 Great honor for me this morning to be here with Major General Frank McKenzie, the director of the Marine Corps QDR office, and sort of general expert in all things Pentagon and Marine Corps, so it couldn't be a better leader for that endeavor for the Marine Corps. So I think we're going to just start off with you diving right in on some of the changes that the Marine Corps is considering in response to some of the outside fiscal pressures and strategic changes that you're facing. And then we'll try to get to Q&A from the audience as quickly as we can. A couple admin announcements first if people could turn off the ringers on their cell phones. We'd appreciate it. Also, because General McKenzie's timeline got a little compressed, because there's not much going on and depending on right now, we're going to try to be efficient with our questioning, which means you should have gotten cards when you came in. Hopefully, if you didn't, if you can just raise your hand and the interns will bring some cards around. If you could write your questions down on those, then we'll collect them when we get to the end of the remarks period. And then we'll try to consolidate them with our questionnaires up here. So again, at any point, you can raise your hand to get a card. And if you've written some questions, then just hold them up and the interns will run around and grab them from you. So again, General McKenzie, thanks so much for coming. And we look forward to your illuminating remarks on the future Marine Corps. Mayor, thanks very much. It's good to be here this morning, busy times back at the Pentagon right now, as Mayor alluded to. I was out here in the early spring and gave a strategy orientated discussion of QDR. And this morning, I'm not going to stick at that level. I'm going to dive down a level and talk a little bit more about my service, the Marine Corps and some of the specific things that we view as important to us as we go into the quadrennial defense review, which is actually well underway. This is the fifth QDR, though. And I think everyone in the room is well aware of their widely varying opinions about how effective these QDRs have been in the past. In fact, at the risk of inflicting something on you that you've almost certainly heard before, I'll quote Anthony Quartersman, a distinguished analyst here, who said a few years back talking about working on the QDR. If God really hates you, you may end up working on a quadrennial defense review, the most pointless and destructive planning effort imaginable. You'll spend two years on a document decoupled from a real-world force plan from an honest set of decisions about manpower procurement with no clear budget or fit-up and with no metrics to measure or determine its success. Hard to improve on that language. Given that dawning assessment from Tony Quartersman, there are some opportunities in this QDR. We face significant fiscal pressure, which is unparalleled in modern times in the building. And that's going to exercise a forcing function. Additionally, unlike prior years, we got a jumpstart on this QDR through the Strategic Choices Management Review, the initiative that Secretary Hagel launched in the spring that took a sort of a 60-90-day look at strategy resources across all aspects of the defense portfolio. And most of us who work QDR also worked on the skimmer. So that gave us an opportunity to sort of get a jumpstart. So for the Marine Corps, we came out of the skimmer feeling that some of our visions or some of our views on force structure had been affirmed. And I'll talk about that here in just a minute. Some of our key programs have been protected. And we felt and continue to feel that we were well positioned going into this quadrennial defense review. So we'll see how that all works out. The downside of the skimmer, of course, is it a way available time that could have been otherwise used to do the quadrennial defense review. So now it's mid-October. The report is due to Congress around the 1st of February. And I'm not certain there's going to be any slippage in that date. So we are in an extremely, an extremely compressed environment. And so that's one of the reasons I'm not going to be able to spend as long as I had thought here this morning. But it's day to day and on the weekends, too, back in the building right now. But we do think we're making some progress on that. So one of the key things that I want to sort of, it's sort of a view the Marine Corps has, one of the things that came out of the skimmer was the sense that it was going to be a capability or a capacity choice, a modernization or a modernization choice on one hand or a existing force's response today on the other. We would argue that's really an interesting way to frame the debate. It's probably a useful way to frame the debate. But ultimately, it's too binary. You're arguing from two different poles. In fact, the grounds you're going to find is going to be somewhere in the middle. And it will be nuanced across the joint force. For example, some elements of the joint force may need to emphasize capability as we look to the future. Other elements of the joint force may need to emphasize capacity. So it's not one brush does not fit all as you look across the joint force. And it's going to be a little bit more of a nuanced application of those things. But let me just talk a little bit about, when the Marine Corps looks at our future, our product is the Marine, the man or woman that's on the battlefield. And so we are a human force. So we first measure ourselves in terms of how big is the Marine Corps. How big is that human force that we deliver to various places around the world to support the United States' interests? Today, the Marine Corps active duty and strength is about 194,000 in some change. And we're on our way to 182,000. And I'll address that in just a minute. So 194,000 today coming down from a wartime high of just a few years ago when we were in two large land campaigns, one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, of 202,000. But actually, since 1950, the Marine Corps average in strength has been about 196,000 with some big bumps up there, a bump for Vietnam, and then a bump, of course, for the wars that were just drawing down. In fact, even if you take out Vietnam, the Marine Corps in strength has been 189,000 over the last roughly half century or so. And we haven't been below 170,000 since the Korean War, since 1950, just some numbers to bear in mind. The last time the Marine Corps looked at really exhaustively looked at a resource constrained force structure below 170,000 was in the early 1990s, when under the leadership of then commandant Carl Mundy, a force structure planning group run by then Brigadier General Chuck Krulak looked at post-co-war in-strength numbers, potential post-co-war in-strength numbers for the Marine Corps, directed to take a look at a Marine Corps of 159,000. General Krulak did his work, commandant took that work, went back and argued inside the department that the risks of going to a Marine Corps that size in that era were such that they weren't sustainable. And his argument prevailed and we ended up coming out of there with a in-strength for the Marine Corps of about 174,000, a number that we've largely stayed around since then. I would