The navy maintain s a stunt and enduring prince of 100 ships and submarines forward deemployed rained the globe to ensure the freedom of maritime. The challenges facing the 21st 21st century navy have never been greater. There are those who would argue that the greatest challenge donations navy has come from our own congress. Over the decade of continuing resolutions and fiscal restraint and budget control act, has had a cumulative effect of degrading the capacity, capabilities and reddiness of the u. S. Navy. In light of these increasingly complex Maritime Security environment and the recently released National Defense strategy, the discussions today could not be more timely. As retired submariner myself, im greatly honored to host the cno today. I, too was also a physic major and we also share another common piece in our history that admiral will talk about. Admiral john richardson, graduate from the United StatesNaval Academy in 1982, batch of or describes in physics has masters from m. I. T. And woods hole and National Security strategy from national war college. At sea, he served on neuer numerous submarines and commanded u. S. Ss honolulu and. And awarded the stockdale award for his command. Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much. I want to thank you for that generous introduction. We go way back to the Naval Academy, physics majors issue copied toms papers a lot and rode together. So, just a lot of time staring at the back of each others heads in the boat. So, tom, also want to thank you and the foundation for being so flexible with our schedule and putting this event together. Tell you what. In the terms of events, there are they go in three categories. Right . A lot of invitations, remarkable number of invitations and some that you dont want to do in youre not going. Do just say no. Then there are some that you rather not do but probably have to so you say yes reluctantly. Then there are some that you really sort of shopping around for, that you want to do, and this is one of those events. I really am eager to be here and look around the 0 crowd, people know as much also i do about naval strategy and i want to get through the remarks and get to the question and answer period which i think will be a lot of fun. And again, its a pleasure and a privilege to be here at heritage, the foundation itself has a Firm Reputation for supporting National Security and the navy in particular. This starts before i get into my remarks about just a quick operational update. Is a speak you any, my brief this morning showed that we have 92 ships Forward Deployed in the United States navy today, about 60,000 a little more than 60,000 sailors Forward Deployed. That includes two underway Carrier Strike groups and of course the ronald reagan, Carrier Strike group, the Forward Deployed strike group in japan. Two am fibbous ready grind their marine expedition yay unit and the fighting arm of the carrier, 14 attack submarines deployed today, which is a bit of a high point. Our normal force offering there is between 10 and 12 normally. Ssbns on patrol as they have been 100 of the time sense 1960. And thats an important part, maintaining that alert status is an important part of our Program Going forward. We have six cruisers and destroyers on bmd station. So, as tom said, our discussion today comes at critical time for our navy, as we face a very dynamic and changing maritime environment. It comes on the cusp of some important sort of annual events as well as we get ready to release the budget for 19. Wont discuss the details of that here until thats released, but it will be talking about the strategic underpinnings that inform that budget. As were talking about strategy, another reality is that the National Security strategy has just been recently released, as has the National Defense strategy, just a couple weeks ago, secretary mattis provides a much needed framework. In fact if you think about the navy the nation needs and the other sort of an ellipsis at the end, dot, dot for what . The nation needs to fulfill the maritime responsibilities in the National Defense strategy. So we have one strategy for the department, that is the mds, and this could be seen almost as part of the Maritime Component of that strategy. So were using the tag line, the nation the navy needs. So, as i said well get through a quick discussion of the security environment and then get to questions. So i thought i would throw up a couple of charts. Dont want to get too heavy into the charts. This really looks a lot bigger on the pictures so an intimate setting. Dont feel too bad on a couple of charts. If you look at a map of the world, this is an uncommon format for that depiction and you see a lot of geography, right . Most of the political map you see are maps that focus on the land part of the globe, so youve got both the political and geographic things represented here. Cities, towns, roads, those sort of featured. And then theres this blue stuff that connects it, and this is kind of how i see it. So i start with the blue. In fact, its not that. Thats just the template which i see. See it more like that. Which is a depiction of just how busy things are in the maritime and getting busier all the time. So well talk at a context of the return to Great Power Competition this morning, and by virtue that word return will go back to last time we were in Great Power Competition and just makes some comparisons. I would say its just not a rerun of that last time. In the i would say the last time we were in Great Power Competition was the order of 25 years ago. Right . The cold war. Since that time, the last 25 years or so, maritime traffic, just ships on the ocean, has increased 400 , and if you consider the fact that people have been going to sea for tens of thousands of years, ten