 Unfortunately, and when he's early, it's a catastrophe. So thank you for helping us avoid a catastrophe this morning, sir. We appreciate it. DC traffic has worked its will on the schedule in our event. So we apologize for being a little bit late and getting started. But John Paxton has graciously agreed to stick around for a few minutes longer. So hopefully we'll be able to have a full hour-long conversation. Thank you all very much for coming out this morning. We are very honored to have General Paxton here with us. He flew all night long to keep this commitment. So we're especially grateful for the heroic sacrifices he's made to be here. It coincides with the release of our recent report. I think some copies of this were available. It's also available on our website, Amphibious Shipping Shortfalls, risks and opportunities to bridge the gap. So we undertook that analysis with the support of Huntington Ingalls Industries, for whom we had done some work a few years ago on the contributions of Amphibious Ships to sort of low-end missions. And they asked us to do some follow-on work to look at sort of the contributions that Amphibious Ships and other ships might make to across the full range of missions. So we undertook this analysis. I think we had to start with the reality that General Paxton is faced to confront every day, that there's a serious gap between what the Marine Corps is being asked to do and the resources that they have available to do it. Not only because of sequestration, this is a problem that has been developing over a decade or more, both on the supply side and the demand side. And I think while innovation is the word of the day, the Marine Corps has been forced by circumstances to innovate in lots of ways to respond to that gap over the past few years in particular. And so I think we were really trying to look at some of that. And in particular, the opportunities available to leverage other nontraditional platforms to try to accomplish some of the missions that the Marine Corps is being asked to do and attempted to lay out a framework for how some of the decisions about where the investments are made to better leverage the entire fleet. Amphibious MSC and otherwise might be most efficient and most effective. So again, I'm sure that will be part of the conversation that we have today, but don't want to restrict it to that, that we could spend days and days talking about all the challenges facing the Marine Corps and their chart for the future. No one better suited to have that conversation with than General Paxson who has commanded and served in I think probably three quarters of the globe approximately. It's been responsible for in some capacity. So and commanded at every level inside the Marine Corps and served in multiple critical positions outside the Corps both in the Joint Force and elsewhere. And so and now coming up on his two-year anniversary as the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps has been living the day-to-day challenges not only of trying to address current demands but of helping to set the chart, the course for the future and determine make very difficult decisions about where the Corps is headed. So, sir, again, we're very grateful to you for coming. I'll ask him to make a couple of remarks. I'll pose a few questions and then really want to open it up for a conversation with you all. When we get to the Q&A period, first, if people could turn off ringers, that would be much appreciated. And then when we get to the Q&A period, if you would just raise your hand, we have a couple of people with mics who will come around and give them to you if you could identify yourself and briefly ask your question. It would be much appreciated. So with that, sir. Thank you, Dr. Lee. It's great to be with everyone. My apologies could not mark Twain and John Wayne. Both said never start with an apology, but I regret that the traffic didn't cooperate this morning. Delighted to be with you. And if indeed if we do have a few extra minutes, I'm happy to stay a little bit longer if the question and answer period is going well. As I look out at the audience, I see some familiar faces from around the town, either from think tanks from industry, from the Navy Marine team, from allied partners. So I know we have an interested and an active group here. And for Dr. Lee and CSIS, I thank you for the opportunity to speak with the audience, as well as for the great efforts that the team did to put together the study on amphibious shipping. We do suffer sometimes in the building from being focused on the crisis of the immediate. And whenever we get folks from outside that force us to pick up our site picture and open our aperture a little bit, it's helpful just to see where the sense of the broader population, the sense of the broader community is and how it's asking us to maybe take a look at some difficult challenges. I would start just with, if you will, a little bit of context and leveling on the playing field. So I'd like to talk a little bit about who we are, where we are, and then either where we are going and how that compares to where we have been. And I want to do it just for a couple minutes, just so you may get a sense either on the Marine Corps or on the Navy Marine team how we look at amphibious shipping. So first issue, of course, is the missions, the day-to-day missions that we actually have to accomplish around the world. And then the military personnel and the military equipment and resources that we have available to us to accomplish the mission. So no surprise to anyone that before 9-11, we were in the 180s. We had envisioned ourselves for the better part of four decades to be the nation's 9-11 force pre-9-11. And that is still what the Marine Corps truly thinks we are all about. Since the National Defense Authorization Act in 1952, we are chartered to be most ready when the nation is least ready. We have articulated that message in two mindsets. Complimentary, sometimes a little friction, but very, very complementary to the Marine Corps. The first one is it has to be naval. It's not marine, it's naval. We're a part of the Department of the Navy. It's an integrated mission set. It's a complementary mission set. And we can't do what we need to do without our shipmates