 Ladies and gentlemen, operating in the art of deception, I brought General Neller in through the side door. But it gives me great pleasure to introduce the command on the Marine Corps, General Robert Neller. OK, I really appreciate getting the time after lunch. Thank another special deal from our Navy. At least you're awake now. So I would tell for the students, you know the deal. If you start to fall asleep, move to the back of the room. But because of some of the more experienced nature and seasoned nature of some of our other guests, just go ahead and take a nap. So what I'm going to do, I've got 45 minutes, not enough time, but I'm going to talk. I'm going to look at Mr. West here. You've got at about 20 till, if you would give me the hook. And then I want to take some questions. So there's a book John Tulin, a friend of mine, just retired 40 years. And he and I are big rugby players. And he says, hey, you've got to read this book called Legacy by this guy, Kerr. And it's about the New Zealand national rugby side, the all blacks, arguably, I mean, if you're a British Lions fan or a Australian Wallaby fan, I apologize, the best rugby side in the last 100 years. And they found themselves at the turn of this century where their standard is kind of like our military, they expect to win the World Cup. They expect to win. And if they don't win, it'd be like us going to war and coming back and saying, the American people saying, well, how'd you do? So we took third. We took third. And that's not acceptable. And they realized that they had lost some things in their culture. And they had got some people on the team that really weren't committed, that they had kind of gotten more selfish. They had forgotten about serving the whole group. And so they needed a change. And Kerr wrote this book about how they went through this organizational, cultural change. But you're talking about picking 30 men. Now, they have a woman's team, but 30 male rugby players out of a population of five million people. And I actually met their coach, Steve Hansen. He's been the assistant coach. He played for them. He's their coach now. And I asked him, I said, do you have a problem finding talent? He goes, no, I got no problem finding it. I have a problem finding character. And then later on, they had their fitness coach came, because we're revamping our fitness program. And he said, you know, they're picking on the side. He says, probably the best player in New Zealand is not going to get picked. I said, why is that? Because he's a jerk. He said, jerk. And we don't want him on the team. And Hansen, when I talked to him, he said, you know, what I'm trying to get to, is I said, there's pressure down from the organization, like the heritage and legacy of the Navy and the Marine Corps. But I got to have pressure up. I got to have the players want it more than the coach. And he says, I don't want to have to lose to learn. Now think about that. Most time, we've been taught, hey, you got to have a failure to learn. You got to have something bad, happy to learn. He says, I don't want to lose. But I want to get better. So this is kind of what we're trying to do in the Marine Corps. And whether we get there or not, we'll see. So let me just talk about where our Marines are real quick. So end strength, probably when you put all the reserves in there on active duty today, probably close to 190,000 in summertime, because we've got a lot of reserves on active duty. And if you go from right to left, as you look at it, we've got a special purpose MAGTF, primarily reserve Marines down in Honduras working with Admiral Tidd. We've got the USS America, the first LHA replacement, non-well deck, big deck out there training up, getting ready to go to SENTCOM. And they'll relieve the 24th MEW that's out there later this summer. 31st MEW is headed to Australia for Talisman Saber, big exercise with Australian M5 forces and a carrier strike group and Admiral Swift's going out there to be the JTF commander. And there'll be a large force down there to include Marines that are down there with the Ameritime Response Force. Darwin, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, my very first battalion that just came back online about a year ago, now that we're back up to 24 infantry battalions. And they'll probably get embarked aboard Australian amphib ships. And they'll conduct a landing down there. Continue across the globe. We're back in, I was talking to Bing West about this. We're back in Helmand with about 300 folks. And they're actually right now helping the Afghans get back in Marsha. So, you know, the sequel, Marsha the sequel. Hopefully there won't be a third. Across further in, 24th MEW and CENTCOM, they're actually making a port call in Jebel Ali. There are LPD, the whole platform, the Mesa Verdes in the Med, working for Admiral Walhauser. So we've actually, we have distributed the force. That's what we call, when the ARG MEW is split between two COCOMs that are distributed because they're still OPCON to that MEW ARG CO team when they're taken on to the COCOM. We've got a special person, Agtaf and