 Proceedings Magazine over the last year, a year and a half, China, Russia, cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, anti-access, area denial, near peer threats, et cetera. So this should be a very lively discussion. And as I said at the start, we have microphones. So when we switch to the Q&A, please move to the microphones so we can get your, everyone can hear your question. And also we can get it on tape and get it on the webcast. Before I introduce the moderator of today's panel, I want to thank Northrop Grumman for sponsoring this panel discussion. It's difficult for us to do much of anything without our corporate sponsors. Northrop Grumman stepped up to sponsor today's panel discussion. And they are represented this morning by Kevin Kelly, who is the director of business development for Northrop Grumman. Is Kevin in the audience here? He's here on the floor, probably running around with the big corporate representation that they've got out at West this year. It's my pleasure now to introduce the moderator for this morning's panel and also to thank Vice Admiral Doug Crowder for stepping in at the last minute for Admiral Gortney, who, despite having 5,300 mishap free hours in Naval aircraft, was not able to get here for reasons of commercial airline availability today. But Admiral Crowder stepped in at the last moment. Thank you, sir. Admiral Crowder is a career surface warfare officer, graduate of the Naval Academy in 1974. He commanded the USS Kidd, destroyer squadron 24, carrier strike group 9, the Abraham Lincoln strike group, and the US 7th Fleet. Prior to his retirement in 2009, Admiral Crowder served as the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans and Strategy. He is now the chairman of the Olmstead Foundation. The Olmstead Foundation, their flagship program is the Olmstead Scholarship Program, which provides scholarships for junior officers of the military to study overseas, to get master's degrees in foreign languages, studying abroad. So, Admiral Crowder, thank you for being here today thanks for stepping up and moderating this panel. Okay, can everybody hear me? I am not Bill Gordney, but we're here for, I think, is one of the most important panels of this week, especially for those in uniform as we have the community leaders here to answer your questions. And we will have time for a question and answer. The question posed to the panel is, what are the major warfare communities doing to adjust to the increasing near-peer threat? Couple of editorial comments to start off. The US forces have primarily focused for the last 16 years on counter-terrorism. Some O5 in our services, O5s in our services, that's all they know. Many of us have watched over the last decade and a half carrier strike groups and expeditionary strike groups run straight through the med or straight through Westpac and out to the fifth fleet AOR. My favorite story is after taking command of the seventh fleet in 2006, I had 10 P3s assigned to me, and by mid-2007, I had one. The other nine had been grabbed because there was no ASW threat in the South China Sea, as you know, and they were grabbed to go out to fifth fleet AOR, my friend Bill Gortney. So I sent my task force commander out and he came back. I said, what are they doing with the P3s out there? And this is a quote, this he said this to me with a straight face. They're flying around looking for guys with beards, individual terrorists. So again, a lot of focus elsewhere over the last decade. Meanwhile, Russia has been reemerging. Those of us who saw the submarine, their submarine launched, land attack cruise missiles, you can't help but be impressed by that. Their air force in Syria was successfully able to destroy the city of Aleppo. No doubt. And their incursions into Georgia and Crimea and also Ukraine, the other part of Ukraine have been noteworthy events. China has emerged at the same time as our friend Harry Harris, like to say, building a wall of sand in the South China Sea. Their string of pearls concept throughout the world, building carriers. Their submarines are plentiful and are at sea and they have a clever way of intimidating our friends and allies out there. So no problem because we have been fully funded to do both counterterrorism and prepare for these sorts of threats, right? No, we've had a decade of CRs continuing resolutions. We've had years of the Budget Control Act sequestration. We've had major issues with some of our larger tests, tests. All right, we're back. As I said, the issue with a decade of CRs. Shortening did it. And really the years of the sequestration, major issue with some of our larger programs, LCS, F-45 comes to mind. And we're just off a pretty tough year in 2017 with the Fitzgerald and the John S. McCain Collisions tragedies and the ensuing comprehensive and strategic reviews. Wow, tough challenges. The good news is we have just a panel to show us the Wayfair. And today I'd like to introduce them very quickly all the way to my left. Your right is Vice-Emma Rich Brown, the Commander of Naval Surface Force for two weeks now, Rich. I think it's starting week three. Starting week three. Rich is a Naval Academy grad, career Surface Warfare officer, commanded the USS Sullivan's, the USS Gettysburg Carrier Strike Group 11. Ashory spent a lot of time in the personnel world, including EA to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower Reserve Affairs. He's just coming from Commander of the Navy Personnel Command. Next to him is the brand new Air Boss who's in week three, I believe, right? Just finishing week three as the Air Boss. Vice-Emma Chip Miller. Chip is also a graduate of the Naval Academy, Strike Attack Guy, Nuclear Power Train, Exo of Vincent, Seal of Nashville, and commanding also the USS George W. Butch, Commander Carrier Strike Group two. Lots of time in the Pentagon as well and is recently coming from Director of Air Warfare. Next to him Vice-Emma Joe Tovalo, again a Naval Academy grad, career Submariner, including Command of USS Maine and Submarine Squadron Three. He commanded as a Flag Officer, Submarine Group 10, and his previous job was Director of Undersea Warfare and has been in his current jobs in September of 2015. So you're kind of the old guy, Joe. Next is Vice-Emma Jan Ty, again a graduate of the United States Naval Academy as a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering. Cryptologists, lots of time in the NSG Naval Support Group area, VQ-1. She commanded the 2,800 personnel at Kania in Hawaii, was the 10th Fleet Commander as well and has assumed her duties as the N2, N6 and also the 66th Director of Naval Intelligence in July of 2016. And to my immediate left is Major General Eric Smith, Commanding General of the First Marine Division and he went to an accredited university. Texas A&M I could say that as a fellow Naval Academy grad. General Smith is an infantry man, has served in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, three tours combined in Afghanistan and Iraq during Operation Enduring Freedom, was the Senior Military Assistant, both the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense and is in his current job since June of 2017. So with that, I'm gonna start with our first question and as I mentioned before, we will stop in enough time for at least 15 minutes of questions, hopefully from junior officers. So to the panel, question number one, as we have set up near term, near peer competition is back and our military must be able and prepared for a high end war fight against more capable adversaries. How are your communities preparing for near peer conflict? We'll start all the way down the end with Vice Admiral Brown, please. Thanks, Admiral Crotto. So as the Admiral pointed out, I haven't quite finished my third week as Commander Naval Surface Forces and Commander Naval Surface Force US Pacific Fleet but within those first two and a half weeks, I transmitted two messages. The first one was a P-4 to our commanding officers and the subject line of that P-4 was command. I absolutely value command the way that the United States Navy commands and the philosophy of our command has been the bedrock of our success for over 240 years. I told our commanding officers that I implicitly trust them but with that trust