Period. Good question, curt. I guess were through. Tonight on cspan3s American History tv in primetime, the start of two weeks of our series the contenders. At the ran and lost but changed political history. Programs about henry clay lead off the series. Well show you a profile of the former House Speaker from kentucky known as the great compromiser in the early 19th century. Well also tour his ashland estate in lexington. Also, senator Mitch Mcconnell talks about the legacy of henry clay as a member of the house and nat for overfour deckeds and then a look at the compromise of 1850 and the impact of slavery on the compromise that preserved the union. All of this. Coming up on American History tv on y span 3 begins at 8 00 p. M. Eastern time. Now, British Embassy defense material minister Steve Mccarthy and others examining russias underwater warfare capabilities and intentions. They also talk about a report titled under sea warfare in northern why you were. It was released by the center for strategic and international studies. Hi, hello. Good afternoon, everybody. And thank you for coming to the rollout event for our newest report undersea warfare in northern why you were. We have a few hand outs floating around. Be sure to grab one on your way out. I am a senior fellow here at csis in our International Security program and one of the coauthorize of the report. Before we kick off, i do need to do a quick security announcement. So bear with me. Overall, we feel the we feel very secure in our building. But as a convener, we have a duty to prepare for an emergency situation. I will serve as your responsible Safety Officer at this event. So please follow my instruction should the need arise. Finally take a moment to familiarize yourself with the emergency exit pathways for this room. In the back and theres one up here in the front. So additionally before we get started i need to say a big thank you to saab north america for their generous support in making todays event possible. And first up i wanted to introduce andrew metrick, hes going to give us a brief overview of the report before we turn to the panel. Hes another coauthor of the report, a Research Assistant here at csis. So youll be very impressed with everything he has to say. So andrew, over to you. And thank you all for being here. Goods afternoon. My name is andrew met system rick. Im a Research Assistant and one of the authors of the study. So im just going to take a brief time to go over sort of what the key findings of the study were what were our big takeaways from the entire process. I think weve seen other the past couple of years an increase in russian operational tempo that have been engaged in what we perceive as new and worrying activities at sea, major components of these have taken place around the European Land mass, whether thats in the ball trick or med traiterranean. Vice admiral, the commander of the allied command was quoted pretty widely about his statement where he asserted that russian actives the were at the highest level since the end of the cold war. The key thing to remember about that statement is the way u was reported often left out that last clausing with since the end of the cold war. So we really tried to hone in and make sure that we were capturing the essence of the russian threat without sort of build the russians into this tenfoot tall man that they arent today. The russians have ad mitted that theyre increasing their tempo. They stated in 2013 that their submarine activities increased 20 in 2015 when compared to 2014. As part of the study the team had the opportunity to travel throughout the region, stopping in uk, sweden, finland and warsaw. In addition we conducted another workshop here in d. C. These were all tremendously helpful in building out our findings and making sure that we were tempering the reports conclusions correctly. So this is a useful image, its actually taken from a study that looked at nato, Antisubmarine Warfare during the cold war. Theres some things about it that are a little off. Notably the breakout route of russian subs from the baltic sea into the north sea might not be the operational construct of the day. But however, this really captured sort of the scope of the problem. For us looking to the north, you can see the two main areas concerning the baltic and then coming out of the cola peninsula through the uk gap and out into the broader atlantic. What this doesnt show and something i want to hone in on is the difference in the threat and the way that it has to be addressed in the baltic sea. The north atlantic is wide open, there are some exploitable choke points. Nato used this to its advantage in years past. Its unclear how much this is going to be able to be used to their advantage today simply because of increases in russian capabilities which i will touch on in a little more detail later on. In the baltic sea its really a very very difficult environment for one to conduct any submarine operations. Its shallow, its confined. For those that operate small sub ma reins, there are many place to hide, lots of unexploded ordinates left over from world war ii and the cold war. During the most recent exercise there were reports of some of the demining units actually finding world war ii mines buried 10 feet down in the mud. Its clearly a challenging area to operate in. And its something thats going to have to be that difference between the two basins is something that needs to be remembered and respected. So what do we think the russians are up to . Theres a host of activities that have been that we view are concerning. Probably the most widely reported was the territorial believed to be territorial violation conducted by what most people think is a Russian Submarine in sweden in october 2014. There are reports that were released by the Swedish Ministry of defense that shows looks to be a periscope. They spent a week looking for the submarine