctic nations, including the Russians, and our comment was just last week in Boston, meeting with the Russians, Norwegians, everybody else up there to work on issues of the Coast Guard concern, like search and rescue, marine environmental protection, the other issues that I mentioned there, and very much of a peaceful type format. So we're actually hopeful that up in the Arctic, this can be, we've talked about global competition. This can actually be a realm where we can work together peacefully and cooperatively, and I think all our nations would benefit from that, and I think the Arctic Coast Guard Forum is an example of how that can be done. All right, thank you. We're increasing our cold weather training. Okay. Yeah. Out in Norway. That ought to be a really clear signal right there. So I say two things. One is the Arctic is on everybody's scope right now because of the amount of water space that opens up today as compared to 20 years ago, and much like other parts of the globe where territorial claims may be made that could create friction, we'd much rather see it go the way that the animal just described, but we have to be prepared that it doesn't. So we are as well concerned about are we trained to go up in that area like we used to be, which is arguably we are not. The other piece is just purely from an infrastructure standpoint. I mean, everybody knows the Navy's got waterfront property everywhere, and so if the tidal surge does occur over time, that has impacts on piers and infrastructure because all of our bases are at sea level. So we have to really pay attention to the impacts on infrastructure over time as well. All right, so let us turn to the floor. There are folks walking around with microphones. If you'll raise your hand, we'll get one to you. Again, please introduce yourself and please phrase your statement in the form of a question. Good morning, I'm John Wortman with the American Association of Geographers. My question is for Admiral Michelle. Sir, the commandant has spoken out this year about the need for budget certainty, perhaps by somehow getting the Coast Guard outside of the non-defense discretionary part of the federal budget. Your House authorizing chairman Duncan Hunter has sent a letter to the administration proposing that the Coast Guard be moved into DOD. So can you talk about what you view as what will happen in the next several months or year and perhaps the future outlook for where the Coast Guard should sit? Yeah, so it's been a perennial discussion in the Coast Guard where the appropriate organizational placement of the Coast Guard is, and it's been there ever since I've been in the service and it's because we're a multi-mission agency. All the missions arguably fit into various different parts of the government. So we actually began life in the Treasury Department if you can believe that from 1790 until 1967 when we became member of Department of Transportation. Now we're a member of the Department of Homeland Security and we've also been members of the Department of Defense, actually a specialized service in the Navy during World War I and World War II and some other things. So perennial discussion on placement of the Coast Guard, here's what I'll say, and this is what our commandant has said too, is that the right place for the Coast Guard is in the Department of Homeland Security. We get tremendous benefit from being there and our secretary, Secretary John Kelly, couldn't ask for a better secretary, completely supportive of the United States Coast Guard and not only that, he is working with the Coast Guard and the other components to actually work at a higher level of unity of effort and sophistication than we've ever been before. So the Coast Guard works regularly with the other parts of Homeland Security, CBP, TSA, ICE, FEMA, everybody else in there. At a level of sophistication we've never been able to operate at before. There are still challenges there because it's kind of a difficult department to get its arms around, but Department of Homeland Security is where we need to be right now and I think we're gonna remain that way in the future, but I guess we'll see what the future holds. On the budget side of the house, Commandant did talk about our existence in non-defense discretionary. It's the only member of the Armed Force that is in non-defense discretionary because of our organizational placement. I don't think our Commandant is advocating that somehow we'd be placed in defense discretionary, but he is making the observation that it's the only member of the Armed Force that is in non-defense discretionary and from a budgetary standpoint that creates different pushes and pulls. Ultimately, I think at the end of the day we'll manage it, but part of it I appreciate you raising the question is raising this issue of this unusual placement of a member of the Armed Forces in non-defense discretionary. Just getting your arms around that, bringing that to light so that people don't do things just out of ignorance because they don't understand the way the budget is done. That's been where the task is, so I think that's the Commandant in my view on where we are for organizational placement, but it's gonna be a perennial discussion. It's been there ever since I was a cadet at the Coast Guard Academy and