 Thank you very much, Admiral. Like everyone else, I'd like to start off by saying it's a great honour and pleasure for me to be here participating in this great event. Of course it's always nice to come to Newport, but wherever I go around the world and speak to navies, I can't help but notice that they usually have the nicest bits of real estate around. I suppose it's something to do with the fact that sailors always get everywhere first. That's certainly true at Newport, especially when the weather is as nice as it is today. We've heard a lot about the international context, the nature of strategy, cyber issues. I guess my job today is to get us back to the maritime narrative for this last afternoon, setting some of the issues up for the panel that will be followed and moderated by Pete Schwartz. So, hang on. There we go. Alfred Thayer Mahon, who once graced this establishment, argued that sea power was the most important material element in the rise and fall of nations. Most of us here would probably agree that sea was and is important for five separate, if related reasons. First it's a stock resource of invaluable resources like oil, gas and fish. And in the future, who knows what else. And that's a really important point for the future. Second of course, the sea is the world's main, cheapest and usually safest means of transportation, of transporting goods and people around the world. These two attributes put together explain why it is that the maritime element in many national economies around the world from China to Colombia is dramatically rising. Third, rather like today's internet, it was a principal means for the acquisition and dissemination of information. And to some extent, it still is. Even now in the electronic age, 96% of our digital information is still transmitted through cables laid on the bottom of the sea. Further, many of the world's unknown unknowns are to be found at sea in fact. Fourth, a sea has been and remains a highly effective means of securing the capacity for military dominion and strategic manoeuvre. Lastly, and this is a relatively recent addition to the listening, the sea is a physical environment whose health is critical to the world's ecological well-being, not least through its complex relationship with climate change. And yet despite all of this, which seems so obvious to us, what I would call the maritime narrative today is faced by a number of significant challenges. And I think these need to be seriously addressed because on the face of it, they could undermine the apparent relative importance of sea power for the 21st century, which is something that we tend to take for granted. I would argue that these challenges fall into three broad categories and produce what I've called three different battles that need to be won. The first of these battles is the battle for maritime security. The second is the battle for access and the third, the battle for maritime sustainability. I aim to talk about each of these in turn using as a visual aid, not a PowerPoint presentation, but a number of pictures on the basis that one of these is probably worth a thousand words. My aim is not to provide answers, I wish I could. So much is to remind you of the issues and the questions that need to be thought about if not answered when dealing with sea power issues for the rest of the 21st century, which if you like are my challenge for the panel that follows. So let's start with the first of my battles, the battle for maritime security. And this is the first of my pictures. It will be familiar to many of you, I think, because it was produced here. I think it was anyway, but in the best academic traditions I stole it years ago and have made relentless use of it ever since. And I've done so because I think it's well worth dwelling on. What it shows, of course, is a map of the world that's produced by plotting the radio transmissions of ships over, I think, it was a week. And some things really stand out from this immediately. The first, of course, is the concentration of shipping in the northern hemisphere rather than the southern, which tells you quite a lot about what's happening. It picks out some of the major sea routes, obviously, particularly across the North Atlantic and the North Pacific. But somewhat less, obviously, with one or two exceptions. Australia, for example, and if you have a really good imagination, New Zealand squeezed in down the bottom left hand right hand corner here, it doesn't pick out nations. What it portrays is a system, a system that operates over and above the level of the nation-state. Now, I'm not for one moment saying that the nation-state doesn't matter, of course it does. But it has to be seen these days as a constituent of the system. And it's a system that underpins globalization, on which, for all its faults, the world's peace and prosperity generally depend. And the key constituent of that system is that, the merchant ship, that's the Emma Meirsk, of course. This is the essential constituent of the system. Its capacity to move goods around freely is absolutely critical to our present and our future. And so is the confidence that it can do so, because that underpins our financial system, our investments and our stock exchanges. But for all of this, good order at sea, or what is increasingly called these days maritime security, is a precondition. Without it, international trade and everything that depends on it would fall to pieces. Good order at sea is nonetheless threatened from various directions. Interstate conflict, such as the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, is