 Well, in the interest of time, I'm not going to read to you the preamble, which I assume you can find in the program, and I won't read the bios because they're also provided, but I would like to introduce Mr. Bill Wesley, the Executive Director for Plans and Policy, U.S. Pacific Fleet, Dr. Shun Murray, Associate Professor of, excuse me, from the School of International Service, American University, and also Ms. Nina Serrafino, the Specialist to International Security Affairs and Congressional Research Service. So using scientific methodology, we're going to have Mr. Wesley go first because he's the only one that has slides, and I actually got the projector to work. So with no more delay, we'll have you start, sir. Okay. Thanks, Tony. And then for Derek, thanks for letting me be here. And obviously, my great thanks to Admiral Howe. On behalf of Admiral Harris, it's my pleasure to be here today to represent the Pacific Fleet. I used to tell folks when I'd give briefings that I'm glad to be in the D.C. arena because no one has a clue what happens beyond the West Coast, so I'm glad to be here to let you know what's happening in Westpac. So sometimes that was received very well, sometimes it wasn't received very well. What you're seeing here is this slide, what I'm going to concentrate on is some operational things, and then what Tony asked me to do is look at assessments. And he says, how are you doing the things that you are doing, the operations, actions, activities, et cetera, and then are you assessing them, and are you doing the right things? Sometimes that's a question we ask every day at Pact Fleet. So as a consequence, this one here represents the high end of ROMO, the range of military operations. It's a valiant shield exercise, three carrier battle groups, all those services, Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps. That's the high end. And if you can do the high end of operations, you can always do HADR, which we talked about the other day. If you have a Navy or a Naval force built for HADR, you cannot do this. And that's something that Admiral Harris represents to everybody all the time. So this is our AOR. We talked about it the other day. You can see these things. I provided the slides of Tony. If you want them, you can ask Tony. He'll be able to give them to you, I'm sure. Shows where we are. Third Fleet, Seventh Fleet, international dateline, half the world's surface, six of the largest militaries. And we got lots of flashpoints we have to be concerned about. Admiral Harris has put in place the most qualified folks in all the various command billets that have a lot of Westpac experience. We think that's absolutely critical. If you look at this thing, when people talk about the rebalance, Admiral Harris always wants everybody to know that the rebalance is real and we're doing it in the Westpac arena and the Asia Pacific or the Indo-Pacific, depending on what terminology you want to use. He likes to emphasize that he's been on PA to Poseidon. He's a P3 guy by trade. We've got the Joint Fighter coming. We've got the best CVNs. We're going to transition from George Washington to the Ronald Reagan. What's good about that is Bob Greer, who's our deputy, he was the battlegroup commander when we did Operation Tomodachi in Japan. So the Reagan coming to Japan will again enhance and advance our relationship with the Japanese. You've got the MV-22. The reason I like to show that one is because the JGSDF, the Japanese Ground Self Defense Forces, buying them. They're going to use them as a quick reaction force. Guess where they're going to be located? Lower Ryukus. What's near there? The Senkakus. So as a consequence, that's something we're looking at and obviously the submarines and the DG-1000, these are things we're really pleased we're going to get. As you look at this thing, there's lots of flash points here and this is the thing we look at just about every single day. Up in the northern part there you get the Kurols, Russia, Japan. They haven't settled that since World War II. You've got the Takdo or Takashima, which is the Korean and Japanese way of saying it. The United States take the position of Lee and Court Rocks. The Koreans are so forceful that they named a ship Takdo just to basically punch everybody in the eye. The Japanese are much more subdued. They had their Izumi and that one is basically the old prefecture where it was located for Takashima years and years ago. So they did it subtly. Korea did it basically in your face. Then you've got the East Sea, the China Sea. You've got the Senkakus. The Spratlys are the pinkish colored areas there. And then you've got the Nine Dash Line, which basically was originally in 1947 by Shanghai Shek. We don't give it any credence. A lot of people look at it and they say, okay, the Chinese are very adamant when you look at five countries claiming areas in there that they're going to control it. This next slide is really important because it shows the reclamation effort in the South China Sea. This is ongoing. We think they're going to build a couple of runways down that area. They're going to have an area that they're going to put a fleet probably in Hainan. And then they're going to have the force congestion capabilities to be there. I had a meeting with DASD C-Rite two weeks ago. She wanted to know what red lines