 Thanks, Derek. This morning, we have Brian McGrath, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. T. X. Amps retired colonel, UNS Marine Corps, professor down at the National Defense University, and also Professor Eric Gardski, professor out at UC San Diego. In my view, 20 years ago, plus, about the same time that Frank Fukuyama was proclaiming his famous end-of-history thesis, the US Navy essentially declared its own end-of-history, essentially proclaiming that with the disappearance of the Soviet Navy, all serious competitors to the United States Navy and its allies for command of the sea had disappeared, and therefore that we could turn our attention to exercising command of the sea, much as Corbett tells us we should win command than exercise command. I think a big driver of this particular conference is simply the notion that we have to now return to history with the return of great power challengers and all the challenges that poses. So I've read the papers, I'm looking forward to a very lively discussion, and I would encourage you to follow along, ask a lot of lively questions. I'll say a couple of brief words and hopefully post some questions to get us started after the speakers, but for the most part I would like to leave it for interchange between you and the speakers. We will proceed in the order that it's lead out for you in your program, starting with Colonel Amps. T. X. Good morning, pleasure to be here. I'm gonna use PowerPoint, not for the words, but for pictures, I'm a Marine, you gotta have pictures, we don't understand otherwise. We're gonna start with power projection in the 21st century. I am not going to deal with the diplomatic, economic, political aspects of power projection. If you wanna have that talk, I don't know, see the State Department or somebody. Our job is to look at bad things and breaking things. So I'll start with that, and really the question I'm gonna ask is why military power projection? And really we do it for three basic reasons, to stop or compel behavior, i.e. to solve a problem. The second one is to modify behavior, i.e. to manage a problem. We can't really stop what they're doing, but we can manage it, keep it within an acceptable box. Sometimes the behavior you're trying to manage or the problem you're trying to manage is domestic. The desire to do something, and power projection is often a cheap way, particularly strike as a cheap way to do something. You don't accomplish anything other than tamping down the political problems of the United States. And if those two fail, the third purpose of power projection is to get the Americans out. So those are the three things I'm gonna look at. Now, the record on this, essentially kind of had three types of power projection. The first is strike, fairly recently historically you had to have cannon that could reach far enough inland to make it worth a strike. So strike is one, amphibious is the second, and denial would be the third. Now strike appeals because it's seen as quick and clean, a very low casualty rate. We sometimes lose aviators. There's a concern about that because of the problem of trying to get the prisoner back. But more and more as we go to unmanned systems, cruise missiles, et cetera, strike will have greater and greater appeal. And it is very good as they do something. Rarely does it have any significant effect. Strike is not a particularly effective form of power projection, except for solving your political problem or perhaps managing a problem as we're doing in Syria. If you're accepted Syria is a 40 to 50 year problem, then your strategy has to be, how do I manage this problem? Not how do I solve it? How do I manage it in a way that's affordable? And we've chosen to use our air power in combination with ground power provided by the Iraqis. For a strategic operational effect, strike has to be reinforced with some kind of ground force. The second one is amphibious and this is the whole thing. It's an ancient process going a long ways back and it's either physically putting yourself ashore or the raid going ashore coming back out. It's the most seriously challenged today. It's still doable, but the rise of small, smart, many, which we'll talk about later is one of the key problems or key challenges. And then denial, we don't generally think of denial as power projection. Blockade is power projection, but it really is. If you're striking an opponent's economy, that's a projection of your power into the heart of his political and social structure. A strategic target on that is obviously enemies economy. You can do operational level type blockade, for instance, after the Battle of Salamis. The Persian fleet is no longer effective. So the operational target becomes the Persian army and they have to withdraw most of the army back to the mainland. They simply can't supply them except by sea. And so that's an operational example. One thing we've got to be clear about, if you use blockade, it is an act of war. It's not a gray zone tool. It's not something you do to discourage people. This is an open act of war. It's been used effectively with varying levels depending upon how serious you are about it against Germany and World War I, World War II, against Japan and World War II, the submarine blockade was devastatingly effective. It's changing because of the way trade is done today with very, very large ships and profit margin being based on these large ships. It allows you to alter an economy with really fairly small effort. Capturing one triple E class is the same as capturing a half dozen smaller ships. So that's what we're trying to do. What are the threats to that? And this is where we're really getting a problem. We're all painfully aware of the A2AD problem, the air and sea threats. I'm not gonna go into that. This room's fully aware of that. Cyber in space, a little harder to find because of the classification issues. Space, probably the scariest because we really don't know what's going on and we are so heavily reliant on space, but also on cyber. The United States is in the middle of an enormous command and control experiment. I can find no example in history where any military turned over 95% of its command and control to international communications companies. 