 And as I got asked to come do this talk about the surface Navy vision, I was thinking about what I see every morning when I walk into my office. And that's two long rows of photographs. There's two huge walls covered with just black and white pictures. And most of you would think that those are pictures of ships and weapons systems and things blowing up. It's not. It's photographs of my predecessors going back to 1901. That's when, in one way or another, we stood up this job and said, there will be a director of surface Navy. The other day in preparing for this, I thought about it and I went back and looked at those individuals. And I found an interesting trend. Those people serving in my job in times of good or rising budgets, they smile in their photographs. They seem like happy, calm individuals. They're known throughout the surface Navy as really nice guys. Then I looked at those pictures of those people that had my jobs in decreasing or bottoming budgets. I'll try to be polite. They're grumpy. None of them smile in their photographs. They all kind of stare at you with these haggard look. I'll let you decide where I fall on that scale. But somebody accused me of channeling Barry McCullough the other day and walking around the Pentagon going, which he was famous for. So back to the surface vision. It sounds like a simple task to talk to you about the surface vision. It normally would be about three weeks from now. At that point, the budget would be on the hill. There would be no surprises. There would be nothing I can be accused of three weeks on because I just tell you what we did. Right now, what I have to do is tell you about general things we would like to do. So none of you can come back to me three weeks from now and go, you didn't do enough of that. And where's mine? And my program isn't in there. So I'm not going to do that. I'm going to take a little different tact and talk to you and follow on with Admiral Rowden's speech and kind of pile on, but with a twist. So I'm going to describe to you the next level down a detail on distributed lethality. And then I'm going to talk to you about whether we can afford it. As one of my staff put it the other day, distributed lethality meets distributed budget reality. Can you do it? All right. And that's what I'm going to try to answer for you today. So what's the surface vision and what's it guiding us over the next 20 years? What does a surface force do for you? In real simple terms, a surface force is putting warheads on foreheads since 1775. All right. Our job is to put a warhead on the bad guy's forehead. All right. Real simple. Nothing else. And there's elements of that and we can get more sophisticated or less sophisticated. But how is that distributed? And what's our historical example? That's our first historical example right there. The Continental Navy of 1775. Six frigates. Funny, we had to build them in six different districts to make sure that the oak timbers were matched by the pine timbers were matched by the spruce of somewhere else. And we had to build them all in different coasts or different ports on the east coast to make sure we got a distributed budget across the entire east coast. Doesn't sound like anything we're doing today. But at that time we had to get cannons from each individual ironworks in all major cities. All right. To make sure that we spread the one major largest thing we build, which is in the United States government, which is a surface ship construction amongst the east coast. Early colonies. Was that distributed lethality? Well, there were only six of them. They were really heavily armed for the most part. We could argue about the one built in the Chesapeake Bay, which wasn't quite as much. But these were really hard to fight ships of the line. We weren't quite distributed enough because we couldn't quite afford enough. So the British with two blockades locked up half our fleet. What was distributed about this time? So we can either look at the fleet of John Paul Jones or we can look at the fleet of Commodore Barney. The fleet of Commodore Barney was the mosquito fleet of the Chesapeake Bays. At that point it was the littoral combat ships. We took small craft. We put cannons on them. We took barges. We rode them. We put sails on everything. We put cannons on everything and we gave the British hell. Sorry, guys. I know you guys are sitting over there. My apologies. Okay, we're friends now. Okay. And we drove them nuts. Why? Because they didn't know what canal, what creek, what slump we would come out of, row out there, shoot at them, turn around and go back. Commodore Barney defended the accesses to Washington, D.C. Okay, you guys got there. You guys burned it. I got it. All right. I'm not going to say anything about doing that now. All right. And we got there. We were a distributed lethal fleet everywhere else. All right. So that's our distributed lethality background. Let's go to the next example. This is distributed lethality. 