 Very good morning everyone. Thank you for coming here very early this morning for some of you and I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to Admiral John Richardson who is going to be our speaker this morning Admiral Richardson graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1982 with a Bachelor of Science in physics. He holds a master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and would tell oceanographic institution and national security strategy from the National War College. At sea Admiral Richardson served on the USS Pache, USS George C. Marshall and USS Salt Lake City and he can commanded USS Honolulu in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. For those of you who are interested those vessels are submarine so Admiral Richardson Richardson is a Submariner. The Admiral also served as Commodore of Submarine Development Squadron 12 Commander Submarine Group 8 Commander of Submarine Allied Forces South Deputy Commander US 6th Fleet Chief of Staff US Naval Forces Europe and US Naval Forces Africa and also Commander Naval Submarine Forces and Director of Naval Reactors. His staff assignments include duty in the attack submarine division on the Chief of Naval Operations Staff, Naval Aids to the President, Prospective Commanding Officer Instructor for the Commander Submarine Forces US Pacific Fleet, Assistant Deputy Director for Regional Operations on the Joint Staff and Director of Strategy and Policy at US Joint Forces Command. The Admiral also served on teams that have been awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, the Joint Meritorious Unit Award, the Navy Unit Commendation and the Navy E-Ribbon. He was awarded the Vice Admiral Stockdale Award for his time in command of USS Honolulu and the Admiral began serving as the 31st Chief of Naval Operations from September 2015. So it's a very illustrious CV. Thank you very much for coming to talk to us today. This is the time for thunderous applause, right? Well, thank you so much for that very kind introduction. It tends to be a bit technical, though, don't you think? It sounds I started to feel like this guy over here after an answer. I just want to go back to bed. I want to thank everybody for joining me in a magnificent hall here. And I think my natural tendency is to wander around, but I think for the media or something, I have to stay here. Is that right for the microphones? But I do want to just thank everybody here at King's College, the faculty, Professor Bone, Dr. Patelano. And I thought that we could spend some time today quickly going through how I see the maritime environment and then try and finish up my talk in about half the time that we have together and then open it up for questions, if that's a fair set of rules of engagement. What I'd like to do is highlight the front, you know, a critical question that faces us today, which is the question of maritime competition, particularly blue water competition. And so I'm going to my thesis is that we've not been in real competition for maritime superiority in about 25 years. And now as we sort of engage in this competition again for the first time in over two decades, we have to be mindful that not only the competitors have changed, and when we talk about competition, we're so often drawn to, you know, who's playing who, right? Who are the teams? But in the 25 years since we've last done this, you know, the very rules of the competition, the character of the competition itself has changed. And so I'd like to talk about that. So we will talk a little bit about the competitors. We'll talk about how the US Navy is responding to that challenge. And then some ideas about sort of the more nuanced challenges that faces. And then we'll open it up for questions after that, if that's a quick outline. So if this all works, we'll be in good shape. Okay, so I'm going to start with very few assumptions. And one of the first challenges that we face as we move into this competition is that the most of the people that I talk to have this view of the world. And this work, yeah. So all look how busy it is on the land, right? All of the labels, all of the features, the political part, the roads, highways, railroads, rivers, valleys, streams, mountains, everything, all of the politics centered on the land. The blue part that occupies 75% is really just a nice place to put labels, right? So they do label the oceans. And then when it gets particularly crowded on the land or a country or features too small, the label will go out into the ocean. And that's about it. That's how people see the world in many ways. It's, you know, their world around them is very land centric. So I thought I'd start by describing how I see the world, which is much more like that. Okay. And this land part divided by the oceans or surrounded by the ocean. So first and foremost, you know, if you go back, we're going to shift the perspective of the map so that we put Eurasia here front and center. Okay. And then you can see from our perspective, the east coast of the United States over here, west coast over here, you've got these two oceans that sort of separate our nation from Eurasia. And we'll just start building the picture at sea over a series of slides. Can you see the things in the back? Okay. All right. Great. All right. So first and foremost, a very traditional thing, which is we'll just lay on the sea lines of communication. Okay. Nothing super magic about this. It's about 4000 years that we've been going to see in some form or another. And so what you see here is the traditional lines of transit. This is the super highways of trade. 