 Thank you, Mike, for that very kind introduction. I am a member of the CNO executive panel. It was invited by Admiral Richardson. And one of the first thing I asked the Admiral was, are there any kind of special projects we could work on? And he said, well, yeah, you come to me, you tell me. And I said, well, is there any project that's reviewing the Naval Academy's football program? Because I'd like to become involved in anything that takes a look at that, so I could run up the road to West Point. Janine, Secretary Davidson, whom I've known for many years, as she said, very, very hard act to follow. I'm going to do my best, but I have to tell you I was a bit discouraged, because when I found out that Secretary Davidson was speaking, I called up here to talk to Mike and said, what's the secretary going to talk about? And so we talked a little bit about that. And I said, well, last time I spoke here, I didn't use slides. And he said, well, she's not using slides. I said, well, I won't use slides either. And then Mike said, yeah, no, you better use slides. And then I said, well, is she telling any jokes or anything, you warm up? And he said, no. And I said, well, I won't tell any either. He said, yeah, no, you better bring some jokes with you. So I figure, well, I'm the CNO executive panel. They said, if you ever did any help, so I called up Captain Morris and said, anything in the CNO joke file. And he said, for you. And I said, yeah. And he said, well, CNO is a submarine or he's a nuke. He always got this joke file or physics jokes. So I said, well, give me some and I'll take them up. And he said, OK, yeah, I guess we could use you as sort of the guinea pig. But I really am terrible at telling jokes. So when we get to the Q&A, if you want to hear the physics jokes, then I will tell them, especially if you have a hard question that might give me some difficulty. But other than that, I'm actually the warm up act for the great speakers you're going to have here today and tomorrow. And so what I thought I'd do is just give you some impressions, some thoughts about strategy that might help you as you listen to some of these other distinguished speakers. So let's see if this actually works, yeah. So I'm going to talk about, this is sort of the roadmap, a little bit about what is strategy, why is strategy difficult, some characteristics of good strategy, and some strategy sins, as I call them. And then finally, talking about the fact that as Secretary Davidson said, the threat chart is going like this, and the resource chart is kind of going like that right now, what are some ways that we can sort of bridge that gap? And hopefully, as I said, that'll set you up for the good presentations that follow. So what is strategy? Hope you can read this well enough. I put the font as big as I could. But these are some distinguished strategists who basically give you the fundamental definition of strategy. Strategy is how you apply the means at hand to achieve the ends that you seek. And you have everybody from Richard Betts all the way down to the official Defense Department definition that tells you that. Now that tells you something, but it doesn't tell you a lot. And my colleague Barry Watson and I, but they're also Richard Rimmelt, who advises or advise people like Steve Jobs on strategy. General Smith, the UK, they talk about strategy and they add something to it. And they say that at the core of strategy, really the core of strategy is about identifying, developing, and exploiting areas of advantage. And we might add to that by identifying those advantages that we have that are becoming wasting assets. And doing this all in a very dynamic environment where your adversaries are trying to do the same. And if you're a great power, like the United States, you have multiple adversaries. So you're competing against a range of competitors, not just one or two. But again, I think, and I'm going to come back to this, the core of strategy in my estimation is identifying, developing, and exploiting new sources of advantage. Why is strategy hard? Colin Gray says, it's so difficult, it's remarkable that we ever actually get strategy right. So that's pretty discouraging for somebody like me who tries to do strategy. The great Jimmy Dugan. You remember Jimmy Dugan? He was head of the Rockford Peaches. Jimmy said, it's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great. And indeed, strategy is hard. And for these reasons, the situation is dynamic. It's always changing. You're trying to deal with something that's not static, but it's a moving train. Second, there's so many variables. Secretary Davidson just mentioned a plate full. Now, we didn't even get into the economic and diplomatic aspects of strategy in any great detail. It's not a moonshot. Your enemy is actively trying to frustrate you. You're not just trying to deal with overcoming physics that are well known to get to the moon. You're dealing with somebody who's trying to disrupt you in every which way from getting there or from getting the outcome that you seek. Another problem, information. The strategist who sits down and tries to plot out strategy, does that person have accurate information? The problem today seems to be we have so much information that we can't separate the wheat