Indopacific region at the heritage foundation. His talk focused on the future direction of the marines and the technology in their future missions. This is an hour and 20 minutes. [ applause ] were sitting next to General Mills and were infantry guys so were not pal, but you look at the guy who introduced me and i dont know down in pensacola, they decide what aircraft theyll fly, but that guy will not fit into the cockpit and he must fly big helicopters. General mills is one of my mentors for life so its sort of intimidating to be up here in front of him. I if i could follow your foot steps and do half as good as you d i would be really happy, sir. Good to be here this morning. Dr. Holmes, thank you for allowing me to be here this morning, as well. It is a privilege just to be asked. In that kind introduction, thank you for also keeping it short, sir. Bullet. I have to think of how you got that call assignment, bullet and theres probably a story there. Dakota, very quickly, has been more help to me over the years than you all will ever understand, but hes a lot like me in that hes a critical thinker and thats sort of how i was trained and every assumption and every direction and every path that you go down questioning that and im just thanking you for continuing to do that. Please dont let up on it at all. I thought this morning i would offer two parts to this. First, ill give you some i think i owe you some perspectives on the Planning Guidance that we published this sum e and i would just tell you, i had the benefit of several months of knowing where i was going and when you have several months you can sit down and think and you can write. I contrast that with my my battle buddy, admiral gil who had two weeks. Thats not much time to think your way through, so i was hugely beneficial of several months of time to think. The second part, though, is to listen and to learn, and i mean that, i say that genuinely. Your thoughts, your questions, your criticisms and your poking at our ideas is a very healthy thing and i welcome that in advance, so im thanking you in advance. I think, let me start off talking about where i see us. I think the fact that were in an era of great power competition, perhaps 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 my term, demands in no Uncertain Terms that the Services Change to meet the challenges of the new world. The guidance, i believe, very clear. I can tell you that the marine corps fully embraces the components of the National Defense strategy. I think there absolutely will be jermaine Going Forward and valid and everything that we do has to be aligned with that. The world obviously is changing pretty rapidly, and id like to thank those who had a hand over the summer in the spring . Summertime shaping and the deep thinking thats required before you publish the sort of document that we had a chance to do. Your thoughts and your criticisms improved that and in places like this are petrie dishes for that and i think theyre very valuable and im asking you to keep challenging us. I think the strategic realities will cause us to think differently, and im going to go into that. I believe that the realities of the world kwauz us to throw out old assumptions and start fresh. We cannot assume that todayy equipment and the way we organize how we train and select leaders and all of our warfighting concept, we cannot assume that they would remain relevant in the future. In fact, my assumption, my primm premisis that theyre not. This requires us unshackling ourselves to what war looks like and reimagining how marines will train and how we will operate and how we will fight and it requires very honest assessments of our strengths and our weaknesses based on my observations and on other folks that i listen to keenly including a bunch in the room like sync and others that ive known for years i can 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 it is not optimized to deter a threat. So if thats the diagnosis and im asking you to ride along with me you can have your own opinion and for the rest of my session thats where i am and well go forward from there. For anyone who had a chance to read the Planning Guidance that i published this summer, youll know, and you will recognize that forced design is my top priority i think that is my principle vehicle for redesigning, realigning the marine corps as part of a Naval Expeditionary force which is part of a joint force and all of the requirements that are laid out in the National Defense strategy. So over the summer and for the last 30, 45 days weve been developing a vision for where the marine corps will need to go into the future. Heres where this is a little bit different than previous attempts not attempts, but previous efforts to do this. The test for us this summer was truly due design. Look beyond the fiveyear defense plan and look beyond the manpower and management cycle ten years into the future and imagine what force we will need based on some assumptions about our pacing threat and then map that force backwards to not forwards, 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 illustrate the 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. I said arguably from about 1950, 1951 until 1989, 1990 we had a very clear picture of who are peer 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 peer threat, we had advantages and resourcing. We went after capabilities, because we had no peer adversary, no peer threat. Along comes peer threats again and to 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 deterrents and Strategic Nuclear deterrents 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 are trying 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 is the sense if you set the pace, whether you are runner or a nation, you are breaking trail, you are working harder, and you spend more money. So your choices are, if both are moving and in a peertopeer 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 gap 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 immediate 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 decisions, and the world changes in those 10 years. It 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 fy21 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 itd 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 now 80 , 85 picture of what the marine corps will need in a decade. But this last step is so important, because now is when we run that force against a peer threat ten years out over and over and over again i will ask to develop the analytical base that is the foundation, in my opinion, we need to justify that force. So i believe in experimentation. In my opinion, we need to i believe in the analytics as a foundation. So we are 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 and 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 do to help the commander fight his fleet . How does that contribute towards a joint fight . That could mean marines ashore or afloat with longerrange antiship missiles, and you can visualize them as an extension of the fleets magazine basically. In other words, augumenting 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 happen 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 Systems tells you every where 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 in complete control of all those domains, and we will need to persist and we need the force to 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 the 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 for the inside is very important. And you can also in my opinion 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, indopacom, deterring is one half and reassuring your allies and partners being the other half. Being on the inside as a standin force does achieve the reassurance to allies and partners that is so critical. It is a huge advantage the United States has. The third part i think we will, have to fight in a undistributed manner. I am absolutely distributed maritime advancements as a naval concept. We must distribute the force, for two reasons. One is, in a peertopeer fight what you do not want to do is, drive into the heart of weapon systems, you want to distribute your force, so you pose 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 navy and 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 the sustainability we will need. As quoted earlier, i am absolutely a believer in the plentiful over the exquisite and expensive. We have 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 of systems and families of ships, and just one caveat to that, when i say that, i mean lowcost 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, i think that game plan is all about the opposing cost is all about the ability to impose cost and bring in a peer 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. I will pause there, mr. Wood, i think if thats ok with you. applause 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 so in 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 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 not 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 resourcing, 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 go back and 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 hill and even within marine corps . I would say a bu