95% of our communications rides on fiber optic networks, which we do not own, are not even owned by quote, American companies or international companies. Interesting experiment. I don't think we know yet where we go. The third thing is this whole revolution is small, smart and many. And this is the convergence of technologies, nanotechnology, additive manufacturing, materials, artificial intelligence that is going to allow almost anyone to develop intercontinental range precision strike or blockade. I'll talk about how you're gonna do that. This is, that's what we feel today. That's the switch blade. It's a Marine Corps, it carries that little tube that looks like almost like a baby 60 millimeter mortar, pops up in the air, gives you 10 kilometers, 10 minutes, 40 millimeter grenade, which using that weight class is big enough to take out a tank from above. Because it's the US government is $15,000, if you look at what in the upper left corner, that's $9. That's a 3D printed drone all apart, snapped together. In the upper right corner here, that's autonomous. 20 gallons of spray takes off, flies a pattern, comes back, lands itself. Cheap enough farmers are using it. This is a common GoPro, a lot of the GoPro's are mounted low. The key point is that's about two pounds. Two pounds of explosives is more than enough to destroy a vehicle from above, an armored vehicle. Something easy like a fuel truck, quarter pound shot is more than enough. So that's the problem. Now this is not a high technology thing. See these guys here? They're biologists. They built these. They had no knowledge of engineering, no engineering training. They're trying to survey a rainforest and keep the loggers out and they realized they needed search patterns. So they built that air force. On a very small grant, they built it. It's autonomous. They launch each of those every day and it goes out and flies a pattern, does multispectral imagery and comes back. Farmers are now using autonomous drones with multispectral imagery. And the problem is when it's that cheap and then it gets as cheap as this, it really becomes a problem. Now this is extraordinarily rapid evolution. You looked at the switchblade was 10 kilometers, 15 minutes. They now have a six bladed copter. They're selling commercially 100 miles payload, 20 pounds. This is in response to Google's effort to deliver by quadcopter. They are not doing this to satisfy any commercial or any military need, but a commercial need. Well, of course, 20 pounds is really a nice size shot. If I can deliver that with precision autonomously, which means it's not subject to jamming, except for GPS system, then that's an enormous advantage. We're also working on inertial nav. Fixed wing drones are now regularly flying across the ocean. They're composite bodies. They burn about two and a half gallons of fuel crossing the Atlantic Ocean. So what's your thermal signature? What's your radar return? You've really got to go to millimeter wave radar to do this, and that's an enormously expensive proposition to cover the entire coast. The cost, something like this, obviously is in the thousands of dollars. This is approaching zero because they also announced this week that they've got a 3D printing process. That takes about a day to print. This week, they announced a process that accelerates that 25 to 100 times. So one printer might print 50 of these a day for you. If you have a bank of 10 printers, you've got 500 a day. So in a week of printing, I've got a 3,500 aircrafts form coming at you. I really don't care if 3,000 of them get stupid and fall in the ocean. 500 will probably get the job done. And that's the thing we're facing. Control is either radio control. That can be jammed, obviously, subject to things. But there's also autonomous, not just GPS, but inertial nav. An inertial nav is somewhat scary for the simple reason of how do you jam it. Also remember the early Tomahawks were a visual, the Land Tomahawk was a visual mapping. They've gone back to that because they're concerned about GPS. And that's a commercial application. That's not being developed for military, it's commercial. Now just so sailors don't feel abused. Whoops, I lost my Slocum glider slide. Okay, maybe it'll be in there later. The Slocum glider is based on a Woods Hole project which put sensors on a torpedo-like object and put it at sea. The Navy now is adopted as a Slocum glider, five-year at sea program. Looks like a torpedo, five years at sea GPS navigation. Looks to me like a self-seeding minefield with intercontinental range. And that's some very interesting applications. Now we're gonna do something. Can you show the fire ant video? For the land guys, we've been dealing with IEDs for 12 years, fairly unsuccessfully. This is an interesting development that you'll notice that that's an explosively formed projectile there. So from well off road, this thing will take out an armored vehicle. So this guy just goes out and wanders. It's got a battery system. It can sit out there for days, perhaps as long as a month and just go out there and wait until it gets the right, magnetic and acoustic signal. And there comes the signal. Okay, kill that one. Now if that one doesn't bother you, particularly if we show the next one. Again, we have had a horrific time with IEDs, finding them. We've been hunting IEDs for 14 years. This is an IED that will hunt you. This is just a kid who got this as a hobby and decided his friends were racing these things and they wanted videos. Look at the skill this guy's got. How do you get a convoy through with this guy stalking you? Okay, cut it. Go back to the presentation. There's the slope of the ladder. Again, you can see why I'd be worried about this. This seems to me a self-deploying minefield. And that's my concern. The worst threat is really the smart mine threat. They've now got them that confirm magnetic, acoustic, random arm, random count. All these things are built into digital systems. We can plant these, the US Air Force just did an experiment with the B-52 bomber, which takes the standard gravity bomb, puts a JDAM kit on it and a mine sensor and it's a shallow water mine up to 200 meters. And so you can lay these very, very quickly with very sophisticated sensors. But if I'm a small power, I don't know the B-52 and I don't know the JDAM, but one of these Slocum gliders, if Woods Hole can afford to put dozens of these at sea, I probably can too. So that gets us to the question of how do we do this in the future? How do we do power projection? Well, obviously we've got to harden the tail and reduce it and that includes the fleet. Can we operate a shore when every ammo dump, fuel dump, fuel truck, ammo truck is subject to attack by swarms of small drones? Cause it would just be too