90% of the world's trade travels on these maritime highways. And so extremely important for all of us. You get a sense these green dots are major ports around the world and the size of the circle is proportional to the volume of business that that port does. And so we talk about a rebalance to the Pacific in the United States. And my goodness, you can see why, right? I mean, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, there's an awful lot rebalancing to the Pacific as these economies grow and just look at the port volume that they're doing in terms of maritime trade. So as I said, you know, millennium that we've been going to see some of these choke points that through which this traffic travels have existed since that the very beginning, sort of the new folks on the block or the Panama Canal here, Suez Canal. But if you think about Gibraltar, Malacca, Hormuz, Baba Mendev, very busy recently, some of these features which which shape this trade, it's, you know, if you go back to the earlier slides, one could be led to believe that it's all very homogeneous. But it's not, right? It's there's structure structure is imposed by these choke points, structures imposed by these ports. And so it's there is a structure here that can be it prevents opportunities and risks. Okay. But so millennia since we've been going to see and trading at sea. However, in the last 25 years, the amount of traffic on the world's oceans has quadrupled. All right, which is an astounding fact. If you think of thousands and thousands of years, there's been this steady build up. But in the last quarter century, that amount of traffic on the world's oceans has increased by a factor of four. Okay, this exponential shape that we'll be talking about in so many other areas and has driven the world economy, which has roughly doubled in that same amount of time, global GDP up roughly by a factor of two, you know, 80% or so. So very, very important, very busy, increasingly contested and crowded at sea, even when we think about very traditional types of uses of the ocean. Okay, but let's keep building. This is a depiction now these regions of purple are natural gas deposits regions of light blue are offshore oil. And with the advances in technology, you know, many of these resources are now available, accessible for the first time. And this has been another explosion in the last 25 years, which has, you know, again, made the maritime domain that much more important to the prosperity of so many people, so many nations. So there's this, this accessibility to resources here. In fact, you're probably much more well versed in this than I am. But even agriculture and now, you know, aquaculture growing very, very quickly as people move offshore, you know, not only for natural resources like minerals, oil, those sorts of things, but also now farming offshore, right? And in much more frequently, much more, much greater volume of our food comes from the ocean and that trend also increasing. As well, you know, so these are the oil and gas deposits, these these white diamond shaped dots are just minerals that sort of along the seams of the tectonic plates and those minerals also much more accept accessible with robots, robots remotely operated vehicles that can go down and get access to those types of things. So again, another dimension of busyness, if you will, let's see, and we'll keep building. The layer that just came on points us up to the Arctic. And in my 35 years in the Navy, the Arctic, the North Pole is as small as it's ever been. All right. And I think it's as small as it's ever been since we started taking measurements, you know, satellite measurements of the size of the polar ice cap. And so what does that mean, right? Well, certainly, there are trade routes open, you know, sea lines open across the north for, you know, on the factor of twice as often, right, twice as much time, you can take those routes across the north of Europe and Russia, even across the north of North America. That has strategic implications not only from a security standpoint, but again, you save a lot of time if you want to take that route rather than going down through all of these choke points. And so there's a, again, a commercial or a prosperity dimension to that as well as giving rise to, well, it's giving rise to rising sea levels, right. And so some of these nations in the Pacific really watching that very closely, right. They're not that high above sea level. And so, you know, tremendous economic impact and social impact of the rising sea level that's brought about by the melting ice cap. Okay. We'll keep building still. This is sort of a representation of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations hot spots in the world. Okay. And so you can see that one, they're right there in the middle of the map where we've chosen to put our center of gravity and they often overlay on these choke points as well. So they are right there where trade must go through, right. So through the South China Sea, about 33 percent of the world's trade travels through that body of water, through the Mediterranean and this sort of track through here, about 25 percent of the world's trade travels through there. So extremely important from an economic standpoint and then traveling through those hot spots that have continued to challenge the security of