 Very good. Is everybody got a copy of their latest copy of the Surface Warfare Magazine? It's available for you and I highly recommend it. It is a great publication. I would like to echo certainly my thanks to the Surface Navy Association and again to all the exhibitors. I think it's my fifth year in a row that I've had the opportunity to speak on day one and I've got to tell you. It remains my favorite time of year and it is due to no small measure to a superb association like the Surface Navy Association and all the support that we get from all the exhibitors. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you very much. Admiral Hogg, sir, wherever you are, thank you very much for being here. It's always great to see you, sir, and for the president, Admiral Barry McCullough, thank you for your continued support. You know, Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme. And as I think about that in the context of where we were, well, about 100 years ago, and as I was caging up my gyro to talk to you all today about where we are in Surface Warfare and where we're going, I started thinking about what was happening, well, 100 years ago. Actually, 100 years ago, this May 31st. Of course, I'm talking about the Battle of Jutland that occurred between the Royal Navy and the high seas fleet of Germany. And I think about the approach to that epic battle. Here, the Royal Navy had been the preeminent navy on the face of the earth for a long, long centuries. They and Great Britain certainly had benefited from the preeminence of that navy. And here we had the German navy understanding the value of the navy to Great Britain. And as they moved into the 20th century, they started to think differently about their tactics. They started to think differently about their weapons, about how they were going to build their ships and build their navy to the advantage of Germany. And on the 31st of May, the two navies met in this epic battle in the Battle of Jutland. And although it is subject to some debate, I think we can all agree that the British came away victors. But they came away victors, perhaps not by the margin that people would have expected. And I think it's instructive as we reflect on that and think about that as we look to the future. You know, as I think about the value of our surface ships, the value that they provide to the navy, to the naval forces, to the nation, joint and combined, I think to myself, is there a way that we can do, that we can think differently about the employment and the deployment of our forces, of our surface forces in the support of our navy as we move ahead. And so with that as a backdrop, what I'd like to do is I'd like to go to a little, a little movie here. Now you may have seen the Army Navy Spirit Spot, it's not that. Okay, we thought we'd tee up something else. Let's go ahead and play the clip. Forward, visible, ready. Control of the seas and power projection. Naval surface forces are returning to the offensive. Potential adversaries are increasing the range and lethality of their weapons. Applying surveillance and reconnaissance across greater distances. All to deny the US and its allies access to the maritime domain and the ability to project power from it. As a maritime nation, free use of the seas underpins the core of a US economy that transports 90% of its goods across water and it underpins a global system of trade that works to the advantage of all nations. The challenges to maritime access must be addressed and in the surface force, the concept of distributed lethality provides a powerful contribution to the broader Navy approach. The ability to exert sea control where necessary, when necessary enables joint force access to the other domains of land, air, space and cyber. Greater lethal power across larger geographical areas is the key. We will add offensive power to the force, to our cruisers, our destroyers, our littoral combat ships, our amphibious and our logistic ships. And then employ them in dispersed adaptive force packages capable of executing a specific range of critical missions. Distributed lethality demands capability increases to existing platforms and payloads that are prioritized and opportunistic. It also provides a roadmap for the design of new ship classes. More powerful ships capable of creative deception using active and passive defense technologies will force an adversary to apply his limited surveillance and targeting resources, not to mention his weapons across a larger and more confusing target set. Distributed, more lethal surface naval forces will rely on inorganic and organic means to locate and target adversary forces and to provide battle damage assessment. As we increase our ability to understand the environment, we must have weapons that exploit this additional battle space knowledge. Our priority will be to field them on traditional surface combatants first but then also move onto selected amphibious ships and perhaps even the logistics force. Taking advantage of the over 8,000 VLS cells in our fleet, we look to opportunistically fit ships with additional capability. By modifying existing weapons, we can empower ships currently without surface-to-surface missiles to engage surface contacts using a layered range approach in order to hold potential adversaries at risk and at range. While more lethal and distributed surface forces are designed to increase the offensive options available to the Joint Force Commander when the shooting starts, equally important is the ability to enhance conventional deterrence postures that limit an adversary's options for escalation. Again, greater lethality distributed across our naval surface warships and over a wider geographic area forces a potential adversary to account for far more threats than he currently must budget for. Distributed lethality, more power in more places to retain USC control, to reject power and to have access to all domains. Naval surface forces, forward, visible, ready. So what is distributed lethality? It's increasing offensive power. It's defensive hardening of our individual ships. It's employing them in a more distributed