 All right, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here today, and thank you for those of you who are calling in over the phone from home or whatever your quarantine location is. I want to start by giving just a brief update on some of our latest efforts in the fight against COVID-19. As you know, we saw personnel currently deployed in hospitals in New York City, Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and other cities. After more than three weeks, the US NS Comfort will be leaving New York City, although I do not have an updated date of departure for you today. This is a sure sign of modest progress in mitigating the virus in the nation's hardest city and is a welcome sign. While in New York City and other locations, local officials indicate that the rate of infections and hospitalizations is declining, we are aware that there are other cities where that is not the case. Therefore, Northcom is still taking action to ensure that DOD personnel and resources are deployed in the proper locations to do the most good. As of today, we have more than 60,000 personnel deployed nationwide, including 4,400 medical professionals on the front lines. Although we're still on the front lines of the current coronavirus fight, we are also looking into the future. Your military continues to train, sail, fight, and fly around the globe. But like many Americans, we're eager to fully resume normal operations and are putting plans in place for that transition. To reach that normal operational status, we will be evaluating many different areas. One is training, which you've heard a good bit about in the last week or so. How are we protecting our trainees and how are we keeping the pipeline full? So we're continuing to look at that, continuing to adopt and adapt so that we can pursue full training classes in the future. Secondly, we're looking at the stop movement order and when that will be lifted. Right now it has been extended until June 30th. But once it is lifted, and the Secretary is re-evaluating that every 15 days, how are we going to deal with the backlog of individuals that need to move throughout the world? It's a complex issue. Transcoms has the lead on it, but it's something we're looking at. With our strategic forces, looking at how we're going to continue to protect those forces, I think we've seen some great leadership from STRATCOM on this topic of keeping those forces protected and able to operate. But we're going to take lessons learned from this and how we operate those forces going forward. You've heard a lot about testing. We're continuing to develop our testing capabilities and pursue lab trials and clinical vaccines. We're going to be doing that for months and months going forward as we ensure that we have the capability and we have the capacity and the stockpiles needed for testing our forces. Next, Ellen Lord is taking a hard look at our industrial base. So we're taking a look at how those industrial-based companies, how their suppliers are operating, how to ensure that in any type of pandemic or any type of crisis, global crisis, our vendors, our contractors, our suppliers are still able to provide equipment. And then secondly, we're looking at how do we help our vendors for some of these crucial pandemic products, the PPE, how they're able to develop their capacity and grow that capacity and how we can help them with that. As I mentioned, our stockpiles, we're looking at what our stockpiles need to be. So we came into this crisis with a healthy defense pandemic stockpile in place. We've used a good deal of that in giving part of that stockpile to HHS and FEMA to pass on to the states that need it, 20 million masks and additional PPE ventilators. We're looking at what do we need to do to not only rebuild that stockpile to where we have sufficient supplies for our own use, but where our stockpile needs to be for a future pandemic or future crisis for the department. And then additionally, just ensuring that we have the capability and that our vendors and suppliers can provide that. And then last, but we're looking at allies and partners. So what we can do to be helping our allies and partners around the world is they're dealing with this crisis and as we ramp up our production of PPE or as we ramp up our ability to assist, how can we be the best partner we can be for allies and partners around the world? So next, I know everyone will ask. So later today, Secretary Esper will meet with the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gilday, to discuss the results of the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Burke's investigation into the circumstances surrounding the COVID outbreak on the Teddy Roosevelt. I spoke with the Secretary about this yesterday and his position remains the same. He's going into this with an open mind and he is generally inclined to support Navy leadership in their decisions, but he will go into it with an open mind and we will, once he's briefed, we will see where that takes us. I expect that after the briefing takes place that we will be able to get you guys an update on what the investigation's conclusions were. But right now we are focused, continue to be focused on getting the TR crew back to good health and back out to sea. So with that, I will take questions. We'll start here, start on the phone. I think we got Bob. Yes, thank you. Good morning, Bob Burns here. On that meeting between Secretary Esper and Admiral Gilday, did you say, did I hear you say it's this afternoon? And also he mentioned the comfort leaving New York. Is it going to return to Norfolk? Or is it going to do another coronavirus related mission? So on the meeting right now, I think I said it's later today. I don't have a time to share, but it will be later today. So as soon as that concludes, and I have some guidance from Secretary and from the Navy, we will try to get you guys some more information. On the comfort, we expect the comfort will be heading back to Norfolk, where it will go through kind of the normal post-deployment cycle where we will restock it. It will be just prepared for the next