 A theme of energy security with another of our very special speakers, Admiral Gary Ruffhead. He has just very recently retired as Chief of Naval Operations. As is he was responsible for all the operations of the Navy. He was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thirty-eight years in the Naval Service is just a very impressive career. Many functions for those of us who are academics, we note that he was commandant of the Naval Academy at one time. For those of us who are interested in policy, he served as the Navy's liaison to Congress for two and a half years. Now he's moved to a third career, and we'll talk about the first one earlier. We'll talk about the earlier first career at a later point. He's now at the Hoover Institution as a Annenberg fellow who's addressing national security issues. I've been very fortunate to hear his insightful comments as he serves as a member of the Hoover Energy Task Force, a task force that's chaired by Secretary George Schultz. He's an avid bicyclist, and now, as I said, become an important member of our community. I'd like to just have a conversation with him. I want to start with a rumor I heard, and it had something to do with an earlier career. I understand you used to be involved with the ponies, sort of a jockey, riding horses. Now you don't actually look like you could be a jockey right now, but is there any truth to this rumor that I've heard? There is, Jim, and I claim to be the only naval officer that ever made money as a jockey. That said, as you look at me, I have to confess that I probably violated every child labor law on the books when I was doing it in a much younger and much smaller frame, but it was a lot of fun. Where was that? That was in the Middle East, in Iran. I had the privilege of living there for many years. My father was in the oil industry and spent 50 years in the Middle East, so from my earliest days I've been in the energy business, so to speak. Was horse racing the same there, or were the rules a little bit ... What was it like? Rules was an unknown term at the time, because many of the races involved the tribes that would come in from the hills, and for them the purses were quite large, and in many instances the whips were not being used on the horses, so it was pretty sporty. You learned about defense early on, and you moved you into another defense career. So the Navy, energy efficiency, renewable, what are you doing? Yeah, I think the Navy's story and the military writ large, and what we're doing with regard to energy, is a good story, but it's more than a story. It's fact-based. For me, as I took up my last position as the Chief of Naval Operations, it became apparent to me that we were living in different times, that there were changes that were taking place globally, that really needed a look, a different look at how we saw our future, and early on I established two task forces. I'm not a task force type of person. I prefer to make an organization work as opposed to band-aid ad hoc groups that can generate activity, maybe give you a sense that things are moving in the right direction, but there were two areas that I thought required a focus outside of the inertia of the institution itself. So I created two task force. One was on climate change, because I think if you look at what's happening to the planet, the changes that are taking place, it forecasts the challenges that we're going to have with resources, humanitarian issues, and changes in the nature of things, such as commerce. For example, when the Arctic opens for commerce in about 20 or 25 years, it fundamentally changes the trade routes of the planet. It opens up vast energy resources. And we haven't had an event like that since the end of the last Ice Age. It's a big deal. And I thought it needed some fresh thinking, some focused thinking, and some long-term planning as to what we intended as a Navy to do about it. With regard to energy, throughout my career there have been, as Bill Perry pointed out, fits and starts on our seriousness about energy. And that was reflected in the Navy, because you can imagine whenever the President says energy is important, it becomes obsessive for everybody in the government for a period of time. So I saw that, but in thinking back over my career, I saw the efforts of being pretty superficial. I often said that our energy initiative was to put a label over the light switch in every room that said turn off lights before leaving room. But it really didn't get to the big things. So I also looked at what the total operating costs would be for our Navy 20 years down the road. And when I looked at those, I realized that I was delivering to my successors many times removed, a Navy that would be unaffordable for the American people. So when you look at and you break that down, it really falls into two main categories. Energy costs, which are huge for the types of systems that we buy. And then the cost of people, which are continuing to grow. And so we were dealing with the people issues, but I really wanted a good focus on energy. And so we put in place the task force. We looked at what should we be doing. And when you look at the military, whether it's the Navy, the Army, the Marine Corps Air Force, you can't simply say we need a more energy efficient pick the service. And flush that down the drain and create a new one. So you have to look at it in terms of that