 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval sea power both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well, good afternoon, and welcome to our fifth issues in national security lecture held here in the virtual world. I'm John Jackson, and I will serve as the host for today's event. To kick off our event, I'd like to call on Rear Admiral Chatfield to extend her greetings. Hello all. Thank you for joining us again for our issues in national security. And I'm joined here by my husband, David Scoville. And we are so inspired to see you online and to share with you some of these wonderful gifts that we have from our faculty members. And we're looking forward to the lecture today. Thank you very much, Admiral. David, to begin, I'd like to just mention that anyone who's joined us for the first time, I'd like to reiterate that this series was originally conceived as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and friends here in the Newport area. Over the past four years, it has been a structure to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, and colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport and indeed around the world. We will be offering 13 additional lectures between now and May of 2021 spaced about two weeks apart. An announcement detailing the dates, topics, and speakers of each lecture will be posted by our public affairs office. On Tuesday 10 November 2020, we will feature a lively discussion on ethics and emerging military technology with Professor Tom Creely. Each event will consist of three parts, the scholarly speakers presentation, a question and answer period, and then a brief pause before we proceed to the family discussion group session. This final segment is a primary interest to family members residing here in Newport and will feature guest speakers from various support activities and organizations on base. OK, now on with the main event. Please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom and we'll get to them at the conclusion of the presentation. I'm now very pleased to introduce our speaker, Dr. James Holmes. Jim is one of the most prolific writers at the college and is known by almost everyone in the maritime security business. He holds the JC Wiley chair of maritime strategy here at the Naval War College, and he previously served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former US Navy surface warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship's big guns in anger during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, recognizing him as the top graduate in his class. The latest version of his widely read book, Red Star Over the Pacific, is a primary selection on the chief of naval operations, professional reading list. Most recently, he published a brief guide to maritime strategy. I'm not exactly sure why, but former Secretary of Defense James Mattis considers him troublesome. His talk this afternoon will explain why it is so hard for the US Navy to prevail in strategic competition or warfare in the Pacific, even though it remains stronger than its competitors. He will review the geography, naval budgets, combat capability, and much, much more to show why the strong need not and may not necessarily win. I'm pleased to pass the digital baton to a friend and colleague, Dr. Jim Holtz. Oh, I didn't unmute myself. I was being too good, too good a host. Just like I was just saying, I would like to give a shout out to Porter Halliburton and Tom Feddison out there. And I see them on my main screen here, so it's great to see you all. This, I think, is the best timing I have ever had to give this talk, being the week before Halloween and also the week before the election. And I think you'll, and I hope you'll see why I think the timing is really good. So I mean, really the question that we're going to explore tonight is how much she-power is enough. It's a recurring theme in election years. It's a recurring theme in our field all of the time. Most recently, Secretary of Defense Esper has proposed something he calls Battle Force 2045, which calls, by mid-century, or thereabouts for the Navy to be about 500 ships, including about 355 man ships, sort of traditional-type warships in a large contingent of optionally manned or unmanned craft. And I think, and so that's really sort of the sub-sex that we're talking about. When we get into this question of how to measure naval power, both objectively in the sense that we look at ourselves and then subjectively as we measure ourselves against prospective enemies, and of course to the prospective enemy I want to spend time on tonight would of course be China. How do we make ourselves strong enough to deter China in its own backyard, which requires the ability to defeat China in its own backyard? Even if we are better on a platform for platform and person-for-person basis within the sea services, I think that it's still a really hard thing to do to go into somebody else's, onto somebody else's home turf and overpower them there and make yourself stronger and accomplish your political objectives. So that's sort of the way that I'm coming at this topic. So let's just go ahead and dive right into it. This project goes out back about 10 years when Professor Yoshihara, whom most of you are probably familiar with, unfortunately left us about three years ago to get to return to the think-tank world. But we got a sort of a strange-seeming request from an outlet in Korea, South Korea called Global Asian. They said, hey, would you write a piece explaining how to measure the strength of a navy? And that way it really became sort of a fun project. This is the first page of that article which appeared I think about December of 2010, if I remember right. And we went through a lot of the things that I'm going to go through with you tonight. So I wanna share that with you and help you think about these things as well. We don't have, none of us, least of all me has any definite answers to all of these things, but we can at least reason together and try to figure out how to look at these matters together and hopefully find collective wisdom as we vote next week and as we try to shape to help our elected leaders shape our policy and strategy in the future. One thing you'll find, when you start getting into these discussions, you will feel like this guy, Rick Grimes, the zombie hunter from The Walking Dead fame. I'm not even sure if that show is still on anymore. We sort of fell out of love with it a few years ago. But I mean, if you think about it, if you read zombie books or if you watch the movies, it's really, really hard to fight zombies. You shoot one down with a shot to the head and 10 more or a hundred more come just like it come behind it and you have to shoot those down as well. And ultimately you expend your ordinance and they get you. I mean, at that point you're a lost cause and you probably become one of them. You will feel like this when you get into arguments about naval power and military power because you hear the same things over and over again. You can rebut them as many times as you want and 10 more times somebody will come back, come back the next election cycle or whenever the topic of naval affairs comes up that these same things will come up over and over again. Now I should hasten to add these fallacies about how to measure C power. None of them is entirely wrong. In fact, there is value to all of them but using them individually as a one size fits all indicator of how much C power is enough is deeply misleading. And so I want to put that case to you in the next hour and hopefully during the Q and A we can reason this out and figure out how we can do things better. So my agenda is pretty straightforward. As I said, I wanted to look at us. I want to look at our strategy and our force structure and budgets a little bit. And then I want to flip it around and try to put that force structure to work in the Western Pacific vis-a-vis China. Vis-a-vis a growing and increasingly muscular and increasingly assertive China. All you have to do is survey the daily news headlines and you will quickly realize that China is growing increasingly comfortable with throwing its weight around in the Western Pacific. So first of all, let's look at our strategy. What is our strategy in the Asia Pacific or in the Indo-Pacific as we've taken to calling it in the last few years? Well, I think you can reach, in fact, you can reach out back even beyond the Obama administration that for a long time after the Cold War, we sort of took a strategic