those areas. And so when you think about, you know, where the U.S. Navy, where we want to be stationed, you know, this is where the challenge is. If we want to be out doing what the Navy does, protecting our security and prosperity, these are the areas where it's most challenged. And as you see a little bit later on, this is exactly where our attention is. Okay. So this idea of just sort of the classic maritime, things happening at sea, very, very dynamic change in the last 25 years. So although we can think about, hey, let's just go to sea and get this competition on, maybe as we've done it 25 years ago, fundamentally different rules at sea, four times as crowded, access to resources, underwater infrastructure, all of those things new to the competition since the last time we were really in a competitive environment. And there's more to it. We'll one more layer. So this might be a difficult to see from the back. It overlays closely with some of the sea lines, but it's a little bit of a gold color undersea cables. Okay. And so this is a vast network of undersea cables, copper, fiber optic. On those cables rides 99% of the world's internet traffic, international traffic. Okay, this cannot be recovered, right? It can't be picked up by any other thing. It rides on those cables. A satellite constellation can maybe pick up 3% of that volume right now if those cables were disrupted. So again, an extremely important part of the ocean, we talk about the internet, we talk about clouds, right? And clouds make you look up. The truth of the matter is it's a lake. Okay. And all of that data, we should be looking to the ocean floor when we think about where that data resides, or at least where it travels. And so these cables interconnecting and the cables also giving rise to so this maritime classic maritime force is different than it was 25 years ago. Certainly there's another force out there, the force of the information world, which is completely new than it was 25 years ago. And so it's given rise to, well, the whole cyber element, right? Whether it's a cyber business, security, cyber warfare, you name it. That's a new phenomena since we last were competing at sea for maritime superiority. It's accelerated everything. We were just talking at breakfast, even politically, how fast this internet changes things and what a big impact it's had on the political environment. It's the same with the security environment, giving rise to cyber safety concerns, personal information concerns, you know, the whole thing. And the speed and the reach and the precision, the cost of entry for that world so low, right? Anybody with a laptop or even a smartphone can be a global player if they're clever enough in this new information environment. Again, an exponential type of shape, right? The amount of information in the world doubling about every two years. So this brings on at a challenge in and of itself. How do we operate in that sea of information? And how do we make sense? Where do we find truth amongst the noise in that is a challenge again? And so this information environment, a second force that's new since the last time we were competitive in this maritime world. And then finally related to that is the introduction of technology in the world right now. Related to information, there's an awful lot of information technology, but it's not just that, right? It's genetic technology, it's additive manufacturing, right? If we can three-dimensionally print everything that we need or more and more of the things that we need, I'll tell you from my standpoint that changes logistics at sea a tremendous amount, right? And then there's also artificial intelligence, right? There's a lot of investment reaching an inflection point in artificial intelligence, the AlphaGo you're all familiar with, this algorithm that learned its way to beat the World Go Championship, a champion. And then what that means for autonomy, unmanned platforms, that sort of thing. So there's a vast force moving in terms of technologies being introduced, and not just introduced, but adapted faster. So take the telephone, for instance, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, it took about 35 years for 25% of the population to get the phone, right, in the United States. A smartphone, what do you think it was when the iPhone came out? How long to get? It's about three years, right? So and you know that that iPhone brings you a whole lot more than that Alexander Graham Bell machine gave you. So there's, again, an exponential dimension to the introduction of technology and what that means for us is, you know, it's about pace, pace and complexity. And I guess my point is, is that, you know, we could have the strongest team on the field, player for player, but if we are not ready to compete at the pace of the game, we'll just be outscored. Our defense will be out of position over and over. And so there's this need to become more agile, which is a primary challenge for us in the U.S. Navy. Okay, so lots changed about the character of the game in the last 25 years. And if we're not mindful of that, we're just going to be non-competitive no matter who are the competitors. But there are some interesting competitors out there. And so I just thought I'd step through those quickly here is depiction of land reclamation in the South China Sea. Okay, and so arising, in fact, these two competitors, China and Russia, I would say, are sort of competitors on a global scale, right? In just about