 strategy is chaired by our 31st Chief of Naval Operations and Navy League National Vice President Admiral John Richardson. With your support, we are confident that the Center will quickly establish itself as the most influential maritime thought leadership organization in, yes, in the world. These two big changes will serve as force multipliers for the Navy League's ability to influence and support all those connected to the maritime domain, which happens to be every person on Earth. We have an exciting three days lined up for you. We would now like to kick off Sea Air Space with some opening remarks by the Under Secretary of the Navy, the Honorable Meredith Berger. The Honorable Meredith Berger assumed the responsibilities of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for energy, installations, and environment on July 28th of 2021 and has been performing the duties as Under Secretary of the Navy since August of 2021. She is responsible for providing oversight and policy for Navy and Marine Corps energy and climate resilience, infrastructure sustainment, restoration, modernization, military construction, acquisition, utilization, and disposal of real property and facilities, environmental protection, planning, restoration, and natural resource conservation, and safety and occupational health. Berger has served in a variety of policy and senior leadership positions in both federal and state government and private sector. Before her nomination, Ms. Berger was a senior manager for the Defending Democracy Project at Microsoft Corporation. Please welcome the Honorable Meredith Berger Under Secretary of the Navy to our stage. Good morning, everyone. What a great response. I am so glad to be here with you today as we begin CR Space 2022. Thank you to the Navy League for convening us in this forum and for all that you do. For more than a century, you've advocated to strengthen our sea services, you've given strength to those who serve, and you've strengthened the bond between those who protect our nation and the people of the nation that they protect. At the Department of Navy, we do the same. We focus on the strength of the Navy and the Marine Corps, our naval services. Secretary Del Toro is concentrating the Department of the Navy's actions on three enduring priorities to ensure that every single thing that we do builds up these powerful forces and the unique advantage that they bring to bear. These enduring priorities are strengthening our maritime dominance, empowering our people, and strengthening our partnerships. These enduring priorities are well-aligned and fully support the National Defense Strategy. These priorities are integrated deterrents, campaigning forward, and building upon our enduring advantages. Likewise, the Chief of Naval Operations NAVP plan and the Commodore of the Marine Corps force design 2030, complement Secretary Del Toro's enduring priorities, and guide and strengthen our Navy and Marine Corps team. We focus our strength in the context of a dynamic security environment. We face increasing global threats from coercive and malign actors whose actions threaten peace, stability, and rules-based order. Russia poses an acute threat, and we are actively collaborating with our NATO allies and partners to reinforce robust deterrents in the face of Russian aggression. China has expanded and modernized nearly every aspect of the People's Liberation Army to include an exponential expansion of their maritime capabilities and capacity. We also militarized islands in the South China Sea and have drastically increased their incursions in the maritime environment to normalize provocative behavior. In addition to the threats these actors present, we face the climate crisis, an existential threat, and operational driver for our sea services. More than 90 percent of trade and 95 percent of international communication cables span or cross the seabed. The value of forward naval forces cannot be overstated. They provide a combat credible presence, ensuring critical waterways remain open. Our forward deployed and strategic forces signal formidable strength to our allies and deter our adversaries. The security and prosperity of our nation depends on our sea services. The unique capabilities that the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard bring in order to maintain our advantage at sea. Last week, we delivered a budget request that prioritizes the resources necessary to operate and build a lethal, integrated, forward maneuverable naval force capable of preserving freedom of navigation, deterring aggression, and defending our nation and our way of life. I anticipate the service chiefs will spend some time on that topic in their upcoming discussion. I'd like to talk to you today about how we resource and operate in the security environment I just discussed through our enduring priorities. And I'm going to address them a little out of order. Because our people come first is empowering our people. Our people are the foundational strength of the Department of the Navy. We focus each day in every investment on building and sustaining a strong, diverse, healthy force, ready at all times, and focused on war fighting and leadership at every level. We're focused on producing more capable, more accountable sailors and marines while increasing our ability to attract and retain the most talented individuals across the force. Next, I'll address our other two enduring priorities as they really come to the forefront environments like this one. Strengthening our maritime dominance and strengthening our partnerships. The sea services build towards integrated, all-domain power to contribute to the joint force. Together they bring unique capabilities to the table to demonstrate our military presence and uphold rules-based international order. We work together to promote peace, stability, and prosperity in our oceans through joint and combined military campaigns, conducting missions, freedom of navigation operations, and routine transit. Our Coast Guard reinforces homeland defense through marine safety and environmental protection, security along our ports, waterways and coasts, and law enforcement. Our Navy and Marine Corps provide warfare capabilities that demonstrate our ability to deliver, lethality, and carry out our priorities. And as Admiral Schultz has noted, the Coast Guard provides multi-mission and intelligence capabilities to complement the lethality of the Navy and Marine Corps. The Navy is committed to building a modernized naval force, operating forward with sufficient capability, size, and mix to deter and defend prioritizing readiness to provide integrated, lethal, and survivable forces. The Marine Corps, uniquely responsible for crisis response under Title X, are implementing force design 2030. The Commandant's initiatives include modernization efforts to optimize the Marine Corps for the demands of naval expeditionary warfare and enabling our Marines to be the nation's stand-in force, able to both deter and act inside an adversary's operating area. And the areas in which we are operating are changing. Our installations are reading critical junctures requiring substantial recapitalization and repair. Forces are essential shore platforms from which our naval forces train, deploy, and maintain forward presence. We're finding that the information ecosystem, cyberspace, and a changing climate define our threats and frame our fight, and that resilience is a critical part of readiness. Over the Department of Navy, information dominance, cybersecurity, and climate action are critical components of the way that we act and operate. And I'd like to spend a moment in particular on climate as it is one that's particularly impactful for our sea services. What we are seeing firsthand is that climate change increases in stability and demands on our forces while simultaneously impacting our capacity to respond to those demands. For this reason, for the Navy and Marine Corps, climate readiness is mission readiness. Mitigation and adaptation to increase our resilience is an operational imperative. It strengthens our maritime dominance by creating the optimal environment for our naval forces to deter, defend, and if necessary, fight and win. The climate crisis does not discriminate by borders or laws. We are all seeing how heat, hurricanes, typhoons, monsoons, drought, fires, and abnormal weather patterns bring cascading effects to our way of life. When we operate in a climate-informed