and there was no Public Statement saying this is what it was, this is what we found. But again enough historical antecedents that were certain it was a russian sub. And then also alarmingly for our Close Friends if the uk, Russian Submarines have been reported to be operating in close proximity to the home of the nuclear de r deterrent. Those are particularly concerning because of antisubmarine war craft has none of that capability. They were forced to reach out to their allies in nato to sort of say hey, we need this, get it in and start looking if are the submarines. Some important things to remember about these sort of activities. In many ways russia is returning to its normal course of operations during the cold war. So what we perceive now as aggressive is really more of a return to what normalcy was. And that was one of the core things that we found in the study. Theres a pretty big gap in how we perceive the activities and whats actually going on in reality. Thats not the say there arent places where russia is actually carrying out aggressive activities. Territorial violations in sweden and finland, activities in undersea cables, blocking of the laying of undersea cables, under sea cable in the baltic sea are clearly provocative. What this all sort of shows us is that russia is using its undersea capabilities is part of what we perceive to be a coercive campaign aimed at allies and partners in europe and also what these have shown is theres a current lack of asw capability and capacity amongst partners in the region. So this is sort of a snapshot of the russian navy today, looking specifically at its submarine fleet. The Russian Submarine fleet is considerably smaller than it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were 240 submarines at the end of the cold war. There are roughly 56 in the russian fleet. Looking at the russian fleet is always a challengie ining thingo simply because its unclear what is and is not operational in the fleet. So what russia claims is often not what it actually can put to sea. That said, russia has been overhauling all of its modern core of attack submarines. Diesel powered submarines. That core force is very capable, well trained and very proficient in undersea warfare. On the material side, theres a new generation of Russian Submarines coming out, a new blas tick missile submarine, a new attack submarine. From what we can tell from the open source reporting, theyre fantastic submarines. However there arent many of them and theyre subject to extremely difficult procurement processes and its unclear how many of them russia will be able to afford going forward. This is i briefly want to talk about something that isnt talked about at lot. And its the russian auxiliary submarine force. Russia operates a small number of very Small Nuclear powered submarines that are capable of diving, believed to be in excess of several thousand meters. The u. S. Used to operate a submarine like this, it was called nr 1. I was a small deep sub mer jens vessel used for research and other tasks. We dont operate it anymore. It was old. It had to be replaced. The difference being is that the russians in their ingenuity figured out a way to make a deep convergence vehicle with the submarine, which is what the graphic shows here, one can only if one puts their imagination to it, you can imagine what a clandestine deemployable deep sub mer jens vehicle can be used for and its scary when you think about the types of missions that it could be used for. This is something important to highlight. Its probably the most shadowy part of the russian undersea ap ra tut. Its not operated we the navy. But when you take a look at it, its something that someone has to keep in the back of their mind. Where do we think the russian navy is going . There are clear challenges. The sanctions that are a result of their activities in the u careen have hurt them, especially in terms of their ability to procure western electronics, Machine Tooling is a big one, their shipyards will likely face a falloff in Trained Personnel sometime in the near future simply because of demographic issues and a sort of lack of funding through the 1990s and early 2000s. What i refer to as the postsoviet naval platforms encountered problems, decades long. However, this is the key part to remember, what they do have is very good. The new submarines are technically excellent. The head of the Naval Warfare center had a model of the new ssn built in his office because he was so impressed with it. And were going to have to this is something were going to have to monitor. In the baltic, the deezen submarine fleets, its a little more unclear. Theyre prioritizing their Nuclear Powered boats and theyve struggled with building newer diesel boats. But what they do have is modern and its increasingly wellmaintained and the personnel behind it are generally pretty good. So sort of moving on to nato, comes as no surprise that the capabilities have atrophied. Nato didnt think it was going to be involved in Territorial Defense if high end war fighting. In all of its documents it was looking at afghanistan, stability operations, those types of activities. That shows up in the types and kinds of equipment being purchased. That said, there is a solid core of submarines within nato. And other capabilities have fallen further than that. That said, there are some promising signs of recapitalization in places such as sweden, france and the uk. Longer term there are additional opportunities in places such as norway, spain, poland. And then theres looking further afield than that in the mid 2020s, its likely that both france and germany will be considering how they replace their asw aircraft. So batesed on these shortcomings, to sort of meet and counter the russian threat, what were our recommendations coming out of that. They fall into three categories. The first pg what were the organizational changes that