 Thank you, Mike, for that very generous introduction. It's about the nicest I've received since the person who was supposed to introduce me got sick and they let me introduce myself. I was asked to come and we were talking about what I should do, and since I'm one of the early speakers, they said, you know, why don't you do sort of a scene setter, kind of a lightning round of issues relating to strategy. And so we agreed on that. And from my days as a student here, you know, way back in the Dark Ages when we only had one big problem, I said, well, you know, back in the day it was traditional for the speaker to tell a joke. And they said, yeah, yeah, you should probably tell a joke. And I said, I don't tell jokes very well. And they said, yes, but we've heard you speak and you should probably tell a joke. And so I said, well, you know, why don't I just try and set people's expectations before I start. And they said, okay, that was after I told them that the only jokes I knew were jokes about physics. And I was up in Lincoln Labs and I told my physics jokes to the physicists and they didn't laugh. And they told me they're physics jokes and I didn't laugh. They said because I didn't understand what they were talking about. But anyway, I was out in Nebraska a couple of years ago, a friend of mine who was a provost at the University of Nebraska at Carney. It's out in the Panhandle. They were having a speaker series and there's about eight speakers. And so I was one of them and I went out and there was a nice dais. And you get up and you give your talk. It's kind of an evening thing, you know, people have eaten their dinner. And so I got up and my friend was on my right and somebody was on my left. And got up and gave my talk and finished two polite applause, which I always think is a good thing when you hear a speaker, you know, polite applause at the end. And I sat down and I was feeling pretty good. And I turned to the fellow on my left and said, what do you think? And in Washington, you expect somebody to give you the polite answer. In Nebraska, you get an honest answer. And this fellow said to me, let's see, it's an eight speaker series. You're the sixth speaker. I have to say you're about the worst. So my jaw just about hit the table and I kind of turned back to my friend who invited me out there. And he was talking to somebody else. He turned back toward me and he saw the look on my face. And he saw the other guy was kind of smiling and he turned away. And my friend said to me, hey, Andy, hey, don't mind that guy. Don't listen to him. Don't pay attention to what he says. He doesn't even have a mind of his own. He's just repeating what everybody else is saying. So I'm setting your expectations now. What I'd like to do as quick as I can is to talk a little bit about security challenges, the resources we have to deal with them, and a little bit about strategy. And hopefully give you some food for thought and the discussion that follows in the seminar sessions. To start out, I guess one of the fundamental things we think about in terms of strategy is, we've had sort of an enduring way of preserving our interest over time as a global power and assuming that we want to remain a global power. In order to preserve our security and our well-being, we try to fight our wars as far away from our homeland as possible, which gives us enormous strategic depth if we use it right. And that's an advantage that most other countries don't have. And one of the core principles of strategy, and I'm going to repeat it as I go through, is strategy is a lot about identifying, developing, and exploiting areas of advantage and having great strategic depth as an advantage. Second, by going, say, to fight our wars away, we go to key areas of the world and we engage and have the good fortune of having powerful allies, which is another source of advantage that we have relative to, say, our competitors or our rivals. And third, it enables us to maintain access to key areas around the world as part of a global economy where we need access to resources and trade to help sustain our economy as the most vibrant and powerful economy in the world, at least up to this point. So these are important advantages that we have. And as Admiral Howard said, sustaining and maintaining those advantages really relies on our ability to have access, access to those regions because if we don't, our allies and partners begin to wonder if we really are going to be able to assure them to provide the kind of capability that we say that we will, that we're committed to. It also runs the risk that key parts of the world with great industrial power could fall under the control of adversaries and thus reducing our strategic depth and not only imperiling our economic well-being but our physical well-being, our security. So, again, there are several regions of the world. One obviously is Europe. Another has become the Middle East in the recent decades and then the Far East where we have important security interests, important economic interests. And of course, we have to maintain access to the global commons which have been expanded from the maritime domain, as Admiral Howard said, to the cyber domain and also the space in order to be able to move goods and services but also move military force if we need to to support, again, our interest in those parts of the world. Now, what I'd like to do now is just talk about some of the challenges that we're confronting. And if I could give you the bottom line up front, challenges are going up, resources are going down, which means you really need to think hard about strategy. The best way to use limited resources is the most effective way to use them in order to preserve your interests. And the way I look at it, I don't think