 I'm going to take a couple of moments to distill some of the issues you've been hearing about and frame the problems as we're going along to give you a better feel for why we're looking at distributed lethality. Admiral Rodin's movie did a great distributed lethality. What is it? We're going to talk about some of the reasons we're pursuing it in a little different realm. One quick catch before I move on to my first slide. For those of you that don't recognize that picture up on the screen right now, that is a Tomahawk cruise missile impacting a target ship at sea. That doesn't have a seeker in it yet, folks. All right, I keep getting asked, well, you had a F-18 over the top of it, flying it right into the side of that cruise, right into the side of that container ship. No, that F-18 was to make sure that some sailboat didn't have a really bad day. So that thing hit the side of a container ship at a very long range. Those missiles can go a lot farther. Sydney, to your gap question earlier, we ain't even scratched the surface yet. We're going to talk about why and where we're going. All right, so let's get at it. These are the tenants. What's distributed lethality? If it floats, it fights. We need to increase the offensive lethality of every surface ship out there. I get asked, does that mean you're putting aegis weapon systems on oilers? No, it does not. But it doesn't mean that that oiler can't have a defensive weapon system of its own. What's more cost effective? Two Arleigh Burke destroyers to defend that oiler or putting two CRAM missile systems on that oiler and adding two LCS. It's all about every ship contributing to the fight in every way possible to make sure we have every potential advantage at sea. Second, confuse the adversary or the potential adversary. Make them look in every different direction for every possible avenue of attack. Make them wonder where that next missile is coming from. Make them wonder where those damn Americans are today and how many of them are going to hit us from how many different directions. That's the idea behind this. Does that mean we're abandoning the carrier strike group? As Admiral Rodin pointed out, no. That just means we're taking the pressure off the carrier strike group in that high value unit as we spread out our fires. And just because we spread out the surface ships doesn't mean we don't concentrate our fires. And we'll talk about how we're doing that in a couple of slides. And third, hold the adversary at risk at range. Develop that range of weapons. Develop that targeting system. Develop that ability to shoot at a very long range. Develop that family of missile systems. Some of them already exist. It's just looking at how we do things differently. Those targeting systems exist. It's just using them differently. Those weapons exist. It's using them differently. How do we hold an adversary at risk at range and make it effective every single day? And that's what we're gonna talk about here in a couple of seconds. But first, let's look at a little history. For those of you that have been under a rock for a while, blue is us. On this side of the ocean, red is them, okay? So the blue on the left-hand side of the screen there is 1985, three decades ago. That was the range of our weapon. Up to 10 times the range of the adversary weapon. 2015. It kinda swapped. We took our eye off the ball. We forgot about range of weapons. The last time we had ordered and built a Harpoon cruise missile, 1988. That was the last time we upgraded a long range. At that time, long range surface weapon. We were kind of asleep. That's not to say we were neglecting. It's just we had other things on our plates. For those of you that say it's not about just the weapon, it's also about the targeting, you're absolutely correct. Now, blue on the top, 1985, our weapon. Gray at the top, range of our targeting. The problem is we couldn't see the distance our weapon went so we didn't think we would use it so we canceled the weapon. And the adversary didn't have anything that could shoot that far. Red and yellow, they couldn't find us, they couldn't shoot us. So why worry about it, right? Well, history kinda tends to move along. 2015, now we've got a weapon that doesn't reach as far as we can target. Yes, we can target out that far and even farther. And we'll talk about those in a little bit. But the adversary hasn't been sitting there. You can't bring a knife to a gunfight. You have to bring a gun. And it's time we changed our weapons and brought the guns to the gunfight. It's not just a single axis thread anymore. In 1985, it could come at you from any direction, from undersea, from any direction, from over, from the air, from the surface. In 1999, we changed down to a single axis thread or no axis threat or no threat at all. And we started to go to sea in that manner and we forgot how to do all the things you were talking about earlier. We forgot how to do MCON. Why? Because nobody was shooting at us and nobody could shoot us at range. We have to relearn today the lessons we knew in the 80s. We have to get back out there and see exactly what Admiral Rodin and Admiral Kilby were talking about. We have to retrain ourselves to do this again and again. We have to understand the adversary's advantages and we have to move on towards them and we have to understand the adversary's disadvantages. We have to bring another capability and we have to go