probably all the way back when Alexander Hamilton founded the Department in 1790. Well, I'll just add a Department of Transportation note on the organizational aspect. So in 2002, as Homeland Security was being stood up, Department of Transportation lost two major organizations over to DHS. One was TSA and the other was the Coast Guard. No one in the Department of Transportation regrets losing TSA. Every single day we miss the Coast Guard. Well, thanks. All right, thank you. You're well-liked. They love us. All right, who's next? Yes, I'm Kurt Hamill. I'm a retired US Navy. I work for Esri now. I wanted to extend the discussion about unmanned systems into the surface, unmanned surface, unmanned submerged vehicles in view of their affordability and their extent into their operating environment. Last fall, the Royal Navy hosted a unmanned warrior exercise. Very successful and showed the integration and how that information could be integrated in the operations. US Navy is gonna do something similar here this summer, first of June in the Gulf of Mexico. I'd just like to hear some discussion about unmanned surface vehicles, unmanned undersea vehicles, and their appetite in the future force structure. Yeah, I'll start. Certainly very interested in what unmanned offers across all the domains in terms of duration and persistence. I think that's the huge value. And then, of course, cost over time if they're unmanned should have an impact. What we also need to do is figure out how to reduce the amount of manning that's required to operate that unmanned vessel in the future. So spent a lot of time on that. But there's no question that in terms of a platform that can carry payloads of sensors, potentially someday in weapon systems, those are all on the table to help, General Walters brought up this notion of the more distributed you are, the more targets that the potential adversary has to worry about. They imagine what this, with those sorts of capabilities would do if we could put them out there in numbers to complement the manned platforms that we have in the Navy today. So we are actively pursuing on the surface, below the surface. And of course, you know about our unmanned aerial system programs. Yeah, for the Marine Corps, it's a, it's replete in all of our operating concepts right now. We are not touching the underwater part that's completely yours. But the, in a war in the future, the first American capability through a door should not be a US Marine with a flak best on if we have an alternative to that. And there are lots of exciting technologies out there. Personally, I think there's so many of them that getting through them and figuring out which one is best and which one fits into our operating concepts. That'll be the challenge in the futures is how do we get down to what's the best value and what's the one thing that's gonna advance our capability on the battlefield. And I don't think it's gonna be one. I think it's gonna be a multitude. And then how do we, where do we put it? I think we've already settled on that it's gonna be the squad level in the Marine Corps. Whether it's this big or this big, we'll have to see. But unmanned is here to stay both in the air and on the ground. All right, great. I think for our surface and subsurface has all been done with the Navy. So whatever they're doing, we obviously monitor all that. And then most of our organic effort has been on the aerial systems I talked about before. I'm a visioning underwater cargo. Please share that vision, right? All right, who's next? Hi, Hope Sec with military.com. I wanted to follow up on the concept of lightning carriers that was in the Marine Corps aviation plan. Seems like something that will require coordination between the Marine Corps and the Navy. So I was hoping both sides could address that. What's the way forward to make that a reality? Will that require a reconfiguration of the ARG, possibly? And just how will these lighter carriers differ from the CVNs of today? Go ahead, brother. You want to start with that one? So I've seen some briefs on the lightning carrier. I would put it kind of in the category of concept right now and we welcome all concepts and we want to explore them but we have no requirement yet. Doesn't mean we won't have one in the future. But we have a fleet of amphibious, ships right now, we're putting capabilities on there and there are options on those amphibious ships to configure them differently depending on the mission. It's always been that way. We've always task organized our ARGs and our MUSE to the question in the room on whether that should be a CVN or not. That's not a realizable, in my opinion, goal for an extended period of time. So we have some time to think about it and get it right. Yeah, I would just add that we know how to build and operate nuclear aircraft carriers of the 90 to 100,000 ton class. Nobody in the world can compete against us in that class. So we're gonna continue to build and operate in that off that platform. And I think the other thing we know how to do is build amphibious warships and we know how to operate together with the Marine Corps off those ships. And so today, if we're looking at stability and capability and effects, then I think we're better off doing what we have and making sure that we can continue to