 Our first conversation is helping us think about the challenges that the Navy will face in 2030 and beyond. And to help us envision that topic and that idea, we are joined, have the pleasure of being joined by Admiral John Richardson who is serving as the 31st Chief of the Naval Operations and he's been doing that since 2015. Admiral Richardson graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1982 with a Bachelor's of Science in Physics. He holds master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and National Security Strategy from the National War College. He has served as both Commodore and Commander several times as well as Chief of Staff to the US Naval Forces Europe and US Naval Forces Africa. His staff assignments have included duty in the attack submarine division of the Chief of Naval Operations staff, Naval aid to the President and Director of Strategy and Policy at US Joint Forces Command. The conversation will be moderated by our very own CEO extraordinaire Anne-Marie Slaughter whom you've met already but a little about Anne-Marie's background is that prior to becoming CEO of New America she served as a Director of Policy and Planning for the US Department of State and was the first woman to hold that position and before then she was Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002 to 2009 and before then Professor of International Foreign and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School. So our very distinguished leaders for this morning please join me in thanking them for the conversation. So good morning again. We have we have lots of things to cover. I know I'm not sure who set that up. The Army managed to get its imagining the future in on the video before the Navy got here but I can't compete with the Ghost Brigade. Although Ghost Fleet is singer's wonderful novel if any of you have not read it you absolutely should. So I've been reading some of your testimony and some of your speeches and I can't help noticing that you you have a the Navy gets a big boost from our first president. George Washington said I'm not sure if I can quote it exactly but he essentially seems to have said without a Navy we can't do anything with the Navy we can do everything that is honorable and glorious. Just a pretty good way to start anything and I thought we're gonna we're talking about the future of war we're talking about the future of the Navy and I've got a lot of specific questions but one of the things I'm most interested in is when George Washington was talking he was talking about the Navy as ships right there were ships and there were sailors and they sailed the different places and of course they had naval combat and they still do that but when you talk about ships and actually when you talk about ships and planes and all the different parts of the Navy you talk about them as platforms so I'm gonna start by asking you just to reflect on that big change that you now think of a ship or a plane as a platform. Well maybe if I could just back up a little bit and talk about why we start with that quote and the quote talks about hey without a Navy we can do nothing decisive and with it everything honorable and glorious and so your question really goes to the idea of what makes a Navy decisive and we spend a lot of time thinking about that right that's really what our our strategy goes towards and and then whether we call them platforms or ships or whatever we go towards putting together the right mix of those things to deliver a Navy to the nation that is decisive but the other reason that we start with that more and more is that we are taking every opportunity that we can to go back to what I would say as first principles and I think it's very much a theme that we have in common that this honorable and glorious part is as important as the decisive part and you know George Washington our first president has a lot of street cred in the founding father group and if we think about what the Navy can do for the nation certainly we contribute to the military dimension of national power and we'll talk a lot about that but in addition we also a quick scan of our history shows that the Navy is deeply involved in the diplomatic element of national power and so if we think about the role of the Navy in diplomacy very very important it up to this day a Navy ship visits a foreign port the US ambassador to that country will host a reception on US sovereign territory that Navy ship and then just like George Washington did and particularly Thomas Jefferson one of the very first missions the Navy undertook was to go overseas to the Strait of Gibraltar to protect our trade against the Barbary pirates at the time and we still do a lot of that that's why we are deployed around the world to make sure that the Navy continues to meet its responsibilities to contribute to the economic dimension of national power and then all in the service of the value proposition that the United States presents to the world and so this idea of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness so important for us to center up on that and so we begin a lot of our discussions both internally in the Navy and externally reminding ourselves of those founding principles so that when somebody meets a US Navy sailor that might be the first actual you know manifestation of the United States that they meet so it's important that all of our folks understand that we certainly are part of the military dimension of power but also diplomatic also economic all in the service of these values so that's really why we start with that now to your to your question I think that as we start to appreciate the anything that can contribute you know certainly platforms the only thing that George Washington was thinking about was ships right sailing ships and then as you just sort of track the progress of technology through well we've introduced more things that can deliver naval power over time and so it's just become more complicated you have to stop thinking about these things as almost as individual things but also how they can contribute in a combined way and so you start to generalize them to these this idea of platforms some thing that can deliver naval power so whether that's a submarine or a satellite or a plane this integrated and