6,768 ships at the peak of World War II. Everywhere. Everything carrying armament. It was everywhere. Now, that's not just the battle wagons. The battleships with 16-inch shells in the Surigao Straits, which was the last time we did a crossing of the T in a major fleet engagement. That's also the destroyers and the light carriers of Taffy III. That's also Admiral Brinkley's, or at that time, Commodore Brinkley's, patrol boats with torpedoes messing with the Japanese in every single strait. That's distributed lethality. And it doesn't take 67,068 ships. It just takes arming everything. If it floats, it fights. And if it fights, it's nasty to the enemy. And you take what you got and you bolt it on everything. Plywood patrol boats with torpedoes. Who would have thunk it 20 years before World War II? All right. The Germans would have. We didn't. We figured it out. That's distributed lethality. That's everything going to sea. And if it floats, it fights. And it fights well. All right. Let's go look at the Cold War. Many of you might get depressed at this slide. On the far left is all the ship types and everything else we had during the height of the Cold War. All right. And you can kind of go down that list. Distributed lethality at some of its best. We used to look at tonnage of hull versus ordnance throw weight and decide who was the biggest, baddest thing out there. By that criteria, you know what that is? A hydrofoil patrol boat. 221 tons and a whole bunch of cruise missiles and a whole bunch of ordnance in a 76-millimeter gun. At that time, Commander McCullough had one of them down there. That's a nasty system. That whole fleet was built around defense distributed lethality. I'm trying to give you a picture of what distributed lethality means to you. At that time, everything we had could fight a surface battle. Everything we had had one capability against the submarine or another. Almost everything we had could fight an air engagement. Everything we had out there could fight and give the enemy a hard time. The patrol hydrofoil I just mentioned had the radar cross signature of a small patrol boat and it could come out of anywhere. And it gave the folks on the other side nightmares. Look at what the Russians did to us. Look at the small patrol boats they strapped long-range weapons to and drove against our sixth fleet. They gave us the reason of distributed lethality. They gave us the thought process that if it floats, we have to worry about it. Make them sweat. Make every contact out there lethal. That's what we're talking about, distributed lethality. Now I'm a simple guy. I'll give you an analogy and then I'll ask you to remember it at the end. I live out a long ways from here west. I have a heck of a commute every day. A couple hours getting in back and forth. But when I go out in the backyard on a summer evening, I look out at the Shenandoah range and I'm sitting in my backyard and I try to equate these things to what I see every day. So I go out there and I think about presence of the Navy and I think about deterrence and I think about distributed lethality. So when I'm sitting out there and I'm looking out over the Shenandoah mountains and I'm listening to the bees and they got that nice quiet buzz and I know they're fertilizing the flowers or whatever the heck else bees do out there. And I'm thinking about that nice quiet home. I'm thinking that's presence. You know that nice quiet home. The bees are making things grow. Then I go out there and I look out there like I did last summer and I look up and there's a bald faced hornet's nest up in that trees where I like to sit. I start to worry about every little buzz. Every time something goes past me it goes, look, I'm looking. I'm not worried about whether it's fertilizing a flower. I'm worried about whether it's going to come get me. Now imagine what I'd be thinking about if all of a sudden on the news there'd be an article about killer bees now in Virginia. Don't quote me, that's not true. But what happens if killer bees are out there? Would I even walk out my door to look up and see what type of nest that is? That's distributed lethality. Everything that's out there can hurt you. And I'll ask you to remember my bee analogy when I get to my last slide and I'll come back to it. All right, up to this point I've been talking about what we would like to do. Now this is distributed lethality meets distributed budget reality. You've all seen this, you've all seen slides similar to this. This is what the possibilities are of budgets over the next several years. It goes back to the end of World War II which is the far left side of the axis and it goes up and down on this rather interesting historical cycle. You'll find four major conflicts in there. Korea, 1,000 ships. Vietnam, 750 ships. Reagan built up almost 600 ships. Today, 284 ships and coming down off OIF and OEF. The slopes on these are important. On the back side as you