we could put in from a military perspective. I'll keep this all at the unclass level. And what I told her was basically you don't want military red lines there. What you want is the diplomatic, political, and economic solutions. You guys have to push forward in the D.C. arena because you don't want us doing it because it might go kinetic. And as a consequence, it was a very interesting conversation. And then this is what we say to a lot of audiences. Is China going to rise peacefully? Are they going to rise in a cursively? You can take your pick. My personal opinion is that we don't know which way they're going to go. And right now they don't back away. I have a very good friend, our New Zealand Consul General, a new posting there in Hawaii. He says, you've got to drop to the line. He says the Chinese will always lean over it. And if you back off it all, then they'll take the big step forward. So we're watching them carefully. I've only been handling the Chinese-Taiwan problem since 1995. For me, it's one of those things we look at constantly. And then you can see the quote by Xi Jinping. You've got to take that at heart and see what's going to happen next. On our strategy, the low ends, obviously, what Joe Nye talked about was soft power. That's the HADR aspects of it. We do a lot of it in our theater, real world, and also exercise-wise. You look at the annual X, a bilateral event, high-end with the Japanese. It's a great exercise. Malabar is wonderful. It's a bilateral normally between us and the Indian Navy. We've had as many as five countries participate in it. We're going to have Japan on the next one. It'll be an October-November timeframe. That's another high-end event. And then we talked about RIMPAC. But the key thing on this one are the six imperatives that Valhara has. Be ready to fight tonight, posture forward, demonstrate commitment, posture cooperation, assure the region, and innovate to survive or harness innovation. These are really key to him, and I have to give assessments on about four of those because they're in my area. On this thing here we talked about Damian yesterday. Again, this kind of shows the scene, what goes on there, how we use all the assets available. I get asked all the time, how come the mercy didn't come there? You've got to be invited in to do HADR events. The mercy was not needed. The Philippine government did not ask for it. That's why the mercy did not deploy. At that time, the Chinese, they sent their Peace Arc there, the ship, and I can't remember the Chinese name for it, but it was stationed about 20 miles out and they only saw seven or eight patients. It's not a big deal as far as we were concerned, but it was good that they came there. And I think the idea behind HADR is that everybody wants to come and provide help to those that are suffering. The City Partnership 214 is a challenge for us. The reason I bring this up, this is really an HADR focused event, medical diplomacy, engineering, a lot of things we do, working with non-government organizations. It worked out really well for us because the Japanese came to our defense. We had sequestration of effect. We lost the money for the mercy, which was supposed to be out in 2014. So we're trying to figure out how we can do it, and we had a good conversation with the JMSDF side, and they volunteered to have the Kunisaki support us. I'll give you one side story of this thing. Vietnam didn't want the Kunisaki to come into Vietnam to do the Pacific Partnership, but they wanted the Pacific Partnership. We gave them a deadline of 1630 on a certain day, and at 1629 they finally said the Kunisaki can come in and we can do the Pacific Partnership. For 2015, someone talked about it the other day, I think it was Admiral Cullen Chin. Vietnam, as Adam Lee said, no. So we're not going to have the Japanese ship go in there this year. We've got an AOE that's going to be with us helping us out. So they've refused it this year, but this has been a program out for that 10 years. It's worked out really great for us, and we're going to send the mercy to Southeast Asia and Oceania, and we're also going to have the JHSD, and I'll talk about that later. Carrot, this is a bilateral event that's over 20 years old with six countries. It's growing to 10 countries now. Admiral Harris has got a focus now. He wants to make a trilateral, a multilateral. We're going to do that in 2016. Charlie Williams is the Commonwealth Westpac Commander. He's got a great job of coordinating this, and these advances that relationship again within the theater, which is good for us. RIMPAC, we talked about that a little bit yesterday. This kind of shows what's going on. Already, Turkey said they want to come. They had observers, now they're going to participate. They'll show you how important it is to some of the smaller countries. Bangladesh sent observers to 2014. You have to have observers there before you can bring a ship. They've gone over excess defense article. Cutters that are in Bangladesh right now, the Sudahara Joy, as they've named it. Sudahara Joy is RIMPAC in 2016. People keep asking me about China. Are they going to participate in 2016? We and Admiral Harris have recommended that they participate. OSD is still determining whether or not they want to extend the invitation. That's one of the things we have to work through if