every way you can slice it now. This is, you know, a Russian jet aircraft. We were just talking again at breakfast, you know, flying extremely close to the USS Donald Cook up in the Baltic. You know, I probably should have brought a picture of the Kuznetsov as it translated the English Channel, much more relevant here in the United Kingdom. And so, you know, 25 years ago, these competitors were completely different. We had the Soviet Union back then was our last real competitor. Russia, much different competitor than the Soviet Union was. China brand new onto the scene when you compare to 25 years ago. Okay, another group of competitors, I would say, is that competition posed by Iran and North Korea. Okay, not entirely as global as China and Russia, but truly another dimension of the competition as we just talked about is nothing is truly regional now, is it? Right, and so everything is at least trans-regional, if not global. Every, the dimensions of this competition are multi-domain, so we can't just wish away the fact that this is going to be a surface, subsurface, air, space, cyber, all coming at us at one time. And so we've got to be able to move, command and control, operate in all of those dimensions at the same time. Very, very challenging, even for competitors that we would not not too long ago have considered a very regional type of an actor. And then, of course, there is this pervasive, persistent, adaptive counterterrorism threat which continues to challenge us very greatly today. And so you've read about the four plus one, right? This is just a representation of that four plus one broken into, I think, three roughly distinct groups. Okay, so what do we do? Well, this is the mission of the United States Navy as we confront that competition, which has changed both in character and the competitors have changed as well. This is right out of US code, right? Be ready to conduct prompt and sustained combat incident operations at sea, certainly to protect America from attack, but also to preserve our strategic influence in key regions of the world, right? Nobody can be everywhere, but you've got to be where it counts, when it counts. Trying to capture this idea that it really has to operate proficiently from the sea floor all the way up into space and into the information domain. I will tell you that this deep water competition in the deep water is something that's returned. The idea of sea control isn't something we've had to think about for 25 years, and we're getting a lot more water under the keel as we think about sea control in the 21st century. And then, of course, our idea is to deter aggression, right? We want to be out there, want to be the absolute best US chief of naval operations, not fighting anybody. And I think I do that by being so prepared that everybody wakes up in the morning and says, you know what? This is not the day to take that on, right? And so, ideas to deter aggression enable peaceful resolution of conflicts on terms that are acceptable not only to us but to our allies and partners with which we operate so often. But we've got to be very mindful that if that deterrence fails, our mission is to conduct decisive operations to end any conflict quickly and decisively. And how are we going about that? We'll return to our picture of the globe. We've got operations in the Arabian Gulf right now, USS Eisenhower and her strike group conducting strike operations against ISIL in Iraq and Syria. Again, this is the USS San Antonio operating helicopters going against the in the conflict in Libya, right? So they're doing strike operations, insert. Extremely important, sometimes so effective at being unseen and undetected that they get forgotten. But we're constantly have five SSBNs at sea providing that undersea leg of the strategic deterrent. And so critical that we maintain that capability. In the U.S. Navy, we're at a point, and in the Royal Navy, at a point where we have to reconstitute that capability. And then this is a picture of a destroyer of the USS John McCain kind of operating in the Middle East. It's been very active down there off the coast of Yemen and the straight of Baba Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea. In fact, that's where I'm headed right after this. We're going to get on the plane, fly to Djibouti, and I'll be visiting our teams underway in the Red Sea just to talk to them about how that missile attack went off the coast of Yemen. And so just going back, this is where the demand signal is for us. And this is where those forces are deployed. We have on any given day, within this circle that I'm depicting with the laser, about 100 ships of the U.S. Navy and about 65,000 U.S. sailors four deployed away from home inside that circle, meeting these challenges, progressing and ensuring peace and stability in those hotspots. Let's see. Okay, so since the end of the Civil War, really, we've been a nation that's been looking beyond our shores to increase our prosperity. We kind of started on the East Coast and the West Coast, worked our way in, but at about the mid-1800s, we started turning out. And this gave rise to Alfred Thayer Mahan and a lot of naval strategists coming up in the latter half of the 1800s. And the new dynamic now is that we've got this push out as other nations now are turning outward, right? Whether it's in their near abroad in Eastern Europe, the Baltic down through the Eastern Mediterranean, or out here through the South China Sea. I mean, this is