network distributed but networked vehicle for delivering naval power right so that it operates together with everything else and and then we can't forget the human dimension of naval power as well which so with that's overview and I do think I remember reading the strategy that you all put out in like 2007 where really these these integrated military economic diplomatic and really value-based missions but right now in some ways we are we're going back to the future right the prep the national security strategy the national defense strategy talk about a return to great power conflict return in many ways to 19th century views of the world and I was struck those of you who are dinner last night no I'm a Game of Thrones fan the end I hope spoiler alert but sorry I mean if you didn't see it last night you had to be prepared the end of the war against the Night King and back to great power conflict we're back to conflict among the nation so when we talk about that now we talk about China and Russia and I wanted to ask you how you think about China and Russia and how how how alike they're both powers that are adversarial to us in some ways not in all ways but they're also very different and so how you think about that specific part of great power conflict well there's certainly a great deal of difference between those two powers and particularly over time you know I think that China growing very fast becoming more and more global and with with tremendous ambitions Russia trying to regain a near abroad security and using a little bit different approach to to maintain their security more asymmetric I would say and so they require a little bit different approaches but in general I think the approach is the same one is that there are certainly areas where we have a lot of differences and in the discussions that I have at least with my peers in China it's really about how do we mitigate manage risk as we resolve these differences the it's going to be important to the future of the whole world how China and the United States resolve their differences in a way that hopefully avoids conflict to to the point that the president of Arizona state made in his opening remarks and then with respect to Russia you know how do we just sort of sort of try and anticipate these moves that Russia is making but as you as we are starting to think about it really exists along a spectrum of competition right and we want to be trying to move things to the sort of lower kinetic end of that spectrum with every every move that we make there's a lot that goes into that one that we have to sort of be able to control the high end of spectrum so that we can deescalate on on our terms and and then you know just really do the hard analysis to sort of deconstruct each one based on its own merits you know I'm interested when you when you talk about mitigating risk and I think about I know you have regular dialogue with your Chinese counterpart and we've learned those lessons of the last great power conflict that there's great power conflict you can't avoid but of course World War one much more where people or are rising power as with China now where with the security dilemma the risk of mistake of misinterpretation is as great as anything else and so you can't stop the sort of head on we want this territory no you can't have it but you can stop the I'm not sure what you mean and I'm gonna make decisions I think you're exactly right and so we spend a lot of time we're obviously focused on things that happen at sea and near the sea and so what are those operational arrangements that are going to do everything we can to minimize the risk of miscalculation so we have this code for unplanned encounters at sea which is a communications protocol so that when us ships and foreign ships and this is spreading to more and more navies as they adopt it okay let's let's talk to one another let's arrange you know a passing that's going to be predictable and safe and not confrontational so that we minimize the risk of any kind of a miscalculation because it'll go the most tactical miscalculation will go strategic very very fast right and then to the point of responsive communications if something like that should happen one by virtue of our time together we can understand each other's thinking so we can and then we can get each other on the phone real quick and say okay this just happened let's not let this thing escalate you know beyond where it's helpful for either one of us de-escalate and to keep it in perspective exactly yeah what's that so let's turn to technology and but this is inevitable in all our lives in particularly when we think about the future of conflict and the future of security I was I was very interested looking at your your testimony presenting the most recent budget and senator in hope I think basically said to you you're taking the Harry S. Truman out why are you doing that and you said look we you know we need to to use those funds for new technologies and I want to invite you to talk about some of the specific technologies that that the Navy's investing in them and that you think about yeah no well you know Dr. Sanders up here he just wrote a piece that I read this morning about this thing and so one thing that characterizes success and failure I think is our ability to just move right though the most mortal sin we can have right now is to stay stable or stagnant right and so we're trying to move and that's exactly the decision dynamic with respect to hey what's more relevant for the future is it going to be the Harry S. Truman and its air wing where there's a lot of innovation taking place or is it going to be something else and those technologies are really right around the corner you know I know that it was a scientific science fiction award that we started with and if you think about the time horizon of science fiction for you know for readers it's it's steadily moved in whereas science fiction writers were used to write about a hundred years in the future 150 years in the future now it's like 25 30 years in the future thanks it's an indication that things are moving fast so you know the Navy's also trying to move fast in these directions things like unmanned and autonomy artificial intelligence things like directed energy which I think are going to