 I have received a lot of compliments about the extraordinary day that we had yesterday. I was just told it was the best in someone's 30-year memory of attending the current strategy forum. I saw a lot of that. I think the discussion of the intellectual firepower that was here yesterday, I certainly felt the same way. You know, goosebumps having read a lot of the books of that combined talent was a really special day. And that's really a tribute to Mike Sherlock who is much more than just the administrator of the current strategy forum. He's the guy who goes out and gets that talent and puts this on, so I'd like to thank you, Mike. And we've got an equally exciting day today. You saw the schedule there. It starts off with one of the world's foremost foreign policy experts. Our next keynote speaker is a recognized foreign policy expert, a prolific writer, a businessman. It's my pleasure to introduce my friend, Dr. Harlan Omen. Dr. Omen is the chair of two different companies, the C&I Guard and the Killowen Group. He's a graduate of the Naval Academy, served in the Vietnam War as a small vote commander, swift vote commander, received his Ph.D. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, was a professor of strategy at the National War College. Author of numerous books, including Shock and All, a Handful of Bullets, which is about the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and it has a forthcoming book titled The Anatomy of Failure, Why America Loses Wars It Starts. Dr. Omen Harlan has been a great supporter of your U.S. Naval War College. He recently did six lectures here for the student body, showing his Russia expertise and filling a very important niche that we have at the college. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce Dr. Harlan Omen. That was too kind, Jack. Am I on? Can you hear me? Admiral, that was a very, very kind introduction. I'm grateful. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure and a privilege to be back at Newport, the home created by Stephen B. Luce, Alfred Thea Mahan, James Spruance, and of course, Stansfield Turner. It is also the intellectual center of gravity for the Navy and Marine Corps. And for those students who are about to graduate, I hope you've made best use of your time here because you are our future leaders. A lot is writing on you and what you've learned here. And for our civilian friends in the audience, especially members of the Naval War College Foundation, I have a plea I would like to make for you at the end of this session. I want to leave you with three points to ponder. First, John Paul Jones was correct. Men and by extension women are more important than guns in the rating of a ship. I will say that again. Men and women are more important than guns in the rating of a ship. We often give lip service to people, but unless we realize in the 21st century how important our people are going to be, we are never going to be able to deal with all these challenges. Second, for you going back to the fleet, to the Marine Corps, I would argue that the largest challenge you will face is not the Russians or the Chinese or North Korea or the Islamic State. It is the threat of uncontrolled internal cost growth of about five to 7% a year, which means just to sustain the current force, you need plus ups in the budget of between 30 and 50 billion dollars. And unless that is corrected, we are headed for some variant of the hollow force following the Vietnam War. And for those of you who may be disbelieving, listen to the testimony of the vice chiefs before Congress earlier this year. My third point is that I want to offer to you a brains-based approach to sound strategic thinking. Now some of you will say this is hugely arrogant and others of you will say this is naive because obviously we exercise our brains. And we do it, if we do it correctly, we win. Fortunately, we won the big ones, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. But when we did not exercise sound strategic thinking, it got us Korea, it got us Vietnam, it got us the Second Iraq War, it got us Libya, and it got us Syria. Now what do I mean by a brains-based approach to sound strategic thinking? And I actually am gonna talk about national security and force design. But I wanna give you the context. First, we have to realize that the 21st century is not the 20th century. The world is far more interconnected, interrelated on an instantaneous basis. The Westphalian system of state-based centric politics has been at least eroded by the diffusion of power that has given far more authority to individuals, Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and non-state actors from Al Qaeda to the Islamic State. And what we have to realize on top of that, when we create force design, we have to understand the broader context of national security. And I would argue the four greatest challenges to mankind. What I call the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are first, failed and failing government. This applies from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe with Washington and Brussels in between. It accounts for the fact why Donald Trump was elected president and why Bernie Sanders made a very close run at it. It reflects what's happening right now in Britain over Brexit and the failure of Theresa May to sustain a majority. The second is economic disparity and dislocation. The world is being increasingly divided between rich and poor and what happens in the United States is happening around the rest of the world. Third