in the Navy. And then the second piece is it's expeditionary, that we're going to go places where the rest of the nation is not normally going to go, where there's a lack of infrastructure, where we're going to have to project power. We're going to need some sovereign launch and recovery space. And we may have to operate for a sustained period of time without many other resources, which would mean you have to fly back and forth on and off the ship. And we're going to need the ability, as I said, not only to launch and recover people in power, but also the things that we need to sustain us, whether it's command and control, logistics, whatever that is. So that's where we were since 1952. Certainly since 1991, when we had a major revision on the amphibious structure and the way the Navy Marine Team looked at amphibious platforms. And then again, in 2006 and 2007, when it was a reminder to us that despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we needed to stay focused on our primary mission. And indeed, if many of you will remember, we were still launching and recovering mues and expeditionary units in and out of both of those theaters from naval shipping. In particular, when we did the pivot back in 09, 10, and we looked to kind of move some of the folks back into Afghanistan, we took Thurbertine 8th Marines off the baton and moved them into theater with their equipment, with the amphibious, with the helicopters and the lift that they needed. So I give this to you because we've been 13 and a half years in the war in Afghanistan, and we were almost nine years in Iraq. So there was a focus on land operations. But that never took the eyes of the Navy Marine Team off amphibious operations and off expeditionary operations. Point number two, if I may, is that inside the Navy, and this is just a statement of fact, so I'm not casting any aspersions here. The Navy has a wonderful, first off, the Navy has great capital investment challenges. They have great capital investment opportunities, but they have great capital investment challenges because they are capital resource intensive in a way that the Marine Corps is not. So we are keenly aware on the green side of what our shipmates on the blue side have to deal with in terms of investments. I would submit to the audience that the Navy has long had a very robust and detailed plan for how they want to both modernize and maintain their submarines, and how they want to modernize and maintain their carriers. And to another sense, between the blue and the green side, how we're going to modernize and maintain our aircraft. We have not always been that dedicated and that good on how we're going to modernize and maintain our amphibious shipping, and that means the totality of that construct. It's the ship, the aircraft that goes ship to shore, the landing craft that goes ship to shore, and the connectors that go ship to shore. And this is not for lack of intellect. It's not for lack of effort. It's just for lack of continued consistent focus because we get pulled in different directions. We have reorganizations on the green side and the blue side. We need to be good. We have a naval board. We have a Navy Marine team. And we do very well when we sit down at the table, but we have to force ourselves to sit down at the table. And many times it takes a crisis or a equipment malfunction or a piece of equipment that didn't deliver on time and on target and on cost that forces to go back in and relook at these things. So we are subject to the issues of construction in the shipyards. We're subject to the challenges that happen around the world that pull us in different directions. And we have learned a lot over the last, probably 18, 19, 20 years about how to do this better, but it still requires a lot of focus. So I would say I think that the Navy Marine team is committed to continue to work together. And if you allow the words of Winston Churchill and hey, we're out of money, we have to think. And that's where we're at right now. We're out of money and we're gonna have to think. Point number next. On the mission sets themselves. I would be remiss if I didn't remind that in the Marines, at least in specific, we are always gonna focus on the most dangerous enemy course of action. Not necessarily the most likely enemy course of action, but the most dangerous course of action. And we're gonna try and hold ourselves as a service, our department and our institution liable for a responsible rather for helping us produce people, equipment, training and readiness that can handle the most dangerous course of action. We believe that the most likely will be some type of subset from the most dangerous. But we're gonna focus on the most dangerous. So we're gonna keep ringing that clarion bell for why we need more ships and why we need more ships available. And those are two key points that were in the good study that CSIS did, which is you have to tackle the challenge of amphibious lift and amphibious power projection through the lens of both inventory and availability. And we have challenges on both of them. We knew the better part of 10 years ago that we were gonna be in this kind of dynamic, because you could see the growing national debt, you could see when the national debt was gonna be due. And as Dr. Lee said, again, this was long before sequestration at the table. And sequestration has just magnified the problem. So when the buying power and the purchasing power of the Navy Marine team, and indeed all the services somewhere between nine and 14% less per year and forecasted to remain that way for the next 10 years, we're gonna have some significant challenges here. We also know that people are our most valuable and most precious, but also our most expensive resource. Two of the services, the Navy and the Air Force spend a lot on hardware, but the Army and the Marine Corps are gonna continue to spend the high percentage of their dollar on people. In the Marine Corps, it's almost 62%. Now we think that's the right investment. That's our most lethal weapons system. And we're gonna continue to seek out, recruit, train, retain high quality individuals. But we're gonna then go back to the Navy, to our shipmates and ask them to make a comparable investment in the piece of that weapons system that helps the Marine do its mission, which for us is the amphib ship. So I tell you that only because, again, we know that there's a national requirement and you've seen the debate when the budget comes due, how many carriers we have to keep underway and on the waterfront. We know that we have to modernize our aircraft fleet. We're gonna bring in the F-35, the JSF. We can see where the bathtub is going between Virginia and the high-class submarines and the great challenge that the Navy has there. But somewhere in the middle of all that construct, we have to get back and build more amphibious ships. 