way, we fulfill objectives in support of our homeland defense and our global security. As we strengthen our maritime dominance, the partnership among our sea services protect our interests at home and abroad. In fact, we can't do any of these things without partnerships, which brings me to the last enduring priority that I'd like to spend some time on with all of you today. According to which everyone, every entity represented here today contributes, strengthening partnerships. Our partnerships across the government, industry, communities, and our global allies provide an unmatched and irreplaceable advantage. We work hard to sustain and expand that advantage through integration, communication, and collaboration. There's one exercise that I participated in recently, which reflects the urgency of our current threat environment in all its forms and applies to our sea services directly. Just a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in ice exercise 2022, camping for a night at the U.S. Navy's ice camp queenfish, and embarked overnight on a submarine, the USS Illinois. The coordination, planning, and execution of ice x involved representatives from four nations and more than 200 participants across a variety of disciplines over the course of five weeks of operations. Ice camp queenfish was built on an ice flow, a sheet of ice in the Arctic. It was a temporary ice camp with a near zero footprint made up of a command center, a sleeping tent, a galley tent, and a 2,500 foot ice runway for the forces there built in just a few days. In a place where temperatures can drop to 60 or 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, I was able to go from a mobile command center on a drifting piece of ice built by marines, Navy seabees, and Navy civilians to a nuclear-powered submarine surfaced just a short distance away. After a few weeks of, excuse me, a few weeks after participating in this exercise, I came back and hosted our sea services for a half a day forum on the Arctic. Together we talked about the platforms, submarines and cutters, and the capabilities, science informed decision making, and cold weather ready forces and resources that will help us to operate effectively and collectively in this environment. None of this becomes reality without the partnerships represented in this forum today. Our international allies skilled in readiness in this demanding environment and our industry partners skilled in meeting our requirements. With the climate crisis, the needs in this region are becoming more urgent and apparent. Often called the canary in the coal mine for climate, the Arctic is warming faster than any other place on earth. New opportunities for commerce come with an increasingly navigable Arctic, but that also presents challenges with increased competition. As maritime traffic increases in the Arctic waters, we will work with our partners to project strength and keep the region safe and secure. As we continue to take action to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis, we will cultivate solutions in partnership with the best and brightest to ensure our operational success and maintain our competitive edge. This is why it's important for us to come together at events like sea or space. Our ability to work together is a key factor in maintaining our collective superiority in all domains. Today we get to hear from our maritime service chiefs, Admiral Gilday, General Berger, and Admiral Schultz. Last August, these leaders talked about the tri-service maritime strategy, the importance of people, preparing leaders for the future, and how industry can assist the services. They took your questions about competition, conflict and crisis, investments, industry, and agility. Open and transparent dialogue like this is an important avenue to find out what matters. Together, we identify obstacles and barriers, propose solutions, and jump-start solutions. It is a continued effort to ensure that we are making the right investments today so that we have the right capabilities for the challenges of tomorrow. We look forward to hearing from our sea service chiefs about their experiences with putting their respective components together to build the right mix of capabilities that we need for our force. Thank you for taking the time to have these important discussions and for bringing your knowledge and experience to this forum. I look forward to seeing what we accomplish together to strengthen our sea services during this year's Sea Airspace Symposium. Thank you. All right. And without further ado, I am so pleased to be able to introduce our sea service chiefs and hear what they have to tell us. Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to welcome to the floor the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Day, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Carl Schultz, and moderating today's panel will be Vice President of Multimedia Solutions, Fed Scoop, Mr. Francis Rose. Gentlemen, welcome to all of you. Please have a seat, gentlemen. It's great to see people anywhere in person at this point in time. Thank you all for coming. I see a lot of familiar faces in the audience, and I see just a lot of people that have a lot of questions. And so we will get underway in just a moment, and we will have an opportunity for all of you folks to talk to my colleagues on the panel. We'll begin, gentlemen, with a few opening remarks from each of you. We'll start with General Berger, Admiral Gilday, Admiral Schultz, and then I've written down a few things I'd like to discuss. Commandant Berger. Sir, first thanks for the Navy Leagues organizing this event. Not easy, I'm sure, coming out of COVID to assemble a crowd like this and pull it off. They did so. I'm really grateful that the three of us have a chance to chat with the folks that we work with every week. We were down, several of us, in fact, all of us were down in Tampa on Friday for change of command and retirement for General McKinsey, and a couple of us were talking about the volume of documents and information that's come out in the last two or three weeks. It's never even paced, in other words, in the last couple weeks, the combination of a national defense strategy, national or the global posture review, nuclear posture review, and a budget all in a few weeks' time, struck a couple of us as that's a lot of information. We work on, of course, those things for six months, so it's none of it is new to us, but if I were on the receiving end of all that, trying to stitch that together in a short span of time. But I think a couple of takeaways from my perspective, although it all seemed to be released all at the same time, of course, it was developed in parallel. For us, the reason I bring that up is I think it is very clear to me that this is a strategy driven budget, that you can draw connecting files between the last national defense strategy and this current one and the budget that supports them, that it is thread-informed strategy driven budget. Working backwards, in other words, is helpful or forwards either way. For us, this is our third year of a long-term effort of force design in the Marine Corps. Look through the lens of this strategy and the previous strategy, I should inform those who are wondering what is the basis for it and where are we going? It's all apparent, I think if you lay it all out on a table and look at it all in one whole picture. A couple of things I would say to add. Last year we published a talent management plan that's a parallel plan to force design and this year we'll do one for training and education. All of them, those three put together, is the cardinal direction for the Marine Corps. All that said, I'll just finish up before the C&O takes over. There is a scope and a scale to that change in the Marine Corps, but probably worthwhile also thinking about what will not change. I think my fault sometimes for not explaining the things that will not change. The core, the ethos, our expeditionary role as a naval service, the level of discipline, the combined arms and Marine Air Ground Task Force sort of approach to warfare that we have and maneuver warfare is our underpinning kind of doctrine. All those things don't change. But we have to match the cardinal, the character of warfare changes that are happening. So I look forward to the questions. It's a great venue and I'm really happy to be up here with my partners here. Commandant, thank you very much. Chief? Thanks, sir. I'd