which you already have, which in the case of the Navy, the capital investments we make last 35, 40 years. USS Enterprise, our first nuclear aircraft carrier, is on its last mission in Afghanistan as we speak. Its first mission was the Cuban Missile Crisis, 52 years of service. That's a good investment, I would say, for the country. And I would also say, from an energy standpoint, a huge investment, a good investment for the country. But you have to look at that which you have, and then that which you want to have in the future. And then in the case of all of the services, you look at that which goes forward, and that infrastructure that you keep behind to keep that machine working. So I kind of thought of it in four quadrants, the operational or the term of art we use as the tactical, and then the non-tactical, meaning all the infrastructure. And then you break it into the old and the new. And the investments are different for each one. With the old, we looked at how can we really make a difference in how much energy we're consuming. And we found, as you get into this, a large part of it, to Mitzi's point earlier, so much about driving change is really cultural. I maintain that the technical is easy, the policy is probably the hardest. And then the cultural is just a grinding effort that you have to put in. And find ways to change people's thinking about it. So the reason I mentioned that is some of the first comments were, well, if you do this on this ship, you're only going to save 2% in fuel costs over the lifetime. So you look at large fuel usage, you look at a long lifetime. 2% on every ship begins to add up to a big number. And so we started really looking at the math. Which oftentimes, I think, in our discussions within the government, we're so superficial, we talk in generalities and then we get very general guidance. You have to get into the details and really look at how you want to drive your investments. So we did things, for example, on very large ships, we put stern flaps. Much like you see the trim tabs on some of the power boats that buzz around the bay, it saves about 2% to 3% in fuel costs over the lifetime of the ship. We changed out lighting systems and went to LED lighting. We put in place continuous water washing of gas turbine engines. And you increase the efficiency of those engines. And so we started putting that into place. A little more boldly, we dropped in a hybrid drive into one of our large amphibious ships. Because warships need power and speed, but they don't need it all the time. But yet we design a power plant that has it available all the time. And your fuel consumption shows that. So by putting in the hybrid drive, for example, on this new ship that we built, made in voyage from the building yard in Mississippi to San Diego. The fuel cost was $1 million less than the previous ship of that class that had been built. We estimate that over the lifetime of a ship in current dollars, the hybrid drive is gonna save us about a quarter of a billion dollars per ship. Begins to add up. So those are some of the things that we were doing there. On the shore side or the non-tactical side, photovoltaics. The Navy runs the two largest government photovoltaic fields in the country. Wind, we have a wind farm in Guantanamo Bay where we have a very important naval base there, strategically important. Divorce that from your thinking about the detention facility. Guantanamo Bay is an important place for us in this hemisphere. But that's helpful. San Clemente Island off the coast here, we put wind in there to power the facilities that we have on that island. And we took advantage of some of the Recovery Act money to add more solar, more wind because I was, in my position, I was always, always looking for other people's money to spend. And so we could get that and then we could apply it. So those were some of the things that we did there. But then we also looked at where do we want to go in the future. And it was clear to us for operational reasons as well as for environmental reasons that we wanted to really move into biofuels. Because we wanted the flexibility, we wanted the cleanness. And again, this was something we hadn't done before. And we challenged ourselves a bit. We looked at the inventory that we had and said, okay, what would it take to prove all of this out? And we looked at one of our frontline fighter jets that we fly off of aircraft carriers. And the objective was set, we want to fly this airplane super sonically on biofuels. Excuse me, when the question was asked, how long would that take? It would take about two years to get there. That sounded like a good number, so I halved it. And told my staff that from this day, you have less than one year to fly a hornet on biofuels. We called it the green hornet. I got the one year, but I couldn't get the aviators to let me paint it green. They just dug in on that one. Shortly after that, we flew the Blue Angels Air Demonstration Team on biofuels. And if you have anyone that questions performance, watch that demonstration team in action, flying on biofuels, and you get a performance test, the likes of which you've never seen before. We then dropped it into our helicopters. We dropped it into our ships. And we set a goal that by 2012, that we would sale a green task group made up of ships and airplanes in our Navy. We have the benefit of being able to use some