 And welcome back to our conference today. First, I'd like to go over the poll results. Which did our audience think was the most dangerous? Well, if you look at the numbers, 44% of you thought security to the homeland was more dangerous, which is perfect because this panel's for you. What I thought really interesting was that the security of allies and partners was ranked next at 37%. Well, the security of our adversaries was below 20%, which is fascinating to me, given the nature of our first two panels and how global power competition might affect their behavior around the world. But it was a forced choice so we can understand where you ended up. I'm gonna stop sharing the poll results. As a reminder, all of the conference materials are available for download at the bottom of the events page, and there's a link to that in the chat. Also, the agenda and full bios are available in the conference program. This event is being recorded and will be available to the Naval War College channel after the event. So during this third panel, remember to enter your questions in the Q&A box at any time and upvote the questions you like. Welcome to our third panel, domestic security implications, operations within the homeland. I look forward to this talk about the operations and cost of defense support to civil authorities. Our moderator for this panel is Dr. Rebecca Pincus. She is a Naval War College assistant professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department for our Center for Naval Warfare Studies. She previously served as the primary investigator at the Coast Guard's Center for Arctic Study and Policy located at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Currently, she is on detail as Arctic Strategy Advisor at OSD Policy. Dr. Pincus has a PhD in Environment and Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Pincus as she leads this fourth panel. Andrea, thank you for this warm welcome. I am grateful for the opportunity to moderate this outstanding panel. I will begin by introducing our panelists and then we will go to their remarks. So we're fortunate today to be joined by Mr. Stephen Austin, Assistant Chief of the Army Reserve, a position he's been serving in since 2015. In this role, he serves as the primary advisor to the Chief of Army Reserve within the Department of the Army and contributes to oversight, policy and strategy development at the national, departmental and service levels. Prior to becoming Assistant Chief, Mr. Austin served as Chief Financial Officer and Director of Resource Management for the Army Reserve. He has also served in leadership roles at the Department of Commerce. A longer format bio is available on our website. Admiral Paul Zuchampft, our second panelist, served as the 25th commandant of the US Coast Guard from 2014 to 2018. As commandant, Admiral Z established the Arctic Coast Guard Forum to build cooperation on human and environmental security challenges in the region. In 2010, he served as federal on-scene coordinator during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, directing a massive effort of over 47,000 first responders, 6,700 vessels and 120 aircraft. Admiral Z currently serves on the Climate and Security Advisory Board at the Wilson Center. Our third panel addresses domestic security implications of climate change. We are fortunate to have these two experienced leaders representing important elements of Homeland Response, the Army Reserve and the Coast Guard. Elements of DOD provide defense support to civil authorities known as DISCA in response to requests for assistance from civil authorities. DISCA includes support to prepare, prevent, protect, respond and recover from domestic incidents. Stafford Act provides authorization for DOD to do this under federal law and DOD directive defense support of civil authorities provides further guidance. While DOD may provide support, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security is responsible under the overall federal framework for domestic incident management. The Coast Guard as an element of DHS has direct statutory missions of maritime prevention and response. The Coast Guard is America's maritime first responder and it is the lead federal agency for responding to spills. Our two speakers have prepared remarks that provide additional background on these missions. First, let's hear from Mr. Austin. Good morning to my fellow panelists and conference participants and all of you watching online. It's a great pleasure to be with you and to talk about the operational mission of the Army Reserve as it relates to defense support of civil authorities and our mission in the homeland. So first, let's talk about the Army Reserve Discomission and overview of operations for defense support of civil authorities and let's talk about immediate response authority. The Army Reserve is the dedicated federal reserve of the Army, providing quick access to the mission critical forces and capabilities the Army needs to fight, survive, and win on the battlefield from day one. But another part of our mission, one not immediately associated with the Army Reserve, is defense support of civil authorities, which was authorized under the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA. In addition to articulating the guards disaster responsibilities, the 2012 law enabled Army Reserve personnel and resources to be used for emergency and disaster relief efforts at home for up to 120 days in response to requests such as from a state governor or other local authority. This also includes immediate response authority, which allows the Army Reserve