like to thank the Navy League as we begin this session this morning. This looks like a full house standing remotely. It's good to see everybody back here in person. This is a great opportunity for the three of us to talk about where we're headed as a maritime force. I think it's worth pointing out up front because I know that we're going to talk about our proposed budgets and what has influenced our thinking with respect to how they were constructed. It's easy in some do take a look at those budgets in and of themselves for a particular fiscal year. And I think with respect for the Navy, I think you have to go back seven or eight years and take a look at the journey that we've been on with respect to understanding how we would not only compete or campaign, but also deter and potentially fight a near peer competitor, which is a significant change from what we did after the fall of the wall for the period of almost two decades. And so the Navy's journey with distributed maritime operations really began with the understanding that we were going to fight as a fleet under, above and on the sea. And that would be driven by a fleet commander and not just whether it's an amphibious ready group or a carrier strike group. So it was thinking about how we would operate across the physical domains, across the virtual domains, and perhaps even transnationally against a given peer, peer competitor. So that journey has influenced us because I would argue in order to resource a fleet, you have to understand how you're going to use the fleet, how you're going to fight the fleet. And so that journey has been incredibly important for us in terms of looking at ourselves and understanding how we're going to both, how we're going to operate a train and then potentially fight. I think as you take a look at our budget proposals, they are consistent as the Commandant said with the strategic guidance that the Secretary of Defense has given us in the NDS it's about to drop. And I just make three points about that. I think first it's important to think about the pacing threat. He's been clear it's China. And so given everything that's going on in the world right now in Europe, I think the three of us would still say keep your eye on China. The second is his talk about deterrence. And I think what that bulls down to is fielding and investing in a combat credible force that can deter. And then his last point really is about campaigning or how the means by which you exercise that joint force on a day to day basis to deter using that combat credible force. And so I think if you take a look at the investments that we're making and the force that we are fielding in this decade, during this fit up of the next five years. And then if you think about with respect to the three of us, the transition period between let's say 2028 and 2032, whether it's laws or whether it is unmanned, whether it's DDGX. Those transitions we're making to a force design that'll really we hope come alive in the 2030s for all of us. And so again, this is an evolutionary process for all of us. I think our budget proposals and what we're fielding reflect that. I look forward to the questions and answers today as we get deeper into this so they're able to peel back into the specifics. Sir, thank you very much. Welcome. Coming down Schultz. Yeah, Francis, thank you. And I just want to echo the CNO and the CMC's words to the Navy League. I think there's 1,800 plus folks here eight months after we did this last time and 2,500 young men and women students here for STEM yesterday. So this is a great opportunity. About 15 months ago, the CNO, the CMC and I signed out Advantage and See the Tri-Service Maritime Strategy. And I think we found the Coast Guard linked in here with the naval forces unlike never before. The timing with the 22 budget penned a couple weeks ago by the President, 23 budget on the hill on the 28th, I think is very opportune. From a Coast Guard perspective, almost four years ago when my leadership team sort of took over, we talked about a Coast Guard that was ready, relevant, responsive. And we've been on a readiness narrative incessantly for the last four years. I think the last few budget cycles, I think that narrative is being heard. We're a Coast Guard that has unprecedented demand on our services both domestically and internationally globally. And I maybe just split the world into those two genres a bit just to chat about domestically. We all know about 95% of all the goods commodities in this nation come by sea. We've seen the supply chain pressures here in the past year. It's about 30 million jobs tied to the waterfront, the maritime industry, about $5.5 trillion of annual economic activity. So we are busy at home. We're busy building out a cyber force to ride the backbone of the Dotmill domain with our DoD colleagues. And really, that regulatory function here, as we think through cyber and the shipping industry, the vulnerability of the ports. You look just at LALB, Los Angeles Long Beach. 40% of the goods in this nation come through that one port. So cyber protection is critically important there. Sort of going to the away game and increasingly global Coast Guard across the world, I don't think we've ever been in higher demand with the numbered fleet commanders. We've got new vessels operating in the Indo-Pacific. We've sailed national security cutters over there for Phil Davidson now. Admiral Aquilina on an increasing basis. And when we send a ship there, it is under the tactical control of the fleet commander. We're excited burgeoning opportunities in the Arctic. I think recent world events even put more clarity on the criticality Arctic when you can run commercial cargoes out of Shanghai, up across the northern sea route and knock off 11, 12, 13 days versus Sue as that will be an attractive option in the future. And the largest territory holder for the Arctic is Russia. And they've got a fleet of multi-dozen ice breakers. We've got a 45-year-old heavy breaker, a medium breaker. We're building new ships. There's a good emerging story there. But we have not been under higher demand, I think, in my 39 years in the Coast Guard. So very excited to be here today. We're in our most prolific shipbuilding period since the Second World War. So we're going to finish up the last two national security cutters. We're going to award a phase two on OPCs and take delivery of that ship year and a half or so down the road, probably splash the first hull of the Argus here sometime this calendar year. Going to award a contract for waterways commerce cutters. We've funded through 64 fast response cutters. The Congress just put two more in the $22 budget for us. And a lot of good things going on with aviation. So, France, the risk of being long, I would just tell you, very excited about working with the Commandant, the CNO, here under the umbrella of the Tri-Service Strategy, putting the Coast Guard into the fight as a part of the joint team, not by law, but I think from a contribution standpoint to the number of fleets. Thank you. Commandant, thank you very much. All three of you referenced the transitions or changes that your services are going through and what warfighting looks like, what defense looks like in the CNO, you used the 28 to 32 timeframe. I'll start with you, Chief. How does the budget request that just came out fit to that? You addressed it a little bit, but if you would describe that in a little more detail, please. I think it's important to think about the Navy across at least three domains, under, above, and on the sea, to also think about the investments we're making in the information warfare area, which would include cyber and space. So the virtual battlefield as well. And then lastly, the human weapon system, the investments that we're making in our sailors and civilians that are absolutely critical to moving forward in this key decade. So if I take a look at under the sea, the investments we're making, I'm very proud of the investments in undersea warfare we're making with our fielding Virginia Block 4 and Block 5 submarines. Block 5's mid-decade, or actually by 2028, will have hypersonics. So we'll have that capability fielder from our most stealthy strike platforms under the sea. There's an article in this month's proceedings from Admiral Wyman Howard. He's the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, California. And he talks about the Navy's commandos pivoting back to their roots as frogmen. It's an