thousand years is not a bad estimate to see a fourfold increase in the last quarter center, think about what that means in terms of manage that amount of traffic and its fueled the roughly doubling of the gdp of the globe, right . So a lot of that prosperity has been manifested and enabled by maritime traffic. Mega cities continue to grow, expected to grow from 31 to 41 by 2030. A vast majority of those mega cities within 100mile of thoseline. Were returning to the sea more and more for our food, our sustenance. Increasing 13told and expected to continue. We have a laser pointer . Anyway, on this chart, are depicted a number of things inch white are the sea lanes, these diamond shapes are another feature of the dynamism in the maritime domain, as is are the purple shaded areas, which is technology has given us access to resources on the sea floor that we just simply never had before. And so now weve got access to oil, natural gas, other natural resources, minerals. The lines that run roughly parallel to the sea lanes but colored in gold or orange, signify the undersea cable network. This is this network, this infrastructure that is undersea, on which rides about 99 of International Internet traffic. And so when we talk bat cloud, were really looking in the wrong direction from my standpoint. The cloud you look up, most of that information is in the sea. We should be talking about a lake. Okay . So, help me there. Im just trying to change the whole not cloud computing. Its lake computing. And then another thing that is depicted here are the polar ices caps up near the top of the chart, and those are the smallest theyve been in that period of time in that 25 years since the last time we have been in Great Power Competition, giving rise to, again, access to more resources, giving rise to sea lanes of communication, that simply just werent there before. And so given these dynamics and the maritime and others, a balanced strategy, a balanced strategic approach is more important than ever, and our priorities have been very clearly defined by the National Security strategy, which directs us to protect america, promote american prosperity, preserve peace through strength, and advance american influence throughout the world, and the National Defense strategy picks up, describes the imperative for confronting these challenges to challenges head on. Were going to compete, going to deter and going to win. Centered on three major lines of effort which are to build a more lethal force, to continue to strengthen our alliances and even attract new partners, so expand and deepen those alliances, and then to look to reform the departments in terms of the way we do our business and acquire the material with which we do our business. And so this is also handing off opinion. The navy in the nation needs picks up the agent, that call to action, and i want to talk in terms just quickly in terms of how i see the defining naval power. And theres been a good consensus, clearly a consensus by the Heritage Foundation and many other studies over the last roughly two years, that have all converged on the conclusion that we the navy needs we need more naval power to meet our responsibilities to the nation. Okay . And so i want to talk about the concept of naval power. Im going 0 break it down into dimensions that hang together. Very difficult to talk about coherent naval power if you start stripping these out and disconnect them from one another. You must keep them in balance to provide this sense of integrate integrity or wholeness. One way to increase naval power is just to build a bigger fleet. A number of those studies i alluded to talk about that capacity. And in fact all of those studies converged on navy in the neighborhood of 300, 355 ships. Our force Structure Assessment did and that a number of other studied that went that, and the congress picked up on that, and the National Defense authorization act has a statement in there that we will do everything we took achieve 355 ship navy subject to appropriation and authorization and all those things. So, this idea of the numbers of platforms, not a great leap of intuition that a bigger navy is a more powerful navy. Second component, second dimension of naval power, would be to build a better fleet. So if you modernize each platform and other ways with better systems, make each one of those things more capable, then that means each one being more capable, and they sum up also to more naval power, more capable fleet. And we are actually on the cusp of some very Intriguing Technology that would not only increase our capability, i would think, very much, but also could do so and get us on the correct side of the cost curve. So im looking hard at things like directed energy, high powered microwave, lasers, electromag yet nick maneuver warfare and other innovative ways. Also in this group, this better fleet, this Capability Department mention. We might want to consider things like unmanned. So depending on how we think about unmanned, some of those unmanned platforms may be kind of in the platform dimension, many of them here in the capability dimension. So were looking hard at building out our family of unmanned underwater systems, surface systems, and air systems. The third dimension of power, as the naval power as we think about it, is to take those platforms with their inherent capabilities, which we can increase, and then network them together. So this third component is a network fleet. So we have sort of a bigger fleet, more capable fleet, and now a network fleet, and there are plenty of examples in history where the power of networking things together creatively, adaptively, brings actually more power to that force, and so we can talk about some of those historical examples, and but it makes intuitive sense as well. Sort