to respond without delay for up to 72 hours for requests from community officials, such as a mayor or fire chief, in order to save lives, prevent human suffering, or mitigate great property damage when there is insufficient time to get approval from higher headquarters. The Discommission is well suited to our role as an operational reserve because there is nothing in the Discommission that we don't do normally. We have a life-saving mission, 54%, 54% of the Army's medical capability resides within the Army Reserve, including 62% of hospitals. We're experts at moving supplies. Our expeditionary sustainment commands go into places with no infrastructure whatsoever and open seaports and airports while our logistical and supply chain experts put supplies on trucks and move them into affected areas. We're engineers. A significant portion of the Army's engineer capability resides within the Army Reserve with some capabilities almost exclusively or predominantly within the Army Reserve. And the core competence of the Army Reserve, combat support and combat service support readily lends itself to the recovery and restoration missions inherent in disaster response. So the same trained and ready forces that provide indispensable and immediately accessible capabilities for Army and joint forces operations abroad are uniquely suited to supporting domestic emergency and disaster relief efforts here at home. And because the Army Reserve is also a command, all of these capabilities can be packaged with appropriate command and staff structure to facilitate assistance to civil authorities. So now, having said that, let's talk about some examples of support for DISCA. And let's talk about Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. A lot of you probably went through. Many of these capabilities came into play during the string of disasters that occurred in 2017 as a result of those Hurricanes, Harvey, Irma and Maria. During Hurricane Harvey in Texas, the Army Reserve provided critical response capabilities including search and rescue, aviation, engineer, transportation, medical and communication support. Within five days of getting the mission, Army Reserve soldiers had executed more than 28 vehicle and aviation missions, rescuing more than 4,900 women, children and elderly civilians and over 390 pets. The 64 transportation company provided temporary shelter for both evacuees and pets. The 300 sustainment brigade mobilized on short notice to transport prison guards to the Houston Correctional Facility to relieve those who had been stranded as a result of flooding. And in Beaumont, Texas, to relieve a shortage of drinking water that had reached critical mass as a result of severe flooding and impassable roadways, an anonymous billionaire donated three semi-trailers of bottled water. Local pilots were willing to transport the supplies to flooded communities, but their personal craft could only carry a few hundred pounds at a time. And the airspace was already congestion with military helicopters trying to locate survivors. The pilots reached out to local Army Reserve aviators with the first assault helicopter battalion of the 158th Aviation Regiment. And one day later, four CH-47 Chinooks, each capable of moving 15,000 pounds of water took on the mission. Together with four other Army Reserve Blackhawks, UH-60s, they moved just under 100,000 pounds of clean drinking water to a community without a primary source of water, potentially saving thousands of people from drinking contaminated water that could result in death or disease. By the end of operations in Beaumont, Army Reserve soldiers had helped evacuate more than 700 citizens and 170 animals and transported more than a hundred emergency personnel to critical locations. Now let's talk about Hurricane Irma. By the time Irma, the strongest hurricane ever recorded hit Florida, Army Reserve soldiers had provided equipment and vehicles, including several medium trucks capable of traversing rugged terrain and fording high waters to deliver bottled water to residents on Merritt Island on the East Coast, which had also lost access to safe water resources. And now talking about Hurricane Maria, in Puerto Rico, Army Reserve soldiers in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria established a medical facility and together with an Air Force Medical Support Team provided primary care services to more than 5,000 patients, more than 300 a day, while others delivered food and water, installed protective tarps over homes and shelters, and cleared debris from houses and roads. Linemen from the 249th Engineer Battalion's Delta Company, those are the prime power guys, deployed to Puerto Rico to help the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority execute repairs to distribution feeder lines. Delta Company is the only Army unit composed solely of linemen. Over the course of 11 weeks, the 941st Quartermaster Company executed more than 540 missions, delivering more than 381,000 gallons of fuel to community hospitals, clinics, Army Reserve centers, and other areas. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Army Reserve mounted one of the largest domestic mobilizations in its history, working with Army North and the Joint Force Land Component Command, JFLIC, in support of DOD's COVID-19 response. Adapting its readiness construct to domestic operations, critical medical capabilities were reorganized into an entirely new type of unit, the Urban Augmentation Medical Task Force, or UAMTF. Each UAMTF consisted of 85 critical medical personnel, including multiple specialties, as well as clinical and administrative staff. Each UAMTF is capable of supporting 250 patients, the same as a small field hospital. In less than two weeks, two weeks, 15 UAMTFs were assembled and ready for deployment across the nation, as well as all of the Army's emergency preparedness liaison officers, EPLOs for short, who helped coordinate between the Department of Defense, federal state and local governments, and non-governmental organizations during emergency response events. More than 3,000 Army Reserve personnel were mobilized, 2,800 in less than 72 hours, as well as 180 of those emergency preparedness liaison officers. These are just a few examples of the kinds of support the Army Reserve provides under its discommission. But just as important as all of these organized activities during major events are all of the smaller missions that pop up in communities where the Army Reserve lives and works and jumps in to make a really significant difference. Because as I said, this is all about relationships between the Army Reserve, other service components, the local and state operating officials. So with that, thank you very much. Amazing imagery we just saw. Thank you, Mr. Alston for that video. Up next, Admiral Zucconft. Hi, this is Paul Zucconft, former commoner of the U.S. Coast Guard. And I want to thank the Navy War College, Commander Andrea Cameron, for hosting this forum and giving me an opportunity to just share my thoughts, my insights on the topics that will be discussed over the course of the day. So I thought it would be helpful rather than show you some slides to share what was on my mind while I was a senior leader in the Coast Guard. And oftentimes when you go to an all hands, people would ask, what keeps you awake at night? So I'll share with you what kept me awake. And what kept me awake were three Cs, complex, concurrent catastrophe. And I'll give you a couple of examples of that and how some of our plans and some of our planning assumptions fall short of the mark when it comes to dealing with a complex concurrent catastrophe. So let me take you back to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It's been nearly a decade now since that happened. I was the on scene coordinator for that. We had a squadron of aircraft over 120, nearly 50,000 responders. All of the response equipment, not just here in the United States, but probably on a global scale to deal with the worst oil spill in US history. So what kept me awake at night? Well, it falls into a couple of areas. As we were dialed in on this oil spill, what was playing out behind the scenes were midterm elections. Five Republican states impacted by oil and the Gulf of Mexico is now shut down to offshore oil drilling and the fishing industry shut down as well. The political fallout, I came with that. And then how do you navigate your external messaging within this very tense political environment? So another political risk, if you will, and there will always be political risk with any disaster, but more significant than that. I looked at what if we have a category three, category four hurricane in this very same region when the Gulf of Mexico is inundated with oil and then all of that oiled water inundates coastal communities. Now under a hurricane, we operate under the Stafford Act and in an oil spill, we operate under the National Response Plan. Stafford Act, the state, the governor is ultimately in charge. National Response Plan, it's the federal on-seeing coordinator. So we have tension between two governance systems when you co-mingle a major oil spill on top of a natural disaster. So that kept me awake at night. But then as we had pulled so many of our resources to respond to this oil spill, we left some of the areas that deter migration in the maritime environment, particularly Haiti and Cuba. So throw in a mass migration on top of an oil spill and then on top of a natural disaster. I lost a little bit of sleep over that as well. And as we're now trying to juggle these three balls, if an adversary determines what an opportune time while we are diverted attention-wise domestically, what an opportune time to cause havoc in a domestic terrorist event, which triggers a whole series of maritime security response plans for the United States Coast Guard in order to keep commerce flowing at the same time. So I looked at that, of course, four spectrums, an oil spill, a natural disaster, a mass migration, and now you have domestic terrorism. Our planning usually deals with one event at a time and our planning assumptions fail to recognize the financial, the political, and then the cross-contamination of a disaster that will compromise our ability to respond in another domain. So going back to Deepwater Horizon, there was a national level exercise conducted in February, March of 2010. It was an oil spill, and it involved a spill that migrated between the U.S.