holiday. We didn't do a whole lot, but one thing we did was realize that the Pacific was going to be important. So even during President Bush, Bush II's reign, you started seeing more and more submarines transferring out into the Pacific and making their home ports there to the extent that by about 2006, 60% of the submarine fleet was already in the Pacific. The Obama administration comes after that as I will review for you in a few minutes and makes it formal. It says we will pivot or rebalance to Asia. We will unbalance the fourth structure so that we have more forces at our disposal to match up with what we hope to accomplish in the end of the Western Pacific, which is big things. We have great ambitions as we have for many decades. So that's sort of a shorthand for what, and I think that, I know we think of President Trump's administration as being radically different from its predecessors and certainly they have dropped a lot of the same language, but if you read between the lines, if you look at the strategic documents that have come out during this administration, I think there's a lot of continuity, which is kind of a heartening thing in these eras in which bipartisanship seems very elusive. And it's kind of good to see that we can all agree on some big things in the policy and strategy world. So look for statements about what US maritime political objectives are out in the Pacific. You can look at documents like these, the one to the left, which came out in October, 2007, right on the stage in Spruin's Auditorium here at the college. It was our first formal maritime strategy since the 1980s, and I will review a little bit with you what that said, because I think that actually set the tone, and actually it sets several threads of continuity that you see flowing through strategic documents over since. The document to the right is the 2015, what they called the refresh, sort of an updated and revised version of that. It's a lot longer. I don't find it as user-friendly. So I will actually revert back to the 2007 document as sort of the guidance for the pivot. I will tell you why I understand that there is a new maritime strategy in the works, and I think we may see that pretty soon. So this lecture will be possibly very different next year. So I think that's in the works, so for some time, potentially by the end of the year. Okay, what are the basic trends in US maritime strategy in the Western Pacific? And as I said, I'm reaching back to 2007 here. I think the three most striking things in that document, which was a nice short little punchy, very user-friendly document were this. First of all, the United States reserves on the right unto itself to maintain credible combat power in the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. So it's sort of the wider Indo-Pacific basin plus the Persian Gulf. And that was widely interpreted by the framers of that strategy as well as meaning that we intend to remain number one in the region for the foreseeable future. So that's, which leads to the second point that I highlighted there. We reserve unto ourselves also the right to take local sea control at times of places of our own choosing alone if need be. So what are expansive water? We need control of in that region. We're gonna go and grab it preferably with allies and friends, but alone if need be. Pretty striking thing. We talk about Mahan and I know you all have heard from John Maurer about Mahan. He was all about command of the sea, but he was thinking mostly in regional terms, mostly about the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and in the waters off our Eastern and Western coasts. This takes Mahan to a whole nother level that basically saying we'll do this anywhere on the face of the earth that we need to, but especially in the Indo-Pacific region. So a really breathtaking statement of purpose coming out of the Navy Marine Corps on the Coast Guard, the three signatories to this document. And lastly, the documents, and this was the part that occasion, I think the most was among commentators on maritime strategy, but it did explicitly make plain what we already knew, which is that the United States seizes itself as the lead custodian of the system, the system being the system of freedom of the sea, freedom to use the sea for military and commercial purposes in concert with friends and allies of whom we hope to recruit a lot so that we could have more of forces available to police to see against kind of proliferation against terrorism and all these sorts of things. So this made it formal that the United States contends that it is the steward of the maritime system at sea, the liberal order at sea. So like I said, a pretty bold statement of purpose coming out of the Bush administration that carried over, as I said, into the Obama administration in which the Obama Pentagon in 2015 released this document, the Asia Pacific maritime security strategy. I was totally stoked when I opened this up on my screen in my office that day and saw this on page one. Why we safeguard freedom of the seas? Man, page one right there. It's all about defending the seas against, not only law breakers, whether it's gun runners or human traffickers or whatnot, but also potentially state challengers to free use of the seas. Wonderful, that was a great tone center for that document, which is why I dumped it right into this thing and highlighted it quite nicely. So again, you do see that sort of continuity. This is basically the Obama administration's way of stating we are all about preserving the system. So this was their way of saying it. I actually think they said it even a bit better. Freedom of the Seas is really important and it is a lot more than freedom of navigation, the term that you normally hear. For when we go to make demonstrations of the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea or whatever the case may be. Just to close out this opening section about strategy, just to point out that there is continuity from administration to administration, here's the Indo-Pacific, I'm not sure what we call it, what we call it a strategy. Report exactly, but it's basically the Department of Defense Indo-Pacific strategy. And here we go, right on page one. The Indo-Pacific is DOD's priority theater and the nomenclature which you see down there below, they've taken to say it's instead of freedom of the seas, it's a free and open Indo-Pacific in which all nations can partake of maritime freedom and all the blessings that go with a liberal international system. So again, sort of different on the rhetorical side, but not really a whole lot different on the substance, if at all. What does that translate into in real terms? I already, when I introduced the pivot, the rebounds to Asia, in more force structure terms, it amounts to a 60-40 split in the force structure between surface ships and the naval aviation and all the branches of the US naval power, which is a good thing. I mean, I'm glad to see Washington under successive administrations, realize the importance of the region and realize that if we have big ambitions in this important region that we need to allocate more resources to that in order to match policy with strategy with resources and accomplish our goals. So, but I mean, that does look like a rather large question unaddressed. Is that enough? I mean, just, I mean, that's an input measure. We're saying, say, okay, we're gonna put 60% in the end of the region. That's fine, but is that enough? If it's not enough to defeat China or deter Russia or whatever the case may be, then at that point, we really have to do some soul searching and figure out what we're gonna do, whether it's to augment the forces of the whole, whether it's to swing more forces from the Atlantic into the Indo-Pacific, whatever the case may be. So that's a big question that we should always be bearing in mind. And that's where you start running into zombies. They're gonna start attacking you when you start delving into these matters. So hopefully this fence will open, this fence will hold so you don't expend all your ordinance trying to gun them down. Okay, the first zombie, the first fallacy that I think you will encounter when you talk about naval power. And again, this is a partial truth, not it's something that's totally wrong at all. But that's it, I mean, this is the idea, and I'm stating it more clearly than you'll hear it, the idea that he who spends the most on defense wins. How many times out there in the press, in fact, you can get into your favorite search