from the chaff. But then there's still that information that's being kept from us. Or efforts that are made to actively misinform us about the true nature of things, intentions and capabilities. Why is strategy hard? Resources are limited. We know that, but as I'll explain to you a little bit, sometimes we don't act as though, especially in a rich country like the United States, that resources are in fact limited. The competition is non-linear. What that means is essentially that if you add 10% to the defense budget, it doesn't automatically mean that you're going to be 10% more secure, 10% more effective. It's a very non-linear kind of activity. And then finally, you have to convince your boss. And here are some comments. Sandy Berger in the 90s warned Christopher during that time period. Susan Rice more recently skeptical about strategy. And I sometimes wonder if they were skeptical because they didn't believe in strategy or skeptical because at that time, it seemed as though we were doing strategy so poorly that they said, why should I have a deep interest in this product, if you will, if it's not particularly good strategy? Why is strategy? Your boss has to convince his constituents. I was recently reading a biography of Eisenhower and Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House in the 1950s when Ike was president. Ike, of course, a Republican, Rayburn, a Democrat. And Ike says, I told Eisenhower, just send up your budget. I'll give you 95% of the Democrat votes in the House. You can imagine that happening today with President Obama and the Republican Congress. Of course, it's hard to find somebody who invaded Europe and won our half of World War II. But the point is you have to convince, and I think Secretary David said, made the point. The administration works with Congress. It doesn't get a free ride. It's not a private business where it can just chart its own course. And then finally, the strategy may not be executed as set forth. Peter Rodman wrote a book some years ago sort of going through the national security history of the presidents during the Cold War. And he found that it was extremely difficult at times for presidents to actually get the bureaucracy to do what they wanted them to do. Truman once joked about Eisenhower. He said, poor old Ike, he's used to working in the military. You give orders, and they get carried out. He'll come up here. He's going to be president. And poor Ike, God help him. He's going to have to deal with the bureaucracy, the Congress, the media, and everything else. So again, the strategy, just because you have a good strategy, the execution part shouldn't be neglected, shouldn't be ignored. In fact, you almost have to work that into the crafting of strategy if you want to have a good one, one that has a chance of being executed. Some characteristics of good strategy. Again, I like Ike, OK? West Point graduate, you know? Anyway, Ike's talking about you, in a way. He says, principles of strategy are really simple. But it requires the hardest kind of work and the finest available staff officers. And if you just, if you absorb some of the reasons why strategy is so hard, you'll understand why Ike and Howard felt this way. The other thing he said was, plans are useless. I often thought about the QDR when I was reading this. You like that, huh? Planning, by the way, Congress, I guess, in the current NDA has abolished the QDR. So for those of you who are going to the salt mines or the Pentagon, you may get some slack there. But don't get your hopes up, OK? Why did he say this? And again, it gets back to the point that the situation you're dealing with is dynamic. If you get that perfect plan done on June the 14th, 2016, the world, as Secretary Davidson said, is so dynamic, it's changing so quickly that the half-life of that plan, even if it were perfect, which we know it's not for all the reasons I gave you, that plan quickly becomes obsolete. How did Eisenhower deal with that? Well, one way he dealt with it, 171 meetings of his NSC during his first administration alone. Part of that administration he had a heart attack, and he was hospitalized and bedridden for a number of months. 171. And it was basically just the principles. There was no group of folks like you sitting along the wall to help out the principal. You imagine being locked in a room with Eisenhower and nobody, no backup. And here's the guy, D-Day and all this stuff. And he said, you have to be living with the problem. Those meetings were not designed to come up with a perfect strategy. It was just designed that when it hit the fan, the emergency situation, that we would be less screwed up than the other guy. I mean, that's basically what he was hoping for. And there's an interesting book, Eisenhower, 1956, that talks about the Suez crisis. And Eisenhower's point was, well, at least we have been thinking with and living with this problem. It's not something that came to us out of the blue. Yes, we're scrambling, but the other guys are scrambling even worse than we are. Andy Marshall and Richard Remelt. I mentioned Remelt in the link with Steve Jobs. He wrote a book a couple of years ago called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. He talks a lot about his work with the Pentagon as well. Andy