Kuwait. We're flying F-18s out of Bahrain that are part of the strike package. The Marines are, we use an MV-22 Ospreys or trapping or prepared to recover any down pilot that goes down in Syria or Iraq of any of our coalition partners or the Iraqis. We got two Marine colonels running about 2,000 to 5,000 coalition forces, Australians, Canadians, Brits, Danes, all up in there training the Iraqis at places that many of us are familiar with, Tocatum and Al-Assad. And then in the Med, we've got another Spurs, Spurs, Magtaf operating out of Moron, Spain. They're also in Sigonella doing theater security cooperation in Africa. They're out of MK, Romania. We've got another amphib ship that Arlington's up doing ball tops with the Sixth Fleet Commander in the Baltic Sea to include active and reserve Marines and we've got Marines back in Norway for the first time in about, we never really had anybody stationed in Norway. We just trained there, but we're living there and the Norwegians are excited about it and we'll see if we can keep from getting some of those guys married off. That's what I'm worried about. That's what I'm worried about. And then back in the States, one thing is important and I know you watch the Secretary and the Chairman's testimony that testified again this morning to testify tomorrow myself and acting Secretary Stackley and the CNO to testify Thursday in front of the Senate. We're a two to one force, a Marine Corps. We used to be a three to one force. When I came in and in the 80s, we were gone for six and back for 18. Now we're gone for six and we're home for 12. That tempo is hard on our people, it's hard on our gear and it's hard on our families. And what it also does to our people is, you checked in, you had 18, well you never really had 18 months because you figured you gotta leave it and leave when you come back from an appointment and leave before you go. So now we're talking 16 months. Now you gotta learn your job. So now you used to have 16 months to go out there and be second lieutenant and now learn, kinda screw it up and figure it out and go to the field and go out there and learn who your Marines were and learn your trade craft and have the platoon sergeant tell you what to do and then make mistakes, make mistakes and learn. Now you got 10 months, maybe nine months. That's not a lot of time. And if you're single and you join the Marine Corps to go do stuff, that's great. But for the first time, I'm getting a little concerned about our career force. So that's what's going on and we can talk about that. But let me talk about the future because there's really three things going on right now in all our militaries. One, we're meeting current requirements. Two, we're trying to reestablish our readiness of our legacy gear and we're preparing for the future. We're modernizing. And those three things within that two to one cycle and when you had a CR for eight years, I mean, we're very thankful that we've got a budget this year and we got a supplemental but we only got four months to spend it. And for the Marine Corps, the difference between that CR and what we got is about $2 billion. I mean, for the Navy, that's not a lot of money. For Marine Corps, that's big money, that's big money. We're going to spend that money and we're already seeing improvement in our readiness. It's going to take, it took us a while to get to this point, particularly the aviation but it's going to take us a while to get back but it's starting to happen. But the future operating environment is not going to be, we don't think, and we may be wrong but we think it's going to be, we don't know geographically where it's going to be but I think even if it is geographically the places we've been, it's going to be more like this where you've got complex terrain, you've got fighting in urban areas, you've got a proliferation of technology both amongst yourself and by your adversaries. Information is a weapon. We see that every day in our own lives, just watch the news. You're being informed whether you like it or not about what's going on and you have to decipher what is really accurate and what is not. Contested domains used to be when we would teach here and for those of you who support the school, thank you so much for doing that because we train for the mission but we educate for the future. So this is really where for the students here, you're learning, you have a chance to read the good books, spend time with your families and get connected and then we're going to bring you out of here in about a week and we're going to wear your ass out. I'm so excited that you're getting out of this school because I got stuff for you to do. But the domains, and we talked to you about air, land and sea and maybe under the sea. Now we're talking about space. We're talking about cyber. I think information is a domain because information rides through space and on cyber and we've got to be able to operate because our adversaries are operating now today. In fact, the fight in cyber is going on right now. Right now, the fight in cyber is going on and we have skill sets and they have skill