engine and you can find, you can dig up any number of graphics to go along with this one. This one's from the last election cycle in 2016. Look at that, look at that headline. This remarkable chart shows how U.S. defending dwarfs the rest of the world, dwarfs the rest of the world. And the point being that the United States spends about the same as the combined 14 next competitors, many of whom are our friends, along with China and Russia and other potential antagonists. Man, so the takeaway is that if we spend that much, we must be able to win because we must have bought so much more stuff, so many more soldiers, sailors and airmen and all that kind of stuff that if we apply that resource or those resources against any potential foe, we are gonna win. And again, that does make a certain amount of sense. You should be able to buy more military power if you spend more on it. But think about what all that defense spending, you know, about three quarters of a trillion dollars goes into every year. We buy a lot of really expensive stuff. This is the U.S. Zoom Walk, the first of a new class of stealth destroyers that's now out in San Diego, stopped off here on its way to San Diego from Bath, Maine a few years ago and had us on board for tours, which was really kind of cool. This thing goes for about $4 billion a copy. And there's only gonna be three of them because they're so darn expensive. We were gonna get 30 some of them and you progressively saw the number go down and the unit costs go up. So again, that really helps eat into that defense budget pretty fast. This is the U.S. as Gerald R. Ford, the first of a new class of aircraft carriers, nuclear powered aircraft carriers. This thing goes for about $13 billion a copy and that's without putting planes, without putting sailors, without putting stores and ammunition on board, all of which will of course add to the operating costs of that thing. So yeah, that's a big chunk of change. Speaking of putting an air wing on there, it's going to carry, it's gonna carry eventually these F-35 joint strike fighters, stealth fighters. If you look at DOD, the figures out of the DOD, the different services that are gonna operate that, the Navy Marine Corps and the Air Force, this thing goes for well upwards of $100 billion per copy. Multiply that by a couple of squadrons, whether it's 12 points per squadron or whatever the figure is, that really adds up quite a bit as well. But that's not all. I mean, these are forces that we use to go out and do battle for the command of the sea. At the same time that is happening, we're also trying to recapitalize, basically replace an entire class of nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines. The ones they built when I and Captain Jackson were in uniform way back when the Ohio class are now reaching the end of their service lives by the end of this decade or thereabouts and we have to replace them. The Navy has made no bones about it. These are ships that we cannot do with that and they are very expensive. Also $7 billion a copy for 12 boats. So $84 billion right there. And in fact, if anybody's sitting alongside the near against Bay, if you can look over towards Quonset point, it's part of those boats are being assembled right there. And then of course, a hop skip and jump down the road at Groton is where they're being assembled. So kind of neat to see this major project going on right here in our own backyard. But again, this is a major expenditure. In fact, the Navy has said, not only we cannot do without this, we cannot let the schedule slip. And also at one point in the last administration before President Trump's administration, the warning from the, the warning out of the Chief of Naval Operations Office was this is gonna bankrupt us. It's gonna bankrupt our entire shipbuilding budget unless Congress does something to help us work around it. So again, this is something that is a potential budget buster and that we have to keep an eye on and see how this progresses. And lastly, just to kind of a silly, kind of a silly way to explain that we spend a whole lot on manpower relative to our rivals. Anybody used to watch Top Gear on BBC or the Grand Tour when it moved over to Netflix, I think it was. I mean, if you think, they always had these expensive professional race car drivers driving these hypercars and supercars around. You gotta think that people like to stick. They're in-house race car driver are not low-cost labor. Estimates hold that the United States, or excuse me, that China and Russia can put about eight or nine sailor soldiers or airmen into uniform for the price of one American. So again, that's another thing that really consumes, by the time you think about salaries, healthcare benefits, for pensions and all that kind of stuff. So it's a good thing that we take care of our people, but it does cost us. And that's something that there could be a great equalizer in competition with China, especially since we have to go into China's backyard, which obviously confers many advantages on China as we will explore on the back half of this. So to beat that one down, this lovely young lady would tell us, he who spends the most need not win. It's not a guarantee. The next metric that you often see for C-Power is the idea that he who weighs the most wins. What do I mean by that? Well, let's go through some of the greats who we've heard comments on this, including this is Robert Kaplan, one of the greats in the field of geopolitics, pictured on our stage in Spruitz Auditorium back in 2014. He was back here in 2017 and he said this, the United States is a maritime nation. Let me summon out the keywords. The Navy is the largest in the world by far. He goes on to say the coast, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't summon that one out. He goes on to say that the Coast Guard would qualify as the 12th largest Navy in the world. Well, we know that China's Navy is more numerous by many measures than we are today. And that was actually true back in 2017 as well. In fact, the Economist magazine about eight or nine years ago put out a story that generated an enormous buzz by pointing out that in terms of major warships, China's Navy was already bigger than us either by then. Is that a showstopper? Not necessarily. The Soviet Navy was always much bigger than we were as well, but it does give you pause when you think about the rapid growth of the China's Navy relative to ours, which has remained more or less stagnant in recent years. But in any event, what does he mean by that? Well, I mean, he would get an argument from my friend, Jim Fanell, Captain Fanell, former, a very outspoken former Pacific Fleet Intelligence officer, head of Pacific Fleet Intelligence out there who forecasted a book out of our own CMSI a few years ago that China would have about a 500 ship Navy by 2030. So he didn't make a strong prediction about that, but he quite clearly believes that that would be the case. So there's one reputable source to pushing back against this idea. But you go on to some of the other really reputable and smart people in the field. This is Mike Hohanlon down at the Brookings Institution. The Navy, yes, he rightly observes, the Navy has chosen to put more value, more technology into fewer platforms, more expensive platforms, but then he comes to the same place as well. Our aggregate tonnage is still almost three times that of China. Okay, does that mean that we win? Only if we're going to be in a ramming contest. I mean, if you take that logic to its extreme, the logic of superior tonnage, this is one of the strongest warships in the world. This is the Emma Mares working for the Maresk line, a 550,000 ton ship, about five times that of the USS Gerald R. Ford, which I showed you a picture of a minute ago. That's obviously a nonsense statement. I mean, this is a civilian freighter and it's unarmed, but that's what I mean to taking this logic to its extreme. That's where it leaves you. You really gotta add a whole lot more to that metaphor for this drill to really make much sense. Yes, I mean, this indirectly indicates that we have certain advantages. Our ships are bigger. They carry more fuel, more ammunition, more stores, and all that sort of thing, which they have to do because we anticipate fighting thousands of miles from home, whether it's off the shores of Western Europe or in East Asia. So indirectly, this is a meaningful thing, but it really leaves out an enormous amount of context to the point of where it's almost meaningless. I mean, think about it. Do