they come great and if they don't, we'll work around it. When you look at the SIFMA course, we do this co-hosting with the Naval War College. I can't give enough credit to Jamie Kelly, Sleep Spinley, and Sean Carroll for helping us out. We've been doing this for almost 10 years now. This is one of the really great courses. This past year we had 14 foreign flag officers come, including Sri Lanka, which was a big step up. They get them back into the class again. It has a HADR and a little bit of a security focus. We also have two foreign senior facilitators to help us out. Arun Prakash, Admiral Prakash is a former CNO and Chief of Defense for India. A very close friend of mine. This was in the past. And then Yoji Kota, Vice Admiral Kota is great to give his perspectives on what he views China's doing in the theater in northeast Asia. So it's a great environment. There are lots of cross-fertilization of ideas. And these are lasting relationships. And right now, if I remember correctly, we have three SIFMA grads that are now Chiefs of their Navy in the theater. I'm bringing this one up here just to talk about medical diplomacy. The SIFMA, you want to really get into a country such as Vietnam and expand an advanced relationship. It's through the medical side of it. Undersea medicine, the other things that we do with them. Medical SMEs, et cetera. That's extraordinarily important. And that's why we're getting an awful lot of bang for our buck, if you will, on the engagement phase. So now I come to this slide. And this slide shows you when people ask me, well, how do you figure out your maritime security cooperation plan? You can see some of the documents there that we use. It's important for us. We have the theater campaign plan that Paycom has that we developed the theater campaign order to support them. And then we have the maritime security cooperation plan which we've been promulgating for over, I think, 10 or 12 years now. I've been the five there for 14 years and it took me a couple of years to figure out we really needed this. So this complements what we get out of the higher agency directions, and I'm going to dwell on this one just for a couple of minutes here, is that this is how we grade folks in the Paycom Pacific Fleet operating area. One through five. One's the best we can ever do. We want to have those guys achieve that. There's very few countries we want at the one level. The number five level of those that we now engage, DPRK is one of them, we don't want to try to get too much above five, to be honest with you. That's a personal opinion and one thing that we can do. A lot of congressional oversight, as we all know. So we're looking at that one carefully. But we look at these various bins and we try to look at those very carefully over the course of the year and we assess them every year. Are they still the right bins? Are they still the right criteria? We look at a lot of things that go into this thing. A lot of reports. We have a that's known as a MAG, a maritime assessment group. It's led by my deputy and my main awareness director. We have the pollad, a political advisor. He starts out the conversation. Here's the political situation in this particular country. And then we have the IPO representatives. We have the seventh fleet, third fleet. We have the folks from Paycom. We have other services. We all go through this. We look at the cooperation management information system reports. So there's an awful act that goes in as we assess it and we have today a program, the foreign area officer program. Our desk officers are now FAOs. When I got there 14 plus years ago, I only had one FAO kind of guy and that was it. And I didn't have anybody that spoke a different language. Today you have five different languages being spoken. I have five that speak Mandarin. So we really moved up and they have a lot of regional expertise. So this is how we look at it and there's 36 countries in the Paycom AOR. We grade 34 countries. We cut out four of them. We have Laos, Bhutan and Nepal because they're landlocked. We really don't engage in that much. So you say how do you get to 34? Well, we add in Taiwan because we have a separate engagement with Taiwan and then we add in Russia. Russia belongs in the UConn AOR but because we have the Far East Military District there, we do a number of exercises with them and we engage them and we have visits with them. We have them involved as well. So that's why we assess 34 countries and I can't show you the slide that shows how I did is I just want to show you this slide but then I want to go through the criteria of things that measure the performance. This is how we look at all these countries and we want to see if we're on track or off track with our operations, our activities and the actions that we take. We do these things routinely. Every week we have a meeting on this stuff with various countries as we go through it. We want to make sure that we're not forgetting something or there may be an added emphasis to engage someone because maybe we're not going to have a meeting or maybe the Paycom Direction is there or we've gotten a CNO to say hey, have you looked at this? Right now we've got a request to support Columbia to be part of the western Pacific Naval Symposium which are 26 countries basically. We're the voting member at PAC Fleet and the