something that I think nobody should be surprised about, right? Sometimes I, you know, you just have to raise your eyebrow that folks are surprised that this is happening. Of course it's happening, right? It's happened to every prosperous nation. At some point, they're going to go beyond their shores. And so we should be ready for this, right? It's not too surprising. So what does it mean for us? You know, another mission, how do we deter that conflict in meaningful ways? We'll go to the South China Sea here. And this is, you know, a depiction of those arrows as the People's Republic of China looks to the sea now to enhance their prosperity. And so how do you govern that business? How do you govern that new maritime environment short of conflict? And so we'll, you know, certainly there's the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, right? And so this depiction gives you a sense of the territorial seas. It might be difficult to see, but there's some red lines that depict sort of the 12-mile limit, if you will. Out from three, right? If you're a scholar of unclass, used to be three-mile limit, out to 12, okay, as part of that convention. And so that's, I think, pretty much easy for everybody to understand, and you just, there's rules of behavior when you're in another nation's territorial waters, but it's really just sort of an extension of their territory, and you've got to respect that. Take a look at the same region of the world now when we start to consider exclusive economic zones. And so, you know, again, a feature of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, and it starts to look a lot more crowded, right? And if, you know, one thing that I feel strongly we need to do is just sort of advocate, be present, and provide a stable force to advocate for behavior consistent with these ruleset that has underpinned this prosperity for the last 70 years, really, since the end of World War II. And even in this region of the world, you know, these economies, many of them have grown remarkably under that ruleset. And there is, you know, there are moves afoot to take these exclusive economic zones, for instance, which allow, you know, a fair degree of freedom of operation inside those, and make that ruleset a bit more restrictive, make, you know, move these EEZs more towards, you know, the ruleset that you would apply towards territorial waters. And, you know, you can see that a nation like Singapore, for instance, would have to go thousands of miles. They'd become essentially landlocked, if you will, by virtue of, you know, making these exclusive economic, the rules associated with the EEZs, you know, overly restrictive. And so, you know, finding just the right balance point. There was, you know, a great give and take as they negotiated that convention. Finding that balance point, a ruleset by which we can all abide, I think is the key towards avoiding that lucidity trap that a lot of people have talked about, right? And this will allow us, I mean, there's plenty of opportunity for everybody to grow still, I think, right? It's not a zero-sum game. And then, even when it does become competitive, I want to do so in a way that avoids conflict at all possible costs. And so these rules and norms, I think, are the path forward in that regard. And so, I think that that is my last slide. I hope I've delivered on my promise to just give you my perspective. And we've got a little bit of time left for questions, and I'm happy to open it up. Thanks very much for being here. It's remarkably early for an academic calendar, so I appreciate you waking up and joining me. Thanks. Thank you, Mike. I mean, thank you very much for was a very comprehensive and far-reaching talk. And very much up our alleys here at King's, where we strive very much to engage with these various questions. I thought that the looking at what is the meaning of the maritime domain, why does it matter to national security, was central to the talk. And it was interesting how you tried to touch upon traditional themes. See matters because of trade, because of resources in it, and, but also you added something new, connectivity, not just as a transport, but also as an information connectivity. So, this to me seemed to be one of the emerging new themes that you were discussing, how even in the contemporary world, where we think that the most obvious things, such as the clouds, drive us away from the sea, in fact, it's quite the opposite. They turn us even closer to the maritime domain the way we know it. And I think the other component that I thought was extremely interesting is how you connected this to the return of competition at sea. A couple of years ago, I was at the November War College, and I think I remember I used the expression, contested the sea control is back. And it's been absent for 25 years. This is the first time that this has been brought back into the discussion. Sorry, very much appreciated the fact that you laid out a very clear context as to based on these four core themes, trade, transport, energy resources, and connectivity. These are also where potential friction could emerge. And you had clearly identified this four plus one, four state actors. And I think the contested sea control is back. It's part of this state actors being back at sea in that sense. It identified two potential global actors, Russia and China, two more original one, North Korea and Iran. And of course, one non-state problem that is transnational in nature, and there's