you think your coach Belichick is recruiting this guy for the offensive line, for the Patriots? I mean, he's probably bigger and he's probably bigger and heftier than anybody on the team, but one doubts his ability to block or run a football is very good. If you want to continue on with sports metaphors, if it's somebody like this though, I mean, a big beefy guy who's got lots of combat capability and can give his adversary a wedgie. If we can give China's Navy a wedgie, I'm all about that. So, but I think this picture does help you ask the right questions. What are we actually getting for all that gross tonnage? Are we actually getting combat to capability or is it just sort of more or less meaningless? So this is one way to think about that. And she'll remind us again, he who weighs the most need not win in action. Okay, the next zombie that you might encounter would be something like this, numbers of halls. Let's count numbers of halls and figure out who has more, whoever has more hulls in the water wins. And this is actually one of the, in fact, I'm kind of surprised. I think just because it's such an unusual year and such an unusual election, you actually haven't heard too much of this in this particular election cycle, but it normally comes up. The idea that numbers of halls means, or numbers of halls mean everything versus the idea that they mean very little at all. What do I mean by that? Well, here's a, from the run up to the 2016 election, here's what PolitiFact had to say. And this is, I would indeed agree with them that this is a talking point. The smallest Navy since 1917. What is that? What are we talking about there? That's basically the idea that we have the smallest number of ships in the fleet that we had since the naval expansion in act of 1916 when Woodrow Wilson was president. And when the United States was still a regional fleet and was only then embarking on the pathway to become a global Navy. So I mean, that's a pretty strong statement. And there are essentially purveyors of this talking point are essentially saying, we're on the verge of reverting to not being a global Navy anymore. Yes, so like I said, pretty startling statement to make. Let me move on here. And this is something, this is a way of looking at that has continued onto the present day. This is a picture of David Perdue, a Republican of Georgia Senator from Georgia. Again, this was during the 2018 election cycle. But again, smallest Navy since World War I, solely a function of counting hulls in the water. Here's what, like I said, this is a debate that goes back. It goes back certainly years and probably decades as well. This is what our Secretary of the Navy for the entire Obama presidency had to say. He's pushing back. He's pushing it back against this idea that the number of hulls is very, very important. And here's what he has to say a few years ago. He says, well, the 1917 comparison is pointless because today's ships are much more technically advanced, technologically advanced, which is undoubtedly true. I mean, would you take today's Navy in a battle with the Great White Fleet of Teddy Roosevelt? Yeah, I think they'd have a pretty good shot since the Great White Fleet would never get in range of our carrier air wing, set along with our anti-ship missile batteries and all that sort of thing. So that's indisputably true. But what the purveyors of this particular talking point never point out is that yes, ships have gotten a lot more advanced, but the threat environment has gotten a lot, lot more menacing. As we will see, as we will see for the rest of the lecture here, it is not 1917. You have to interpret things like hull numbers, combat capability in the context in which they will be used. We're not going out to fight in 1917. We're going to have to fight in 2020 against things like this. This is an early model of China's J-20 stealth fighter, which will reportedly eventually be added to the carrier air wings. That China is busily developing as it constructs carriers for use in the China seas and in the Indian Ocean. So you get the idea. So numbers, yes, they're important. Certainly mass is important. Any strategist knows that, but at the same point, you can't just use it as a talisman, as a one-stop or one-shop stopping way to measure naval power. So again, we need to combine a lot of these different metrics together and try to figure out. And then we need to measure ourselves in war games, such as we do a lot of new ports against actual competitors, and thus figure out whether we have enough sea power in order to get our job done. So numbers are not everything. The next, I think the last fallacy that I'll go through with you is sort of like this. It's the Jane's Fighting ships way of looking at sea power. If you want to figure out whose Navy is stronger, you do what I just said. You crack open your copy of Jane's Fighting ships. You look at the pages for the PLA Navy, for the U.S. Navy, compare them up, see who has more stuff and better stuff, and that tells you who wins. It's all about ships and it's all about fleets. That was one time, or it was true at one time. Sea power at one time was mostly about ships unless during the age of sail, you went in really, really close to a force that had guns that could out shoot you because the land power had the advantage, even back in those days, if you got close enough. But for the most part, you could detour around it. I think that behind this fallacy, I think there is imagery like this. This is one that's a famous painting out of the Battle of Jutland in 1916, in which the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet stood out to sea, to meet the German high seas fleet. They were out of range of any land-based munitions and they had a gunfight. It was a solely fleet-on-fleet affair. So that's, of course, is a kind of an outdated way of thinking about sea power these days because, as we know already by World War II, the airplane naval aviation was becoming a thing. Land-based aviation was becoming able to strike out the sea. This logic has really started to break down even a century ago, not long after Jutland. So thinking about sea battles in this term is deeply misleading these days because battle involves a lot more than fleets nowadays. In fact, it involves more than Navy's full-stock land, air forces and even armies are now maritime services to a great extent, which is why when you're looking with the United States Army and Marine Corps and Air Force are doing, a lot of it involves shaping events at sea, which is a beautiful thing. That's how I hope we will offset some of the shortcomings that we see in our own force structure. Look at them, you think of just a few representative things. This is a line of Chinese PLA Air Force jets armed with the anti-ship cruise missiles, able to strike out 100 miles out of the sea against moving US Navy or Allied formations at sea. This is an arm of sea power as surely as an aircraft carrier or a cruiser or a destroyer. So again, if you're going into somebody else's backyard, they're gonna have this sort of thing at their disposal. But it doesn't really stop with me and aircraft. This is the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile, the world's first working such missile. A missile that is mounted on trucks, as you can tell about, so it can move around and not be attacked by our forces easily and can strike according to the Pentagon, about 900 nautical miles off China's coastlines. Also, we'll go through a little bit of geography here and see exactly what that means. But it doesn't even stop with that. Back in 2015, the PLA Navy during a parade in Beijing, so I'm showing here, introduced the DF-26, which is another anti-ship ballistic missile, reported to be able to strike over 2,000 nautical miles offshore, that puts it able to hit targets beyond Guam, beyond the second island chain that parallels Asia's coastlines. Which as you can imagine, that's a pretty significant thing. If our Pacific fleet is trying to steam across the Pacific to join up with forces in Japan and elsewhere in the region and form a fighting force that can defeat China or deter China. So again, this is something that's preoccupies people in my field, in our field. Here's a diagram that shows exactly what I just said. This comes out of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and it's a wonderful graphic. The important curves here are number one and number six. So the innermost and the outermost curves, that depicts the reach of the DF-21D and the DF-26. So as you