working group meeting is next month. My deputy is going to go there. We're going to basically put Columbia on the table as a member. We're also going to proselytize queues, the use of not just names. That's something very important for us because that shows intent and that way you'll avoid the unintended consequences and things that happen within particularly the South China Sea, East China Sea areas. But this kind of shows how we look at it, things we look at and why we look at them. And then you look at the effects. You know, are you doing a lot of things but are you doing the right things? Are you getting the effects you want? Now I had a conversation with Mark Lippert who's now the ambassador of the United States. And my view is sometimes they'll take 5 years, 10 years or longer to have an effect. A lot of people want the instant return on investment. I get asked that question all the time and it's a difficult one to ask. We think we're doing the right things. Sometimes you don't know if you got the return on investment right away that you make an assessment. There's some that say you can. Now I say it's really difficult to do. Tony knows it from his days at 7th Fleet that this is probably one of the most difficult assessment group of what they have to do. Then you go scoring. How do you score within a bin? And then you've got to figure out are we doing all these right things? What's the subjectiveness, if you will? A lot of it is very difficult to do and that's where it comes with the experience and the expertise and how you look at it. And once my team gets all done and they come to me and they look at this, we're going to write this one 3, this one 2, this one 4 and we sit down with me. And I look at them and I go, are you kidding me? And then they'll convince me. And so once they convince me I'm a happy camper. But these are the things we do and these are the types of things they look at and this is how we score it. And then once we've done that, then we move on to this type of chart. Okay, what we want to do, these guys we think could be a 2, these guys could be this whatever. We want to have them move up. The blue is what we want to have this aspirational. That's what we want them to do. We want them to go in the red block. How can we move them out? What's it going to take? These are things that we look at on a routine basis as we do these assessments. And it takes a lot of work as many you can imagine. And once we've done that and said, well, okay, I guess we're going to have to improve this area here. We've got to spend more time on coalition building. Well, some don't have the capacity or capability to do it and they'll never get there. But that's where we work with their type of strategic program as well. And also when you start looking at how you work within the theater, we've been trying through Admiral Harris and our SIFMA courses last time to try to come up with a multilateral standing force. We tried this 12 years ago. We called it SEAM, Southeast Asia Maritime Security Initiative. Then it became the regional Maritime Security Initiative. Today it's called Maritime Security. So we had a thing called SIRC, Southeast Asia Maritime Security. And we had a lot of people who were working in the headquarters. Well now they're thinking maybe Singapore, as you heard about the other day, might be a place to have a standing force. And in open press reporting recently, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Burma, Vietnam, and maybe the Philippines might get together to start looking at Maritime Security. And some of the issues are having with C-Rovery, C-Banditry. So you have to be very careful on terminology. But those are things we look at so that's how you can develop a coalition force. And they're thinking of doing that, which is a step up. And we try to advertise that and we're going to bring it up at the next ASEAN Defense Ministerial Meeting Experts Working Group because I have reps that go to that. And we've been very fortunate that we've been able to have some influence there. And we're going to discuss this further with them to see if we can do that. And I just want to also talk about when you look at the new things coming into our theater, one of the things Admiral Harris says we've got to innovate, we've got to start moving in things, looking at tactics, techniques, procedures. So we've got the LCS. Everybody doesn't say a lot of good things about it, but we in the Pacific Theater enjoy the LCS. It's doing a great job. We're going to use it in a number of areas that are really important for us. We've got Ambassador Shingapore, Ambassador, our US Ambassador to Singapore had his web page devoted to part of the LCS one that's coming there on a rotational basis. Ambassador Wager who took his place, he and I met for an hour in his office talking about how he wanted the LCS there, what he wanted the LCS to do. It's been embraced by the Southeast Asian Natives. This is a huge step forward for us. It's not intimidating, you know, like the cruisers and the carriers and what have you. So the LCS has proved that it was mentioned yesterday, I think a lot of ways. We're going to use that as a proof of concept for our Pacific Partnership events. What we're going to try to do is take a company of Army Medics basically, put them on the ship, bring it to Oceania and