Marshall, about two years ago, retired as head of the Secretary of Defense's internal strategy think tank. But again, getting back to this issue of asymmetries and advantages. They would argue that a good strategy, again, exploits those advantages. A better strategy aligns your advantages against your enemy's weaknesses. Think of a football game where you have a good running game and the other guy has a weak run defense. And so you're going to run the ball. Even better strategy aligns enduring advantages against enduring weaknesses. And a great example of that comes from the work done at institutions like this and the people who graduated from it, the maritime strategy of the 1980s. The problem we had then, I don't if you can see this all that well, but the problem was how could we reinforce Europe? We had a lot of forces there, but in the event of war, we're going to have to move a lot of stuff to Europe very quickly. And the question was the Soviets were getting better and better with their submarines. And so how do we protect, again, in a sort of an advanced version of the Battle of the Atlantic that was waged in World War II? And so that was the goal. How do we reinforce and sustain NATO? And how do we deal with this growing fleet that was could have threatened the slacks? And we said, well, what are our enduring advantages? And this was, really, to some extent, in the wake of the second offset strategy that I'll get to in a few minutes. We had very quiet submarines. So hard to detect our subs. We had very good sensors, easier to detect theirs. We had a geographic advantage. We had the Greenland, Iceland, UK gap where we could operate from that bottled up the Soviet fleet, again making it difficult to get through those choke points without being detected. And the Soviets had weaknesses. They had loud submarines where we had quiet submarines. Their sensors weren't all that good. Geography, again, I mentioned that the choke points here, having to get through the Greenland, Iceland, UK gap. And then fears about their boomers. They had long enough range missiles, but they were concerned that their boomers were up here that they might be threatened by the fact that we had such good attack submarines. So the strategy was align our strengths against these weaknesses, highlight the anti-submarine war threat to their boomers through forward operations up in here in peacetime. The results was the Soviets pulled back a lot of their better SSNs, a lot of their best SSNs to protect their boomers. And again, it was an effective way for us through the maritime strategy to achieve that objective, one that the Soviets could not, a problem posed to the Soviets that they could not find a way out of very easily because, again, enduring strengths of the part of the Navy, enduring weaknesses on the part of the Soviets. Okay, the quintessential strategy, again, enduring advantage, enduring weakness. Okay, here you go, scissors cuts paper, all right? Remember that. Scissors, paper, that's what I know about World War II. Okay, the third offset strategy. And again, remember what Secretary Davidson said. The emphasis on speed and new operational concepts. Okay, we had three, according to Deputy Secretary Work, who really has done a lot to lead the way on this issue. The first was in the early 1950s. And we were faced with the fact that the Soviets had tested their nuclear weapon that our nuclear monopoly was a wasting asset. They were building more and more. They were building delivery systems, long-range bombers, ballistic missiles. And so this was an asset that was going the way. And Eisenhower basically said, look, if this is a wasting asset, we need to have a new advantage. He ruled out preventive war against the Soviet Union as a way of resolving our situation with them. So even a long-term competition. With this guy, he's gonna have nuclear weapons. Eisenhower said in a long-term competition, what's gonna count for a lot is a strong economic base and a strong technical industrial base. And he looked at Europe. And Europe, there was a Lisbon conference in 1952, and NATO committed to fielding 90 divisions. And can you imagine that, 90 divisions. And besides sort of saying this is crazy, we're never gonna be able to do this, Eisenhower said, let's ride this advantage. Let's ride this monopoly as long as we can and cut ourselves some slack to allow Europe to recover economically, industrially, technologically their key allies. And you could argue secondarily the Japanese as well in the Pacific because this is a long-term competition. And if you're ruling out general war and Eisenhower thought that general war once the Soviets had a sufficient number of nuclear weapons would be a catastrophe. So you're in this long-term competition. So again, riding a wasting asset, a source of great competitive advantage that was basically fading in order to create a new source of advantage. By the mid 1970s, the Soviets not only had an advantage, at least we perceived it in conventional forces, they had caught up with nuclear forces. We had the SALT one and we're negotiating the SALT two agreement. So we needed to find a new source of advantage. And the industrial technical base that we had built in the 50s, 60s and 70s was about ready to give us that advantage. And