 Thanks. So it's now my pleasure to introduce a man who needs no introduction, the 31st Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson. OK, well, I don't know how to follow that up. Let's give another round of applause for just an amazingly energetic talk by Secretary Layman. Secretary, thanks so much not only for the history, but how it relates today. Get filling our sails with that wind of inspiration. I'd like to also just recognize, first of all, it's just terrific to be back here in Newport as always. And I couldn't agree more with Secretary Layman about what this place means to the Navy and the nation in terms of being just a supernova of intellectual activity. And this current strategy forum being a very bright star in that constellation. And it's just a privilege for me to be here amongst such distinguished company and also the students. Not to say that the students are not distinguished, but they bring a special energy. Ambassador Bindorf, great to see you again, sir. Thanks for joining us today. Let's give a round of applause for his former Secretary of the Navy. Admiral Haugh, great to see you again, sir, as always. Yeah, there we go. We have our very well represented by our allies and partners here with Admiral Guimra Barrera from the Colombian Navy. Good to see you again, sir. And also Admiral Verma from the Indian Navy. So we've never fought alone. And we will not fight alone going forward. And it's terrific to have our allies and partners represented so well here, not only in the student body and the faculty, but most especially by our two distinguished guests. Honorable Randy Forbes is here somewhere. He's on campus. There you are, sir. Good to see you again. And so it's just terrific to address all of you. And what a timely conference this is right now. And I'm going to, despite the fact that Secretary Layman stole almost all of my best lines to describe our current situation, I'm going to go forward. And now he provided such a terrific strategic overview going back to that rich time in our strategy and kind of the Cold War, really the end of the Cold War, the final plays in that huge chess match that brought it to a close on terms favorable to us. And I hearken back also to where when this place was so vibrant in terms of developing the color plans, war plan orange and the interwar period too just by that iteration, iterative war games coming back and back and back again to just work our way through to the point that Admiral Nimitz when he fought World War II having been to so many of the war games here at the Naval War College said that nothing in the fight in the Pacific surprised him at all except kamikaze. That was the only thing that really hadn't been foreseen in some form or fashion by virtue of the war gaming process here and developing that war plan. So here we are at the current strategy forum and I'm going to actually talk a little bit about fleet design and fleet tactics. And so one can sort of throw me into the bus right away. What are you doing? It's just why do you want to do that? And I kind of go back to one of my favorite references is Captain Wayne Hughes seminal book fleet tactics. And in the forward for that book, another great naval strategist, Art Sobrowski calls tactics the sum of the art and science of the actual application of combat power and therefore the soul of our profession. And Wayne Hughes himself argues convincingly in that book for the study of strategy and tactics. And he says this is especially important during periods of transition in naval warfare. And if you've heard me talk anytime in the last two years, you know that I think we are on, we are in the middle of a tremendously changing time, very rapidly changing time and so very appropriate. Captain Hughes observes that the ultimate act of a great transition in the hands of a master tactician maybe felt like a bolt from the blue. And that's exactly the words that I was thinking about when Secretary Layman was talking about that great exercise that went up 84 ships north of the GI UK gap right up into the Northern Atlantic surprising everybody, it sounds like. What, you know, when you think of a bolt from the blue that is exactly what comes to mind. And you know, the book goes on to observe that while it takes the work of many from both inside and out of the Navy to navigate through such a transition, the good perspiration always comes from within the Navy when we do this. And so I'm hoping that today at this conference and maybe getting started with this talk we can see if we can't break a little bit of a sweat. And so with that in mind, just wanted to share some of my recent thinking on tactics and fleet design and we'll start with our OODA loop. Now I think everybody in this room is familiar in one sense or another with John Boyd's OODA loop. We're comfortable with it as a very tactical thing, even down to an individual, a pilot let's say, but also sort of as a more operational concept or even a staffing process. And actually we're a little bit perhaps too comfortable with it. If you read Colonel Boyd, he talks about, hey, this is nothing that's very deterministic. There's a tremendous amount of ambiguity. There's always, our mental models will bias us in certain ways, leading us to that unavoidable fog and friction of war. And so sometimes we oversimplify our OODA loop, but if it's understood as sort of a model, recipe if you will, then I think you can help us describe the character of what we do from sort of small group tactics all the way up to the strategic level and help us navigate this transition. Now I've emphasized through my tenure the need to back up a bit and talk about what has changed