 Before I start, please bear with me. This is my first public speaking event that is not before a group of Marines, so I will try not to curse, grunt, growl, or bark. I make no promises about knife hands, however. We are told that we cannot predict the next war. No less a scholar than Sir Michael Howard advises that the best we can hope for is not to be too wrong. But Pete Ellis did it. He predicted a future war that he would not live to see. It's general outlines and how it would be fought down to the number of regiments the United States would need to take an obscure island in the vastness of the Pacific. That's what made him famous, but when I got the opportunity to research more into his ideas and works, I found so much more. In the four works by Ellis that we have, he identified a myriad of problems and, importantly, numerous solutions. What is striking about the four big problems he identified is that all four remain today. Unfortunately, solutions still elude us. The four problems that Pete Ellis tackled in his written works are these. First, how would we fight and win when conducting counterinsurgency operations? Second, how would we deal with command and control in modern warfare? Third, what is the role and purpose of the Marine Corps? And lastly, how can the United States fight and win a Pacific war? I don't think anyone will disagree with me. The questions remain about all four of these issues. Prior to doing the research for the book, I had no idea that Ellis wrote about counterinsurgency. So subsumed is his legacy by his prophetic ideas about World War II. I'm not sure that anyone else in the Marine Corps knew either. As I write in the book, Ellis' ideas on this wicked problem were ahead of all of the most well-known counterinsurgency theorists that we've been so enamored with lately. Kilcullen, Galula, even Mao. Ellis described the dynamic between insurgents and insurgencies and the local population. He recommended the prudent use of fire support advocated for the provision of clear and ethical strategic guidance from national authorities to the troops themselves and formulated a force structure designed for counterinsurgency operations. If only this article was dusted off prior to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe we would have struggled less than we have. His most important work during his life and soon after his death was, of course, advanced base operations in Micronesia. But I think the most important article for us today is this one about counterinsurgency, titled Bush Wars. It was published in 1921, but is clearly informed by Ellis' service in the Philippines from 1902 to 1903 and 1907 to 1911. He makes numerous points familiar to any veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, but I think the most important point he makes is the role of strategy in determining the morale and effectiveness of the troops on the ground. Unambiguous and clear strategic guidance directly from national authorities, especially the president, regarding the reasons the troops are fighting and the goals they are expected to strive for is a key element in the mind of soldiers. This actually occurred for the Philippines. President McKinley wrote a proclamation of occupation and issued it to the troops, giving them a clear idea of what they were supposed to be doing. Ellis recommends this and says that an ethical strategic goal will go far in preventing war crimes in the field. If a soldier has an ethical and state in mind, he may be more inclined to choose ethical means to achieve it. As many of you know, McKinley's proclamation did not prevent all such war crimes, but something is surely better than nothing. The nothing that we as practitioners receive for Afghanistan and Iraq is something that could have been easily fixed. It would cost the United States exactly nothing to produce a simple strategic statement of goals periodically updated as events warrant in the case of future wars. Such an effort would have gone farther in making us a strategically effective counter-insurgent force than more armor and more gargantuan fobs. Also remarkable is his youth and inexperience at the time he formulated these ideas. By the time he was sent as a Green Lieutenant to an already raging insurgency against the United States in the Philippines, he had received only basic training and education. By our standards today, he was untrained and uneducated, veritably plucked from his boyhood home in Ayukka, Kansas, and dropped off in Manila, tasked with securing the archipelago for the rising United States. Yet he got it. He understood what generals have struggled with in recent years. This brings me to the main point I want to make today. After his service in the Philippines and once his insight and intellect were recognized as above and beyond his peers, he was not left to languish along with his peers in billets below his abilities. He was sent to headquarters Marine Corps and from there selected to attend the Naval War College here as a newly minted captain. That is significant. Today a Marine officer cannot even dream of attending the resident course here at the Naval War College until he's a major. Indeed, most young captains today would probably struggle with