note on 9-11, we were at 173,000 in change, so right at 174,000. In 2011, directed by Secretary Gates, we took a look at where we thought the Marine Corps would be after the end of operations in the CENTCOM AOR. You know, once you get out of Iraq and once you'd largely get out of Afghanistan, how big did the Marine Corps think it needed to be in order to fulfill its requirements the nation's defense strategy? And we call that a strategy-driven look. And we developed a Marine Corps of 186,800, 186.8K in shorthand. A little bit lower than what we've been in the past, but nonetheless a number that we felt was strategy-driven and that would allow us to do at a deployment to a dwell ratio of one to three, that is your home three times as much as you're deployed, the nation's bidding. And so again, we call that the strategy-driven force. And today, as I speak to you, that force remains our optimum force. If we could propose a force that was not primarily driven by budgetary concerns, would arrive at a 186.8K force. So you just need to keep that in the back of your mind as we go forward that for us, the optimum force is 186.8K. However, after we did this work for Secretary Gates, the Budget Control Act gave us a DOD, a $487 billion bill. Our part of it was to absorb additional in-strength cuts down to 182,000 in 182.1, or I'll just use the shorthand of 182 to talk about that force. This was not a strategy-driven force, but we got to it by carving elements of the 186K force down, except at a little bit higher risk, but nonetheless still pretty much the 186K force with a future reduction. And that most recently is the program in-strength for the Marine Corps until very recently, where we're going and we were gonna be there in another couple of years. In the spring, as we began to look inside the Marine Corps at sequestration and its probable impact on the force, the Commandant stood up an examination of a range of future Marine Corps that would be resource constrained. And I was the officer that led that effort for the Commandant, and we looked at a Marine Corps of the future, and we took a timeline of 2017 because we thought we don't wanna take something, we wanna do something that will be within the fit-up, that will not be out in the future as to be a dream, but nonetheless has real and practical utility. So we took as our time horizon 2017, we sat down and we looked at redesigning the Marine Corps based on our understanding and derivation of the national security strategy, national military strategy, the defense strategic guidance of January, 2012, signed by the president. And from that, we developed a new Marine Corps that fits within a series of resource constraints. So if we face sequestration type numbers, this is the Marine Corps that the Commandant will pull out, and it's the Marine Corps that we'll build to. And in fact, the Commandant, as many of you know, has been very active talking about this in the past. So I wanna dig down a little bit into the force and tell you some things about it. First of all, the force that we built is a force that's weighted toward crisis response and for deployed presence. That's a key thing to remember because in every design decision that followed, we came back and looked at that. What does it mean for our ability to respond to crises that are gonna occur this afternoon that we don't know about this morning? So we wanna optimize our force to be the force of choice for that requirement. And you've gotta be forward deployed in order to be that force. If you're not there, you can't react this afternoon. You can't react in six hours, eight hours, 10 hours, or even shorter timelines for a crisis. Now, in doing that, we have to take risk. And we elected to take risk in major combat operations. The high end, if you will, are the range of military operations and in long-term stability operations. So when I talk about the range of military operations or the Romo for those of you that unfortunately are in this business, phases one and two, phases zero and one, actually. Phases zero and one are deterrents and presence. This force is optimized to be deployed forward during those phases. And to bridge to phase two, we begin to get into combat operations in phase three decisive operations. So we don't ride ourselves out of any existing war plans. We don't say that we can't fight on a battlefield, but we do think we're gonna be the force that will be there first, that will enable the bridge for the joint force to enter and then that would be able to contribute to a war fight should that occur. However, we think our principal utility and our value added to the nation is gonna be in our ability to deter through forward presence, through theater security, cooperation activities, through all the benefits that you get from forces that are forward deployed. So that's really how we sort of see the force at the very basic level. It's important to understand that distinction as we go forward. So we looked at a band of forces and I'm not gonna describe all the range of forces that we looked at, but we thought the most reasonable level of forces of in-state for the Marine Corps that best balance operational requirements of steady state deployments, those men and women that are forward all the time, crisis response activities, and potential major combat operations while preserving the institutional health of the Marine Corps. We felt that number was 174K. Now, it's important to understand that 174K as we looked at it was not 8,000 reduction from 182. Numerically it is, but philosophically, conceptually, analytically, and in design concept, it's not a reduction. Rather, it represents the lowest risk band of a future set of a future look at the Marine Corps. We think it's the best bang for the buck for the nation. We think it fits in a very good space there. Also, I would note, and this is important, it's within the range of future Marine Corps posited by the Secretary's Strategic Choices and Management Review. Although I'll tell you in complete candor, we got to our number before this number was released. As you know, the range for the Marine Corps between 150 and 175K is what came out of the skimmer. Our number is 174, but we were looking at that number well before the skimmer actually came out. And let me note that we see being at 174K in FY17. So this is not a force that is a long-term out in the future. We believe we have the ability to get to 174K without adopting onerous force shaping measures. Not gonna have to do any rifts, we're not gonna have to do a lot of those things. We can get there with the authorities we currently have and attain this by the end of FY17. So let me go down another level and talk a little bit more about the force structure that we're talking about. It's a lighter, more agile design. In order to get there, we're gonna eliminate one of our three-star Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters. We have three in the Marine Corps, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, one in Okinawa. We're gonna stand down the MEF headquarters, Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters currently located at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. And we're gonna absorb its functions into a sitting, already existing, MAR-4COM headquarters