it came in the form of IT, information technology. And I was a young army officer at the time and I went to the PX at Fort Bliss and they were selling these things about this big. And Texas Instruments, it was a pocket calculator. And I didn't, I looked at this thing and I said, no, this will do everything your slide rule will do. I said, there's nothing that will do everything my slide rule will do. Does anybody here know what a slide rule is? And so I bought this thing, went home and my wife said, you spent $30 on this thing. And I said, yeah. And I didn't tell her, I went back six months later and they had a much better one for about $20. But the fact of the matter was I wasn't buying one that was made in Kiev or, you know, Leningrad. I was buying one made in wherever Texas Instruments makes their stuff. But the point is, this was the onset of an enduring source of competitive advantage we had over the Soviets, information technology, broadly applied, okay? You know, I was buying a Tandy computer, not a, you know, a Mikhail Yan computer or a, you know, MiG computer. But it applied in so many ways. It applied in terms of quieting our submarines, improved sensors, it enabled, at least a running start at the battle networks as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative because that was really one of the hardest parts of, you know, missile defense, the battle network. And all that was driven by information technology. And those battle, what we learned there really began to apply as we built the battle networks of precision warfare, precision weapons themselves. So all these things gave us an enormous advantage. The kind of CAD-CAM technology we needed to do to design the stealth aircraft. Again, battle networks, quieting of submarines. And then we kind of go back in history, what's all this about down here? And Secretary Davidson mentioned it to you. The third offset strategy is not gonna be like either the 50s or the 70s. The third offset strategy is more like the 1920s and 1930s. There you had multiple great powers. You had, as Secretary Davidson mentioned, rapid advances in commercial technology. You know, the automotive industry, the aviation industry, radio, the onset of radar. And the recipe for success went to those militaries who could figure out how to use this stuff, how to integrate it into new operational concepts to give themselves a big boost in combat capability to deal with the problems that they were facing and to do it faster than the other guy could. And so that's really the core, I think, of the third offset strategy. And I think the Pentagon's got it exactly right. And in this case, I think it's hard to argue against history. History doesn't maybe repeat itself, but boy, there's a lot of strong themes here. Okay, what are some strategy sins? Some things that we think about with respect to strategy that maybe we ought not to think about. One is, you know, failing to recognize or take seriously the fact that resources are really tight. And I was in a meeting with Secretary Hagel a couple years ago when he was putting out the QDR and he said, the military must be ready and capable to respond quickly to all contingencies and decisively defeat any opponent should deterrence fail. I don't know how you guys do that. I mean, really how quickly to all decisively defeat anybody? You can decisively defeat China quickly? Or anybody? I mean, again, so it's a great thing to want to be able to do, but again, resources just don't enable that. And as you can see here, it says Blitzkrieg, you're doing it wrong. You could have a great idea, you could have a great strategy, but if you don't have the resources to execute it, this is what Blitzkrieg looks like. You know, the Germans had the resources to get tanks and the radios and the planes and all that. So I think the, listen to the turtle, okay? Okay, make, mistaking goals for strategy or choosing unrealistic goals. This is part of the national security strategy in 2002. So we're gonna prevent our enemies from threatening us, our allies, and our friends with weapons of mass destruction. If you're into deterrence, what do you think the Russians are doing with their nukes and the Chinese are doing with their nukes and the North Koreans? That's what they're doing. They're threatening us. You do certain things, you cross that line and this is where we're going. Expanding the circle of development by opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy. We're just gonna go around and do that. Igniting a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade. Again, the other guy's gotta be willing, especially if the other guy's not your enemy. So again, these are goals and they're certainly laudable goals, but they're not strategy and I'm not sure how realistic they are. Okay, and it's kind of, remind me of this. It says goals, there's the tree, there's the lion, it says, if you can see it, you can reach it. Except for that tree, you'll never reach it. Okay, so think about that. You wanna set ambitious goals, but they've gotta be realistic. Okay, failure to recognize the strategic problem or that it might change. And again, the pivot or the rebalance to the Asia Pacific. I'm all for it for my own reasons. But what is the purpose of the rebalance? In my mind