we've seen this kind of environment in terms of the strategic challenges that we are confronted with. Since the late 1940s and early 1950s. You know, we fought the Cold War. It was a radical shift in terms of our thinking in the late 40s and early 50s at NSC 68-162-2, the Solarium effort. A lot of smart people working the problem. At the end of the Cold War, there didn't seem to be anybody out there. And so, arguably, we became a little bit strategically lazy. Well, now it's time to put our thinking caps back on. In terms of the challenges to our security, relative to the last 20, 25 years, they're growing in scale and shifting in form. Certainly, when we did our planning in the 90s and the early 2000s, when we did the MRCs, MTWs, MCOs, major regional conflicts against relatively small adversaries, the Libyans, the Iraqs, the North Korea planning, those sorts of things. That's small potatoes compared to the rise of major revisionist powers. Russia in Europe, China in the Far East, and of course, Iran for quite some time now in the Middle East. Now, these are countries that don't like the existing international order and it's not clear that they're willing to respect international norms of behavior in their efforts to shift that order in ways that are more favorable to them. And of course, we see the Russians acting upon this, looking for territorial gains in Eastern Europe, the Chinese, expanding their claims of what actually belongs to China and their recent moves in the South China Sea, the Air Defense Identification Zone in areas that cover Korean and Japanese zones, and Iran, which has been active almost since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, certainly now in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen, in Bahrain. So we have a problem whose scale is much greater than the kinds of adversaries, the kinds of concerns we had in the, say, the two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But even just as worrisome is that the form of the challenges is shifting. And as Admiral Howard said, and the theme of this conference indeed is adversaries are looking for their own forms of advantage in order to deny us access, in order to make access to the commons and access to key regions around the world where we have security commitments, very problematic. A simple way of putting this is the cost of projecting power is going up, and it seems to be going up rather dramatically. And either we face the fact that we're going to be crowded out of some areas or the cost of doing business is going to be too high, or we find a way around that. We find a way to restore our freedom of maneuver in these areas. So that's the strategic challenge. And this A-to-AD problem, at least in one domain, is the result of our loss of a key source of competitive advantage at the end of the Cold War, the First Gulf War. What we found out was we had the ability to wage precision warfare and we had nascent battle networks. And over the course of the next 10 years or so, we developed that. We relied more and more on precision weaponry. We developed our battle networks to be far more capable than they were at the end of the Cold War. And this gave us a great advantage. However, this source of competitive advantage has become what people in the late 40s and early 50s, once the Russians tested their nuclear weapon, they called our nuclear monopoly a wasting asset. It was an advantage we had, but it was going away. It was being dissipated. Others were entering the competition. And it's the same now with precision warfare. And of course, the pace setter right now is China. They have the most advanced capabilities when it comes to precision and the rise of battle networks. And like good strategists, what they're doing is they are trying to align the strengths that they're building with our weaknesses. And they see our weaknesses as many eggs in a few baskets, the few major bases we have in the Western Pacific and the many eggs we have in our aircraft carriers. And also going after the battle networks with anti-space capabilities, cyber capabilities, and so on. So I confronted with a much more challenging environment, moving from permissive to non-permissive, uncontested to contested environments. And the Russians are doing it in a more modest way. The Iranians are doing it in their own way. In fact, nobody's trying to mimic us exactly. They are all doing it with their own specific characteristics in mind. So that's one area. Second is we're losing an advantage that we've long had in the developing world, which is nuclear weapons over the last 15, 20 years are now proliferated to the developing world. And when you think about nuclear planning, it's not these Armageddon exchanges between us and the Soviet Union anymore. It's thinking about the Russian doctrine now which is escalate to de-escalate. If you find yourself at a disadvantage in a conventional conflict, escalate to nuclear weapons is a way of de-escalating the conflict. I'm not quite sure how that would work in practice, but this is what the Russians talk about and this is what they're exercising and their military exercises both focused on NATO in Europe and China in the Far East. They're more about NATO than China, but still that's one of the issues. Another is Pakistan, which Pakistani generals will tell you they've learned a lot from our experience in the 1950s, which is if you're outgunned by a conventional adversary, use nuclear weapons. They're building nuclear weapons faster than any other country and their doctrine says if we're invaded by India, then we use nuclear weapons on our own territory to stop them. Of course the Indians will understand that they shouldn't use nuclear weapons against us. Indian doctrine says we've got a cold start