at it with the understanding that it's a multi-axis threat. Make matters worse, we build weapons in an ever growing, ever slowing, ever more complex bureaucracy that does nothing more than create more requirements on top of more requirements to slow our processes down at every turn. We can no longer live with seven to 10 years to develop something to counter this. We can no longer live with tactics that aren't updated every 10 years. We can no longer live with ships that go in, get built once, and then for the next 35 to 40 years never get changed. That's what Admiral Rodin was talking about with getting out there and changing things quickly. That's what Admiral Kilby was talking about, changing the tactics, getting after this and figuring out where we are. We have to integrate everything to develop those systems rapidly. We have to integrate our systems with the understanding that they will fight as networks. We have to integrate our systems and it's not just the problem you see here. There are solutions to this problem set and we're gonna go there. One, this should be simple and self-evident. Increase our lethality. Two, we're starting to call it three ways to kill everything. I recognize that may not be the nicest way to talk about things, but folks, our job is to kill people and break their toys. There's nothing else in the world that matters. That's why you have a Navy, all right? I got it, there's all, yeah, I got it. There's presence, you know, presence without lethality is impotence, okay? So let's talk about lethality and deterrence, okay? So three ways to kill everything. What does that mean? Find, fix, finish, locate them, target them and drop something on their forehead, okay? That's what this means. Capability and capacity enough to induce doubt into any potential adversary so they don't even leave port. They got it, they don't wanna fight it, they don't want a piece of it, leave them alone, let the Americans go and we'll pick on somebody smaller. Okay, that's the idea behind distributed lethality. It's hard to do. I showed you this slide last year. Capability on the y-axis going up, more green better. Capacity on the x-axis going out, more green better to the right. We are losing one to 3% of our surface budget every year over the past five years. That green light's not just sliding left, it's plummeting left. So how do we get there? How do we make this work? How do we get to that upper right-hand quadrant that talks about unmatched technology distributed across a sufficient force with plenty of margin? Well, it ain't easy, all right? We have to go after this in multiple ways but we have to go after it understanding what our limitations are. The budget is forcing us down and left. We have to go after what we're doing. So let's take a look at what the surface fleet has been doing over the last several years. Remember those three decades? Some of this, some of people call it this the ski slope. Some of it called the cliff we've fallen off of. Some of it called a lot of different things. We call it a problem. 1985, we were on our way to 350 surface combatants. 2015, you see that little tiny dip, the farthest right dip, the lowest point on this chart, the year we are in today. That's where we are now. That's what we have to do. The problem is ships take 15 years or more to design, well, to determine the requirements to get through the bureaucratic process, to start bending steel, to test it six ways to Sunday, to make sure it's impervious to any bureaucratic budget fight and to get it built. 15 years we don't have to get out of that little divot here. The numbers aren't going up in any massive numbers here in the near future, have you seen from the progress in the newspapers lately? So how do we do this? All right, when you can't build more ships, you increase the capacity and capability of the weapons and the ships that carry them. Up the left side, I did not make this specific to a program, but bottom line is you can see what we need to do. This is the idea that every weapon is dual or multi-purpose. When you can't carry more weapons because you don't have more ships to put at sea, you make those weapons do more things. Remember that Tomahawk cruise missile I showed you at the start of these slide presentation? Why can't that impact a surface ship? Why can't it find mobile targets on land? Why can't it find moving targets on land? Why can't it find moving targets at sea? It flies a real long distance. I got it, it's not perfect. It may not be the ideal. It doesn't move at Mach, you know, one million. Okay, I got it, but I've got 3,500 of them. It's an incredible truck. Let's change the payloads. Let's change the sensors. Let's move it forward. We've done this already. This is not aspirational, this is operational. When we get done with the next test, we will leave behind an operational capability at sea to do this, and that next test happens this year. And that's before we work with our industry partners to put that sensor in here. Last year we told you we were gonna try it. This year we're doing it. This is not business as usual. This is not taking seven years to 10 years to make this work. This is everything else. Yes, there are new gun rounds. Yes, we are building them next year. Yes, there are long range projectiles. Yes, there is a new way of looking at things. You've heard about rail gun. When we take that projectile out of a rail gun, why