is to defend the first island chain because we have security commitments to all three countries that comprise the main portion of the first island chain. But I haven't really seen it written or talked about or planned against. So okay, again, what are we trying to do here? What is the problem that we're trying to address and accomplish other than sort of in a vague way promoting peace and stability? QDR provides an accurate depiction of our future national security requirements. Okay, Admiral Mullen, I think I have a great deal of admiration for Admiral Mullen. I think it was probably maybe something written for him, I don't know. But Eisenhower would say, again, it's planning. It's not the plan, it's planning. It doesn't, you know, the QDR is a point in time. It's not the plan, it's planning. This is my favorite slide, okay? Failure to understand the enemy. Okay, here's Herman Goering. Herman in 39, Herman in 40, Herman in 42. The only thing Americans are good at is making automobiles but not planes. The Americans can't build planes. They're very good at refrigerators and razor blades. Okay, so we know we're good at automobiles, refrigerators and razor blades. America is all talk and no action. This is 1942. I mean, but he stops saying that after 1942. So I guess eventually Herman gets it. Okay, Herman gets it in more ways than one. But, and again, you know, Herman's not the only one. President Johnson gives a speech at Johns Hopkins in April 65. This is before, just before the major commitment of ground forces to Vietnam. And he gives a speech and he offers up basically a new deal program to the Vietnamese. We're gonna build a TVA, you know, in the Mekong Valley and this is gonna promote economic growth. You know, all laudable, but after the speech, President says to Bill Moyers, who was his PR guy at the time, old hoe can't turn me down now. A profound misunderstanding of what was motivating the North Vietnamese in this war. Okay, making false presumptions about our competence or the link between our strategy and the goals or mistaken means for strategy. Sorry about this, this is Senator Weary from Nebraska. This is during the civil war between the nationalist Chinese and the communist Chinese. And Weary says on the floor of the Senate, will God's help, we'll lift Shanghai up until it's just like Kansas City. Okay, I don't know why he didn't say Omaha because he was a senator from Nebraska. But anyway, it's not clear to me that competence and the cause of linkages. If we were to get Shanghai to look like Kansas City, I'm not sure that would have done much for Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist Chinese. But so again, our strategy, this is President Bush, in terms of mistaken means for strategy, as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down. That might be the strategy for getting us out of Iraq, but it's not a strategy for winning the war, it's just changing means, one set of means for another. So you have these means, how are you gonna apply them to achieve the ends that you seek? And then finally, strategy has not been her production. Yeah, we're fortunate to have people like Secretary Davidson where she is, because she is a strategist. And John Collins, who I think many of you know from his time at CRS, says, I think he puts it extremely well. Strategy is a game anybody can play, it's kind of like chess. But it's not a game just anyone can play well. Only the most gifted participants have a chance to win a prize. And if you look at the great strategies that we have developed over time, they haven't been developed by a cast of thousands. You look at NSC 68, 162.2, the Solarium Project, some of the others during the Cold War, small group of people who really know how to do strategy well. And with advances in the cognitive sciences, we're finding out just how people think differently in the kinds of intellectual traits that are required to think like a strategist. In fact, the British have a high command and staff course that they send their rising flag officers to, not just so they can learn how to use the right fork and all that stuff, because you believe me, you guys don't know how to do that. But what they try and find out through a series of tests and so on is, well, who's the right general to put in charge of getting this program through the acquisition process? And who's the right one to lead a core in the field? Or who's the right one to do strategic planning? And that's a big part of the effort that they have underway, which I think is quite good. Okay, I mentioned to you, we're gonna do a little bit on strategy and resolving the ends means disconnect, because you can see oftentimes we're prone to unrealistic objectives with inadequate resources. And right now, as I mentioned also, and certainly Secretary Davidson did, the threat graphs going like this and the resource graph is going like that. So let's look at some ways. One, of course, give the Defense Department more money, more resources. You may have trouble seeing this cartoon. It's called The Biggest Loser. This is the US taxpayer standing on top of the Pentagon with this huge Pentagon budget. And you could say that the person who drew this cartoon was saying the burden on the American taxpayer of the defense budget is