doctrine, which is we're going to grab Pakistani territory very quickly, call for a ceasefire and negotiate from a position of strength. So you have two very different views of what a conflict might look like and it's not a trivial possibility that if such a conflict would occur that nuclear weapons would not be involved. And of course the issue of the day, which is Iran, Iran stands to become perhaps a threshold nuclear power. If Iran does acquire a nuclear capability, there are some interesting observations you could make. One is that the missile flight time between Israel and Iran is about five minutes. That is not enough time for even the most advanced early warning and command and control system to detect an attack, to inform the national command authority, to make an informed decision about whether it's a real attack or whether the system is faulty, and to engineer a corresponding response. So in a crisis situation, and one could imagine any number of ways where a crisis could emerge between Iran and Israel, how would that play out? And what would our role be in trying to stabilize the crisis situation? The Saudis have said in many different ways that if the Iranians, if there's a Persian Shia bomb and if there's an Israeli Jewish bomb, then by Ghali there's going to be a Sunni Arab bomb. And given the funds that they provided to Pakistan, one could imagine Pakistan providing extended deterrence to Saudi Arabia, just as we provide extended deterrence to Turkey by placing nuclear weapons in Turkey, they could do the same. Pakistanis could do the same for Saudi Arabia. Only in this case you'd wonder, well, who's actually controlling those nuclear weapons? And so you see that there's a rich set of scenarios and contingencies one could think about that are certainly not beyond the pale. And given the prospective consequences of nuclear weapons use, they're worth thinking about, it seems to me. I'll just put one or two lines in about the biosciences. If you look at some of the enormous advances that are being made in the field of genetics, the field of fighting cancer, many of them very encouraging. Unfortunately, science can be put to good use. There's talk about specifically designed pathogens to go after specific population sets and subsets. And the fact that as the late Defense Secretary James Schlesinger once said, and I don't know why he said this, but anyway, he said, if you have the technology to know how to develop and run a microbrewery, then you have the basic technology that enables you to create biological weapons. So I prefer to get into the microbrewery business. But anyway, so there's also this issue of the global commons. And if you look at space, cyberspace, and the undersea, you find that they're increasingly contested. It's not clear that countries even know what they're doing in this domain. So in space, we see in 2007, China conducts an ASAT test and creates an enormous amount of space junk, which doesn't help them any more than it helps us. So what are these guys thinking about? What was on their mind before they started doing this stuff? The cyber domain, Admiral Howard covered that, I think, very well. Not much I can add to that. I would talk about the undersea. When I was growing up, I used to watch Victory at Sea. And we were fighting our way across the Pacific and everything. I noticed that after a while, whether it was Guadalcanal or the Battle of the Philippines Sea or Lady Gulf, we were always shooting up the same Japanese transport ship. They just kept running it over and over. I guess we didn't have a lot of film on that. So I thought, well, you know, you have to worry about commerce rating, commerce defense and so on. In 1947, two years after the war, we started sinking the first oil rigs off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. And now we have this enormous undersea infrastructure. A lot of it's energy-based, but also, obviously, a lot of communications cables running undersea. And if you look back, you see that one of the first things the Brits did in 1914 was cut Germany's overseas cables when World War I started. You also note that there's, potentially, we had the BP spill, enormous environmental damage. That could be caused depending upon how these kinds of economic assets, not at sea but under the sea, the kind of cost we could incur if this becomes a battleground in another war. And if you look at space, cyberspace in the undersea, what strikes me is we often rely on a posture of deterrence to deter aggression against us. Well, arguably in each of these domains, attribution is difficult and given an equal amount of resources, the advantage goes to the offense. So, if you're thinking about deterring through retaliation, deterring through the threat of punishment, if attribution is difficult, and again, Admiral Howard made a great point, who actually was conducting these cyber attacks on Estonia? Who actually conducts these denial of service attacks, identity theft attacks? Our defense industry is attacked on a regular basis. Who's conducting the attacks? We think we might know, but do you really have a smoking gun? So many countries getting into space. Your satellite that's blinded by a laser from some part of the world, well, who actually is conducting that attack? Your well heads are blowing up in the Gulf of Mexico. Do we know exactly who's doing it? One of the interesting things we're looking at at CSBA right now is the eastern med where the gas finds, natural gas finds under the ocean, are claimed by the Egyptians, the Israelis, the Lebanese, the Turks, the Greeks, and probably Hezbollah in there somewhere. Can you imagine what it's going to be like sorting that out? The potential for conflict there, and again, the difficulty of identifying