at the last time. We were really in a competition. And I've argued that the character of the competition has changed. Certainly the competitors have changed in important ways, but the character of the competition has changed. And I talk about this in the design for maintaining maritime superiority. We talk about a number of forces that are changing that character, two of which are the rate of technology creation, and then also the rate at which that technology is adopted or embraced by users. And both of those trends really began at the time that Secretary Lehmann was talking about. In the 80s and 90s, they've had a major impact on our business characterized by a number of catchphrases, reconnaissance strike network, a revolution in military affairs. You hear a lot of talk about transformation. And in particularly advances in networks and in space have created tremendous opportunities, sort of unprecedented levels of precision. And so in the Oodaloo context are much of that transformation, much of that revolution to date has provided an ISR network that has offered us the opportunity to observe things with a tremendous amount of fidelity and precision. And then when married to precise weapons, it allows us to orient ourselves to translate that into decisions and actions with a whole new level of accuracy. And so I would say, if I can, hopefully this works right, point it at the clock, there we go. So this is sort of where our advantage has been seen to date, all right? And the leverage that the Joint Force was able to realize has perhaps been the defining characteristic of our military advantage over the past few decades. We were able to see things better, more precisely than our adversaries that allowed us to more quickly orient and that led to decisions and actions that were better, more precise, and ahead of our competition. And this effectiveness rippled all the way back into our force architectures and design. We've been optimizing our ability to see, better, and shoot more accurately ever since. And so much of the air land battle, if you talk about the second offset that Secretary Worth describes, it is this precision strike network. But if you're kinda keeping your ear to the ground right now, I think we can all feel that things are changing. The story didn't stop simply with precision. And the information technology trends of the decades since we were last in a head-to-head competition have not only continued, but they've accelerated. And the technological march has become much more of a sprint, just some examples. The cellular phone, okay, it was invented and adopted by the people, the population, the users of that phone, in about half the time that it took for people to adopt the personal computer. And the personal computer was adopted in about half the time that the original telephone itself was adopted. And of course, that cellular phone brings a tremendous amount more capability to your hand. And so it enabled entire communications and banking capabilities to regions of the world that have never seen a copper wire, have never seen a bank. They can do it all on your phone. The size of this digital universe into which this phone plugs is doubling every two years. And I'm gonna give you a number here, but I have no idea what this really means in practical terms. The amount of information is gonna reach 44 zettabytes by 2020. Any of the students give me a sense of the, what the heck a zettabyte means. It's an order of magnitude change since 2010. It gives you a sense of how fast things are changing. The internet of things, right? The bringing in of hardware into this digital connection. By the end of this year, we're gonna cross the threshold where 20 billion things are connected into that internet of things. And it's gonna be 30 billion by 2020. And more than double again by 2025. So that's everything from your car to your refrigerator, to your phone, you name it, right? All connected in. And as things get more and more connected, as the information becomes really flowing in a waterfall or an avalanche, it's bringing along with it a brand new age cognitive computing, decision and cognitive assistance, machine assistance to help us make sense of all that data. Adaptive network sensors are now on the horizon and proliferating. And a little bit different than maybe perhaps when Secretary Layman was making history. The private sector is leading in a lot of these areas. And militaries, the Navy in many of these areas is becoming a fast follower, trying to leverage what's going on. So a sense of what's going on in the private sector. Global fishing watch is a cooperative venture involving Google. It already uses AIS data and other information from a comparatively low cost satellite constellation to track over 50% of the world's fishing fleets and not only by their location, but also monitoring their behavior. Of the roughly 1500 operational satellites in orbit today, close to a third of those have been launched in the last seven years. And only about 40% of what's in orbit right now was launched by the United States. So now you gotta think about what this means. All of those sensors in space, on our phones and our homes. You know, I tell people, I teach a lot, really enjoy teaching command. In fact, I'm gonna spend the afternoon over at the Navy Leadership and Ethics Center. And we talk a lot about ethics and we, there's this sense that there's a sense, a false sense of privacy. And if, how many people here have a Facebook account? Okay, how many people don't have a Facebook account? All right, so, see, it's always interesting in these crowds. There's always kind of a, you know, if I asked that at a college, it