probably the worst if possibly inadvertent threat that the system faces. But we should always remember, not least in the light of 9-11, that globalization itself has its deliberate and determined enemies. Maritime crime in its various forms, piracy, terrorism, drugs, arms and people trafficking, can also severely threaten the system. Directly by what can happen at sea or indirectly by virtue of its consequences on stability and the conditions for trade are sure. Finally, systemic pollution, unsustainable levels of resource extraction, catastrophic weather events also could potentially undermine the sea-based trading system. Now let me give you an example of the kind of threat that I think we're talking about here. This is a picture of the fishing fleet at Bajor in Hainan Island in China. It's a really extraordinary sight. You see these fishing boats stretching to the far horizon. There seems no end to them. And what we're looking at really is a community of interest, a community of interest of artisanal fishermen who are under desperate pressure. They're under pressure because the fish stocks that they rely on are rapidly depleting. They're under pressure because they're facing competition from other such communities all round the South China Sea. They're under pressure because they're facing the broader effects of industrial fishermen coming from mainland ports in China, Taiwan and elsewhere. So what they do is to push out constantly looking for new fishing grounds in a challenge sea. And this brings them up against other fishermen from other ports doing exactly the same thing. So there's daily confrontations between fleets of trawlers, fleets of coastguard vessels and increasingly warships confronting each other in a restricted area of sea. It is a disaster waiting to happen. And it's a disaster waiting to happen that's critical, especially for commercial shipping, particularly of China, Japan, Korea, as well as the United States and other countries. And it's also an area of sea that's of rising strategic importance for hard military reasons. It's worrying apropos of what we were talking about earlier today for another reason too, and that's a nationalist sentiment that it tends to feed. The netizens, the citizens now empowered by the social media are getting increasingly anxious to see their governments defend what they regard as their own nation, their own sovereignty, if you like. And all of this, the fact that these fishermen are freewheeling fishermen going where they want to, the fact that the governments are under pressure from local authorities like those in Hainan, they're under pressure from different constituencies of interest like the fishermen, is all kind of boxing in the freedom of governments and the ability of governments to keep control of what's happening, to keep control of events and affairs. And that, in a sensitive and delicate area like the South China Sea, is profoundly worrying. But there's another problem too at the same place. This is a picture of fishing tackle. Mountains and mountains and mountains of this stuff being mended by ladies that you can just about pick out in that black tent up there and a whole series of all of these, the support industry, if you like, for the fishing fleet. And what this implies and demonstrates really is the scale of the threat that the South China Sea faces as a physical environment because it suggests the scale of the fish take. The South China Sea is a highly vulnerable, semi-enclosed sea threatened by imminent environmental disaster. Because jurisdiction over it is so disputed, it largely lacks effective protection. And the absence of protection itself could provide consequences that could have a catastrophic effect on the region and indirectly on the world. So that's just one example of the kind of threat I'm talking about. And there are legions of such examples. So against such threats and challenges, the aim is not to control the sea as such, but to keep it safe for all forms of legitimate use. Now this is a very different form of sea control to the version normally associated with Mahal and Corbett. It's more about monitoring the sea, supervising the sea than it is about dominating it. It's about protecting the sea. It's more often aimed at non-state actors than at states. Navies and coast guards then, and other maritime stakeholders too, seek to defend the system by what they do at sea and from the sea. And this is an important point because it's not just a question of defending trade or fishing. It's about defending the conditions for trade, ashore, most obviously in the literals. At least to the extent that navies can do that in an era when more and more of the world's population is shifting to the heaving mega cities of the coast, the so-called crowding of the literal. Navies and coast guards and the other maritime stakeholders do this both locally in their own and neighbouring waters, what you might call the home game. And more distantly in responding to far off threats, usually in the company of others, the away game. But the analogy of a game shouldn't suggest that this is anything but a battle for maritime security. It's a battle that must be won insofar as it can be won at any one time because it is so important. And winning it requires the kind of joined up ocean strategy at governmental level, only slowly being developed around the world. The demands of the battle in one area, like the Arctic, may be fundamentally different from the demands of, let's say, the Gulf of Guinea. There is no one size fits all solution to the problem. The sheer diversity of