interesting piece to read. And it talks about how we're leveraging those skillsets, not just in the counterterrorism fight, but also under the sea in that critical domain where we need to keep overmatch against our adversaries. And lastly, with respect to the undersea, the investments we're making in AI are proving to be very, very useful against an increasingly sophisticated adversary. And also the investments we're making in an advanced weapon under the sea. On the surface similarly, we'll be fielding the consolation class frigate. We just christened our first Flight 3 DDG with an enhanced weapon system and radar combat system last week down in Pascagoula, Mississippi. We'll field hypersonics on Zumwalt by mid decade. We are making investments in SM6 Block 1 Bravo and Maritime Strike Tomahawk. This budget tries to maximize those domestic production lines so that we're putting weapons and magazines, of course readiness being our number one priority. Above the sea, we continue to make investments in the F-35 and also upgrades to our existing super horned fleet. We're in our second F-35 deployment right now, so our second integrated wing. By mid decade, half of our wings will be integrated with fourth and fifth gen aircraft. By later on in this decade, they'll all be integrated. That's a substantial capability over our adversary. The weapons that we're investing in, now RASM, JASME, are again maxing out domestic production lines. And then lastly, the MQ-25 on board our carriers, A, as an autonomous vehicle in a refueling role, frees up two or three strike fighters from that role and gives us more of a combat punch, extends range of our air wing in conjunction with those longer range weapons. In the human weapons system, the investments we're making in ready relevant learning and live virtual constructive training are significant, in fact groundbreaking. And then lastly, in terms of space cyber and that domain, we've just started our Maritime Space Officer Corps. We are making investments in a float targeting cells that are groundbreaking in terms of what they deliver fleet commander in terms of being able to create effects downrange. So all of that moves from this fit up into the next with a bigger transition into unmanned and automated. Thank you, Chief. General Berger, same question. How does what we saw last week fit with where you want the force to be in the, I assume, 2030 as your target date, sir? Target date, just to be clear, I think all of us have to have a force that's ready now. We can't take our forces off the field for five or six years, reshape them, and then put them back out on the playing field. So it's not a now or then. As a CNO and others said, it is now and then. This is the third year into our force design effort. But as CNO did, we would not have been able to even begin that effort if it hadn't been for the hard work that General Neller and the Congress did to rebuild our readiness for four years before he and I changed out, or we would not be on the path that we're on. So he took four years to rebuild us from the Iraq, Afghanistan conflict into a ready force and then started the modernization. This is then third, you could say, the fourth year into that effort. The approach that we took based on where we were was, if you're gonna match the speed of the change of the character of war, meaning the threats, technology, everything that's involved in the operating environment we're gonna face in the future, then if you're gonna accelerate, then you have to divest of some platforms. You have to adjust your force structure. You have to do things up front that will create the resources and then pour them back into the force. This is the third year in which Congress and this administration has allowed us to keep those resources and pour them back in. Those are, of course, all those changes are not without risk. The risk is that you have to be ready now, which we are. So you have to retain the crisis response capability, responsibility that the Marine Corps has, but also be ready four, five, six years into the future. I think General McKinsey really captured on Friday, said I'm a combatant commander. I have to be ready this afternoon. I really don't have a vested interest five, six, seven years into the future. And he acknowledged that the service chiefs have both. We have to give them the forces, the capabilities now and five years, six years from now. None of us, just to go back to your start point, none of us have a belief that we can wait until 28 or 30 or 31. The capabilities, the forces that we're fielding now are now 22, 23, 24. It's on a very rapid pace. Last part of that I would say, in order to move at that speed, you have to learn at that speed, which means a lot of experimentation, a lot of war gaming, a lot of trial and error, and the mechanisms to feed it back into your force development process to make adjustments along the way, which we have. So we have an aim point that's out 10 years out, but we have inside the Marine Corps the ability to turn what we're learning, even from what's happening in Ukraine, the exercises that we're doing in Norway, what the forces are doing in the Indo-Pacific. You have to be able to plug that back into your learning process and make adjustments on as you go, which this budget allows us to do. Keep that momentum going. Commandant Berger, thank you. Commandant Schultz, same question. You referred to the away game and it sounds like the tempo is faster in addition to the force being more dispersed than it's ever been before. How does your budget request feed that, sir? Yeah, thanks, Francis. I would tell you just for a little context, sort of 2011 Budget Control Act and sequestration 13, we had a tough seven, eight years that followed that. We lost about 10% of purchasing power in our operation support, operation and maintenance budget. And I think we have turned the corner. 2018, when there was the 12% plus up for DOD, we were sort of outside of that sitting in DHS. But last few budget cycles, I think we've sort of turned the corner. 22 put us on about a 7% uptick. 23 builds on that. So I think the conversation about what kind of nation does the Coast Guard need is sort of now walking into the resource arena. I think three to 5% out your growth, we can continue to deliver that Coast Guard. Where we're challenged, Francis, to be frank, is critical infrastructure. We're a 232-year-old Coast Guard coming this August, and we've been patching roofs and other things. So as we site new cutters, as we deal with most of our infrastructure investment has been where we've been whacked by hurricanes. The folks that are in the Great Lakes are praying for hurricanes to come up there so they can get some new infrastructure. That's not a good model to have here. So we're really working hard to have a conversation about the readiness of the Coast Guard. We've made progress. Now it's sort of to get ready. We gotta continue on the trajectory and we gotta get after some of this baggage we carry. I think I talked about readiness before, but I talked about a relevant response of Coast Guard, the people thing. We're gonna publish this ready workforce 2030. It's at the printers now, but it's really how we think through finding sufficient young men and women to be recruited into the service. How do we train them, modernize ready learning for us? And how do we retain them? We have the highest retention across the services, but we gotta do better there. And I think there's a piece, 23 budget, while the numbers aren't big proportionately to the whole budget, there's money in there for people. How do we create a Coast Guard that looks more like the nation we serve? How do we get after health, mental health? How do we get after some of the challenges that our Coast Guard families and our service families are realizing this is gonna be a tough PCS season? You know, housing costs as I transition, I look out there and say, boy, this is just a tough place even to find how you uproot and go somewhere. So I would tell you, budgetarily, Francis, we're having the right conversations, 23 budget down the hill, put some monies out there for the Atlantic Partnership. It talks about the Arctic, talks about the Coast Guard in the Pacific. That's sort of forward-leaning. We generally go do things for a few years and we have a conversation about what do you wanna pay for us to continue to do. I think it's very encouraging that the administration, the hill is embracing the