deployment. We have said from the start, when General Friedrichs and I were up here, it seems like months ago, talking about this and with the comfort and the mercy both, we wanted to be very careful with our deployment of those assets because we wanted to ensure that they are mobile, they can be used somewhere else. So our goal along has been to use them in New York as needed and then when the need no longer exists to prepare them to move to the next location. We'll be looking to FEMA to identify where that next location is. They are the federal government's lead on this and so they're the ones who will be tasking us with where they believe a 1000 bed hospital ship with over 1000 medical providers is most needed on the East Coast or Gulf Coast. So we'll be looking to them for that, but we'll have an update on the timing of that in the coming days. All right. Just a quick follow-up. You say it is returning to Norfolk, but it also was gonna do another mission? We're gonna look to FEMA on that. We're gonna return it to Norfolk and prepare it for another mission, but that will be FEMA's call. So one of the great benefits of the comfort is that it is at sea and that it's mobile and we can take it to a port city and set up shop. One of the drawbacks is that it needs to be on the water. So that limits the number of cities that it can be deployed to. So if there's an outbreak in Kansas City, probably not going to Kansas City. So we'll look to FEMA as to where it's gonna go and for guidance on whether that there's that demand signal for us to send in. Because if we look back to the comfort and the mercy there was a very strong demand signal from the governors and mayors about having those assets be deployed. And then as we saw them deployed, you saw the use of them change from an initial trauma hospital to help take the weight off of the local hospitals to a low acuity COVID hospital to basically the frontline hospital for COVID patients or one of the frontline hospital for COVID patients. Fortunately, we saw that the demand over time diminished and therefore we're able to see them, governor and the mayor have indicated that they no longer believe that they need that resource and we appreciate them returning it to our stockpile so that we can look to use it elsewhere. All right, go to the room. So as you guys start to test more and more troops who are asymptomatic, who is gonna be tracking that at the point of the test and how are you gonna release that information? So we have a better view of who's symptomatic and who's not symptomatic in these numbers we're getting. So that's gonna be a DHS is, sorry, DHA is gonna have the lead on our testing efforts. And so we've been building out the program. They'll be working with the services, obviously, as the owners for some of the military personnel and tracking that information. And so part of this is learning about who has the virus so that we can obviously protect the force and part of it is taking efforts to conduct science and learn more about the virus itself. So a secretary set up here before, what we've learned from the TR is very informative, the number, the high number of asymptomatic cases. And so we'll continue to see that as we go forward. But the goal right now in our testing is we wanna get that, those tier one, obviously tiers zero, people who show symptoms, people who may have been exposed, we're gonna test them as quickly as we can. But we wanna get to a place where we can test our tier one, tier two, and tier three assets. So those are the strategic ones, those are engaged forces overseas and then our forward deployed forces. And then working to a place where we have enough testing capability to test the rest of the force as needed. And you plan to release that spread of asymptomatic versus symptomatic so we kind of know what we're really looking at with the numbers? I don't think there's, I haven't seen any conversation about that. But on the flip side, I haven't seen any conversation about not releasing that. I believe that that would be information that we've been cooperating very closely with state, local, and federal health officials on information that we glean from our testing efforts as the whole of government effort and show of transparency and effort to get to a solution for this. The same type of transparency we're asking for other countries and other governments. We're taking the lead on that. And so I expect we'll continue to do so. Okay. All right, we'll go back to the phones. Lara Siegelman. Hey, Johnston, thanks for doing this. I'm just wondering if there's anything you can tell that the USS Kidd has a significant outbreak on board. How many sailors have it? When was this outbreak first known? And at what point does it have to ever turn to shore to upload it to sailors? So I think the Navy will have some more information on this later today. I think they're going through some notification procedures right now with the Hill and some others. But I can confirm that there has been a sailor on the USS Kidd who had symptoms, was a medivac off of the ship to a hospital in San Antonio, sorry, medical treatment facility in San Antonio where he was tested and was unfortunately found to be positive with COVID. As a result, the Navy has, using lessons learned from other cases, they have flowed a medical evaluation team, the specialized medical evaluation team onto the Kidd. I think it's an eight person team that is conducting testing on the ship. There have been other positive cases. I don't have the number, but I think the Navy will be able to give that information later. They are preparing to return to port where they will undertake efforts to clean the ship. They will remove a portion of the crew from the ship and work to get everybody back to health and get the ship back to sea. But that medical crew on the ship right now has been conducting contact tracing, has been working to isolate individuals they believe may have been exposed and take measures to protect the crew. Any follow-ups, Laura? Yeah, when do you expect they will need to go into port and where will they be docking and how