really be very decisive directed energy at energies that make a difference I would say that you're gonna have to explain to me a little more directed energy think lasers high-power microwave you know electromagnetic energy in a in a focused way they can deliver either sort of kinetic right or non-kinetic effects I would say that additive manufacturing and the ability to create things from printers you know from raw material very decisive particularly for the Navy because we're always making these hard decisions you know what parts do I have to carry right and you know we only have very limited space well if I can make whatever part I need then it's it's a much different logistics thing for us so so you know these are the types of technologies that I think are going to have very decisive impact on the future and then you know the information systems that need to support it the artificial intelligence and machine learning and then you know how do we team all of that technology with people which I think are really the that's the competitive edge of the future the technology field if we can maintain pace is going to be relatively even so then it comes down to how we team with that technology as people to be more innovative creative etc so I want to come to your people how you're training them what you're offering them but when you talk about these different technologies one of courses they will all be connected so even if you think about a 3d printer and all the things it has to be connected to so that's part of how we're going to fight but it's also part of your economic mission so we think about the Internet of Things and everything being connected that you know those connections go through under underwater cables so you're when you now think about protecting our economy it used to be protecting ships from the Barbary Pirates it's now protecting cables how do you think about that and you know cables just being one part of sort of a national infrastructure that's all very very vulnerable because it's all being run by some network which is getting increasingly interconnected and therefore if you want to talk about a an attack surface is kind of the term of art lots of ways to get into that and so you know so how do you manage all that both the physical infrastructure and you know I will tell you that it's not just undersea cables but it's you know the technology has given us the ability to get to resources in deeper and deeper water so there's a lot of energy resources a lot of infrastructure at the sea it's one of the most dynamic parts of being in the maritime domain right now and then how do you protect all that sort of a seabed approach to our thinking is one way that we're getting after it and so now you know to get down to that well think about a network of unmanned vehicles remotely operated vehicles they can go down and hopefully be effective at securing all of that infrastructure so I mean yeah that economic mission is so much bigger than protecting ships even though we're protecting ships it's still a pretty big mission so from undersea to outer space because you also talk about cyberspace and space right the two domains we talked about mixed right make mixed reality right there how do you think about protecting our assets in space and to what extent do you think about that but I you know the layman would say well surely that's the air force but I know it's not we've got tremendous equities in space if you think about trying to maintain awareness and stay connected over you know over the vast distances particularly in the Pacific in the Atlantic you know space very very important sense so we're teaming very closely with all the other services the army has a tremendous investment and equities in space as well and then the idea of this interconnectedness well starts with the space architecture but it really goes all the way down to each individual system as well and so thinking about the communication standards that are going to be required to really truly connect this thing so that you know as the internet of things comes real and it gets more and more ubiquitous you know we don't want to be left behind as the only kind of network of stuff that's not to networked right so we've got to think about all that so I promised I'd I'd ask you to talk about people and again I mean it's the size of your workforce the range of things they have to do I was fascinated you have something called sailor 2025 right and this idea also of offering your workforce flexible career options I mean it's ahead of a think tag can action platform I think about that all the time I've got 60% millennials they their careers are changing in all sorts of different ways and so we think about how to offer that but you've got a much much bigger task so I wanted to ask you when you look forward at the future of the Navy and also the need to have a very diverse workforce because in many of the things that you're thinking about if you don't have a reflective workforce you're not going to be able to do the AI the right way you're not gonna be able to really think about use the technology in the full way that we need to talk to us about sailor 2025 and how you think about the future of your workforce I'll tell you sailor 2025 is really a suite of things that we're doing to really move our human resources into the 21st century and so we had and a lot of it starts with very sort of mundane things like a we've got to refresh the information technology right so there's been a number of events in the past two or three years that have honored Admiral Grace Hopper right great pioneer in computer science and I think some of our personnel databases were actually written by Admiral Grace Hopper I mean they're that old they don't talk to one another and we were sort of the you know the masters of small date right and so we've got all that moving up into the cloud now and with modern software which allows us now to get down to the individual sailor and understand what that sailor's priorities are right their professional priorities what they want to do their personal priorities and you know everything about that person and then we've got a proposition that we can make consistent with meeting the needs of the Navy if let's say sailor just wants to run from one