38 is the number that we have operationally agreed to, to support two operations plans in two different geographic commander area responsibilities and to do the assault echelon power projection of two mebs. So that's the most stressing, most dangerous case that I talked about a few minutes ago. There's an equal dynamic that in today's unstable world, doesn't matter whether you call it the new norm or steady state instability. But when you look at what happened several years ago, simultaneously in Sana'a, Yemen, Cairo, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, all around the literals there in the Eastern Red and North Africa, the same time we were trying to keep presence in the Gulf to project what we couldn't do either in Iraq or elsewhere from Kuwait and onboard the ship, the same time we're looking at piracy in the Somalia basin. So there's an argument that in many cases, the steady state environment is the most pressing as well. And if you have seven marine expeditionary units, seven mews that you're gonna deploy around the world and it takes three to make one. So you have three that are out, the 31st Meal out in Western Pacific, you have an East Coast Meal and a West Coast Meal. And then arguably you have one that just came back and one that's going out again. So how you work the availability of the marines on a one to two dwell, how you work the availability of the ships in the FRP, whether it was a 737 or an OFRP mix there, or 727 rather, or an OFRP mix, is a challenge how you synchronize those schedules. And then in the final analysis, the Navy always gets a vote. I spent three years almost down at Second Marine Expeditionary Force prior to coming up to the building. And I believe we sent out five consecutive mews and everyone went early and everyone stayed late. They never went out on the scheduled time and they never stayed for seven months. One of them stayed for 10 and a half months, set a record if that's a record you wanna set. But the challenge is we have to respond to the crisis around the world and there's not really an appetite to say no because they know that the Swiss Army knife, if you will, or the weapon of choice is this Navy Marine team, this Army that has to go out there. So how you continue to answer the bell for the crisis that happened around the world, whether it's Benghazi or Cairo or Sana'a or Somalia, how you then husband your resources so you can get them into the maintenance that the ships absolutely need and still be ready for this stressing straight up plan is the challenge that we have. So any of these arguments that we have either inside the building, separate and distinct from the budget on an operational or a strategic side and the studies at CSIS do help us get to where we need to go in terms of looking at this problem. So let me address quickly two other things and then turn it over to Dr. Lee for any questions she has and then open it up to the broader audience. One of the discussions that was highlighted in the study that we continue to look at is the availability of alternative platforms. And I will tell you that alternative platforms are just that, they are alternative platforms. So we are most willing to look at them but they bring with them not only a sense of opportunity which we should always seize in the short term particularly when we have crisis missions that we have to respond to but we should always be wary of the risk that we entertain when we bring in an alternative platform. Some of the alternative platforms are not near as advantageous as they would offer themselves to be either because of the C-state they can work in, the degree of survivability they have or for us, and I know the study looked at five different attributes of attribute shipping but within the five different attributes on the projection attribute in the study we look at five fingerprints a lift and these are steady state constant requirements for the Navy Marine team and it's people, small craft, so well deck spots, aircraft, flight deck spots, square feet for vehicles and so on, cubic feet for supply. So we're gonna look at those five fingerprints a lift regardless of what the ship makes is, regardless of what the mission is and then we also have to look at the ability of that platform to have an integrated command and control capability. The Navy is gonna rightfully so look at command and control within the task force of the task element. They're gonna look at links for enable aircraft but we're gonna look at it for links into the joint force, links from ship to shore and some command and control and communications capabilities that are not always put into the design of the ship. We get much, much better at that. Things like the New York class and the new LPD is a state of the art ship that we're incredibly proud of and it can answer the five fingerprints a lift, it can answer the command and control capability but how you build that resident capability and capacity in each ship is really important to us. So I guess on that note, I probably spoke long enough. Hopefully that's kind of set the stage for everybody. Thank you all for being here and thanks for the great work to kind of tee up the discussion which is incredibly important and I think to everyone here, the Navy Marine team is committed to do with or without the sequestration that we're gonna face. Thank you sir. Let me build off your closing remarks if I could and say I think the biggest macro takeaway from our work was that you, the Navy Marine Corps leadership are constantly being forced with trade-offs across the entire very complex system that results in amphibious capability from not just the ships, the