make what we have better while we continue to explore the concepts that General Walters just brought up. Next question. Sydney Friedberg from Breaking Defense. Speaking of concepts, this is a question really for General Walters and Admiral Moran. So the right half of the panel can relax. A lot of mentions of distributed operations, of spreading the force out and smaller but still connected elements to present more problems to an adversary. A lot of talk at many forms of multi-domain operations where you're not only distributed but you're integrated sort of vertically from undersea to surface to EM spectrum to space. And I think the adm will touch on this. This requires regaining some traditional naval virtues of initiative, of independence as opposed to someone sitting in a command post or a CIC micromanaging everyone from long range. What's the difficulty not just technically but culturally getting this vision realized? And if you realize it, what's the advantage? What's the gain in warfighting capability? Well, I think your question is can we do it and how do we do it culturally? If you look at the last 15 years of conflict, we've kind of been doing that at least on the marine side. We did not operate on forward edge of the battle areas. We didn't have large formation of troops. We, if you look at when I was in Afghanistan, we had some 124 forward operating bases under junior officers throughout. Now they had connectivity back to headquarters but their operational concepts and employment were down at the lower level. This is just an extension of that. So I would propose that it's already in our culture and that we have wonderfully trained young leaders, both staff NCOs, NCOs and officers that were capable of doing distributed operations. And if you give them the right mission type order against their own counterparts, I think they will be successful. Yeah, I would just add, I think the culture shift that has to happen here is not on the part of our young sailors and marines. They want this more than anybody. It's us old folks up here that need to learn how to let them go off and operate autonomously with enough commander's intent and direction and guidance and then allow them to do their job. They're gonna be great. I think in the last 15 years of combat, you look at what this service has done on the ground in some pretty tough places. They've had to operate in that environment. You look at our submarine ops around the world. They are operating in that environment every day. I think the culture is there, but we can't allow technology to replace that culture. It was the point I was making earlier. Technology should augment it, should benefit it, should give our commanders at sea and in forward operating bases around the globe information that they can use to do their job, but not as it is perceived and often practiced, an opportunity for higher level authorities to be looking for information almost instantaneously when the need is really what's happening on the ground at sea in the forward operating areas. All right. Go ahead, Anthony. We'll go to the next one. We'll go to the next question. Glenn Wright, World Maritime University. Admiral Mitchell, you'd mentioned the Arctic. The bottoms are unsurveyed, our charts are blank. There are no aids to navigation there, and GPS is low to the horizon, so it's unreliable. What is the Coast Guard strategy for handling increased traffic in the Arctic under those circumstances? Yeah, that's just symptomatic of that increased human activity. I think just a tiny fraction of that entire Arctic Ocean has been mapped to modern standards yet there are ships operating through there, whether it's Northwest Passage, Northern Sea Route, so on and so forth. No real aids navigation, your communications, your navigation are right at the edge, if not over the edge, an incredibly challenging environment to operate on. And oh, by the way, if you have a problem up there, guess where your nearest search and rescue asset is or something environmental pollution? So just kind of on the navigation side of the house, we have been studying the Arctic navigation patterns and for example, we have a port access route study which deals with the routing for shipping in the American side of the Bering Strait and we're also working with the Russians, believe it or not, on a traffic separation scheme for up there in the Bering Strait to make sure that we're doing everything possible to keep the shipping separated. But ultimately at the end of the day, how do you put in that type of a sophisticated navigation communications network? I can tell you it's incredibly expensive. Anything that's done up in the Arctic has to be survivable from the weather conditions which are absolutely atrocious even during the summer. I mean, just terrible things, very remote locations, very difficult to get sustained anywhere where you're gonna get your power from all these other types of things. I mean, it's a vexing problem set. And like I said, 10 years ago, you probably wouldn't have heard this from me because I would say, oh, it's a frozen wasteland, you know, there's gonna be some people up there riding around on a sled or something like that. But now you actually have the opportunity, not only the opportunity, but the reality of real navigation