would be everybody but one person, you know, would have a Facebook account. Here, there's always a little bit of hesitation about that level of exposure. And, but I'll tell you, you just have to watch the news to see that, you know, criminal behavior, undesired behavior, oftentimes is caught on some kind of a sensor. So, all of these things are proliferating around, literally everywhere. It means that, you know, this idea of that first O in the OODA loop, the observe stage, is really becoming ubiquitous. And I think that that has tremendous implications for how we do business. In the near future, I hypothesize, I propose that just about anybody is going to be able to see almost anything anywhere in the world on demand. In fact, it's going to be much more, well, it's gonna be as accessible to my daughter on her cell phone as it is going to be to my son, a Navy Lieutenant, in a skiff. In fact, if we don't attack some of these things that Secretary Layman talked about, my daughter's probably gonna be a couple of days ahead of my son in the Navy skiff, because she won't have, you know, anywhere near as many crazy firewalls to break through to get to the information. Now, you know, we might not be able to read somebody's driver's license from space with those sensors, but they will be able to detect ships. They'll be able to detect things at tactically relevant scale. They'll be able to detect cars. They'll be able to detect changes in cars, right? How many cars are in a particular parking lot? And they'll be able to do that automatically. They won't need a person to examine that. They'll have an algorithm that can do all that. They'll be able to detect the level of petroleum in storage tanks, because they can measure the tops of those tanks. They can do all that and measure those. They'll know when a particular country gets below its 20% of its strategic reserve of petroleum, because they're tracking that with a machine. They're taking the imagery and processing it by a machine. And so it's sifting through all of that data to be able to rapidly understand the operational environment and discern those changes is now gonna be the critical part of orienting. So as we gather here in Newport, the information environment, the pace of change, the word that's used to describe that more and more is exponential, exponential pace of change. And we're familiar with this idea. We kind of, we live at it, right? Download apps, we have smart houses, smart cars, smart phones, smart everything. But in terms of our business and fleet design, we may not have yet fully appreciated its impact, which were to date underpinned by superior access to data and a presumed advantage that it has in a military application. So the idea here that I propose for you, one of the ideas is that this era of precision, and observation is giving way to an era of competition for decision, okay? In fact, it's moving over. That's the new contest. Observation, that information is gonna be ubiquitous. It's gonna be on demand. It's already being eroded, our observational advantage. And in an era in which CubeSats are being launched into space, zettabytes of information available, the advantage boils down not to who gets the data, the information, but who can make better sense of it, who can orient themselves better and make a better decision. Observation has become synonymous with the physical orientation. The sensors now are omnipresent and the positioning information is embedded. And so now the competition shifts to orienting, finding your way through that information and making a decision. So what does this mean for the Navy? I mean, this is a great theoretical construct, but we're here at the Naval War College. Well, I'll tell you, I'll just pile on to Secretary Layman's comments. We no longer have the luxury of moving slowly, okay? We have, I mean, it is an imperative to speed up. And we also no longer have the luxury of just leaving our information and data unexamined, okay? We gather a lot of data, but as you look around the Navy right now, we're not taking full advantage of it. And we can't expect to keep pace in an exponential environment with linear and evolutionary improvements by applying analog processes in a digital world. We haven't been in true competition for a generation. And when we were in competition last, as I said, you know, the competition was for observation superiority, precision, but the Udallup, I would argue, is still relevant, but it's the team that orients and decides better that's going to win. Another dimension of an exponential competition, there is no silver medal. There is no bronze medal. It is winner-take-all, okay? And so we want to be the one on the podium. So how quickly we move to connect distributed sensors, to capable payloads in the middle with orienting and deciding, that's gonna determine whether we prevail in this new era of competition. And it's an additive challenge, right? It's not like we can abandon precision as we do this. We have to continue to protect our precision capabilities, our command, our control, our sensor networks, our weapons networks. Those have all got to be made resilient and survivable. But to continue to put all of our money on the bet of superior observation is, I would argue, a losing strategy. Okay, so I recently put out a paper that talked about how to move towards a future Navy. And it adopts a lot of the concepts and the ideas that Secretary Layman proposed. In fact, that's not an accidental thing. That book that was up there, I read that book. And Secretary Layman and I had talked off and I just stole his ideas, all right? So, you know, it's the sincerest form of flattery, sir, it's just an