can see, unfortunately, they kind of great at the geography a little bit, but with the DF-21D, they can hit well beyond Taiwan or Japan. Good way to blunt the force of an impact of our forces closing in on Western or Pacific. And then, man, look at that curve number six there. That extends well beyond Guam, as well as being able to range the entire Bay of Bengal, the vast majority of the Arabian Sea and well into the Gulf of Oman as well. Without even deploying anything beyond Chinese soil, they can do that within their own frontier. So as indeed we've seen demonstrated just this year. So this is a problem. It's not just a matter of matching up the PLA Navy force structure against our own and seeing who has more stuff, better stuff, better people. We have to think in terms of going up against a joint Chinese sea power force. And that's something that often gets lost in, especially in politicized debates in Washington employees like that. But it doesn't even stop there. China's, in fact, I would describe the early focus of China's naval buildup as a force of pretty impressive diesel-electric submarines all are not only with torpedoes, but also with the anti-ship missiles. As indeed is this force of stealthy catamorans, who'll be catamorans, which also bear eight anti-ship missiles apiece, things that can feed out into the Western Pacific and potentially give us a hard time as we approach whatever the combat theater happens to be. So again, this is a force that is designed to slow us down, to weaken us before we actually even have a battle. So as the Marines like to say, we're gonna have to fight to get to the fight. And that's by design for force designers in China. And I think that it's a pretty impressive strategy and a pretty impressive force that they've come up to challenge our ability to get into the region. I like this one. I leave this one in. This is actually kind of an old one, but it's really Laura. It sort of suggests that we get into a yellow zone along before we approach the Asian shorelines and you come within reach of more and more things as you actually get into the combat theaters, which would presumably be in places like the Taiwan Strait, Sinkaku Islands. You'll notice the South China Sea is pretty red. Would be even more so today because this dates from before the island building project which started in 2013. So it gives you a sense of what we're up against as we try to go out and actually cure our strategy. I mentioned the island building, the island reclamation projects. These have all been dug up from islands and reefs and atolls in the South China Sea equipped with airfields and made ready to host aircraft and ships. And thus extending China's ability to mount a presence in the South China Sea well seward of its shorelines and make things as tough not only on us but especially on its Southeast Asian neighbors who were really the focus of all that. I used to get sort of snickers. This used to be sort of a laugh line. In around 2012, when we first saw the Philippines get into a tussle with China over Scarborough Shoal at that point off their coast, I used to describe this as the vanguard of Chinese sea power. I don't get laughs much anymore because we know for a fact now including through the efforts of people at CMI side, the China Maritime Studies Institute that China indeed operates a maritime militia within the fishing fleet. So this is very much a dual purpose fleet. Yes, it goes and catches fish and does the economic stuff but it is also responsible to the Chinese military and it's very much an arm of Chinese sea power. We can talk more about it at the Q and A if you like. It's really quite fascinating and it's a really hard strategy to beat for a lot of reasons. But again, any implement for China that can shape events at sea is an implement of sea power. We really need to keep that in mind. The strongest fleet need not win the strongest force when you add in all the components that are able to mold events on the high seas or in the skies above. That is what is going to win and determine the course of Asia and the Indo-Pacific in the future coming years and decades. I would just leave you before we round this off and start looking at some geography with a quote from the wonderful Albert Einstein who tells us about net assessment. Not everything we can count counts. Not everything that counts can be counted. So there are intangibles that it's really hard to measure using numbers and metrics and graphs and that sort of thing. And he's basically telling us to keep those things in mind because it's natural to count what you can count and to conclude that that's okay. Not necessarily, I think that leaves a lot of important things out there. We're out of the discussion. So that's the end of the zombies. As you can see, they've been coming out of the heart pretty thick for about half an hour here. Some of all the bad ideas or all the partial ideas that I've gone through with you and you get statements like this from people who really ought to know better. This is John Meersheimer from the University of Chicago. One of the greats in my field of international relations. It is very well-regarded book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics a few years ago. He essentially said this, the United States Navy is 10 feet tall. How do I arrive at that interpretation? Well, here's the actual passage out of the introduction to that book, which again is one of the landmark works in my field. Here's what he says about China and just in passing. China and present day China does not possess significant military power. That kind of goes against everything that I've been saying to you and anything that you read in the defense or trade press. I mean, that's a, we know that China has done pretty well. Look at the second half of the sentence. And he seems to think that he's restating what he said in the first half of the sentence. It's military forces are inferior to those of the United States. Well, I mean, it's possible to be inferior to your adversary and yet still be, not only have significant military power but have war winning military power. And I think that's the case with China. And I think that, I think that Professor Meersheimer has lost sight of that. It doesn't necessarily matter whether we as a whole are stronger or weaker than our adversary. It matters whether we are stronger or weaker at the place and at the time where battle takes place. And that's something that I think gets lost in this analysis. Beijing would be making a huge mistake to pick a fight with the US military. Well, I mean, I think it's, I think that's that might be true in certain circumstances but I think in the most likely circumstances that is definitely not true. Taiwan only sits 90 miles off the Chinese shorelines. I mean, is that a place in which Beijing would be making a huge mistake to think that it might win? Yeah, I'll leave that to you to ponder. Okay, so let's turn to the closing in. I promised you some maps. I love maps, I usually lead with them but it didn't seem to work quite into the narrative here. So we'll hit up the maps here at the end. Why is it so hard to do this? Why are away games? It's commonly said that the US military only plays away games. We go to the rimlands of Western Europe and go to the rimlands of South Asia or East Asia and that's where the fights happen. And that makes things really hard on us. Why is it so hard? Well, let's go back to the master of strategy Carl von Klauswitz. He says something that's sort of like, don't take any wooden nickels or buy low sell high type stuff. The best strategy is to be very strong. Be like Arnold Schwarzenegger or the rock or something like that. And that is certainly true. It's best to be stronger on the whole than your adversary. Have a bigger military, a more powerful military, more numerous and all the other measures. But then he makes it more interesting. Yes, it's good to do that in general but the main thing is to do it at the decisive point. The place where the action takes place. If I'm stronger at point A and the fight takes place there, I'm gonna win. It doesn't matter whether I'm stronger on the whole or not. I usually, normally when I come to this point in the auditorium, I normally look out in the crowd and so I'll look out virtually at you all and point out that there's a, how many people are there? 