places like Kira Boss or what have you, see how it operates in there and how we can work together. This is going to be a big deal as a compliment what we're doing with the USNS Mercy. Here you can see what's going on with the ship, some of the things that we've got too. The MLP obviously is supposed to be just a port in the water. That was the original thing. Well now we've got to come up with ways of doing it. We're very lucky that our N3 Captain Norm Weaklin, Sturman is a guy that had worked on the Op-Nav staff and he was trying to figure out innovative ways to use it and we're going to try to do that as well. How can we make it more accessible? How can we use it at sea? Can we use soft forces on it? Marine forces, what comes to the theater? That was within 15 minutes because I promised Tony I would not go over. So I'm glad to be here. I think it's been a great opportunity. I'm glad to listen everybody. We're really busy in the West Pack Arena. We make 135 port visits a year. I'm 125 exercises a year, 135 exercises, 350 port visits a year. We have major exercises we conduct. Every day we've got something to do. So from our perspective, a lot of times we're ignored because it's pretty stable out there except that when we look at Russia, China, DPRK, the border between Pakistan and India, the border between India and China, you start looking at what's happening between Vietnam and China. Those are things that we look at on a daily basis and it causes us some worry. If you ask Admiral Harris what's his biggest worry in the Pacific region, he'll tell you what's going to happen. As you all know, today is the anniversary of the Chonin Sinking. It was 2010 when that occurred. If you ever get a chance, and I put this on a blog that Jimmy Finnell has to go see it at Incheon, where they got the two sections up on stanchions. They've got a great display there and they got all the pictures of it. They lost 46 rock sailors and the North Koreans did this and they had a restraint that the government had was remarkable. We're worried about everything that Kim Jong-un does because no one knows what he's doing. He's so unpredictable. I pass it on and I want to thank Tony and Dr. Everett and also Admiral Howell again for letting me be up here to talk about the West Pack Arena. Thanks so much. Thank you, sir. Dr. Murray from American University. I want to start by saying I'm appreciative I am to be invited to this conference. This is my first time at the Naval War conference and it's really an honor to be here. I'm going to come at this the issue of security cooperation from a much less direct route than both of my panelists. We heard from Mr. Wesley from the perspective of an actual planner and Nina Garfino is a nationally recognized expert on the legal authorities behind the myriad of security assistance programs. I'm coming at this from a different route which is a concern about the balance, the institutional balance between the military side of the US government and the civilian side of the US government that works abroad. I'm coming at it from the sentiment behind Robert Gates the former secretary of defense when he talked about the issue of the military taking on over time many more non-traditional roles that was taking on roles that had been the sole purview of civilian agencies and that may be over time that can lead to sort of a creeping militarization of US foreign policy. In that spirit I've actually recently come out with a book which I'm going to advertise co-ordered with Gordon Adams which looks at the title is Mission Creep, the militarization of US foreign policy question mark and it is an exploration of the ways in which the military has become increasingly involved in different issue areas and it features contributions by Nina Serifino on security assistance and also Derek Reverend on security cooperation and it looks at different issue areas intelligence development public diplomacy and some of the implications of the increased military role in these areas which is relevant to my conversation here and my contribution to that book is a study that I did with Ambassador Tony Quayton which is looking at the role of the military in traditional diplomacy and the role and how the increased use of engagement activities by the combatant commanders how that affects whether it's influencing foreign policy and there's some reason to think that it might this is a response to a work that was done by Dana Priest, the mission and she talked just to give you a sense that this might be a problem she wrote in 2003 on Clinton's watch the military slowly and without public scrutiny or debate came to surpass its civilian leaders and resources and influence around the world and there's a civil military historian who agrees with that in 2002 the regional commanders have come to assume such importance in their areas particularly in the Pacific the Middle East and Central Asia that they've effectively displaced American ambassadors in the State Department as the primary instruments of American foreign policy so that's actually what I'm trying to figure out in my work with Tony Quayton what the truth of this and what we did to do this was to interview ambassadors and get their view of whether they felt displaced by the increasing engagement of combatant commanders and military components in their host countries