operational assignment to the next and just move move move I got a lot of jobs like that so I can help that person if on the other hand maybe a sailor and their family want to stabilize because they have children going through school hey listen dependent upon where you want to live I can make you have some pretty good offers in that way if you want to get educated yourself we've got options there and so you know what is the compensation package that we can meet up and then how can we just eliminate all of the bureaucratic inefficiencies to make this literally all done on your smart phone and so that's what we want to do is deliver all of that flexibility transparency control of a sailor's career to their smart phone so that's just the human resources then you know there's the training part and so as we think about technology another thing in the past 20 25 years we've learned a tremendous about amount about how people learn right and so we're bringing all of that knowledge technology assists but also just the techniques through which information is presented all of that bringing you know brought to bear and then again you know we're networking our training venues as well so you put on you know the the goggles you're you're sitting in Norfolk you're in the simulated cockpit of an F-18 another sailor sitting in San Diego or Fallon Nevada and they're all networked together all fighting the same you know thing because the training systems are networked together you go to sea right now on a ship and you are presented a very complicated problem with the rest of your strike group and fleet half of that problem is real so you look out on the horizon and there's the ship when half of that problem is completely simulated and so there's live and virtual mix in terms of training opportunities gives us a chance to really ramp up the complexity of the scenarios and and make us much better you know I'll tell you also kind of going back to where we started knock on wood the Navy's met its recruiting goals for the past 12 and a half years every month and it's been you know a challenging thing and you sort of have to ask yourself why is that right I mean I can't compete on salary we have the most talented Navy by every measure of performance that we've ever had and I think it goes back to that value proposition Dr. Slaughter that hey we they join the Navy to do something noble and we need to make sure that when they join and they become part of that organization that our walk is consistent with our talk and that our behavior is consistent with their values honorable and glorious honorable and glorious wonderful so I think we have a few minutes for for questions I'm it's hard for me to see who's got the microphone and I'm just gonna say whoever is controlling the clock somebody needs to give me a hand sign when we're done because the clock is not telling me what I need to know so floor is open yes keep your hand raised there we go thank you Admiral for your service and for joining us here today Candace Rondo I'm a fellow with New America and a professor at ASU congratulations thank you feel very lucky my question for you is actually I recently took some a trip to Ukraine where we've seen a lot of challenges on the Sea of Azov and also on the Black Sea I'm wondering what lessons you and the Navy have taken away from this last period of confrontation in that part of the world I know that the USS Ross is patrolling now I've had the Donald Cook there as well what should we expect and what lessons would we take away and also what does this mean for interoperability for for NATO going forward as well as for the Ukrainian Navy yeah well that's a heavy question there's not enough time but I think some of the big lessons from that episode and many other like it are that one I think it's easy but a mistake to think of this in terms of kind of a bilateral approach hey what are we gonna do as the United States to be more resilient to things like that and as and this happens I think both in the Atlantic Mediterranean context the NATO context also in the Pacific as well where it's really a regional approach that we have to take and so one aspect of this is to make all of our allies and partners in that region I think more resilient and resistant to those types of actions going forward and so how do we all team together to respond as as an alliance or a team rather than just make this sort of a bilateral thing I think that's a that's a vulnerability we really want to try and avoid both in as I said in the Atlantic and the Pacific and then it goes to this idea of response time as well and so we've got to be able to respond or even better to anticipate these types of behaviors in fact in the ideal we would want our competitors responding to our first move rather than always being in the response mode ourselves and so you know if you think about that full spectrum of competition we would want to hey be making plenty of first moves of our own so that we can force the the competitor to respond and then you know the the decision cycle we've got to be able to when it when we do that to respond we've got to be able to do so on a timescale that's relevant right so that we can't let one actor go in you know potentially establish a new normal and then move on to the next thing before we've had a response to the first move so we've got to both think about this as making the region more resilient to these types of things so that one would give a great deal of thought before trying something like that and then when they happen be a little bit more responsive I think the building resilience point is again I mean whether you're thinking about climate or you're but but it's such as a core part of how we think about the future of our security is really a key point here in the front sir George Nicholson with the global special operations forces Foundation a little over a year ago at the Atlantic Council general Miller said our biggest threat in the future for the Marine Corps is our dependence upon GPS and Satcom and he talked about being in Afghanistan the year before I mean the month before asking one of his Marines where was something on the map makes he said they looked at me like I was a dinosaur and said we don't use maps I think about two or three weeks later you made