is the rise of violent religious extremism, most seen in the form of a violent Islam. And fourth, potentially the most wild of wild cards is environmental catastrophe. Whether this is a pandemic or global warming, this could change everything. And unless or until we understand these are the major challenges, any subset of strategy in my mind is gonna be incomplete. The second facet of a brains-based approach is knowledge and understanding. And I mean knowledge and understanding. The war I fought in, we were clueless about the Vietnamese. Before September 11th, most people didn't know the distinctions between Sunni and Shia. And one of the problems we face is we find ourselves engaged in situations about which we know very little. And I hope some of the knowledge that the students gain here will really be extremely important in making sure your understanding of future environments is far better than many of our understandings in the past. Finally, policy must be about, in my view, affecting, influencing, and controlling will and perception of friends, adversaries, and others. Force may be necessary, but it's not sufficient. Former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld put this brilliantly by saying, this is about getting people to do what you want or preventing people from doing things that you don't want. But unless you take this Klaus Witzian principle and focus on will and perception, we are going to fall short. Now how do I take this and put it into a practical application so that you can think about what future force design should be? Admiral Bud Zumwalt became CNO in 1970 at age 50. Some of you may have heard of Project 60. This was not just Z-Grams and sideburns and social issues. This was the most fundamental change the Navy had probably made since Pearl Harbor. Bud came up with four missions for the Navy. Deterrence, sea control, power projection, and presence. I would take that framework and modify it for the 21st century. Deterrence, during the Cold War, the McNamara scheme of 400 megatons, 400 megatons of deliverable nuclear munitions was enough to kill a third of the Soviet population and destroy half their infrastructure. That was seen as enough to deter. We then had conventional deterrence. Today is quite different. We now have a four plus one matrix planning for the Department of Defense. The requirements are to be able to deter and if necessary, defeat Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea and deal with the Islamic State. What does it take to deter Russia? World War II was a global war. We mobilized more than 12 million people. If we're looking at a global war today, and that was about 15% of the population, we're looking at 30 million people. We're not gonna do that. And how do you deter Russia from moving into Crimea, from active measures, from moving into Syria, from using Russian television, Sputnik, and all these other devices? That's something we have to think about. About sea control, the fact of the matter is, notions are normally not contested. And I think we have to look at sea denial. And I'll come back to that in terms of a strategy as opposed to sea control. About power projection, we have to be very, very careful. In every exercise I ever participated in, when I was the Navy, including a midshipman cruise in a Guppy class World War II submarine, which was terrific. Two things always happen. The carrier got sunk and the submarine got away. Now I'm sure our technology is much better, but these ships unfortunately are very vulnerable. Now the Commandant yesterday talked about forcible entry, and one of the challenges that I will put to the Marines to see a forcible entry is still a viable strategy. 50, 67 years ago marks the battle of, that's not correct, 77 years ago marks the battle of Okinawa. Okinawa is the biggest amphibious operation in history, far bigger than Normandy. The Japanese flew thousands of kamikazes, depending upon how you count, only between eight to 10% hit some 368 ships. Supposing the effect of this rate was 20%, or 30%, or 100%, and supposing they had EMP, electromagnetic pulse, to shut us down. That's what we're looking at. And the last area behind power projection is presence. And I think here we have to redefine presence in a much more sophisticated way relying on partners. When George W. Bush was president, he signed a directive authorizing the Navy to pursue maritime partnerships, which was shorthand for a thousand ship Navy. The idea was to connect all these navies together and Marine Corps, and I think we have to do that. Now what do you derive from all this? There are three challenges I would present to you. First, we need a broader strategy, and most national security study strategies are aspirational. They tell you the what, they don't tell you the how. Second, you have to deal with a couple of strategic black holes. One is that we have been very poor in dealing with Russian active measures. We've not been very good dealing with the Chinese encroachment. We have to think about that. Now this encovers everything from cyber, and the excuse that cyber is too tough is not a really good answer. If you were ordered into battle and you said, gee Admiral, gee General, it's a little bit too tough, you know what the response would be. So we have got to deal with these active measures in an intellectual way, and then we have to deal with the hollow force. Now taking all that, I wanna talk about force design. I would argue that we have several choices. Steady as you go, hollow force, spend more