the resident course. But Ellis not only excelled, he did so well that the Naval War College kept him on for another year as an instructor, along with another notable thinker, William Sims. This is unthinkable today. Even at a remove of 100 years, it's somewhat shocking. If it did occur today, such an officer would be maligned as different and denied promotion for going outside of the standard career path. Him or her and the senior officers responsible for the assignment may even be officially sanctioned. Fortunately, Ellis was not and the sharpening of his intellect here at the Naval War College early in his career would reap benefits for both the Marine Corps and the Navy. For it was here while a student and an instructor at the Naval War College that Pete Ellis worked out the role of the Marine Corps for the next century. In his student papers, Ellis worked out the thorny question of what a modern Marine Corps should do. This question was raised not by the Marine Corps but by the Navy, specifically Rear Admiral William Freeland Fuller prior to the outbreak of World War I. In response, Ellis envisioned an expeditionary Marine Corps, not relegated to the static defense of naval installations, a shore and the enforcement of discipline afloat, but one that would support the Navy in war as a landward extension of sea power. This was a codification of a sea change that had already occurred. When the nation needed troops, Marines were frequently called upon to fight alongside the Army in every climate place. But the institutionalization of the Marine Corps as an expeditionary fighting force had yet to occur. When it did occur, it was built on the work of Pete Ellis, conducted here at the Naval War College. When General Lejeune debuted his vision of the future of the Marine Corps in the very first article in the very first Marine Corps Gazette, he wrote a note that his ideas were based on the Naval War College lectures of Pete Ellis. While Ellis might have been called crazy, for those lectures, developed from the student papers which are included in 21st Century Ellis, were conducted against a backdrop of the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign. The Gallipoli Campaign convinced the Army War College of the time that amphibious assaults were impossible and would never occur again. Score one for the Navy. The origin of the expeditionary Marine Corps is significant for us today. Despite repeated assertions that the Marine Corps is getting less relevant, it continues to become more relevant. World War II proved that Ellis was right about amphibious assault and subsequent conflicts have continued to prove the need for a forward deployed, flexible, naval combined arms force. Despite the expectations of a return to a peacetime military, the Navy and the Marine Corps continues to deploy and geographic combatant commanders continue to demand more and more. There's no such thing as a peacetime Navy and Marine Corps. There's just war and there's ready for war. After leaving the Naval War College, Pete Ellis was destined for war. Before the Marine Corps could develop its more modern structure, it would have to join the fight on the battlefields of Europe alongside the Army. Both the Army and the Marine Corps were steeped in experience of fighting irregular insurgents and wars around the globe and yet were quickly ready for the most brutal industrial battlefields in history. As an aside, this fact should be remembered by those who think that because we have fought counterinsurgencies for a decade, we are somehow less ready to fight uniformed soldiers. General Lejeune attributed our success in the Great War directly to this experience in small wars. By most accounts, Pete Ellis did very well as a staff officer on the Western Front. One legend has it that he was drunk on the day of the San Miguel Offensive. When the American attack bogged down, someone, either General Lejeune, the division commander, or Colonel Neville, the brigade commander, called for Ellis to come to the front. When it was reported that Ellis was drunk, the speaker replied, Ellis drunk is better than anyone else around here sober. I can only hope that that description makes it on one of my fit reps someday. He did not however command, whether this was because of his drinking or the fact that he was too junior for a battalion command is unclear. He had last commanded a company in the Philippines. His article based on his experience in the Great War is reflective of his duties as a staff officer at the brigade level. In it, he details the problems of command and control in the fast-paced, highly kinetic combat that occurred once the stalemate on the Western Front was broken. The major problem was how to sift through a glut of information, sift for accuracy and applicability, and then turn that information into plans and orders. Where Ellis had to sift through information transferred through rudimentary radios, telephones, runners, dispatches, dogs, and even pigeons, today's commanders and staff officers have banks of computers, dozens of radios, and gargantuan staffs. The technology has changed, but the same problem remains, how to command and control in combat. Rather than train and educate our leaders to