164 people in the room right now. Clearly I would have no chance against all 164 of you if you came out in mass at a particular decisive point. But you know what? If I could find a good place of battle that actually suits my aims and if I could take you one by one, I might actually have a chance. I might actually have a chance to be stronger than the force that you put into battle at a particular place in time. Especially if I bring my baseball bat or I use a walking stick. I can actually use that to help get the drop on you. So you get the sense. It all depends on the relative correlation of forces right at the decisive place in time. In fact, the cause of what goes on to say and he doesn't want, I mean he wants to be strongest at the decisive place in time. And therefore he cautions very strongly against dividing your forces to try to do lots of things. The United States, we famously try to do everything in the world. He's cautioning against that. He's such a very high standard for breaking concentration. He wants you to keep the force together as much as possible so that you are stronger at the decisive place in time. He goes on later on in his book. He says, well, you know you need to handle your forces with such skill that even in the absence of absolute superiority, again sort of on the whole superiority, you need to be stronger at the decisive place. And if you are, that's enough. You are sufficient. So we might sum this up by saying you took a terrific bumper sticker you used to see here in New England. We can be globally inferior but locally superior. And in fact, if you read back into the 19th century, the late 19th century, that was exactly what the Teddy Roosevelt's in the hands of the world wanted to do. They didn't need to, we didn't need to outbuild the Royal Navy. We didn't need to outbuild the Imperial German Navy. All we needed was a force that could command the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the waters immediately off our Atlantic and Pacific coast. That was what we cared about back then and therefore that was enough. And we could do that without outbuilding them as they were running an open-ended naval arms race. So it's something that China, in fact, China studies our history and sometimes I think they know it better than we do. I think this is a lesson that they've taken to heart. Now, if we take all this and to apply it to the actual theater, here's the Pacific theater. I love this image out of the Google Earth because you can barely see any land. I see, you can see Alaska up here, the first island chain coming down on towards Taiwan. And you get the sense. It's a very, very maritime theater. It tends you to break that Clausewitzian law and disperse forces. And I think that's a danger that Clausewitz and Mahan and other maritime theorists, that strategic theorists would warn us to guard against because we know that zombies can go under water. We cannot escape them by going to the Western Pacific. We're gonna encounter these things over and over again and need to take them into mind or take them into account when trying to figure out how much she powers enough. How do I mean that? Well, the Pacific Ocean is a big theater. Here's a map out of the Fortune Atlas of World Strategy from 1944, I think, 1943 or 1944. And it depicts Imperial Japan's claims in the Western Pacific, which sort of roughly parallel what China, I think, has in mind when it looks at the right of the region today. Let me summon out the external perimeter that Japan had in mind. It basically wanted to enclose the Western Pacific and make that a Japanese preserve. The co-prosperity sphere, as they took to calling it later on in the conflict, that's a big theater. I mean, look at all that water, especially if you juxtapose it back against the Google Earth image that has showed you. That's a lot of water. But there is a bigger theater. Let me show you again. On this map, on this polar projection out of Nicholas Speigman's geography of the piece, that's basically where China's interests lie. Within the first island chain and then to a lesser extent out to the second island chain. That's a big theater, but it's also a small subset of the theater for U.S. maritime and Allied maritime endeavor, which is this. We think that we have interests pretty much in every expanse of water on the globe, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, but also in places like the South that lands in places like that, as well as the Indian Ocean. So as you juxtapose those two things against each other, as you look at the range of U.S. interests that presidents of various administrations have posited, man, we tend to fragment our forces all over the place, putting forward destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea, doing things in the Baltic Sea. I mean, I'd say the tendency to violate that closancy in law and break away from concentration is intense when you're a superpower, a global power like ourselves, as we've been at least since 1945. So if you look at Moses, AKA Charlton Heston from way back when, man, he can come down and bring the tablet all he wants to, stay concentrated, but it really is not that easy to do. If you think about some other aspects of this, I mean, what happens? Let's suppose that the United States military, what we can put into the theater, if we were willing to give up all those interests across the globe and actually do the Clausavitzian thing, mass in the Western Pacific and be able to overpower the Chinese military, that brings up heavy, heavy opportunity costs with regard to basically giving Russia potentially free reign in the Atlantic Ocean. You can just list all the priorities that you want to that we would have to forego in order to mass all of our forces in the Western Pacific to make this happen. I mean, it can even be things like counterpattery in the Gulf of Guinea off the Western and African coast might be something that would go without being tended. So again, and that's the logic in which China has conscripted for its own maritime strategy. It counts on our not putting all of our forces into the combat theater at the right place in the right time. And I think that's a pretty sound guess at what Washington will do in the future. So we have to figure out how to work around that. It's hard to mass forces in the Western Pacific also for very basic reasons. They're very far away. Look at this map, another map out of the Fortune Atlas from World War II, in which it's depicting how far in the routes that forces going from the East Coast and the West Coast have to take in order to even get into the combat theaters around the world. Well, I mean, it's long and circuitous. I mean, look at that one right there. If you want to use the Mediterranean route, boy, not only is that a long and convoluted route but that's potentially contested by our adversaries if we try to mass in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. So again, distance really matters. The potential for adversaries to make things hard on you as you go, as you try to get to the theater also is something we have to take into account as well. This is a picture of Pearl Harbor from way back in the good old days when we used to back in the late Cold War when we used to have enough ships that we can nest them four or five abreast. That was kind of cool. You get the idea. I mean, thinking back to that budget question, we have to maintain naval stations all over the place just to get to the theater so that we can support ships as they're making, ships and aircraft as they're making their way to a contested battleground where we might face off against the Russian Navy but especially against the PLA Navy and supporting arms of joint sea power. In fact, this is my favorite image for thinking about how hard it is to project sea power out to sea. This is an artist rendering of the inverse squares law from physics. Basically it says when you radiate light or some form of energy, the amount of the intensity of the energy doesn't dwindle sort of slowly and gradually. It goes down by the square of the distance. So right here, the intensity is already one quarter what it was at the source. Taking another increment, it's one ninth. It's really, really hard to project sea power out out to sea, sea and air power out to sea and therefore you need booster stations which is maybe you can also think of bases like Pearl Harbor, Yokoska, whatever the case may be as being booster stations to try to boost that signal so that you can actually get military power to where it's needed when you're going very far from home. So again, Charlton Eston, whoever, Clausewitz, whoever you want to talk to, it is really hard to obey that Clausewitzian