fact that, hey, a ready Coast Guard that can do some unique things, given all our authorities, needs to be funded properly. So I'm actually quite encouraged. The piece that really keeps me up at night a little bit is just this infrastructure challenge we pull forward. I'm gonna be a hop-a-ton, hand-off to my successor to continue to message into that. I'll be messaging to that in my budget hearings in the coming weeks, sir. Thank you, Commandant Schultz. You've all mentioned, at one level or another, the new national defense strategy, the classified version transmitted to Congress and the unclassified version coming. And the fact sheet from the department says, department will advance our goals through three primary ways, integrated deterrence, campaigning, and actions that build enduring advantages. So, you know, you referred to China and no one is surprised by that, but what we're seeing in Ukraine strikes me as informing the way that we all should be thinking about each of those three elements. Commandant Schultz, you are interacting with Russia in the Arctic on ongoing, I imagine, almost daily basis. What do you learn? What do you take from what is happening in the world broadly, especially given what you're trying to do for the United States in the Arctic? Yeah, Francis, I would tell you, currently, because of what's going on in the unjust acts in Ukraine by Russia's, you know, the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, the Arctic Council, where Russia holds a chair, you know, I was supposed to have met with them in April, and that's obviously on hold for very obvious reasons. But, you know, a pragmatic relationship with Russia and the Arctic, a pragmatic relationship with China on, you know, operations, you know, international fishing, UN sanctions against illegal fishing. You know, we need to have a pragmatic relation. Our proximity with the 17th district based out of Juneau, Alaska, on the maritime boundary land. We still work functionally, pragmatically, but I think it's a stress pair. I think, you know, how does that play forward going? That's something we have to think about. But in the Arctic, you know, like I said, it's inarguable. Russia has a lot of clear Arctic interests, and they're deriving about a quarter of their GDP from the Arctic. So what does 20 years down the road, you know, we're looking at freedom of navigation, operations potentially in the Arctic, and as we build out a fleet of a minimum of three polar security cutters that are on a good budgetary trajectory, that needs to really be a conversation about six plus heavy breakers. And then we need to have a conversation about some medium capabilities. We need to be teamed up with Mike's team in the Arctic and, you know, the Marines and the Navy, you know, back from Trident Juncture to the recent operation. I think the Arctic is absolutely an area of increasing geostrategic importance. And I think recent weeks, you know, the month plus of events now, just put a point on that. We need to really be thinking into that with more strategic, you know, clarity than ever before. Thank you, Commandant. Commandant Berger, excuse me. I'm curious about the three elements that I mentioned at the National Defense Strategy and directly in reference to force design 2030. You're aware of the controversy about it in some quarters. How does what you envision and the core envisions through that force design 2030 get you to fulfilling the vision of the National Defense Strategy integrated deterrence, campaigning, building enduring advantages, sir? For those of us seated up here, this is, and a few others in the audience, this is the second time in my career we've had a pacing challenge. I think for the first decade or so, it was the Soviet Union. And I remember as a lieutenant and captain, that you had cards like this. You had to study their formations. You had to study all their weapons systems. We knew their tactics. We knew their leaders. And that arguably helped us in 1990 and 91 and beyond. So this is not deja vu. It's a different framework. But still, it's just for us, it's a second time we've had a pacing challenge. For the Marine Corps, fitting into the National Defense Strategy and that ends ways mean sort of way. We are, in terms of campaigning, you need the nation needs a force forward persistently, I would argue, that is also expeditionary and has a forcible entry capability. Why? Because that's your first opportunity to deter. In other words, having a Coast Guard, Navy, Marine Corps presence, and I would argue special operations as well, forward all the time, not fighting their way in, but forward all the time, gives the secretary a better picture of what's in front of them. You're already in places they want to be. If they wanna extend beyond the South China Sea, and if you're the PLAN or Iraq or Russia, if you wanna extend your fence line further and we're already there, it makes it much more difficult. But it has to be credible the way that these two gentlemen point out. The campaigning part is part of the deterrence part. It's not campaigning for campaigning's sake. You're doing it with a purpose in mind, that you're posturing the force all the time to be ready to respond in a crisis, but your positional advantage gives you a deterrent capability. It alters the thinking of the threat, and Admiral Paparo's sitting right here and probably better suited than me to come up here and tell you how he's using, he and Admiral Aquilino are using those forces in the Indo-Pacific forward all the time, rather than fight your way in. You have a better picture, you can respond to crisis faster. CNO, one of the elements of those three components is conversation about your force structure. The number for a long time was 355 ships. The most recent number that I believe I heard was 500, including unmanned. What does that look like today? How does the budget get you to that, and how does that structure, and then what those ships are, fit into those three components of the NDS, sir? Yeah, if I could, before I answer that directly, if I could just add onto something that General Berger just talked about with respect to campaigning, the deterrence piece is really important. It's fundamentally important because it's a cornerstone of the Secretary's strategy. But I also think, in a world of gray zone competition, I also think our presence forward allows us to be in the way and to expose malign behavior by China. Think about how important it was for the United States and the world really with respect to Russia's activity into Ukraine. We took away his strategic surprise. We took away his operational and tactical surprise. We pulled a rug out from under Vladimir Putin with respect to his ability to use false flag operations as a pretext to cross the border and invade Ukraine. And so our ability to do that on a day-to-day basis in the Western Pacific, I would argue, is critically important. And you can't do that virtually. You have to be there to assure allies and partners to see that activity, to expose it. And so that's another element of why a forward force, I think, is critically important in conjunction with General Berger's comments about being ready to support the fight tonight and to make President Xi think twice about whether or not he's gonna make a malicious move. With respect to the size of the force, so the Navy's priorities are and have been steady for the past three or five years. Readiness, modernization, and capacity in that order. I think that those priorities have served us exceedingly well. Why? Because we need a ready, capable lethal force, more than we need a bigger force that's less ready, less lethal, and less capable. In other words, we can't have a Navy or Marine Corps larger than one we can sustain. That's important. So let's keep it real with respect to what we're gonna feel about there. So if you take a look at our investments, right, we are trying to divest of those, given our top line and given the fact that we can only have so many ready ships that are manned properly, that are trained properly, that have ammunition in their magazines, that have the proper maintenance. In order to do that, we've had to make some very difficult decisions about divesting of some platforms. It's more than just a numbers game. It is a capabilities and a numbers game about fielding a combat credible force that can deter. If we want to talk just about capability and you want a force that's ineffective, take a look at