the comment that you had the same problem in the in the Navy and I think that you said that you asked the question about can we use sections we're told we stopped using sections year ago how do you see this problem being resolved yeah well the problem I think comes under a group of problems that we call I think it's positioning navigation and timing right at PNT and because we you know the other thing is we just got to make an acronym for it so the the challenge of positioning navigation and timing is going to I think it's we're making good progress there right this is an area where technology is helping us there's a lot of these positioning systems up in in space and and in geo types of approaches to this I think that all of our systems should be able to use all of them right and so that it makes it more robust if we're going to use kind of those electronic navigations types of systems and then you know we have returned to celestial navigation and some of those things which technology here we can do better than a sextant right now in terms of getting a star fix and so it's the combination of all of those things that will make us be more resilient your question though sort of elicits a kind of a broader matter which is we've talked a lot about the network today and that network of course is going to be the first point of attack I think if when conflict starts to move to the higher end of that spectrum and ours is not going to be 100% resilient all that we can expect ours to degrade but our hope is that and our goal is that while ours degrades it won't degrade as much as theirs and at the lowest point of connectivity or performance will be better than our adversaries and then we'll heal faster and so it's really you know thinking about that information space whether it's navigation whether it's communication that's contested battle space right now and thinking about some of those fundamental ideas of contested space those principles will do us well in this space as well they're over there hello admiral Pete Montsuor I'm a professor of military history at the Ohio State University what are your concerns that the Navy hasn't engaged in a major blue water conflict since the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944 and I'm thinking the parallel here would be the Royal Navy between Trafalgar in Yutland doesn't see a lot of blue water comp conflict and then at Yutland it doesn't do very well because its culture had ossified how do you prevent that from happening in the United States Navy I'll tell you it's a it's a real challenge and there's that great book rules of the game that talks exactly about that problem for the Royal Navy and has tremendous lessons for us in terms of the culture of command and a freedom of action the ability to innovate you know it's just up at New Port last night and talk to the course that we teach to future joint force maritime component commanders we talked exactly about this right and then we went to dinner with a bunch of the prospective commanding officers that are going to go out and command ships and we talked exactly about this and so it's a matter of how are you training right I mean that's the best that we can do Pete is just sort of make our training as challenging and prototypic as we possibly can including the decision structures and the challenges that are going to poke right at that problem that you just talked about and then you know what is the response and what is the ability of each of our commanders at every level to sort of think on their own innovatively creatively use their initiative exercise the full scope of the authorities that we have given because I think what happens in these long periods without exercising those muscles that we just you know just like an athlete we sort of get out of shape and so we're trying to push out an exercise but I'm mindful you know you mentioned late day golf at the beginning of World War two even after Pearl Harbor even after Guadalcanal you know we were still learning on the fly at you know at great cost right in combat and so you know I'm mindful that every opportunity we can to make that training more representative of the complexity of the challenge we face will get us closer and then we've got to sort of build in that resilience and toughness and I guess humility to understand that we're not going to get it all perfect and we're still going to have to fight through that transition yes Chris Wolf BBC I'm sure you're not going to be any Admiral Jellicos or but the we've talked a little bit about great power competition but a lot of smart people have been talking about John Bolton for example pushing towards a confrontation with Iran so I was wondering you know what your advice might be when that issue comes up. I think well the United States is a global power right and one of the lessons that we have learned we have to internalize is that every time we try and focus on one thing too much without maintaining a balanced perspective that well there's vulnerabilities associated that people will you know steal a march on us in our blind spots and then I think particularly with the Middle East and other areas the importance of allies and partners is even more made more manifest and so building those meaningful networks where we're sharing you know not only kind of military capability but every time we get together with our allies and partners in any kind of an international contest it's really like hey what are we going to how much more information can we share right so that we can get out in front of this start to be in the anticipatory phase of things rather than the reactionary phase of things and then so I think that that's a you know a big part of the solution and then as we think about sort of you know those adversaries identified in the national defense strategy we've got to watch out for any kind of alliances between them so you know China Iran Russia Iran those sorts of things those types of alliances only complicate our problem as well with somebody in the back there no Peter thank you good morning I'm rolling you started off I'm Tom Squattery with talk media news you began your comments about communication on the high seas between navies and over the weekend two US ships again went through the Taiwan Strait this year