that's up at Norfolk, Virginia. So we're gonna take down one of our MEFs, reduce our, and the MEFs, as an aside, are the war-fighting headquarters of the Marine Corps. If you go to a major contingency, you're gonna go with the Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters. It is the largest of our Marine Air Ground Task Forces. So we're gonna do away with one of those and we're gonna absorb those functions into another headquarters up in Norfolk. So we'll lose a Lieutenant General Command. Second point I'd wanna make is, this design emphasizes the importance of Marine Expeditionary Brigades, or MEFs, as I'll refer to them in shorthand as we continue the discussion. Today, the Marine Corps has three Marine Expeditionary Brigades. We have one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, one on Okinawa. These MEFs today, though, are not fully stand-alone entities. If we wanted to push a MEF headquarters out the door, we would have to take augmentation from the Marine Expeditionary Force staff to move it. The design we're talking about makes these brigade headquarters, the brigade command elements, if you will, completely stand-alone. They're fully manned. They can go on very short notice, very short notice. And these are command elements. 200 Marines plus or minus, they would have the capability to go forward to fall in on an existing Marine Expeditionary unit or to fall in on joint forces that are forward deployed because it is our intent to certify these headquarters to be JTF-capable headquarters. Additionally, they will have the capability to interact with the Joint Interagency Task Force world so they can do everything from HADR to combat operations and they'll be able to deploy either amphibiously or through other means as necessary. This is a significant distinction for us as we go forward. And it's another thing I would call out to you. We've always had Marine Expeditionary Brigades. They are the middle level of the hierarchy of Marine Air Ground Task Forces. The big war fighter is the MEPH. The MEPH is in the middle and we're gonna emphasize the MEPH a little bit more than we have in the past. So this design is gonna get to that. I would also note, as we talk about this, our Marine Expeditionary units, our MUSE, sort of the coin in the realm today of forward presence will remain essentially unchanged. We have seven of those in our structure today. We will take seven forward. We will tinker with various command relationships with the Marine Expeditionary Brigades with these MUSE as we go forward, but nothing is fundamental to the design. The last point I'd wanna call out is the only new thing really in our design structure are special purpose MAGTAPs. As many of you know today, special purpose MAGTAP crisis response is a tailored Marine Air Ground Task Force that is forward deployed into the Mediterranean. It has a remarkable capability marrying a infantry unit with a MV-22 Osprey capability, our tilt rotor aircraft that has vertical takeoff landing capabilities and aerial refuelers to reach out very quickly across the entire Mediterranean basin to reinforce an embassy, to assist in a NEO, to do a variety of other tasks. Number of other COCOMs have seen the utility of this force and are interested in pursuing it. We're gonna provide permanent structure for two of these entities. And we're neutral on where they go because in 2017 the requirements could change. But we think, for example, if we were to keep this capability in the Mediterranean basin, by 2017, not only would this headquarters conduct crisis response actions, it would also manage our theater security cooperation activities. From the Black Sea in the North to off the West Coast of Africa in the South, spanning across really the domains of two combatant commanders would manage through this headquarters that would be forward deployed right now. It's land-based, could be sea-based in the future. We're neutral on that and we'll see how circumstances develop as we go forward. I just wanna note that the special purpose MAGTF I'm talking about mitigates the risk of a marine expeditionary unit not being there. Under all cases, you'd prefer to have a marine expeditionary unit but they are in such demand that they are not able to be all places at all time. So these special purpose MAGTFs allow you to mitigate that risk and go to places where you can't put, as I've noted before, the corner of the rim, the marine expeditionary unit. Now our key point about this force is we wanna rotate at one to two deployment to dwell. So a marine deploys for seven months, he's home for 14 months, he or she is home for 14 months, and then they deploy again. That is different from the standard for the joint force which other services largely prefer one to three dwell. The Marine Corps' assessment is, first of all, we're the youngest force through a pretty significant amount of analysis, manpower analysis. We find that young men and women join the Marine Corps because they wanna deploy and they like to go. So this force is designed to take advantage of that. Now I would tell you, in a perfect world, we'd rather be at one to three, we'd rather be at 186. But given the requirements that we face, we need to be at one to two in order to execute the missions that we've been given. So that's an important distinction as well. It is pretty easy on your lance corpus and below. If you're in for a four year enlistment, you're gonna deploy twice during that period of time, then you're gonna go on carry on with the rest of your life. It has greater impact on the career force and we recognize that and that's part of the risk of this. But again, we don't live in a perfect world. We're having to do various things that we'd prefer not to do in order to adapt to the financial austerity that we face at this time. Another point, if we talk about major combat operations, the Marine Corps is all in, there's no rotation. If we go to a fight, we're all gonna go and there's not gonna be a one to two or one to three dwell in that operation. The whole Marine Corps will go and then we'll come back when it's over. Not to me, there won't be individual replacements, but units will not rotate. The force I've described is very supportive of the rebalance to the Pacific. And in fact, we'll restore efforts that were gapped during OEF as we go forward, ranging from initiatives in Darwin to initiatives in Guam as we go forward. It also maintains key capabilities that are new that came in after 9-11. For example, Marsach Marine Corps and then the Marine Special Operations Component and then Marine Corps contribution to Cyber Command, both at the headquarters level and as a component. So a lot of things have changed for us since 9-11 and this force recognizes those changes. There are a couple of programs that we think are key to us as we go forward into this force. The first is the EF-35 Bravo, our V-stall vertical takeoff jet that eventually we wanna go to a single airframe for in long-term for Marine aviation remains a very high priority for us. The second is the amphibious combat vehicle. And when I say amphibious combat vehicle, what I really mean is we wanna protect the decision space for the commandant to decide what that ACV is gonna look like. As you know, it is designed to be a vehicle that