comes incredible and unyielding accountability. But what I would do and I dedicated my service as their commander to making sure they have everything that they need to make sure that they're successful in command of their ships. The second message that I transmitted was to all Naval Surface Forces and it laid out three guiding principles of how we would get after that near peer competitive fight. And if we adhere to these three guiding principles, we will own the fight. The first one is good stewardship. I like to tell even the younger sailors on the ships that 60% of our fit fill in our ships comes from a session sailors. And many of our sailors join the Navy right after graduating from boot camp. And that means their relief is in the eighth grade because typically sailors are sent to ships under five year orders. So it's about good stewardship. It's about good stewardship for them to make sure that our ships are materially maintained so that when you pull the trigger, the gun goes boom, the engineering plan is safe to operate, the morale is high on the ship, there's a clean place to eat and sleep. And I related to him in this manner that I ask him how many of them have little brothers and sisters who are 12 or 13 years old and many of them raise their hand and I say that's good stewardship. You wanna make sure that that ship is ready to fight not only for yourselves but for those young Americans that are gonna come behind you. If we follow the guiding principle of good stewardship, we will produce warships ready for tasking for our numbered fleet commanders and meet that near-pair competition. The second one is professional development. We ask a lot of our sailors but it is an imperative that our sailors are well-educated, well-trained and well-qualified. And a crew that is well-educated, well-trained and well-qualified is a crew that knows the ship's missions and her systems and will be able to take that ship into the fight and win. The third guiding principle is safety. Going to sea and ships is inherently dangerous but I will tell you that we should never unnecessarily put any of our shipmates' lives in danger or into bodily harm. And with that comes the application of risk management. I tell them don't necessarily assume someone's senior to you has thought of the consequences of an action and they could simply, they could save a shipmate's life or save a shipmate from bodily harm by simply asking the question, should we be doing this? It's not only important to understand and apply the concepts of safety and risk management in our phase zero operations or in our basic phase of training or intermediate and advanced phase of training, it's also important that we practice that during phase zero because it's incredibly important to understand the concept of safety and risk management when we get into the fight because we have to be able to get into the fight and continue the fight, taking all those concepts into consideration. I think that if we do well in these three areas we will own the fight and in short we will be the fastest, the smartest and the most capable naval surface force out there in the fleet. Alan Miller? Thank you. The beauty of just taking over a job and anybody that's had to change a command it's no different at whatever level that you are entering the job but you get an opportunity to not change the direction but just increase speed, provide a little sense of urgency and a little focus to what we're doing. So taking over as commander of naval air forces I was approached at the same way I've done any other change of command and so we said hey let's just sit down and take a look at our mission, our vision or where our priorities are and let's just make sure that we have them all aligned and that we know exactly what it is that we're doing in order to get after, I don't like to call it a near peer threat, I like to call it a peer threat. Growing up the Soviet Union was 10 feet tall and I liked training against that 10 feet tall adversary and so that's the same way that I approach it. So back on the mission of vision, it's pretty simple. We man train and equip deployable combat ready naval aviation forces that win in combat, very simple. What are our priorities? Priorities are war fighting, war fighting and people and the readiness of both. And so when we talk about that, so priority one is war fighting, priority one is people and how do we keep them ready? And so that's where you get into the current readiness, future readiness, what is it that we need to resource our sailors, our aviators to be able to win in combat. First thing is a realization that it's not just about us and what I like about this panel is we're sitting shoulder to shoulder with the people that we go to battle with. Because we are a joint force in and of the Navy. We operate across domains and we operate as strike groups and we operate as teams. So I look at naval aviation, I look in the future and I get excited. I look at the introduction of fifth gen aircraft onto our carriers and the mix of fourth gen and fifth gen and I say we will be more lethal. I look at Growler being across our strike groups and having next gen jammer on their wings and I say we will be more survivable. I look at the introduction of the E2D and advanced data links throughout our Navy and I say we will be more networked. As we transition out of the C2 into the CMV 22 and I look at all the advances we're doing with respect to logistics and I say okay we are gonna be more sustainable. As I look at MQ-25, the IOC at Triton later this year and MQ-8 which you'll see on the other side of that partition there when you depart this venue and I say we are more unmanned and more autonomous. Then I take a look at Ford and the Ford class aircraft carrier and I say we will be relevant well into the future. But what puts it all together though are trained people and so to answer your question Admiral Crowder I think the biggest, our strategic advantage is in our training and so I look at what we're doing out at Fallon and a live virtual constructive and how we're improving the ranges to make them more representative of a high end fight. To look at how we train virtually such that our adversaries and what we see in our cockpits and the threat presentations that we get absolutely make sure that not only do we have the right equipment but we absolutely know how to operate it and it will allow us to win in combat. So as I look at all of that and you couple that trained sailor, trained aviator who works with his partners I'm very confident in our future and I say we are more ready. Admiral to Fallon. Yeah, thanks Admiral Crowder and again thanks for stepping up here for Admiral Gortney. Also like to thank Naval Institute and FC I see Admiral Pete Daly, General Wood, General Shea appreciate your leadership in this venue it's a very, very important. I'm gonna answer the question kind of from kind of two points and start with the stuff we have now and then kind of get into the training piece just like Bullet did. So first off, first and foremost for the submarine force as we look at the high end fight is our number one mission of strategic deterrence. 