expensive to have air defense systems. The other problem is the Israelis have systems on their tanks that defeat inbound missiles, they're very good. So the problem is you've got a parameter of speed on this, right? Suppose I make my drone operate at the speed of birds and act like birds, then your sensor starts killing all the birds in the neighborhood, as well as any kid who moves at the wrong speed, cause I can do this down at the deck. And I don't know how we're gonna move. Frankly, as an instrument, this one scares the hell out of me. Strike, while we have lots of strike capability, we've really got to start thinking in different terms about how to do it. The low end guys will start doing this first. Small states and primitive groups, super power groups, small groups, will start using these drones on us. And they will be used at commercial targets. I am, frankly, I don't know why C-17s can still land at Bagram. In the mid-80s, when the insurgents were good guys, I was training them Afghans. It took us two years to develop a long-range rocket system to hit Bagram. And we weren't particularly successful. We got a few kills, but not many. But today I could do that in a matter of weeks with drones. And if I take out three or four C-17s on the flight line, you've got a problem. Amphib, the problem is, as you begin to see the tremendous power of these, you still have to do amphibious operations, but I think we're gonna have to look for being on a strategic and operational offensive but the tactical offensive. Get ashore somewhere they're not. Quickly dig in, make them come to you, and then take over the power of the defense. Because much like the period between 1863 and about 1918, on the ground, defense will become the dominant form of warfare for a while until we figure out a way to break that. In denial, this also gives us a great opportunity because, frankly, I guess God doesn't like the Chinese. He gave them a terrible coastline configuration for a trading nation with the first island chain there. Only nine ways out. We are really in position to stifle them with denial as a power projection method. I'm glad to see we've got another speaker later in the program on that. So the key questions we've got to ask ourselves. US military is moving a few and exquisite. We're gonna build LRSB. We claim we'll build 100. That was the plan. I remember for the B-2, we got 21. So we're gonna have to assume that we'll get very few of these because we may wish there's a better budget. We may project there's gonna be a better budget, but I don't say any indication there's gonna be a better budget. So is that the right path to follow? If you're gonna come after them with bombers, I'm not gonna chase your bombers in the air. I'm gonna chase them back to their bases. And again, it's easy enough from China to launch a thousand cheap drones. In fact, the Harpy drone that the Israelis produced and sold to the Chinese has arranged to reach mainland Japan. And it can have an autonomous function too. So it's dispersal part of the solution. Probably at sea it is because the mobility at sea is a tremendously powerful thing. But how do we reduce and harden that tail? Harder on land than at sea, but at sea we've got to start thinking of our support infrastructure and ships as vulnerable now for seven years. We've had the luxury of totally ignoring that problem other than against the Soviets or worried about their submarines. Is the tactical defense becoming dominant? And what does that imply for us? Because the first step we have to do is deploy the force 6,000 miles. Is that possible? By the way, I now have the capability to strike your air and sea ports of embarkation, not just debarkation, but embarkation. How do you clear San Diego? And then the real question then becomes is the US Joint Force resilient or brittle? I think we're building an extraordinarily brittle force that may not survive. I don't have to kill your character, I just have to get a mission kill. One of these small drones flies into your hangar bay and detonates against one of your airplanes. You've got a problem in your hangar bay. One of the things I discovered when working with the insurgents is aviators are very kind to those that was trying to blow up airplanes because they always store them full of gas. So I don't have to provide the explosive, I just provide the detonator. And small, cheap, smart detonators are there. And I'll leave that happy thought. I hate to say thanks, TX, but thanks. We'll turn to Brian now. Thank you, Derek, and to the EMC Corporation and the Native War College Foundation for the invitation to be here today. My task is to try and explain why something that isn't quite as high technology, the large nuclear power to aircraft carrier remains a vital part of our ability to project power and why it is even in the face of determined foes feeding, fielding all manner of weapons designed specifically to neutralize it. Why it remains important. I'll turn to this central focus after a short discussion on the general subject of power projection. Power projection is a subject that is near and dear to the heart of anyone who has worn the cloth of this nation's Navy. A Navy which by virtue of this nation's propitious geography are widely flung interests and our position of world leadership has offered a central place of importance to this mission in and among all of the other things this Navy does, not as a luxury, but out of necessity. It has, as most of you know, been the central aim of this nation's defense and national security policy since the end of World War II to prevent the rise of a regional hegemon in Eurasia. A nation which could by virtue of its power and influence exercise the same level hegemony in its region as we exercise here in the Western Hemisphere. So the theory goes where a nation in either Asia or Europe to achieve such a status it would then be free to cast its eyes towards our position of strength in the Western Hemisphere. No other nation on earth has such a goal to its national security planning and so no other nation on earth has the same unique requirements for its military. Put simply, we must plan and resource to pick up and move a considerable amount of military might thousands of miles from our own shores, then keep it fed, clothed, armed, fueled, and greased. Our Navy in particular is sized and postured as a result of this Eurasian hegemony mitigation strategy. And it seems to me that there are two main things that our Navy or any Navy with