transports Marines from the sea base ashore and carries them inland. Do we want high water speed for that vehicle? Do we not want it? I'm not gonna presume to know the final answer on that right now. We're looking at it hard and the commandant will look at those decisions and look at the options in the early winter and in fact in the next few months. We'll take a look at that. So those are a couple of programs that we think are actually very important to us as we go forward. So as I end and I'm happy to stop and now take your questions, which I think will be actually the most valuable part of this exercise, I wanna just emphasize again that if we were developing a strategy-driven force, we'd take a 186.8k force at one to three dwell. But it's our view that while forces may grow smaller, recent history tells us that the requirements don't actually always compete with that. So you may or don't actually agree with that, I should say. So you may have a smaller force that's gonna continue to have to do many of the things you gotta do today. That force for us is a 174k force that operates at a one to two depth to dwell ratio that maintains the balance, the rebalance to the Pacific. And that is a force found that on forward presence, crisis response. If you will, the commandant has a phrase that he uses to describe it, a middle weight force. And I think that's a pretty accurate force. It's a force that is either there or can get there very quickly, yet it's a force that has the capability to fight and be effective on a modern combined arms battlefield. Having said that, I'll stop, Maureen, and be glad to take questions. Thanks so much, General. That was a great overview of your recent decisions. And thanks, we appreciate the detail you provided. If people can start holding their questions up, I'll ask a few, if you can get a card and write it down and then people will pick them up. And so if the interns can go around and collect the ones that are out there, I'll start with a few. And then we'll get to the audience questions. If I could back up for a moment, and you talked initially about sort of the fast pace of the QDR, if you could just give us a general sense of where things stand in that timeline and any insights you have as to the potential direction or how optimistic are you for big decisions and what kinds of decisions do you see as likely? Sure, Maureen. First of all, as I noted, it's a compressed timeline. So we're moving very quickly. I'm the service QDR guy from the Marine Corps. There's equivalent to me for all the other services have it. The thing to remember is this is a OSD project. It is not a service project. It is not a joint staff project. The secretary is the official who actually signs a document that goes over to the Congress. So we just need to bear that in mind that this is their effort. But they have been extremely transparent actually in allowing us to participate. There are a number of working groups. We play at all levels in it. I am actually pleased by the level of transparency and energy that has gone into it. I believe we will actually have a deliverable product on time, and I believe it's going to be a product that is going to have to take into effect the potentialities of sequestration, which means that as we go forward and around the edges, those numbers are tinkered with, we're going to have to be adaptive to change even at the last minute as we go in. But we feel that they've made us part of the process, which has not always been the case. And we very much appreciate that, same with the joint staff and the combatant commanders for that matter. So I think we're in a pretty good place on it. Okay, thanks. Let me ask you a quick question about the holy trinity of the Marine Corps, the air, ground, and logistics combat elements. Excuse me. At the end of this program, I believe the aviation component of that will have been pretty thoroughly modernized and much less true for the ground and logistics pieces that I think will have a lot of old, tired equipment. You talked a little bit about the ACV, but I don't think that's on a timeline to be relevant in the near term. So how is the Marine Corps looking at the risk associated with the sort of an imbalance of that triad and how's it gonna manage that reality? Actually, I would tell you that, we don't think of it in those terms. The holy trinity, I take that. I'm not certain I'd say that the elements of the MAGTF are that significantly imbalanced. I would tell you this as an example, the MV-22, which was a long, maligned, much fought over airplane, makes us look pretty good right now. And it replaced an airplane that was flying when President Kennedy was a senator. So we should remember that the aviation combat element has been aged in the past too. So you take a slice, you can say, well, the aviation combat element's getting a lot of stuff that the ground guys aren't getting. And given a single slice, yes. But we tend to think in terms of the MAGTF as a unity and how it all plays together. On the ground side, certainly we're looking at the JLTV as a possible replacement for the Humvee going forward. The individual equipment of the Marine over the last 10 years has dramatically changed. So Marines today are carrying equipment that was unthought of 15 years ago. The average rifleman on the ground is well-equipped. We don't have some of the flashy programs, but I would tell you speaking as a Marine and as a Marine infantryman, those are flashy aviation programs that we need, that we absolutely had to have that were long overdue. And particularly as you look forward, phase zero, phase one, deterrence operations, the F-35B is really the only airframe that's gonna be able to operate inside a theater ballistic missile defense threat envelope off dispersed fields. And that makes it a very attractive platform. I don't know what I'd trade away for that capability going forward. I mean, it's gonna replace the Harrier, which is a fantastic airplane that is now reaching the end of its service life. So just from my perspective, I would say the MAGTF as a whole is far richer. Slice a life, sure, we maybe spent a lot of money on airplanes because airplanes are expensive. We bought tanks a while back, but now those tanks are in the inventory. The ACV is gonna be a very expensive program for the ground side when it finally comes in. And I'm confident that it will, whatever configuration it's gonna be yet to be seen. If I could ask a little bit about changes in this new structure for the reserves and how that fits into the bigger picture. Sure, we are very lucky in the Marine Corps in that the reserves are literally the mirror image of the active force. Today, our reserve structure is, I wanna say 39.6K, 39,600. We're actually gonna trim them down about 1,100 to a number in the range of 38,500. But we will continue to use the reserves as a shock absorber for active component forces. We choose to, we wanna rotate our reserves at a one to five depth to dwell ratio. Correction, one to four depth to dwell ratio, which means once every five years you're gonna get an opportunity, you're gonna get an opportunity to deploy. So we can feed those reserve units in either ground or air to relieve stress on active component units. And in a major war fight, of course they would