-Canadian border up in the Atlantic northeast. Ideally, for a national level exercise, you get the highest level of play at the principal level within our federal government, and in this case, diplomatically, with our neighbors as well. Regrettably, the level of play was diminished to the undersecretary level and not the principals because there was a shrug of the shoulders and saying, what's the likelihood that we'll ever have another Exxon Valdez? So the level of play was limited at best, and we didn't have an Exxon Valdez. We had multiple, in fact, we had daily Exxon Valdez for 67 continuous days, and with all of that, our house flipped. What I mean, the house flipped is leading up to midterm elections, there was a turnaround, and so there was a political fallout. There was a fiscal fallout from that as well. There was a public trust fallout that came with that. So let's move ahead. I'm come on the Coast Guard in 2017, and we have three successive hurricanes, Harvey, Irma, and Maria come in one right after the other, but there was enough laps between each one of those events that allowed us to repurpose emergency response assets from Texas, Harvey, to Florida, Irma, to Puerto Rico, Maria. But before a hurricane even comes close to making landfill, what the Commandant of the Coast Guard is empowered to do is literally field strip outlying units that are not in the eye wall of that hurricane and repurpose helicopters, airplanes, flight crews, you name it, to bring all of those resources as close to the frontline of that hurricane. So that when it does make landfall, we are the first on scene. That's the way it works. And people may wonder why is it the Coast Guard is always there because there's no red tape. There is no request for forces. In fact, I don't wait for a FEMA mission assignment if it comes down to do we save a life or not? Let the paperwork settle itself out afterwards. But let me just share with you my thought process going into Hurricane Harvey. This would be the first natural disaster encountered by the Trump administration. And that response shapes perception and it's perception of the senior most leadership. And I realized that we need to give this everything we had, all hands on deck. And we did to the point where the president said, no stock went up like the Coast Guard way up. Thought our stock was pretty good before that, but we can't divorce ourselves from the political realities of any one of these responses. I wanna share with you a little story though, what also happened during Hurricane Harvey. The 911 call system in Greater Houston went down. Over 8 million people did not have any way of communicating if they were truly in dire need of assistance. I had an enterprising lieutenant working at the Emergency Operations Center in Austin, Texas. And he was looking at an application that Texas has. I would equate it to an Uber app that you can use and to trigger pin your location and says, I need help. It was on a dot com domain. When I looked at that and my staff, I immediately reached out to Admiral Mike Rogers. I said, hey Mike, I need to get this into the dot mill domain because now my headquarters in Washington DC is the de facto Emergency Operations Center for the state of Texas. In light speed, we had this app up and running. To the point where we were directing helicopters in real time performing rescues off rooftops and flooded communities. So effective that CNN was now tracking where our helicopters were going because they didn't know what we were up to and they were scratching the house. How is it the Coast Guard is beating CNN to the scene? It's probably a good place to be if you're in the emergency response business. Fortunately, we had enough time to repurpose our forces to then respond to Hurricane Irma. And we're very lucky with Irma, that it didn't shift slightly to the West and devastate the low lying flood prone city of Tampa, Florida. Still a devastating hurricane nonetheless. But then the coup de grace was Puerto Rico. When Hurricane Maria struck hitting the Southeast corner of Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth and then exiting out to Northwest corner and pretty much devastating everything in its sight. What was complex about Maria and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is we could not truck in or drive in emergency responders. It became pretty much a sea lift operation and to a limited degree airlift because we could only get so many aircraft in at a given time and you can't get that heavy lift needed as well. But during the intervening period, we lost the narrative. Absolutely lost the narrative with Puerto Rico. And the matter of what our efforts, we were still going to lose that narrative. All the more reason that we look at strategic communications and how do we get in front of that narrative? How do we exercise these plans? There was much talk about the Jones Act. It was a non-issue in terms of bringing deliveries of critical supplies to the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. But as I reflected upon Harvey, Irma, Maria I went through that very same thought process, a mass migration, or now throw in an oil spill, or now throw in a terrorist threat to the homeland. I can't do all four of those at the same time. What is the standard of care that I can provide during a disaster if I have to strip away resources to deal with another contingency? We need to build that into our planning assumptions. And one of our other planning assumptions is when do we make that shift from emergency response to disaster recovery? And when it comes to disaster recovery, what is the threshold of care that is provided? We tend to default to five-star quality care. And we certainly saw that in Puerto Rico with an already failed electric grid with the expectation that the federal government would totally restore that electrical grid. We need to manage those expectations as well. So those are just a few thoughts that keep me awake at night. But more importantly, what we need to do to sleep a little better is at least provide a more integrated planning process in dealing with concurrent complex catastrophes. And the worst one we're dealing with right now is the COVID-19 pandemic. You throw in all of these other complex catastrophes and now you throw in COVID-19. There is no policy in place that makes it mandatory for our first