invitation. And so I thought I'd walk you through this with just a couple of graphs. So here's a chart from the paper. Let me just go back, there we go. So this is a description of a summary slide that talks about the output of a number of studies that we've undertaken and other people have undertaken over the past year or so. And along the axis is the year you can see. And then you can see sort of a forced building, numbers of ships growing over time. And there is a good consensus of studies that say that the size of the Navy, well, first of all, there's unanimous consensus that we need more Navy, okay? This is a conclusion by every one of the studies. And there is also a consensus around 350, okay? 355, 350, mid-300s in terms of the number of platforms that this Navy should grow towards. And so these are some of the trajectories that have emerged from those. And it is exactly like Secretary Layman said, we're rhyming with history. It's just as he describes. Somewhere out in 2040, we start to approach 350 platforms. That's using sort of current ideas, traditional thinking, the bureaucratic approach that defines our acquisition processes right now. The problem is that we, this is the Navy we need. We need that capability, but we need that now. We need to start building towards that right now. How do we accelerate our way forward so that we get this Navy we need at the time that we need it, all right? How to get there. And so I've got a couple of cartoons that propose an approach. And I'm gonna, I've got about an hour talk. I'll talk for 59 minutes and leave the last 50 seconds or so for questions. But I would like to engage in a dialogue about, what do you think about this idea? So we'll start with just sort of a cartoon about a fleet, okay? And the capability of that fleet sort of roughly goes up somewhat linearly over the number of platforms. So you can see naval power on the y-axis, the vertical axis, as the number of platforms on the x-axis grows, the naval power grows. And this is sort of a description of let's say our current fleet, okay? So let's move forward. How do we gain, you know, how do we get from linear to exponential? How do we get to that naval power that we need at the time that we need it? Well, just as Secretary Layman said, we can build stuff. We can get more platforms. And so if we do that, there's a picture of more platforms, okay, a bigger Navy. And there's a description of what that, those more platforms can get. And as just as Secretary Layman said, some of that is going to become from service life extension, right? If we plan now, for instance, to extend the life of the Arleigh Burke DDGs beyond, you know, their current projections, you know, the initial returns are that we could buy 10 to 15 years to the left in terms of reaching that 350 ship goal. All right? And so we're looking at every trick, extending lives, bringing ships back, you know, we'll do everything it takes to bring more platforms. And then of course, we can have a discussion about new acquisitions and how those new acquisitions should be done so that we can keep a fleet that's relevant for as far out as we can see, okay? So one way to grow that naval power is to just build more platforms, okay? Then there is another thing. So if you look at the cartoons, there's sort of a circle radius that talks about the, represents the capability of each of the one of those platforms. But you can put things on those platforms, you can modernize them to make them each more capable. All right? So now you've got not only more platforms, but each of those platforms individually is more capable and they add up to yet a more, more naval power, all right? So you've got this growing naval power there by adding more platforms and then making each of those platforms more capable. What sort of technologies will do this? Well, I think that, you know, between more platforms and more capable platforms unmanned and autonomous technologies are right around the corner being employed. I would think that, well, directed energy is a technology that can make platforms significantly more capable and at a cost that's much more reasonable. It gets us on the right side of the cost curve in many ways. There are those types of technologies that are out there, imaging radars, those sorts of things that can make each of these platforms more capable, delivering more naval power. Final step then is to network them all together. Now, this is greater than linear, I would argue. And this is where we need to get the theorists together. But I would say that by taking more platforms, more capable capability on each of those platforms and networking them together, you start to now see that exponential growth as that networked fleet can combine in adaptive and creative ways. And this place, more than any, knows that many of those revolutions in military affairs, some of them were brought about by the introduction of new technologies, but many of them, in fact, many of the most decisive ones were brought about not by a new technology in and of itself, but by new combinations of things. And so by allowing these combinations, by networking these, the fleet together, you start to now see how this naval power can grow near exponentially, matching this exponential environment, delivering us that navy that we need at the time that we need it, okay? So this is the idea. Let's go back to our slide build. You know, it's not just the fact that we've got to do the right thing. You know, we'll go back to fleet tactics. Captain Hughes says again, throughout history, the genius of winning sea battles has not so much been knowing what to do as when to do it. And Arleigh Burke, as only he