long, is there an estimate of how long that they will have to be there? No, those are good questions for the Navy. I don't have the answers for those right now, but I believe the Navy will be able to provide some more details a little bit later today. All right, there. Okay, thank you. Okay, follow-ups. Earlier you were talking about some of the steps the Pentagon is taking for returning to normal. We've heard various senior defense leaders this week talk about a new abnormal and planning long-term for what impact has this virus had on the way the military operates. I was just wondering if you could provide a few examples, like for example, a number of contracts have been vetted for cloth masks, like millions of cloth masks. How long do you think that the military will have to wear cloth masks? And is this really a permanent change of the way we do things? So when I said normal, I think I said the new normal, I think is the indication of what it would be, is that there are gonna be changes to how we operate. I think what you've seen to some extent for the near term at least, things like deployments, where we're gonna take an additional maybe time to screen people on the front end or the back end, where troops are going or sailors are going on the ships, we're taking time to maybe quarantine them as a group prior to putting them at sea and then test them to make sure that they're not contagious. That may continue for a little while. I think there'll probably be some other practices that'll happen. Some of the social distancing practices may exist for a little while in terms of maybe shaking hands with everybody you meet really isn't the most hygienic thing that people should be doing. And so you may see one of those practices take place. I don't have any guidance on whether masks are here to stay. I think that'll be something our medical providers will look at, as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of science going on behind this. We've got the teams up at Fort Detrick and we've got other teams that are looking into this along with the whole of government CDC. So we'll be looking to their examples and the guidance from that whole of government approach and that whole of science approach to get some guidance on what we shouldn't be doing and what things are here to stay and what things we can go back to normal with. And then just a follow up since the decision has been made on the comfort, how are people looking at the mercy? Will the mercy redeploy to San Diego? So with the comfort, that was at the request of the governor and the mayor have indicated. So from our perspective, we look to state and locals and we're providing the resources through FEMA that are requested. And that's what we've been doing from the start of this. And so I'm not familiar right at this point with any determination by Governor Newsom or the mayor of Los Angeles that they do not believe they need the mercy. I will say though that the mercy, some of the crew, the mercy is actually in New York right now and they have been helping in New York in hospitals there and as well, I think they've been actually off the ship helping in some facilities in the city of Los Angeles as opposed to on the ship. So we've kind of gone from that model we originally anticipated of, the need for beds to the need for doctors and so we've moved the doctors to different places. So don't have a timeline on that. I would expect it at some point, obviously that will happen whether that's this week or next week or in a couple of weeks, I don't know the answer to that. Okay. All right, we'll go back to the phone. I will call on Carla Bab. I've been, thank you for doing this. I just have a quick follow on the USS Kidd. Are there concerns of the Pentagon that this could be another Teddy Roosevelt situation? And then I will ask my actual question. Well, I will count that as an actual question as well. So I think the good news is that because of the fact that we have seen outbreaks on some of our naval vessels in the past, there are lessons learned. I think that there is a high level of attention to the issue from the Navy. I think that they have procedures in place and they've activated them. So within 24 hours of the first person who was symptomatic on the ship, they had a medical team on that ship doing a detailed analysis and contact tracing and testing of members of the crew. They've already put in place an effort to get the ship back to port quickly and to continue with the cleaning isolation of members and getting crew members off that ship if necessary. So I think that the Navy has lessons learned from prior experience with the COVID crisis and they have been quickly applying those to this case. So your fingers crossed, the Navy is doing everything they can right now and we're gonna hope for the best outcome but we're gonna take all the prudent steps that they possibly can. All right, so now to your second question. Okay, and oh, thank you. And then to my question about Chinese disinformation, we've seen a lot of repetition and regurgitation of these fake stories from China that are trying to pin the origination of the virus to the US military. There was something about Fort Dietrich. There was something about Hawaii. There was something about Army people in Wuhan, US Army people in Wuhan. What is the US military doing now to stop this repetition of this fake news that's coming out of China? And do you believe that China is taking a page out of Russia's disinformation playbook? I don't know if it's a playbook that Russia owns on its own. I think the Chinese have, the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party have used some of these measures in the past and we've seen them. From the Department of Defense, we've been focused on confronting the crisis. I think we've been very direct in calling out what we see as misinformation. And our hope is that the Chinese government and the Communist Party would see this as an opportunity to work with the world and to come to agreement to where sharing of information, I think this is the information that they have shared on the