money, which I don't think we're gonna do, or make some dramatic changes. If you're forced to make dramatic changes, here are my assumptions. First of all, given the choice between a large, unready force and a smaller, ready, capable force that will work, that's what I want. You can disagree with me, you can say we can rely more on a strategy of reconstruction and regeneration, but I think today's environment needs a force that's ready. I would size this force on the basis of having the equivalent of a joint core CORPS on each coast of about 150,000 each who are either R-deployed or could be deployed. If you use a three to one rotational basis and add in a few, you're talking about a force of about 900,000 or a million, perhaps a quarter of a million fewer. And the reason I want a smaller force is so that I can use that money, recapitalize as Zumwalt did, who almost cut the Navy in half to make sure the current force is really able. On top of that, what would this mean for the Navy and the Marine Corps? I'm looking at a Navy which is about the current size. I would put it on the basis of six to eight deployable carrier battle groups. I would not decommission the other ships, but I would put them in a cadre or stand-down condition. I served as XO of a cadre destroyer, that was fine. And if we needed it, we could have bring it back. And so I would take a look at putting some of our forces in the status. I would also look at designing two new classes of ships. Admiral Mike Borda had what was called the Arsenal ship or the strike cruiser. Imagine a ship that could contain say 500 Tomahawk cruise missiles and arguably a thousand drones, UAVs, and have all sorts of other capacity. I'd let you use your imagination about that. And second, being a small boat guy, I would like to see us designing a ship somewhere between 1200, 1500, 2000 tons displacement that is loaded to the gills, just like the Russian ships are. And I'd like to use these much more actively in these partnership arrangements. As far as the Marine Corps, I would look at a Marine Corps of about 150,000 simply because we cannot afford in my mind what we currently are going to have. Now, what are some of the other things that we would do? First, I would call for a revolution in naval education. I think it's essential we need to draw these capacities on which we spend huge amounts of money to be able to empower you to be able to do a better job. Further, I would say anybody who makes flag or general officer has to go to a war college, preferably the Naval War College. And regarding acquisition, which is broken, I was on the Packard Commission in 1986 as an advisor. I also conducted a study co-chaired with Jim Schlesinger, former secretary of defense on this. And after the Packard Commission was over, I took Dave Packard, who obviously chaired it, former inventor of a Hewlett Packard to lunch. And I said, what do you think, Dave? He said, it's the biggest waste of time in my life. It's not gonna work. There's only one thing that we can do in acquisition that is codify and streamline or streamline and codify the acquisition regulations. I don't know whether John Layman said this yesterday, but he did say at one time, the only Washington monument is the thousands of pages of defense acquisition regulations. This is what I think needs to be attacked because unless or until we do that, we can reorganize the Pentagon and unfortunately that's not gonna work. Let me conclude. For the civilians in the audience, you should be extraordinarily proud and surprised that the Pentagon is doing as well as it is under the most odious conditions. The situations in which it is working, not just continuing resolutions and sequestration, but the odious rules and regulations had to be designed by the KGB because no rational American would do that. And what I would ask you to do is to call, write, email at your member of Congress and say, we have to do something about defense. I'm gonna hold you responsible. And if we don't, if you don't, I'm not gonna vote for you because we are gonna put defense in a horrible position not because of what the department is doing. They're doing too much. They've been at war for 16 years under these extraordinary circumstances but it's gonna take public outcry to keep whatever forces we have ready, manned, and able. And for the military, a brains-based approach to sound strategic thinking is not the only answer but unless we have something like that, the chances for failure are gonna be too great to take. And I implore you to think about how we minimize those chances by thinking much smarter. I'll stop now and be delighted to take your questions and comments. We've got 12 minutes. If you don't have questions for me, I've got questions for you. Please. What you said, I think makes eminent sense and I think a lot of people would agree with that. But Eisenhower warned of a military and real complex. And ever since there have been a lot of smart people that have come and gone from Washington and come and gone from the ranks of flag officers in the military would like a solution to that. On a practical level. I think you gotta push the button down. I am holding the button hard. If you get everybody to agree, do you have any potential steps as to how you would approach the great barrier to what you are talking about? The military industrial complex. Well, first of all, you gotta put Eisenhower in context. We're talking about the military industrial complex. What you just said really wasn't what he meant to say. What he meant