come down you look at the reductions in a fairly short amount of time. Those are 30 to 40% reductions in a short period of time. Now there's a view that somebody out there is going to go, ah history, this time it'll be different. We'll be smarter, we'll be better, this time it'll change. It's not the history of old. History has a funny way of killing off those people that say that. They kind of live at their own risk. So I'm not saying history is going to repeat itself, but what I'm saying is if I was watching this trend I would take away two things. One, every two decades the surface navy better be ready for a conflict. And two, every time the budget changes to that level the surface navy changes with it. So are we going to be ready for this next change and how are we going to think about it? If I look at that, at the peak funding and then I come down and all of you are pros, you understand this, at a 5% change you tighten your belt. At a 10% loss you run out of margin. At a 20% reduction in DOD budgets you better start doing things differently. And that's where distributed lethality sits. Distributed lethality to a couple of your questions is taking the budget that we have and making everything out there that floats more lethal. Making the trades that we need to make and making the surface navy of the next 10 years or 20 years the most lethal we can. It comes down to two main elements. And at the risk of sounding like some college professor up here and talking to you about it I needed this slide to talk to you about the trades we are going to make. Vertical axis. There's only two, well actually let me back up. There's only two things that any resource sponsor needs to worry about from a war fighting perspective. One is capability or the vertical axis. How well the things you have kill the bad guy. Horizontal axis. Capacity. How many things you have to do it with a lot or a little. Vertical axis. Advanced technology. Redundant readiness. Advanced training. All increasing up that axis. Horizontal axis. How many ships I have. How many missiles I have. How many guns are in the fleet. How many of everything I own are there. The people. The maintenance. The basic core readiness. How much of that do I have. Where those two intersect at the lower left of the screen I have exactly no Navy. Or maybe I have a row boat and one driver for Admiral Rowden. And that's the Navy. All right. We'll keep that guy just in case. All right. Up in the upper right hand corner that's Nirvana. That's a fully funded war time Navy. I have more as many sufficient and a few more ships that I need. And each one of them is exquisitely armed to the latest and greatest technology. I will tell you that at 20% budget reductions within DoD. We no longer have the ability to strictly live up in that world. So what's our choices. We move to one of the other three quadrants. Simple. You can't live in your budget up in the upper right. Where you have as much of it as you want. And it's all perfect. So you move in three different directions. What happens if we move to the lower left. It's called a hollow force. I no longer have readiness. I no longer have manning. I no longer have the equipment. I no longer have the dollars. And I can't keep the force I have going. We've tried this before. We tried it in the late 1970s. We tried it again a little bit in the early 2000s. We took money out of manpower. We gained savings. We took money out of readiness. We gave savings. We took money out of structure and background and everything else. And we hollowed out our force. I'll tell you this. We're not going there. The scars are still too fresh. We have just put hundreds of millions of dollars back into training and readiness and manpower to do exactly what Admiral Rowden was just talking about. Fill the ships to 95% and have the people properly trained when they get there. What Pete Gumatow-Tow is talking about. Have the maintenance money ready to go when they get to that port and have the people ready to fix it when we're ready there. We're not going lower left. We're not hollowing out the force again to keep whatever we have left going. Two choices. I'm down to two. And this is the crux of what you'll be seeing over the next 10 years. Upper left. There's a huge feeling in some areas that we should go upper left. Cut the number of ships that you're building or own and make those ships perfect. Take the force structure you got and put the best technology on it. Make the enemy worry about that perfect technology and they'll run scurrying back to their home ports. For those of you that like popular movies, this is the Star Wars Death Star analogy. You know the one big ball out there and all the rebels in all the world run away. For those of you that like history, this is the battleship Bismarck. Make it unsinkable. Make it just steam in the face of the North Sea and every other navy will run into port. We forgot about aircraft. We forgot about dropping