not just make it smaller enough to put in a five inch round and take a couple of hundred five inch mounts now that can shoot something that flies almost as far and sits as accurately as a rail gun? Why can't we take the existing missiles that shoot down cruise missiles and use them for other things? Why can't we take those sensor networks that are sitting up there that are capable of finding an individual in a mud hut in the middle of a desert and find something the size of a warship in the middle of an ocean? I would think if I could find an individual, I could find a warship. Let's integrate these things and that's what we're doing. It's matching the eyes of the fleet, both organic and inorganic. It's matching that capability to do this quietly as well as with a lot of noise and it's doing it in numbers. So let's take a look. It's not just the weapons. It's not just as we move up this weapons capability and it's not just looking at whether I can take a torpedo that's right now designed to drop against the submarine and remember what we used to do and shoot it against the surface ship. It's also about the ships themselves. Let's start at the bottom. LCS. I've heard all the stories. Okay, I've heard all the rumblings. In fact, I probably could fill the volumes and probably have heard ones you haven't. All right, it's not lethal enough. It's not invincible. It's not this. It's too small. It's too large. It's just right. Oh, wait a minute, that was Goldilocks. Sorry. It's, I got it. All right, I don't know. We'll keep the analogy to three bears. One panda, one grizzly. No, we'll keep that out of here, okay? Well, LCS, you have to help me sell the story on that. Your surface warfare. The sonar going on LCS will increase our capability multi-fold against all submarines. Folks, if our submariners are afraid of a continuous active sonar at double digit miles, what do you think the adversary's submariners are afraid of? If we've proven that a continuous active sonar reaches out, what do you think it's going to do to the adversary's submarines? It's going to push them out. I've got it. It's not perfectly tested. I've got it. It's not perfect. I've got it. It's like every other ship we've had. Arleigh Burke took years to get down the channel and then we weren't sure if we were going to have to tow it to Norfolk to get there before Arleigh Burke could, so Arleigh Burke could speak at the commissioning. Okay, we weren't sure we would make it. We did unnatural acts to get it down the river and out the channel and down to Norfolk in ship building terms. Okay, I see some of you snickering. All right, but bottom line is we got it there. It's like every other ship. We're building it. We're deploying it and we're figuring out what it can do. Fort Worth is doing amazing things. Yes, there are still naysayers. You know what a lot of those naysayers problem is? You didn't write the stack of reports that was required to build this ship. All right. I found a great quote on this system. And if you'll allow me just for a second, it's a translation from the Italian so I'll try to get it right. The permanent bureaucracy is dedicated to a single mission to change nothing. They are in favor of things as they are. In pursuit of that mission, they are canny shrewd, ruthless, and conspiratorial. They infiltrate the ranks of those who want to change with the goal of destroying them. They use delay and details to overwhelm any new ideas for a continuation of this status quo. Welcome to the Pentagon. Machiavelli was right, okay? So in the long run, you have to help me get the message out. There's war fighting capability in this thing. And it's overwhelming even our own submarines and surface ships and ability to target and move forward. We are going to take this ship to sea and it is going to be the envy of that size and shape ship in the world. Why? Because at 3,000 tons, we can do a hell of a lot with it. And the frigate, even more. In the frigate, we are installing both the anti-submarine and anti-surface capability at all times and we're going forward and deploying it in that manner. And we will build the frigate. Cruisers. I got a lot of questions on cruisers. So let's talk about upgraded capability in cruisers. Everybody wants to talk about cruisers and what do we do with them? Can they stick around? Can they not stick around? What can you do with them? How long do they last and so on? So let's remember that we surface warfare officers are a little crafty in ourselves. And those first 11 cruisers, those oldest cruisers, while everybody else has been wailing and gnashing a teeth about what we do in the next couple for using the money that Congress gave us to do it very well to upgrade those, we've upgraded the 10 of the first 11 cruisers or we will by the end of next year. Remember a few years ago when we changed those cruisers from standard Navy computer systems to open architecture, commercial off the shelf? Well it allowed us now to work with industry, change out the blade servers in those first 10 cruisers and make them the highest capability Aegis ships we have out there. It allowed us to take that technology and leap forward and now counter supersonic, ballistic missile, increased capabilities, subsonic, stream raids and everything else. It allowed us to shoot at range, it allowed us to shoot over the horizon and it allows us to do everything else why because we use that open