the forms that this battle can take is a substantial problem. Nor even here in the hallowed halls of Newport should we forget that navies should preserve a fitting sense of humility, for there are many things that they cannot do, even in the sphere of wider maritime security. Of Somalia, for instance, they have shown that they can deal with piracy with the symptoms of the problem, in other words, but they are much less capable of dealing with its causes. But this humility shouldn't be overdone, though, for the naval contribution is vital. The sheer comprehensiveness of the requirement, though, is a challenge to any purely military service. A consequent problem here, I think, is conceptual. Often countries do have broad definitions of what they want in terms of good order at sea maritime security, and often a set of tactical procedures. What they often don't have is a strategy for maritime security. That says not much conceptual thinking, not much examination of some of the key differences between a maritime security operation and war fighting ones. For instance, in dealing with people or drug smugglers, it's probably, almost certainly, inappropriate even to think about achieving victory as an objective. And that for a military service with conventional thinking is extremely hard to do. Instead, in the maritime security battles, it's much more a question of containing or managing a problem, probably indefinitely, and this too is an extremely hard objective for military people to accept. The last challenge they face in the battle for maritime security is that it calls for a range of procedures, activities, skill sets, equipment, weaponry and platforms that can be very different from those of what many in many navies would regard as their real business preparation for war fighting. And this, therefore, raises extremely difficult dilemmas of choice, especially in times of economic constraint, either within the navy, if the Coast Guard responsibility is part of its responsibility, or at governmental level, if it isn't. And this really gets us to the second battle, the more familiar one, as far as most navies are concerned, that is all about seeking strategic dominance and the capacity for military manoeuvre. This boils down to a battle for access. The real justification for navies is that they prevent war by being able to show they can fight it. Sea whist, packum, parabellum, after all. This surely is their top priority. The biggest threat to this traditional function, and indeed to the more muscular forms of the battle for maritime security that I've already talked about, is the rise these days of land and sea-based capabilities for denial. Some of these would seem to pose such military technical or political strategic challenges to even the strongest naval powers as to raise doubts about the extent to which they can go on defending their national interests, and perhaps a system more widely through being able to maintain a forward's presence and the capacity to project even limited power ashore. In British maritime doctrine, sea denial is defined as, and I'm quoting, the condition short of full-scale sea control that exists when an opponent is prevented from using a sea area for his purposes. In this way, a markedly inferior force can successfully thwart a superior force. Recently, of course, the concept of sea denial has been relabeled, anti-access area denial A2AD. But as a concept, it's not in any way new. But some, though, would argue that recent developments, technical, political and legal, have made it more transformative in effect than ever before, suggesting in fact that it could now profoundly shift the balance between big ships and small ones, surface ships and submarines, aircraft and missiles, forces at sea compared to forces on land, and raise doubts about the operational viability of forward deployed forces in areas of contention. All of this, it could be argued, threatens the strategic utility of navies because of the importance of access to their function. Their strategic value is bound up with the capacity to use the sea as the world's greatest manoeuvre space. Sea control, or at least the capacity to keep the sea even in the face of opposition, is a precondition for the maintenance of that forward presence which provides the ability to monitor the maritime domain, to sustain political relationships with local countries in the area of concern, and if necessary to project power ashore to some degree. To deal with this challenge all around the world, navies are looking at various ways of countering the alleged rise of sea denial capabilities, investigating it and substantively investing in it. In the United States, but elsewhere too, this has provoked debate about the so-called air-sea battle, or air-sea coordination, as it is rather less snappily known in the UK, as a means of assuring access in the seemingly new context. While you've all seen pictures like this, we all know what we're talking about. This is a hugely complex situation that goes across all five of the domains, and there's layers of battle, A2AD versus ASB. What seems to be involved in this kind of conception of the future is a contest in long-range precision strike between two systems that each comprise a multitude of components linked together electronically with levels of efficiency that make the operational whole a good deal more effective than the sum of its parts. Clearly the outcome of any such contest for access, for real, would be highly scenario dependent and would remain extremely hard to call. Geography, the relative military technical capabilities of