could do, boiled that down to a phrase. He said, the difference between a good and a great naval officer, it's about 10 seconds, all right? You've got to be able to do this faster than faster and better than the enemy. So we'll go back to our Oota slide here. So we'll take this and we'll spin it on its head a little bit. And now you start to see how this breaks down. And think about that interconnected, more capable fleet. All of those sensors that we talked about, right? The ubiquitous sensing environment. You start to see an environment emerge where, you know, if you think about hardware as a service, software as a service, we have a fleet commander now who can really literally think of sensors as a service. Okay, and how many of those sensors can you network into that maritime operation center for him to take advantage of? That will be his avalanche of information that orientate, observing phase of the step. And then, you know, again, go back to that picture. Each of those platforms can deliver a payload. Those payloads are a combination of kinetic and non-kinetic payloads. And he's, and those payloads are also part of that network. They are wired in, right? Their sensors are wired in. And they are receiving information. They're both contributing to and receiving from that network. And so you see now that payloads emerge as a service. Payloads as a service. That is your act part. And the battle space here now is in terms of orienting and deciding. And this is where we've got to pay a lot of attention. First of all, it raises a tremendous amount of questions. If we agree, and I'm not saying that we do, that this observation, we're going to be under near constant observation, what does that mean in terms of the way we train and exercise, all right? I mean, if you're gonna get ready for the big game on Sunday, how do you prepare for that game when you've got the competition watching all your practices during the week? It's different than it was when they weren't there. What does that mean for operational deception, right? Secretary Layman talked about the importance of deception in that great bolt out of the blue. What does this ubiquitous observation mean for operational deception? How do you deceive under constant observation? Where do you want that orienting and deciding happening? Do you want that at the unit command level? Do you want that at the strike group level, the individual level, the fleet command level? Where do we build the tools to orient and decide? So, a lot of questions, that's why I bring this talk here. Because this is the place to ask a lot of questions and get them answered, all right? So, I just wanna leave you with a couple things. One, we're back in competition for the first time really in a generation. The good news is, as Secretary Layman said, there's a tremendously growing realization of that and the conditions are right to maintain our lead in that competition, maintain our superiority. But I hope I've instilled in you a sense that the character of the game has changed. We can talk about the competitors. It's always, I know I'll get questions about the four plus one, I always do. But if we don't understand that changing character, it doesn't matter, position by position, we can have the best defense in the NFL, but if we are not ready for the no huddle offense, we're just gonna fall into disarray further and further with every play as we are called for too many men on the field, as we're at a position when the ball snaps and the other team walks into the end zone against ostensibly the most powerful and maybe irrelevant defense in the league. I hope I've instilled in you that we've got to capture this changing character and get moving with a sense of urgency, a sense of immediacy. This is not something that can wait until 2040 to get going. We've got to make these moves now. We've got to make them boldly. And so I look forward to hearing the insights of not only the current strategy forum, but continuing to work closely with the minds here at the Naval War College as we wrestle with this period of transition, as we work at the close interconnection of tactics, operations, and strategy in crafting our fleet design, moving towards that 350 ship platform Navy that will continue to make us the most powerful maritime power in the world. Thank you all very much. And I look forward to your questions. I think there's some rules here. We got to find the most junior person to ask the first question. Senator Colonel Tracy, United States Marine Corps. Very excited, your presentation on Colonel Boyd and his philosophy. I completely concur that this is the wave of the future. However, I've wrestled with this problem and looked at it over the past year and I've concluded that our service cannot execute this policy and this philosophy. The reason for that I believe is mired in what I call the three M's. Our service today is modern by its postmodern, it's mechanistic, and it's Mahanian. In that we have trained ourselves to seek a correct solution by speaking more postmodern and being comfortable in the fluidity and exponentiality of the potentials of these technologies. Do you believe that that assessment is one incorrect? And if two, if it is correct, then how do we change the culture and philosophy of our service to accept this? Well, it's sort of as is and to be. As is, I think a lot of what you said resonates. First of all, don't be busting on my hand. We're gonna have to, not here. Then our service literally is what we make it. And so I will tell you that of the ingredients in the mix of everything that we have to do, the most important ingredient is a sense of urgency and paranoia. With that we can