operate amidst ambiguity, we threw money at communications technology without a commensurate focus on command and control. We overload our staffs and commanders with information and various homework. Kalswitz's Frog of War concept was predicated on the lack of accurate information, but today we've created a monsoon of war, trading fog for a deluge of gathered data, hastily compiled reports, and bureaucratic sludge. The Department of Defense has spent billions of dollars on information technology to make the military more efficient. But once we acquired the technology, we just used it to keep doing the same old thing rather than develop new processes that exploit information technology. I'll give you an example. All official military messages in the Marine Corps, including Maher admins and Al Maher's and the like, are written in all capital letters. The Navy only recently stopped doing this. The reason for all caps is that it conserves memory when using a teletype machine to write and transmit the messages, so writing in all capital letters is more efficient. Now, I'm not sure there's anyone left in the military that even knows what a teletype machine is, but we still operate that way. There's a cell phone in my pocket right now that is communicating without our space, as I speak, but the Marine Corps is still typing messages as if it's sending telegrams to the Northwest Territories to update uniform regulations for cavalry units. I don't have a lot of hope that we can evolve at the rapid pace demanded by modern warfare when we have yet to master the shift key. We purchase technology, but we don't exploit it. Ellis' magnum opus was, of course, advanced base operations in Micronesia. This is where Ellis stepped beyond the ranks of average military analysts and intelligent. Most can dream up new operating concepts and organizations, but Ellis took his ideas on how war should be fought and how the Marine Corps should be organized to fight it and match it to an actual enemy. It formed not only the Marine Corps' contribution to war plan Orange, but also was the true impetus for the reorganization of the Marine Corps during the interwar period. If the legacy had ended here, it still would have been a major accomplishment, but the remarkable presence displayed by the document, written 20 years before Pearl Harbor, is what secured Ellis' place in Marine Corps legend. Ellis worked alone in a room at headquarters Marine Corps, slaving over the document to the detriment of his health. He did so much he had to be hospitalized in the middle of its creation. But in so doing, he predicted that Japan would open the door, open the war with a surprise attack. He predicted both the strategy that Japan would employ and the strategy that the United States would use to defeat it. He predicted individual islands that Japan would seize, and the number of troops the United States would use to seize them back. Other wars have been predicted, but perhaps none to the level of the detail achieved by Pete Ellis. It is a feat perhaps unmatched in history, and it is still relevant today. It is even cited in Expeditionary Force 21, the Marine Corps' most recent operational paper produced just last year, page 15 if you're interested. I mentioned in my opening that Ellis identified four problems that remain today. Obviously, the problem of Imperial Japan does not. While a conflict with China is not inevitable, nor is it even remotely desirable, it is a contingency for which we as American service members must prepare. The debate rages on between air-sea battle and offshore control as operational concepts and what the U.S. Army's role in such a conflict could and should be. I'm not going to wade into these conflicts here, but suffice to say that Ellis' deep study into the geography of the Pacific in terms of warfighting is excellent reading for those debates. Ellis understood that the key to control of the Pacific is control of its islands. China understands this lesson so well that they're building new islands to assert that control. What's not up for debate is the role of amphibious warfare in such a conflict. Not that you should take my word for it. Every major military power in the Pacific is currently expanding its amphibious capabilities, except the United States. We're downsizing. The geography of the Pacific has not changed since World War II, except for China's new islands, of course. Islands will still have to be seized and held by Marines and soldiers to support the Navy and the Air Force, and the Navy and the Air Force will be needed to get us there. Whether amphibious assaults into the teeth of enemy defenses will be as common as they were in World War II is debatable, but one way or the other will have to get boots on the sand. This is why the cancellation of the expeditionary fighting vehicle is such a liability. I'm not going to defend the program itself. It was mishandled and ended up being far too expensive to purchase. However, the ship-to-shore problem needs to be solved in some way. Now, the Navy has made great strides in expanding the options for getting troops and equipment ashore, but there is no reliable way to get ashore across the surface in the face of fire. Entire operations may rest