be critical players. But we are closely aligned with the reserves. The reserves are closely attuned to the requirements of the active force. So it really is a shock absorber for us. Okay. If we can, Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Anthony is our Marine Corps fellow here at CSIS and master questioner. So, Jeff if you can start with some of the questions from the audience. So there are a number of questions regarding the future of amphibious operations. Specifically, Marine Corps desires for future amphibious warships. What the Navy's plan is for the number of amphibious vessels. And also some critics question the viability of power projection from the sea, thinking Iwo Jima and Enchon type operations. Can you comment on the Marine Corps institutional position on amphibious salt? Sure. The four structure that I've described to you maintains a forcible entry capability of two Marine expeditionary brigades from the sea. Really at any level we looked at, we have that capability. And that reflects our view that the nation needs a joint forcible entry capability. A major portion of which is the ability to enter from the sea. No Marine, no Marine thinks of Iwo Jima when we think about an amphibious landing. We don't think of ships right up against the beach, smoke drifting across while a line of tractors pushes up the beach while the beach is under fire. We would choose to go places where the enemy is not. We would choose through a variety of shaping means to get ashore in an uncontested area. But in the final analysis you do have to be able to go across the defended beach. And we have a variety of things we can do to increase the chances of that being successful. We would say first of all we respond to the requirement for amphibious operations because our existing plans call for us to have that capability. In the long term though the United States probably needs an amphibious operations entry capability that's independent of that. You want to have the capability in the nation's quiver to be able to impose your will on someone who might not want you to come ashore. And so we think it's very useful to have that capability. And in the same breath I would talk about airborne forces. They're also a useful capability. They do different things, perhaps in concert with amphibious operations. But as a joint concept it's a concept that has proved remarkably durable and remarkably capable. And history is littered with famous generals and others who said it's dead only the next year to see a major amphibious operation be executed. So we should remember that we always talk about the end of amphibious operations. Yet it's probably still a pretty good thing to have around. Now that requires us to be close partners with our sister service the Navy. We were pleased with the amphibious force structure that came out of the strategic choices and management review for the amphibious fleet. That's what transports us to the fight. You're gonna go in under fire, you're gonna go in an amphibious warship. So the corner of the room for us remains the amphibious warship. When we talk about forward deployed forces and the things that we'd wanna do. It is a resource intensive environment for the Navy. They've been very good to us and we think they're all POM going forward. Their alternative program going forward is gonna continue to be good to amphibious capabilities because not only for amphibious entry but also for forward presence. The demand signal for amphibious warships is very high. In fact, it's one of all the things in the joint force amphibious warships are probably right at the very top of the list. So I've got the criticism of landing on Iwo Jima. We would hope to not do that again either. But there are a lot of ways to do that differently and that's the Marine Corps I'm talking about is a Marine Corps that will enter through a variety of other means to gain and maintain an advantage. Someone suggested, so you mentioned the low end estimate from the skimmer for the Marine Corps was 150,000 range. Someone suggested this is a viable number and how would that change the picture from the Marine Corps and how would that influence the sort of core programs, priority programs that you mentioned earlier, the amphibious ship. And of course without knowing what the requirements placed on the joint force are, it's difficult to know if it's a viable number or not. Based on our view of existing requirements today and our best case projection to 2017, 150K would be an unviable number for the Marine Corps. You would have to change a number of things, not only in the Marine Corps but across the joint force to meet not only forward presence requirements but also war fighting requirements if you were to go to that level for a Marine Corps. So we've done a great deal of study of it. And so when I say that it's an unviable number, it's an informed analysis. You may disagree with it, but it's an informed analysis. Obviously if you get smaller numbers, the program gets smaller, you need less of certain things. But the programs I've outlined to you today would all remain, perhaps in different forms. But I would like to emphasize that one of the beauties of the work that we did was we were able to take a look at a range of Marine Corps and we looked at a 150K Marine Corps and that's a dangerously small force. You run into a lot of difficulty training that force. You are not able to meet a lot of obligations that we meet today, including treaty obligations. And so it would have a significant impact and we were heartened that as part of the skimmer process, that argument was heard. So there's been a great deal of attention on air sea battle and A2AD capabilities around the various parts of the world. Can you comment on the role of the MEB and also the MPF of concerning operations in an A2AD environment? Sure. You know, A2AD is a very broad range of capabilities, but I think where the Marine Corps could best fit in would be an expeditionary, let me give you just one example, would be an expeditionary basing of fifth generation fighters. The capability to operate those aircraft from a dispersed basing structure that would complicate a potential adversary's ability to strike your high value aircraft. You could do that through the seizure and defensive advance naval bases to return to a theme from the Marine Corps' distant past. You would then be able to replenish those small airfields. Through the use of MPF, the brigade could play, the MEF could play, sort of for that concept, the command level is not particularly relevant, but MPF and the aviation capabilities embarked in our MPF, our forward prepositioning ships for those who don't know the acronym are gonna be very important in that thing. So we think we're excited about the capability that we would offer the A2AD fight by our ability to place within a potential threat ring a fifth generation fighter that for the first time complicates an adversary's targeting process. You're gonna present potentially far more potential locations for that aircraft to operate than he could safely, than he could reasonably surveil gather target acquisition data on and fire at. With your focus on MEBs and use rather than MEFs, what does that do to your acquisition requirements going forward for smaller