bombs. We forgot technology moves on. But heck, for that time when we were building it, that technology was perfect and it was the best in the world and it was out there and there was nothing else like it. If I go upper left and take force structure down and ships down and try to make those perfect, where do I end up? If I ever hit a conflict, which if I looked at my historical analysis it will take another 10 years, maybe 15 before we get back into another conflict I can't build my way out of this. It takes an average of 17 years to build a new ship from design concept in your head to something at sea. I can't get to the upper right if I guess wrong in here. So where are we going? We're going to distributed lethality. Distributed lethality lives in the bottom right. Sufficient number of platforms to do the mission. Enough. We got to do the math to tell you what that enough is but we're going to be conservative on the enough. And then put things together that make sense in there. Make every cruiser destroyer, amphib, LCS, CLF just like Admiral Rowden talked about a thorn in somebody else's side. If I need a new weapon system I don't go spend 10 years developing it. I go take a seeker if that's my problem and I glue it on the front end of an existing missile. If it doesn't go far enough I go put a new back end on it. If somebody in the world is already flying it I go buy it. If somebody else in the world's got a PowerPoint description of it and says I can get that from you, I ignore it, because PowerPoint doesn't win wars. What's the difference in here between the upper left and the lower right? Let's say I need over-the-horizon targeting. Somebody asked about that. Admiral Rowden talked about it. Perfect exquisite solution for over-the-horizon target. A brand new satellite system that can track a sparrow in a snowstorm on the high seas in the middle of North Atlantic on a bad day. And it goes up to space and it sits there for the next 20 years. It takes me 25 years to develop it, but okay. It can track that sparrow in a snowstorm. I'm not fighting sparrows, okay, and I'm certainly not fighting them in a snowstorm. What happens if I turn around and take something I'm flying today like fire scout, and I went and looked at a radar the other day that somebody else is using, and I said can you turn that upside down and bolt it in the bottom of a fire scout and put it all off now? They went, yeah, just reverse the polarity, plug it in. Okay, go do that. That's distributed lethality. That's operating inside your budget constraints. That's operating with what we have today. And then teaching the young officers out there on how to think like that. Admiral Rowden talked about the tactics and development centers. If they find a hole, we'll go scratch our heads and put it together. To me, this sort of thought process and innovation is looking at the Israelis of the 1960s and early 1970s. We sold them A4s. A lot of you remember those. Some of you may have flown in them, all right? And A4 was really great. It went really fast and it dropped a big bomb and it was great. But when somebody was behind it, you couldn't see back there. So the Israelis had a choice. They could have rebuilt the cockpit and put a new bubble cockpit and had the guy sit higher, or they could bolt on two rear view mirrors. All right? And the guy could look out and go yep, somebody behind me gets check six, leave. Okay? That worked. I don't need an exquisite solution. I don't need a new cockpit. I don't need a guy sitting up higher. I don't need three A4s running together. I need rear view mirrors. Or in this case, front view mirrors and different ways of doing things. All right. So let's look at something and how this infects us. Distributed lethality in what we're thinking about and a different process of looking at how we do things. So how did we look at the modified LCS or small surface combatant? I was one of the co-chairs of the task force, all right, that went and looked at it. And the first thing everybody goes, oh gee, you set your budget and you told me what you could do. Wrong answer. What we did first was we went and asked all the warfighters what they needed to do. And we asked them all in both fleets, in all areas, in all parts of the world and said, what do you want most? Well, the first thing they said is, well, we want an Arleigh Burke destroyer. We said, okay, you can have those. Well, okay, now we said, what else do you want? Well, they said, well, we'd like a small surface combatant that does a lot of ASW work, covers our mine mission and still does a lot of surface engagements depending on different parts of the world. Here's a shock. The guys in the Middle East didn't think the legs needed to be that long. The range needed that long. Why? Because if you go up an airplane, you see both sides, right? It doesn't need to go a long ways and there's a lot of surface stuff there. The guys in the Far East, what do they want? Something