both sides, the contending powers, and the extent to which they divide their investments between sea control or sea denial, and the effect of the international context would all have a major role to play. And in the light of what we've already heard this morning, systems of systems are especially vulnerable to cyber attack, and the sheer unpredictability of its effect would need to be factored into the equation as well. There's another big cause of uncertainty that makes it very difficult to come to a verdict about the balance between sea denial and sea control in the 21st century. Pre-emptif or reactive attacks on assets ashore often seem to be part of the planning assumption in the debate that both sides use. Either the access denier will use land-based missiles or aircraft to target incoming naval forces, or the access assertor will target those assets to reduce their effect, possibly preemptively. That being so, the prospect of an initial clash at sea escalating dramatically into a full scale war between major players would seem to be high, and so would surely deter its extended use for all but the direst of contingencies. Hence the willingness of the two sides actually to employ all their capabilities and to take the operational risk of unwanted escalation also becomes a major cause of uncertainty. Maybe this uncertainty makes for good deterrence, question mark discussed. Either way, what could well result would be a competition in risk taking where everything is uncertain. But of course in most cases a major navy would probably be able to regard such threats to access as being containable, especially when it wasn't up against high end and militarily capable adversaries who were able to provide capable and sustained incredible resistance. Even so the possibility of significant change in the defensive offensive, denial control balances does need to be taken very seriously. This is partly because of the enormous consequences for the established way of doing things at sea were it to be true. It's partly because a professional determination to produce ships that are nonetheless capable of going into harm's way in order to do their business is far more likely to increase costs than to reduce them in times that are for many navies budgetarily constrained. And it's partly because such a shift is likely to reduce the willingness of politicians and diplomats around the world to take the risks of even necessary interventions. The more discretionary the commitment is seen to be the less likely that operational risks will be taken. And this usefully demonstrates the fuzziness of the distinctions between the military technical and the political strategic dimensions of the battle for access, 21st century seaper and maritime strategy. As so often the Chinese have a word for it, or a phrase at any rate, the three warfare's. There is likely to be a very substantial, even dominating, political strategic aspect to the battle for access. Some of this will be what is sometimes called lawfare, using or defeating interpretations of international law as a weapon against perceived outsiders, something I'll come back to later. In all probability there will be a competitive campaign of strategic communications, of political engagement with allies, partners and bystanders in the region that's intended to persuade them that the presence of intervening forces is helpful or not, depending on who's doing it. It will also likely involve efforts to present the military technical threat to access as being more or less, depending on who is conducting it, than it probably is. So there are crucial legal, political and psychological aspects to the battle for access, as well as a host of military technical ones. There's nothing new about any of this either. But such is a seductive lure of new technology that we sometimes need to be reminded that there's much more to military effectiveness than things that go bang. Securing and maintaining access to the world ocean is so important, however, that no aspect of the case should be neglected. Well, amateurs like me talk strategy. Professionals like you talk logistics. This brings me to the third battle, the one for maritime sustainability. The need, if you like, to maintain the advantages of sea power and to be able to enjoy them for the long run. There seem to be four, maybe five key elements to this. The first is increasing operational efficiency. The CNO recently released some interesting figures to the effect that the US Navy currently has 104 ships operational, out of a total of 285. This is about the same number as it used to maintain 20 years ago when the US Navy was around 400 ships. This suggests that up to a point you can do more with less. Up to a point. The strength of a Navy isn't, of course, simply measured by how many ships it has, or even how good they are. Instead, it's a function of how its forces compare to the commitments it has when compared to the equivalent balance characteristic of other countries. Although most estimates suggest that globally US naval dominance is unlikely to be overset in the near future, or even the foreseeable future, the gap will be appreciably narrower in the future in some regions of the world. This calls for serious thinking about strategic priorities, about force levels, about how to maintain them and to make the best use of them. The second element to ensuring sustainability is to make the best use of other key stakeholders in sea power. This conference is about sea power and maritime strategy, not just navies, which is simply a subset of that. Long-term sustainability calls again