connected to terrorism. And I think the key element that I take away from this is how to manage, prevent things from escalating beyond the point of no return. And of course, that brings in the key question of how do we govern this space that is complex, is multi-layered, and require us to have some shared principles and values. And the emphasis towards the end of the call, the talk was really very much about how to accommodate what this evolving normative framework that existed before Anglos, now with Anglos, and perhaps we're entering a stage where there are different perceptions and understandings of Anglos. And so I thought it was very interesting how in this respect, you're trying to combine traditional way of thinking about the maritime domain and sea power as a competition at sea between sort of zero-sum forces phasing each other to one whereby that component still exists. But at the same time, there's a new component that is about exploiting the maritime domain as a rescue monist, as something that is we all have in common and whereby we can find by agreeing on the principles and rules ways to manage and keep conflict under control. You said it so much better than I did. That's what I meant to say. So without any further ado, what I'll do in the convenience of time, we'll go back to 20 minutes. So I'll take three questions at a time and then the ambival will come back to you. Steve and then the lady on first one. Could you please introduce yourself, please introduce yourself. Yes, of course, just in my time as a professor and as a critic on the day master, I and I, with the Symesia Monoclonis, have discussed the matter of 20 years ago. What I'm really curious about here is being what you call the sea control problem. Because it seems to me that there was a real change in the problem of sea control, again, in the 19th and 19th century, ushered by technology, which technology, theoretically, in the middle of the submarine, seen now with a change in balance in sea control. But it seems to me that now you've got something else that's happening. It's not the same, I think, but it's here, it's rather difficult. And the difference there is the hybridity of the threat. And I know that being Chinese in the South Island Sea, for example, I see the PLA, I see the Chinese Pesco, and I see the Maxine Mission. I see it in the Gulf, of course, the Gulf Mission in the Gulf, forces operating out of the Gulf. How do you cope with this kind of threat? It seems to me that it's posing a real threat to making it gear up to traditional sea control, but how will ships be able to ships in major sea competitions, or the basin of sea, I suppose, in the Soviet era, up until the 1990s? Where is something new now? What is the amount of space needed here to prepare for the challenge that might occur? Lady of the front there. Yes, yes, yes. Please introduce yourself. You also mentioned the opening of the Arctic, so it's possible that that could open a sea lane for Russia. On the other hand, we've just seen the election of Donald Trump in America, and the risk is that America becomes an inward-looking country. I'd like to hear your point of view on how the dynamics at sea are going to change given these circumstances. Thank you. He took a minute and 25 seconds before anyone mentioned the president in the lecture, so we're doing very well right now. Anne-Lucy, at the back. Anne-Lucy Norton, Department of Justice. Thank you, Admiral, for an extremely illuminating talk. My question is, what does agility look like for the USM? I don't know. Which one? Each one of these questions would, to answer it properly, would consume the remaining time, but I'll give it a shot. And I'll go in reverse order, I think, if you'll allow me. With respect to agility, the way that we're dissecting that, if you will, is really in terms of everything that we do. And so if you read into this design for maintaining maritime superiority, it really describes an approach along four lines of effort. One line, we've coded them by color, right? So the blue line of effort talks about operations and warfighting at sea. And what the vision is is that, well, again, it goes to this hybridity or multi-domain type of an approach where you've just got to be, you know, if you're the fleet commander, the conductor of an orchestra, your orchestra just tripled in size. You've just got that many more things to keep on the same sheet of music. And so traditionally, you might want to think about physical movement of ships in the environment. Now you've got to think about not only that, but that's got to be coordinated with movement in the electromagnetic spectrum, which is an increasingly important part of our business at sea. It's got to be coordinated with space maneuver. And so there's this space dimension as well. And so you can just see these layers starting to emerge. And all of that has got to be much more responsive. And then as well as there is, in addition to electromagnetic, there is this information environment that has to be coordinated. So that requires sort of a dexterity and a flexibility in operations, layers and complexity of command and control that we just have to continue to war game and wring out how to respond at the speed of conflict in those multiple domains. But it's not just that, right? It takes us forever to design and build a new ship, for instance, right? It takes far too long. And so we've got to become more agile in our acquisition processes to be able to deliver