sets and getting permissions and authorities is probably the bigger issue. And for a Western democracy, a liberal democracy like ours, the right of free speech and the privacy of your information is always going to butt up head against what's going on in cyber and the protection of your rights and your information against the country that really doesn't care about that. It's something we need to talk about. And the last one is battle of signatures. Now when I was a company commander, we were getting ready to fight the Soviet Union and we trained and that I could tell you the order of battle of every Soviet motorized rifle regiment and what was in the lead echelon, the combat reconnaissance patrol, the advance guard, how far apart they were. And I knew when I went out to train at 29 Palms that there were gonna be radio battalion people out there trying to jam my net, do imitative deception. I mean, this happened in Vietnam. There was jamming, there was imitated decession, people, because they didn't have any crypto. You know, flip flop, take the thing on the prick 25 and flip the thing and use brevity codes and all that, we haven't done that in the last 16 years of war. I mean, I can't speak for the Navy, but for the ground forces, I mean, we went to a fob, there was fiber optic cable, we had big screen TVs and we were sitting there in an air conditioned room more or less, we never moved, we never maneuvered and we didn't worry about anybody jamming us because there was nobody that could jam us. We didn't worry about our signature, we didn't worry about how much electromagnetic mass or our energy we were putting out because there was nobody who's gonna shoot at us. That's not that way anymore. So our training, our thought process, this battle of signatures, minimize my signature, get the adversary to raise their signature, find their signature, because if I can find your signature, I can target your signature and if I can target your signature, I can kill you. If that sounds harsh, I'm not gonna apologize because I mean, that's what you pay me to do. You pay Marines to go out and break stuff. You pay your Navy to go out and break things. And we can feed them and we can rescue them and we all feel good about that, but at the end of the day, we break stuff and we try not to get ourselves broken. But this signature thing is a big deal. So all these things are part of that future operating environment that we're concerned with. So what are we gonna do about it? We're trying to write, we've written a concept called the Marine Operational Concept. Talks about how we're gonna fight as part of the naval team as a maritime component in the sea space. It's tied to Co-operative Strategy 21. We're writing a littoral ops in a contested environment. I'll talk about that and we're also working with the Army in multi-domain battle. We're trying to get back to maneuver, not just in the physical dimensions, but also in the mental dimensions and the kind of ubiquitous dimensions of cyber. How do you maneuver in cyber? What's the space? I mean, space is three-dimensional. Information's not three-dimensional. Cyber has got a physical part, but it's also got a mental, a cognitive piece. So we've written this document, trying to get back to being a combined arms force, enhance maneuver, maneuver warfare, find the enemy's gaps, avoid their surfaces. In other words, find where they're weak, take advantage of their weaknesses, find their vulnerabilities, minimize or mask our vulnerabilities or protect our vulnerabilities or our friendly centers of gravity and go out after that. And that's in this document, which is not too long, and it's got some vignettes on how we think we're gonna fight from the sea to get to this point. And that's something that we're working on and we're a work in progress. Part of that is also changing our force structure and what we're calling force 2025. And we're gonna see the first iteration of that. The Marine Corps was gonna go to a force of 182,000 until we got the money for this budget, where we've got money to pay for 185,000 marines, so we're gonna be able to buy 3,000 more marines. Those marines are going to be intel marines, cyber marines, air defense marines, information marines, public affairs marines, electronic warfare marines. I need more infantry and ground combat in airplanes, but I don't need them now. I gotta make what we've got now in the more traditional force capabilities whole and ready, but I gotta build this other capability because right now we don't believe, I don't believe we're trained, organized and equipped to fight up here or near peer in 2025. And we gotta get after it because time is moving and so are our adversaries. So we're doing experiments, C-Dragon, on the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, the infantry battalion out there, 35, battalion landing 35, they're kind of our experimental unit, and we're giving them some of the cool guy stuff and all the Gucci infantry stuff that, it's not expensive, it's actually, it's rifles, it's suppressors, it's better calm. Every rifle squad by any of this year is gonna