manner. It's holding more adversaries at risk across a wider geography, both at sea and on land. People say, well, it's about long range weapons, it's about netted sensors, no. It's about that, but it's about so much more. I would submit to you that it's about a cultural shift. It's about thinking differently about how we arm our ships, thinking differently about the weapons systems and the weapons that we have in those ships today, but thinking differently in a much more broadly. What will it do? It will increase our ability to deter aggression. It will contribute to achieving success in any domain. It will increase our ability to gain and maintain sea control and it will project power and it will enable others to project power. Our submarines, more lethal. Our airwings, more lethal. Our joint and combined partners, more lethal. Forcing a change in the calculus of our adversaries. Forcing our adversaries to wake up and say, I didn't see that coming, a cultural shift. It's about delivering value. Understanding the value of our surface ships, understanding the value of our surface navy and understanding the value that it can deliver. You get an idea? You have to understand, hey, is this a good idea? Is there value to this idea? How are we gonna go get after it to understand what this, what can be delivered, what the art of the possible is? So we stood up a task force, the distributed lethality task force, headed by Captain Joe Cahill. We brought together O2 to a flag level review board. Organizations across the spectrum, the fleets, OPNAV, DARPA, the centers of intellectual excellence, the Naval War College, the Naval Postgraduate School, across a wide variety to look at a couple things. Understand the value of distributed lethality and look holistically. Yes, it's about weapons systems. Yes, it's about weapons, but it's about so much more. What I'd like to talk to you about is what the task force has been up to, what we have been up to in the past year to understand distributed lethality, to understand the value that it delivers, to understand the value that it contributes to our ships and move it forward. We live in an analytical world. I knew that it was absolutely essential to start the analysis and to continue that analysis to understand what we're delivering and understand where the eaches are and understand what we have to go after. Got an analysis team together from one of the folks here in town, brought a bunch of folks in, conducting the analysis across multi-levels of classification with approved scenarios from OSD to understand the value that we're delivering. Worked our way through this and what we found out at the end and again classification levels unfortunately will prevent me to talk specifically about it, but I can tell you this, it works. It works, it delivers value. How much? We need to continue to work that, but I can tell you it is significant. Beyond that, we knew we had to war game it. 10 war games over the course of the last 12 months to understand the value that we're delivering. The Naval War College out in Hawaii, out at PAG Fleet down in Norfolk at the Naval Postgraduate School to get at the eaches and to get at understanding the value that we're delivering. And like I said previously, it works. Back on the June the 9th and Pier 2 thinking differently about how we're going to prepare our warships for the execution of their responsibilities. We sit at the surface of my war fighting development center under the leadership of our Admiral Jim Kilby. Jim's coming up after me, I'll introduce him at the end and I don't want to steal too much of his thunder but he's gonna get up and he's gonna talk to you about warfare tactics instructors. He's gonna talk to you about how we're able to proliferate them and the value that they're delivering. He's looking at doctrine. He's looking at how we can what other training events we can insert into our preparation for our ships to deploy to ensure that they're fully ready. He's gonna talk about surface warfare advanced tactical training, a bridging event between the basic phase executed by the type commander and the integrated phase executed by the operational commander to ensure that those ships are fully prepared and ready to go. He's gonna talk to you about even down to the tactical level. He's looking at Navy integrated fire control counter air from the sea and how we can integrate that. We have an organization as of the 9th of June last year that we can turn to and say, hey, we've seen this problem. What do we need to do and how do we need to go address it and how rapidly can we get it out to our warfighters on the pointy end? I think that is absolutely tremendous not only for our surface Navy but for our Navy writ large. Surface in my warfighting development center I could not be more excited about the value that that organization will deliver as we think differently and think about delivering distributed lethality. Thinking differently about the people. Distributed lethality is about the people. We wanted to look at the training continuum of surface warfare officers and then led by Captain Dave Welch up in surface warfare officer school. We're thinking differently about how to develop those surface warfare leaders. What training do we have to deliver for the basic division officer course, the advanced division officer course? How do we add rigor to the department head level or to the department head course? How do we properly prepare our folks for executing their responsibilities as executive officer and commanding officer? One of the adjustments that we made over the last year was to think differently about how we prepare that commanding officer. We've been executing what was known as the XOCO fleet up. You've heard about that and I was concerned that perhaps we were running folks hard because executive officer tour, I mean it's a tough tour, but I wanted to make sure that we had commanding officers fully prepared when they stepped onto that bridge wing and they gave the officer the order to take all lines and get underway that they were confident and competent in the execution of their responsibilities. So