those types of new capabilities in a relevant time frame at a cost that's not prohibitive. With respect to our personnel system, how we recruit, train, retain, that is the heart and soul of our success. And so we're spending a tremendous amount of time and investment updating our personnel system into a 21st century system that allows us to better match each of our sailors' skills and priorities with the missions in the Navy. We just honored Admiral Grace Hopper, one of the founding fathers, founding mothers of computer science. And I think some of our personnel databases were coded by Admiral Hopper herself in the 1950s. So we just really have to overhaul that system to get our people. The way we learn, there's been, again, you know, I'm preaching to the converted here, the way that we've learned, we've discovered a tremendous amount about how people learn, right? And so how do we incorporate that so that our sailors, our recruits are learning as fast as we can, both as we inculcate and do that genetic engineering to make them all sailors, but also how do we learn on the job in a much more dynamic and agile fashion? And so it really spans all four lines of efforts, this agility question in terms of, you know, just being able to do things, not just quicker, but, you know, quicker with precision and effectiveness as well. So with respect to the election, you know, my crystal ball says, just don't talk about that. So I'm going to go past that to the question about hybridity. I think that even classic seat control to get at the beginning of your question has changed, right? And it is very much married to technology. And so I just wrote a piece recently on what I think about the term what is anti-access area denial, A2AD. And it just struck me that, well, what, it's not a term that's very useful, I guess, at the end of the day. It's like going into the doctor and, you know, getting the, him telling you, hey, you know, you're sick. It's like, oh, I got that part. It's not very helpful. It's just too general to be very useful. And similarly, it's not, again, like these nations moving out to the sea to enhance their security and prosperity. You know, we should not be surprised at this trend of trying to reach longer with more precision, right? I mean, it's as in court, you know, all the way forward. So it's nothing really new. Just the technology has changed. But it does change sea control challenge when you can do that at a range that is now in the thousands of miles with some, you know, pretty good precision in that kind of reconnaissance strike network. And what that network looks like is different depending upon which part of the world you're talking about, which is why I don't like the blanket term. But there is something to it, right? There's something as a substantial challenge that changes the nature of sea control I think we would all agree that a thousand miles out from shore, that's blue water, and yet you can be challenged with great precision from a shore-based system with a ballistic missile. And then there's the challenge that you highlighted, which is this hybrid nature and the increasing complexity of what I would call maritime security, right? It's not, you know, in terms of the missions of a navy, sea control in my mind is just as you say, our ability to control the seas, right? A coercive kind of classic battle, if you will, if it comes to that. But these are sort of, you know, bending the rules, testing us up to the threshold just short of a kinetic response, if you will. And so this is, you know, when we said maritime security even five, 10 years ago, what we really meant was narco-trafficking, you know, trafficking in illicit people, that type of a thing. Now we're seeing maritime security mean something much more different, and I'll be honest, it's highlighted in the design as something we've got to think about because it's something we don't really have a creative solution for right now. And this is just a maritime dimension of what we see in Crimea and Ukraine. I mean, these sorts of tactics are happening all over the world. And we've got to, I think that the answer has a lot to do with enhancing the strength of regional security structures. And so it just makes them more resilient to these types of activities in and of themselves. And so we're spending a lot of time and effort working with partners, making sure that we're contributing in the most effective way together to regional security and make those parts of the world, whether they're at sea or in land, a little more resilient to those types of hybrid activities. I think, conscious of the time, I'll probably take two questions. John Vendor back and Van here at the front. Sir. Hello, Jonathan Beal from BBC News, Defence Correspondent. A group of MPs, the Defence Select Committee in the Commons, recently published a report saying that the Royal Navy with 19 frigates and destroyers, that number was woefully low. I wondered if you would concur with that view as our key ally. And if you want to dodge the question, which I suspect you might, could you just tell us what you think is the minimum for a navy to have as a credible force? I should just point out that some marinas never dodge. They're just beneath the water, in fact, from below. Just to make things clear. Bill. Bill Hayton, Associate Fellow at Chatham House, occasional right on South China Sea. There was talk earlier this year that the US Navy physically deterred China from building on the