connectors, the lift fingerprints which are also changing and the force that uses all that equipment. And that there is not a good system for understanding the system-wide effects of trades within those piece parts necessarily. So it appeared at least to us that decisions are made within the components of those without understanding the broader implications necessarily and that there can be pretty significant changes in capability that may not be understood when individual decisions are made. So A, I wanted to see if you share that assessment and B, is if so, is there something needed that would allow you all to better understand the system dynamics so that you could manage it more holistically or is that just the nature of the beast? Yes, so to your first question, Dr. Leed, it is a fair assessment. We do make and not maliciously, not always accidentally, but we do make some decisions that are forced on the exigencies of the time and a lot of them are fiscal that we will try to optimize the decision but we will sub-optimize the process. And this is just a fact of life which gets to your second point. The challenge for us will be that we're gonna continue to live in this environment in the short term and we are at greater risk for making sub-optimal decisions in the short term that will be sub-optimal in the long term which is why things like the Navy Marine Board need to be a continuous drum beat to get the Navy Marine team together, why we are actively looking within the department to make decisions for the amphibious enterprise akin to some of the large scale decisions they make on the aviation enterprise or the submarine enterprise. And we need to be better at that, steady at that to make sure that in the ARD-MU days if you get a Navy Marine team out there, normally the questions they will ask themselves is what do I know, who have I told and who else needs to know. In the building we are at risk, particularly when you have a fast turn and you have a lot of fiscal marks of not remembering to tell everybody and then you get a decision that you think you made for the right reason but it's just on the green side and not on the blue side or just on the blue side, not on the green side or just in the aviation piece of it and not on the surface piece and then you sub-optimize the decision. And again, it's not Alamalas, it's invariably driven by the fiscal environment but knowing that we're gonna be in this fiscal environment for the next seven to 10 years and with a reasonable expectation that sequestration will kick in and there'll be that $552 billion debt and that 10% less buying power for a year we have to get better about talking across the table and maybe not rushing to a decision. And we also have to, in all fairness, go back and take a look at both our industry partners who make these and our congressional leadership to say what other options do we have here? When we take a look at about multi-year and split increment and what are the triggers to allow you to start to fund a ship and how long you can continue that with a reasonable expectation that it will still deliver on time, on target and on cost, these are things that we have to continue to work together. Let me switch gears a little bit and ask you about Expeditionary Force 21 and from your perspective, what you see as the most important elements of that strategy and then where you think it needs to continue to be fleshed out going forward. Right. Expeditionary Force 21 is indeed a blue-green strategy. It was worked between the two departments. It was an effort to take a look at the unstable, steady-state world that we're looking at in the future and the new norm. It was an effort to take a look at where some of the advanced capabilities are, both in amphibious shipping and in maritime preposition shipping and black bottom and gray bottom alike and take a look at where the challenge could be around the world, what kind of capability sets we need and how is the blue-green team, we would look to answer those mission sets. So it is a first step just as we did from the sea and forward from the sea. So the first thing is it's a clarion call that it is a Navy Marine team and isn't an amphibious world. It's an expeditionary world and we want to go back and focus on that. So it was a conscious decision within the service and within the department to say, hey, look, we're getting away from Iraq and Afghanistan. Not that we can't go back there and not that those kind of sustained ground wars couldn't happen again, but we have to still be the nation's 911 force. It's a maritime nation. And God bless, you know, we maintain a Navy. We raise an army, but we maintain a Navy. So we're looking into the business of how we maintain that Navy and that naval capability. So this was a call to start to think about that again and to kind of set a baseline template and a foundation from which we could continue to adjust in the years ahead. One final question, it's, I don't know if ironic is the right word, but it's interesting to me that while our amphibious capability is certainly under strain and arguably declining to some degree, much of the rest of the world is starting to invest much more heavily in their amphibious capabilities. And so as the Marine Corps looks both to better leverage existing other ships across the US fleet, what kinds of opportunities do you see for increasing combined operations with the growing amphibious capabilities of many of our partners? Yeah, I mean, we are living in a joint world, an interagency world, an allied and coalition partner world. So whether you look at advanced capabilities that the United Kingdom has, that France has, that perhaps Spain and Italy are looking at, and then you certainly look at where Australia may want to go. And then you look at potential enemies out there and what they're investing in amphibious fleet too. And there's a marker there that most allied partners in nations and a lot of the enemy realize that there is true amphibious value, true war fighting value and a necessity to invest in amphibious shipping. So you have sovereign turf from which you can launch and recover power, from which you can do sustained command and control and sustained support to shore. So it's a message there that it is important