 Well, good morning. This is Admiral Rick Breckenridge coming to you from the Chinfo Studios here at the Pentagon. I'm the Director of Undersea Warfare, and we started a dialogue the last time we were together about our undersea forces. We specifically talked about our ballistic missile force, our SSBNs, or our boomers. And just the important work they're doing for our national security day in and day out in their alert patrols in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Today I want to talk to you about an interesting question. How many do we need? How many SSBNs? What's the minimum essential number we need as a nation to do national security right? To protect our country from a homeland attack, from an adversary, and also to reassure our allies that they are also protected underneath our umbrella. So, you know, you might recall the days in the 60s and 70s, we had 41 SSBNs, 41 dual-crewed SSBNs out on alert patrols conducting that strategic deterrent mission. That ended up transitioning to the Ohio class. Initially planned to be a 24 ship class, we actually built 18 SSBNs to replace the 41. In the early 2000s we reduced that force to 14 SSBNs. Blue and Gold Crew, 14 SSBNs, 60-40 split between the Pacific and the Atlantic. And so the question comes today as we get ready to recapitalize that SSBN class. Right now we're in the beginning of the design effort to develop a brand new SSBN that can conduct that important mission for our country. The question is how many? How low can we go? And it's a hot day here in DC. We were going to do this outside, but the temperatures outside are sort of in the hundreds. Well, the heat inside the Pentagon right now is probably just as bad. With sequestration and the fiscal crisis and the budgetary impacts on the DOD top line, there's a lot of folks looking at how low we can go with the SSBN force. And I'm here today to tell you that I've written a blog to address this question. And it really is simply a matter of geography. We in the United States of America are an island nation with a good buffer between us and our adversaries, the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean. And for us to be able to conduct two ocean strategic deterrence requires a bare minimum number of SSBNs of a force of 12. And so there's two important points for you to know of how strategic deterrence works. The first is those SSBNs have to be invincible. They have to be survivable at sea. The adversary can't find them, hidden and unable to be detected. And second is they have to be within range of targets of that matter to the adversary that we can hold at risk to dissuade or deter them from ever considering attacking it's the homeland. Well, geography requires that 60-40 split of our SSBN force a few more in the Pacific than the Atlantic to be able to meet those two criteria for our nation's defense. And so 12 SSBNs of the Ohio replacement class will provide a guaranteed 10 minimum operational SSBNs that are ready to go out day in and day out and do those deterrent patrols. And although other numbers come down, we came down from 41 to 18 to 14, now we're going to go to 12, this is the floor. Even as the number of warheads continue to come down in our nation's arsenal, the number of SSBNs are going to remain at this constant because that's how much you need to do the geography, to do the math of strategic deterrence. So I ask you to go ahead and read my article and we'll continue to keep this dialogue going on our undersea force and how it's providing security for our country. Thanks very much.