70% in fact, effective yesterday when the New Star Treaty essentially was declared entered into force. The United States Submarine Force is responsible for 70%, 70% of the nation's accountable nuclear warheads. That's a big number. Definitely something that's all about a near peer competition. We execute that mission with very, very high execution rates 99 plus percent type execution rates and rightly so, it's a zero fail mission. Second thing would be our Virginia class submarine. It's the best submarine on the planet. I can look anyone in the eye and say that without question. But it is gonna drop to, our force is gonna drop to about 43 SSNs in the later part of the 2020s. So maintaining that minimum two peer build rate is absolutely vital. Next would be our acoustic superiority program. I cannot overstate the importance of the acoustic superiority program. When you boil it all down, a submarine fundamentally turns acoustic superiority into tactical superiority. So that's kind of foundational for who we are. We're not called a silent service for nothing. And so the work we've done on USS Dallas, on USS Maryland and prototyping, and South Dakota who's kind of the next big prototype ship here for acoustic superiority is huge. Definitely focused at the high end fight. We're also working on improving missile torpedo, EW capabilities, a family of unmanned undersea vehicles and unmanned systems. All a big part of the stuff that we have now, if you will. But like the two gentlemen who's spoken before me here, that the training piece is absolutely key to the high end fight. A submarine sitting next to the peer is capable of doing one thing, rusting. It takes the people properly trained to bring that submarine to life. So I have spent a big part of my two and a half years in the job on doing what I call retuning the FRTP, the Fleet Response Training Plan, the cycle which you prepare for deployment and execute deployment. And we have been all about retuning the submarine force FRTP to be all about that high end fight, making sure it's efficient as it can possibly can be, make sure we have our, when we hit the surge ready certification, which happens to be our tactical readiness evaluation, the ships have been addressing that milestone exclusively. And then when we get to the end of the cycle prior to deployment and we need to be focusing on the challenging peacetime missions that the submarine's gonna do and our POM certifications, our overseas certifications that we're peaking at that point too. And this has been very, very effective. You may not realize it, but the majority of the Navy has gone to the optimized Fleet Response Training Plan, which is a 36 month cycle. Submarine force still does 18 month FRTPs, double pumps inside that turning radius. So I've got to be very, very efficient in my preparation for those forces and the training piece is a huge part of that. We've also been doubling down on tactical development, making sure we pay ourselves first and do the tack dev that's needed. We only did five tack dev Xs in 2015 and in 2016, we increased that to 24. And they're not just quantity, they're quality. They're done far forward in representative environments and the standing up of the UNSC Warfighting Development Center was a huge part of that whole initiative. We're increasing our sub on sub time to make sure that we're ready to do those high end warfighting missions, but also those challenging peacetime missions that submarines have to do. And we've also been putting a lot of work into an EW campaign plan, electronic warfare campaign plan to make sure that both policy, doctrine, training, kit, support systems are all very much focused on this, which is an additional part, EW that is, of the high end fight. Okay, ammo time. Thank you, Admiral Crowder. When we think about, I'd like to answer the question in two kinds of ways. When we think about the information warfare community being focused, refocused or retuned on the long term strategic competition that we're facing, it's very easy to look back at the last 20 years and realize that the CT and coin fights that we've been in have heavily leveraged naval information warfare professionals in that fight. So, we haven't been in a maritime specific fight, but we have been in a fight. And when we think about the intelligence, the cryptologic and the information technology, information professional folks, they've been serving forward in the fight. And I think it's very clear that a lot of the skills that they have maintained and honed in that fight are gonna serve as well, looking at the long term strategic competition. But clearly, the skills that we've developed in that CTU fight is not sufficient to the fully to the need. So, focusing on the intelligence and the cyber cryptologic warfare folks on the cognitive domain of our adversaries, of our potential near peer adversaries, what will deter them? If deterrence fails, how will we understand how they might maneuver? That type of focus has really never gone away. We do that with relationships across the interagency. And my good friend, Bob Sharp, is back there, Office of Naval Intelligence has never taken the eye off the ball on Russia and has continued to build capabilities against China. And so, focusing on the cognitive domain there and what we must do in a high-end maritime fight, what we must be prepared to understand in that fight is something that we have to be able to do. Also, when you think about the RF spectrum and how we've fought over the last 20 years, getting into a contested RF spectrum is gonna be fundamentally a different matter. And so, continuing to hone the skills of our team, either in electromagnetic maneuver warfare or on the IT, IP side of the house, to be prepared to fight to establish assured command and control in that contested environment with the idea of space also being contested, that's a huge hurdle and a huge step that we're getting very focused on very fast, how those domains, the maritime domain and the space domain potentially maneuver together and preparing our sailors for that fight is a key element. In cyberspace, I would say that over the last eight years, we've been fairly focused on the near-peer competitor in cyberspace, the near-peer competitors in cyberspace. So, continuing to hone our cyber warrior's ability to fight in cyberspace, to fight through attacks, to be able to detect, react and restore is something that we've been on a path and we're continuing to continue to examine our readiness in that fight. So, we can take that to the maritime domain and ensure mission in the maritime domain. And then, Amal Tafalo talked about the undersea, an acoustic superiority, clearly understanding the undersea from an oceanographic perspective and then from an acoustic perspective, acoustic intelligence perspective and our ability to surveil in the undersea is gonna be critical to meeting the challenges that we face there. So, expertise is clearly one area that we'll continue to focus on building that expertise while we're in the fight. Every day, most of the information warfare professionals out there are on mission. Every single day, there's no rotation off of mission. We're always on mission. The other aspect that I think is important for people to understand is our organizational approach. Information warfare, like the other warfare domains established, a type commander by Samuel Matt Kohler is the type commander for information warfare and that happened in 2014 and we've been building the ability to generate readiness in information warfare, both for our operational commands, fleet cyber command, office and naval intelligence and the Center for Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, but also for the individual platform level requirements that the other Tycoms have. And so, establishing the Tycom in 2014 and being able to generate the kind of readiness that we need for all the missions across the Navy, critically important. Just last year, we established the Warfare Development Center, the Information Warfare Development Center. And when we think about the types of capabilities that we wanna put in the hands of the fleet, having a Warfare Development Center to work the TTPs and work the mission areas and have WIDIs that can then make those capabilities sing and help understand how to integrate information warfare capabilities in with the other warfare areas is a critical element and they are working today every day with the other WDCs and I think we're gonna see great return on investment there. The next piece of the organizational shoe to fall is establishing for information warfare something like the ATG. So the Information Warfare Training Group that's dedicated and focused on training our folks to those high end skills and to the new capabilities that may be coming in. Lastly, I'd say that in the fight operationally we have recently reaffirmed our process for establishing carrier strike group Information Warfare Commander capabilities. So we've taken a new process to use post major command O6s to provide to the strike groups to be able to leverage and take advantage of and bring together the Information Warfare part of the fight in the strike group. As additional capabilities come in that fight will be harder and more complex and so we've established about 100 day training pipeline for each of the strike group Information