nuclear, because 17% of the Navy is nuclear with our submarines and aircraft carriers. That demonstration is taking place in Hawaii as we speak, as part of the largest international naval exercise in history, called Rim of the Pacific Exercise. That's now kicking off, and I might add for the first time the Russians are there with us. So it's a great opportunity not just for us to prove this concept, but also to let other countries who are there see the art of the possible. And perhaps see opportunities, but move them in that right direction. So those are some of the things that we've done. I think when you look at what the Air Force is doing, and the Air Force is the largest consumer of energy within the Department of Defense, they fully realize the need to become more energy efficient, which is what they are doing, both ashore and with their fleet. And they too are working the biofuel issue with us. The Army and Marine Corps are looking at other aspects of what needs to be done to become more efficient, to become lighter, and to become more expeditionary. And I highlight those three things for the entrepreneurs in the audience. Lighter, more efficient, and more distributed. The technologies that allow them to do that are going to become extraordinarily important. And we see it in some of the things that have been done in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as I mentioned at a previous conference here, combat has a way of focusing people. And when you want to talk about how to change a culture, combat can do that. The young man or woman that has to drive a fuel convoy, which means that every time they get in that car or in that truck and go outside the wire, that there is a probability that they will not come back. People become very serious about saving energy to minimize the number of convoys that have to run. To be able to put more distributed power in place so that remote outposts can subsist and sustain themselves on solar, maybe wind, maybe local biomass. So that you're not having to run the trucks out back and forth to that remote outpost. So those are areas that are going to be extraordinarily important as we go forward. So I hope I've touched on some things that may be of interest. Right, there's so many things to follow up on. Let me start with one. I have a fairly simple view of a ship, I'm sure it's much more complicated. But it's a combination of a large transport vehicle, a weapon system, and a hotel. Exactly. And those three sort of fit together and they use up the energy. I heard you talking more about what you can do for the system of the transport vehicle there. How about the hotel, the whole group of sailors who are there making decisions themselves in the hotel. And what are the things that you're doing in that function? And then later, and you can put in, is there something that's happening in the weapon system as well that will be a part of it? Thanks for that question. And I think that gets to areas of potential pursuit for those who are looking for some technology solutions. As Jim said, the ships are extraordinarily complex. And so you do have the problem of pushing it through the water. And navies from the beginning of time have relied on energy. They say an army moves on its stomach, a fleet moves on energy. I mean, even back to the Roman galleys, there was this exchange between two galley slaves when I got up in the morning. And one said to the other, good news and bad news for the day. Claudius, the good news is we're gonna get a two hour energy conservation break this morning. The bad news is the captain wants to water ski after lunch. So we're looking at how do you move it through the water? But then once you start getting into how people live, you're talking about lighting, you're talking about cooling, you're talking about preparing meals constantly on a ship. So how do you make things more efficient in that regard? Talked about going to LED, which brings down the energy cost markedly. Can you become more efficient in your heating and ventilation and air conditioning systems that you have on board? So we're looking at what's the best way to do that? How can you design a ship that maybe you don't have to heat and cool as much of it from the same power sources? And then once you get into what I call the working end of the ship and it doesn't make any difference if it's an amphibious ship that's responsible for putting the marines across the beach or our very advanced missile defense ships. Power is extraordinarily important. And how can you reduce the power that's consumed? How can you reduce the cooling that's required? Because with these large radars that we operate, you're generating a lot of heat. You have to remove that heat from the system in order for it to perform properly. I was just down in Australia where there was a fascinating company down there that took something that as I looked at it and recalled my days of having built a ship with similar capability. Large rooms and a vast amount of equipment required to provide the same detection capability out of a radar. And that had all been reduced down to about 20th of the size. So how can we take the technology that exists and bring it into the military and think differently about how we might be able to apply it? I think the other thing that comes into play during the period that we are about to enter and make no mistake about the fact