of checks with the chart, if youre able to share data or across the force, youre able to respond to that awareness with more agility, and you can be a more powerful fleet. Not talked about enough is what ill call the Fourth Dimension which is more talented. No if you think. Greg other dimensions, growing naval power, at some point we have to man that fleet with sailors and so theres also sort of a number of sailors dimension but also the skill sets with which those sailors are going to need different than the ones that we have right now. Right . And so particularly as you think about lets go back to the network fleet. Were talking about sharing and assimilating, sifting through vast amounts of data that come from growing Sensor Networks and such, and so as we get a bigger fleet, okay, well need more sailors. As we get a better fleet, were glowing to need sailors that are trained differently than we treason them right now. The systems demand different skills. As we consider a network fleet, were going to need some help. So this is the realm of artificial intelligence, learning al go rhythms, figuring out the optimum way to Team Together the people, our sailors and machine assistants. To be able to sort through that amount of data and get to those decision relevant bits of information as quickly as possible. Competing in that orient and decide part of the odoo so we can beat the competition in that part of the move. Fifth dimension is what im calling the agile fleet. This is an appreciation for the concept of operations with which we operate that fleet. The sea tub struck cures with which we command and control the fleet. Once we have built the fleet, modernized it, networked. I, manned it with appropriately trained sailors, with the assistants they need, we have to figure out how well operate it, and theres always, as you know, dynamic tension between sort of the technology that is available to the fleet and the con ops which with we operate the fleet. I dont know if its a tension maybe an interplay is a better dui describe, as more possibilities become evident, to technology, then you adapt your con ops and that feedded back to the Technology Space to say if i only had this i could do so much more. Theres a great reinforcing dynamism. So as we consider things like distributed maritime operationsing were really looking for a fleet that much more leverages the global maneuver power that is inherent in the navy, and so as you think about this type of an environment, its the only thing that structured that environment are natural choke points. And some of those have been around since the United States navy started, 242 years ago. You can see them up there. Gibraltar, the suez, the strait 0 of hormuz. What is not responsive to is artificial lines. We have to make sure we preserve the inherent agility of the navy as it maneuvers weapon dont think in terms of where a particular naval capability is, right . But not only where it is but then its only a few days away from wherever it might need to be. And they this idea of tethers rather than a one or a zero presence. And then final dimension. This is getting complicated so the only thing i could have done worse is to have every one of these things on a slide. So, the final dimension is everything ive talk about right now, sort of a fleet in being. Potential energy, if you will. Until you get the force out and train it and this is the ready fleet, so turning all of that potential power, the potential energy into Kinetic Energy requires readiness, and that means you have to go out, have to steam, have to fly. You have to have your magazines full. You have to have your logistics element in place. You have to have your parts, do the maintenance, all of those things bring that fleet light and turn it into actual energy. Actual fleet capability. And so i hope ive painted a picture, then, of naval power composed of elements, and it is that wholeness, right . Its a unless you have all those elements present, youre not talking the full dimensionality of naval power. Mission commander versus network command is both and youve got to navigate your way into the space dynamically so theres these tradeoffs that when you think in terms of naval power we can elevate our thinking about these false choices and concentrate on whats important. If youve got the pure element and you think about the bigger fleet, the better fleet and the more talented fleet. Those are the components and if you try to care one out. As you all know because i know youve done your nuclear homework the isotopes are sometimes unstable. As we talk about the strategy and strategic components my aim is to sort of give you a view through the telescope up a microscope. In the last 18 months of the fiscal year 17 and 18 we have the continuing resolutions in the period of time. During the 18 months weve operated five months in the budget and in a continuing resolution. This type of dynamism impacts the strategic planning. Working through this time managing through the turn rather than getting it the Strategic Direction we need to maintain. As we build a more lethal navy and build more ships and advanced technologies none of them by themselves are sufficient to respond to the complex challenges without Commanding Officers of ships that are focused on competition. Just as we have done throughout our history we are going to continue to focus on developing Commanding Officers who are almost literally obsessed with building winning teams that can compete again and again on a sustainable basis that is our business. We envy the service so many are still resident and you can see the train to coach again. We want to be the navy that disables the way celebrity no doubt. Protect america from attack and protect the prosperity of the. By virtue we will build a niche in the le