there have been an increased number of freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea of course you know with the incident last fall where it appeared a Chinese vessel was going to ram a US vessel can you talk a little bit about the South China Sea in regards to the communication aspects that you mentioned at the beginning remarks and how to avoid an accidental ramming or something like that thank you yeah I mean I think I was pretty complete when I talked about it it's really just an operational construct that in the vast vast majority of encounters that we see in the South China Sea and everywhere else that you mentioned we both parties behave all parties really because it's bigger than just the two of us behave consistently with those with those arrangements and so in fact that's one of the things that we stress quite a bit when I last visited China was this responsibility that we have to make sure that we train our commanding officers who have so much responsibility on their shoulders to make sure that hey if we're not if we don't consider ourselves enemies well let's not treat ourselves like enemies let's pass peacefully in the South China Sea or wherever and let's not make it hard to abide by these constructs and pass peacefully so let's not try and drive erratically in front of one another let's try and not throw obstacles in front of each other etc and it's the responsibility of those commanding officers to make sure that they make a very measured approach in this and then it's the responsibility of higher echelon commanders to teach that and hold the commanding officers responsible and so you know I think that that's about all that said there the South China Sea a very important body of water for a lot of reasons you know the United States as well about a third of the world's trade flows through that body of water and so it's extremely important that as we advocate for continued freedom of navigation through their and other international waters like the Taiwan Straits that were mindful that we've got a tremendous economic interest in that as a maritime nation have to say for all our talk about mixed reality and virtual reality you go to Singapore you look at your hotel room you see all those ships lined up right about to go to the streets and it's it just reminds you how physical it is and and how much we do rely on these these very narrow passageways no yeah you and you can map them out through the world there's the Malacca Straits where you were talking about there's Hormuz there's Babel Men Dem there's Gibraltar there's Suez Panama you know you can just sort of take a look at them and you know geography is still destiny you can't simulate that away Peter Peter singer with New America thanks again for joining us I'm gonna ask you a question maybe less likely to get you in trouble than Bolton and Iran policy it actually goes back to the prior question about Naval Warfare a hundred years ago so one of the challenges of that period that you face now is that there were a set of technologies a set of platforms some of which had been dominant were still believed to be dominant you know that was the last great dreadnought battle and yet wasn't moving forward you had other technologies that were not yet realized to be as powerful as they would be aircraft carrier submarine and then you had a third category of ones akin to the like the blimp aircraft carrier that seemed like it was the future and yet it was like a false alley so as you're planning the Navy of 2030 how are you navigating these questions of which kind of investments to make how are you testing them how are you visioning this now that's a great question and so it's very central to our approach right now and so I'll just tell you story and I apologize if I'm repeating myself but there's this number 10,000 that's out there and it gets a lot of play right so if you think about 10,000 of us out in a would-be island just last week at where we have a lot of our electronic attack squatters this is a new area right that's proving more and more valuable and they had this quote on the wall of their building that talked about hey it's a Thomas Edison quote right I didn't make 10,000 mistakes I just learned 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb so there's 10,000 in that context in terms of experimentation you know if you read Malcolm Gladwell he talks about the 10,000 hours right that it takes to become an expert I feel like oftentimes I'm a trapped in a world of 10,000 briefs right where it takes 10,000 briefs to kind of get the consensus in the group of fellow travelers to come together with the unity of effort that's the way it's not going to work right and so I would as we think about all of these technologies and in the context of the Navy as a learning engine a global learning engine I would say that as always we want to move forward on an evidence based approach and so the more that we can get out and test these concepts in every possible way some we test by analyzing them a little bit more some we test by wargaming them you know up in Newport or wherever some we test by going out and doing a fleet experiment we actually get on the water and check it out but we've got to make sure that when the nation security is involved that we're not making a leap of faith right so some people use this battleship to aircraft carrier example as a as a pivotal moment for the Navy and I suppose it was but hey there was 20 years of experimentation with naval aviation that prepared us for that time right and so it wasn't like we just sort of invented it on the fly we had a lot of evidence and and tactical development and technological development and so as we move forward we've got to make sure that we continue those experiments those prototypes that refining and we have to be mindful that hey this exponential pace of change is getting more and more rapid so also our pace of experimentation needs to get more and more rapid so that we don't fall behind so you know I'd much rather be in the 10,000 experiments realm than the 10,000 brief realm well that is a perfect note on which to end okay and we thank you it's a perfect kickoff to a day of discussion about the future of security well thank you very much thanks for having it's great to be together