move mountains. Unless we get that, we're gonna continue to be comfortable and complacent and we'll be mechanistic and we'll be slow and we'll be non-exponential. I'll tell you, a lot of the books that are read in academic institutions about competition, they're business books, aren't they? Right, you talk about a lot of what's going on in business, particularly in a lot of these startups in Silicon Valley. And that's because, well, they're interesting because their victory is the margins of victory there, the margins of survival or capitulation are razor-thin. They understand this competition a lot more viscerally than we do. And while those startup things are sort of the latest manifestation of that, maybe the more academically interesting, there's an awful lot of corporations that look a lot like us. They have a lot of capital. They bring a great legacy and tradition and they are modernizing and they are adapting and continuing to dominate the competition. You just probably read in the last couple of days that Jeffrey Immelt is stepping down as the CEO of General Electric. Boy, what a company that is, right? I mean, GE, I think, is the only company that was on the original Dow Jones that is still there. And I've almost completely transformed themselves in the last 10 years under Mr. Immelt's leadership. And so this can be done, but it's gonna take leadership and it's gonna take a sense of urgency by everybody involved. It's gonna take alliance, alignment and everybody pushing on this thing. This is not something where you should feel yourself pulled along. If you're not pushing, then you're in the wrong organization. So today, looking back, a lot of what you said checks, checks with the chart. Like going forward, it doesn't have to be that way. Secretary Layman proved it. He built 600 ship Navy, all right? It can be done. All right, next question. It's a question back here, I think. Sir, thank you. I'm from Special Operations Command, so my question will go in that direction. What I took away from your chart was that the sensors and the networked ability to fight a problem globally, which is where we hear the chairman is going, is equally, if not more important than the platforms for that competitive advantage. So to get back to competition, it seems to me some of our smaller teams and unique capabilities could be better integrated soft specifically rather than looking at it as a CT capability. How do you pull those things in for that unique game changer capability going forward as opposed to, what's the transformational next step that our first question from the Marine focus on? Well, I'll tell you, I'll stick to the network. And what we do, I mean, we're working very hard on this in the Navy and I hope that that is felt up here at the Naval War College. And it's just as you said, so oftentimes we'll put together the plan and if we aren't careful that, hey, we'll get to the information part of the plan or the digital part, the cyber part, whatever you want, however you want to do it, the electromagnetic maneuver warfare part of the plan after the cake is baked, right? We'll take it out of the oven and it's like, oh, we forgot this and we'll try and frost something over it. If we're not careful, Special Operations can be the same way. And so we just have to be careful to include that whole thing in our planning. Now, you mentioned the chairman and his idea of this global approach that he's taken. You know, what he means there is that by virtue of a lot of these technologies, nothing is truly regional anymore, is it, right? It really is sort of very interconnected and global. Some things more global than others. If you talk about a competitor like Russia and China, they can bring a lot more tools, a lot more global tools to the table than a competitor like Iran and North Korea. But even those latter two, it would be a mistake, I think, to call them just a regional challenge. And so, and then, of course, space and cyber, two war fighting domains, operational domains that weren't even around last time we were competing. And so that's, I think, a little bit more what the chairman's talking about in terms of this impact of this technology and making things not regional, but much more trans-regional, okay? But we've got to kind of get all of the special operations, cyber information, all of those things, those new dimension space. It's like conducting two or three orchestras at one time and everything has to be done very precisely. So, again, you go back, Secretary Layman talked about the importance of war games. What better place to talk about that than here? We've got to be war gaming that level of complexity so that we get the C2 rights and the timing down so that when the authorities come, we'll have done our homework and be ready to go. What other question? Over here. Tim, back to Ripple on US Navy. For the third and efficient Navy, I noticed you didn't mention pulling ships out of mothballs. That's obviously probably the fastest way. How do you see the balance between numbers and capabilities? Yeah, now that's always the question, right? So we've got to be thoughtful about this. In this exponential world, a lot has changed. So the ones that are sort of, the ones that we're taking a hard look at are the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates. There's seven or eight of those that I think we could take a look at. But those are some old ships and the technology on those ships is old. And in these exponential types of environments, a lot has changed since we last modernized those. And so it'll be a cost-benefit analysis in terms of how we do that. The other part is just life extension. So we sort of