Introducing, in pensacola, deciding what aircraft theyre going to fly, but he was not fit cockpit, sojet he might fly helicopters. General mills is one of my istors for life, so it intimidating to be up here before him. If i follow your footsteps and do half as good as you, i would be really be happy. Its good to be here. Dr. Holmes, thank you for allowing me too be here as well. It is a privilege just to be asked. Thank you for keeping it short. I have to think how you got that call sign bullet. Theres probably a story behind there. Real quickly, dakota has been more helpful to me over the years than you all will understand. But he is a lot like me in that he is a critical thinker, and thats how i was trained to think, every path you go down questioning that and for continuing to do that please do not go down that at all. I thought this morning i would offer two parts to this. First, i think i owe you some perspectives on the Planning Guidance that we published the summer. I will just say that i had the benefit of several months of knowing where i was going, and when you have several months he , you can sit down and think and write. I contrast that with my battle buddy, who has two weeks. That is not much time to think your way through, so i was hugely beneficial of several months of time to think. The second part is to listen and to learn. I mean that, i say that genuinely. Your thoughts, your questions, your criticism, your poking at our ideas is a very healthy thing, and i welcome that in advance. Im thanking you and advance. Let me start off by talking about where i see us. I think we are in an era of Great Power Competition and some might debate that for some period of time, i dont think thats open for discussion any longer. Our National Defense strategy, which you all are very familiar with this, acknowledges that and demands in no Uncertain Terms of that the Services Change to meet the challenges of the new world. Believe is very , clear. I can tell you there marine corps fully embraces the components of the National Defense strategy. Absolutelyy actuall will be germane going forward, and everything that we do has to be aligned with that. The world obviously is changing rapidly. I would like to thank those who had a hand over the spring and summer time shaping the deep thinking that is required before you publish the sort of document that we had a chance to do. Your thoughts, your criticisms improve in places like this are sort of petri dishes for that thinking, and they are very valuable, and i am asking you to keep challenging us. I think the realities will cause us to think differently going , and i am going to go into that. I believe the realities of the world causes to draw old assumptions and start fresh. We cannot assume that todays equipment, the way we organize, how we train, how we select leaders, all the war fighting concepts, we cannot assume they will remain relevant in the future. In fact, my assumption, my premise is they will not. This requires unshackle yourselves from previous notions looks like and reimagining how marines will train, how we will operate, how we will fight and it requires , very honest assessment of our strength and what weaknesses. Based on my observations and those of other folks, including that i listen to keenly, including a bunch in the room , some of whom i have known for some years, i would like to tell you that our current force, your current marine corps to include a large part of the program , nearterm marine corps, is not optimized for great competition. It is not optimized to support a naval campaign. It is not optimized to support the fleet through missions like sea denial and not optimized to deter abasing threat. So, that is a diagnosis, and im asking you to ride along with me. You can have your own opinion, but thats where i am, so we will go forward from there. Anyone who had a chance to read the guidance that we published this summer, you will know and recognize that force these nine is my top priority, i think that is my principal vehicle for redesigning and realigning the marine corps as part of enable expedition force, which is part of a joint force and all requirements that are layout in laid out in this strategy. So, with the summer in the last 30 or 45 days we have whether marine corps will need to go into the future. Heres where this is a little different than previous attempts, not attempts, but effort to do this. The test this summer was truly do force design look beyond the , fiveyear defense plan, look beyond the manpower management cycles deeper, ten years into the future, and imagine what force we will need based on assumptions about the pacing mask thatd then forced backwards to todays, not forward, and there is good reasons for doing that. I dont think this is Ground Breaking necessarily but clearly it is clearly threatbased force design. To help those rationale the logic behind this, about three or four years ago while i was in hawaii, during a congressional visit by some members that were traveling to asia, i sketched over the top of them of a map three time frames that i thought were relevant. I was talking about both poor posture and the composition of the force. 1950, arguably from about 1951 until 1981, 1990 when a , we had a very clear picture of who are pure threat was, it was a bipolar world in both conventional and Strategic Deterrence and play, but everybody knew who the opponent was. But all that changed in 1990 but 1990 until 2012 to 2015, 2016 we shifted deliberately into the capability mode. We did not have a threat, we had advantages and resourcing. We went after capabilities, because we had no peer adversary, no peer threat. Along comes peer threats again into some in this room, it is not back to the future, but it is in a way and approach that some are familiar with with the 1970s and 1980s. That is where we are right now. We have a threat perhaps for conventional deterrence and Strategic Nuclear deterrence are in play. Both are moving and advancing. And in terms of a pacing threat, which is something, if you want to talk about later, i think is a fascinating topic, both return to gain an edge over each other looking for vulnerability on the , other side, sort of like a slinky. One aspect, if you have thoughts i would very much appreciate it, the sense if you set the pace runner or au are nation, you are breaking trail, you are working harder, and you spend more money. So your choices are, if both are your scenario, do you do you want to set the pace . If so, can you afford to do so, because you will set the pace the whole time, and if you dont, youre in a rehab mode. And someone else is setting the pace. In my opinion, in the last several years, to some degree we we have let an adversary set the , pace. I think all that requires tough choices. I confident that we will get to am a new design by making large changes, not small ones. I do not believe the annual pace of force development, that grind will not achieve what we have to do. There will be an ever widening debt if we have to do so. We have to do it for design and change our posture around the world. In other words, i am not content and we should not be content to merely try to keep up. We should set the pace. There are some things that we can introduce today in the near term, in terms of media effects, and there are others that will take some years that will happen. And again, the timeline i am choosing is 10 years, 2030. In 10 years, we will no doubt make these adjustments. It will not be an overnight process. We are trying to visualize the force that we will need in 2030 and plan backwards. We will have to be flexible , because the adversaries making and the world changes in those 10 years. I to adjust along the way. But a threat based design allows you to do that. It enables you to do that because the competition is not standing still. The next budget request for fy 21, which we are in the latter stages of finalizing, was submitted to osd this summer, you will probably see some changes along the lines of what i refer to today, but because where we are in the budget cycle, i think itll be the following year where youll see the bulk of them. Today, i know it would be great, and i would anticipate it be great if i can be very specific for force design. I would love to take the chance this morning to do that. I cannot. And here is the reason why. We have 80 , 85 picture of what the marine corps will need in a decade. But this last step is so important, because when we run that force against the peer threat ten years out over and over and over again to develop the analytical base that is the foundation, in my opinion, we need to justify that force. So i believe in experimentation. I believe in the analytics as a foundation. At that stage now where were testing the force where we think we will need and and that will conclude in a , mother to. And perhaps in the future, it would be a great discussion to have. We are in the latter stage right now. Let me talk about the future in broader terms, three parts are relevant. First is an integrated naval force. To be competitive, i believe, in the Indo Pacific Region in the , in the mediterranean, and elsewhere around the world requires an integrated naval force. In other words, this is not a personalitybased relationship. I think both the navy and marine corps drive us towards an overlap in our unique roles and omissions. We have not focused on that aspect for 20 years. We have to get creative, and when i say creative, i mean what can the marine corps do, what can marines adjust to help the commander fight his fleet . How does that contribute towards a joint fight . That could mean marines ashore with longerrange antimissiles, and you can visualize them as an extension of the fleets magazine basically. In other words, air and shipbased fires, you want to add options for fleet commander to get after the geometry challenges that we will have. It also means strapping weapon systems onto decks of ships. You saw that happened a month, six weeks ago in the middle east passing through where counter you counter a system that we developed strapped on the deck of the ship. Very successful. And we will need to do a lot more of that. Its entirely possible that you can see marines doing rearming and refueling for the joint force for the naval force. That is certainly not a comprehensive list but different roles and different mission sets for the marine corps going forward. Second for me is the concept of a stand in force. I think the question the advancements in technology and resourcing that china has put in to the Missile System tells you every word that we will operate and in a mere time environment you should plan on it being , contested. So theres no way that we will travel around and complete control of all those domains, and we will need to persist and remain inside the surveillance range, inside the weapons range of an adversary. And inside the envelope, heres why, in my opinion, being inside if youre a stand in force allows you to maintain awareness , which is absolutely critical for the naval and joint force. Its very difficult to sense from the outside in. It is much more clear picture to sense from the inside, so collection and understanding is very important. And you can also deter much more effectively from the inside than from the outside. Longrange deterrence loses its effect. There is a physical geographical aspect to deterrence. And lastly, i would offer to you in my experience in nato and pacom, deterring is one half and reassuring your allies and partners being the other half. Being on the inside of a standin force does achieve the reassurance to allies and partners that is so critical. It is a huge advantage to the United States task. The third part i think we will , have to fight in a distributed manner. I am absolutely distributed maritime advancements as a naval concept. We must distribute the force, for two reasons. Topeer fightpeer what you do not want to do is , drive into the heart of weapon systems, you want to distribute your force, so you propose a dilemma in multiple aspects in , multiple domains. The byproduct is you become more survivable and more difficult to detect. I think you will see naval formations much more distributed, and i think thats right down in the marine corps in terms of empowering to make decisions on their own. I think it drives into the