such a globally inclusive portfolio must do in order to protect and sustain such an approach. The first is that it must act to regulate the peacetime environment, particularly the maritime environment. This it does by performing two sub-functions. The first is that it acts as the guarantor of the global system of trade, sea-based trade upon which the world economy depends. You're all familiar with this, this is the classic freedom of navigation mission. The other sub-function under regulating the peacetime environment is to act as a powerful conventional deterrent to regional aggression, aggression that could upset peacetime stability. The second main thing that a global Navy must do is that it must support the wartime efforts of land armies to include transportation, sustainment, and fire support. This is because why we navalists like to strut about and drone on about fleets and such, political questions are settled on land. Included in this mandate is the requirement to defeat enemy fleets at sea, not as an end unto itself, but to remove a force whose job it is to ensure that we do not perform the main part of this function, the support of land armies. Because of these broad mandates, regulating the peacetime environment and support of wartime land operations, because they both place great value on our ability to project power from the sea. In the first case, it is a function of the deterrent value of power projection. In the second case, it is the kinetic energy or combat value of power projection. For over 70 years, the most useful item in our naval inventory to support both elements of this mandate has been the aircraft carrier, a ship that has grown larger since its introduction, and which is today, at least in our inventory, exclusively nuclear power. Throughout these years, critics have time and again declared either its irrelevance or its obsolescence, not as a result of this nation valuing what it does less, but as a consequence of new risks to its operations. We have already heard and we will hear over the next two days, perhaps of all manner of diabolical threats and weapons and capabilities designed to deny our naval forces access. Weapons and capabilities that lead some analysts to conclude that the risk-reward calculation in continuing to build and buy supercarriers is a losing proposition. I find many of these assessments to be historically inaccurate, operationally short-sighted, and strategically unwise. In general, these assessments do not sufficiently comprehend the systemic relationship between the aircraft carrier and its primary weapon system and sensor suite, the carrier air wing, nor do they sufficiently comprehend the relationship of the carrier and its air wing to the larger system of the carrier strike group. To add insult to injury, most assessments of carrier strike force war fighting success and durability tend to hinge upon operational dubious assumptions about how a joint combined arms campaign would be waged. This is a lot to unpack, so let me spend our remaining time together attempting to do so. The US aircraft carrier or CVN must be large because much is asked of it. Though known more for its power projection roles, the carrier is central to the Navy's ability to seize and hold sea control in contested areas. These twin missions, in turn, drive the design of the carrier's principle weapons system. Four carriers for squadrons of strike fighters, an airborne early warning squadron, an electronic warfare squadron, and host of helicopters require a considerable amount of real estate, ample fuel and ordnance storage, a launching and recovery system, and repair and maintenance facilities able to support those types of aircraft and others for months at a time in a demanding maritime environment. This weapon system enables strike, ashore and at sea, organic situational awareness and command and control, electronic warfare, anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, surveillance and rescue, surveillance and search and rescue, among other things. CVN must be nuclear powered because of our nation's great distance from overseas regions. Think the Eurasian hegemony mitigation strategy which demand a ship with the endurance to operate independently for long periods of time with less logistic support. Nuclear power allows a large deck carrier to dedicate virtually every drop of its over three million gallons of fuel to its airway, its primary weapon system and sensor system. Without the need for large intake and exhaust trumps for combustion as in a conventionally powered ship, room for huge ordinance magazines necessary to arm the air wing for extended periods of combat is accommodated. Just as a fact, the Ford class aircraft carrier has 23 times the ordinance storage as the next largest combatant in the United States Navy. Lastly, nuclear power allows the CVN to operate at high speeds for great distances without refueling, which means it can be strategically repositioned without being restricted to an auxiliary ship's speed of advance. But like any weapon, counters are continually being devised that seek to mitigate the great advantage the United States enjoys through its carrier force. The anti-access area denial complex that the Chinese have created to impose some level of cease superiority in the Western Pacific is only the latest instantiation of threats that have existed since the carrier first demonstrated its worth in World War II. We have before us eight decades of experience in which risks to the carrier have arisen only to be mitigated by the inherent flexibility of naval power in general and the aircraft carrier weapon system specifically. Japanese dive bombers in Kamikaze gave way to Soviet Cold War era long-range bombers and nuclear powered submarines armed with supersonic maneuvering high-speed cruise missiles that were sure to devastate our carriers. Cold War journals of the day were replete with many of the same arguments that are raised today. Nevertheless, the Navy became quite skilled at confounding Soviet ocean surveillance and reconnaissance and responded to Soviet threats to the carrier through a number of counters, including the Aegis weapon system on its ships, the F-14 and the Phoenix missile system, rather than just packing it in and trying to do something else. That decision, the decision to pursue counters and pursue more capable carriers resulted in decades of options for multiple presidents to deter, assure, punish, preempt and aid in countless situations that did not