have its own UAV because I want the UAV to go look over the hill and not Lance Corporal West, okay? West, you stay here, go fly that UAV up there and then go look. And if it gets shot down, then I got Lance Corporal Harley back on the 3D printer, making me a new one. Oh yeah, right now. I mean, we're moving out and all the old curmudgeons like myself are getting religion about this because once we energize the force, the soldiers, sailors, German Marines, they're all fired up about this and they're gonna go faster than we can probably handle. But part of this is also being part of a maritime force. So there's a lot of discussion and I know there's a question earlier about should big deck amphibs be the equivalent of, you know, light carriers? Well, of course we can do that. I mean, the America could carry 20 F-35Bs and I think they're going out with six or eight and the F-35B squad and then we have deployed to the Westpac and Iwakuni, they just came back from Alaska where they did a, there's a big giant trainer, I didn't realize this till I went to Alaska, up in Isleson Air Force Base, three times bigger than Nellis. It's like the size of Indiana. And it's instrumented and they go up there and fight each other. And of course the F-35 is gonna go up there and slaughter everybody, they slaughter them. You know what the Air Force call the F-35 at Nellis? Big fat, ugly kid in magic suit. That was told to me by an Air Force officer, so. Because they can't see him. They can't see him. And they all get killed. So we're excited about that but there's a lot of discussion about, okay, if the enemy has this capability, if the adversaries got long range, anti-ship ballistic missiles, all our adversaries have got anti-ship coastal defense cruise missiles. They've all got mines, a problem we've never really solved. You know, how are you gonna get in the second island chain? How are you gonna get in the first island chain? How are you gonna just go in there? You just can't go kind of lollygagging in there and laying the landing force. That's fact, and that's always been the truth. We've never been able to do that. I'm going to Guadalcanal in August for the 75th anniversary. I'm so jacked up about that. It's gonna be so cool. For the Marines, any Marines in here? Besides, there are a few Marines here. I'm gonna go find John Basilon's position. And I'm just gonna sit there. I'm gonna smell the ground. Let's say this is it, right here. Holy land. But if you read about that campaign, it's not a whole lot different than what we're doing now. The Japanese had long-range, air-based aircraft. They had submarines. They had a really good fleet. They did really good at night fighting. And we had radar, but we didn't really know how to use it. And they had already been campaigning across the Pacific, and we were kind of, we had to lose to learn. We can't lose to learn the next time. Because it could be too much. So, for those that would say, well, the amphibious operation is the thing of the past, you're never gonna be able to defeat this adversary, I would disagree. Because I think we know what their capabilities are. We've got our capabilities, you know what I mean? I can give you a scenario. So all right, so I'm take off. We're all part of a maritime task force. I got carrier strike groups. I got amphibious strike groups. I got surface action groups. I got submarines out screen in front of me. I go up and seize an advanced naval base, a secure area. That becomes a land-based aircraft carrier for me. I'm flying UAVs and F-35Bs off of that. And I use that to suppress the enemy as I go along. I take a circuitous route screened by my submarines and my surface action. I come around and I use the carrier strike group. Once I get penetration and beat down the air defense, and I go in there and I land those Marines and I beat them up. Now it's not that gonna be that simple. I gotta clear the mines. I've gotta do it at extreme ranges. I've gotta have logistics. It's really, really complicated. It's always really, really been complicated. And we haven't had to work at it real hard the last 15, 16 years because we haven't had to work at it. Because we were been ashore in a land-based counter-insurgency stability off-bite with no maneuver. And we know we can do that. And we don't wanna lose that skill set. But we're a maritime force. We're Marines. We come from the sea. And we use the sea as maneuver space. And as part of that Navy Marine Corps team, we've gotta be able to do this. And whether it's a seizure of advanced bases, which is in the Marine operational concept, I mean, that's one of our core missions in the National Security Act to seize and secure advanced naval bases for the further prosecution of the naval campaign. Whether it's a port or an airfield. We composite the force. We integrate our force. We move up. The carrier strike group, the surface action group allows us the ability to set the condition to land the landing force and we project that power ashore. And do we have everything we need? Do we have a long range radars? No, but I think we realize that. You know, one of our