architecture and while everybody else is watching the bright shiny object over here we just went and updated those cruisers. Okay, that's 10. We're taking four more into modernization by the end of this year or four total into modernization by the end of this year. They will get the same combat system upgrade and we'll do all the engineering to make sure they work for a long time. That's 14. Now, we have five ballistic missile cruisers out there. We are under statute to keep those going and not replace them until we get another BMD replacement. Okay, that's five more. That's 19 of the 22 cruisers and people say we don't know what we're doing with the cruisers. Let me see, that's 19 of 22. Yeah, we're working the last couple. All right, cruisers are getting updated. Well, the other question is why don't you just replace a cruiser with a destroyer? Look, you're building the flight three, you're doing all this other stuff with a destroyer. All right, it's about this chart. It's capacity and capability. If I changed the cruisers for destroyers I would lose 23% of my vertical launch cells at sea. That's the equivalent of decommissioning for SSGN submarines, cruise missile carrying submarines. And let's face it, the Navy is loath to do that. We're putting in Virginia payload module to make sure we don't lose 23% of our vertical payload, vertical payload modules. So why does anybody think we're going to do that same thing with cruisers? Virginia payload module is a great idea for the submariners. It replaces a potential 23% loss. Why would you think it would be okay for the surface Navy to accept a 23% loss in vertical launch cells at the same time? It's not, we need to do something and we need to figure this out. We need to keep the cruisers going and then we need to figure out that next generational shift or that incremental increase for payloads at sea. I don't know, Virginia payload module. You guys come up with the name, you figure it out. Destroyer payload module. I don't care what it is, okay? But get the capability to see, it's not just capability, but it's also capacity. Future surface combat, yes, we're studying it. It's a replacement of a family of ships. Everything from patrol boats, actually everything from yard patrol craft to train the Naval Academy. A shipment to patrol boats to destroyers and cruisers and everything in between. It's a family of ships over the next 20 years and we're studying that right now. All right, so let's talk about what we're doing. This is a typical bureaucratic slide from Washington, DC. It's intentionally too small for you to read, okay? It's intentionally too complex for you to read and it's intentionally made up and the dates don't match anything in reality, okay? Why? Because I don't want you trying to figure out what we're doing. But let me tell you a few things we are doing. Admiral Rodin said that we are going and deploying that three ship group to determine how we fight these. That's on there. We're going to deploy to another group to look at MCON and relearning that. That's on there. We're going to fly Tomahawk against a moving surface target. That's on there. We are going to use fighter tracks off a modern fighter to fire an SM missile off a Navy surface ship and impact an incoming track. That's on there. We are looking at every different way of using every different existing sensor, weapon and ship type and proving it. Yes, we are pushing forward to install over the horizon missiles on LCS this next year and if we can do it, we will. So let me use an example in here. Let me wrap this together in a kind of a different way. Using Admiral Kilby's and Admiral Rodin's concept together. Admiral Ferguson from Europe came to us, actually we walked past each other in the hall about just under about a year ago and he looked at me and said, I have a new threat in the Eastern Mediterranean. I have a threat that's going to threaten those ballistic missile destroyers on station in the Mediterranean. Can you do something about it? Okay, let's take the normal process. We study the problem. We write a lot of studies. We pay $10 million for somebody to write a study that tells us we should go do this. I got a four star telling me to do this. I kind of get it. And then we go spend seven years in development, testing and everything else. There's an alternative. We simultaneously procure, develop, move money, test and move forward. Seven years on one hand. I think I saw some of them out here in the audience. Congressional staff turned around and moved money for us to the tune of $50 million inside a couple of months unheard of in Washington D.C. The program manager and the program executive officer said, we got this. Show us the requirement. We said, oh, requirement. We sent, we know how to do this. We put together a paper. We sent it out to Europe. The Admiral signed it, said this is my requirement. He sent it back to us. And we said, oh, you're a genius. All right, let's go build this. The program executive officer said, I now know what I need to build. Oh, by the way, we're already building it for something else. We'll glue a couple of them together and we'll go put it on one of your ships. The engineer said, well, you haven't done all the testing. He said, let's go do that in Europe. The repair facility said, well, we're not sure we could stick that into the availability. We said, guess what? You will if you don't want your