rise to the level of war with the Soviets. Now, please review what I just said. Nowhere in those words did I suggest, hint, intimate, whisper or postulate that the US Navy had either taken on the Soviets in combat or be that we had prevailed in such a contest. I mentioned this in order to respond to the criticisms of an esteemed professor of naval strategy expressed in December, 2013, when he took issue with this line of argument by writing, but did the US Navy really beat the Soviet maritime threat as Brian and Kindred navalists opine? How would we know? Not only did I not opine this, but I do not think it. Nor did I, quote, assume whoever won must have gotten the tactics in hardware right, unquote. I think nothing of the sort. What I think and opine is that it remains exceedingly difficult to find and target carriers and that we remain capable of developing counters to emerging threats that will render the carrier of continuing utility for decades to come, just as we did decades ago. Now, as then, and as Navalist Jonathan Solomon reminds us, the attacker must find, fix, classify, track, engage, and assess the target. This includes making the hardly cost-free decision to even execute the attack. This difficult process is ripe with opportunities for disruption or exploitation by an imaginative and resourceful defender, which I hope we remain. The mobility of the carrier further complicates the attacker's problem. Recent improvements in adversary technology have not fundamentally changed any of this. Put simply, the choice carrier critics want us to consider is between a carrier and some other sort of launch platform, which will ultimately be found to be less efficient and less effective because it is too small and has too insufficient strike capacity. Know the real choices between a carrier and a land base. In terms of disrupting the adversary targeting attack process, which one is more likely to succeed, a stationary airport, or a moving one? Additionally, campaign design and operating concepts also matter greatly. US battle force operations should not be thought of as suicidal charges into the middle of a contested zone at the beginning of a war, followed by the establishment of uncontested long duration front line sanctuaries. Rather, they should be conceived of as hit and run operations that gradually degrade an adversary's ability to fight effectively in the contested zone's outer areas before moving the conflict closer in. Critics of the carrier do have a point, though, in that advanced A2AD capabilities have increased the risk to aircraft carriers. And all things being equal, the closer we operate to the A2AD power shores, the more risky the proposition. That said, critical assessments of carrier effectiveness tend to make a number of errors. The first is the assumption that the density and effectiveness of the adversary strike reconnaissance complex is equal throughout its volume. This is manifestly untrue. Next, they assume that because the present air wing embarked on the carrier is optimized for sortie generation and environment of low sea control threats, it must ever be thus. They fail to understand that what is given the carrier, its decades of effectiveness, has been the flexibility of its air wing to adapt. Clearly, today's air wing is suboptimal to face this A2AD threat. Specifically, for new or new again capabilities must be reintegrated to the aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier must buy back long range strike in a contested environment with a stealthy enough penetrator. Next, the carrier air wing must reintegrate organic tanking into its air wing. Not only for its own use, but for the use of land-based UAVs that may fly into its area of operations. Third, the air wing must fuel the true sea control aircraft again along the lines of the S3, which was proficient in both anti-submarine warfare and anti-surface warfare. And finally, the air wing must integrate a large, likely unmanned truck, which carries multiple long range armed UAVs, which when employed together create the swarming mass necessary to overwhelm sophisticated integrated air defense systems in advance of the more powerful munitions fired from the rest of the joint arsenal. The ability of the carrier to dramatically change its mission set and capabilities by swapping out new aircraft will contribute to its relevance in the face of determined high end threats. And while I cannot, with any real certainty, declare when the carrier will be obsolete, I will know exactly on the day when that happens. It will be the day after land-based strike becomes obsolete. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time. Thanks, Brian. We'll turn now to Professor Gardsky at the UCSD. Yeah, so somebody warned me. Don't talk to an able audience following somebody that just sang the praises of aircraft carriers. But I'm stuck in the queue where I am. So I'm going to present a bit of work that's coming from a project that is funded by DoD Minerva. And you can see a number of different icons, labels up here. Our team includes the cores in San Diego. We've got folks up at Cal. And then we managed to rope the labs into this project as well. And there are a couple of other labels that I can't tell you about right now that are waiting in the wings. So it's a neat project. And this is what it looks like schematically. The mission of this project, the larger project, is to come up with a theory of cross-domain deterrence. And when I tell people that, it's very interesting. The academics, oh, look at me and say, there's nothing interesting there. And the policy people say, that's really interesting, but it's impossible. And we're hoping that we're somewhere in the middle that it's possible and that there is something there. And perhaps in a couple of years we'll have something to demonstrate that. But this is the first little bit out of this project. So somebody else was telling me that in a good DOD type presentation, you want to do two things. You want to have lots of pictures, preferably of neat-looking platforms and behaviors. And the other is you want to demonstrate that you're in some kind of authority. So here's my stab at that, right? Actually, this is FFG 37, the Cromlin, where I briefly served in the summer of my midshipman cruise. And I was very dismayed to find out that it's now decommissioned. That's an indication of age. Nobody wants to see their ship's decommission because it implies you're no longer young. So what I want to talk to you