Warfare commanders going out there and we're really excited about the results that are coming back and we're gonna continue to build upon that. Again, that's dealing with electromagnetic maneuver warfare and cyber warfare as part of the strike group and so we're gonna continue to build that and grow that in a very deliberate way at the strike group level and then think about how that affects the operational level of war and what we need in our mocks moving forward to be able to sort of do the command and control of a high end fight when it comes to Information Warfare. Thank you. Okay, General Smith. Thank you, sir. So for us as the Marine Air Ground Task Force you're gonna get the infantry portion of that but I'll speak for the entire MAGTF here. It's an overly simplistic answer but it also has the advantage of being true. The way that we're preparing to fight a peer or near peer competitor is all of our training scenarios are against a peer or near peer competitor. They're all based on O-plans. If it's not based on an O-plan, then don't do it. There's added incentive for the young Marines to actually go out and execute a training environment that has a real name, not the decotions or whatever else you make up in some of our scenarios. It's got to be an O-plan based scenario so that you have skin in the game. One of the things that we are trying to do and have done is we're using a concept called C-Dragon, the commandant directed it. We're pushing an infantry battalion. Actually we've pushed them out. They've already returned from deployment. General Crewlack did this some years ago and we're doing the next version of C-Dragon to experiment with an infantry battalion, our base unit. What concepts, what equipment, what manning, what structure best works for that battalion. They've already deployed, returned and we're doing the after action reports and we'll continue this through multiple phases through 2020 to kind of get the infantry community exactly where it needs to be. Some of the things that we're doing are training to signature management. I mean it is a fight of signatures and I'll get to this probably later on in a different question but the signature management fight is actually one we're excited about having because if we go to a completely calm degraded environment, I win all day long because it's about training. Because if nobody's talking, I win because I'll guarantee you the Marines that we have are far better trained than the soldiers or Marines we will go up against. If they can't talk and I can't talk, I win all day long. So we're trying to make sure that the Marines are instilled with the confidence to be able to go against their peer competitor. Some of it is as simple as air threats. We haven't had a bomb dropped on us in almost 70 years so you have to begin to prepare yourselves for a aviation threat which we haven't faced since the 50s so we're doing that. Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear responses. We're prepping for that in a significant manner because of the proliferation of chemical weapons. So the basics of putting an individual Marine in his mop suit and mop four gas mask entire suit and leaving him there for eight, 10, 12 hours that is something that hasn't been done for a while but you have to do it. As Admiral Ty said, for the last 15, 16, 17 years of stability operations, counterterrorism, et cetera, very much needed and very valuable at the time but that also comes at a cost to preparing for a high-end peer and near-peer competitor. So we have to shift off of that and that is an entire mindset shift. There's a generation of Marine officers all the way up to major who have not done that, who have not done peer near-peer fights. The final thing that I would tell you is it's about the training environment. So between our Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, 29 Palms, Yuma, so our folks that are out doing aviation at Yuma at Weapons Taxi Instructor Group, if we're not maximizing our range scenario or our range sets to go up against a peer near-peer competitor, which means range modernization and utilization, then we're wasting our time. We have to get up to that so that we're actually able to use our weapon systems at the ranges that a peer or a near-peer could engage us at. I'm not supposed to end the sentence with a preposition. I did recognize that at Texas A&M but I kind of ran out of airspace and altitude there. My mom is watching, she'll be displeased. The final thing that I would tell you is a small example. For us, it is about integrated training, both within the MAGTF and with the Navy. We are a joint force. We are also a naval force, a very small example. We just, within the last couple of months, put a high-mars rocket launcher on the back of the USS Rushmore, fired it from 70 kilometers away from the sea, hit a target about the size of a trash can on San Clemente Island. That is how you prepare for a peer near-peer competitor because nobody wants to have high-mars coming down on them from 70 kilometers away because you don't know which ship it's on. So that is a small concept, but we can do that any day we want to. It's just a matter of logistics and how much space. Those are the kind of things that we are doing to prepare for a peer near-peer competitor and I'll stop there. Okay, for the panel, in two minutes or less, what is the assessment of the readiness of your community to face near-peer competition today? And what is your most pressing need? Now we'll start down at this end, this is double-tapping the good general, but he's a Marine, he can take it. The most pressing need that we have is time, period stop. Our tip, our training exercise and employment plan is full. Our dance card is full. So what we're shooting for is opportunities to do basic repetitive training that will allow Marines to thrive and survive the first 30 days of combat against a peer competitor. We have to have the time to do that. When we continue to be filled up with exercise after exercise after exercise, some of the exercises can become a show. For us it's a training opportunity, it cannot be a show, you have to fail here because we can't fail in combat. So for us it is absolutely 100% time so that that individual Marine, that battalion commander, squadron commander, regimental commander, group commander can reset the force, try it again, try it again, try it a new way. If he's successful, God forbid he actually reset and try it a new way until he does fail in training so that he knows that the first way was the correct way. But it is absolutely time and the ability to reset yourself against that peer near-peer competitor, time. I'll leave it right there because that's a 100% answer. Admiral Ty. Well it talks a lot about having to operate in a contested environment and so that certainly is the thing that we need to be able to flex both in our systems and inside in the human performance factors. Anybody who was at the breakfast this morning, her dept sec def talk about being able to measure performance and getting more quantitative in our measures as opposed to qualitative when we're talking about readiness as we build the palm. The warfare communities to my left have very good measures that have been generated over time. We'll see if they survive the test of reform but the point becomes in information warfare, having some real quantitative measures that help us understand both from an equipment perspective, how do we measure the information warfare platform for availability, those kinds of things and on the human performance. Are we sure that we're preparing our sailors to establish a SATCOM channel in a contested environment? Are we sure that we're ready for the EMW fight with the SLIC 32 and NOLCA? How are we measuring the human performance pieces of that? And so as the resource sponsor, I would benefit greatly from some quantitative metrics that would help us really understand our readiness in a more comprehensive way so that we can assure ourselves about where we stand with the high end fight. Adam, what's the follow-up? So the bottom line up front on what I'll call the capability readiness of the submarine force today to answer your first question, Amor Crowder, is overall the capability readiness is very good. We have