ginormous and we need to do something about it. So the trend is actually the opposite of what you might think. And here's the military and other cartoon, the social safety net, okay? So these are the entitlements and so on. I feel your pain, they're trying to cut my funding too. Hey, you gonna eat that? And so again, the impression is that you've got this huge defense budget. Well, during the Cold War, we averaged over 6% of GDP going to defense. Currently, we're down to 3.6%. According to the CBO study that came out in January, current trajectory will have us down to 2.6%. Now, it's not to say that we should peg our defense spending to a certain percentage of GDP. I think that's somewhat ridiculous. But it does give you a sense of A, where the current trajectory is, and some sense of, in general, how the American people feel about where all the wasteful money's going. And then this is again from the CBO. If you look at defense spending today and then in 2020 and then in 2026, along with mandatory spending and interest on the debt, you see that defense goes up 22%, which is less than the projected economic growth. So defense, that's how you get from 3.6 to 2.6. Mandatory spending, 80% increase, that's social security, Medicare. By the way, the CV also projects that the trust funds will go broke earlier than expected, probably in the early 2030s, as opposed to the mid to late 2030s. And then if you look at interest on the debt, we go from 223 to 830. So that's about a 300% increase just on paying the interest on the debt. So if you think there's a lot of room for increases in defense spending, certainly we can get back to 6%, if we're entering a new cold war. But the figures would tend to say, you're gonna be doing that because you're gonna be inflicting some serious pain somewhere else. And the CBO study, I think the most provocative sentence in the report with something along the lines, we are quickly reaching the point where we can no longer roll over our debt to the next generation. So old against young, rich against poor, cats and dogs. But it is a serious problem, a problem that we can resolve, but it probably gets harder and harder to resolve the further and further we go into the future without taking action. So, yes, we can spend more on defense, but the political barriers and social barriers to doing that are growing, and as you can see, they're growing non-linearly. And here's Paul Paul Ryan. This is sequestration, which deals with defense spending and discretionary spending. Essentially the parts of the budget that are growing the most slowly, whereas the parts that are growing the most rapidly, which are entitlements and interest on the debt are not being addressed by sequestration. So again, that's where you are. Second, you can be more efficient. I love this cartoon, this giant poster with stop waste in the tiny middle. I was in a meeting with Secretary Panetta, who was getting ready to leave office, and he had worked at OMB and he had been in the Budget Committee up on Capitol Hill, and as probably, at least some of you know, a lot of efficiency savings are baked into the budget, and it's a good thing. We should always try to become more efficient. The problem is, I'll be glad to respond to a question during the Q&A, we often don't get there in a lot of ways, we often make a difficult situation worse. And so when somebody said, well at least we have this, about a quarter of a trillion dollars of efficiency savings that we're gonna work in that'll give us some relief. Panetta looked and said, that's a bunch of bullshit. That was his word, not mine. But again, there are a lot of reasons why we don't typically get anything like the efficiencies we're hoping to get, and that can distort your planning priorities. Third, we can outsource to allies. And this is the spithead review. This is the Royal Navy forming for review on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. And I counted seven aircraft carriers here. Okay, so that was in 1953. And then we had the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and in 2012, and I was struck by the, and this, I gave this, I showed this slide of one of the presentation and to his great credit, British officer in the audience said, there was a review with the Royal Navy and he offered to send me the photographs and I have not gotten them yet. But the point here is, if you look at the trends, okay. You know, from during the, before 9-11, we were up in the late 90s when you had Allied force and so on the Balkans. We've gone up since then for obvious reasons. Our three principal allies in Europe, the three great powers have gone down. And with the Brits last year, to their credit, being the only one of the three above the NATO standard. These countries, if you look at the kinds of pressures that are on us, the pressures on them are even greater. They have more generous social welfare systems than we do. Secretary Davidson said, they're dealing with this challenge of immigration. Refugees coming into Europe, which is gonna stress that system even further. And they're old. There are more people over 60 in Germany, Italy, Spain and Greece than there are under the age of 15. And so where is that, you know, again, there's an increasing demand for social welfare payments