for an ocean's policy that knits together the interests and the contribution of all maritime stakeholders. The Coast Guard, the amphibious community, parts of the other services, the city, and importantly, industry. The evidence suggests wherever you look at it around the world that it takes government policy and drive to overcome sectional interest. It's not enough simply to leave all of this to the coalescence of resources, something more substantial needs to be done to produce the kind of maritime teamwork that the future requires. This in turn requires that coherence is built across and between government departments and agencies. And it also bears repeating that the use of the word maritime implies the involvement of all the domains of cyber as well as the sea, especially perhaps these days of cyber. You only have to think of the consequences of adversaries being able to take down the operating systems of a merchant ship, or a warship even, or even a networked force to see the possible consequences of inadequate co-ordination across the domains. This all seems to call for a multi-agency maritime risk assessment procedure that is proactive rather than reactive, that is tasked to think ahead generically rather than simply to respond to the latest challenge. One problem here though is that in constructing such multi-agency and or multinational alliances of interest it's hard to avoid creating large lumbering organisations that take time to get their acts together to decide on their course of action or to get their domestic legislation in order. Compared to this, the small freewheeling organisations characteristics of drugs cartels or people smuggling gangs can be much more agile, constantly forcing enforcement agencies on to the back foot and into reactive mode, winning the battles in the Uda loop, if you like. This is a real issue. Thirdly, one important advantage enjoyed by USC Power is that 18 of the world's other top 20 navies are allies or partners at least to some degree of the United States. Continuing this happy state of affairs and sustainability will call for some diplomatic finesse on the part of the United States. The trouble with allies, as Winston Churchill once said, is that sometimes they have views of their own. On the one hand, the support of the 18 and indeed of all the other smaller fry as well will therefore constantly need to be worked for. On the other hand, the United States will want neither to offer such support as might encourage destabilising adventurism nor to make unnecessary enemies of the other two major naval players. Nor can the United States, as the global player, afford to favour one group of allies or partners at the expense of neglecting others. All this makes that concentration of force that Mahan advocated so strongly very difficult to achieve. Fourthly, there is a need for conceptual resilience in order to ensure that the maritime narrative can withstand the many challenges thrown at it, such as the alleged rise of sea denial capabilities, all the demands of maritime security that I've just been talking about. Neither of these issues nor a welter of other contemporary concerns have been much discussed by the classical masters, Mahan and Corbyn. There are many such issues to be thought about. One of the real problems with strategy making though is that strategies and doctrinal statements often do little more than articulate the desired ends of policy. They do the clasavitzian thing of applying means to ends or operationalising policy and strategy, if you like. Let me end with just one example of this and I've already signed posted earlier on, the freedom of navigation. Mahan famously likened the sea to a wide common over which men may pass in all directions. This is a very interesting analogy. Once upon a time, common used to be large areas of non-owned land that people could use for the common benefit. Poor people would keep their crops and their animals on it for your charge. But gradually over the days in England, over the years in England, these commons got enclosed. People started putting out fences on them until they dwindled to this kind of thing, which is the common of the village next to mine in the UK. This process of enclosure, this notion of putting fences on the common land, caused huge anguish and social distress. It was partly responsible for the English Civil War of the 17th century, but the process nonetheless went on. My point really is that the memory of all of this goes deep in the Anglo-American psyche. It's a cultural thing as well as a legal concept, the notion of the commons without fences. But although all countries subscribe to the freedom of the seas in general, a disturbing number including US allies and partners, I might say, in practice imposed restraints on it. Even the United States occasionally talks about the sea as an ungoverned space as though it shouldn't be. The practical restriction can come about through claiming illegitimate baselines from which sea areas are calculated by excessive claims or by seeking to limit the freedom of foreign warships to operate in exclusive economic zones. This latter is a particular problem. To defend the global commons in short, the argument needs to be better articulated and better planned for primarily by the maritime powers. I would argue that Mahan and Corwit don't offer much help. It's something we really need to think about. Such a strategy you could say then needs to be operationalised. By a designed program that puts it into effect that are designed, if you like, to produce the desired end state, which is a commons open