law and remain concentrated so that you can be stronger at the right place in the right time. This, I mean, so these are sort of the obvious obstacles, distance and all these sorts of things. But this actually leaves aside probably the most important thing and that's the fact that the adversary is not a potted plant. We cannot say that we cannot simply assume that China will let us come into the theater in order to enter or to array ourselves for battle and get ready for them. The Clausewitz tells us that war, it's an interactive thing. It's about a collision of two living forces, both of which, not just us, both of which have an intense desire to win. They have ingenuity. In the case of China, it knows the battleground better than we are likely to. There are simply a lot of advantages that are going to go to defending your own environs, your own immediate backyard. Here's a general Paul van Rieper, kind of a hero to a lot of us here at the college. Van Rieper was in, he basically played Iran back in 2002 in an exercise called Millennium Challenge. He was basically allocated the resources of Iran back in those days, which were pretty slender. Anyway, he used them so creatively. He was such a creative red team that he actually managed to defeat a US Navy carrier task force operating out in the Persian Gulf. So it's, I mean, this to me is a metaphor for how we should assume our adversaries they will be resourceful, they'll be creative. I mean, he was doing things like passing a combat, a combat or through mosques. And I mean, they're just wild sort of stuff. So you can take the electronic stuff away from them, but they can still figure out how to work around it. So it's, I mean, that's, so that again, a very resourceful adversary. Oh, just as a side, you know what happened after that? After that round, the Navy changed the rules so that Van Rieper couldn't win. So he quit, I can't hardly blame him for that. Kind of a danger of wargaming. This is a metaphor. I mean, when you think about going into somebody else's, in this case, dojo, you're going into somebody else's turf to fight. We have to be like the great Bruce Lee who ventured into his adversary's dojo in the fists of fury. And he had to go in there and pound them. And he actually won. Of course he's Bruce Lee, come on. We have to ask ourselves whether we are Bruce Lee. Can we go into China's dojo and hope to fair as well against the representatives of that just the way he did back in the 1960s and 1970s? Stick with the sports metaphors. What other advantages go to the home team? This is the stadium at Texas A&M University, which claims to be the inventor of the 12th man, basically having the home crowd. I mean, think about all the moral advantages, but think about how intimidating that is for the adversary. Think about how good it is to know your own home turf. There might be some quirks in the field and so forth. So there's quite clearly advantages of fighting off your own shores. You probably care more than your adversary about what goes on there. I mean, that's just sort of reason that you care more about what happens in your own environs than your outsiders might do so. Or you could tell you, how about Duke University? The residents of Cameron Auditorium there are so fierce and so crazy they actually call them the Cameron crazies. They actually directly interfere with the opposing team's ability to do what's work. Football, they can try to drown them out so they can't call plays. There's just a lot of ways to mess with the adversary. And there are certainly military analogs to this. It's actually, to stick with one more a little bit of sporting, it's kind of like a WWE wrestling match. There's nobody, this guy looks pretty pathetic trying to police this about. There is nobody in warfare who makes the teams be equal, equal in numbers or equal in weight class or characteristics. This is somebody, if China has more stuff available in the theater, it behooves China to throw all of that in there so that it can try to toss us out of the ring, hit us with a chair, whatever the case may be. So that's a way to think about warfare. It always behooves you to bring all of your stuff that you can so that you can overpower the opponent. There's nobody making sure. In fact, we often in the United States say we don't want to fight fair fights. We want to have a technological overmatch as well as all the other advantages that you need to win. So I think this is kind of another silly example. Way to think about what we're up against in the Western Pacific. The enemy gets a vote. This is a mantra in our department. This is a mantra at the war college. The enemy gets a vote in the success of my policy and my strategy. And the enemy is always going to cast that vote against me. And for its own purposes, and the use of power to fulfill those purposes. So it's always a mistake if you assume that the adversary is an inert mask on which you can work your will. It's not the case. It wouldn't be the case if somebody came against us and it's certainly not the case as we go up against a serious competitor like China. As we can close out, we can basically close out with a simple, I actually haven't mentioned my hand much here which is unusual for me. He sounds very clausivitian as well. He's trying to figure out how to size a fleet. How can we size our US Pacific fleet? So sort of back to the question I posed at the beginning about the 60% number. He proposes what he calls a broad formula. The fleet must be great enough to take to the sea and to fight with reasonable chances of success. The biggest fleet that it is likely to be brought against it. The largest force that it is likely to meet in battle. Break that down just briefly. Great, so it sounds like another one where there's a bylaw so high type of advice pieces. Anybody, there's actually a lot here. My hand was not known as a master wordsmith but I think there's really a lot of content here. The fleet needs to be great enough to take on the largest. This sounds like net assessment. This sounds like measuring numbers of hulls, measuring the capabilities of weapons, all of that kind of thing that helps one force square off against another. Reasonable chances of success. There's an element of risk. How much risk is each side willing to run in order to get its aims in battle? So there's an element of risk. There's also an element of the politics. How much does each contender care about winning? If it doesn't care that much, it's probably not gonna commit a lot of all of its forces. If it cares a whole lot, it's gonna throw everything into the fight for as long as it takes. So that geopolitical calculation is a huge aspect of this and that's where the likelihood comes in. Think about it. Look out from Beijing into the Western Pacific and try to gauge what is the largest force that President Trump or whoever wins next week is likely to put into battle in the Western Pacific. That's the standard of adequacy for the PLA Navy and for the PLA Air Force and for strategic rocket force, all those forces that we went through. If President Trump's willing to send a whole lot, that's the measure of our adequacy. If President Trump is not willing to sacrifice heavily, if the American people are not willing to sacrifice heavily on behalf of Taiwan or whatever the case may be, they will commit less in that mate and that becomes the standard of adequacy for the PLA. And that's what they need to measure against. And I think that's, I think that's quite clear in Chinese strategic thinking. So to take that Mahanian formula and try to neck this down toward the end, compare forces, do that stuff that we have to do the stuff that I went over with all the zombie discussions. But again, then it becomes interesting. Think about cost to each side. Think about opportunity cost for each side. That's a lot squishier, but it's equally important. And think about how much risk each side is willing to run. China is willing to run a lot of risk because it sees these goals that it is set forth as a permanent impressing importance to China, reaching all the way back into the 19th century, a century of humiliation for China. So China has vested a lot of importance in these things. And I think we have to contend with that. So really, when you really break it down, this is the question that we have to pose for ourselves. Who wins when a fraction of U.S. forces goes up against an adversary's entire navy potentially, entire air force potentially, and the army of which the strategic rocket forces and outgrowth. So