to go in a long direction, a long time and look for submarines. Why? Because for a small surface combatant threat to get out to that battle group, it takes a week. They want to hunt submarines. Okay, so we looked at the trades. Still, cost agnostic, platform agnostic. Then we went and looked at what's possible. We talked just about a representative from everybody in this audience. We said, what have you got? That can be PowerPoint deep. That can be DARPA-esque. That can be unobtainium to the nth degree, all right? Nuclear fusion, okay, we'll take one of those, okay? I don't care. You tell me what you got. And then we asked you, what have you got now? What's tested? What's flying? What's fighting today? And we put it together. So what did we come up with? We came up with a more lethal, more survivable, small surface combatant that gets the fleet exactly what they want. Something that, one, is capable of handling itself in a fight against an air threat. Not to the level of an ages destroyer. We got those. Two, something that can shoot a surface-to-surface missile a long way to give the enemy a bad time. Okay, we'll bolt one of those on. Three, an anti-submarine capability that knows, one, if there's a submarine out there, and two, if a torpedo is coming at you. Important safety tip, all right? At 40 knots with a countermeasure, run away and put out the countermeasure, okay? 40 knots is good for stuff, you know? Go do that. Next, if you've got all these things, look at what it's susceptible to. And we came out with some great insights to this. We looked at all the threats in the world. Mines, missiles, gravity bombs, everything else. We looked at all of them. And you know what we found? That the things that can kill an aircraft carrier can kill an LCS. I know that's a blinding flashly obvious to some of you, okay? The things that can kill a destroyer can kill an LCS. Wow. And what we found was a lot of the weapons in the world are targeted against our big, heavy medium, you know, big, heavy threats to the bad guy. They want to kill our big, heavy, bad threats. So if it can kill the carrier or kill the destroyer, it can kill LCS. Okay, ignore that. All right? I'm not going to be better than a carrier, a battleship, a destroyer or anything else. So what can we do? We can get armor around the magazine. You can add structure. You can add things that make it survivable, susceptible. You can spread out the gear that's in there. So if you do take a hit, despite all the new defensive and offensive systems that you've put on there, you can still keep going and at least steam back to get repaired. First choice, any surface warfare officer is hit the bad guy first. Second choice, keep from getting hit by a surface ship, a submarine or something that flies. In all cases, put that on LCS, modified at all times. Third, make sure you can back fit as much as possible to make everything in the entire surface Navy more lethal, more survivable and give the other guy a bad time so you don't get hit. That's the essence of this. That didn't convince everybody. That should have been a good enough argument. So the last part of this is how much of it do you want? Remember to the quad chart? I can build you an exquisite something up in the upper left or I can build and take what I got and leave it down in the lower right. So this is the trade. Build four to six exquisite ships from a brand new scrap of paper and out of those four to six ships, I'll be able to deploy one or two of them somewhere to the Far East or the Middle East and I'll build them in the next 15 to 20 years because I'm building a new ship and it takes that long to get it through. Or I can build you 20 modified LCS in half the time and deploy 10 of them in half the time. Your choice. And that wasn't quite enough. So then just like Admiral Rowan was talking about, we were at it against every war game we could find. We went out and we wargamed it in the fleets. We went out to Newport and we wargamed it up there. We went to our nemesis and the Op-Nav staff, those guys with the slide rules that says you got too many or too few and we had them run it. And this is what we found without naming the adversary. You're right. You lose some LCS in a full up nation on nation war. There shouldn't be a discovery to anybody. It's called war for a reason. And you put entire enemy fleets on the bottom of the ocean. Why? Because they come from everywhere and they're all equipped with weapons and they're all equipped with weapons that can come out and touch you. And if we add things like a fire scout, which we're already putting on there, I turn the radar upside down and glue it to it. It does it organically and it does it by itself and if I add a nice direction system that looks for EW signatures, electromagnetic warfare signatures, I now put together a fighting force that the United States Navy hasn't had in 20 or 25 years. That's distributed lethality and that's distributed