the 125 BTGs that Vladimir Putin is positioned around Ukraine, that's not the force that any of us want. And so the investment strategy, if we want to flip that and make Capacity King, you'll end up with a force like that because you'll pay for it with people, with ammunition, with training, and with maintenance. We're maxing out the production lines of all of our long-range weapons with high speed in this budget. Whether they're advanced capability torpedoes, SM-61 Bravo, Maritime Strike Tomahawk, JASM-ER, L-RASM, and all three domains, we're maxing out, trying to max out those production lines. We are trying to make sure that the fleet today is ready to go. And 70% of that fleet, we're going to have 10 years from now. So the investments that we're making in hypersonics to deliver that capability by mid-decade, as well as the critical R&D in microwave and laser technology that gives us an enhanced capability to defend that fleet become incredibly important. I personally think you're on the right path. That path is not popular with everybody in this room. You're certainly not on the hill, but I believe it's a responsible path. And I think it both feels a force today that's ready to go and it invests in a force mid-centering beyond, a mid-decade and beyond that will serve us well. Chief, thank you very much. We have some time for some questions from the audience. I now need glasses to see the audience in the microphones. Microphone people, can you raise your hands please? Terrific. If you would like to pose a question, the microphone will come to you, just raise your hand and I'll ask you to state your name, the organization that you're with, and then direct your one question, one question to one or more of the speakers. Hello, John Conrad with G-Captain and the US Merchant Mariner. Last time we faced this issue, John Lehman was Secretary of the Navy and he was a hedge fund manager. I just got back from the biggest shipping conference with finance people and Admiral Schultz had many representatives there. There was not a single naval officer. The PLA is using credit default swaps and coded capital in order to use the financial instruments with the commercial fleet to push a shipbuilding plan for their Navy. There are four flags behind you, but only three service chiefs. Where is the commandant of the US Merchant Marine and when are we going to put our people into shipyards of Korea and China to learn those lessons of efficiency and finance that are commercial? Thank you. Would any of you like to take that question? I guess I heard my service mention. I think from a Coast Guard perspective, back to my initial entry comment about the global maritime conference, the importance of that, when you think about the largest Navy in the world, the largest Coast Guard world, the China Coast Guard's more than 200 ships, the China government will have more icebreakers than the United States government because of their wherewithal and their shipbuilding. So I think there's a lot to think through in that case. Obviously, you need to sit down with Secretary Buttigieg and as a seat there, Mayor and Administrator, I think your points are fair. I think we have to sort of think about the whole of government response in a pacing thread of China. I think absolutely it's all stakeholders at the table and think about this through a very comprehensive lens, maybe arguably more so than we have in the past. I think your point is fair and it's something we all need to sort of take for consideration. I lost a bet. I bet a colleague of mine at work that the first question would be about force design 2030 and I lost big. Who's next? Good morning, gentlemen. Sir. Good morning, my name's Reed McAllister. I have a question about being agile in acquisition, agile in requirements and agile in our budgeting. And what is it that we're gonna do with continuing resolutions always hampering us? How are you preparing for a means for us to be more agile as we're finding greater capability coming against us in order to get after our adversaries because they tend to be appearing to be turning inside of our diameter and what are we gonna do to get more agile in that area? Thank you. Thank you, sir. Sienna? Sure, I think it's difficult to take a look at that across the entire United States Navy. Let me give you a couple of examples of things that I think are going well that we can learn from and things that we are trying to become more agile. First of all, I think with respect to our large platform submarines and ships as an example, I think predictability and stability for industry and for the United States Navy is critically important. I think that we're achieving that with respect to submarine build rates, right? They're predictable out to 2037, boomer year and two fast attack subs. That allows industry to plan their investments in infrastructure and in their workforce and they have a set of headlights. It goes out 15 years or more. It allows the repair side of the house, whether it's a public yards or whether it's a private yards in Connecticut and Hampton, Rose, Virginia to understand what that demand signal looks like and to plan for that. So I think that predictability and stability there are really important. I would like to have that in the surface force and so as we take a look at our major investment lines, Flight 3 DDGs, FFG 62, potentially DDGX by the end of the decade, right? I wanna be able to count on two or three of those types of ships a year with plenty of overlap between Flight 3 DDGs and DDGX. We're pushing out great capability to the United States Navy and for the nation. At the same time, we're giving a nice feather-predictable plan for industry so that we're not taking high technical risk. I think driving down technical risk in shipbuilding programs is really important and I think the example that I gave at comparing the submarine build with the surface build is an important one that we can learn from. With respect to agility, what we're doing now with unmanned is exactly where we wanna go with disruptive technology. So instead of fielding unmanned when the same kind of deliberative, long lead timeframes that we have for those larger platforms, we're experimenting with the fleet, CTF 59 in the Middle East right now, last month, the largest unmanned exercise in the world. 100 different platforms, 10 different countries, dozens of vendors, taking a look at how we can connect software AI with a variety of platforms to enhance maritime domain awareness. In other words, to both sense and make sense of the environment we're around them and in a way that we can deliver capability to the warfighter whether they're on, whether they're ashore like the Marines or whether they're a float like the Navy and the Coast Guard at the same time, taking a look at problems outside the fit up, large unmanned vessels as an example that provide us that floating arsenal or will provide us that floating arsenal weapons that necessarily have to be completely unmanned. It'll be minimally manned for a while. This needs to be evolutionary but land-based prototyping that we use successfully with Columbia and DDG 51s where we take an engineering plant and we run the hell out of it so that we understand that it's reliable and capable before we scale it and put it on a large unmanned vessel. Same type of idea. And I would tell you that Project Overmatch which most of you are familiar with is also getting after those C2 challenges that we need to resolve before we scale in a big kind of way with unmanned. So that experimentation that's ongoing with small unmanned and the prototyping, that's the kind of agility we need to deliver stuff quickly in a critical decade. I took a lot of time and I apologize for, maybe you're happy I just, that filibuster burned up like five minutes ago. No. Comment on, Schultz, you talked about some of the platforms that you're bringing online and the timelines and so on. What do you, regarding the question about agility and acquisition, agility and requirements, what have you learned from those and what have you learned from maybe some of the things in the past that didn't work the way that you wanted them to that's put you on this trajectory to be more agile in acquisition and requirements and so on. Well thanks Francis. I think Mike was spot on. I think for us smaller service, stable predictable funding is critical. We've sort of been in a good spot in that in recent years. I think for us, locking in requirements, we