heart of Expeditionary Advanced spaces, which we are very good at but have not done operationally in a while. But those Expeditionary Advanced spaces give you the agility and sustainability we will need. As quoted earlier, i am absolutely a believer in the plentiful over the exquisite and expensive. We spent a lot of money on highend ships and planes and assistance for the last 20 years. Now, once again, mass will have an equality all on its own. We have to go after the plentiful and we have to go after families and systems and families of ships, and just one caveat to that, when i say that lowcost is not cheap. We have to operable systems and dependable systems and they have to be lethal. But they also have to be affordable, where we can have them in the numbers that we need. An adjunct to that, my learning over time, we need to drive Unmanned Systems from the top down. The system is built to resist that. It is built from a Program Perspective to defend manned programs and manned platforms. We have to mandate very aggressive pace and fueling Unmanned Systems. Altogether, the game plan is all about the opposing cost is all about the ability to impose cost and bring in a threat to the point where the decision is not today. That is the game plan. Some of the characteristics, there are many more but i think , i will probably stop there , because really i mentioned the most important aspect of this morning is listening to your questions and having a dialogue back and forth. Wood, iause there, mr. Think if thats ok with you. ,[laughter] thank you so much. Yes, sir. Ive got kind of four baskets of questions. Im a fan of the document. Ive underlined and highlighted too many things to go into the details in such a short period of time. But i stepped back and looked at kind of the baskets or the buckets that i think a lot of this subcomponents are derivative of. We try to have a conversation, not some kind of a wooden dialogue here, Something Like that, and as mentioned, you all came here to participate in some way. Were going to try to maximize q a, so im going to keep this brief. Just to kind of expand on some of the points you made, skepticism runs rampant in d. C. , right . You know and some of our colleagues here know that the battlefield does not prize mediocrity or complacency, so there are realworld consequences to kind of taking a halfhearted or halfstep approach. Oftentimes what weve seen is services make these giant, grandiose plans, promise in the world at nickel prices, were going to deliver it in 18 months, and it never works n. Your Planning Guidance, you made some very bold statements. Marine corps has been talking about operations for three decades. Some of the first documents came out in 1992, i think. How does this effort presumably differ from all the other stuff that we have heard for years and years . Is it that make sense . I think the way you characterize it is accurate. Some of those ideas and you and i know the thinkers in the early 1990s, i think therpt right idea. They were not the wrong idea. But to take an idea into execution, some things have to fall in place, and they were not in place. My sense is they are right, right now. There was no peer existential threat in the 1990s time frame. There was no pressing need to change. It was an idea that wasnt driven by anything to get it there. I think the second part is there was no pacing threat, there was no peer adversary, so we are just developing capability. It was an idea time frame. Now theres clearly a sense of urgency. If we do not make a change right now, then the balance is ot going to work in our favor. So half steps when you have an adversary thats going full zpeps youre going half, that math is not to work out in the long run. It does leave the openended question of resources, and that i cant answer. I know what would be required to make it happen. That means were going to have to kill, divest of some legacy, some systems right now that were very comfortable with and go into other things. And the big gambit is will Congress Resource us to do that . That is at the heart of a lot of these rhetoric reality gaps is what i talk about. Great rhetoric. We say the right things across d. O. D. And services and all that, but you dont see that manifested in the programs. Counterparts in the army went through very detailed processes saying some of the legacy stuff doesnt isnt relevant anymore. We want to cancel that, reprogram funds, try to get the army going in the direction it needs to be, and just recently congress has come back and said we werent consulted, were putting the kibosh on all this stuff, these great ideas for fy2020, we need to revisit. The system seems to have these antibodies built into it, and you almost have to be a bulldozer, this relentless kind of thing to drive that. Clearly its in the Planning Guidance, but your sense of receptivity on the hirblings even within marine corps . I would say a bulldozer pproach will not work. First of all, you have to have the war fighting concept behind it or else it wont fly. Second part of it, you have to have the analytics to support it. If youre going to sit down with staffers and ask them to cancel this, but put your money here, they want to see how that fits into a war fighting construct. Even though theyre not military. If you cant paint that picture for them clearly, then a bulldozer is not going to help. Even after that, even after walking in through this is how the naval force will fight, which we spent a lot of time over the past 12 months doing, after that, you still have to have the analytics to back it up or else its just intuitively i think this will work, and that dog wont hunt either. In plain speak, right . Most of the stuff that comes into d. C. Is incomprehensible. Its just in a foreign language. Moving charts and slides that are just kind of a wash in errors and everything else. I like the plain spokenness, the frankness of this particular document, and i presume the video that was released yesterday, etc. , is trying to make this in common language. Yeah, because i think the people we have to convince in congress, you have to talk in plain language. No acronyms, no complications, straight forw