to say was we can't have a permanently mobilized military. He was calling for a much smaller military. Having said that, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the secretary of defense and the service chiefs go forward with their plan and they really lay out the problems and they've done this piece mail. You can make a big change. Bud Zumwalt did that. Go back to his project 60. It was remarkable and he got away with it. And by the way, one of the things I forgot to add, those in uniform, what was Zumwalt's best advice? It is far better to beg forgiveness than request permission. Don't ever forget that. Sir, could you expand a little more on that revolution in military education that you talk about and also the international partnerships? Yeah. I will send you a study I did for Gordon England twice when he was secretary of the Navy and also deputy secretary of defense. We have these huge assets in military education. They're not coordinated. There's no center library. One of the things I've argued for is a combination. Everybody know what Bletchley Park was, the code breakers, World War II? Everybody know what companycommander.com is or was? In Iraq, General Jack helped me, the former vice chief. Keane, Jack Keane set up the system online in which a young officer, captain and below, could ask any question of people who had been previously deployed to Iraq. This was sort of a Wikipedia. And what we need is a Wikipedia for enlisted and officers, far more extended learning. We need to coordinate the war colleges much more closely and we need to challenge and I know the students are gonna groan, challenge the students to think even more profoundly than we do right now. I taught at the National War College and one of the ways I got that was that I would bring in the service chiefs or the vice chiefs to conduct seminars and grade each of the student seminars. Boy, I will tell you that got a lot of people thinking. Those are things that we have to do because we have these terrific capabilities and I think the only way we're really gonna succeed is through this brains-based approach about partnerships. I think we need to expand the whole issue of exchange officers and enlisted. I think you can probably do as much with a squad of Marines. And by the way, I also forgot to say that one of the things I would do, having served in the Royal Navy with a platoon of Royal Marines on board, I would like to see more Marines and special forces serving on some of these ships which will be adept in dealing with things like saving Captain Phillips and other issues that are gonna take place. But I think what we need to do is expand our training and interaction with other services. We have it here in the War College where you've got a bevy of international students working more proactively so that we keep in touch with these students as they rise to great ranks heading navies as the Admiral did and even rising to more senior positions in government. That's what I would do. Good morning, sir. I've had the opportunity to speak with a lot of different software companies, companies that make applications and the biggest concern that they have with dealing with DOD as far as innovative things that may come out of the enterprise is speed. The accuracy to me is a temporary condition. We've just told ourselves it's too big. We can't tear it down but we're missing major opportunities in the civilian sector because they don't see any investment that's in their favor because we can't operate in a 60 to 90 day cradle to grave environment. Are we working on that? I don't see a ton of things coming out of DIUX to promote the speed and efficiency. Is there any other ways we can be doing that better? That's a terrific question. If you get into the acquisition rules and regulations which he never really did, that's step one. If we rely on the ingenuity of our troops to develop things, as an example for the Royal Artillery in Helmand Province had a series of cameras that they installed for protection but they realized they could all be linked microwave through microwaves and therefore they had this great protective device for virtually the entire province. I think in terms of innovation, we need to go out into the field and get all these suggestions and then use those suggestions to see how can we then apply the technology that's available. I don't think we're relying sufficiently enough on our younger people. I'm a Luddite when it comes to computers and cell phones. I only have a cell phone to use to call. I can't do anything else on it. But you've got any number of these youngsters who have been at this forever and that's where we have to really seek the innovation and reward. There's nothing a kid likes better. I use the word in the nicest sense than get a metal pinned on for doing something that's of value. And so I think we're not using creativity enough. I think Ash Carter's innovations were very, very good. They were at the wrong level. I think you've got to start at the deck plates and work up. And then you're going to have to work arounds. The other problem is IP. There's a huge problem with intellectual property. But I think we can fix that by saying, okay, it's the corporations, but it's going to take some major changes, I would argue, to the acquisition rules and regulations. Is a hand way in the back. Good morning, sir. Lieutenant Stipas, Kelly, creation name. You are speaking today about revolution in organizational armed forces and revolution in building off new ships. So how do you plan to