about today is this idea of deterrence as not an it, but a they. That societies in competition are doing two things. They're warning and they're winning. They're trying to warn through the mechanisms of deterrence. And they're trying to win, of course, if they have to fight a war. And warning and winning can differ in their utility to decision makers at different moments in time and in different subject matters and in different contexts. But the best way to warn may or may not be the best way to win. Obviously, winning a war is an important advantage in deterrence. But some of the ways in which you can prove your prospects for winning a war also degrade your ability to deter because they involve things like surprise and stealth and mobility that make it harder to convince the other side, in fact, what you will do. On the one hand, policymakers want to be able to draw pictures for their adversaries and their friends that make it clear what the future, if war happens, will look like. On the other hand, oftentimes the combatants themselves find that there's a lot of value in not drawing those pictures too clearly because clear pictures make it easier for your adversary to optimize against what you're going to do. So if that's the case, then the inputs to the process of winning and warning can potentially differ. And capabilities, force structures, force postures, even platforms may be better at doing some of these things and less effective at doing others. And that's one cut that we're taking at trying to understand what cross-domain deterrence looks like. Sometimes there'll be domains or platforms that are very good at warning and maybe not quite as good at fighting by themselves in a contest. And sometimes a converse will be true. So I want to talk a little bit about a theory of naval capabilities and political trade-offs. And I think it's my little piece of this world with a lot of humility. I'm not an expert on naval power. I'm not an expert on naval operations. I think probably the only thing in which I can claim a little bit of knowledge and skill is how violence, how conflict is used as a political tool. And people like me love to bring up close wits and say politics matters. So let's talk a little bit about the politics of political violence and how it relates to naval capabilities. So one of the things that's happened in the literature on conflict in the last 20 years is the evolution of a new kind of thinking about the nature of the process itself. That war is not a function of the balance of power as much as a function of uncertainty about what that balance looks like. So I'll talk a little bit about that. I'm going to draw out some hypotheses for attributes of the naval domain. And then I'm going to try to show at a very first cut that there might be some validity to the things that I'm hypothesizing are true. Now, again, a lot of caveats. This is early days. And this is correlation, not causation. I make a plausible story, perhaps, about what that causation looks like. But that's as far as we can take it right now. So I'll tell you about the research design and I'll present the results in a couple conclusions. OK. So there's these distinctive trade-offs about the relationship between recent insights about the causes of war and peace. Things like mobility, firepower, and presence increase power in the sense that they affect who's going to win those contests should they occur. And that should be useful in power projection. And it should be helpful in influence. So these are characteristics, sometimes, that we associate with naval platforms and with the naval domain in general. But mobility, and especially stealth, also carry with it a less desirable consequence from a political perspective. And that's that you can't, without any equivocation, convince a friend or an enemy that you will, in fact, be there to make that balance of power shift that you are capable of. The very mobility of the platforms that we're talking about mean that it's easier for you to be there, but it's also easier for you not to be there. OK. So these characteristics should lead to an increase in the frequency with which others misperceive or underestimate the threat that posed by societies with substantial naval power. And I also make an argument that these should carry through to various naval platforms and explore a couple of these in the near future. So aircraft carriers are going to be very good in terms of influence precisely because they have that high visibility. But they do lead to this question about where that pivotal influence that we just heard about, where it's going to be exercised and where it's not going to be exercised. Subs allow societies to move farther from home than they would otherwise precisely because of stealth. But they also make it very hard to convince an adversary to act with discretion upfront because they're not sure whether they're vulnerable or whether, in fact, attention is elsewhere. So the point of this conception of war as an informational problem is that the balance of power, the things that everyone recognizes as this sort of what would happen if we fight, are baked into the deals that societies make with each other without having to fight. I live in San Diego and I tell my students that Mexico gave up on owning California a number of years ago when they sort of counted the number of federales and the number of US forces and decided that reoccupying the Southwest wasn't in the cards. So where do we see that societies challenge one another? It's in the context where a reasonable count by one side or the other can come up with a claim that maybe we'll get this thing that we want. Maybe we will, maybe we won't. If it's a foregone conclusion that one side is not going to prevail, then we don't see those contests occurring in the first place. So this focus on uncertainty is important because it's the dynamic that political actors are facing and trying to decide whether force will be necessary. The certainty part of it is very useful for political actors as well because that 90,000 or 100,000 tons of diplomacy is something that they can use to get their way without having to use the platform itself kinetically. So mobility means being able to influence in more places on the Earth, but it also means more questions about where that capability will actually be exercised and where, in fact, it won't be used because it's busy somewhere else. So national priorities are not as transparent of function of force structure or force