priorities for acquisition is one of the things I get beat up a lot by the younger Marine officers is how come we're not flying reapers and preds? I said, well, I like that capability, but I'm not sure in a maritime campaign how that works. I have to have a land base. There's a lot of infrastructure. I gotta have a 6,000 foot runway, which means I got an infantry battalion to guard it. I gotta maintain it. I gotta pet it. And you've got no survivability. I would much rather have a group four or five unmanned air system UAV flying off a ship. And that's my number one, not me, the Marine Corps' number one aviation procurement requirement. So I don't know if you know anybody that's got one that built it in their garage. Have them give me a call. I'm interested. So my point in all this is, I'm not wishing away the problems. We're not wishing away the problems. We're doing a lot of stuff with the Navy. Navy Marine Corps Board is back in business and we're talking about these really hard, tough problems. There's a lot of wargaming going on, but it's being done by with all due respect to Lieutenant-Colonels, Commanders and Captains and Marine-Colonels, and my point is, well, how am I supposed to learn anything if everybody's doing the wargame but me? We need to get generals and animals up here, Admiral Harley, in the wargame. I don't wanna hear about what the captain learned. I wanna learn it myself. So we need to come up here because that way we'll be forced to talk. The generals and animals will be forced to talk through these really tough issues of command and control, logistics, sea control, shaping the environment, setting the conditions, securing advanced bases, denying the enemy, long range fires, distributed lethality, all the stuff, getting the proper command and control and radars on amphib ships so that we can talk to each other so that the F-35 cannot just do what it does through stealth. It can link the force and provide information and create conditions so that we can impose our will either at sea, under the sea, in the air, on the land. So that's what's going on. And if we can create this fifth generation Marine Corps, and you'll see the similar themes that I was just talking about up here, integrate that naval force, evolve the Marine air ground task force, which we're trying to do with force 2025, operate with resilience in that contested environment to the network, reduce our signature, be resilient, deny the enemy, their ability to use the network, enhance our maneuver, and then really the most important part is take advantage of the skill and competence of the young Marine we've got. I mean, they're really, they're different. I mean, I came in in 1975, my first three squad leaders were a guy, Sergeant Bacon, Sergeant Douglas, and Corporal Thomas had an average GCT of 69. They were good men. They were good Marines. I tried to teach them a right of five paragraph order, that lasted like about three minutes. But Sergeant Bacon, I mean, they were not stupid, they were just not educated. And I didn't have time to educate, but I had time to train them and they had time to train me. That's not the case anymore. The young men and women we get are really, really smart, and I think we need, we, I'm looking at all the uniforms in here, we need to put the pressure on them. They can do more. They can do more. Same thing with our junior officers, you gotta press them, you gotta press them, and they'll come up. You gotta explain to them why you want them to do it, because they get, they're kind of needy, but that's okay. I always wanted to know why too. I mean, I wanted to know why. If there's time, I'm happy to tell you why. If there's not time, I'm just happy to tell you what to do. But if there's time, I think we should all tell them why. And because they want it, they're curious. It's not because they're pushing back, they're curious. They wanna know. I always wanted to know, hey, why are we doing that? That sounds stupid to me. Well, it really is stupid, but I don't have time to explain it to you. But if we can do these things as part of that naval force, figure out these tough gnarly problems, I think we'll be in a better place because we don't want a fair fight. And those that would oppose us, while we've been off doing what we've been doing the last 15 years, they've recapitalized their force, they modernized their force, they're exercising and training their force. And their focus has been us. I mean, just don't make no mistake about it. And whether, hopefully there won't be conflict, but if there is, we don't wanna come back and talk about we got third place. So that's my last slide. I mean, I think I'm right on time. Are there any questions for me? If there are no questions, I got a video, but so just, just cause you wanna see the video, just doesn't mean you can't, I'll just throw the video at the end over here. Anybody, yes sir. I'm getting really nervous now. I don't think there's any, there's only one kind of relationship. The Commander of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, and he gives orders. And as long as they're moral and