that we did have it right and we need to continue to get it right. Okay, let me open it up to all of you again if you could briefly state your name and question. We'll go up here and if we can pre-position the mics if other people have questions. Stun them into silence except for Sidney. Exactly, I'm shocked. Yes, I know you were trying to avoid giving me the first one but here I am. I have no options. Reporters, we don't die, we multiply. Sidney Friedberg, breakingdefense.com. One thing that popped out of me from the study and other places and that you wrestled a bit with your comments is to what degree the size of the fleet, the amphibious fleet and all those other pieces, connectors and so forth to go with it. To the extent the stressing case is still that two-meb, two major theater war scenario, to the extent the put in quote, new normal is actually pulling you in so many different directions that that really has to be the forcing function. That's not matter of just of how you size but what you size for and certainly with these different survivability levels of ships may suggest that some things which were previously considered not useful or not as useful may actually have more application. Yes, so understand the question Sidney. I'm gonna try and answer it and I agree with your first part but disagree with your second part. So we do have to balance the dual stressors of a multi op plan near simultaneous or the simultaneity of major theater operations as well as the steady state disorder out in the world and how we respond to that with crisis response, contingency and presence. I think the report did a very good job about looking historically where the department has been and where those numbers are and where testimony from the service chiefs and the service deputies who do amphibious ops have been. As I said in prepared comments a minute ago, 38 is the number that we have agreed to since 1991 as the steady state dual operation plan requirement and there is argument and both CNL and common honor on record is saying in the steady state with the disorder around the world the number could easily be somewhere between 48 and 54, high 40s, low 50s and that's designed or based on the premise that again you need three to make one which is the always the Navy Marine construct. You have a unit that's out deployed, you just brought a similar unit back and you're gonna get ready to train and send out another unit. The report was good about highlighting for example, the fact that because of the current paucity of shipping that we have a lot of units that in order to get the ships and the aircraft and so it's not just shipping into the maintenance cycle that you have a unit that's getting ready to deploy and will train on one set of ships and with one set of aircraft and then they will do their certifications and actually deploy on another ship and with another set of aircraft which is another example being suboptimal because it just destroys the concept of cohesion, it destroys the ability to have you wrestle with and get those lessons learned so the unit you're gonna train with is the actual unit you deployed with. So the answer to your second part is I believe that the most likely and the daily crisis response contingency is still a subset of the most dangerous. I have not seen in the time I've been in an indication where there was some unique capability on an amphib ship that we needed to have for contingency response and crisis response in day to day that wasn't subsumed in that larger set of major theater operation. I just needed that ship to be available and want to make sure that the chief of boat and the Sergeant Major had worked with each other that the lead petty officer who was doing the well deck and doing launch and recovery and the gunny who was splashing the tracks. I wanted to make sure that they had gone through the right workup together and that they indeed had trained together and I'm gonna deploy together. So having sufficient ships, preposition or home ported in the right places and available to train and deploy is the critical piece. So we have to, we can balance capacity and capability but we just need, we need more. We need more inventory and we need better availability as the report said. I just wanna add one thing because one of the things that I learned over the course of conducting the study is the 38 number is utilized frequently but as an example of what I was talking about earlier the 38 number also included an assumption that the maritime prepositioning force future was going to deliver a certain set of capabilities which was subsequently significantly downgraded which I think, I don't wanna second guess what past commandants might have done but that lack of clear transparency about when you make changes to what MPFF might look like. Hey, it affects the number of amphibes you might need is something that sort of got lost in the shuffle and so we still use the 38 number although the premise upon which it was based changed somewhat and again that's sort of the lack of systems view that I think we found a lot of. The second challenge there without being flipped is that when you work to come to a short term fiscal agreement and you get to the end state there are all the asterisks and caveats down below and all people understand and agree to is that you bought the house and they don't see all the caveats subject to an inspection of the roof subject to the chimney won't fall off subject to repair of the sewer and we don't read all the caveats so when we do these Navy Marine integrated decisions there subject to quantity, quality, availability of maritime preposition ships subject to the fact that those MPF ships should not be prepositioned in the right places and have the right Cuban square and capability that they have so we have to continue to follow through on all the asterisks and caveats and footnotes. Okay, we have a question right here. Hi, Laura Seligman inside the Navy. Thank you for being here today. I wanted to ask you about the joint high speed vessel if you could just elaborate on that I know there was some talk about it in the report and that especially I know that Austal has been doing a study where they're trying to certify the V-22 to fly off the JHSV. I was wondering