that the budgets are going to get extraordinarily tight here in the coming, I'll say, decade. And that there will be, I believe, renewed interest. And how can we take cost out of what we do? And recall what I said about the old and the new. All too often everyone wants to look to the new. But I believe that there will be significant interest. And how can I go back and retrofit or change the systems that we have in the fleet today so that I can save money on energy, that I can save money perhaps on maintainability and reliability because I may not have to have as many people. And I think everyone here in the room would agree that people costs are where the real money is as well. So what technologies can be brought to bear to produce those types of savings in power and in lighting and heating and cooling? And simply in ways that people live on the ship. For example, if you were to go on board one of our older ships, you'd go in where they prepare all the meals and they're steam kettles and ovens. And there's a lot of energy going into what we call a galley. Whether it's in the form of thermal energy in the steam or electric power. If you go on one of our newer ships, we're moving to pre-prepared meals, which is a cultural shift, as you would expect for the Navy. But more efficient ovens to heat them quickly. So again, you're not using as much energy. So those are the types of things that I think would be extraordinarily helpful. You know, I want to make sure I get it right. Because listening to the many things you're doing, seems like there's really three goals that you've been pursuing at the bottom line. Goal one, you think moving in this direction will be part of a big trend that'll improve our national security. Goal two, you want to reduce the cost of running the Navy, from what it would have been otherwise. And then goal three, you want to make it a more effective fighting force. Absolutely. Is that right or did I miss any goals? Those are the three goals that really are driving everything. The only thing I would do, Jim, is I'd kind of reverse the last item you mentioned and move it to the first. Because at the end of the day, the American people want a Navy, a Marine Corps, an Air Force, an Army. That's an effective fighting force. And all too often, you can get in debates on many sides of a spectrum that we're trying to become efficient. And that we're sacrificing effectiveness for efficiency. And my point is that if you are efficient, you are more effective. If I can bring down power costs and power requirements, if I can put components in place that are smaller, take less power, that also opens up other opportunities within that container that we call a ship or a tank or a truck, whatever it may be. And so any time I get into the efficiency versus effectiveness discussion, I think it's important that they be fused together because they go forward together and they are not separate and distinct. So being effective is what it's all about. Thank you. Can we turn a little bit more to the shore facilities? Right. Because here you have, again, this combination, but you have physical facilities that's set up. And then you have people who are there on the basis who are doing things. Could you talk about some of the initiatives? I mean, one of the things I found very interesting is the experimental work that is changing the incentives for reduction of energy in living quarters by having financial incentives. Can you talk a little bit about the shore? I think all too often, as you look back over the government facilities, and I'll go even beyond the military facilities, that for almost everyone, energy was just not an issue. That was done by somebody else. Well, it wasn't until I was in a position in the Navy to check for it that I got this passionate interest in having to deliver on a more efficient basis. And part of our problem was that we didn't know exactly how much we were using, who was using it, and for what purpose it was being used. And so the idea of measuring and metering is a big deal because it allows us to get in and better understand what is going on and to drive the behavior and to drive the culture. Because people in the military tend to be competitive. They tend to be a little on the type A side. So when you inject competition or you are able to set measurable goals, you find that people in the military like that, they thrive on it. It's just a cultural thing. And so by doing that, we have been able to bring some costs down. And San Diego, which was the first port that we put individual ship meters on, commanding officers are now aware of how much they're using. And I would tell you that if Jim and I are together for a beer at the end of the day, and he tells me that he's using less energy than I am, chances are I'm going to say, well, watch this, and we'll go get into a little bit of a competition. But what we also have done is in our residential areas within the military, we've started a metering process there, which initially caused a little bit of a stir. Again, because of that culture of energy is something that I just get and use to one where our families now were having to pay attention. But we incentivized it. If they used over what the established average was, they paid. If they used under, they got a rebate. And in the first year where we did the pilot in Hawaii, we brought residential use down 10%. Maybe not a