for the legitimate use of all. This isn't just a question of conducting freedom of navigation exercises. It's largely much more a question that says that the freedom of navigation for warships, shall we say, is not just a legal right that is in the interests of global stability. This is just one example of the need to do some fresh thinking about maritime strategy and how best to put it into effect for the 21st century. There are many others. Well, in conclusion, it's been well said that if you want to understand sea power, you need a bigger map to take in the bigger picture because that's always what justifies it. But despite everything I said at the beginning of this talk in its latest Gallup Poll survey, the Washington Times found that the US Navy was regarded as the least important of the four main military services. Ladies and gentlemen, we all have work to do in selling the sea. To my mind at least there is little doubt that in the rest of this century sea power will be at least as important as it always has been and arguably much more. The only real question though is who's sea power it will be and that partly depends on you. Thank you very much. We have a few minutes so if you'd like to engage in comments, questions of what President Gorbachev in happier days used to call socialist criticism. Now's your chance. Yeah. A threatened question from yesterday. Professor Till, thank you very much for being here. Some would argue that the high water point of maritime strategy, naval strategy, was John Layman and Jim Watkins' maritime strategy of the 1980s. A question for you, do you agree with that and so why and if you don't, why? I do and I don't. I'm an academic. I can see both sides of the argument. I do in the sense that, no I don't in the sense that it didn't articulate means and it didn't identify how the means were to be sustained in any great detail to the level that would be helpful to defence planners. So in that sense I think you could argue that it wasn't a really highly effective strategy. It's more a policy statement, if you like. But I do agree that it was a high water market for several reasons. And the first was that it articulated a general sense of what the navy was for in the conditions that applied in the 1980s. That most people, most people, yes I think most people found at least interesting if not wholly convincing. It was also a nicely articulated strategy in the sense that it had different target audiences and within one document was able to transmit three different messages. The one message was to of course the Soviet Union of deterrence, that the waters of northern Europe and the northeast Asia, northeast Pacific were not to be regarded in any sense as the Soviet Union's own backyard from which it would be clear of all interference and threaten and so on and so forth. So this was an act of deterrence, if you like, to the Soviet Union. It was also an act of reassurance to the United States' forward allies in Europe and in the Far East and the far end of the Mediterranean that wherever their position was they would not be regarded, if you like, as forward of the line. I think there was an implicit message in it as well in terms of less of what was said but more in terms of how it was operationalised. That this was an occasional presence, another continuous presence, and so there was an element of reassurance for the Soviet Union as well. That this wasn't, if you like, an overtly aggressive move that was designed, if you like, to initiate an attack out of the blue or anything of that sort. Nonetheless, it contained within it the inevitability for the Soviet Union that they would have to respond in order to respond at a time when it was also famously responding to the Star Wars initiative and all sorts of other military technical challenges that it thought the United States was posing it. President Gorbachev's mind did considerable damage to the Soviet economy and played a part in bringing about the end of the Cold War. For all of those reasons, I think it had a set of objectives. You could more or less deduce how they would be put into effect. In places like this, the detailed planning on whether and when certain acts to operationalise a strategy could be carried out were being discussed in private, as they probably should have been. I think it was also important, as being, if you like, the first step of convergence in coming up with a strategy to which the US Allies and the other services could all play a significant role. In all of those ways, I think there were good things. It's a clarity of vision. It's the idea of coming up with a narrative, if you like, that even the Navy's enemies need to take seriously. I think it was a piece of the... It was something that was really effective, is what I'm trying to say. Dead silence? I can't see anybody else? Oh, yes, run over there, sorry. A questioner had, when you showed the container ship, it was a bunch of containers on it. How navy ships, the US Navy ships, they picked these things up in containers in shallow water, you know, 100 feet, 150 feet. In the latest I heard, say, ignore it. I ignore it. It's not in the Navy apparently, it's politics. I'm not sure I understood the question. Could you say it again? Could you say it again? I didn't quite understand the point you were making. The container ship that you showed on your slide, sometimes some of those containers fall off from the ship. We pick up these containers in shallow water, our Navy ships, tell the local people what it is. I guess they dive after them and I don't know what happens. Specifically we were