don't build ships that frequently when we're in a period of prolific shipbuilding. It's important that we have those locked on. I think as we're moving the design forward of the Polar Security Code, that's been a little bit of delays. That's a complicated ship, a lot of foreign pieces in that but we're excited to hopefully start cutting steel. I think the piece that's interesting, that's outside of Coast Guard control, outside the Naval control is, for us when you get a budget halfway into the fiscal year, that's challenging and it used to be it didn't get a budget, 90 days in the first quarter, when we go out and compete for ship repair work, the scale of our shipyard repair is much smaller than a Navy combatant coming in sometimes competing for the same places. So if you're making decisions as the Coast Guard, if you're making decisions as a ship repair industry, you might wait for the Navy contract. So for us, we got a little bit of two year monies. We need to expand that. We need to go back to Congress and double down on that. I do worry a little bit as we build out the 10th and 11th National Security Cutter, a fleet of 25 offshore patrol cutters, which is a 4,500 plus ton ship, big ships. We're gonna be competing for these same shipyards and we need to think through that a bit. You know, only in Washington can you have a continued resolution if it expires on a Friday. You pass it on a Thursday, you're still five and a half years in and that's still a budget success but you're half a year in apps way into the fiscal year. So we gotta get, I think, a little more clarity as a nation about the importance of getting a budget at the start of the fiscal year. To the extent that's not just a delusional dream here, it impacts a smaller service like the Coast Guard. I think exponentially so. I know it affects, you know, Mike and the ship repair industry, shipbuilding as well. Thank you, sir. Comment on Berger, how is agility and requirements and acquisition and the other elements impacting the Corps? How are you thinking about those issues and applying them, sir? The first part, I would say an answer to the question I had time to think of course, which is always helpful but I think the best thing we could do to relatively to speed up our acquisitions actually find a way to convince the PRC to adopt our acquisition process. That would be huge. We can just do that. But I think that aside, I think a couple of things. First, the Marine Corps benefited from some really brilliant moves 30 years ago to put acquisition and requirements and manpower and training and education all at the same base in Quantico, Virginia, which is not far from the Pentagon. So they can collaborate at speed. We've been able to do that for decades. It's just a huge advantage, really great foresight. Second, I would say, and again, a great question for Admiral Paparo or others to validate or not, I think you have to actually get something in the field and demonstrate it as early as you can. Rather than take two or three years to develop it and work on it and engineer it, last summer Admiral Aquilino pressed really hard to get a demonstration of the nemesis system for us, which took a lot of coordination between the Navy and the Marine Corps in Hawaii to pull off. But in the end, very early on in the process of something, you actually show what it can do. I think that's the confidence builder, sometimes the Congress and others need to see it. It's also great because for the second half of that, as the other two gentlemen know, is you're putting things in the hands of operators early. They're gonna give you feedback on that system and say that's in the wrong place. It needs to be moved over here, or that's not functional, I need it bigger or smaller. So I think you have to demonstrate it. We have to get it into the field as quickly as possible for both of those reasons, to build confidence in those that resource us, but also to get it into the hands of operators so that the feedback, we're not waiting two or three years for feedback. We can make the changes early on. Thank you, sir. We have one more audience question. I saw a hand in the back there, there you go. Over here, Megan Eckstein with the news. Hi, I wanted to ask about beginning to change your operations to reflect things like campaigning forward and distributed operations. As you try to do those things with today's fleet, are you looking at different force generation models or different ways of employing today's ships and forces? If I take a look at the operating concepts of our fleets forward, they're signed by not only the fleet commander, the numbered fleet commander, but also the numbered MEF commander. And so these are integrated war fighting concepts that we are now using on a day to day basis, right? With respect to campaigning and the JTF concept that Admiral Aquilino is exercising out there in Hawaii with Admiral Paparo acting almost as a de facto JTF commander supported by the other services. It's caused us to think hard quickly about how we integrate our forces, how we integrate our naval forces better. I'll tell you, besides that nemesis firing those two missiles, which I was fortunate enough to be in a range and watch, which is awesome. Right now our deputy commander, right now our Joint Force Maritime Component Commander in Naples, Italy, which has some 30 ships under their command right now. The deputy commander is a Marine officer, Marine General Officer, and that staff, our JIFMIC staff, is infused with Marines from the European, from Marfor Europe. I would say the same thing for Admiral Paparo's staff on Hawaii as same thing with Admiral Colders third fleet staff in San Diego. We are working together with those MEFs operationally. We're testing stuff. We do an experimentation. We're operating together. That's where you're seeing the preponderance of the Navy Marine Corps integration going on is at that level. We're quite honestly, probably most important for today and what we're learning from it that'll inform what we're resourcing tomorrow. I'll just add, we are to answer the question, we are talking about the process we use right now for global force management and the process we use right now to assess readiness, both of which we need to upgrade, we need to bring into the way that's much more helpful to the secretary. And he has the tools that he has now, but we can do a better job of portraying the risk for him because a combatant commander is going to ask for this and say, if I don't get it, I can articulate the risk. The onus is on us for not countering that, but to say, if you do that, here's the impact on long-term readiness and the impact on risk long-term to force generation and force development so that the secretary has the complete picture and can make the right calls. Now he makes them right now with the information that he has, but I think we can do better. It's just an evolutionary process, in other words. It's about understanding risk globally, managing that risk, and given the secretary, the senior decision-makers, as accurate a picture as we can so that they can make all the right calls all the time. Commandant Berger, thank you for that. I want to give you and the CNO a chance to correct me in a moment. Answer the questions I didn't ask you, but Commandant Schultz, I want to start with you because this will probably be the last chance that I have to talk to you while you're still the commandant, you're transitioning out shortly. What will you take away primarily from your service? You all have talked in various times that I've spoken to you over the years about leaving the service better than you found it. How do you believe that you've done that over the time that you've been the commandant in your entire career, sir? Yeah, thanks, Francis. Wasn't expecting that. You know, as I reflect back, I think all the senior military leaders, all the service leaders, it's been an interesting time here. So I'm an 18 to 22 guy, the four years, and we've had some challenging periods. From a Coast Guard standpoint, never expected to stand in front of 55,000 people explaining why they weren't getting paid for a little bit. And you stand in the watch, we stood tough, you're resilient, our families were phenomenal. I think I reflect back on just how resilient the military family has been in recent years. And I think we talk about an environment where 75% of Americans used 18 to 26 are ineligible to serve, so 25% are. And then within their