lethality in a budget constrained environment. So, back to my bumblebees, back to my bees analogy. I asked you to remember this. Can we do this? This is Project Bumblebee, 1950s, budget dropping like a rock. Upper left picture is two cruisers, Canterbury and Boston. We were looking at what we could do with World War II cruisers. They were built in 1943. Project Bumblebee extension was what you see in the lower right. This is SM-2 in its infancy. And you ask me, well, that was a huge program. That was a... No, it wasn't. You know what SM-2 came out of? SM-2 is the test missile for the TALOS program, which was a really big missile that we were putting on other things. It was the test to prove if we could fly this. And how did we put it together? We used a German World War II beam rider missile, and we said, that's how we're going to guide it. And how did we decide we were going to fuse it? We took a gun round from a World War II gun, a variable time fuse that we were using to kill kamikazes, and we glued it to the front end. And we did it in a government lab that's still around. And we stuck all these things together. We came up with a launcher. We cut off the gun and we put it on top. And we did it in a real short amount of time. And we did it in a budget that was dropping like a rock. If you remember my first time that I showed you that. All right, that's that first huge downslope. After Korea, after World War II, a World War II cruiser now becomes Project Bumblebee, and the start of the age we know now, the guided weapons systems on ships. Can we do it? Absolutely. We've done it in the past. We learned how to fight these fleets. We learned how to steam these fleets. We learned how to take these fleets to sea, and we gave everybody else in the world nightmares about how to come get us. Did it last forever? No. But if we keep doing this, even in declining budgets, we can still do this. So at the risk of being the gloomy guy, the budget's coming down. But if I take and I distribute my lethality and give the enemy a hard time in his targeting, in his thought process, and knock him back on the defensive, I don't have to worry about as much him coming to get me. He has to worry about me coming to get him. And that's what United States Navy is. Warheads on forehead since 1775. All right? And we're going to do it again. So with that, I'll take your questions and then I'll let my good friend from the Marine Corps here, who by the way, we are linked at the hip, you know, in years past it's been, you know, how about your brother and for the Marine Corps? Yes, we're brothers. Cane and Abel. All right? Now, we're brothers. All right? He's sailed with me. I've sailed with him. We're linked. And we're not going to break that trust, just like Admiral Rowden was talking about. So questions before I turn it over to Whaler. Sir. You gave a good defense of the LCS, modified LCS. The big critics are going to be on the Hill, perhaps maybe the Senate Armed Services Committee and John McCain. Have you given this presentation to them yet? He still, his last statement, service statement, public statement was, you know, that your idea is going to need a lot of looking at. Okay. So let's talk about a couple of criticisms of LCS. One, I hope I've given you a hint on lethality and survivability, okay? Don't get hit. Engage the bad guy. And if you do get hit, the systems in there allow you some flexibility in what happens. So let's talk about the other main criticism. It costs too much. When we started this program, and I was happened to be a, I got way too much time in the Pentagon, I happened to be a budget guy in the Pentagon at that time, too. And we said it was going to cost us about $250 million or so per haul, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Look at LCS today. Everybody goes, oh my goodness. It's gotten so expensive. No. Inflate LCS of 2002 at the inflation rates you've seen over the period of time, over the last 12 to 15 years, and guess what? You folks in industry are coming in right on that target with the exception of maybe a couple percent up or down, depending on what we tell you to do that day. We hit it right on the money. Did the first one hit it right on the money? No. No first ship of the class comes in at what you expect to pay for everything else. Are they coming in right on the money now? Yes. Will it bump up a little bit again? When we change it to modified LCS, absolutely with the first ship of the class. Will it come back to a steady state? Yes. Why? Because it behooves all of us to bring it in on a budget that's affordable, and when we created that budget that's affordable, we kind of had a pretty good target number, and you're hitting it. Industry is hitting it today. Well, a couple percent, you know, one or two percent either way we can argue about amongst friends. I'm not going to do that. But those are the main criticisms. The other main criticism is it's not an Arleigh Burke