these were two mostly recently retired ambassadors they had several posts and we asked them about their relationship with the combatant commander how often the combatant commander came to their post the relationship of the combatant commander with the political and military leaders in their host countries and the activities of the military that were going on in those countries and we found that the ambassadors did not feel displaced that they actually had a very favorable view of the combatant commanders and one that was not that they didn't see them as competitive and supportive we also found that the combatant commanders did not visit the countries that much that given the span of the region and the number of countries that they had to deal with they were actually not in the country that much typically it might be two or three times unless it was a very strategic country so we found that the ambassadors did not feel displaced as the primary interlocutor between the U.S. government and the host country that has been exaggerated they did sometimes have trouble down the chain of command and they gave stories of having to stop ill-advised military activities but they would get backed up by the combatant commander in those situations there were stories of having difficulties of dealing with a senior defense officer in the embassy because the senior defense officer in the embassy might was an advisor to the ambassador but also had a direct line of communication to the COCOM and that could create challenges but overall the results that we found were that the from the ambassador's perspective the ambassador's authority in the country was intact the ambassador is the president's representative and that was respected by the combatant commanders and that there was not this encroachment upon the area of traditional diplomacy we did just as an aside we did not find the same favorable view from the ambassadors towards SOCOM there was a sense that SOF was more free-wielding perhaps it's the devious thinking that Captain Tisca talked about earlier and that they were less differential to ambassador authority and that there was some ambiguity about whether they would know about operations that were happening in their host country so there was some tension there but in terms of the geographic combatant commanders we did not find that so then the question is whether or not the influence of the military on diplomacy is more subtle than that whether it comes from the sheer activity of the regional commands and they're sort of setting more of a security agenda from the outside and there's some indication that that may be true we asked ambassadors about their management of security cooperation activities that were going on in the countries and we found different patterns in some cases ambassadors would have a very collaborative relationship with the combatant commander for common goals that they saw as strategic so ambassador Barbara Bodine tells stories of her relationship with Tony Zinni and their mutual project of starting the beginnings of laying the groundwork for the US Guard in Yemen that kind of an example but we did find other examples the ambassador from Jordan talked about how he learned of the plans for a special operations training center a very prominent one and that the plans were well along the way there was a lot of momentum and that he was very wary about the project at first because he for political reasons he didn't know the Jordanian people would be as favorably disposed toward the middle to middle relationship as the leadership was but even though they had a momentum that was difficult to stop so that's sort of an agenda setting by the military an effect on political relations that comes from outside so there are examples of that overall though in terms of the attitudes of ambassadors toward security cooperation and resources by the military was appreciation there was a sense of that as one interviewee said state can't make the case in congress for resources so we will do what we can with the military resources and they were appreciative of what the military could bring to the country so just to tie this together just to sum up I think that it's the idea that the ambassadors have been overshadowed by the combatant commanders in country is exaggerated the ambassadors still have formal authority as the president's representative at the same time there may be an indirect influence by security cooperation activities by the sheer resources and the regional perspective of the combatant command the planning culture the energy the sheer number of activities that sometimes come from outside the country and can influence the foreign relations into a more of a security direction but then the question I have and it's a question I don't have the answer to and I would be interested in the discussion insights about this what is the coordination at the regional level the relationship between combatant commands have a regional perspective a regional planning where the state and they are in field whereas in the state department that is in the assistant secretary regional bureaus and what is the connection and maybe Mr. Wesley can give me some information on it's the connection between those two and how much that is guided by the military side or the military side filling more of a void thank you