who might be the source of an attack. And if you're talking about deterrence through defense or denial, we'll just deny you the ability to conduct an effective attack. In each of those domains right now, the betting line is that it favors the offense, which means that whatever defenses you could put in place, your adversary can offset them far more cheaply than you can continue to improve them. So what does that say about how stable that kind of a situation might be? So those are some of the challenges. Again, increasing in scale, but also shifting in form. And if they're also shifting in form, what that means is that a lot of the capital stock, the military capability that we have built that's focused on a particular set of contingencies may depreciate somewhat, perhaps precipitously, if we're faced with using that in a different set of contingencies. So the stuff we've had, the stuff we're building, are we building it in anticipation of these kinds of contingencies, or are we kind of living off what we consider to be arguably the more comfortable, familiar kinds of conflicts? And I would also mention that just one theme is the democratization of destruction. If you're looking at cyber, if you're looking at precision weapons, if you're looking at the ability to use the internet to proselytize and recruit people to your cause, we're facing a situation where, increasingly, it seems to me that even small groups and individuals can cause enormous, have the potential to cause enormous destruction. And with that, I would say, we may also be looking at the return of proxy warfare. We've said one of the things we want to do as a country is sort of get out of the business of large-scale stability operations. But Trotsky once said, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. And the Russians are waging proxy warfare in Eastern Europe. The Iranians were waging proxy warfare for the last 30-odd years against us. Not clear where the Chinese are headed. But again, if you can basically empower a small group with high destructive potential, then that may make that group more attractive as a proxy. And proxy is a great way of imposing costs on your adversaries, as we've seen in a number of instances over the years. So what kind of resources do we have to deal with this particular problem? I mentioned the fact that, for me at least, this kind of strategic environment is as rich as anything we've seen since the late 40s and early 50s. Typically though, when threats are increasing, the resources we have to deal with the threats increase as well. We haven't seen a major, from my point of view anyway, arguably, major increase in the security challenges and a corresponding decline in economic resources since the 1930s. Now, I'm not saying here comes, you know, World War III. I'm just saying that that makes for a particularly challenging environment. So, if you have this mismatch between declining resources and growing threats or challenges, what are some ways you might address that? And let's see. One is to increase defense spending. And interestingly, both the administration and the Congress say, yes, we need to increase defense spending. We need to get away from sequestration. The problem is that they're both holding that hostage. And when both parties in the dispute are holding you hostage, as the hostage you can't feel particularly good about that situation. The President wants increased revenues and he wants corresponding increases in domestic programs. The Congressional leadership wants basically other programs to be cut in order to fund increases in defense. And there they stand and, you know, we don't know if we're going to see another Ryan Murray situation or not, but it makes it very difficult to plan. Now, the current glide path we're on will have defense spending by around 2020 at less than 3% of our gross domestic product. We're up around the mid-4s until the drawdown, okay? During the Cold War, we sustained over 6% GDP on average for a 40-year period. And again, to some extent, it's a matter of how much risk you want to take, how much investment you want to put in defense. And this is just, gives you an idea of how easy or difficult it's going to be for us to increase defense spending. Now, these are CBO estimates and they're about as reliable as you can get, but if things remain unchanged, and of course, we can always change things. The debt mountain there, there's a guy with his two kids saying, someday all this will be yours. So it's kind of planning for their future. You're going to have to hand off at some point. But if you look 2014, 2020, 2025, you see that defense spending, as we go out to 2025, increases about 19% over 2014. That's slower growth in the U.S. economy. So as a percentage of our overall wealth, that's going to decline. Mandatory spending, these are primarily entitlements and a few other things. The boomers are retiring. We have Obamacare. We have the Bush administration expanded coverage for drugs and so on. 84% here. And that interest payments, the projection is that we'll be paying more on interest on the debt than we will on defense in another 10 years. So you've got to, by definition, you have to pay an entitlement. You're entitled to that benefit. Only countries with very poor economic outlooks default on their debt. So if you've got those two parts of the overall budget pie squeezing, you've got less and less available for discretionary spending. And it's going to be interesting to see if we can even sustain under those conditions the kind of defense spending that may be necessary to deal with the rising challenges that we face. So if increasing spending may be problematic, there are some other ways. Second is you become more efficient. So you free up resources in order to