decreasing number have a propensity to serve, nine, 10, 11%. And we're all out there trying to encourage these bright young men and women to come forward and wear the cloth they're in a nation to serve. So we have invested heavily in our people and we got a lot of work left to do. And I talk about readiness. There is a clear people piece. And we talked about this ready workforce 2030. It's about more portability, permeability. We're striving to be a Coast Guard reflective of the nation. We got to go recruit different places. We kicked off in 2020 what we call the tech revolution. I announced that I do an annual State of the Coast Guard. And these bright young men and women that want to serve, they don't want to have more mobility on their personal device and you give them at their desk or in their job. So we have worked very hard to put some mobility out in our people's hands. We're looking at data, AI and data analytics. I think that's how we move forward and make the best decisions. I think the shipbuilding, we've maintained pace. I think as I reflect back just at the risk of getting long winded, I think we've managed a service. We've all managed a service through some priority challenging pandemic periods. Sending a national security cutter, a DDG, Marines on an amphib downrange, N95s away from families and an uncertain virus in the first months of COVID. Nothing, we've been as busy as we've ever been in the last 24 months. So I'm excited that we did that safely. We tried to attenuate the risk and the stress on the families and then we constantly went back to our four-year plan. We've had a four-year strategic plan about a ready coast guard. I reflect on the last five or six years from Hurricane Matthew in 16, which was a one-off storm after a decade in those storms to 17, 18, 20 being a record Atlantic basin hurricane season. Your coasties have stood to watch here throughout those storm seasons. 50% of our reserve force has activated almost each of the last couple of years for whether it's vaccination sites, whether it's hurricane response, whether it's a part of allies welcome. So I think I reflect back on the men and women that are serving their nation, 60% retention of the coast guard. We need to go continue to find them. And I think it's continually, despite some of the challenges, it's going back to a plan that delivers that coast guard that the nation needs. And I mentioned domestic before, so I won't rehash that in really increasingly global. I think when you roll up, and my predecessor used this term, he called it, it's an air of coast guards across the globe. Most of the maritime forces tend to look more like the United States Coast Guard than they do the United States Navy. They just don't have the wherewithal. So they're interested in their sovereign waters. They're interested in illegal fishery in their sovereign waters that detracts from their own economics. They're the African continent will have 25% of the world's population here in the next 25 years. Food sustainment and IUF fishing. There's some burgeoning opportunities. I think we've positioned the coast guard, we being the leadership team, the men and women of the service to be relevant there. I think it's the coast guard as this unique instrument of national security. It's trusted access. It goes able to go some places where maybe you can't send a gray hull or an amphib of Marines on board, but you can get a coast guard from there. We can partner at a different level. I think Francis, that's what I'd reflect on and say. I think that's been the work of this team here that I'm most proud of in recent years. Not bad for a question you weren't expecting, sir. Thank you. Comed on burger, what should I have asked you that I didn't, sir? At first I thought you were going to say I was winding down my tour. No, sir, I don't know anything about that. I was supposed to tell you that, Dave, just like that. Ask me to tell you. I don't know anything about that. I would say we grade our, I think the service chief gets graded in the two different time frames. We have to give the combatant commanders what they need. Not always everything they want, but what they need now. Grading our homework, do they have the capabilities? Are we organizing the force right? Are we training the force right? The way that Commandant spoke about, are they the right people? Are we bringing in and retaining the right people today? Right now, we are. And I think the ongoing operations, the conflict in Ukraine, for me, validates actually the last couple NDSs in that you need a really strong land force to deter Russia and Europe. We all play a supporting role in that. The air and naval marine elements play a supporting role, but you need a really strong land force in land Europe to deter Russia from just expanding beyond where they are in Ukraine. I counter that, I think, to Indo-Pakom where it's very much a maritime theater and you need a very strong Navy Marine Corps team backed up with a supporting role from the Army. But that's the value of the joint force, right? Knowing what you have and applying it to the environment that's in front of you. I think grade in our homework, though, probably equally valid to look at it five, six, seven years into the future. That's the only time you're really gonna know whether the service chief did their homework. Made the hard decisions. Got rid of stuff that they had to get rid of, put the resources into the right places. You can't grade it in the near term, in other words. I think there's too early to tell, but you would wanna go down the same checklist. Do they have the right people? Five, six, seven, eight years from now. Are they trained as well as they should be trained? Do they have the right capabilities to overmatch the threat? Not an even fight, but like others posit that you have a clear tactical to operational advantage. And can they stitch it all together in a combined arms in a joint way that makes it really tough for an adversary to, as the CNO points out, to take the next step? So I think you can't really grade a service chief's homework the second half until years down the road. And then you'll know. Then you'll know whether they organized training and equipped that force to do what it needed to do in the future, because the future's a, there's a lot of unknowns there. We have to make a lot of assumptions and make hard decisions. Thank you, Comedon. CNO? I think I'll take the opportunity to talk about industry for just a moment. And the first point I'd make for those small companies that are looking for to find a door that actually you can push open and inform us, educate us about things that we're not even thinking about that you've been working on. Naval X is that door to push on. And Naval X has been an extraordinary, has introduced extraordinary opportunities to us in the areas of unmanned, of AI and cutting edge software. So please continue to use Naval X to get to us. And the other thing is we'd appreciate your feedback on how we can improve and make that door swing open even easier and faster. I spent a lot of time going around to shipyards, visiting production lines for aircraft. And a common issue right now is workforce and attracting and recruiting that talent and retaining it. I'm struck by the apprenticeship programs that you offer in private industry. They are extraordinary. And I would offer this thought to you as you try to attract talent. Think about the 100,000 Ukrainians and the 124,000 Afghans that are either coming to this country or have already set foot in our shores. In reaching out to them and find a path to attract them into those apprenticeship programs, you offer well-paying jobs with a career of advancement that'll allow them to send their kids to college and to buy a home. Think about how powerful that would be to somebody immigrating to this country that wants to give back. I'd leave that thought with you as something to consider here as you leave the conference this week. Chief, thank you very much. Commandant, thank you very much for joining us today. I wanna thank the Navy League for inviting me to be a part of this. McPon, thank you very much for the great invitation. Julia Simpson is here somewhere who's done just a wonderful job to put all this together. Thank all of you for your attention. It's great to be back in person. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us. Our next sessions begin at 11.30 a.m. and the exhibit hall will be open until 5 p.m.