as long as they're not immoral on ethical or legal, we're bound and required to carry them out. Full stop. Support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies formed domestic, bear true faith, only just the same. So, I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. And I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I'm about to enter, so help me God. Who raw? That was easy. Yes sir. General, you mentioned exporting the competence of individual Marines. Could you say a little bit more about the enhancing the effectiveness of individual Marines at the squad platoon company level? You mentioned UAVs, for example. I'm wondering what other materials and equipment you see are gonna be increasingly important level? Well what we've done is, the question is what are we doing about enhancing the competence of the rifle squad? So, the mantra has always been every Marine is a rifleman. That's true. I have added every Marine is not in the infantry. And I say this, it sounds shamelessly parochial as an infantry Marine, and every Marine is a rifleman, not every Marine is in the infantry. And the infantry needs to get different stuff. And we've never done that, really. And so whether it's small arms, ammunition, packs, helmets, suppressors on weapons, ammunition, food, way to generate power, mobility, small vehicles that will follow you like a little dog to carry your stuff, a little battle squire. No, we've got robots, little six wheel things. They're just outrageously expensive, but they're really cool. You just have to hook them on your belt and we all put our packs on them and we walk along and it carries all my stuff. And I get to where I'm going, I'm not exhausted, because I've been carrying 120 pounds. How to make water, so I don't have to carry all the water. How do I get resupplied? My comm, having a tablet, like a droid tablet where I've got an app on there called Kill Switch where I can get full visibility of everybody in the squad. I can do a nine line brief and I can call an air strike or a precision ammunition. This is all done by Lance Corporal. There's a little thing called a switch blade. It's like a little mortar. You poop it out, flies around until you get tired until she's about 10 clicks. I was a little camera and then you see the bad guy and you go, I'm gonna kill him and hit the button and flies in and kills him. That's really cool. But they're so expensive. It's a lot of money to kill some knucklehead on a motorcycle. But the stuff is there. And so comparatively, it's not a lot of money. You only got 24 infantry battalions times 650 infantry Marines times. So we're not buying this for everybody. It doesn't mean I don't care about air the Marines. They're gonna have the gear they need to protect themselves, but they're not the ones out there at the pointy end. So it'd be infantry, combat engineers, anybody who goes with the infantry. So we're testing this stuff and we go listen and we have the organization, the squad. So there's a Marine now. We called him at first the assistant squad leader, but the assistant squad leader implies like the second in charge. He's not the assistant squad leader. He's actually the assistant to the squad leader. And it's not the second senior guy. It's like who's the biggest geek in the squad that knows how to make all this stuff work? I'm like, okay, here it. And they're there. They're there. We'll find, I mean, they just, they know who they are. The Marines know who they are. I mean, I mean, any of these, any, all of our, all of young, I mean, everybody walking around, they, you know, they know how to do more with their phone than, you know, they just know how to make a phone call. I mean, they're doing all sorts of stuff. Now the question then is, is the network gonna be there to support that? Can I defend the network? Am I gonna get jammed? Am I gonna get malware? Am I gonna get hacked? And we've never even thought about this. Does my GPS on that phone give away my position to somebody else who's trying to find me? And can I, can I now be targeted? We had an exercise. The first Marine Expeditionary Force went to the field as a meff. Three star headquarters and the commander of the headquarters group went out there and she did a pass over the headquarters with Google Earth, got a picture using Google Earth. And then she did electronic signature base. Guess what area of the headquarters had the biggest electronic signature? The building area. Where everybody lived, because they all had their phones. So there's a solution to that. You ain't taking your phone to the field. I mean, I can't text my significant other 55 times a day. No. No, no phone. No phone, no phone, go to work. You wanna live or you wanna text? Sir. Sir, I'm curious about the role of the reservist. As you mentioned, the deployment of Marine Corps Reserves. What percentage of the force is now made up of reservists and what role are they playing? The Marine Corps, Selected Marine Corps Reserve is about 38,000 Marines. They're organized more or less in a mirror image of the active force. We've got an air wing, a marine logistics