vehicles, weapons, armor, et cetera? Will you be spending less? Will you be spending differently? How does that change? Key point is not no less emphasis on the MEF. It rather is a, you know, the MEFs remain. Three MEF in, three MEF in Okinawa is essentially unchanged. This force is very little change as a result of this force redesign. And you should think of three MEF as a globally, or correction, three MEF as a locally employable marine expeditionary force. One MEF in California now is your globally employable marine expeditionary force, but we really don't lessen the, we really don't lessen the emphasis or the importance of the MEF because if you go to a high end war fight, you are going to go with probably with a marine expeditionary force. Rather, we accentuate not a gap but a niche we've identified that we can fill with the marine expeditionary brigade for not a high end war fight necessarily, but rather a large complex HADR mission or even a small contingency operation where it might be useful to have a flag led JTF capable, rapidly deployable headquarters that you could send into the fight. So we don't see the gain of the MEF at the cost of the MEF at all as we look at the design. And as we look at, and so it has actually very little effect on our programatics. However, as we go forward, we have reduced some total artillery going forward and we have reduced some tanks going forward just because we're cutting 8,000 spaces. We have to look to places where we have to make reductions and we always come back to the first principle I talked about which is we're going to emphasize crisis response for deployed status. So we had to take away things. We generally took them away from the high end of the fight. So on the subject of drawdowns and reduction of forces, there is some concern as we draw down to 174,000 by FY17 and given the fiscal austere circumstances that we may be creating a hell of force. Can you discuss the Marine Corps methodology of the drawdown and specifically the preservation and supporting structures that would be required to maintain? Sure. Sure, a couple of things. First of all, as we go to 174, we're not going to reduce our training infrastructure or our base support infrastructure by a single Marine. We're going to maintain the 182 level. So we're going to be actually very healthy in our training infrastructure. We are going to consciously emphasize readiness above all other characteristics of the force. If the comment out we're here, he would say, whatever number the Marine Corps is going to be at, it's going to be a ready force and whatever forces we generate are going to be ready forces. And so that's obviously you're not going to be able to have a force that's going to be a forward presence, crisis response force, unless it meets those capabilities. So we're going to take some risk in long-term infrastructure, development, buildings, maintenance inside the Marine Corps of structures because you can't do everything that you want to do. So we're going to take some risk there and we're going to consciously apply those resources to near-term readiness, which means the capability of forces to be able to deploy and accomplish the missions that they're given. So we will sacrifice when it's all said and done, the Marine Corps sacrifice everything to have a ready force. Can I ask a quick follow-on to that? You said you're going to protect the training infrastructure and the base operations and also I believe you're protecting special operations, cyber, some of those other key investments at the same time that you have to meet a 20% headquarters reduction bill. So given everything that you're protecting, there's presumably that 20% is going to fall pretty heavily in certain areas. Can you talk a little bit about how you're thinking about that? Absolutely. When you cut a three-star headquarters, you can take some pretty big steps. So that helps us along the road quite a bit. Additionally, as we've looked at it and we don't have a final decision yet, we have identified a full 20% cut and we encourage others to do this thing. As a mix between military, civilian? No, 20% military. The cut, the requirement was to cut 20% military. There are other initiatives on the way for cutting civilian structure, but when I say 20%, I'm talking 20% military. And we're moving in that direction. We think we've got a good plan to do that. The Marine Corps starts pretty lean anyway. We're not particularly fat, but we have identified those cuts and we make those cuts without prejudice to the things I've just talked about that we're gonna preserve, base infrastructure, training infrastructure, things of that nature. Okay. You've talked about the HADR capabilities of the Marine Corps. How do you see those evolving with these changes increase and decrease capability, et cetera? You know, the capability today is very robust. We don't see that capability changing. I mean, what you'll get if you're gonna, the only thing additive would be you're gonna get that Marine Expeditionary Brigade headquarters that's gonna be able to go on very short notice, which now gives you the capability to plug in very quickly at the flag level. You notice department of state structures, to NGO structures, you know, and so that gives you just a real, another level of flexibility as you go forward. You know, our Marine Expeditionary Units are capable of doing that today, but what we've got now is a capability to join a flag level headquarters out there in a matter of hours, depending on location, so that we could, you could have that and the ability to plug in and conduct that lateral coordination. So we think our capabilities are robust today. We think it will get better as we go forward. Sir, as the Marine Corps looks to the future in its new equipment, what part does energy efficiency play in decisions, if any? Sure. Energy efficiency is a tactical battlefield imperative. If you can reduce the logistics throughput to your four deployed forces, then you reduce the footprint that others can attack. There are a variety of compelling tactical reasons to seek energy efficiency. And as the department of the Navy is doing it writ large, so we're pursuing the same thing. So we're working on a variety of particularly tactical initiatives, some of which have been using RC Southwest as just one example. So we'll continue to do that because, you know, it's useful obviously for a variety of global reasons, but it also has compelling tactical advantage for the force. Can I say a quick question about sort of growing amphibious capability around the world? Many of our partners and some that are not so much, our partners, many are pursuing expanded or new amphibious capabilities. And given the emphasis in the strategy on partner capacity building, how does the Marine Corps view that expansion, global expansion? Is it an opportunity that you're trying to particularly leverage? Is that you'll work in where you can? We think, you know, there's obviously a natural congruence with our friends and partners that are developing those capabilities. So we will consciously work to leverage that, you know, as we go forward. You're right, a variety of nations see the utility in having sea-based forces that are independent of sovereignty considerations that can do a wide variety of