buy the things you really need. And we've had efficient... I'm going back all the way to the time I was here. I think it was the Packard Commission in 85 or 86. And they were going to improve the efficiencies in the Defense Department. We've had other ones that were going along. And I was in a meeting with then Secretary of Defense Panetta. And there's about 200-odd billion in efficiency savings baked into the current long-term program. And Panetta, who was in OMB and in the Budget Committee in Congress sitting there, and this issue is raised, and this is Panetta's quote, not mine, okay? He looks at it and says, well, that's a bunch of bullshit. So the bottom line here is we often plan for efficiencies. We usually get nickels on the dollar. And actually the result can be pernicious because if I bank those savings, how many Air Force Saucers do we have here? One. Guys, what's wrong? Anyway, so I've got this F-35A program and I've got all these savings that I'm going to get. All these efficiency savings. And I've got this big wedge in my budget. I'm going to have this money. And so I go to Lockheed Martin and I say, you know what? I'm building, you know, 7235s a year by 2019. And you get to 2019 and the money isn't there. And you say, well, remember those 72? I said, do you want to build this year? We're going to have to build 48. And Lockheed will say, yes, sir, we'll build the 48. But you know we built the plant for 72. We bought the equipment for 72. We hired the workforce for 72. You're going to have to cover that. So you can actually generate inefficiencies as you move on your way to generate efficiency. You also defer a lot of hard choices, which isn't a good thing. So efficiencies, yeah, we could try it maybe in a more responsible, careful way. Third is to outsource, to get our allies to do more. And here's a percentage GDP to defense in the late 90s and here's where we are today. Some of our key European allies across Japan is always around 1%. Another major power. But you can see that if there's a disarmament race, our allies are winning it, okay? And so the issue here becomes, can we convince our allies that they need to do more? I was talking to a former British Shadow Defense Minister recently. He said, we've got a choice between the carriers and the nuclear deterrent. That's a fundamental choice, right? The new government now controlled entirely by the Tories. The Conservatives is planning a 500 million pound cut in defense expenditures. And these are the folks who are friendly toward defense. So again, it doesn't look as though our allies are going to be bailing us out anytime soon. A fourth area is to increase risk. Well, we're just going to increase the risk that we're going to be able to meet our commitments. The question is at what point does increasing that risk become a strategy of bluff where you're not deterring your adversaries and you're not reassuring your allies? I was spending about a week in Japan a couple of weeks ago talking to a number of their senior military and security officials. And one of them said, you guys scare the hell out of us. We don't quite know how you're planning on. You were still waiting for the meat on the bones of the pivot and the rebounds. So there's a concern there. Then another area would be cost and position. A lot of times we look at a threat and we say, how do we respond to the threat? There's other the other side. How do we pose problems to the adversary? And we got into this in a big way in the 1980s. There's some effort to begin to reinvigorate that kind of thinking. When I was on the 2010 QDR Red Team, we actually did a fair amount of work on that. So as the money gets scarcer, looking for ways to impose cost on the other guy can become attractive. And then finally there's just, can you use the resources not only more efficiently that you have, but more effectively? And a great example of this occurred after the Battle of Midway when the Navy General Board recommended to Admiral King that we continue producing the Iowa class and begin planning for the Montana class of battleships. And King said, we're not going to do that. We can get a lot more value out of X tons of steel by building carriers and amphibs and other ships than we will by building more battleships. So are there ways that we can reallocate resources to improve the effectiveness of our military? And so that kind of leads us to strategy. And let's see, I've got my, here we go. As I mentioned earlier, and this Barry Watts, they now use his definition of strategy at the National War College. Richard Rumelt, strategic advisor to Guy named Steve Jobs. Rupert Smith, very thoughtful British general. But it's very interesting to me, you have three individuals and they say a key element of strategy is identifying, developing, and exploiting areas of advantage. And it's also in a dynamic environment where your competitors are trying to do the same thing. And as they try to do the same thing, you need to identify where your wasting assets are. Assets that look valuable now, like that nuclear monopoly in the early 1950s or that dominant precision warfare in the late 90s and early aughts that is unlikely to last over the long term. And so how do you begin to shift away from that? And Eisenhower said, this kind of work, the principles, the definition of strategy are relatively easy. But figuring out the kernel, what new areas of advantage do we need to develop, how can we exploit them, that's the hardest kind of work. Finally, for those of you who love the QDR, and I've been involved in just about every one of them, plans are useless. Planning is indispensable. And what Eisenhower meant by that was that even if you come up with the perfect plan on June the 16th, 2015, the world is such a dynamic