large number, but it had never moved before. And I would submit with the change in the power of behavior and uses that we now have in our homes that tends to drive it up, bring it down 10% one year. I thought that was a good thing. And we will take that and put it into other areas. The other thing that has been very helpful to us in our residential areas is this idea of a public-private venture that we entered into with our housing in the Navy. We have about 99% of our housing is in a public-private scheme where the Navy stepped out. We entered into 50-year leases with private companies in many instances because we would build a home at least cost because that's how the government likes to budget. When you buy something, you go for the least cost. The public-private ventures are more interested in the lifetime costs over the 50-year term of their lease. And there were cases in Hawaii when we signed the agreement transferring the houses into a public-private scheme. They brought bulldozers in and bulldozed them. And built new because over the life of that lease they had, it was cheaper for them and more profitable for them actually to go with less life cycle costs than lease costs to build. So we're seeing a transformation there. And oh, by the way, our people are now living in the best housing that the United States military has ever lived in because of that program. So those are just some of the initiatives that we have. I'm listening to a lot of long-term thinking. That's having upfront costs but long-term savings. You have an acquisition process and a set of rules that come from Congress. Is your acquisition process effective in dealing, particularly with a biofuels issue, effective in allowing you to life cycle costs to minimize rather than this first cost minimization? No. And did you expand? Yeah. As I alluded to when I was talking about the housing issue, we buy based on the cost of a unit. And there will be lip service given to, yeah, we think about life cycle costs, but in point of fact, that's not what goes on. And I believe that until we inject into our procurement system factors in the decision process that cause us to wait significantly the total ownership cost and the total ownership, and as a component of that total energy cost over the expected life of that system, then we're going to continue to make very short-sighted decisions on procurement. Again, we have to keep in mind that it's not just efficiency. At the end of the day, that which we buy has to go out and do the mission that we expect of it, which means going into dangerous places, which means being able to provide an offensive punch that is far superior to anything else that we might encounter. So we have to have that in the equation, but we must absolutely get energy, long-term energy costs into that equation. And as I also mentioned earlier, we don't need massive power plants in many of our systems to be in operation all the time. That's why the hybrid options to me were very attractive. But for example, we are now in the process of dropping a hybrid drive into one of our high-end combatant ships, one of our guided missile destroyers that does air defense and missile defense. But it was easier for us to drop that into an older ship because I didn't have to change a shipbuilding contract to drop a new configuration into a new ship. When I would argue that the best thing for me to be able to do would be to put this new technology, the cost savings in the ship that's going to be around long enough. So, you know, those are the sorts of things that we need more than a cookie-cutter approach to procurement to be able to factor that in. I would also submit that it's not just the service, but it goes up through the Department of Defense, through the administration, and then also into Congress, that we really need to think about energy in its entirety. There's an issue within the Navy now. I talked about demonstrating this green fleet, which is operating off Hawaii as we speak. The desire was also, by 2016, to deploy a group of ships like that for six months. Excuse me, included in there is a large purchase of biofuels. The House Armed Services Committee trumped it. Shut it off. The Senate, a little closer vote, a very close vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee, to stop or to not let the department use the money to buy that fuel. You could argue you've already demonstrated it. You're probably not going to shift the market, so don't use that money on fuel when you're going into some pretty constrained times. But I think a better solution would be to say, maybe not the best use of energy money. Let's take the money you were going to spend on that, and we have some R&D projects in energy that didn't make the cut. Not that they weren't important, but they just didn't make the cut as the budget was being formulated. Shift the money into R&D, and start moving out on some of the new technologies and new features that are going to be important in the future. And that has to happen all the way. And the cultural change that's required to do that is significant. And I would say that we need to look at energy, not in the budget lines that budgeteers tend to look at them in, whether it's procurement or operation or R&D. But we need to look at energy, break it down, and then keep that money focused in energy so that we can move ahead. I'm going to want to turn to