whereas you have a diminishing number of people of working age that are, and of course that's one of the reasons why they're having fewer children as well. So it's kind of a vicious cycle. So to say, you need to greatly ramp up your military effort, they can do it. But again, the social and political barriers there are enormous, even more especially when the Americans have been carrying a lot of the freight since the end of the Cold War. You know, the old free rider principle. And so is that something to be tackled or is it a condition that we should accept? I think that's an important strategic question for the United States. We can increase or divest commitments. Strategy involves risk. But at what point, when you keep accumulating risk, do you cease to deter your enemies or reassure your friends? Okay, so yes, we can take on more risk, but we had a huge cushion following the end of the Cold War. General Abizade, who led the Lash National Defense Panel, said, we are taking on risk at an alarming rate. So that buffer we had is being eroded. Not necessarily because of our negligence, but because of changing circumstances in the world. You know, it's one thing to plan against North Korea and Libya. It's another thing to plan against China and Russia. And then finally, you can use resources more efficiently. This is, I'm sorry, more effectively. This is another way of saying craft a better strategy. Again, rethink your strategy. Do we have a good one at the current time? It's almost a moot point because we're gonna have a new administration in a few months and every new administration comes in and begins to develop its own strategy. That's probably the closest it'll come to having a clean sheet of paper to work with. If we don't have a good strategy, or as Secretary Davidson mentioned, if things are changing so fast that whether we're gonna have a third Obama administration or not, you need to rethink your strategy. Just as we did in the late 40s, early 50s, when the international situation was changing rather dramatically, then there's the potential to really improve our effectiveness if we can craft a good one. And also that has to do with our military effectiveness in terms of, again, how do we leverage emerging technologies in the commercial sector? How do we develop new operational concepts? How do we do it faster than the other guy? And then, as she said, potential boost to effective this heightens even further if the current circumstances are ripe for a discontinuous shift. And it's not just a discontinuous shift, I think, in terms of military capability. The geopolitical structure in Europe is very different. Geopolitical structure in the Middle East and the Far East, countries have attitudes today that are very different than they had three or four or five years ago. And so there's a potential opportunity there to boost our portfolio, if you will, of alliances and partners. So in a way, it's a scary time to be a strategist, but in another way, it's a great time to be a strategist. So closing thoughts, Eisenhower was right. Colin Gray and John Collins, very hard to do, but very necessary in times like these where you don't need much of a strategy if things are going to stay the same. If you kind of know the situation, when you really need a good strategy, or when you need strategy most, I guess I should say, is when things are changing rapidly. If you want to be successful, you have to have talented strategists, policy makers who value strategy. You have to sell to somebody. And then individuals and organizations capable of executing that strategy. Eisenhower was famous for his planning board, but he also had, I think it was called, the Operations Coordination Board. And that was a very bureaucratic way of saying about six months after Eisenhower made a big decision, the people on this board would have to go out and see how well it was being executed. And if it wasn't being executed, then Eisenhower would start executing. OK. Note to self, end on a positive note. Remember, where your enemy enjoys, unless your enemy has a huge advantage in resources, but the resources are roughly the same, your strategy only needs to be better than his. So there are people, I mean, it's hard for everybody, not just hard for you, not just hard for me. So that's at least some consolation. So that ends my pitch. I know there may be some questions out there, and I'll do my best. But remember, I'm giving you a choice. You have the physics jokes from the CNO's executive panel staff that they told me for sure that, in fact, these were jokes that he might use at some point in time, maybe. So anyway, let me wrap up there and turn it over to Mike. And if there are any questions? OK. Or jokes. Sir, thanks for coming to speak to us today. Lieutenant Commander Jeff Palmer, US Navy. Given your comments talking about Eisenhower's discussion of the importance of getting a contingent of skilled officers together to think deeply about strategy and other Navy initiatives to develop strategic thinking, such as the War Colleges Advanced Naval Strategist curriculum that was put in place, I believe, two years ago, I was wondering if you could comment on the apparent mixed message sent by the CNO and deciding to shut down the strategic studies group instead of