head on a pike. The engineers came forward with a way of doing things. It's not perfect. The tactics and development guys came up with an idea of how to employ it. The company that builds it said, I've got two of them on the production line going out to another ship. I'm going to yank them and put them on a destroyer. Destroyers never had one on here. Well, let's plug it together like this and try it. CRAM is going on the first destroyer in Rota inside seven months, what would have normally taken us seven years to do. For those of you questioning on whether we're doing something and are you doing it fast enough, the answer is absolutely. We are doing it quickly. We are moving it. Of course, now I think I have to go explain to OSD how I did it, but okay, they'll get over it too. All right, so we're going to do this and we're going to do this over and over and over again. We're going to test, we're going to trial, we're going to experiment and we're going to figure it out and every single one of those taco chips and another 10 dozen more on top of it that are classified, we're going to go do. And if you'll notice the timeline with deceive, target, and destroy, it's all in the next two years. All right, what does that mean in total? Where there was a single mission, we need multi missions. When there was a single weapon, it now needs to do multiple things. When we were on the defense, we now need to be on the defense and the offense. When we had single source targeting, organic to the group, it's multi-source, multi-int, multi-everything targeting, where we had kill chains, we're going to kill webs. Try to get away from us now. All right, for those of you that like these type of charts and you wanna see how far we're out we're going, I did something different. Some of you usually expect to see the coast of some foreign country when I put these bubbles on. I use the United States, why? Because most of you know what the United States looks like and most of you have been across it multiple times. So let's look at defense up in the upper left hand corner before last year or last, yeah, but last year we could have a destroyer, not to say the Canadians are attacking, sorry guys, I know you're out there. All right, but we could have a destroyer off Chicago and it could defend about, oh, I don't know, Kalamazoo. All right, this year we will have a destroyer or we could have a destroyer off Chicago and defend Detroit, Toledo, Indianapolis, Erie, every place else all stretched out and we will be able to defend that in depth. Offense, let's say there was a ship off the Virginia coast. Last year it could defeat another ship off the Virginia coast. At the end of this year, a ship in Boston Harbor is not safe. At the end of this year, south coasts of Long Island, we're not attacking Long Island, don't take me, nobody misconstrues, but ships and land targets out to that range are now at risk and the adversary had better take notice. It's defense in depth, it's hit them at range and we're on the offensive and we're pushing forward and we're gonna do this inside a couple years, despite what everybody thinks. Why? Because we've got the teams together that can do it. Admiral Rodin's leadership, Jim Kilby pushing forward and now that the lights go down, I'll turn it over to the general. All right, thank you very much, we'll take questions at the end. All right, well good afternoon everybody. For those who don't know, the CNO has been employing a Marine Major General for the Director of Expeditionary Warfare in the past in 85 and 75, now in 95, but for about the last 20 years. My purpose is to help integrate Marine Corps requirements, Navy requirements, so that we can put together a naval voice when it comes to Expeditionary Warfare. And as I like to tell people, if the Navy and the Marine Corps are aligned, there's nobody else, no other service, that can stand up to us when it comes to making our case, to the public, to Congress, or even in the Pentagon itself. So what I'll do is I'll just take a couple of minutes and go over the N95, Expeditionary Warfare portfolio and then I'm gonna center in on the surface ship side of things, specifically amphibious warships. Next slide please, next slide please. There we go. Okay, so this is Obi-Wan overview of the portfolio. Some people think, well, if it doesn't fit somewhere else, we'll put it in Expeditionary Warfare, but there is a logic to it. We exist to resource those things that help us gain access in the latorals and ashore, where we have to go with limited or no infrastructure, with no host nation support, probably most importantly, oftentimes opposed. It's all about access to the commons, to our allies and friends and where necessary to the enemy held areas. So what you're looking at here, the current capabilities are in white, the future systems are shown in yellow. I'm gonna work my way around the slide counterclockwise from the upper left, starting with our Naval Expeditionary Combat Command Forces. These are the folks who build, restore, and protect infrastructure in the most austere environments. They build and maintain things like remote operating bases, airfields, so forth. They also ensure access to ports, to harbors, to coastal waterways, protect civilian commerce, but also ensure we have access for follow-on forces to come in ashore. Now one of their growing capabilities has been very successful of late, has been their