posture in naval affairs as they might be in other domains because of mobility, because of the ability of the society to change its mind on a relatively short time horizon. More flexibility, stealth means less commitment. Flexibility and stealth are really important assets in winning the wars, but they're not particularly helpful in that warning function. They're not quite as good at convincing your adversary that in shelling sense that you can't swerve that they have to. So this is a picture of a place we all kind of recognize. It's very big. And I was going to do some fancy graphics here, but then I got lazy and it turns out that I lacked some of the skills that some of the other folks that do these presentations have. But imagine if you will that I put up all kinds of neat little symbols here and we could talk about the enormous number of locations on the earth that the US Navy can project power to. But then because of those enormous number of places that we can take that power, there are enormous number of questions in those places about whether their place will be the place that's subject to that pivotal influence or not. So power projection, fighting farther from home. Now I'm going to make a number of sort of leaps here. And I hope they're within the bounds of perhaps plausibility. But anytime that one starts counting things, you're going to simplify the world a little bit. And I want to acknowledge that. So power projection involves fighting farther from home. And one way to measure if you're fighting farther from home is to see where you're fighting. And we can do that empirically. We have geocoded the location of all militarized interstate disputes for the last roughly 200 years. So countries with disproportionate naval capabilities, and by disproportionate, I mean I'm going to measure how much their military capabilities are in general. And then I'm going to ask are their naval capabilities proportionally larger than their overall military capabilities? These countries should tend to be able to project power if by projecting power, one means being able to fight at distance. And there are a variety of advantages to fighting farther from home, including not having your own population subject to harm and so on. So influence is having a presence in more places, according to my definition. And here, disproportionate naval capabilities should lead to increased diplomatic recognition. And again, we've coded who has formally recognized which countries on various levels, Charger d'affaires and embassies, so on. And we can look at whether you receive more diplomatic recognition for having more naval power as a proportion of your overall defense spending or as a proportion of your overall national capabilities. Third hypothesis, the influence of a country's naval capabilities should vary with the target's coastline. And here, the argument I make is if you have no coastline until relatively recently, certainly in the age of cannon, you weren't as subject to naval power as some country that has a coastline. On the other hand, if you have a very long coastline, you have the advantage which smugglers have known about here in Newport and other places that long coastlines are nice places to hide. Uncertainty, ambiguity over preferences and priorities is an issue for warning. Countries that have disproportionate naval capabilities should experience a higher frequency of militarized conflict. And also because of their special role and their stealthiness, submarines should be more associated with militarized states. So I'm going to rush through this very quickly. If anybody has questions about it, please ask me. But there's some new data by Krisha and Suva that codes naval tonnage and platform counts for basically all the navies of the world for the past 150 years. And this is the main independent variable in the analysis I'm going to show you. There's a lot going on behind the scenes here, but in the interest of time and a little bit of useful hand waving, if you don't mind, I'll show you the results. And if you buy them, great. And if you don't, we'll have to dig deeper. Lots of variables here. So here's the result of the first set of repressions. And the x-axis here is just a normalized measure of impact, which you want to look at. The little blue dots are the mean effects. And the bars in these bar charts are our confidence. How much uncertainty the data is telling us there is about this effect. I've set this up so I can measure the distance from where a dispute happened on the earth to either country's capital for the dispute participants. And I'm going to alternate that randomly back and forth between the capital of the initiator and the capital of the target. And as I would expect, these things just, when I measured the other way, they flipped. And that's a good sign because if they weren't symmetrical in that respect, then there'd be some other process going on that I'm not accounting for. So what's happening? As an initiator, the more naval tonnage you have controlling for national capabilities, controlling for a variety of other things that we think are associated with conflict, the more naval tonnage you have, the farther you push your fights away from home. Now, we folks in this room know better than I do. It's an understanding that power projection is a special attributes of navies, but I think this is actual sort of evidence for that kind of a claim that if you have a country that has a relatively large investment in naval tonnage, it tends to fight farther from home when it fights. Okay, and that's true for both the initiators and targets of disputes. All right. But what does that do in terms of conflict behavior? And here I'm gonna look at whether you experience a dispute or not. And it turns out that having that high concentration of national capabilities in naval power increases your propensity to experience disputes. And that's true both if you control this, total naval tonnage has gone up over time. So if we control the proportion of naval tonnage you have in a given year for the system as a whole versus just the absolute numbers, the scale changes, but the results are the same, which is having big navies means that others have more questions about what you're gonna do. All right. So I tried to break this down a little bit. And again, lots of caveats here. There's questions of classification. There's questions of sample size and so on. But in general, what I'm finding is that battleships, well, we're not so worried about them