on this capability, and the Agent AAV-7 cannot last forever or even much longer. In a case where ashore, limited in length by geography, is heavily defended by anti-air and anti-ship systems, an armored surface connector will be the sole option for the Joint Force to seize an objective. The cancellation of the EFV, therefore, is not just a problem for the Marine Corps, but the entire Joint Force. While Ellis can help us think about all of these problems, his story is one of innovation, and that is the most important part of the story. The entire 21st century series is a story of innovation, but it is important to understand what kind of innovation. Alfred Thayer Mahan did not invent steam power. William Sims did not invent naval gunnery. Pete Ellis did not invent amphibious operations. None of these men invented anything, but each of them figured out how and taught us about how to use the technology and how to fight in their own modern era. Each of these innovators made an impact, and, not coincidentally, passed through the halls of this very institution. Innovators win and traditionalists lose. A well-remembered lesson on this day, the 150th anniversary of Lee's surrender to Grant. But not every innovator enjoys the same success. I know this is a talk about Pete Ellis, but I want to talk about John Boyd for a while. Now, we've all heard the simplified version of his OODA loop that the Marine Corps uses, but few read his slide presentations. I want to quote a few lines. He who can generate many non-cooperative centers of gravity magnifies friction. Think about ISIS and its rapidly proliferating aligned terrorist groups, something analyst Aaron Zellin terms an archipelago of provinces. This is exactly what Boyd was talking about, with a non-cooperative centers of gravity. Boyd again. Mentally, we can isolate our adversaries by presenting them with ambiguous, deceptive, or novel situations. Now think Russia's war in Ukraine. Russia is up against a daunting foe in NATO, but they have acted with such ambiguity, deception, and seeming novelty that NATO can't even decide if there's a war or not. One more Boyd quote. Shape or influence a moral, mental, physical atmosphere that you are a part of so that we not only magnify our inner spirit and strength, but also influence potential adversaries and current adversaries, as well as the uncommitted. Now think China. They're using the same ambiguity and deception as Russia, but they have also changed the maps in their grade schools to depict the nine-dash line, the territory they are trying to establish control over in the South China seas. They're creating future generations empathetic towards their success during a seizure of territory while they're still children. I bring up Boyd in three examples of his ideas at work in the strategic environment today to demonstrate what we don't know. John Boyd was a U.S. Air Force officer. He was one of our guys. Yet China and Russia and ISIS get it and we don't. We look at what's happening in the world today and say it's new and it's different and it's hybrid, asymmetric, fourth-generation, non-closetsy, and political warfare. It's not. It's the same as it ever was. It only looks like special war if you don't know much about war. One of our innovators got it, but we ignored him. That's the innovation we need. Innovation isn't the next piece of gear pushed by Boeing or Northrop Grumman. It's people, ideas, and then technology in that order. In closing, the work of Pete Ellis is a gift that keeps on giving to his core, his military, and his nation. It's my hope that 21st century Ellis, by making his work more accessible than ever before, will not only help inform the debates of today, but also inspire another generation of leaders. Like Ellis, our young leaders should not be passive in the face of today's challenges, but should take them head on. We are not Pete Ellis. In most cases, we cannot predict the next war. We cannot predict the strategy or even the tactics we will need to employ. We cannot even predict the types of weapons and platforms that will be necessary. But we can predict, with 100% surety, the kind of people we will need to win any war. We will need innovators, free thinkers, and reformers, tacticians, and strategists. We need those that will close the gap between what the military thinks is going to happen and what is actually going to happen. They will have to do it quickly and boldly, and most likely while under fire, from both their front and their rear. The US military is, historically and presently, utterly inept at identifying such individuals, developing them and exploiting them. I use the word exploiting carefully. Many see placing some young officer in a billet above his or her rank as favoritism. What they ignore is that it is incumbent on the organization to utilize the talents of that officer for improvement and that doing so certainly benefits the individual, but just as surely offers a return on that investment. If favoritism will yield innovative and effective warfighting capabilities, then it is no vice. This was the case of Pete Ellis, as a young captain identified by the commandant of the Marine Corps himself and sent here to the Naval War College. This was a boon