responders to be inoculated. So they don't become super spreaders and exacerbate an already deteriorating disaster. So we need to look at that. How do we factor in our disaster relief centers? Recognizing that those are super spreader events. And it really does come down to triage. Do you drown in a flood? Or do you run the risk of getting COVID at a disaster relief center? Or do you rise to the top of the level in terms of who gets a vaccine and who does not? As we look at potential super spreader events that are surrounding a disaster response effort. But first we need to look at our first responders. I am concerned that many of our first responders to include those in uniform, to include the uniform I wore in the Coast Guard at their discretion are not getting the vaccine even though they rise to the highest tier. That's a concern. I recall during when we were sending our folks to Afghanistan and they had to be inoculated against nerve gas. It was a condition of employment. It was a condition of deployment was a matter of readiness. And our folks willingly rolled up their sleeves and received the inoculation. Well, we need to do the same thing if we're going to be prepared and ready in dealing with a pandemic overridden environment as we deal with all these other potential contingencies that confront us today. So I wouldn't say sleep well on this because you are the leaders who are gonna be dealing with these complex concurrent catastrophes during your tenure whether it's in uniform, whether it's in a civilian capacity. But I would just close with this. It all begins with unity of effort. And if you can't establish unity of effort, your response plan is doomed to fail. And that's where you come in. There's a great concept promulgated by the Kennedy School of Government is called meta leadership, how you lead up down across and down an organization and put yourself in the middle of that. And make sure that you do not let emotions override reason when it comes to building those relationships, sustaining those relationships and ideally building trust. As George Schultz would say, former Secretary of State, trust is the coin of the realm. And if you can build trust, if you can build unity of effort, your plan is bound to succeed. Thank you very much. And I look forward to our live session. Aloha from Hawaii. Thank you both so much for preparing those remarks. They really set the context for our discussion and I'm looking forward to that now. I'm gonna start with a question that will center our panel on climate change. And I wanna ask you how climate change is going to impact the missions that you've both just spoken about. One of our most robust projections about the impacts of climate change is storm severity. As a warming atmosphere holds more moisture and more energy. You both commented on the extraordinary hurricane season of 2017 with Harvey, Irma and then Maria inflicting death and destruction. In 2020, we saw another record breaking hurricane season in the number of named storms and their rapid intensification. At some point in 2020, every single mile of the US Atlantic coastline was under a watch or warning related to tropical cyclones, which is an amazing factoid. Hurricanes Laura and Delta hit the same stretch as Louisiana coastline 44 days apart and caused $20 billion of damage. So I wanna ask both of you, starting with Admiral Z, are we prepared for this tempo and severity of hurricanes to become the new norm? What kind of planning and adaptation do we need to develop so that we can be prepared for what was once unthinkable or extraordinary to become ordinary? So Admiral Z, if you don't mind taking us starting off with this question. Hey, thanks, Becken. It's great to see you and stay. Thanks for joining us panel as well. Through the Wilson Center, I've worked very closely with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And as you know, there's a do not exceed limit of a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in temperature. But what I look at is the concentration of CO2 that's in the atmosphere right now. It's at unprecedented levels. The last time we had this level of CO2 in our atmosphere, the sea was nearly 20 feet higher than it is today. And if you look back over millions of years and using carbon dating, there's a direct correlation between CO2 concentration, temperature, and sea level. And it takes sea level a little while to catch up to those CO2 concentrations, but we're there right now. In my crystal ball, we will blow through that 1.5 degrees Celsius target. The one thing the military does extremely well is we plan. Now we don't react to today's news, but we actually do deliberate planning. And planning is everything, despite what others may say, but we need to plan for this future. And I'll just give you one insight. I was out at the Zooter Z in the Netherlands. And as you may know, in the early 1950s, 5,000 people were washed out to the North Sea. They are now building that levee system another three meters higher than it is today. And they're making that investment in infrastructure because they're preparing themselves for climate change. And then lastly, I met with the former president of Kiribati. And he acquired 80,000 acres of land and to relocate Kiribati because they recognize it's the only question of time before that island is submerged. And how do they reestablish sovereignty? And so this whole other component that comes into play with climate change is the emergence of environmental refugees. And one of those first areas that we will see is in the compact of freely associated states with whom we have