things. It's something that we've recognized for a long time. Now others are seeing the virtue of that. So we will continue to press forward and leverage that to the maximum event, the maximum ability possible. Are there new partnership sort of activities that you think you can undertake in that regard? Are there, I mean, for example, one of the things we've been thinking about is some of the partners, we have a challenge or some would characterize it as a challenge of a couple of amphibs without a well deck. Whereas I think most people have not made that decision and have kept the well deck in the amphibs they're buying. Does that offer some new opportunities for the Marine Corps? Would you look at ways to try to leverage that particular element of others amphibious forces? I would say in the broad sense, yes. But the thing about a national vessel is ultimately it retains the sovereignty of the nation's owner. So you can do a lot of things, but unless it's a very close ally in a very specific set of circumstances, ultimately you gotta lose some of the flexibility that is innate to forward deployed amphibious forces. Having said that, I think you're gonna see a lot of training initiatives. I think you're gonna see a lot of that type of stuff in the Pacific as we go forward. Okay. So you spoke to the, with the drawdown, we're going to have reduced dwell times for the Marines. You mentioned that for the foreign out Marines. It's not such a big deal, but it does have implications for the career force. Could you amplify on your views on that and specifically what kind of impact could that have on our ability to maintain the best and brightest and inconsequent second word effects on future effectiveness on the battlefield? Sure. We've already pretty well rung out the Lance Corporal population, the four-year population. Many of these young men and women joined, they wanted to deploy, they get an opportunity to deploy, then they move on and do other things. For those that stay behind, the long-term future of the Marine Corps, we're still sorting through that, but clearly looking at a long-term one to two dwell is gonna have an effect on families. It's gonna have an effect on people as they look to a long-term career in the Marine Corps, and we're very much aware of that. The fact of the matter is, not everybody's gonna deploy one to two. It's gonna vary wildly across the force. So it's difficult to draw a generalization that everybody's gonna be at that depth-to-dwell ratio, but it is a risk that we know, that we recognize, and that we continue to study right now to see what that long-term effect might be. I don't have any better data from you for that than that, except that we recognize that it's an issue that we need to wring out very thoroughly as we go forward. Sir, as the QDR effort culminates, we anticipate it's published sometime next year, do you have any pressing concerns regarding it, and effectively what would keep you up at night if it was published in the QDR? Well, if it were published now, I mean, it would be largely unfinished. You know, at the stage we're at now, we're looking at alternatives. So it's difficult to say, I would tell you that one of the key things that the QDR is gonna have to look at is it's gonna have to examine the existing strategy, the national military strategy, as modified by the defense strategic guidance. And we're gonna have to make a judgment, is this strategy sustainable with a much smaller and more constrained budget? And we don't have a final answer to that. We're looking at that very hard right now. I think that will be one of the big questions that the QDR answers. For example, are we gonna continue with the tenets of the defense strategic guidance, perhaps albeit at a higher level of risk, or are we gonna say that we need to back off and we need to take a look at a whole new type of strategy? Don't know the answer to that question, but we're looking at it hard. And I think that will be one of the key fundamental, at the very highest level, one of the key fundamental answers that comes out of this QDR. With the US Marine Corps numbers anticipated to drop, how does that coincide with our alliance obligations? What are the views of our partners on this shift? And you've talked about the Marines moving into Australia. How are we leveraging those relationships to better? Sure, just obviously at the highest level, that's a joint Paul Mill question, but for the Marine Corps, the 174K force that I've described to you is a force that emphasizes the Pacific. So particularly our treaty and our other partner nations out there are not gonna see any reduction in Marine presence at all. In fact, as we go forward, we're gonna be sending one more UDP battalion here picking up right about now to Okinawa. So we're actually gonna come back and be able to fill some of the gaps that were left by the OEF, OIF issues over the last decade. So we think we're gonna be able to maintain that without really any significant interruption. And also, as you know, the Marine Corps has a long and solid history in the Western Pacific. And even during the height of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, we still maintain those ties. So we see going forward that there's not gonna be much change at all, you know, at least for us as a service. Can I just get a quick follow on to that one about what at least superficially may seem to be a bit of a contradiction if the Marine Corps remains focused primarily on the Pacific. But I think at least at present, most people would conceive of most crises, probably not emanating in the Pacific. I mean, there are potential points there, but certainly there are other areas of the world that seem more likely to erupt and require a rapid crisis response. So is that a contradiction? Are two special purpose MAGTFs enough? How do you reconcile that? You know, we're still gonna be active in other parts of the world. You know, my last life, as you know, Marine, I was the SENTCOM J5. And when I was in four like these, I used to say that, you know, speaking of SENTCOM at a paraphrase, Leon Trotsky, you may be finished with SENTCOM, but SENTCOM's not finished with you. I think we very much recognize that. And we're, you know, so we're gonna emphasize the shift to the Pacific because that is the national strategy of the United States. But that doesn't mean that we, or the rest of the joint force, is gonna draw down precipitously anywhere else in the world. You know, the great virtue of sea-based forces is their inherent mobility. So you can go a lot of places. You couple that with maritime prepositioning forces. You can, you've got mobility. You can answer a broad range of requirements. So I would say that we do not see this as it is, you know, where, well, we've got to draw back from a lot of other areas in order to do this. It's not gonna happen. We will still maintain presence in those other areas as we go forward. Okay. Sir, you already spoke of your, your desire to preserve the Marsot capabilities as much as possible. As a demand stream from the COCOMs around the world continues to increase, what is the Marine Corps' view on potentially enhancing its soft capabilities or redistributing them? We're gonna protect, we're gonna protect Marsot as we get larger, but we're gonna