plan to keep them out of mothballs longer and that's gonna be, I think, money in the bank if we do that. So it's really a cost-benefit analysis in terms of how much does it cost to modernize these things, make them relevant for the amount of life that we're gonna get out of them and then we'll see how that goes. Sir. Yeah, a class of 93. I had the great privilege of deploying with the CureSarch LHD-3 under Captain Larry Getz. And we were the sole big debt operating in that operating area of the Gulf. Proving to my mind that an LHD with its capability of flight ops and the Mew is a good solution to freeing up some of our large deck carriers to go into other areas. I'd like to suggest and take this opportunity to promote the idea that we need to build some new LHD-3s with increased capability. You know, you'll hear, I think the commandant's on the agenda later on. And so he and I are working very closely to make sure that we take a look at naval power and what those big deck amphibes can bring, particularly as you bring an aircraft like the F-35B on board that. And so it brings an entire new capability set to that formation and provides us, you bring it into that network I was talking about with just the progress of technology, you can put pretty near an Aegis combat system, you know, in a couple of racks of gear now and now you're talking about a whole new game there. So I agree with you. Sir. What do you see as the big challenges for the Navy over the next 10 or 15 years? What am I, I've been talking for 47 minutes about the, it's, it's. What I mean by that is, who are at the series? What are their capabilities? How do we have to position ourself? Yeah. Well, again, I think some of the capabilities that we talked about highlight implicitly what our challenges are. But, you know, I wrote a piece not too long ago that sort of advocated that we stop using this A2AD term, right? And it's not that it's not, you know, a good term. Well, actually it's not a good term, but it's, you know, it's like going to the doctor and getting the diagnosis, hey, I think you're sick. You know, it's like, well, thanks. I was hoping for something a little more useful, you know. Every one of those anti-access area denial approaches, you know, they're very tailored to the threat, to the geography, you know. And so I think that decomposing that is going, you know, as observation becomes more and more ubiquitous and more and more precise, as the weapons become longer range, you know, there's going to be contests. There's going to be contests in space. There's going to be contests for access as we move into each of those kind of reconnaissance-strike networks and decomposing each one of those things is going to be, you know, the challenge. It's been some time since we've been challenged for sea control. And a lot of times when we think of the traditional battle for sea control, it's sort of fleet on fleet. What does that mean, you know? Another ancient adage is, you know, fleets don't fight forts. Well, what happens when that fort can reach out 1,500 miles? That's a big challenge, okay? Sir. Sir, how do we convince a civilian population that, how do we engender this essential sense of urgency in a civilian population that pays the bills and yet seems naive to the fact that you can be paranoid and still have enemies? Well, you know, another great competitor in the private sector was a guy named Andy Grove. He came over from Hungary and educated himself and went on to be the CEO of Intel. And he wrote a book, well, you know, he could have written a number of books, right? If you think about his life and he did write a number, he wrote one on management, which is a fascinating book, high output management. He also wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. So we should embrace our paranoia. But in terms of energizing the population, I think it's really just a matter of talking to them. I mean, and I wouldn't take for granted that anybody knows the challenges that face us. You get out of the academic circles of Newport and the War College, you get outside the Beltway, different things are on people's minds, right? And so you just have to, the first part is just talk to them. I do a lot of discussions with our partners on Capitol Hill, Congressman Forbes and one of those great partners. Boy, every venue, I think we need to go out and educate people. So all of the chambers of commerce, all of the PTAs, the Rotary Clubs, you name it. Don't miss an opportunity to talk about some of these challenges that we face in the international world and just make sure that it's on people's minds. Sir. My name's Robert Berliner. Many years ago when I still had hair, I served as supply officer on the Henry L. Stimson. And I am curious about two things. One is there seems to be an assumption in the first observation phase that everybody has access to the same sensors. So that raises two questions to me. One, is there an opportunity for our forces to be less observable, which probably means more underwater forces? And is there also an opportunity to interfere with our adversaries' sensor transmission capabilities? Yeah, yes and yes. It's sort of easy questions. But the hard part is how? And so it'd be tempting for a guy like me to submerge everything, right? That's sort of where I was thinking. But the other thing that is really terrific about being in the Navy and why I would argue with anybody that tries to downplay the relevance of navies is that it is absolutely necessary but not sufficient to be a consummate warfighter in the Navy because navies do so much more than that. And so there is the diplomatic element of being in the Navy, which is just a terrific