genesis of the virus, the initial cases, the initial positives has been lacking. I think that's been something that not only the United States but other governments have been clear on and that that information is vital to countering the COVID outbreak and information that would have been helpful in a more timely manner. So we're optimistic that we'll see that this has been an opportunity for them to be more transparent that they probably need to reexamine the process on that. They have had a much more aggressive effort in pushing propaganda and misinformation, whether it's anonymous misinformation as we've seen from some reporting or just their open use of Twitter and Facebook by their foreign ministry and military personnel to attack other governments, not just the US but countries around the world. It's unfortunate, but I think the benefit of this is that a number of other countries around the world and another of our allies and countries that we would like to be better partners with are opening their eyes up to this and that they're seeing that possibly that China's promises and efforts and are not what they're all cracked up to be and that there's a lot of misinformation out there and that people need to look more closely at what China's doing. Okay, back to the room. Mike. Do you have the numbers on how many patients were actually treated on the hospital ships and does DOD, because the numbers are considered relatively small or definitely not a capacity, does DOD assess the use as a good use of resources of these not, it's not inexpensive to use these ships? I don't have, I don't believe I have the comfort and mercy numbers on me right now but I can definitely get this from Northcom. You're correct, the numbers were, you know for a thousand bed hospital ship which we had reconfigured for 500 for COVID, the numbers we were not at capacity at no point were we at capacity on the mercy of the comfort. I think that they did treat a fair number of patients over the three weeks that they've been up in New York and that is a value. I think we have said all along that people have learned where this crisis was gonna go. We've seen the numbers and prediction models change as social distancing took place and if you look at a city like New York the expectations were far worse situation than what we've seen. Having our forces and having our people forward deployed with that capability and not needing it was far better than not having them there and needing it. So I don't think there's been any second guessing the deployment of the comfort of the mercy. All right, we'll go to the phone again. We will go talk to Courtney Cubie. All right, we'll go to Louie Martinez. You're in this briefing. I have a question about the USS Kidd. Do you know if that vessel had had any ports of call recently that or any other possibilities as to how this may have gotten aboard the ship if it's been at sea for a couple of months. I don't have that information right now. I would refer you to the Navy. I think they'll have some more information a little bit later today on this. It's a newly developing issue. I'm certain that all of that will be looked at as we move forward, but I don't have that information for you right now. Louie. And if I could follow up on the USS Roosevelt with the idea now that some of the flowback of sailors onto the ship has been stopped because some of the symphonetics are now presenting symptoms. What's the timeline now for getting that ship back and is the idea now that you have to wait until everybody is fully healthy before everyone can get back on the ship? I would first start with the fact that the Teddy Roosevelt, if needed, could pull up anchor tomorrow and head out to sea in performance mission. So that's remained throughout, is that we've had a small number of symptomatic sailors that required treatment. We had unfortunately the one loss of life for a sailor from the TR, but a very small number have been hospitalized. I think they're now the latest numbers they're four in the hospital, hopefully getting better daily, but that ship could pull up anchor and go to war right now if we needed it to. The timeline has shifted as we've seen some additional symptomatic patients show up or asymptomatic patients show up as positive, but that's out of caution. I mean, this is a learning environment. This is not something we've had to deal with. I think the hope from the Navy's perspective from the department's perspective is we would rather take a little bit more time on the front end to get to a place where we have more confidence that the crew is safe and that the virus is no longer on the ship than being in a position a month from now where we're dealing with a second wave. And so they're taking their time. They're relying on the doctors. They're relying on the testing. We've ramped up our ability to do testing in Guam so that we can get a larger number of tests on each day and rapidly. And we've seen that. We've gone through the entire crew has been tested and we'll start to see additional people tested as we put people back on the ship. All right, stay on the phone lines. Paul Hanley, AFP. Hi, Jonathan, a couple weeks ago the Chinese deployed their carrier bounding. We sit at the semi-circle around Taiwan and it seemed to step up activities in the South China Sea confrontation with the Vietnamese vessels and more exploration for oil. Does the Pentagon see this as taking advantage of the absence of the Roosevelt so it may be distraction by the virus, by the U.S. and what actions are you taking? Was it extending the U.S. to America, the South China Sea, a kind of response to the... Well, I would challenge the premise of the question there a little bit. China's been very active in the South China Sea for years, whether it is increasingly aggressive activity in international waters or even in the littoral waters of neighboring countries. The recent ramming of a Vietnamese fishing vessel as the Vietnamese have claimed, the building of island fortresses with runways and deploying aircraft and vessels into that area. I would argue they've had a pretty busy