if you could talk about how that would enhance the capability of the platform and particularly for amphibious operations. Right, thanks very much. Very good question. Joint high speed vessel, at least two different models there. Very capable and a great, as we talked about, a great opportunity that we can use there. Should not dilute ourselves in terms of its survivability and should not dilute ourselves in terms of the sea state within which it can operate. It is, I think, a splendid platform for building partnership capacity, for theater security cooperation, for humanitarian assistance crisis response. It really doesn't equate and I don't see how you can legitimately put it into an operations plan for major theater operation unless you are doing long term, later follow on operations. Nothing to do with the assault echelon or the early stages because of the survivability of the ship. It's a classic indication also when you talk the five fingerprints of lift that the joint high speed vessel is very good about the people, about projecting the people and perhaps some small arms that's with it. But it is not good about the other fingerprints of lift. It may have some square foot. I will give you that, okay? It doesn't necessarily have all the cubic foot and it certainly doesn't have the flight deck spots, weld deck spots. So again, when you look at this, again, I go back to the second piece of the five attributes in the study, which is projection. And then I go to the five fingerprints of lift and I say, what is the mission? What is the risk to mission? And consequently, what does that platform allow us to do to help accomplish those two things? So the joint high speed vessel certainly has applicability. Putting a ramp to be able to splash off the JHSV is something that we are actively looking at right now. So if you were to work on the draft of the ship and how you would trade off perhaps Cuban square for maybe a vehicle that you could get on there and then splash, that's something that probably merits consideration. That would certainly help if we were doing exercises and building partnership capacity in the North African literal. You could take a look if we had to do a Neo or a casualty evacuation or something like that. And if the threat posture wasn't severe, you may be able to use that high speed vessel and get it back and forth to a larger ship stationed further out at anchor or underway or to an island or something like that. So it has applicability there. But to take that deliberately in with a Mew and to say this is what we're gonna use for a crisis response in the North Arabian Gulf or to posture it as part of an operations plan in the Pacific, probably not the optimal use of that vessel. I'm sorry. Oh, the Osprey, no. I mean, when you look right now, no. The Osprey is an incredible aircraft. Two to three times the range, two to three times the payload and two to three times the lift and can air to air refuel. And it has proven itself in multiple circumstances and is really one of that fundamental pieces now of the Marine Expeditionary Unit. But there's really limitations in terms of not only the force and the heat that it generates down, but the wingspan it needs in terms of the deck spot. And I think right now that's incompatible with the JHSP. And then over here. I must have touched a hot button on your hands, went up. But now I'll do that, you're being a guy. Thank you, sir. John Evans, I'm the Army Fellow at Brookings. I wanted to ask you as we've started to see, as you kind of acknowledge that our world is growing increasingly more urban and more coastal with regards to populations and where the friction points are gonna be. I know that U.S. Army aviation has kind of reinvested itself in being able to stage and project power from naval vessels and platforms. How is the Marine Corps working with the Army on this since there is obviously a capacity issue here with the amphibious assault vessels? Yeah, thanks, John. Good question. First, and let me be clear, we're very conscious inside the Joint Chiefs and very conscious in the building. One of the inherent risks when the dollars get tighter is that you got four or five brothers fighting for the same piece of allowance. And then you love your brother, but you're gonna punch him in the nose if you can get two extra dollars and make him live on 50 cents. So that's not a healthy way to do business. And because we've all been in war together for the last 13 years, I tell you that the services and the departments are pretty committed that despite the pressures of the budget, we gotta talk through this. So just like we wanna talk as a Navy Marine team, we wanna talk with the Joint Chiefs too, make sure that we have a coherent national strategy where we wanna go and we've kind of delineated roles and responsibilities. Do I think in some time in the short term, there may be a relook at roles and missions? I don't think so, but it would be not unrealistic to say we're gonna be challenged to kind of reassert some roles and missions because we've all been operating in a very small theater and very focused on Iraq and Afghanistan. So there will be some folks who say, no, this is what we did 9-11. This is what I think our designated assigned role and mission is in the national security strategy. This is what we're gonna do. Could that create, and I'm being brutally honest here, so could that create tension between the Army and the Marine Corps? It could if we let it. It doesn't need to. It doesn't need to. The Army I know is looking at regional line forces, regional line brigades, they wanna get out and about around the world. As I have said publicly in several other forums, there's a lot of gunfight out there. There's a lot of bad guys out there. There's a lot of missions out there. We ought not to worry about territoriality between the different services. When you get to working with the Army, here's, and I'll be honest with you again, here's our mandate to the Navy. We're okay with Army touching and going, provided the Marines touch and go first. Now it's not because we're most important, it's because we don't have enough time to touch and go. We don't have enough ships out there to do our deck bounces, to do our night vision gogo ops. We don't have enough