stuck to our tried and true standards-based certification process. I talked already about retuning the FRTP to ensure that capability readiness is good. Our force improvement and operational safety program, everything from establishing 24-hour sleep cycles in 2015, our operational safety officers initiative, I can go on and on. That's all fundamentally foundational to what I call the capability readiness. Where I have concerns and that kind of gets to the barrier piece is in our capacity readiness, if you will. A couple of examples, barriers, if you will. Our shipyard workforce workload mismatch is creates a big challenge for us. I have a ship in the Atlantic, the USS Boise, who's the poster child for this situation. To imagine, three weeks prior to entering the shipyard, and anyone who's been a sailor knows all the stuff you gotta do to get ready for the shipyard, families and different home port, whatever, crew changes, all the right people. Three weeks before entering the shipyard, finding out that you can't go to the shipyard for three years, and that submarine has been in 31 months next to the pier. This is a significant barrier. It decreases from our operational availability. It decreases from our ability to have the capacity we need. Our four structure assessment for submarines is 66 SSNs in our Navy's four structure assessment. We're at 50 now, we're going down to 43 before we turn that corner and start coming back around. That goes to capacity, the ability to surge in time of crisis, that's a barrier. Our aging Ohio class submarine, this was a submarine that was designed for 30 years. It was a business decision to extend it to 42. Enemy didn't get a vote, extended to 42 years. The longest we've ever had a single submarine go is 36 years, we're gonna take an entire class to 42. So that gets to margin and capacity and risk. And then finally I'd mention my heavyweight torpedo inventory is also an issue of capacity. So we talk about this near pure competition. It's the greatest capability Navy in the world can still lose if they show up late. If they don't have the capacity to surge that margin that's needed. We see exponential rates of change in technology. And when you're in an exponential fight, it's winner take all. Second place is not an option. So these get to some of the barrier issues. Admiral Miller. You're gonna see our answers are really similar. The point of the pointy end of the spear is sharp. Those that we deploy, those that are out at sea right now are highly trained, highly resourced and they're ready for any fight that comes their way. I look at Vincent, Reagan, TR out there right now. They're doing the job and those airwings and ship teams continue to do great. I look at our deployed maritime forces, same same. Well we get into the capacity and here's where I'm very similar to Admiral to follow the years of high op tempo, years of underfunded budgets and inconsistent budgets once again in another CR has taken its toll on our bench. So the bench is where we are taking risk. It's where our capacity shortfalls are much like as Admiral to follow just mentioned. So that's my concern and with the general it's gonna take time to replenish that bench. And so the 17 budget absolutely a shot of goodness and a move in the right direction and the 18 budget we're waiting for. But what was delivered again exactly what the military and our forces need to be able to recover that readiness to be able to get that capacity to be able to fill in the bench which is the area that we've been taking the risk. So I'm very similar in my response as far as my shipmates up here. I will also tell you that it still comes down to manpower and to manpower training. And so making sure that I can even fill in the bench and have up airplanes and all the parts I need. But if we don't have the people that are well trained and know how to sustain it and operate that stuff then we're gonna be lacking. But right now that's we're in a very similar spot. Admiral Brown. Thanks sir. So I will echo my fellow type commanders and also General Smith. If you look back in the mid to late 80s when we all joined the Navy and the Marine Corps we had approximately 592 ships and out of those 592 ships a hundred were deployed at any one time. So fast forward to 2018. We have about 278 ships and we have about a hundred deployed at any one time. So that gets to the issue of time and the time that we need to give to our commanding officers to prepare their crews to be ready for the fight. I also look at the barriers to getting after our near-pair competitors through three lenses. The first is the near-term lens where we produce the immediate capability in generating that near-term readiness that we need on our ships in San Diego, Everett, Hawaii and forward deployed in Japan and making sure that we send out certified ships under the construct of the surface force readiness manual. It's a proven construct and adhering to that so that we deliver to the number of fleet commanders ships that are ready for tasking. The second is the mid-term lens when we look at our sustainment and our growth capability. This is really the one to five year timeframe. We do this through the fleet commanders readiness council so that we make sure that our production schedules for the carrier and the amphibious strike groups are well-sacronized with our maintenance plans. The other way that we're really getting after that is the work that we're doing with our fellow warfare development center. You know, the surface of mine warfare development center is relatively new construct, but as we look at that intermediate to the beginning of the advanced phase, we're partnering with the Naval Air, the undersea warfare development center and NABI-4 so that we're bringing those capabilities to the ships and the strike groups early in the intermediate and advanced phase so that we really can get to the high end fight when we get into the composite unit training exercise and the joint task force exercise. And then in the long-term lens is that future capability that we need to make sure that we stay ahead of our peer competitors. You know, the CNO said it exactly right at the surface Navy Association. He said, you know, if I was a sailor in a Navy, I would want to be a United States sailor in the United States Navy because we have the most lethal warships, we have the best training and we have the latest technology to fight and win at sea. Well, we have to take that long view work out into the future so that we continue to develop that capability and we buy those ships and those weapons systems that we need for the future fight. Okay, well, I have two more pages of incisive questions that I came up with last night but I thought I would pause now and turn this over to you because I suspect your questions will be better. I ask that you go to the mic, you tell us who you are and what your affiliation is and please no manifestos if you know what I mean. So with that, and I'd like to see junior officers in uniform kind of ahead of the line so please go to the mics and we'll start taking questions now. Okay, yes, sir, they're in the middle. Thank you very much. My name is Lieutenant Commander Tetsuya Higashikawa from Japan maritime safety force. As mentioned before, the deterrence power is still effective means to prevent war but I sometimes feel the limitation of the deterrence power when I see the provocation such as missile test and nuclear development of North Korea. So my question is, what do you think is needed to have effective deterrence power against North Korea and also China? Okay, who wants to take that one? So, sir, I'll go after that for right off the bat. You know, one of the beauties and the power of a naval force so with the United States and our allies is that forward presence in keeping the sea lanes of communication open. The bilateral exercises, the multilateral exercises that we do with all the allies and our partner nations I think sends the exact right message that we're dedicated to keeping the sea lines of communication open, commerce flowing and freedom of the high seas. We see that in all the fleets one of the great things about the lateral combat ship is that we're able to expand the partnering with our international allies as we