schedule for some time in terms of their efforts to militarize the South China Sea. Whether they're taking advantage of a crisis, a global crisis for which they were on the front end of, I won't say that. I think that they are continuing with their destabilizing activities that we have seen for many years. We were in Thailand and Vietnam last fall, I think in September. In every meeting we had with our partners in the region, whether it was Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, all of the countries that were there, Japan, Korea, they all had a very similar message of this is the type of behavior we see from China every day. And the U.S. has been working with our partners to take a lead and standing up to that behavior and ensuring that China knows that that behavior is not necessary and encouraging China to choose a different path. The international global system that has been in place since World War II has been highly beneficial in terms of raising the wealth and living standards of billions of people around the world, including hundreds and hundreds of millions of people in China, and we wanna see that international order remain. But China has continued to challenge it. They wanna reorder it. But we've increasingly seen people in the region push back and we will continue to do so. I don't believe that the fact that the TR is currently in port right now has really had an impact on that. We have additional vessels in the area. We've recently conducted a fan-up through the Taiwan Strait with another vessel. So I think our commitment to the region has been constant and is very visible for the Chinese government. All right, Paula, what do you think that over the time the U.S. operation and representation over in the South China Sea have actually had an impact on China's activities to expand its operations there? So your question is, have our military operations in the South China Sea changed their behavior? Yes, pretty much so. I think the operating assumption would have to be that they would likely be more aggressive in their efforts to expand their geographic and naval presence in the region if we weren't there. I also think that the other important aspect is for our partners and allies in the region to see that we are committed. So whether it's an effort to deploy vessels in a direct show to the Chinese as much as it is to let our partners and allies know that we're there to encourage them to do similar things. And we've seen European countries and Asian countries step up on foreign navigation operations that the U.S. has the lead on. We encourage that and we believe that that's incredibly helpful for maintaining that global order that's been in existence since the end of World War II. All right, we'll do a couple more and then I've got to go. So we'll go to Ellen Milheiser. Any personnel who have been sent to the comfort from the Mercy, could you tell me if they're going to go back to the Mercy once the comfort leaves New York City? So they haven't necessarily been sent to the comfort, they've been sent to New York City. So they've been working either, and I can get you the exact locations that whether they've been working on the comfort or working in the hospitals in New York, but they've been deployed in the region. So that's one of the things we're looking at right now is to whether those forces would stay up there or whether the demand signal is lessened enough that they can return to LA. But we haven't, I don't believe we've made a decision on that. All right, we'll go. Last question to Travis Tritton. Hi, Jonathan, thanks. The administration has suggested timelines for reopening the country and the government. I'm just wondering when do you expect some personnel will begin returning to the Pentagon building? Could that happen in mid-May? And what will that look like? And the second part of the question, the flip side of that is the teleworking. We've heard that a lot of these current telework arrangements could remain post-pandemic. Is there any more clarity now on the scope of that or the number of the personnel? Should most employees expect to be working at least part-time from home from now on? Thank you. So that's part of the planning that's taking place right now. So I know WHS, and Tom Muir has been taking a look at that as well as Dana Deasy with our CIO's office. I think he briefed either late last week or this earlier this week on the numbers. I think we've seen a massive increase in the number of people teleworking. I think some of our, I think DLA had 90% of their people were teleworking. We have almost a million people who are teleworking around the country. Do I expect that there will be changes? As I talked about at the beginning, I think that we're looking at a new normal. What does that look like? And have we, people have been advocating for telework for many years. I think that you would see that there's probably gonna be, technology-wise, we've got more resources in place, whether it's bandwidth, whether it's the equipment to do it. So we're in a better place if we need to continue to do telework. But we're gonna look at that. I think that there is, the Pentagon is open for business now. We've got reporters in here today. We've got staff that are in here. Everybody's being careful about distancing. I think we'll open it probably in a very incremental manner, similar to the way that we started to limit activities in the building to ensure that we can maintain some of these best practices that we've seen develop over the last few months. So we'll work on getting you guys a briefing from Tom Muir and the team at WHS on what we're gonna be doing when we get to that place. I don't think we're there yet where we've made a decision on the timeline. But as we get closer, we'll get you guys a briefing. And then I said last question, but I'm gonna take that back and go back to the phones for Tony Capaccio. I missed you on here, Tony. All right, well, I was probably gonna regret letting him ask a question anyway. So I guess this works out. So, all right guys, thank you for coming in. Have a good weekend and stay safe.