freeze it as current level of growth. We feel it's about right for the requirements that we have. And what we're gonna do, what we're gonna pursue aggressively with Special Operations Command is the integration of our forward deployed news with Special Operations forces that are operative in the theater. We feel there's a natural alliance there and a lot of good work needs to be done to make that more, to make that, to formalize that process to a greater degree. So clearly, as we go forward, Special Operations forces, and all their roles are gonna play a, gonna play a, you know, a critical part in the effort. And we think not only Marsot, but Marine Expeditionary units are gonna be part of that. What's the balance in terms of drawdown on this aviation force versus the ground forces? Are there differences proportionally? Well, as you know, if you draw down human beings, the ground forces are where the human beings are. So you're gonna draw down more. Infantry battalions got 984 people in it. You know, a flying squadron might have 220. So if you draw down a flying squadron and an infantry battalion, it will, in terms of human beings, it will look very disparate, although you're drawing down two flags of equal level. So most of your people are coming out here, coming out of the ground combat element, some out of the logistics combat element, some out of the aviation combat element, but mainly in the infantry side of it. For example, we're gonna go down to 21 infantry battalions. We were at a high in the 202K force of 27 infantry battalions. We were at 23 infantry battalions for the 186K force. And we're gonna go down to 21 in this force. So you're gonna, that's where the people are. That's where your large number is the nature of the business. So you mentioned the F-35B and ACV are two priority programs for the Marine Corps. Both of these have significant price tags attached to them. In the age of fiscal austerity, is there a concern that they may become cost prohibitive and does the Marine Corps have effectively a plan B? Yes, there is a concern that they're gonna become cost prohibitive. We'll make the case. Ultimately, civilian leadership will make that decision. And we would, we obviously always have a plan B to look at alternatives. But we think the F-35s fills a critical niche and not a niche capability actually is far more, far broader than that. It fills a significant strategic capability going forward. And the ACV is just a capability to replace a vehicle who's really done good service but is nearing the end of its service life. So yeah, we will look at alternatives to that, but we feel pretty strongly that these are critical programs for the Marine Corps going forward. But on the ACV, I mean, I think many outsiders have been surprised that it's been coming up now almost on three years since the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was canceled. And there's still not a clear way forward on the program. Can you talk about some of the challenges of why it is taking so long to nail that down and what you think the way ahead is? Certainly, Mary. You know, I would say that we're proceeding cautiously because we wanna get it right because we don't know that this is not the last chance we're gonna get at this. So we wanna make sure we get it right. We have the luxury, if you will, of having a lot of lessons learned from the EFV experience. So we spent some time studying that. But we don't wanna build a vehicle that is son of EFV. We don't want it to be that. We wanna look at, you know, the industry has developed a little bit since we were in the height of the EFV development. We wanted to look at all the alternatives. And, you know, as I think you know, the question you're really asking is, do you wanna build a vehicle that travels at high water speed or do you not wanna build a vehicle that travels at high water speed? And for those of you in the audience who aren't familiar with this arcane subject is, do you want a vehicle that can plane on the water and go about 25 knots or so and then therefore be able to launch from further out at sea, therefore protecting your ships more and make the transit in very quickly? Or do you want a vehicle that looks like the one that we have today, which is around a five-knot vehicle, much slower, ships have to come in slower, have to come in closer, because the transit time is that much slower. So those are the trade-offs and you'll appreciate the complexity of it when you consider that this is a vehicle that's gonna live 80% of its life, maybe even 90% of its life, on the land, driving Marines around, serving as an armored personnel carrier, a transporter of troops, yet the most demanding design criteria or for that 10% of the lifetime it spends in the water. So when you consider that, you can see there's a pretty daunting challenge that you have to resolve. So what we are doing is, we're doing really, really, I think, thorough due diligence on this issue. We're looking at it hard because this is a critical decision for the Marine Corps. It's as important as the V-22, it's as important as the F-35. And so the months that we spend now are actually mattered little. Over the decades, we have the vehicle in use. So we just wanna make sure we've got it right and that we've looked at all the requirements. And I couldn't judge what the final answer is gonna be, but it's gonna be well-informed by what we learned from EFV, the wealth of other innovative things that have happened in those kinds of vehicles over the last few years. And we'll make a decision on the best interests of that capability. Don't know what that final answer is gonna be now. General, I think we only have one more question for you, and regards to the shift of the Pacific in the age of austerity with the drawdown, what steps does the Marine Corps taking to collaboratively work with our coalition partners and leverage their capabilities? We can see a lot of, the number of training exercises that we've been able to conduct with our allies in the Western Pacific, most recently the Japanese, but the Austrians in the Republic of the Philippines, all that is ramping up. You're gonna see those increase over the next few years. So I think we are going to place increasing reliance on coalition and allied partners in the Western Pacific. You know, it's not that we ever lost focus on it, but some of the resources were not available over the last 10 years to probably exercise some of the way that we would like to do now and are going to be able to do in the future. Availability of amphibious ships, all those types of things. It's almost a little bit of a renaissance in that capability as we go forward. So I think it's gonna be very, first of all, it's gonna be very important to us. And second, we have the relationships in place to ensure that this goes forward in a positive manner and the shift to the Pacific will simply emphasize that. Okay, I think we've wiped them out with questions. And we gave you a pretty good exercise too. So thank you again so much for taking the time and we wish you luck as you continue to engage in the QDR and we look forward to the stellar product all the best. And again, appreciate you coming down. Mary, thanks very much. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. Thank you.