for the young and restless Ellis for sure. But it was here that he developed his ideas, codified them, and then carried them to the Fleet Marine Force and eventually to the Navy. The favoritism shown one young officer reap benefits for both branches of service and indeed the nation. For those senior officers and civil servants out there, I offer a challenge. I challenge each of you to identify such a person in your organization, officer enlisted or civilian. Help them along in their self-development and channel that intellectual energy into a productive direction. Tell them to think outside of their box and get out of their lane. There's another word for such favoritism, mentorship, and it is done far too rarely in the military. We cannot predict the next war, but there's probably someone out there who can. Find your Ellis. Thank you. What can you add to all the mystery that went about when he disappeared? My purpose in writing this book was actually not to solve the mystery of his possible assassination, but I can talk a little bit about it. It's covered very well in his biography that is published by the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps Association and Foundation. As a young, for a lieutenant colonel, he somehow managed to swing a job as an intelligence officer in the Pacific. Whether that was officially sanctioned or he was doing that on his own, we're not really sure, but he did travel to the Pacific. Japanese held islands in the Pacific in 1922 and 1923, at which point his health was seriously beginning to fade, and he was unfortunately a very inept spy, and the Japanese knew exactly what he was doing and exactly why he was there. And then one evening, the local Japanese secret police commander brought him a gift of two bottles of Jack Daniel's whiskey, which was his favorite, and the Japanese apparently knew, and he drank both bottles at night and he died before the morning. Whether that was on purpose, assassination via whiskey, or just a strange accident, intimidation tactics gone wrong, and we don't really know and we probably never will know. I do mention that in the book, but I don't cover it in great detail. Thank you. Yes, sir. I was in the Korean War, and we had LSDs. I was preparing us, and they were pretty firing out junk. Yes, sir. You know, you couldn't shut off fire man, you couldn't put a hydrostatic test on fire holding the half of it and burst, and it just, if we're going into another war, you'd better get your maintenance straight up in advance. And I agree, and our AV mechanics are very good, but most of them are 18, and most of the equipment that they're working on is 40 to 50 years old. There's only so much they can do, no matter how good of a mechanic they are. If that equipment is 40 years old, it's going to fall apart at some point. You know, I got a show on E.W. J.M.R. about six or eight years after the battle, and my respect for the Marine Corps is top. I met your commandant one day here. Yes, sir. I'm working on the same thing, because if you walk up along the beach there, you can feel the pain coming right out of the sand. It was weird. I haven't been yet, but my grandfather landed with the Fifth Division on the third day. So I've got E.W. J.M.R. in my blood. You should try to get there sometime. I definitely will. Yes, sir. His outlook for the island hopping campaign that eventually happened after December 41? He never termed it an island hopping campaign, but that's exactly what he was looking at. His advanced-based operations in Micronesia, which is included in the book, is an island-by-island assessment of what you can do as an amphibious military force on that island. So it became not just the base of the plan for War Plan Orange, it was an intelligence document. They could look at that and say the next island we're hopping to, the tides look like this, the vegetation is like this. He worked that all out in 1920 and 1921. He didn't recommend what islands should be taken in what order, but basically laid it all out on what we'd have to do once Japan kind of burst out of their area. And he did predict which the way Japan would go more than he did the way we would go. But I mentioned Guam in there a little bit, which you mentioned earlier before the talks there. He said that if you're going to take Guam, you're going to need four marine regiments. That's how many marine regiments went and took back Guam over 20 years later. How explicit was he in the surprise attack that the division of the Japanese might make? And did he foresee the carrier forces that would be so regimental in the Pacific War? He did not foresee the carrier force. He did foresee aerial combat and aerial operations. He actually applied to be a pilot before he came to Naval War College, and they rejected him as a pilot in order to send him here. This could have been a very different career, but he was very well aware of naval aviation and how important it was going to be. He didn't foresee that it was going to come from the ships themselves. When he predicted the Japanese surprise attack, I want to say he predicted four places where it would come, and Pearl Harbor was one of them. So he didn't actually predict Pearl Harbor, but he said they're going