part of what we do. There's these long-term shaping, certainly we do crisis response. Our presence and our capability there provides national leadership timely, incredible options to respond to a crisis, whether that's a humanitarian crisis, whether that is a security crisis, whatever. And hopefully by virtue of that response, we can mitigate and prevent that crisis from escalating. We can contain it. So that's our sort of very rapid, high bandwidth contribution. On the other end, by virtue of that long-term presence, working with allies and partners, advocating for norms and the rule of law, et cetera, advocating for our values, there is that long-term shaping function. And you can't do any of that unless you're up and you're engaging, right? So there's so much more to a Navy than absolute necessity of being able to fight and win at sea. And so I think it would be incomplete to just try and submerge everything. And then it does get into that middle section. It's not so much the observation, as I said. How do you detect what's normal? How do you know what's normal? And then how do you detect what's a departure from normal, something that I need to respond to? That's that middle part. And we need to do it to our adversaries. We need to understand that they're gonna be doing it to us. We need to understand that culturally, some of our competitors are centuries ahead of us in this deception world. And so you need to be thoughtful about that. All right, anybody over here? Sir? How about giving the Navy a grade? How would you grade them on the need for a system urgency in their garden? Okay, I'll tell you what. I get out around our Navy quite a bit. And it kind of goes back to this question that talks about agility, dynamic, the ability to adapt, focus. Our Navy gets an A in that regard. They are doing terrific work out there. The operational fleet. I had a great visit to Rota, Spain not too long ago. In fact, it was the week before the strikes into Syria. And I wanted to go, the Eastern Mediterranean, part of this changing environment. The Eastern Mediterranean is a pretty sporty place to operate these days. And I visited the USS Ross, one of our FDNF ships in Rota. And I just wanted to, they were getting ready to go on one of their patrols, about four month patrol. I wanted to make sure that one, their heads were in the game, wanted to talk to them. Wanted to talk to their sailors. Wanted to see their systems, understand material condition, et cetera. And one, it became clear some of the long-term influences of being in a resource constrained environment. Where people are into mitigating and minimizing problems. The mindset of restraint, restrained resources is different than the mindset of growth, where people are seeking opportunities and creativity and all of that. And so, there's a little bit of that thread. But what the sailors were completely engaged and ready for what they were doing. They gave me the brief from their previous patrol in the Mediterranean. With pictures of the Russian carrier Kuznetsov doing flight operations and strikes into Syria. With the Kirov in the background, et cetera, et cetera. Things that we haven't seen in a long time. They were just adapting on the fly. But as I was touring around, it was GM2 Smith, second-class gunners mate, showing me the Tomahawk cells, the VLS cells. And he was walking me through how he had, that was his station. When he knew his business, he was an expert in what he did. He said, you know, Admiral, I just, he gave a great presentation. He said, but I have a question for you. Can I ask you a question? I said, you know, of course, GM2, you can ask me a question. He said, I've been just taking care of these missiles for so long. And, you know, keeping them ready. And they are ready to go. And am I ever going to get a chance to use them? And I said, well, I said, well, GM2 Smith, here's what I can guarantee you. When the call comes for you to do your job and employ these missiles, it's going to come without warning and preparation. It's going to be on a very short timeline. And we're going to expect you to execute with perfection. OK? So that I can be, I can, you take that to the bank. All right? So he's like, OK. Within a week, he'd shot 30 of them. Right? So I was back in my office by that time. I was thinking, I'm pretty damn good. So the CEO and I made a nice connection there on board. And he sent me a picture of the missiles leaving the tube. Right? And many of you probably saw those. They were terrific pictures. The strike happened at night. And so the boosters lit up the sky. And some of them had the American flag there. And so they were just great Navy patriotic pictures. So I took one of those. And I had it blown up on a screen. And I put that outside my office in the Pentagon. And then I went out and stood next to it and had a picture taken of me with the picture. Right? And then I emailed that whole thing back to GM2 Smith and said, watch what you ask me. So folks like Professor Smith, they get an A. They're doing their job. We need to help them. Right? Back here in Washington. And as I've testified, and I said this on the record, there's a growing sense that we don't get it. Right? And we've got to overcome that. We have to close that gap. We have to resource our Navy. We have to reduce the bureaucracy. We have to move faster. And then we'll be getting an A across the whole organization. But those sailors operating those ship submarines, aircraft, networks, teams, that's an A team. All right? Thank you all very much. So we're going to go ahead and take a 20-minute break so we set up for the next panel. So it's pleased to be back in our seats at 10.20.