Scarborough Shoal and has maintained, in effect, a century duty ever since. I wonder if you could tell us anything that you're undertaking the South China Sea. So, if you're asking any chief of navy, if he wants more navy, I mean, it's a pretty easy quiz, right? The answer is yes. But as I'm sure you know, and everybody in this room knows, that the size of a navy in a liberal democracy is not just up to the chief of navy, right? And so, it's interesting a lot of times how these conversations happen. It shouldn't be a surprise that these ships take time to build. They have to be, you know, approved. The funds have to be set aside and applied to these types of things. And so, this isn't something that came on us as a surprise, any of our navies, right? I can speak, I think, globally in that regard. But I think it's much, you know, I just had dinner last night with the first sea lord and we spent an awful lot of time together as very close partners. And we talked a bit about this, you know, much different picture going forward. And I think very optimistic times for the Royal Navy. And so, again, also, you know, when it comes to this question of agility, right? Absolutely key that you can turn, you can see that just in the last five years, so much has changed in terms of the security environment and the demands and the responsibilities that are placed on the Navy of a maritime nation. And I think this is something that the United States and the United Kingdom both share. To be able to respond to that is absolutely fundamental to staying relevant as a Navy. And so, if you've got a security environment that's changing on a frequency measured in single digits of years, but it takes you double digits of years to respond to that, then again, that's a recipe for irrelevance. And I know that we're all looking to increase that agility so that we can be more responsive. The other thing is we've got to, you know, build these ships with as much flexibility as we can, right? So that they can have a broad sense, a broad spectrum of response, a lot of words escaping me now, but flexibility in terms of meeting different challenges. One of the first things I had to do when I became the director of Naval Reactors was to give a speech to inactivate the USS Enterprise. Okay, so this is the very first nuclear power carrier had been in commission for 51 years, you know, since 1960. And just take a look at what has happened in our security environment in those 51 years, right? It had, well, she was built, and her first mission was to go down and serve on duty in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then she was at Yankee Station off of Vietnam, and when she finished her time, it had responded to a number of humanitarian crises around the world, and when she came across the ocean and moored in Norfolk, she had just come from Operation Enduring Freedom supporting strikes in Afghanistan. And so, you know, look at the change that had happened in those 51 years, and yet Enterprise remained relevant for that entire time, right? The air wing adapted. There was enough space, weight, and power built into the ship that she was able to reconfigure herself and remain relevant for those 51 years. Similar going forward, right? Some things are just going to be physics, right? The hull, the displacement, those sorts of things. But within those enduring pieces of a ship, we've got to allow for modularity and adaptation. We've got to follow that technology curve that we spoke about. And the Royal Navy, they're absolutely onto this in every way. In fact, we're learning from them in many ways as to how to be as flexible as possible going forward. So I think the future is varied by picture indeed. And then the question here, I'm sorry, was... Scarborough shows. I will tell you that I'm a firm believer in conventional deterrence, not just strategic, but also conventional deterrence. And you've got to be there and provide decision makers and partners with options, right? And so that's really what it comes down to, is that you're visible there, right? If you're not there, it's very hard to take credit for any kind of deterrence. And then you've got to provide capabilities that allow options to unfold, right? And so this might be from... Those options may be some kind of a cooperative engagement or an exercise together for a partner and certainly provide more coercive actions that would deter somebody from stirring something up. Whether that directly applies to Scarborough show very, very hard to determine this game theory. It's kind of infinite game theory now, isn't it? Rather than finite game theory. So to say that anything with finality, we deterred, for now, hard to say, right? The game's still in play. And so what I think is very important, though, is that we're down there, we're present, we're advocating for that rule set, those norms of behaviors that allow us all to compete in a way that doesn't necessarily drive us to conflict. All right? Thank you very much. I think this brings our proceedings to an end. I think it was a remarkable start of the day. We started exploring the challenges, new and old, to the modern domain, and we ended up on a note that how we bring up to date traditional ideas about operating in the modern domain in the 21st century. I mean, it has been a delight, a pleasure, and we wish you all the best for your next commitments. And also happy Thanksgiving, and Gerardo is going to be very soon behind us. Thank you very much. Thank you.