expeditionary mine countermeasure capability, shown in the lower left there. These forces focus on clearing ports and harbors, shallow water areas, landing areas, and so forth, but they can also augment our blue water capabilities. And we're actually learning a great deal from some of the systems that we've deployed. We're currently maintaining an expeditionary mine countermeasures company in the 5th Fleet AOR, created within Fleet Forces Command by NECC, from organic NECC units, and then deployed and sustained, excuse me, in theater. At the bottom right is our blue water MCM capability. We are completely recapitalizing this capability. To put it in a nutshell, we're taking the sailor out of the minefield, but at the same time we're maintaining and then increasing our clearance rates. So you're gonna see us transitioning from the MCM one-class, Avenger one-class ships, to an LCS based system. Not only does it give us a tremendous more modularity and capability, but also they can get to the fight a whole lot quicker than the legacy ships can. We're replacing the MH-53E with system, airborne systems aboard the MH-60S, and also the Firescout UAV, both employed from the LCS. We're gonna retire the legacy ships and the legacy aircraft in the mid-2020s, and we're gonna shift to greater reliance on unmanned systems, both in the air, on the surface, and subsurface. To the upper right is our naval special warfare team. They obviously provide reconnaissance, battle space shaping, and some assault capability in support of expeditionary operations. N95 supports the service common resources that they require. Moving to the center of the chart, and this is where I'll focus my discussion today, is our amphib force. We currently have a force with really good capability, but very limited capacity. But we do have some important developments on the way things are looking up. Starting with the big decks. We've got two versions, the LHD with a well deck and the LHA replacement or LHA flight zero that has no well deck. We've got a third variant on the way with LHA-8, which will be the third of the LHA replacements that we restore the well deck by giving up some other capabilities. The two LHA replacements were built to be optimized for F-35 employment. We've learned enough from that already we figured out how to put a well deck back in there to increase the utility of these platforms. On the LPD side, we currently have nine LPD-17s. We've retired all of the Austin class with the 10th and 11th LPDs are nearing completion. We'll take delivery of the Mertha later this year and the Portland in 2017. We also just issued a request for proposal for LPD-28, which will be our 12th LPD. It's going to be slightly different from the rest of the LPD-17 class and it's going to be a bridge to what will become the replacement for the Woodby Island class LSDs. It's still, we're still referring to it as the LXR, but it's based and it's going to be built upon a LPD-17 hull, which is going to give us tremendous capability above and beyond what the Woodby Island class brings while providing some commonality and a known system, frankly, from the San Antonio class. We're also developing replacements for our LCUs, which by the way achieved IOC in 1959, and our LCACs, which are 30 years old now. So both of these systems are beyond their expected service life. They've done a great job for us, but it's time to replace them. It's past time to replace them. We've got to regain the capability that they once had and provide some greater flexibility and incorporate some lessons learned, particularly in the LCAC. So just to the left of the R, you'll see our auxiliary platforms, including the Expeditionary Sea Base, or ESB, formerly known as the Float Forward Staging Base, AFSB. Also the Expeditionary Transfer Dock, or ESD, formerly known as the MLP, which is designed to be the interface between the large medium speed roll on roll off ship, you see to the right of it, and our LCAC craft to take stores and vehicles directly from the NPF ships to the beach. Now these ships have the primary purpose of supporting our maritime prepositioning forces, but we're continuing to explore new and alternative ways to use these platforms to help stretch our amphibious fleet. They're not replacements for our amphibs, but we simply don't have enough of the amphibs, so we've got to find some ways to do the things we know we're going to have to do in the next few years while continuing to recapitalize our amphibious fleet as well. So these alternative platforms can embark tailored packages that can do humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, embassy reinforcement, non-combatant evacuation, operations under permissive environments, and so forth. I emphasize again, they're not warships. They don't have the redundant systems. They don't have the self-defense capabilities. They don't have the trained Navy crews ready to fight the ship and keep it alive like the sailors did aboard the USS Cole, but they can provide a great capability for lower end crisis response and to allow the combatant commanders to employ those scarce new ARG assets most effectively. Next slide, please. So back to amphibs, right now it's not a real good news story. We're at a nadir in our fleet size. Over the last decade, we've had an increased demand for amphibious ships and all of our strategic guidance that we have and expect to receive only indicates that that demand signal is going to increase. To meet COCOM demand, former CNO said we'd need more than 50 amphibs. Currently today we've got 30. 