group and a fourth Marine Division. We're re-looking the whole structure because there are a lot of things that I don't, I don't think we're taking advantage of the civilian talent and natural skills that the reservists have that they bring. So we need to have enough mirror image for a shock absorber if we have to go do a big fight, but we need to take it like, should we have reserves involved in cyber? Should we have reserves? Because a lot of people working in that business, more communications, other things that we can do. But so right now, because it's summertime the majority of the junior Marines are, they're college, some of them are college students, or they're on their jobs, they're teachers, or they can get a vacation. This is when normally we activate units, battalions and squadrons for 15 days of active duty and then they go. So the ones that are down in Honduras, they've managed to get out, they were mowed for about a year. And they trained up and then they deployed down to Honduras and they'll be there until, they're there during the hurricane season actually to help provide a humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, but they'll go do different things. But we also found last year when they did it, they would go to certain places in El Salvador, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras that just go to do like build a school or help a local community. All the drug traffickers went another direction. So they create a little friction in the drug trade. And then there's, we have reserves involved in training the Mexican Marines who are involved in fighting their drug fight. We got reserve Marines up in Alaska building an airstrip. We got Marines in Norway working on our gear. I mean, whatever we can play them, it's not, and they're willing and able to go, the biggest problem we've had is, I just don't have money to pay their salary. To activate a reserve infantry battalion of about 900 Marines for a year is about $60 million. Just to pay them. I got the gear, we got the stuff. They got their stuff, just to pay them for a year, $60 million. Does that answer your question? Yes, sir. Yes, sir, in the back. You know, the Osprey has been one of your means of getting your men to the beach. And operating with the Harriers has been a challenge. Is there any plan to look at a faster delivery of aircraft, kind of a faster version of the Osprey? I'm not aware of there being any problems working with the Harriers. I mean, you do time and space it. It's a bigger problem, I think, having that group four or five UAS. And we're gonna put a gun on the Osprey. We can throw different types of munitions out the back. You know, the Harrier can cruise. The Harriers problem is a range issue. But they're both air-refuelable. So I don't, I think we've worked out the timing and the synchronization of that. So right now, there's no plan to, we're still buying out the entire acquisition objective of the Osprey. But let me just, you know, you understand the capability. I mean, you probably do, because you asked me the question. So the forces in Australia right now came from the West Coast of the United States. They're down there with four Ospreys, four MB-22 Ospreys. They came out of Hawaii. So they self-deployed from Hawaii to Wake, Wake to Guam, and Guam to Australia. Refueled by Marine C-130s. Nobody else can do that. Yeah, I think the question is from the operating environment, speed of the Harrier, and having to operate at slower speed. Well, I don't know. I mean, there's no other aircraft that can take off vertically and land vertically and then fly horizontally at over 300 miles an hour and be self-deployable globally. And then land in a parking lot. So it's not perfect. It's big, makes a lot of heat. Gotta have the deck of the ship prepared. You know, you gotta be ready to, you know, obviously any time you land is sort of a rotary wing or tilt-rotor aircraft. You gotta be really concerned about the LZ because you get brown out and all that, even though there's automated systems that you punch in the land. I mean, just like if you see an F-35 land, Harrier used to be like really high adventure, landing in high winds coming in and the guys like this. So the F-35 just comes in now. The guy comes orgin' in, he hits a button, the thing slows down and it just lands and the pilot just sits there with his arms folded across his chest. I mean, we're paying him extra money for that too. You believe that? How hard can that be? Anybody else? There was somebody in the back, yes, sir. Well, I think the whole story is, I mean, if you've heard of any of the service chiefs, General Milley, the chief of staff in the Army, he's pretty, I mean, he's pretty adamant. I mean, there's a million people in the active military and probably two million when you count the garden reserve out of a population of, I'd say closer to 350 million. Now, we know for a fact that if we look at all the young people in this country, less than a third of them are qualified, qualified. I'm not even saying they're propounced or have a desire, qualified to join. And we know that we draw