treaties to protect their sovereignty, which is ultimately threatened not by conquested armies and amphibious assault groups, but an assaulting sea. So many challenges that are being put on the plate as we the military are dealing with the consequences, not that you're one of the consequences of climate change. Great, thank you. Mr. Alston, do you have any comments for that question? Yeah, of course. Climate change has been identified as a national threat by the department of defense and the army. And like Paul said, planning is one of the things we do. So we are looking at that. And I would look at it from two lines of effort. One is internally what's the army doing to plan for climate change, for instance, for us, like at camp or 400 ligat, which is out in central California, making posts, energy independent, water independent, that type of thing. So if something happens and on the climate side and then there's a threat, an exterior threat, the army can continue to operate and go do what we were supposed to do. But as far as planning for, for instance, all the hurricanes like last year, 2021, so I know the weather service very well. You know, watching the weather service, watching hurricane forecast, that type of thing, we spin up our planning and we'll activate, unless it's immediate response to the wordy, we expend any funds until like Paul said, you get a mission assignment from FEMA, transportation, engineer, logistics, medical, all of those capabilities are out there. And one of the principles and it also falls in with what Paul said, is if I have a hurricane that's coming up towards New Orleans from the South, I'm not going to, they're planning, our units in New Orleans are planning, but we're looking at units that are outside of the threat area if we have to do something because for instance, another example is the hurricanes in that came up through Houston. You saw on Texas where actually we have an aviation unit, they reacted, but units down from Fort Carson, Colorado down into Texas to support that. So, so I'm coming. Great, thank you. I want to now pick up some questions from our audience. And the first one that I want to offer up comes from John Conger and I'm going to take his question and sort of expand it a little bit. And I'd like to start by sending it to you, Mr. Austin and then Admiral will see if you have any responses as well. So John asks, is there data on the change over time for disco requirements? In other words, is the demand for military forces to respond to domestic disasters increasing? And I'd like to tack on to that a question about cost. So are we seeing costs go up and how will that affect planning and budgets? And I'll expand it even further of course and ask if we're seeing demand increasing for Coast Guard assets and response as well when we need to take a crack at Admiral Z, but let's start with Mr. Austin and then we'll turn to you Admiral for the Coast Guard take. Thank you. Of course it's 85 people, it's high level medicalize it's a herbog, that's the short army term to Merbalot 1.7 million. So that works out to be like for 85 specialists about 59,000 a day aged in the COVID fight because with the COVID fight from West Coast from Midwest down in Southeast to move up into the Northeast, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey. But now with COVID more, you have so many issues out there emergencies than to prioritize. So that would be at some point, but... Great, thank you. Admiral? Yeah, Becca. So when I became comment and I shifted from operations to sales and by sales what I mean is where do I find the supplemental funding? Not just to support the heightened op tempo for these responses, but much of our infrastructure is damaged. Look what happened to Tyndall Air Force Base wiped out. Yeah, where do you find a billion dollars in the budget when we have stimulus funding? And if you go back to just post-Aragan there's a divergence between discretionary and non-discretionary funding. And so our defense budgets and our Coast Guard budget comes within that as well are under enormous strain right now. And we're trying to grow that and depend on supplemental funding with all the competing demands come out of the discretionary budget. Well, then I'm gonna rave non-discretionary. We are not in that mindset right now. So I do foresee a challenge going forward. And to me, one of our other greatest national security threats is our nation's debt. You just change the interest rates by a couple of points. And we're reaching a point where our GDP is less than what our annualized debt is and it's growing. So I think all of these come into play at a point in time where climate change is causing more frequent, more severe claims of federal disaster. But at the end of the day, who's gonna write that check? And then as the salesperson, where do you make those difficult choices where you have to tell members of Congress, no can do. It's not a popular thing, but we may find ourselves boxed in that corner if we're not resourced to carry out these missions. Great. I really appreciate those points. That gives us a lot to think about. And I think one of the things that's so interesting about speaking with both of you in this panel is the practical realities that you have at your fingertips from being in these leadership positions and sort of seeing how the response works on the ground. And so I'm gonna take another question from the audience. And again, I'm gonna make a couple of modifications, but we had an audience member ask about political consensus on climate change. And that's something that has been such an important