told to ignore it, by our management, by the Navy management. Your guess is better than mine. I really don't know. But I think it's very difficult to underrate the importance of the appearance of the container and the large container ship in transforming the way that the world's shipping patterns are shifting towards the notion of hub ports, which can take these sort of huge ships. The way that it, if you like, concentrates vulnerabilities in one geographic area. Much more than used to be in the case of the old days of commercial shipping and even smaller containerships. We're hearing a lot these days about threats to what we call the open seas, particularly in the South China Sea. You see that as requiring more of the US presence in that area to preserve the freedom of the seas, if you will. Do you think that territorial claims made by the Chinese are something that we need to take action to dispute more than international courts, but more directly? Let me distinguish between the Chinese claims and actions in support of the claims. The United States takes a position, which I think is the right and proper one, that it takes no position on who owns what in the South China Sea. I think, in many ways, it's easy to underestimate what the Chinese would regard as the validity of their claims. The claims of Vietnam and China are disputable. I'm not a maritime lawyer. I don't have a definite view on this nor the most maritime lawyers, actually. There are two very interesting issues between China and Vietnam that go back to historical entitlement. The claim between China and the Philippines is also extremely complicated, though somewhat less complicated. I think the United States is very wise not to get involved in actually saying that one claim is just and another claim is not. For that reason, I think it's constant denials of taking such a position are very important, and it's very important that it should carry on doing that. Nonetheless, there's a difference between having a claim and the way you seek to process it, or progress it, I should say. I would say that even though over this oil rig business, for example, between Vietnam and China at the moment, leaving aside the validity of the claims of both claimants, the Chinese were wrong to put an oil rig into a disputed area of sea surrounded by a ring of coastguard vessels and fishing trawlers with an outer ring of naval vessels outside because that was in violation of the 2002 declaration of conduct to my mind, it was anyway, that they signed with all the other claimants back in 2002. That said, leaving aside the question of sovereignty, we all agree not to do things which are going to make the situation worse. Sending that oil rig into waters that the Vietnamese rightly or wrongly regarded as theirs I think was a gratuitous violation of the 2002 agreement, which I think does raise the question about the extent to which it ever can be operationalised. Now, your question was about what should the US do about it. In particular, in that regard, what to do with anything about the oil rig? Anything about... What if anything to do about the oil rig? Yeah, yeah. Well, frankly, I don't think the United States should do anything about the oil rig, but I think it should maintain what lawyers call a watching brief and be known to do so. It makes clear that its position is the defence of freedom of navigation. And I think it should continue to make clear its view that freedom of navigation applies in the exclusive economic zone as far as warships are concerned. I think freedom of navigation exercise is conducted with some finesse or need to be necessary. But I think they should be sustained by that broader argument that I was trying to make that you have to get over the idea, and so do the UK, Australia and other countries of like mind, that it's important for world stability that ships do have this capacity to operate forwards. And in fact, I think the Chinese are actually coming round to this point of view anyway. I can see at the Shangri-La dialogue last year, not the last one, the one last year, they admitted for the first time in public uniform people saying that they engage in military surveillance operations in the USAZ. We all know they do, but saying so in public was very interesting. And they said that this was reciprocal and therefore okay. More interestingly, some of them at least seem to be distinguishing between what they call tactical military surveillance and strategic military surveillance in the exclusive economic zone. The strategic military surveillance or military data gathering, as the British call it, it's just keeping a general eye on things. And that's okay, seems to be. Tactical military surveillance is the kind of battlefield surveillance you do immediately before an attack. That's offensive, that's not okay. And that seems to be an interesting development. I've heard people arguing that this year. No, sorry, at the end of last year in Beijing. So that might be an indication that the Chinese are actually coming round to the standard Western view about freedom of navigation. The point is that the focus should be on freedom of navigation and open seas and not the United States shouldn't be concerned about resource allocation in the South China Sea or anywhere else in the way we have directed. That's exactly my point. It shouldn't be concerned about it because I don't think the United States is in a position to do anything about it that has any legal standing. Nor is any other outside country, I might say. So I don't think it should seek to do that. Yeah. I'm afraid I'm being called.