 I'm not here as a cheerleader today. I feel more like an Old Testament prophet. So I'm going to give it to you fairly straight. And there won't be a lot of slides. Innovation, adaptation, transformation, capabilities based, net-centric, cross-domain synergy, our latest big bumper sticker. Everyone here today has heard these words before. They've gone in and out of vogue over the years. And over those years, vast amounts of resources have been spent in pursuit of achieving each one. At the same time, literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of man-hours have also been spent figuring out how to package what an organization is already doing to demonstrate it supports one of those concepts. Most of what I have seen in my career regarding innovation in our Navy has been activity-driven, not purpose-driven. More focused on getting a program through another step in the process than solving real problems. The reason why I wanted to have this conference and the reason I invited people here who might greatly respect, such as Professor Donald Chisholm, Dr. Whit Murray, to speak here with us today is because institutionally, we have been kidding ourselves. Our organizations and the processes we use are purposely designed to maintain course and speed, not to allow significant change. And please hold on to that thought because it's at the center of everything you all are about here these next couple of days. In his book, A Cognitive Challenge of War, Peter Paray wrote, to recognize innovation, whether in military institutions and how they function, or in their leaders, and how they think is itself a change. Even then, society and soldiers will not find it easy to understand the new. Cultural preconceptions and institutional and individual self-interest may block understanding. Further cognitive barriers add to the difficulties. Today, each of you are here to learn and discuss various topics related to innovation in order to reinvigorate innovation in the maritime domain. Now, history may not exactly repeat itself, but as Abraham Lincoln said, or Glee Mark Twain, perhaps it does tend to rhyme. Victor Davis Hansen wrote in his book, Father of Us All. As a rule, military leaders usually begin wars confident in their existing weapons and technology. But if they are to finish them successfully, it is often only by radically changing designs or finding entirely new ones. Our choice is simple. We can either innovate today and solve the challenges we anticipate in the future, or be forced to rapidly, rapidly adapt in the middle of conflict. Now, we always have to adapt in the middle of conflict. That is certainly our history. But we can certainly get some of the big things right beforehand. That is not our history. And we have plenty of examples to choose from. Many of you here have heard me speak often of the extraordinary innovation that occurred during the interwar period, World War I and World War II, and what it meant for our Navy and our nation, developing the aircraft carrier and coordinated airwind strike ops, amphibious operations, the concept of the fleet mobile logistics trade. For us in 2012, no less than our forebears in 1920, 1940, such innovation is actually essential to our future success in the maritime domain. We did not develop the Captain Magnafron that enabled airborne radar, that enabled us to hunt German U-boats in the black hole, that enabled us to turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942 to 1943. They were not done through holding conferences. Those who went before us in the 20s and the 30s had the focus, and they got it right. They developed such successful innovations because they had first properly defined their strategic challenges. For example, they understood that a conflict with Japan would result in the likelihood of a protracted conflict, which would require island hopping across the vast reaches of the Pacific, the result of the Washington Naval Treaties where we were unable to garrison the islands in the Pacific. And indeed, treaties gave many of those island chains to the Japanese. We would have to fight our way across the Pacific. They then defined the operational requirements to execute that strategy. Working with the Marine Corps, our Navy developed the concepts, ships, and equipment necessary to carry out the amphibious assaults. Despite the best efforts of the Bureau of Ships at the time, the Higgins boat developed from the oil industry in the Gulf made it through every piece of opposition to become the most single important, almost water-borne craft in World War II. The Navy spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to kill it and come up with a design of its own, an institutional imperative that could not accept innovation from the outside, no matter how positive that innovation was. Fortunately, Mr. Higgins was an oil wildcatter, an industrialist, and wouldn't take any crap from the Navy. And they tried to give him a load of it. He persevered, performance proved in time of war, and the Higgins boat passed into history. Our forebears didn't try to adapt reality or physics to their vision, but adapted their vision to the reality they face. This extraordinary period of interwar innovation was made possible, I believe, by a very strong connection between the Naval War College, the Office of the Chief Naval Operations, OPNAV, the fleet, and the all-powerful bureaus, all guided by the Navy's General Board. And interwar innovation was accomplished through establishing a virtuous cycle of Naval War College wargaming to develop a conceptual solution to the then current fleet problems. Then purposeful fleet battle experiments were performed to test the war-gain concept. And those lessons from the fleet battle problems were incorporated into the evolutionary design of the next generation of weapon systems, ships, aircraft, and operational doctrine. Therefore, to reinvigorate and increase innovation in our maritime domain, we must first define our strategic challenges correctly. We need to get the big things right. We can then identify, from those strategic challenges, the operational requirements, we must fulfill to meet those challenges. And then we can empower the right organizations and the right people in the wrong organizations to hypothesize, to develop, experiment, and learn to evolve our tactics, our platforms and systems, to succeed to meet those operational requirements. And we, leaders at every level, and followers at every level, need to read, think, and debate. This is not a damn PowerPoint brief territory. Too many of us, and I mean us in the fullest sense of the word, have outsourced our thinking to others. And as a result, I fear our institution that we know and love in the Navy is losing its ability to think deeply about the challenges we face today. That is the key challenge before us. This is not work solely for industry. This is not work we outsource. This is our work, and it is the most important work we will do.