destroyer. You're right. I'm building those. We restarted the line. I'm building a lot of them. I've got a lot of them. I need more distributed. Make the bad guy sweat. I need it everywhere. I need it in the shoal waters. I need it in the ocean. I need it everywhere. That's the other criticism, and that I hope we've demonstrated that we're going to do. Ma'am. Hi. My name is Laura Seligman. I'm the reporter for Inside the Navy. I was wondering, I understand that the Navy has not briefed the shipbuilders, Lockheed and Oslo, on the modified LCS yet. So can you tell me why that is, and are there plans to do so? Sure. One, actually, the answer is yes and no. The answer is yes, because we're still firming up the requirement. If I go and you're a shipbuilder and I tell you I want a 100-mile missile, that's different than if I tell you a 150-mile missile. Right? So my folks are writing that in right now, and we're doing the math and we're figuring out where exactly we want that to be. And we're doing the trades on that. Do I care whether it goes 42 knots or 39 and a half knots? We're doing the trades, so we don't argue about that later. But I will argue that the shipbuilder had everything to do with this discussion. We asked the shipbuilders what they could do, and they told us exactly what they could do. Bigger, smaller, left, right, painted different colors, I don't know, whatever you want. Shag carpet on the inside, beads on the doors, whatever. They offered us an option for everything. They offered us more weight. They offered us more armor. They offered us bigger weapons. They offered us everything. And when we came down to all these trades and adjustments, it was the shipbuilder's baseline on what they could do in that timeframe to not break production that we kind of went with. So it's not a surprise to any of the shipbuilders, nor will it be a surprise to any of the shipbuilders when we come down and do the RFP on these things, request for proposals for those shipbuilders that we currently have. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. All right, I'm going to turn it over to the Marines if nobody else has a question. Oh, sorry. Can't see in the light. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Somebody said, and I suspect it was one of us in uniform, that peace is the most insidious of enemies. And I get that from your presentation. It's hard. And one of the things that happens in peacetime is that control tends to migrate away from the operating forces. And in our present day into the hands of the acquisition community. And we've made the mistake a number of times in putting design issues in the hand of the engineers rather than the operators. And so my first question for you and Admiral Rodin, I guess, are you currently satisfied that the operating forces have sufficient influence into the design issues of making our forces more capable? Okay. That's essentially what we did with Small Surface Combatant Task Force. We went and asked the people sitting in this audience wearing khaki or blues or whatever color you got out here, what you need and how much of it you need. And then we looked at the trades. This is what I can build you. What would you like to do with it? We said, what do you need to control the seas to make the enemy sweat? And then we went and said, is it possible to build that? And once we figured out it is possible to build that, we said, can we build it within the budget? And we figured out the answer to that was yes as well. So that's not the acquisition tail wagging the operational dog. That is the operational big dog with bigger teeth taking the tail and saying, follow me. And I think we got it right. I meet almost weekly with one of the two or one of the major acquisition program executive offices or program managers and we discussed just this. The trades that are made are war fighting based and not understanding budget reality and not based on what they think they can do within their portfolio. We make those trades at the war fighting level. And then we look at what we can afford. Yes, sir. Roger, it takes X number of years to design and build a ship. And I applaud the Bumblebee analogy because what's really important when you get into battle are the systems, the weapon systems, the combat systems, the sensors. But those in our current environment are still subjects of long range programs of record. So thank you for that question. I think I know what you're asking. So go back to my quadrants. Don't change the slide. But go back to my quadrants for a second. If I get the wrong ship with the exquisite systems, I'm 15 years away from fixing it. If I need a system, we have the normal acquisition process and we have a rapid acquisition process. And if I need something now to get the warfighter to do his job instantly, I can have that out to the fleet in months or at the most early years. And I can actually do that. And we've proven we're doing it. And I've proven