maybe refocusing its charter or allocating resources in order to make sure he's getting out of that group what he wants. OK. What I can say about that, first of all, I wasn't privy. I wasn't part of the decision-making process. I am very familiar with the CNO Strategic Studies Group. And my understanding is that the group was not supposed to develop strategy. The idea was the group existed so that you had these rising people with high potential reached flag rank, that they would be exposed to senior officers, be able to do some work on their own so they would have a better idea of how strategy works, I guess, some of the principles of strategy, and so on. My understanding, and it's just an understanding, is that the CNO is looking to develop a successor to that organization. I also am aware of the fact that the Secretary of Defense at one point had a strategic studies group after a few years. He decided, a proposal of the question this gentleman asked over here earlier, to have a Secretary of Defense corporate fellows program where you have similar officers going out to Apple and Google and Amazon and Caterpillar and so on as a way of getting them integrated into the culture of industries who are operating under a very fast-moving environment, a very high degree of uncertainty, and where the competition is moving very rapidly. All I can say is I think the concept of a strategic studies group to me makes a lot of sense, not because you're going to get these folks to come up with a brilliant strategy, but for two reasons. One is if they have high potential for flag rank, you need to expose them. And number two, I mentioned earlier the British High Command and Staff course, which during the course of their process identifies people who can actually think strategically or do it very well, as opposed to people whose talents may lie elsewhere. Sir, thanks for being here, Major Paul Ishenko, US Army. Let me first just say that if you need any interested Army officers to help in your endeavor to sabotage Army football, I got a continuity of class. Sabotage Army football? Well, not to put a, we haven't once it's our cleaver year, so. At any rate, you talked a lot about, even though you may have an effective strategy, at least from your perception, you have to execute it. And that often takes political will. I'm wondering if you can comment on an apparent policy strategy mix match in several places around the world and how potentially we can reconcile that. We see it in South China Sea, apparently, in Crimea, and other places, sir. Well, I, well, we see, I think, goodness, let me just say very quickly, as Secretary Davidson said, we are in a very different world now. And, you know, maybe we don't realize it because there's always that constant dealing with the radical terrorist groups and so on. We have three revisionist powers operating in three parts of the world along the Eurasian periphery that going back for nearly a century, we've said we cannot let any one of those areas fall under hostile control because the economic and industrial and manpower potential there could pose a serious threat to our security. And there are countries in those regions that agree with us. And so the question is, how do we do that? How do we, you know, preserve the independence of those countries along that long arc that runs from Western Europe all the way up to the Japanese islands? So I think the question is, I think that's been a clear objective and a clear policy for every administration going back at least to Truman. And the question is, in a world where things are changing rather rapidly, how do we begin to adapt our policy and our strategy to make good on that? And final thing I'll say is, from a strategist perspective, if you look at GDP, China has 60% of the GDP of the US by some measures. No other competitor to ours over the last century had more than 40%. So to me, Westpac is number one. Number two, Westpac is the area where we have the least strategic depth. The first island chain is right there. Europe, we've got, I mean, I wouldn't, it's not that we wanna give up Eastern Europe, but we have a lot of strategic depth in Europe, a lot of strategic depth in the Middle East. And third, the Western Pacific is the only region not the Middle East and not Europe where our strategic allies and partners do not have an advantage in terms of overall economic and industrial might. So they alone, if you just use those metrics, could counterbalance the threats in those regions. So again, I mean, to me, it's Westpac, Westpac, Westpac right now. I think that is the area that requires the greatest degree of attention and the greatest degree of thought in terms of how we're gonna maintain peace and stability in that part of the world. And you could argue that we're late to the game, although you could also argue that in 2011, President said by the end of the decade, we'd have 60% of our naval and air forces in that part of the world. So are we slow to move? Maybe. We don't have as much in the way of resources as we thought. The Middle East is not as quiet as we hoped. But again, I think that's gonna be an incredibly interesting strategic issue for at least the next couple of years until we figure out how we're gonna deal with the problem. Thank you very much.