to open a surprise attack just like they did against Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. And here are the four places where I would attack if I was in. And Pearl Harbor was one of those four. Sir. You made some comments about technology and how little understood it is or how little applied wrong terminology, but how it's very difficult to get it applied by the Marine Corps, as an example, in general as a priority. Looking back to the beginning of World War I, World War II, we have technology that nobody had ever seen before, and we had a doctrine that was archaic. Yes, sir. The same thing is going on now. I think it's not as bad, but it could get that way. Take, for example, the media. The media is all pervasive now. It's everywhere you go. Even in war. And I don't think we, as a military, really accepted that. Our doctrine will still state that if you're not worried about collateral damage, then you could use this capability, this weapon in this area, that's never going to happen again. It's a fantasy. We're always going to have to worry about collateral damage in our image and how we look in the media. And other countries do too. I think Russia especially has figured out not just how to operate in those conditions, but to manipulate that, those conditions for their own advancement through their state-controlled media and various information warfare tactics like that, cyber operations. So we are still focused on dealing with the new information revolution without focusing on exploiting it, using it to our benefit. Yes, sir? Thinking along those lines now, no one has mentioned yet. To me, it's one of these potential things that you have to get a grasp on. We're looking in space now. We have satellites for information. We have nuclear submarines that can hide anywhere in the oceans around the world and can send off missiles. Yes, sir. And of course the Chinese and some of the other things that have this in it. And the capability of missiles relative to the cost, let's say, of aircraft carriers, you've got a whole new world out there of potential means of warfare beyond my capability, certainly with respect to it, but it's certainly very, very different from anything that we've known in the past. In other words, just like the nuclear weapons and then having it fall in the hands of someone like Syria or Iraq or Iran and so on, and then suddenly go wrong. And likewise, the Chinese can turn around and say, hey, you know, we can wipe out your naval fleet before you can get close enough to do anything about it. And I just wonder from the marine point of view, if you have any thoughts there or have any perspective on that. Yes, sir. Actually, it's very noticeable in ballistic missile defense. It's something that's big for us, but there's no ballistic missile offense for us. We've signed treaties that we're not going to use such weapons for various reasons, and that's probably a good idea, but some of our adversaries haven't, so we're going to have to figure out how to get within the envelope of their ballistic missile offense and use our smaller tactical level indirect fire capabilities to attack their missile systems. So, we've kind of developed a culture in the military where we want to stand off and fight them from a distance. But if they've got, they're rapidly getting weapons that out-distance ours, and we can't get weapons to out-distance them back because of the treaties, I won't disagree with those treaties, but it is what it is. We're going to have to get up close with personal with them I don't know that we're, as a military, that prepared to do that. We're still assuming... Alright, well you understand what I'm wondering about, and that's what I expressed it well. Maybe I went the wrong way with it. I'm artillery, I think about missiles a lot. They're building a new carrier down in Norfolk, and it's going to have a fleet of F-35 fighter planes. Yes. The ship is going to be able to stay out of the rocket range of the Chinese, so we can launch aircraft which have a range of, say, 4,000 miles. It depends on the objective, really. Those were drone controlled. Could the Chinese take over the drones and send them back? I'm not that familiar with cyber operations, but I will say I do think aviation is probably headed into an unmanned future. I mentioned I'm an artillery officer. An Air Force officer that I went to school with up in DC mentioned a quote that one of his mentors said about whether artillery or manned aviation is going to go away first. The quote is that when they wheel the last manned airplane into the Air and Space Museum, there will be artillery there to fire the final salute. That's well, yes, sir. That's my comment on that. Yes, sir. Who did you discover was a significant influence for P. Ellis, in other words, when you asked, when you kind of put forth a question, the next one, a mentor, who would have been his significant mentors, or who would have cultivated his ability to come over to that? His most active mentor during his life was General Lejeune. He basically shepherded him through his whole career. Every time General Lejeune was going to do something important, P. Ellis was there with him. When he was working at headquarters Marine