we're doing it right now. And people say, well, the budget process is three years out. I've proven I can turn money around inside the current year, reshape a weapons program, and start buying something that we need in a certain AOR tomorrow. Now, it's not a new development. I don't need years of testing. But if somebody has something on the shelf, and I go buy it, and I bolt it out. And in the last six months, we've proven that we can do that inside six months and start that process quickly. So do we do it as a matter of course? No. I would like to think about all the integration pieces and have the training inputs and have everything in place and have the spare parts ready to go and everything else like that. And that takes a couple of years. Can I do it in months? Absolutely. But that's how I stick in that lower right-hand part of my quadrant. If I make a mistake there, it's at most a couple of years to fix it. If I go buy exquisite, it's decades to fix. And that's why we're going in our path. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Sir. Sydney Friedberg, Breaking the Fence. To follow up on the question about the systems being critical, you've talked to the over-the-horizon anti-surface missile that goes on modified LCS, that's to be determined. You mentioned the new radar on the fire scout. You also touched briefly on electronic warfare, electronic sensing, and anti-air being beefed up. But I haven't seen any details about that. So can you speak to those systems a little bit? Absolutely not, because it's in my budget two weeks away. You can give me the budget now if you want. I could, but then I wouldn't be the director of surface warfare in the Department. So in two weeks, come see me again and I'll talk to you specifics. Thank you. Other questions? Yes, ma'am. I'm Valerie Insano with National Defense Magazine. I just had a couple of follow-up questions. Can you say when we might be seeing an RFP? And secondly, you responded to some of the criticisms regarding cost of the LCS, but I was wondering if you could respond directly to Dr. Gilmour's criticism that the changes to the modified LCS are not going to be enough to significantly increase the ship's survivability. Okay. One, we find that when you have a critic, take them to sea. Dr. Gilmour went out to sea on one of the total ship survivability tests of LCS. I suggest you ask him how impressed he was with that crew's ability to handle damage problems and respond quickly and get that ship back up and moving and address exactly the things they've been talking about. Can I make it the same shape, size, steel of a battleship or destroyer? The answer is sure. Do I need to for the mission? Probably not. Am I going to increase the survivability of it just by doing structural and armor and so on? Absolutely. What I recommend is you look at the trades we make and we will release all that within the next few months. I can't give you an exact date, but it's before the summertime, we will have a pretty good answer for you on all those trades we're making, and we're not done with it. That's still work that we're doing right now. But I would recommend you come see us in about three to four months and we'll have a pretty good answer for you, ma'am. Sir, you had a question? Yes, sir. Sorry, I just couldn't resist. Yes, sir. You're the original of this group. If I can satisfy you, I've got it right. Jim Doyle, retired. Yes, sir. I was a little worried when whether that platform was going to hold up, but it did. It survived. I think surface warfare is in good hands in both your hands and, of course, in Tom Roden's hands. I think that you set the right course, and I believe you've got the capability and convinced the government that the surface navy has a lot of things that it can bring to the party in terms of strategic environment and so forth, particularly in this day and age. And I believe that we ought to worry about how we can make it more relevant to the National Command Authority and how it can be used in a number of ways and put the enemy on the defensive. And that's what we ought to do. And I think war fighting is the correct way to set the priorities, and you just can't be worrying about the details as you're going through bringing on new ships and changing things. You've got to go with what you've got and you've got to make modifications, I believe, of what you already have and make them better. And I think that that can be done, but it can't be done overnight. And certainly when I was in charge, I couldn't be worrying about the little details to get involved in. You set your priorities, you can get on with it, and hope the hell that comes out okay. Well, sir, I've been accused of being bullheaded and stubborn enough to get it done, so I guess that's why I'm here. What I'll do is I'll offer you the opportunity, sir, next time we war game this, come play against us. Let's see who comes out on top. Bring it. You're both doing a great job. Sir.