all of you to join the conversation in a moment. So I just have a question or two, but before me, lighting yours as we go ahead. But there's a lot of people here in high-tech industries. How can they get involved in this initiative? They're good opportunities. I fully understand that dealing with the government can be a frustrating experience. But my point is, you know, don't get turned off by that. The focus that the services now have on energy is at an all-time high, in my opinion. The budgetary pressures that the services are going to be experiencing are going to cause them to look for every single way that they can become more effective and efficient. The services have set up offices that deal more exclusively with energy than they ever have in the existence of the Republic. And so, you know, look for those opportunities. If you have technology that can apply, whether it's on the shore infrastructure side or in mobile systems, whether they're airplanes or ships or vehicles, engage and just stay focused on that. Because I really do believe that we are at a point of time in the military where energy is something that there is and there has been a cultural change. And we have to take advantage of it because it's going to cycle. We've seen it cycle before. And the opportunity now is to move quickly, capitalize on it, bring in new technology, and then hopefully we'll be able to jump over that valley of death that is the death of all of us when it comes time to introducing new systems. If people here want to get involved and you mentioned how difficult it is sometimes dealing with the government, are there particular pitfalls that they should worry about as they're getting involved or is it just go for it? I'd say go for it and let your patients meter run a little higher than it normally does as you're dealing with the government. One of the things that I would also say, for those of you who are here, and I can't say enough about how impressed I was when I came to Hoover and the energy initiatives that are in place there through the Schultz-Stevensson Task Force and what was done by the task force to bring in the military and a little bit of shameless hocking here, as a result of one of those seminars that was held at Hoover that involved the Department of Defense, all of the services. There will soon be published by Hoover, a pamphlet called Powering the Armed Forces. It will be posted on the Hoover Energy Task Force website along with the transcript of all the discussions, which is a fairly significant amount of discussion. And in there, you will see how the services are viewing the challenges, what they are seeking in the way of solutions, whether it's the Navy looking at being able to move more quickly into biofuels. What I would call the ground forces priority of becoming a lighter because every soldier or Marine or any serviceman or woman who is running around the hills of Afghanistan or Iraq carries a lot of weight with them, much of which is there to provide power. The battery weight that a soldier carries or a Marine carries on a long patrol, multi-day patrol, is about 70 pounds in batteries per person. As an aside, I happened to be in Iraq. I went into one of the field hospitals and expected to see a lot of our wounded soldiers and Marines there. I saw a lot of people in the ward and I started asking, how are you doing? There were some nicks and cuts. But most of the people that were in there were for hernia operations. I'll let you figure out how they got them. Just the ability to, instead of carrying tens of pounds of batteries to slip a foldable solar panel in a pack makes a world of difference. Those are some areas that I think are going to be very important for the ground forces to be able to get in there, get lighter, be able to get into places and have power generated in such a way that they're more self-sustainable and you don't have the risky resupply going. Because the other thing that comes into it as well is, and this was another way of changing the culture, when we stopped talking about how much it costs to purchase fuel and we started talking about the fully burdened cost of getting that fuel to a ship in the North Arabian Sea or getting it to a remote outpost on a mountain in Afghanistan. The price changes markedly and it was a huge eye-opener. So as you look at energy initiatives that you may have, I would simply not look at the cost of that which you may wish to provide to the military, but rather look at how you are changing that fuel equation of fully burdened costs and survivability for the people that are using it because those factors will win an argument pretty powerfully, I believe. Thank you. It's time for questions. There's a lot of them. The first hand I saw was Jeff here. Thank you. Jeff Byron. Yeah. Good. I was just going to say everybody give their name first. Jeff Byron with the Clean Tech Open. Admiral Ruff had, first of all, thank you very much for your distinguished career. Thank you. In fact, it's somewhat of an honor, I think, to just be amongst, I think, some of the greatest public servants of our generation and I'd just like to acknowledge that. Thank you. It's really nice to meet you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And of course I didn't mean Jim Sweeney yet. Good. Admiral, you've kind of hinted that this Secretary Perry hinted at it when he talked about shale gas and what