TCAT shipping, type commanders amphibious training to launch and recover our amphib ships, launch and recover our Amtrak's and things like that. So we have gone back to the Navy and said, yeah, it's just a joint force. We need to train everybody. Soon as we get X's in all our boxes and the Navy Marine team's good to go, then open it up, okay? Then the second piece is we have learned over 239 years about what it takes to operate off Amtrak shipping and what it means to marinize an aircraft and what it means to do saltwater corrosion and what it means for material handling equipment and all the intricate pieces of launching and recovery. So just like I said, the JHSV is a wonderful opportunity. Could you put an Apache on a ship? Absolutely, but it's a wonderful opportunity. I don't think it's a steady state environment, okay? The steady state environment is to take a 53 or a V-22 or something that's been marinized and done all the night vision gala ops and the deck bounces and everything and use them as the primary focus, you know? We've done it with the Army before. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be willing to do it again, but it ought not to be the first, it ought to be an opportunity, but not the force of first choice, okay? Here in the red and then back. Hi, good morning, Sir. Megan Eckstein with Defense Daily. You mentioned some of the fiscal challenges in the shipbuilding budget. Earlier this summer, the deputy secretary of defense mentioned that perhaps reintroducing the well deck in LHA eight might be, they may need to revisit that decision given budgets. So I wondered, A, where that discussion is with the Marine Corps and B, if there are any other plans for the rest of the decade that you're revisiting given the money situation? Yeah, thanks very much. There are some decisions we make that are around downrange. You can't undo it, okay? But I will tell you that was a perfect example of a suboptimal decision, but it was driven by the exigencies of the time and the fiscal environment of the time and then all the asterisks and caveats and where we thought we want to go. You mean six and seven? Yeah, I'm sorry, yeah, so the issue is, but the larger issue is for the Marine Corps, we're not interested in a single capability ship, a ship with only a flight deck. If we had a ship with only a well deck, we're interested in all five fingerprints of lift and we're interested in ships that have a flight deck and a well deck. Now we'll figure out what the mix would be for an LSD-like ship, an LPD-like ship and a big deck. We'll figure out what that is, but we're interested in a splash capability and a flight capability off of every platform. Good morning, General. Jeff Fingersall, Marine Corps Times. I understand that there was some experiments with fast teams on destroyers and some of these alternative platforms like the Matthew Perry and I'm wondering, what's the likelihood of the Corps adopting these types of alternative platforms and will those capabilities expand beyond fast teams? That's another question of both a crisis response that we have to go to and then opportunities with other platforms. We have within, not only the Navy Marine team, but within the Department of Defense something that we would call the continuum of response. And basically it's here's the day-to-day steady state, here's a potential contingency, here's where the crisis builds up, here's where it peaks, here's where sustained ops would be, or here's where it all fall apart and get worse. So you try and plan capability sets at each step of that continuum of response. So to the previous two questions, we would be not providing the geographic combatant commander or the president with other options unless we took a look about capabilities on every platform. So to take a fast team, which belongs, it's a Navy, it's a Marine team, but belongs to the Naval Component Commander and it's out there to respond. And we have used them for security force in Sana'a, security force in Libya and other places. So how you could introduce that fast team before a Mew got there or how they could do security force is a critical component. And maybe the fast team doesn't have a 53 or V20, they have limited numbers of 53s and V20s to get them in. And maybe one of the options is the faster to get them in. So we're gonna look at those capabilities. And we would look to see what platforms are available. Not the optimal one, but an LCS, a JHSV. So we're gonna take a look at all that until we figure out what is the capability and capacity of that individual platform. And because we have so many new platforms, both aviation and ship come out, we're still testing all of them. So did we do it? Absolutely. Could we use it? This is what we're trying to establish. And if we could use it under what threat scenario, under what range, ring, for how big a force and for how long to stay on the ground. Because the minute you put a marine in there, then you have automatically given yourself the challenge of, how can I talk to that marine? How can I resupply that marine? What marine, what the risk is that marine at? Who is he working for? And then how do I either get into reinforcing or getting back out? So we look at all of that. Any other questions? Let me ask if I could about special purpose MAGTAPS and the recent establishment of the one in Tencom. How do you see the evolution of special purpose MAGTAPS given where the realities of the platforms you may or may not have available and how you prefer to conduct operations? Will we see many more of them? What are some of their strengths and weaknesses? How does it fit into the future Marine Corps? So that's a great question. And to be honest with you, I'm surprised it wasn't the first question coming out, given what's been going on. Every service, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, knows what their mission is, knows what they're gonna do in a major theater, a war, major operation, but they all want to be ready and relevant to national command authority so that the geographic combatant commander and the president are never faced with a solution set of one, that this is all I can do because this is all I have available. So everybody's trying to be relevant. Let me carry out my next point. We have a paucity of amphibious shipping and many of us in the Marine Corps are not happy with it. Now, I give you that because I'm gonna give you the second point and for those of you who are typing frantically and work for defense journals, I would appreciate if you would quote this correctly because I used it twice before. I love my Navy shipmates and they have an incredible challenge with capital investments. They are working very hard and very well in a really resource constrained environment. I'm not happy about amphibious shipping, but we're not happy, it's not me. We're not happy as an institution, as a Marine Corps. So let me belay that last comment. I think the Navy would say they're not happy. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And we have never had a better working relationship than we have between the Commandant and the CNO and between Headquarters Navy and Headquarters Marine Corps. And this is the fourth time I've been in the building and I've seen it from the Joint Staff one time and from the server side three other times. I'm working in the Navy Secretariat, one of those three times. So the working relationship is absolutely splendid. It's transparent, it's cooperative. It's just unfortunate that we have the best working relationship when we have the worst fiscal environment I've seen in 30 years. There's only so much allowance. Absolutely, there's only so much allowance. So we're committed to try and do this right. Now, because we don't have either the inventory or the availability of Navy shipping, the Marines had turned around internally with the, no, the Navy knew what we were doing. We said we still have to provide forces because we're the nation's 911 force. We still gotta provide forces to the geographic combatant commander. What else can we do to be ready and relevant to give that geographic combatant commander something he or she can use in their kit bag? And that's when we came up with a special purpose MAGTAP. So the special purpose MAGTAP is just what that nuclear says. It's a MAGTAP, it's a Marine Air Ground Task Force. And it has an aviation side, a ground side, a logistics side, a command and control side, a power projection side, and it's almost exactly like a Mew, except it doesn't have Navy shipping. And that to us is a serious inability, disability inhibition, whatever you want to call it, because we have no sovereign space from which to launch and recover. We cannot quickly move around. One of the lessons for the special purpose MAGTAP came out of a crisis response that we did last winter. And we used a precursor to the special purpose MAGTAP, but with V-22s and with KC-130s, and we're able to move our Marine unit over large distances and over a 48 hour period doing some air to air refueling from several sovereign bases in both Europe and Africa to respond to a crisis. And I don't think anybody else could have done it. I mean, a lot of folks wanted to do it and had an ultimate capability to do it, U.S. or allied. But because we had the V-22s and because we had units prepositioned and because we had air to air refueling, we were able to execute that mission. But it was a suboptimal mission. It would have been better to have a Mew in the Med, a Mew in Centcom, and some type of amphib capability elsewhere, from which we could launch and recover. And then after you launched, the ships could be moving the following trace so you wouldn't have to recover the same distance and worry about lost aviation or air to air refueling or things like that. So special purpose MAGTF, the first one was special purpose MAGTF crisis response, which was in the Mediterranean basin and was available basically to Europe, U-Com and AFRICOM, a little bit to Centcom. And then when we realized that things were falling apart, then ISIL was stepping back up. We looked at our depth of dwell capability. We looked about the build and the training and the ramp up of the V-22 capability and we asked ourselves, the natural question is with adequate training and not to break the availability and readiness of the aircraft and with the right depth of dwell considerations for units that had come back from Afghanistan, could we build a second special purpose MAGTF and make that available to the Central Command and Geographic Combatant Commander? And the answer was yes. So it's out there and it has just deployed within the last several days that's going to multiple locations in the Central Command AOR. It will flow in and will have various missions, some of them theater security cooperation, some building partnership capacity, some exercises and some crisis response contingency response. And it's a great capability and it helps the Geographic Combatant Commander out but it's a sub-optimal capability because we would really like to have it on a Navy ship. A platform you touched on briefly, I noticed the report examines both variants, the littoral combat ship. And there's lots of speculation about, as with GHSV, which is the cousin of one of the variants, how that could be used. I suspect given your focus on your traditional amphib and its five fingers and its survivability, that's probably more of a marginal asset for you than some kind of new core capability. But where does that, where those two LCSs fit and where don't they fit? We could address that the same way we addressed GHSV. Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a short answer because it's almost identical to GHSV. They're still working to commission them, Chris and them, get them into the fleet. Then we have to work on them just as we did with the FAST team and capability of the GHSV. Right now, I'd be less than candid to tell you, we think they have marginal capability and it's because of the flight deck spot and it's because of the berthing for the number of Marines you can put on there and it's because of command and control capability. So in terms of amphibious power projection, whether it's contingency and crisis at the one end or large scale at the other end, potential use but marginal use right now. I think you've worn them out. Thank you so much for coming. It's been great to have you here. I thank everyone for their interest and I thank CSIS for stimulating the debate and keeping our eyes over the horizon. Thank you.