place. Your adversaries are always trying and looking for new advantages, new ways to undermine your advantages that planning, the constant rethinking, reviewing, re-evaluating where you stand and your strategy, that's the key. That's the key, not the plan itself, it's the process. It's the constant thinking. So, we have something in the Defense Department called the the third offset strategy. And Bob Work and I used the Deputy Defense Secretary Secretary Carter signed up to this. Bob and I are old colleagues so we talk from time to time and I don't want to, this is my view, not his. But supposedly the first offset was in the 50s, the second in the 70s, and now we're looking for the third. The first offset had to do with the fact that the Russians had tested a nuclear weapon and our nuclear monopoly was becoming a wasting asset. Eisenhower essentially decided to ride that wasting asset. To extend that wasting asset, that nuclear monopoly as long as he could. And his rationale was the key, the core asset he wanted to develop over time was a sound economic foundation to enable us to pursue a long-term competition with the Soviet Union. He knew the Europeans were trying to recover from World War II and so putting the kind of stress on them of building up a major conventional military to match the Soviets was going to cripple that recovery. He was very concerned about maintaining economic probity here at home. And so that was the effort to generate and sustain that kind of long-term economic and industrial advantage. In the 70s the Soviets had caught up with the Soviet nuclear weapons. The arms control treaties kind of verified that, if you will. And so we were faced with an inferior conventional force. At least that's what we believed. And so then we had the long-range research and development plan. Efforts were made. Harold Brow was Defense Secretary. Bill Perry was the head of Defense Research and Engineering. And what we decided to do was we identified a new source during competitive advantage. It was our ability to explore information technology in the broadest sense. For those of you who were around back then nobody was buying Tandy computers from the Soviets. Nobody was playing Pong on Soviet arcade game consoles. Nobody was buying Soviet color television sets. These guys were stuck in the industrial age and the world was moving to the information age. And so it was stealth. It was precision weaponry. It was battle networks, initially in the form of SDI. It was sensors. It was quieting. It was all the things that we could leverage information technology to do for us. We just beat the hell out of that advantage against the Soviets. We erected sufficient barriers so that, for the most part, it was very difficult for them to steal that technology and even when they stole it, it was difficult for them to know what to do with it. Now, what's the third offset? We're in a world now where we're losing our asymmetric advantage in precision warfare and where a lot of these new technologies, whether it's artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, directed energy, they're widely available to most advanced economic powers, including at least two of our major revisionist arrivals. What it reminds me of is more similar to what we found in the 1920s and 30s when most of the great powers had mechanization. They had an automotive industry. They had an aviation industry. They had radio. They were working on radar or some form of it. And the key discriminator between who emerged on top in the military competition and who didn't were two things. Who could figure out how to leverage these technologies within the context of new operational concepts better than anyone else? And so you see that even though everyone has access to these technologies, only the Germans really come up with Blitzkrieg. Only the Americans and the British really develop strategic aerial bombardment. Only the Americans and the Japanese really develop what we call the fast carrier task force. The technologies were there. These countries weren't poor. They made their decision. Some stuck with what they had and some saw the potential for developing a new sources competitive advantage. The second factor was who could do it faster than anyone else. Because once you figure out, once you break the code you've got to be able to actually create this capability. And the first one, the operational concept, that's part of the department's mission initiative. But until it gets down to the services and until we do it at a joint level I think that's going to be a hard challenge for us to meet. The command that was supposed to be responsible for that was abolished and it was abolished in my estimation for a good reason. But that mission is now an orphan. And the second, doing it faster than anyone else, well look at our acquisition system. And we have we are not at all effective at time-based competition. And until we get good at that, particularly in the world where so much is related to artificial intelligence, big data and so on, cyber, that world moves at super speed. And again, until we sort that out for ourselves, the good news is there are two areas where we have a lot of potential to develop capability and advantage. Another encouraging thing is you've got Secretary Carter who ran AT&L. You've got Mack Thornberry up on the Hill, who is colleague Adam Smith, and working with the Senate side, really focusing now. So you've got kind of a critical mass on acquisition reform. So there is some hope there. And it's not what do we need to do in acquisition reform. That's been known for a long time. It's the political obstacles that we face. So to a certain extent, that's the case. We're kind of in the late 1930s. And the interesting thing for me is even