incorporate all of that because acquisition processes with her for new class of ship is pretty long and with the challenges that we have today for all our service, decreasing the number of armed forces, how that going to reflect the current operation and how we can respond to the challenges in future. Thank you, sir. Yeah. By the way, you have a great president. She's a lovely, lovely lady. The issue here about innovation. We've got to be clever. We've got to be clever. For example, this is not a direct answer to your question, but it's something that you want to consider. The Russians have a huge advantage numerically in theater or local nuclear weapons. We have a handful of old B61s out there, a couple of hundred in Europe. And quite frankly, we're not really ready to use them because we haven't had the training money. Supposing Supreme Allied Commander Europe stood up and said, I am denying the rumor that I have been given operational control of a tried submarine. What's going to happen in Moscow? Jorasimov is going to go nuts. I can guarantee you that the Russian permanent representative to NATO is going to go to the NAC, North Atlantic Council and say, what are you doing? So there are ways I go back to will and perception. There are lots of things that we can do in bringing our alliance together. Many of our friends in the alliance have got far better understanding, for example, of Russia. I've been actively dealing with a couple of those countries. We don't incorporate this. Too often we look at the world as a binary sense in which it's us against them. And one of the intellectual problems we face in my judgment is that during the Cold War, we mis-assumed that there was monolithic communism. That partially got us into Vietnam. It was a mistake. I think we're making the same mistake saying we have to bet against peer competitors. We're not going to go to war with China and we're not going to go to war with Russia. It's not in their interest or our interest. Now, obviously the services have got to be prepared for every contingency, but I think the flaw in considering monolithic communism is being repeated in saying we have these peer competitors. We have to deal with them, but we have to deal with them with measures short of force. That requires using our brains. Military force, as I said, is necessary, but not sufficient. And it's the innovation and imagination about how we deal with this. I go back to active measures that's really going to be critical. And along those lines, that's how you are able to use the NATO Alliance, I think, much more proactively, to come up with good ideas. And instead of challenging the NATO Alliance to send 2% or pay all the money in arrears which allegedly they owe, I would challenge the Alliance to come up with better ideas for how we make the Alliance more vibrant. Robbie, Captain Harris, Commodore Harris. Holland, thank you for a most provocative comment this morning. This morning, you referred to Admiral Zulmol's Project 60. Yep. Which redirected, redesigned the Navy, if you will. And yesterday morning when Secretary Layman spoke, he referred to the Reagan era at Maritime Strategy. Which restructured the Navy. Now, arguably in both cases, when Admiral Zulmol was a CNO, he and the Secretary of the Navy owned the Navy. When Secretary Layman was the Secretary and Jim Watkins was a CNO, they owned the Navy. Arguably that doesn't exist today among other reasons because of Goldwater Nichols. So I just don't see how a CNO or the Secretary of the Navy, regardless of how brilliant they may be and dedicated they may be, how they can do what Zulmol did with Project 60 or John Layman did with the Maritime Strategy. How do you make that work? Do you, everybody understand the question? Okay. Very easily. I'm the Chief of Naval Operations. I'm the Secretary of the Navy. I'm in charge of training, equipping, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is what I'm gonna do. I go to the Secretary of Defense and the President saying if we don't do this, I'm gone. Very simply. Very simply. I would use a couple of bad words to say whether it's gonna take. But that's, and I think, and the service chiefs are getting close to that. Mark Milley said the Congress would be derelict if we don't get a derelict during the Vietnam War. The only guy that I used that word was HR McMaster. None of the service chiefs did. I think we're at the point where this is what we need and if we don't get it, I'm gone. That's what it's gonna take and it's gonna take our civilian cadre to persist with Congress, call them, hold them accountable and say I'm not gonna vote for you if this does not come out right. That is a powerful message, even when it's delivered in ones and twos because that becomes cumulative. We've gotta work both sides of the Potomac. Otherwise, this is not gonna work and we're doing it at a time where our system is broken. It's failed government. Both political parties are so much in the extreme they cannot tolerate each other. Compromise and civility are gone and as a result, the nation is worse off. It's gonna take the public and outrage to change that and I think the Department of Defense is an area where most people would agree because the military is in such high standing this might work. If it doesn't, Robbie, I'm convinced we're gonna be headed towards some variant of a hollow force. What's your show on the board? You bet. But make sure you got a good plan. Plan B always works. Okay, we're gonna take a 20 minute break. That would be 0-9-23 back in your seats.