we really have to think about that. And we can talk during the Q&A, we can talk about how we might try to overcome these problems and what the navy, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard and our joint friends are all trying to do to make this happen. But any of that, so when you listen to commentary over the next week or whenever this comes up, just let the buyer be aware that you've always asked the tough questions when you hear these really simple metrics trotted out to explain how we are inevitably gonna win, we are inevitably gonna lose whatever the case may be. And you do that, I think you'll be well equipped to take part in these discussions and make wise decisions moving ahead. So I've thrown a lot at you. I hope that I've helped the fuels of thought and I would love to take your questions now. Hey, Jim, thank you very much. As always a superb presentation that scares the heck out of people even without the zombies. But unfortunately, we only have a few minutes for questions here and we've had many, many questions come in but let's just throw one out. And that's the notion of are we properly investing in large deck nuclear powered aircraft carriers that seem to be particularly vulnerable or are we better served with some other force situation including unmanned systems? Yeah, I mean, that's really sort of, I mean, that's one of the big questions. That's an extremely well posed question. And I can tell you with Secretary Esper that I mentioned Battleforce 2045 or at the beginning the design that he has proposed and that the White House I don't think has approved yet and probably won't before the election but the idea is that you would scale back the number of CVNs, nuclear powered aircraft carriers to eight or nine I think was the figure and that you would supplement that with, I think six I think they said half a dozen they're calling them light aircraft carriers basically offshoots of the American class helicopter carriers which can now carry F-35s sort of a vertical jump to F-35. So they're basically saying you rebounce towards a more numerous but lighter carrier force. The other half of that is what the Navy's doing under since about 2015 that has been pursuing what it calls distributed lethality or they're now calling it distributed maritime operations. This is basically the idea that you have lots more numerous ships. They may be smaller or lighter but they will still pack a heavy punch and you put missiles on everything. You basically put anti-ship weapons, anti-air weapons on anything that floats. Whether it's a, it could obviously a cruiser or destroyer but also an amphibious warship or even a tanker or something like that. You really give the adversary, you give the adversary a lot more to think about. You also, the basic idea is that you improve the ability of the force to fight on even though you're gonna lose individual ships and individual units. So you made yourself resilient and thus improve your chances of actually winning even though obviously you're gonna lose some units in battle. I mean, that's just sort of the nature of what we do. As far as, man, I think that Congress has not really been willing yet to throw all its eggs in that basket. Simply because we're still experimenting with these things. A question that oftentimes, and I don't know if this was part of this one but a question that oftentimes comes up is, I mean, are these actually gonna, are they actually gonna replace traditional surface plot? I don't, my good instinct is probably no because I mean, these are still mechanical things. They still break, they're gonna need maintenance. It's kind of hard to see you putting one of these things out to see for six months without maintenance and repairs and so forth. But that's just one guy's guess. And there have been some promising things like Sea Hunter's cruise from San Diego to Hawaii by itself. So yeah, we'll see how it goes. But that's just sort of my good instinct as an old guy who was used to his sailors working on stuff all the time by themselves. Another question is considering that the US has a very, very small merchant marine fleet and very few US flag carriers. How do we justify spending that much money to basically protect someone else's fleets? Oh, so there's two, there's basically two halves of that. I think you're actually, the merchant marine always comes up and you're quite right. It's too small, everybody knows it's too small. In fact, if you, it's kind of hard to nail down the numbers to precisely calculate the number of the merchant marine but it seems to be less than we lost in action in 1942 to the German U-boats. So I think that gives you at least a rough guide to think about how big the merchant marine should be. If you lose the merchant marine, we're probably gonna lose the war because we're not gonna get stuff and people to the places where they need to be, when they need to be. Okay, so that's just sort of the quick and dirty on that. As far as talking about protecting allies, I think was the question. Well, I mean, look at the map. I mean, what is our strategic position in the Western Pacific without allies? You don't have Japan. You don't have South Korea. You don't have some sort of relations with Taiwan. You don't have access to the Philippines. Where are we? Guam, that's about as close as you get. It's really hard to project power into the waters and onto the shores in the Western Pacific from Guam. It's just not big enough. It's all by itself. It can get pounded on by the PLA, whatever the case may be. In fact, the PLA quite clearly calls a couple of those ballistic missiles I showed you. Guam killers. I mean, that's quite clearly a message about that. So, Jason, so if you're willing to withdraw to the Western Hemisphere, go back to the 19th century or even the days before World War II. I guess that's kind of what we're positing that we would do. So it's really hard to do. I mean, it's really hard to balance from thousands of miles offshore. And that's really a strategic question that we would be taking on if we had that national debate as a country. President Trump is not a huge fan of alliances that doesn't seem like let alone foreign wars. But at the same time, I don't think you haven't seen him threaten to shut down our alliances. I think that that would be a massive, massive shift in US policy and strategy. Well, Jim, since we're at the end of our allotted time, do you have any final comments you'd like to make before we turn to our family discussion group meeting? Yeah. I mean, you said something about how dark a picture. I always paint a dark picture. I think that's a way of paying respect to our adversaries, which they are imminently do. I do think that when you look at all these bad news stories, I mean, especially in recent years when we've had a really rough ride in the surface Navy in particular with the collisions in 2017 and groundings. And then basically losing, it looks like we've actually lost a major amphibious warship to fire this year, burning right in the middle of San Diego. I mean, that's a really tough go. But there's also a lot of good news things that are happening out there. The Navy, the Marines are talking about, they're talking about naval integration, basically joining their efforts so that we more effectively fight in the theater where we may fight, which is the Western Pacific. So in particular, General Berger, the new commandant of the Marine Corps is a real hero. I think he's actually driving this process on the technology side. You're seeing new technologies that will help reverse some of these problems. In fact, we've already seen Air Force bombers and F-18 fighters off of aircraft carriers firing a new long range empty ship missile, which will help correct a lot of the difficulties that we've encountered and that I've discussed or at least touched on briefly with you tonight. So you're talking about hypersonics and all this kind of stuff. So again, it's a competition. I think you would expect to see sort of a back and forth dynamic in the coming years, if not decades. So we have to expect that there will be times when we're sort of back on our heels, but sometimes I think we will adapt and have China back on its heels. And I think if we can do that, I think we have a pretty good chance of deterring them. So I guess that would be sort of a slightly uplifting closer for the talk tonight. Well, thank you very much, Jim. Have a good Halloween and I hope the zombies don't bother you around your house. Thanks everybody for attending.