we believe needed to be made to sort of counter russian activities. The first of which is that theres a gap or wedge in the baltic sea. The two most important and most capable baltic sea states, finland and sweden arent inside nato and have a neutrality that has to be respected. At the same time theyre subject to the same sort of course of actions as nato members in the baltic sea are. So bridging that gap and finding a way that both respects their sovereignty and allows a greater operability of capabilities is important moving forward. A lack of integrated information sharing approach across nato and the baltic sea gap in particular, thats not a problem thats particularly specific to asw. And theres been a lack of regular high intensity asw exercises. For these reasons we recommended the following. The Alliance Maritime strategy hasnt been updated since 2011. It should likely be revised. We thought that nato was an interesting route to take to bridge the baltic sea gap, understanding thats a first step in that there are other things going on, a partnership agreement, host support agreements that have been signed that will go a step beyond, creating a nato center of excellence for asw, creating a common playbook for cheater saw, the outgrowth of that center and can also help drive there are several centers in nato that look at issues that touch asw, whether thats the center for operations confined in Shallow Waters, the counter mine center of excellence, their facility in italy, they can sort of drive cohesion between those. Aligning the nato framework nations on the maritime groups, sort of give those a backbone that can help drive those forward and rebuild the high end war fighting capabilities, information sharing again and then an uptick in training. One of the key things about any subMarine Warfare, anyone thats done it will tell you that it requires constant training. Its a proficiency that has to be built and then maintained and its something that we havent necessarily done over the past 15 years and something thats going to need to happen again but will not come back quickly. The shortcomings that we identified in the study we believe are the result of different Investment Patterns and different threat perceptions that have created a mismatched capability across the ie lines. Theres a need to level set that to the greatest degree possible and where possible create synergies across the ie lines so one country is investing in one type of system and another in something thats complimentary. There are aging systems and theres a general lack of capacity. So the big three in terms of asw hard capabilities, Maritime Patrol aircraft, submarines, future networking allows you to drive information between submerged and surface platforms, integrating weapons on existing nato submarines, a little outside the precise scope of the study but sort of folded into some of the other research that they have been doing on countering the russian threat more broadly. Its a powerful signaling tool to the almosts of the russian core strategy open lastly leveraging nonmilitary platforms for intelligence collection is sort of an interesting idea of how one might use ocean Graphic Research vessels in a crisis situation to reinforce our existing asw platforms only as censored platforms. And lastly posture changes. Theres only two. The first is something that we would like to see but it is politically challenging. The russians i should be specific about this. In the early 2000s the norwegians deemed their subway base in northern norway to be surplus, went through the process of divesting of it, put it on sale on the norwegian version of ebay, bought by a private investor who lease ued it to russia which raised some concerns about what exactly the russians were doing, given the current climate there have been some rumblings about the russians being kicked out. Its a useful facility. The u. S. Had rotational visits there in years past, during the cold war. For countries that wish to participate in any sort of theater asw activities in the giuk gap, its particularly use l to conduct reply and other repair type work. And second is using the former naval air station, which is currently the International Airport as a support facility for rotational Maritime Patrol aircraft activities in the giuk gap. So thats something that is currently happening on a u. S. Basis and its been funded through the assurance initiative. We would like the see that moving forward. Other nations who are interested in participating with, rotate through there. It gives an opportunity for them to operate with other nato allies and also help rebuild the fundamental skills that really require constant training in order to maintain and build. So thats sort of what we did and what we found. If youre interested in reading a full copy of the report not just the abridged one that we handed out, go to the website. And with that i will take a twosecond break to mike up the panelists and then well turn it over to the panel. Think about what we just heard rnls heard. We were very moved. Okay. I think were good to go. Sorry about that. Im cat lien hicks. I want to thank lisa and andrew in particular for the great briefing overview of the study. As we said, there are short versions out there, but if you forgive this terrible pun would like to deep dive on this issue, there is a very full report Available Online which i encourage you to look at. Youve heard sort of an overview of how csiss study team looked at the issue and then we wanted to bring to you some independent experts to bring their take on this issue. And im pleased to have the panel before us to. To my immediate left is olga oliker who directs our Russia Program here at csis. Her recent research has been focussed on social development in countries in transition, larly focused on russia, ukraine and the Central Asian and caucus successor states of the soviet union. Prio