60% of the inventory is either deployed or preparing to deploy and the rest, which you see in red there, the various shades of red, are in maintenance. The pressure to meet these deployment deadlines and even to meet the minimum capability required overseas means extended deployments followed by extended availabilities, reduced training and these in turn then lead to deferred maintenance, reduced readiness and ultimately even fewer ships to respond to during crisis or to train for them. We used to be able to set our watch for a Muarg deployment six months to the day almost. And we also kept two afloat, one from the East Coast and one from the West Coast at the same time. But as the years have gone and our fleet has dwindled, those deployments have extended until one reached 10 and a half months a couple of years ago, we've averaged eight to nine months of the past few years and only just recently we stabilized again at about seven month deployments. Complicating this are a couple of additional factors. Two thirds of the amphibious fleet is at or beyond their midlife of 20 years. And our future shipbuilding plans are all based on these ships reaching their expected service life of 40 years. And we've got a ways to go before we can be confident that in our next classes of ships to decommission, which will be the LSDs followed by the LHDs, will in fact make it to their expected service lives. Next slide please. So the first point really for me is numbers matter. Now, Pete just showed a slide a little bit and it's easy to say well as the amphib fleet has gone down so has the whole fleet. And that's absolutely true. One complicating factor with the amphibs is that they're not interchangeable. We can't swap out an LSD for an LHA and so forth. So when we get down to nine LHD LHAs like we have or nine LPDs where we currently sit, we have very limited capacity to back each other up on that. Where we stand today at 30 ships versus where we were at 2001 when we had 38. Some of the things that we simply can't do today that we could back then. Again, I mentioned two args at sea with mus and bark. We used to do a contact relief entering the Mediterranean or in the Western Pacific even into the Indian Ocean. Two mu args out at the same time. Down at Camp Lejeune, we only had, we have three mus down there 22nd, 24th and 26th. We only had two mu headquarters on Camp Lejeune because there was always one of them deployed. We've since had to clear out a building to make room for that third mu headquarters because we are not deploying as often. We can't surge during crisis. You can, if you think back to the wheelchart there, you can kind of figure out what our surge capacity is based on what we have deployed and what we have in maintenance. But the reality is we're gonna fall well short of some of the requirements if things don't change. We don't send out single ship deployers like we used to. These are, some people will refer to them as presence but actually they were targeted either for doing humanitarian assistance, doing partnership interoperability training and in other ways shaping the battle space and ensuring that we'll have access to areas when we need it. We've done one major live force amphibious exercise and I define that as 10 amphibs or more together. One major exercise since 2000. And while in the first part of the last decade our operational commitments were the pacing item. That's what prevented us from doing it. Recently it's been the sheer availability of ships that weren't either deployed or on a very tight timeline to prepare for the next deployment. And then one of the things that has suffered for a long time now is routine training with sailors and Marines aboard amphib ships. So I'll tell you how it has been in the Marine Corps when things were really tight during OIF and OEF the only Marines that were going to the Mew were the Marines who had been to the Mew. So those who shipped board experience we kept recycling them because we needed the experience given that we have the attrition in between deployments we had to maintain that core of people yet it was cost prohibitive, time prohibitive to train up everybody else or other people to be able to go as well. So what we've developed over the years as the inventory has decreased is fewer and fewer Marines who know how to operate a board ship who know how know even just how to get around a ship and what a ship's routine is like and they've got to learn that for the first time we don't want them to learn that for the first time on their way to war. We've also been forced to defer essential upgrades to the amphibs to keep these ships relevant and it has left the amphib fleet to a large degree poorly integrated with the rest of the fleet and at times with the embarked Marine forces and that as well as the maintenance and the condition of the ships is a threat to reaching ESL because if those ships don't maintain relevance they're gonna have to go. So the good news is in 2009, Secretary of the Navy, CMC, CNO agreed, we told Congress that we required 38 amphibious warships. This is based on a requirement to lift two Marine expeditionary brigades simultaneously either to put together in one large scale assault or for two separate contingencies at the same