element of all of these discussions. And I'm wondering if either of you have seen how communities and groups may think about climate change when they're affected by disasters, whether that's a hurricane, wildfire, flooding. I'm focusing on sort of maritime disasters here, Admiral, but are you seeing any kind of shift in political consensus as a result of sort of the direct homeland experience that we're having more and more in recent years? Yeah, I'll take the question first back and then I'll turn it over to Steve. But in 2017, I took Angus King and two world-renowned climatologists up to the northwest coast of Greenland, to the Yakubsov and Glacier that's retreated over 25 miles in the last five years, which is light speed for glacial movement. And in fact, one of those icebreakers that were calved is what sunk the Titanic years ago, but we engage with the Inuit elders and the Inuit elder community is in Greenland, it's in Canada, it's in the United States, they're in Siberia. And when we asked what are we witnessing here in two words, this is climate change. So we wrangle over, why is there more water where there used to be ice? Well, let's first engage with the indigenous peoples who have lived up here for the last millennia whose culture is being changed radically by the receding of sea ice, by melting of permafrost that really is methane that creates a whole nother feedback loop, if you will. But what happens in the Arctic, and the reason I mentioned that doesn't stay in the Arctic. It creates an almost imprimarial barrier for the meandering of the jet stream. And when it meanders, we get 40 inches of rain in Houston, Texas. So we can't look at the Arctic in isolation to the lower latitudes. And so they're all interrelated, but it really begins with ground truthing. See it for your own eyes. Talk to those who are living this, and it's certainly Angus King, he's an independent, but he gets it. We have an Arctic caucus that currently is primarily Republican. They get it. And I think with a even split within the Senate right now, there is an opportunity. And especially if we reassede to the Paris Accords and start putting tangible outcomes associated with policy, I'm optimistic that we can gain some momentum and acknowledge that this is not a political issue. This is reality that we're dealing with today. And do so in a collaborative way with other like-minded nations. What we might want to focus on is China, the largest emitter today of greenhouse gases. Number two, the United States. Can we as global leaders acknowledge and then what can we do? So the least greenhouse emitters who are now being overwashed by rising sea levels don't look and say, well, you created greenhouse gas and I'm suffering the most. So I think there's some diplomatic opportunities and there's clearly, I think there's at least light at the end of the tunnel. Great. Thank you for that note of optimism. Mr. Austin, any comments? Sir, you're muted. Maybe that was the problem. I would say part of it's the human dimension because people that are subject to it, Paul mentioned like in Houston, in the Gulf Coast, in California with the wildfires, all of the snowstorms, climate change is, some places get warmer, some places get colder. I mean, it's not global warming. So where people are subject to that, there's more acceptance. A lot of it is relationships. Our local army reserve units and not all services and the guard working together if you are down in Houston, what is down there? Because there are, for the crowd here, I have 33 army reserve locations that have Navy reserve are part of the facility there. So we're linked together. And to me, that's what it is. How do we respond to this together? Not just with services, but with local governments, federal government, state government. So I, and I mentioned before, Department of Defense has identified climate change as a threat. So I think, it's becoming the, I'm not sure I would use the term dorm yet, but it's becoming more widely accepted. Back to you. Great. Thank you both. And I'm seeing Andrea back on screen to give us the hook. I wish we could stay longer. We have so many interesting questions and you two have been so wonderful. It's really an honor, Admiral, it's wonderful to see you again. So Mr. Austin, Admiral Z, thank you so much. Andrea, back to you. I echo my thanks to Dr. Rebecca Pincus, Mr. Steven Austin and Admiral Zucum for talking to us in depth today about DISCA operations. This panel was perfect for our audience where the majority polled that the diminishing security of our homeland is the most dangerous threat. Your work here is done and you can go camera off as I transition us all to our break. Overall, I'd like to thank all the speakers and moderators for this morning. It's been a truly rich learning environment for our entire global audience that's here today. Before we go to the break, I have our third poll with the audience today. Again, we will launch the poll for one minute and you can provide your answer. After that, we'll be on a lunch break Eastern Standard Time and resume at one o'clock. We'll review the poll results when we come back. So our next poll question is, what is the most significant climate related issue? We'll close the poll in about 30 seconds. It's fun for me. I see all of your answers coming in and the competing answers as the bars go up and down. I look forward to sharing these with you after lunch. That will conclude our third poll of today. Please come back with us at one o'clock as we resume our after-minute noon session for our conference. Thank you so much for your participation today.