we're gonna focus the training leading to executive officer on the execution of executive officer duties and then there's gonna be a three month intervening period that's gonna allow us to A, provide some reset for those individuals, but at the same time, give them about a month back up at surface warfare officer school to cage their gyro and to get them concentrating specifically on where we were or specifically on where they're going with respect to their responsibilities as the commanding officer and then we're gonna get them out to the surface of my war fighting development center where Jim Kilby's gonna take them and say hey, this is where we are, the latest and greatest associated with the tactics for the employment of the ships. A significant modification. We're thinking differently about our talent. We're thinking differently about the way folks approach the execution of their careers. You know, when I think back to when I got commissioned out of the Naval Academy in 1982 was she just kinda hopped on the conveyor belt and if you hung around long enough eventually, well, you just became the C and L. I don't, I don't, that's not the way it works. We all know, but it's not a conveyor belt and the folks, the young men and women that we have coming into the surface Navy today, they think differently than the way, certainly the way I thought when I was coming in. We certainly have to build the equity that they require in order to be confident in the execution of their responsibilities at the department head, the executive officer, commanding officer level, the division officer level. But they also have goals and desires that they want to achieve. So now we have a, not a career path per se, not a conveyor belt per se, but a career chart that presents options for the men and women to pursue the equities that they desire in their lives at the same time, building the equities that we require in order to be able to be confident and competent as we execute those, as they execute their progression through their career. We're populating the ships with warfare tactics instructors, experts in integrated air and missile defense, amphibious warfare, mine warfare, anti-surface, anti-submarine warfare. We're thinking differently about the way we man our ships. I think back to for those of you who can remember or were around or were serving, when I was back on the USS Bunker Hill as combat system officer, operating out of Yakuza, Japan, we had an OS-2 named Schaefer, we ran link 11, and he ran the entire link for the battle group, right? An OS-2 sitting tick. Now it's a JECO on the aircraft carrier and it takes about a PhD in order to be able to pull the strike group together in order to be able to spread that information around. It's a different world. Along those lines, we're adding a department head or we have a pilot going on right now to put an additional first tour department head known as a plans and tactics officer. Plans and tactics officer will then step into the position and start to level the load of the mid-grade management of the ship to ensure that we have that property squared away. We've been looking hard at cyber. We did an evaluation this past year to look at the job of the communications officer. And what we realized was that we had doubled double the requirement, the work requirement for our communications officers without increasing any of the resources that they have. We've added another billet. And in doing so, we have provided, beginning to working with the N26, working with Admiral Branch to build the career path from the ground up for the Information Dominance Corps. Thinking differently about our talent, contributing to the distributive lethality, concept, understanding it, building it, flushing it out. A year ago, I stood up here and I talked about the Naval Postgraduate School of the necessity of the requirement, to stand up the Surface Warfare Officer Chair at the Naval Postgraduate School. This past August, following his relief as the commanding officer here says, Princeton Captain Chuck Good reported up to the Naval Postgraduate School and has been doing phenomenal work for us. Wrapping his arms around not only the Surface Warfare officers up at the Naval Postgraduate School, but really all the folks up there to get them focused on A, things that, and tied in closely with Admiral Kilby at the Surface and Mine Warfare Development Center, tied in closely with the Type Commander in order to be able to focus the efforts and focus the intellectual capacity of the folks that we have at the Naval Postgraduate School. A tremendous, tremendous boost for us up at the Naval Postgraduate School and Chuck is the perfect guy to go up there and do phenomenally for us. Those are some of the things that the task force has been pulling together over the past year in and amongst a lot of things, again, to understand distributed lethality and to understand the value that it will deliver. Well, as we were going through the year, we started looking ahead to 16 and what we might be able to accomplish. Clearly, we're gonna continue the analysis. Clearly, we're gonna continue the wargaming, but can we start to operate our forces differently to think about the influence that they might have? Turns out that in the spring, we have a independent deployers deploying, three of them. Not unlike the independent deployers that I deployed with on Milius back in the 2000 timeframe. HMCS Calgary, let there be light. HMCS Calgary under the command of Commander Tim Howard, USS Oldendorf under the command of Commander Rob Taylor and Tom Rodin and Milius. We got together at the bar one night. We rolled the dice. I lost the game or won the game and we decided that's who was gonna be in charge of the three of us. And really it was just three independent deployers kind of operating in proximity to each other. Is that a way to create a whole that's much greater than the sum of the parts? So what we thought about is we said, hey, we've got these independent deployers, three got to missile destroyers that are gonna be deploying in the spring timeframe. How can we operate them