are able to operate in areas and gain access to ports that in the past weren't open to the deeper draft cruises and disorders. Absolutely incredibly incapable ships especially if you look at what we've done with Coronado and Fort Worth on their maiden deployments and what we're gonna do with Montgomery and Gabriel Giffords and then later on in Detroit. So I think that that's the key to deterring aggression is to show that we're committed, we're out there and we're forward deployed but with our partner nations and with the incredible navies of our allies that if required, we will fight and we will win. Okay, very much. Does anyone wanna bounce on that one? Okay, next question, does Marine over here? Check, test. This is a Messarm pen currently with third light armored reconnaissance from Italian out of 29 palms. I've got lots of questions but I'll stick with one. So maneuver warfare in a domain is particularly dependent on the understanding of key terrain and I'm curious to know is if in that 100 days of training by several that you mentioned with the EMW is that something that's being addressed, associated and also what is involved with that 100 days of training and are the Marine Corps commanders also invited into that in order to partner together going forward? No, thanks for asking that question. When we, first of all, let's start with the beginning. The post-major command 06s that are coming out of our IW commands from around the globe are then screened by a panel to be information warfare commanders. So it's a pretty, it's a long gauntlet to get to that point. They do come with different expertise when you think about the different domains because it could be anything from an intelligence officer to a cryptologic officer to an IP officer to an oceanographic focus officer. So that 100 days is tailored to sort of fill in the gaps in deep expertise that that officer may bring. So we're sort of tailoring it. But to your point on the electromagnetic maneuver warfare pieces of it, understanding the key terrain of the RF spectrum and of cyberspace is a key element in their understanding and be able to deliver for the strike group the types of plans and capabilities that are necessary there. So definitely EMW is a big piece of it, depending on the background of the individual officer and how much depth they've had in electromagnetic maneuver warfare. The notion of maneuvering a network or in the RF spectrum or space capabilities in order to push back on the contestedness of those spaces is something that we're continuing to develop those operational concepts and trying to equip our officers with the latest and greatest thinking and con-ops in those regards. Does that help? Okay, yes sir. Yes, hi. Sydney Friedberg, Breaking Defense. A question for the whole panel, and we've had tidbits of this, but we talk about the importance of training for the high end. Can all of you give a few examples, a concrete thing where either you wouldn't have trained on this two years ago, but you are training on it now, or you were training on it two years ago, but not very much, and you're now doing it a lot more, particularly things that involve not just the high end environment, but also cross-domain, with air, surface, information, undersea, and so forth. Okay, who wants to take this one? We're not gonna do all five. No, I'll start. Sydney, one good thing about coming to this panel every year is I get to answer a question from you every year. Good to have you. A quote comes to mind, and it goes like this. In combat, you never raise your performance to the level of your expectations. You fall to the level of your training. And it goes hand in hand with another one that says, train like you fight, fight like you train. And so, when you talk about training and the importance of training, those two things kind of stick in my head when I think about it. To answer your specific question, I think your question answered it for us, and it's how we operate across domains, how we don't just train as, you know, it's funny I've evolved, my weapon system used to be me and my airplane. And all of a sudden my thinking evolves as you get older and you're now a strike group commander and what is the weapon system? It's not the lieutenant and his airplane, it is that entire strike group. And so our training has evolved as well, not just with me, but across our Navy. I've noticed how our training has evolved such that it is not just individual weapon systems, but it is entire strike groups and entire fleets. And so when we look at how we are taking the information from various platforms and how we integrate those, that's how we're doing our training now. And that training needs to continue to evolve with an evolving threat. So hopefully that answered your question. And I just had to jump on it because I couldn't pass another year by without answering a question from you. So thanks. Okay, right here in the middle. Thank you, General Abnos. Lieutenant Commander Johannes Kittmose from the Royal Danish Navy, presently international student at the Naval Staff College. We can all agree on all the good things about partnerships with allies, with coalition partners, and also when we look at near-peer competitors in particular. But we also know from previous decades of coin operation that it's also a challenge to work with coalition partners. And with your goals of increasing speed and readiness and at the same time incorporating allies and coalition partners, how does that go together if we don't want to increase the risk of mistakes or making our operations slower in the future? So basically, how do we integrate allies, coalition partners, and at the same time increase speed and readiness to fight the future wars? So quick example for you. So we're conducting exercise iron fist this week. I just met yesterday with Lieutenant General Kobayashi of the Japanese Ground Self Defense Force. I think those two things are not mutually exclusive, but they don't have to go hand in hand. And we like to say fast is not fast, smooth is fast. So I don't have to be physically fast, I have to be smooth. So we're doing that right now with the Japanese Ground Self Defense Forces. We're integrating with them, we're learning what their tactics, techniques, and procedures are so that we can operate with them smoothly. So I'll take four, five, six, eight different coalition partners who we're all smooth with and go against an adversary all day long. Because that's the great thing about being in the United States is we have lots of friends. Other people have fewer friends and we don't pay for ours. I mean, we help, but we don't pay for ours. So I think that is really the key is just you have to just do it. It's, you just have to work with them. You have to get used to operating with them in order to provide safety, in order to ensure that my fires, and we have forces, for example, in the Marine Corps Anglico, Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company, I send them to my Japanese Ground Self Defense Force counterparts and he employs the fires. So I don't have to teach everything. I just have to provide that capability. That's a speed. I can do that literally in hours to send him down there. Hopefully that kind of gives a small microcosm answer, but we do this with multiple allies. And I won't speak for the type commanders, but that is not a, for us, it's not a hard concept. It's what we do every day when we're out on deployments. I'll give you another example of where we really get after what your question was asking. One of the best courses that I attend was called the SIFMIC course, which is the Combined Forces Maritime Component Commanders course. And in that course, I had fellow flag officers from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore. And when you have flag officers sitting around and talking about how we would do combined operations with our allies, that gets exactly to the question that you asked. And that's how we build that coalition. That's how we build that trust amongst the allied and partner nations. So then when we get out to sea and we form a combined task force, it's not the first time that we've been talking to each other. I'd be remiss if I didn't jump on this one as a responsible, potentially guilty