activities and real mineral resource activities. And from a Coast Guard perspective, those investments are gonna have to be critical. Same thing with developing your permanent infrastructure up there. Right now the Coast Guard is in format that we call mobile and seasonal. So that means mostly ships, maybe a temporary forward operating base. We have not figured out exactly what investments we wanna make up there. So it's a great question because we've got bits and pieces of it, but how we're gonna be able to pull that together and make it work not only for the US, but understand if you're going through Northern Sea Route or Northwest Passage, it also involves Canada and Russia. So how are we gonna get them involved in that as well? That is an active discussion as the Arctic Coast Guard Forum. Exactly what you identified, sir. All right, I think that brings us almost to the end of our session here. They're flashing the please wrap up message on our monitors. Gentlemen, anything you wanna add to this? We've had, I thought, a very good discussion. Lots of points of uncertainty, lots of points of complexity in our evolving world. Anything you wanna leave the audience with? I'll close with, in spite of all the difficult challenges associated with the uncertain budget environment, the size of our forces, the complexity of the globe, the competition that exists, I think our collective insurance policy is the partnerships that we have together. I look around the room and see a lot of partner nations here represented in the maritime environment, and I think if there's anything we need to continue to pay is that insurance policy. We have got to stay close. We've gotta continue to operate, train together, and make it as easy as possible for us to work in an environment that we all know how to operate in, and to be able to deliver the effects that we want as freedom loving countries around the globe. So I'm just delighted to see so many here today, and you have our commitment to continue to operate in that fashion that collectively we can, we can overcome the challenges that just the United States is seeing here in the near term. This too will end at some point and we'll move on from the budget uncertainty that we're in, but for the time being, this partnership we have with all of you is the most important thing we value. So thank you for being here. All right. I agree with all the partnership and I won't deem to be able to state it any more succinctly, but I can also tell you this, that of the less than 1% of the American population serving the military right now, we're getting the best, the very best, and that'll be our center of gravity, always has been, and always will be. All right, on the partnership piece as well, and I just wanna say that despite the fact we've got a lot of challenges and we tend to focus on the challenges, I'm incredibly optimistic for our organization, the Coast Guard. We are perfectly placed to provide national security, border security, and economic security, and we have the best Coast Guard men and women in my entire career, bar none, and they're on target track and doing the nation's business, so I'm incredibly optimistic. And he could do that so much better in the Department of Transportation, I'm gonna say it. I'll just leave you with, America has a very well founded principle of relying on our civilian commercial merchant marine to meet our sea lift needs. We have two major tensions right now, one is the need to recapitalize our federal ships. There's a great opportunity to do that given where the worldwide market is, we should take advantage of that, and secondly, we need to renew that commitment to the US mariners by making the necessary policy decisions to ensure that our US flag fleet is large enough in terms of both ships but also the mariner base to meet our sea lift needs going forward. Okay, thank you. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you for everybody who's been watching the live stream on Defense One. Admiral, General Admiral, and Mr. Sabat, thank you so much. Can we please have a round of applause for the panelists and thank you for joining us. Well, it wouldn't be any event were it not for a little token of appreciation to our panel members. And so this morning, the national president, Mr. Skip Witonsky will be providing a hacking free journal on behalf of the Navy League in which they can write down their campaign plans, write songs or poems, doodle little pictures, whatever you might want. So Admiral Ryan, thank you very much. General Walters, thank you so much. Admiral Michelle, we really appreciate you being here this morning. Thank you, Mr. Sabat. So appreciate all of your hard work this morning. And Mr. Peniston, thank you as well. We'd like to thank our two star sponsors, BAE Systems, BW, XT, Orbital, ATK, and our four star sponsors, Huntington Ingalls, Lockheed Martin, and Northward Grumman for their financial support to make this wonderful panel possible. Up next in Potomac Sea next door is the interoperability and distributed operations at 1030. We hope to see you back in here at 12.15 for our keynote speaker, Admiral Paul Zunkoff to the commandant of the Coast Guard. Tickets can be purchased at registration for the lunch or any of the paid events. Thank you so much and enjoy the expo.