differently? How can we think differently about their operations, about the way they execute emissions control, about how they work together in order to understand and create doubt in our adversary's minds and gain a sense of the environment, but we gotta put a command element in charge of that. So the surface action group of three ships, we're gonna take Deseron 31 and we're gonna put them in command of the ship and we're gonna develop an entire new training program to look at how much we can get out of the surface action group. Surface action group or as I would submit to you an adaptive force package that consists of three got to missile destroyers. And I think we need to think differently about how we would deploy our forces. The unit of issue that we certainly are familiar with, if it's readiness groups, carrier strike groups, but other ways we can think about deploying our forces. Certainly we understand surface action groups, that adaptive force package. Three got to missile destroyers. We had a little bit different adaptive force package when we deployed with Tim Howard and we had HMCS Calgary. We could also put in a KDX-3 out of Korea or a Congo class out of Japan or an air defense destroyer out of Australia or any of a number of other allies and partners to bring them in to understand, again to understand the value, obviously that they deliver to bring them in and to understand how to operate together. And I think it's about maybe it's bringing in instead of a couple of got to missile destroyers and littoral combat ship with the ASW package installed. The ASW, the phenomenally capable ASW package. All the analysis says that these are gonna deliver tremendous capability, operating them with these two destroyers. Think about an adaptive force package that could consist of an amphibious readiness group, perhaps an amphibious readiness group that has F-35Bs on the flight deck of the big deck. Perhaps augmented by a couple of baseline nine destroyers. A certain level of capacity, a certain level of capability that this adaptive force package has. Back to the surface action group. One of the things we need to understand as we deploy this command element and the surface action group is to understand what's our area of influence? How much can we influence? How much capability and capacity can we deliver? And then as we modify these adaptive force packages and look to think differently about deploying those adaptive force packages, how much can we get? What can we get? And I think the sky's the limit. Certainly, we're thinking about it in the surface force. Certainly my charge to Jim Kilby and his team is to say, hey, let's think differently about this. And again, it's about delivering value to the combatant commanders, regardless of the adaptive force package that we're delivering. Recently, the CNO published his campaign design for Maritime Superiority. How does this concept of distributed lethality and the value that it delivers fit in with his lines of effort? Well, think about it for a second. Strength and able power at and from the sea. Distributed lethality, I think fits right into that. Achieve higher velocity learning at every level and innovate naturally. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about innovating that. How can we innovate the ships that we have? Strengthen our Navy team, think about the work that Brad Cooper's doing down at Purse 41 or Dave Welch is doing up at Swass to strengthen our surface team and our partnerships. Not only our number one joint war-quiting partner or the surface force, the United States Marine Corps operating on our amphibious ships, but also strengthening those partnerships with our allies and our friends and strengthen our partnerships with all of you, with industry. If I were to encapsulate the way we're thinking in three words, I would say it's operate to deceive the enemy, target the enemy and destroy the enemy, deceive, target and destroy. I think if we move in that direction, think about how we can employ our forces to execute that, we have the opportunity to change the calculus, change the calculus of our adversaries, change the calculus of our potential adversaries and move us forward to ensure that we leave no doubt that the United States Navy continues to be the preeminent Navy on the face of the earth. I'll leave you with one final thought and then we can open it up for some questions. And perhaps I'll head off the first question by saying what keeps me awake at night? What keeps me awake at night is, A, understanding what the center of the universe is. Every day I wake up, every interaction I have with the staff, I talk to them about the center of the universe. I talk to myself about the center of the universe and understanding what the center of the universe is. In my mind, clearly, the center of the universe is our ships that we deploy and the men and women that serve on those ships. And what I charge the staff to do when working through Pete and the gang back here, he fought to what I work, is I say, hey, let's never allow the center of the universe to migrate away from where it must be. Keep them in our hearts, keep them in our minds, keep them in our efforts, because ultimately they're gonna take in all lines. They're gonna take on all lines and they're gonna sail out Thimble Shoals Channel. They're gonna sail out past 1ST, they're gonna sail past Papa Hotel, heading west, heading east. And what do we want in their minds? What do we want in their heads and what do we want in their hearts? And in my mind, we need to have them confident in their abilities, whether they're the LS-2 or the commanding officer, confident in their team's abilities, whether it's in the propulsion plant or in combat or in the pilot house or anywhere in between, confident in their ship's ability that those weapons and those weapons systems will deliver on time every time and competent in the execution of any mission that they may be assigned. And if we keep the center of the universe in our heads and hearts and we work hard for them every single day, we'll continue to be the preeminent Navy on the face of this earth.