party in coalition communications. And we rest assured that the focus on being able to do information sharing at multiple levels of classification with our partner is key and critical to the naval leadership for certain, because I hear about it quite a bit. We have been working on the mission partner environment with the whole of DoD to try to get after sort of an objective in-state. We have centrics, we have biases. What will the one solution that supports the range of things be, the range of communications, the range of classification levels, we're tracking towards an objective in-state and we're using opportunities in joint and coalition exercises to demonstrate and test that objective architecture. But again, in the maritime environment, putting new architectures in is a difficult thing. And so we have to be mindful of not overrunning the headlights of our partners who can't sort of keep up with what that objective architecture is. So we're sensitive to it. We're working across all of DoD. And Dyssa has been leading that the Department of Defense at large is very focused on it. And I think in the maritime environment, it's particularly important that we get this one right. We have had an ability to share information at the unclassified level in the APAN construct. That's goodness. And I think everybody can migrate to it, but continuing to work those coalition comms, I've got two different groups that work that, but the M2I2 team who was in Tokyo last week working on constant discussions and deliberations on how to improve that ability to share information. Okay, are you waiting for a question in the back here? No, I guess not. One more here for the active duty and then over to you, sir. Good morning, Admiral, this is General. With the, just in front of John Ty, US's boxer, with the evolving requirements for cybersecurity, the dwindling capacity as we have aging ships and platforms, Admiral Brown mentioned going from 500 ships. Now we're down to less than 300. Where do you see the turning point in starting to build that capacity, build that capability back up while at the same time ensuring that we have nothing but the best going for it? Can you repeat the end of that question while at the same time ensuring? That we have nothing but the best going for it, man. Passive question, Joey, you want to take that one off? Hey, you know, I guess if anybody had that absolute, you know, date that you're looking for, you know, we'd make that person the CNO, Secretary of the Navy, you know, Secretary of Defense. Our job is, you know, fundamentally in order to have the capabilities that we need today, but still, you know, to fight the missions and the war fight of today, but at the same time make sure that capability can endure and adapt to the threat and be what you need there for tomorrow, current readiness, future readiness. You've got to submit whole budgets. That's the bottom line. It's that simple, but it's not very easy. The challenges of budget caps and funny instabilities, the bullet talked about those, you know, those are absolutely killing us. The Secretary of Defense has testified to Congress that no enemy in the field has done more to damage the war-fighting readiness of the United States military than sequestration. And when it comes to CRs, I mean, we're sitting here today two days away from it all happening again. You know, we've had, you know, the last nine years have all had CRs of some kind. I believe the last 12, the last 18 months have had a CR of some kind. Secretary of the Navy testified last week, maybe it was two weeks ago, that he estimates that CRs have cost us $4 billion, not lost opportunity. He made a real point about how it's throw the money in the garbage can, put lighter fluid on it and light it on fire. I don't know how anybody could say it any better than sec-damped it. So, you know, for the submarine force, you're gonna see our big turn point because you're kind of looking for a date. You're gonna see a big turn point in the early 20s when we break through the shipyard workload, workforce mismatch that I talked about earlier. A bunch of things that created that perfect storm that bow-waved all that stuff into that period are gonna start to kind of break open. The refueling overhauls for the Ohio-class submarine which was never originally planned. It was a 30-year sub. We, again, business decision extended to 42 years. Those are all gonna finish up in about the 2020 timeframe, 2021 timeframe. All the SSN availabilities of which USS Boise is the poster child for how not to do it. You know, years ago, we extended that operating cycle from 48 months to, or 44 months, 48 months to 72 months. That was a great idea at the time but it bow-waved right into where we are today. We turned four Ohio-class from BNs into GNs. That was never part of the plan. Great, great, great platform. Everybody wants them. But all that stuff created this perfect storm. So in the early 20s, that log jam's gonna really break. And then when we finally get the two per year, I would say minimum build rate of two per year for Virginia-class, you'll see another kind of takeoff in the 20, 28 timeframe. But so in the meantime, we've gotta have a powerful conversation about the Navy of the nation needs and God bless Secretary Mattis is doing all the stuff he can with, you know, national strategy, defense strategy, nuclear posture review. The strategy is lining up to make the case. And then we've gotta submit whole budgets that allow us to have the capability for today and as well as what we need in the future given the changing threat environment. Okay, yes sir, over here, as promised. Scott Kinner with the Marine Corps Tactics and Operations Group. So a quick question, well it's not a quick question, but for the group, the last time the Navy Marine Corps team, you know, the Naval Services and Clear Coast Guard partners, everybody else actually fought a near peer competitor was last century. Knowing that the force we have, we are buying today in the next couple of years is probably the force we're gonna have in 10 years. Given all of that, from your perspective, as you sit in your billets today, do you believe the Navy Marine Corps team is actually getting after how to fight the near peer competitors and pulling that thread backward to the force you need to have in the next years? Or are we just on a linear path to do what we have today just with some bells and whistles in 10, 15 years? Or are we looking at the problem set and then developing an actual force that can go out and execute as a team? Thank you. Apple Brown, you wanna take that one? Sure. I think absolutely we're getting after that from the Navy Marine Corps team. If you just look at the integration of the F-35 into our amphibious readiness groups, that is changing the construct of that force. We have focused on transitioning from the Marine Corps and General Smith jump in here at any time, principally serving for deployed ashore back to our ships. There's been new energy and a reinvigoration of the Navy Marine Corps team. If you look at our LSDs, the incredibly capable LPD platform, the introduction of like I said of the F-35 onto our big deck amphibs and the coordination that we're doing and fleet exercise with the Marine Corps, we'll be ready for that fight. Yeah. I'll, a quick answer is yes. I mean, we are absolutely pulling that back all the time that I just spent and you know, look this audience, these comments have multiple audience, right? There's junior officers, there's trade and there's also adversaries because everything that we put out is being consumed by our adversaries. So the answer is the last 15, 16 years we've been focusing on the counter-insurgency fight, well now I'm focused on something else and that's not false bravado. That should make you nervous because we got Marines who are just now re-experiencing as my capstone classmate Adam Brown just said, getting back and doing naval integration. We just did it off San Clemente Island with line charges from the sea in the surf zone and they're like, hey sir, there's great guys out there. There's these things called sailors on these amphibs and we're actually working with them, they're awesome. They'll let you move LCUs and LCACs around. When we start putting our time