a game changer that is. Would you, and I know you spoke here a couple of weeks ago with regard to this issue. Could you talk a little bit about the potential significance of the exploration of oil using these new techniques drilling to shale oil? Given what your role has been and that is to keep the spigot open for this country in terms of access to oil, how might that change things going forward? Yeah, thanks for the question, Jeff. And I think that, you know, as I've looked at keeping the spigot open, the amount of energy that we draw, for example, from the Middle East is not as great as others. We actually pull more from the Gulf of Guinea than we do from the Middle East, which I think is important that we start thinking about energy in Africa. That's going to be an issue, I think, 10 or 15 years from now. But quite frankly, our presence in the Middle East, if you believe that it is about the energy source there, is really to enable that energy source to be used by Asia, particularly our allies who need the energy, Korea, Japan, and Australia, China, huge user as well, India, also very dependent on Gulf energy as it comes out. So until you start seeing things change in Asia, I still think that we're going to be the guarantor of the flows of energy in the Middle East because, you know, it may sound a bit arrogant, but nobody else can do it other than the United States. We are the only nation that has that global presence, that global capability to keep those flows going and to minimize any disruption. So I think we're there until you see the energy equation change in other parts of the world, or we are unable to do it because of the size of the fleet or the size of the military that we have. So I think we're going to be there for a while. That said, if the Arctic delivers in a way that it has the potential to when it begins to clear, in fact, energy will start coming out of the Arctic before the transportation routes are in. Will there be a change in the energy equation and will countries start pulling more from the Arctic and using it? China is extremely focused on the Arctic, even though it's not an Arctic nation for trade, but I would also submit that they're looking at the energy up there as well. So you'll see some changing patterns and will our presence diminish as a result of that, but that also means that there will likely be a need for us in the other Arctic nations to have a presence in the Arctic that we don't have now. So what may not be in the Gulf may shift around to the Arctic. I saw some questions. If I understand your question correctly, I would like to see our bases become, as I mentioned at a previous event here, partners with states, with communities on developing new ways of using and sharing that energy. I think you will also see the services moving more toward energy efficient vehicles to get to your line of work. We've already taken our recruiting command and started to put them into more energy efficient vehicles as they move around. So I think those are some of the things that may come into play. I'd like to take a minute and jump to something else that your question triggered because of the business that you're in, and that is we think in terms of more energy efficient vehicles. I think folks here would identify with that. But I believe that there's a game changing technology that will be very dependent on sources of safe, compact power. And those are underwater autonomous vehicles that need long duration, safe, compact power. If you believe that warfare has been changed by aerial drones, you haven't seen anything yet. The potential for those autonomous underwater vehicles in the area of science, the environment, and in defense is extraordinary. And the problem that we have had is not in the communications between and among the vehicles. It is not necessarily in the short term performance. It's all in the endurance. And so if you have any technologies that apply to safe because we'll carry these things in our submarines and in our ships, long endurance, high density, power, that is going to be an area that has not come up on the scope, but it will be a big deal, I would say, starting in about five years because there are some positive things that are happening. But that's an area where there are going to be some tremendous opportunities, not just in the defense area, but in the exploration and the scientific and the environmental areas of monitoring the water mass in different places. Thank you. It looks like my eyes are as good as they. It looks like Mukesh there. Thank you very much Mukesh. Admiral, this was a very good presentation and you have done a lot of that with the changes in the organization from technology, from policy, from culture. What advice would you give to the private sector, the industry, in how to adopt those changes and especially to all of us who are not yet writing the checks? Yeah. I think one of the things would be to bring industry and the government together because I would submit that if you sat in the meeting rooms of Washington as we're talking about energy, we hold you up as the example of how it's being done faster than we are. And so I think that a meeting of the minds would be good. I believe that there are many technologies that exist, particularly in this area, that the military is not aware of, that we'll have application. And I believe that initiatives that bring