a, particularly for enlisted, a disproportionate amount of our accessions come from certain parts of the country. And now that we're down to 4.3% unemployment and every, you know, it's getting hard, particularly if we have to grow the forest. But right now, I mean, I think it's been, I don't know, 13, 14 years we've made it, 99.8% high school grads, 75% of the three highest mental categories. Our attrition, as when I came into Marine Corps, attrition of the force to not get to your end of your EAS or your contract was about 25% to 30%, now we're under seven. So maybe we're being too easy on them. I've got, we've got, blessedly, three or four young men or women for every spot we have to be a Marine officer. So I take your point and I think we're all concerned that, you know, it's nice when everybody says, thank you for your service, thank you for your service and all that, I never take that for granted. Because I remember when it wasn't that way when I came in, when many of the Vietnam folks put up with the total disgusting behavior from this nation that they put up with and I give them all the credit in the world for making sure that that never happened again, but I don't take that for granted. So I would ask all of you in this room, obviously you've got an interest, if you know somebody or you know somebody or know somebody, you have a friend of a family or somebody out there who's got a young man or a woman who's got some game, I'd ask you to chat them up a little bit. Everybody here is a recruiter, you're all recruiters. I've just deputized you, sir. I'm not sure we want them if they're living in daddy's basement, but I take your point, but I mean we're, you know, this is a, this is everybody's, this is an all volunteer force, but more appropriately, this is an all recruited force. And so we've got to recruit about 35,000 new Marines every year and we have to retain out of that cohort about 25% to stay. We are the, we have one officer every nine Marines. I think the closest to us is the Army is like one to five. I've only got, you know, 60% of the Marine Corps under the age of 25. Yeah, welcome to my world, but that's why they're, you know, with that comes all the good and all the rest. So I am concerned about the connection with the American people because I don't want this to turn into a family business, but at the same time, you know, we're, we can always get better and we're always looking to get better, but so far knock on wood, we're making it with the young men and women that come from small towns throughout the country or from the inner city or, or, you know, I talked to a guy the other day, his name's Gillis. So he's, so he's talking to me and he says, hey, you got to talk to the, sorry, he did a TED talk about his fire team. And so I found him. So he's this white kid from McLean, Virginia who went to Georgetown and got his degree and then enlisted in the Marine Corps. So I called him up, I go, all right, I got to tell me why. So I want to be a Marine. So it's, you're a Georgetown grad, political science, honor roll and you're a Sergeant Infantry in the Marine Corps. Yes, sir. I said, why don't I commission you? Cause well, I'm getting married. My fiance doesn't want me to stay in. And I'm like, well, let me talk to her. I'm still working that one. So again, I know, I know we're, I got time for one more and then I'm getting the hook from the Admiral. So this is it, sir, I promise. Last question. Retired Marine Corps major served with Chesty Puller. You're doing a marvelous job. Put every kid we know that wants to do something with his life, get them in the Marine Corps. With you, you're doing a great job. We appreciate you. Well, thank you very much. You know, sometimes you just get picked. So there's been, it's been an interest. I'm about halfway through this. And he's like one of those, if I'd known now what I, when I, if I knew now what I, what happened was going to happen to me before when I've taken the job. Absolutely. So I appreciate it and thanks for all your support. So again, I appreciate all of you being here and supporting the college and all that you do for educating our officers and our enlisted folks. I appreciate your support. Again, you know, as Secretary Manus said, you know, we're not on our butts, but there's been a long period of time where we've been kind of at the low end of the resource thing. And it's our job to make sure that every dollar we get from the U.S. taxpayers spent well and train, we train hard and we take care of our stuff. But we're at a point now where our adversaries, they're either right with us or maybe ahead of us or just right on our tails. And we need to recapitalize this thing. And I guarantee you, and I speak for the CNO and the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and the Command of the Coast Guard and General Selva and General Dunford and the Secretary, we don't need, you know, we just need what we need and we'll take care of the rest because we've got really good young men and women out there that came from our cities and towns who are ready to get after it. So thank you very much.