anymore, but battleships behave mostly, what I'm looking at here is whether these platforms behave differently from tonnage in general. So this is not a claim that these platforms are not having an effect on power projection. Whether they have a bigger effect on power projection than the overall suite of naval capabilities doesn't look like battleships do that. Carriers, yes, they have a bigger effect. They tend to increase mid initiation. And I think here it's both that they're pivotal. If a carrier shows up, chances are the site with the carrier is gonna do better in that battle than otherwise, but the question is whether they're gonna show up. And in particular, submarines have a big effect in increasing dispute propensity. Here's a breakdown by type of submarine. And as I sort of argued in the paper, my suspicion was that there's heterogeneity in the effects of submarines. Boomers are not destabilizing effect. Nuclear missile submarines reduce your country's propensity experience. Mids attack submarines do the opposite. They tend to increase your country's propensity experience. Mids nuclear attack subs, hard to say whether they have, they don't have a significant effect. It's hard to say what that effect would be. And I think this is really a good example of small sample size and a limited number of countries. Okay, time, I'm out of time. I'm gonna talk really, really quickly. Here's the effect of tonnage on recognition. You got a large navy proportional to, and this is not just absolute large navy. This is, you spend proportionally more on your navy than you spend on your army or your air force or whatever. You get a lot of bang for the buck in terms of diplomatic recognition. Other countries tend to recognize countries that have proportionally larger navies. Length of coastline, this was my suspicion about it. If you don't have a coastline, it's hard for the navy to hinge upon you quite so much. You have a very big one you can hide. The effect of aircraft carriers. This is a little weird because we get a lot of aircraft carriers in the Second World War. Cut that data out and it looks cleaner. Basically having more carriers gives you more, more diplomatic influence than having other kinds of platforms. All right, so what are we gonna say? Lots of caveats here. Maybe this stuff means something. Maybe it doesn't. I don't want to push my results too far. But naval tonnage appears to increase power projection. You fight farther from home. It augments influence and presence, but it does have this Achilles heel that it's harder to do deterrence convincingly with a mobile platform, okay? Aircraft carriers, lots more influence, but more uncertainty than other platforms. No additional effects in terms of power projection, which is very interesting. Submarines, lots of, well, a little additional power projection heightened uncertainty because of their stealthiness. No increase in influence. Thank you very much. Thanks, panelists, I appreciate it. Let me make just a couple of remarks about each one of the papers and pose a couple of questions and the panelists can either respond to them now or not as they should choose. Mostly I'd just like to raise questions that came to me as they were speaking. I'll take them in the order that they presented. For TX, you suggest, in fact, you don't suggest, you say rather strongly that defense has become dominant in the offshore realm. At what point does the defense get so dominant that power projection essentially becomes a mood point? I mean, where does that leave us if we don't figure out a way to counter this dispersal of force that you described so ably? I mean, what does the world look like that for the United States, for its allies overseas, and for third parties that have a stake in the outcome of the competition on the high seas? Yeah, but I'd just be interested to hear what you have to say about that. Brian, I'm glad to accept your surrender on the question of the Soviet Navy. And thank you for offering it. So I would really appreciate that. I had actually forgotten about that point, but... I had. Clearly not. It's actually when you were talking about the past conflicts in which aircraft carriers have been involved, it occurred to me, and I'll just throw this out there for you, but if you take the Japanese, if you take World War II and the Pacific as the metric, it occurs to me that it is possible you should do some alternative history and ask whether the correct analogy to today is an Imperial Japanese Navy that's defending a much more modest defense perimeter and not engaging the United States very far from home, not trying to take over Southeast Asia and so on and so forth. What happens if the Imperial Japanese Navy makes a serious effort at full strength in order to deny access rather than doing it later on and after being forced to and already thrown on the reverse by the US maritime offenses in the central and south Pacific? And the other point is I sort of like what I asked TX, do you see on the horizon any chance that the air wing will be reconfigured so as to make the carrier do what you say it should do? You suggest that the problem of dispersal is partly countered by concentrating force and concentrating logistics and all of these things in a single big platform. The deuce, so I'm just asking you, I mean, when do you see this happening? Do you see any momentum in that direction? And so forth, I'd be loved to hear your views on that. And finally, Eric, just one suggestion as you move ahead with this study, I'm very skeptical of the notion that tonnage is much of a proxy for naval power. I mean, if you wanna pick tonnage to just take it in solo, I think you have to conclude that the mayors climb over and Denmark is the most powerful navy in the world. It'd be a size matters, but it's not all important. So I would just build in some counterargument there. And secondly, if I read your conclusions correctly, if I draw the correct takeaway out of there, I think you're suggesting that in order not to make war more likely, we should retire essentially to an offshore balancing posture, build inoffensive platforms and not operate them close to enemy shores or close to the shores of potential enemies. And I would like to just like to ask you to comment on whether that is indeed the takeaway you meant because that came through pretty clear to me when I read your paper this morning. And with that, I will turn it over to the audience for anything that you would like to query these people about.