time. We agreed to accept risk to 33 which would produce 15 ships operational and ready to go that's since been revised in 2014 to 34 ships. So right now 34 ships is the fiscally constrained minimum but beyond having the two brigade lift that that provides 38 ships will also mean having a fleet that is capable of sustaining a new ARG deployment cycle and regain some of the capabilities that I just talked about. Learning how to fight as a large scale amphibious force embedded in a fleet to go gain and maintain access somewhere while all at the same time giving the ships the attention they need between deployments. Now the good news in this is that we are at the bottom and we have a modest recovery on the way. I talked about the next two LPDs that will come in in the next years at the end of 2018 we expect to take delivery of the USS Tripoli which will be LHA seven the second of the LHA replacements and we expect to have take delivery of LPD 28 in fiscal year 22 getting us back to 34 ships. Now the plan is based on our fiscally constrained environment so we continue to defer the purchase of those last four ships and one of the things that we've got to do is be ready to build those additional ships at the appropriate balance between the different classes of ships when the fiscal climate permits it because we have demonstrated the need and again based on the strategic guidance that we have we don't see that changing anytime soon. Next slide. So the counterpart to sheer numbers is maintenance and modernization. I won't dwell a lot on this and I know you're gonna spend some time on this later in the week and that's a really good thing but maintenance leads to capacity. It increases the number of ships that we have that are ready for tasking. But keeping them ready also means we're gonna lower the maintenance costs, reduce the backlog for maintenance and also help ensure that these ships do in fact reach their expected service life. Modernization also helps us reach ESL because it keeps the ships relevant. It also helps us gauge our future ship building requirements. We replace obsolescent equipment but we also lower our costs. We improve our interoperability and we pace the threat. And don't get me wrong, this isn't about simply spending more. This is about getting more for what we spend. So one of the bright spots here and that's gonna help us in the future is taking an enterprise approach towards taking care of these ships. So over the past year or so, the standup of the surface and expeditionary warfare, maintenance and modernization committee known as SWIMC process. This is similar to what aviation did with the Naval Aviation Enterprise about a decade ago. But what SWIMC does is work towards alignment on surface ship maintenance across the entire surface fleet and amphibious fleet, aligning our maintenance goals, priorities and help us apply the resources, however scarce they might be in the most effective way. It also helps us speak with one voice about what we really need to sustain the fleet. And the current budgets aren't gonna let us buy our way out of the maintenance and modernization challenges. But SWIMC process reviews and validates all the requirements. We look at specific ships, we look at trends both within and across the classes of ships. And then we look at solutions and then we prioritize for execution. It helps us gain consensus on the top priority issues, sustain those priorities through the programming and budgeting cycle and better understand where we're taking risk and asking the nation to take risk. Now when we receive the fleet's prioritized requirements list, they're Ipsils, we already have seen them and we've already discussed them and we know where they fit in. Resource sponsors, program offices and the other stakeholders are all involved. We use basic but comprehensive metrics to track plan versus actual costs, deferred maintenance action, execution of availabilities and in figuring out where we are versus where we plan to be. Identifying obstacles and bottlenecks and revising processes and making changes where necessary to remove them. It allows us to focus on which troubled ships or equipment or systems that need priority funding and repairs and improve the, probably most importantly, improve the planning of future availabilities. Next slide. So looking ahead, we don't see the budgets likely to get any better in the short term but the requirements of the requirements, they remain. So while we focus on what we need for the future fight we gotta do better with what we have. Our people, power tools and the money we receive to take care of both of them. We're gonna continue to transition several of our platforms and systems and we're gonna upgrade the ones that we're keeping. We're gonna work towards greater commonality, interoperability and reliability while also increasing utility outside of traditional roles. Alternative platforms, integration of amphibs into the distributed lethality concept, integration of the F-35 which may be the most significant change we make in the next few years and then greater roles for unmanned systems. We're gonna need help from industry to find ways to get more out of what we have, to reduce costs, stay within budgets and schedules. Bottom line is we're all in this together and we're in it for the long run and then finally we'll continue to develop the enterprise approach to help us do all of the above.