though we lacked a lot of resources then and the threats were growing, we had places like the Naval War College where we had strategic thinkers and we had innovative operators. We had people like Admiral Sims, the president who could testify before Congress in 1925 when all we had was the converted carrier Langley and say that the carrier is the capital of the future. People falling off chairs and you know you had people like Tower and Yarnel and Reeves who war game didn't took it out to the fleet. You had innovators like Wagner and Thatch who revolutionized the way we thought about how to conduct air operations. That all happened here then. It needs to happen here now. And I certainly think the war college is up to it and I think this conference quite quickly is a great contribution to that effort. Thank you. Or jokes, physics jokes. Simon Goldman from the State Department. Thank you for your comments sir. We read your book when we're studying Vietnam and the book talks about how lower levels of war overwhelm strategic thinking. Can you talk about if that's a concern that you have today and the fights that we're in or the fights that we may be in in the near future. I don't know if that overwhelms strategic thinking. It certainly challenges it because I think the lower you go the more dimensions of strategy come into play. There's a great article by Michael Howard in 79 foreign affairs called The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy one of which is the social dimension. It's always important but he really highlights how it becomes important in low level conflict. I think we're not comfortable or practiced it particularly well. I think unfortunately we're likely to see more of it because I think proxy warfare is going to be increasingly attractive for major powers. The Pakistanis are waging it against India. We see it occurring in Eastern Europe as I mentioned. Chinese are using the Coast Guard, not their military for certain activities. It's kind of proxy effort. I think we'd like to stay away from but for the very reason we'd like to stay away from it I think our adversaries would continue to push and probe us in that way. Good morning, sir. Mo Morales from Standing Joint Force headquarters for elimination of WMD. So far we've discussed China as an adversary and certainly that's legitimate. What do you think are the best opportunities to try to steer them away from their hegemonic tendencies and towards more of a cooperative relationship with the United States and do you see a role for in the end perhaps some of the smaller other non-traditional partners of the U.S. in trying to achieve that strategy. Thank you. I think the key is to make aggression or coercion unattractive to the Chinese and I don't think they're looking for war any more than we are. To borrow a phrase from the Cold War I think what they're looking for is the eventual finalization of East Asia. Shifting the military balance slowly over time to the point where it becomes evident to countries in the region that they're the dominant power and they need to bandwagon with the Chinese. So two things on that. One, when I was in Japan I was talking to one of Abe's advisers and he said look we're in this. He said you know we're we're not going to bandwagon with the Chinese we don't care if you, well we do care if you abandon us but if you do we're not going to basically fall in line with China. So you start to think about things like nuclear weapons and so on. Their military is doing some very interesting thing. Five new bases along the Senkakus that are supposed to be completed by 2020. They're forming their 8th division which is being developed into a rapid deployment force. They're developing a brigade which basically is going to be mirrored on our MEPH formations. But they're concerned about the ASEAN states and they're looking for us to basically make some kind of statement so that they don't feel compelled to bandwagon with the Chinese. So I think clearly you've got to show them that the ASEAN version is not a desirable or even a possible outcome for them. And what you really need it seems to me and what we're really not perhaps doing aggressively enough our think tank developed something called Air Sea Battle back in 2010 which looked at air and naval operations designed with the objective of defending the first island chain. So we haven't, I don't think we've decided what our mission is out there yet. Is it to defend the first island chain? Is our posture that? Is it a tripwire? Is it blockade? Is it mobilization? Is it escalation? All those are potentials but I don't see anything that really informs how we think we're going to fight. And more recently I published a piece in foreign affairs called Archipelagic Defense that looks at the role of ground forces. And I can tell you the reason I was invited to Japan to talk to General Bancho who commands the Western Army is because he wants to talk about Archipelagic Defense and this is what he's doing. And his question is what are you Americans doing? And how are you planning? And you talk to Abe's advisor and he says we'll cover the northern sector of the first chain. He actually said you need to cover the southern sector because the Philippines were your colony not ours. We have so we didn't want to go there but anyway are you guys serious or aren't you? And it's kind of a big hat, no cattle but if you're going to convince somebody that aggression and coercion doesn't work then you've got to say okay what are these guys trying to do and how are we going to prevent them from doing it so that they see that achieving their goals lie through other avenues other than military aggression or coercion. And I talk a lot about that but that's essentially what we need to do. Thank you.