Corps, P. Ellis would be a staff officer. When Lejeune was assigned to go to Europe and convince General Pershing that he needed Marines, he sent P. Ellis first, scout out the area, and then General Lejeune followed him and succeeded in convincing General Pershing to bring some Marines. When General Lejeune became commandant, Ellis wrote the Marine Corps contribution, the war plan orange, for General Lejeune. During his lifetime, that was his biggest influence. As for intellectual influence, reading through especially his Naval War College papers, there's unsurprisingly Alfred Thayer Mahon, a lot of his ideas, Carl von Klauswitz, and those were the two big theorists I could identify. Using the same language that they used, he used in his papers, and here it's obvious where that came from. So, sending the young man to Naval War College worked. Yes, sir? His soldiers into the Pacific Islands and the Japanese were there. What was his position at that time? Was he under a military order? Or were you indicating it was somewhat mysterious? It is. They found no orders sending him there. He was a Lieutenant Colonel working for General Lejeune and took a leave of absence. Lejeune was a commandant at the time. And the only paper trail we have left of that is he left an unsigned letter of resignation with General Lejeune in case something bad happened. So that's all we know. So whether Lejeune told him to go, whether it was his idea, we don't know. But he never came back. No. When Lejeune came back, my next question is where is he buried? Was he buried with any distinction? I actually don't know the answer to that question. I know he was repatriated, but I don't know if he's buried in a military center or back in Kansas. I want to say his family probably took charge of that and took him back to Kansas. John will probably know that and will Google it on my blog. It's the only hill in Kansas he's got. There are no more. That's a funny remark. Thank you. Yes, sir. You mentioned the necessity of innovative action or innovative thinking and the fostering of that concept. Is that a tangible activity that's going on now in the service or is at this point more of a glimmer in the eyes of a few? It's a little bit of both. I think you're right that it is a glimmer in the eyes of a few and probably a lot of more junior guys. Although there are definitely well known general officer innovators out there. The thing that's different these days is all these lower level innovators, especially company grade officers can communicate instantly through the internet. There are things like the Defense Entrepreneur Forum which is an organization that wants to drive innovation from inside the organization. It's organized by a few company grade officers and now field grade officers. There's other organizations like the Writers Guild of which I'm a co-founder that basically wants to connect everyone who wants to write about military affairs whether they're in the military or not. So I think our organization still makes innovation along traditional lines a little tough but those of us who want to innovate and want to think and want to work out new ways of doing things we're connecting in new ways getting together and I think that's going to bear a lot of fruit in the coming decades. Thank you. Yes sir. What was the timeframe referencing Pearl Harbor from his prediction to the time that it actually happened? He wrote his prediction. He first predicted the war with Japan here at the Naval War College in 1913. But he didn't lay out the big outlines of it. And then in 1921 he revisited the Pacific intellectually at the behest of the Comedian Marine Corps then General Lejeune and that's when he predicted the surprise attack the specific islands they would take. So that's that's a big chunk of time between 1921 he died in 1923 and then in 1941 the attack actually occurred. Yes sir. What were the other three locations that he indicated might be targets for surprise attacks? I don't remember off top of my head but they are in the book it is reprinted. The book is available downstairs. It certainly is. To answer the question he died on Palau he was cremated and his remains were brought back to Arlington section 54 site 3082. Wow. Modern technology. Yes. You being an artillery officer I knew a marine who was a fighting the Chinaman in Korea Do you sit in front of him? He's not that heavy even this guy would train guard. They would take a lot of artillery fire and they couldn't locate the source of the artillery so he took his camera he was a photographer among other things and he set it on time exposure at night he scribed a lock on a rock and he left that there all night and poured dawn and when he clicked it off then at dawn he clicked it out. He superimposed the daylight picture with the night picture and he figured out where each of the artillery pieces were I think he said there were 11 locations and there were old buildings and trash and stuff covering them so that night he got together with his troops and he showed them where he wanted to fire and he concentrated everything on target one and he shifted by midnight there was no return fire it was successful he was an ingenious marine that's the kind of innovation we need