back to that and if you're an adversary, you should be really nervous about that because we will become very good at what we do and what we focus on and what we're focused on right now is peer and near peer competitors. Okay, got time for two more questions right here, sir and then our Marine over here. Good morning, good morning Admiral, good morning General. My name is Commander Cetrin, I'm from the Brazilian Navy. My question is related with an issue that the Brazilian Navy has faced in the last two years. We are very concerned about the monitoring the level of stress of our crews to avoid accidents at sea and I would like to know how the US Navy is facing this problem and if yes, do you have any formal documents to reduce the probability of the accidents at sea doing to the overwork of the sailors? So I'll take that one on. You know, if you look at what we did in the early 2000s, you know, at the end of the 80s, the wall came down and quite honestly, the United States in cooperation with our allies and partners, we had sea control by the mere fact that we all woke up in the morning, we had control of sea and then 9-11 happened and we really ended up in a land war as we fought the scourge of terrorism overseas. That's not the case anymore and the fact of the matter is, is we have emerging peer competitors and by virtue of the fact that us and our allies wake up in the morning, we don't necessarily have sea control. As a result of that in the early 2000s, we had a number of things that happened. We had a revolution in training where we went to kind of computer-based training. We started to hopefully man our ships. We had a top six roll down on the rank of sailors that would fill certain billets. We went into a rapid acquisition policy where we brought new technology to the ships but we didn't necessarily buy the training that went with that new technology. All those things taken in solo were good things for the Navy but then when you start to look at how they all interacted, it wasn't necessarily the right thing to do. In 2010, there was a report that came out that was called the Bilal Report that really took a holistic view of all those actions and what does that mean to the surface force. In 2012, we really started rebuilding our manning in our training in the surface force. We spent over $178 million over three palm cycles rebuilding surface engineering training and we had nearly the same amount of investment in surface combat systems training. In October 2012, we started the basic division officer course and July of 2012, we started the navigator course. We brought back gunnery officer course, the communication officer course. In October of 2014, we built the advanced division officer course. We arguably have one of the most rigorous command qualification processes in the Navy with a command assessment that really puts officers through the ringers of all the various facets from navigation, seamanship and ship handling to maritime warfare. Then we had the tragic events of 2017. So the thing that I want to impress is there is not a single basic division officer course or advanced division officer course graduate who has started department head school. There is not a single officer who went through that very rigorous command assessment who's in the command pipeline right now. But those events of the 2017 really made us take a step back and make sure that we have it right. We have a readiness and review oversight council that is taking all the recommendations from the comprehensive review that was conducted by Admiral Davidson and the Secretary's readiness review and looking at it a holistic view to make sure that we have the training right. I will say that for the most part, the surface force as I said earlier is one of the preeminent naval surface forces in the world. We can absolutely get better and make sure that our officers and our enlisted have the right training at the right time in the careers to do that. So you will see changes to the way that, and modifications to the way that we are training our junior officers and our mid-grade officers and our senior officers. And there will be assessment points that happen throughout an officer's career. But I've got to tell you, I think that we're on the right path. And it goes back to what General Smith said, we need to build time into the ship schedule for the commanding officer to make sure that his sailors are trained and ready to go. You know, one of the fallouts of the things that we did in the 2000s, and then as Admiral Tafalo talked about is the sequestration and the budget control act is we have become incredibly efficient with the resources that we've had. But there's a downside to that, is as we've become incredibly efficient, we've lost a lot of flexibility. And I kind of equate this to, you know, we're coming into approach and we have a half a gallon of gas left in the tank and you better help that nothing goes wrong so that you can land that aircraft and you can make that analogy across all the services. Okay, thank you. Sudden death over time, one minute. Okay, sir, I appreciate it. Good morning, ma'am and gentlemen, I'm Major Goldman from VMX-1 in New Arizona. My question is about command and control in the future. So with new technologies today and emerging technologies in the future, I anticipate that the joint force will, the functions of command and control will not change, but how we execute them will change in the future. And my question to you is how do we balance leveraging the new technologies and taking advantage of those against the need to still operate in a degraded environment? Take her. Here's how I'd answer that question. So if we go in a degraded comms environment, both sides are gonna be in a degraded comms environment. And I think that the United States Navy will have the upper hand because of what I led off this panel with, and that's our concept of command. We have a concept of command that is second to none and our commanding officers understand the mission. They understand their mission orders. And if we go into that comm degraded environment, I don't think that you wanna go up against one of our commanding officers. I would just add when you talk about the technology side, I think what we are striving for is to be able to take advantage of that technology, human machine teaming, artificial intelligence to allow commanders potentially at every level to make better decisions, to synthesize information that's available. So whether you're talking about the tactical, strategic, or operational and mental, we wanna be able to leverage that technology to make speed of decision faster to make the force more lethal and if in some cases the way technology is going, you can carry an awful lot of information with you. You can integrate information from your own sensors right there and having the ability to go, mission command at every level, we wanna take advantage of that technology to aid in the decision making of those commanders not necessarily prevent or rely directly on the degraded environment or the lack of comms there. Okay, how about a nice round of applause for our great panel today? I'd like to thank the audience for great questions and just one plug for the February issue of proceedings on that last question. We have Admiral Scott Swift wrote an article that's in the February issue called Master, the Art of Command and Control. He talks a lot about those issues that you just raised and he's also the luncheon speaker tomorrow and probably would take that question on as well. Admiral Crowder, General Smith, Admiral Tai, Admiral Tufalo, Admiral Miller, Admiral Brown, thank you for joining us today, for being a panel for sharing your insights, your expertise and taking the hard questions. As a token of our thanks, we have a Afsia bookmark and we have a Naval Institute book called Red Star Over the Pacific, China's Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy by Toshi Yashahara and James Holmes. So thank you for your time and your insight today. Can I just say one thing with regard to Admiral Swift as information warfare, I need to point out, he's today's lunch speaker. Oh, today's lunch speaker. I don't want to confuse the crowd, so I'm information, not misinformation. I stand corrected.