industry, technology, and the military together just to have a common conversation would be extraordinarily helpful. Let's see. In the yellow sweater there. Thank you. Meredith Owens, Alameda Municipal Power. As a utility, our largest customer is the Maritime Administration. They have nine ships. Also the Coast Guard is probably our second largest customer. Through our energy efficiency programs and services, we have just completed a retrofit of one maritime ship and we've started two more. On the one we just retrofitted, it was lighting, energy management control systems, motors, and operations. We estimate energy efficiency savings of 30% are greater on this. And we are doing individual metering. We're trying to get them to individual meter each ship. They move around. So to that end, you talked about the climate task force within the Navy. Admiral, do you see that task force generating shipbuilding codes that are concerned with energy efficiency? Number one, I've heard some Coast Guard newly commissioned ships are coming in with some old fluorescent lighting and incandescent lights. So that's a bit disheartening. And number two, do you see any policies coming up in the military requiring energy efficiency on existing facilities, particularly ships? Thanks for the question. I would say that that's all part of what the energy task force was identifying, getting at and what the Navy and the other services are mandating is to drive to the sorts of changes that you're talking about. But as I alluded to, we still haven't really cracked into adjusting the procurement codes because in many instances it's cheaper to not modify a contract and then retrofit the old technology, which you would say it doesn't make sense. That's what I kept saying. It doesn't make sense. And I think we have to get in there and really work with industry on ways to move forward. And I would also say that congressional support can be very helpful in allowing us to have a different view of how we procure and how we can change specifications. I think that in many instances, and this was something that one of our great leaders in the Navy had taken on going in and actually reducing the number of requirements in the shipbuilding procurement requirements to be able to get at some of these challenges. But I applaud what Marat is doing. The Coast Guard recently has put more of their procurement within the umbrella of the Navy because we have the folks that do that for a living. So I'm hopeful that you'll see some commonality coming out because I would submit that for Marat to pursue shipboard technology, Coast Guard to pursue shipboard technology, Navy to pursue shipboard technology, if we're doing it in three separate lanes, we're not doing it very effectively or efficiently. And that needs to be brought together. In the white shirt there. Thank you very much for the presentation. I'm Philip on Guggenberg. I work with SRI International, a technology powerhouse. We do a lot of work with the US government contract work. My question is around the role of robotics in increasing the efficacy and efficiency of the operations on ships. You of course mentioned already the UUAVs which is one solution. I'm also interested in how you look at robotics in terms of the larger ships and even the possibilities of significantly reducing the number of people on the ships in favor of teleoperated or autonomous robots. I think, for example, and it may not completely cover just the robotics area, but on our newest aircraft carrier we've taken 800 people off of that ship. In the new class of combatant ship that we are building called the Latoral Combat Ship, a ship of that tonnage in the past would have had about 250 people on it. We're now down to a crew of 40. They're very busy 40 people. I can tell you that much. But how you are able to do the heavy physical activity that required manpower and using automated systems, robotics, for example, we are in the Navy developing a drone, a UAV, that can land and take off from an aircraft carrier. When an airplane lands on an aircraft carrier now and you have to get it out of the landing pattern, which is relatively a small area of deck space, the pilot will be told where to go. How do you tell a drone where to taxi? Instead of a lot of people pushing it around, there's an umbilical that hooks in and drives it around with one person. So I think there are those issues. We are also, and I go back to the underwater world, looking at not just the vehicles that swim, but underwater robotics that crawl, that can be deposited by UAV or UUV, maybe picked up. And so this whole idea of robotics is going to be significant. And of course, again, I keep coming back to the combat experiences that we've had over the last 10 years. Robots that can perform logistics functions. Robots that can, in a small outpost, can do a lot of the heavy lifting of supplies that are dropped so you're not, you know, using up and applying your manpower to that. So I think, again, this takes me to the, you know, that we're in a period of time where new technologies are going to be much easier adopted. And so I would encourage initiatives that you may have, bringing them to the attention of the various services wherever they may fit in. Great. All good things must come to an end. And I want to thank our speaker. This hour went very, very fast. Thanks, Jim. Appreciate it. Thanks, Jerry. Thank you.