John, thank you very much for that warm welcome. Thanks very much to General Lawrence for this invitation to address this really important conference.

I'll begin - we're going to have a discussion. I'd like to give some brief remarks to kind of prime the pump…I think the meat of what we'll have as a discussion will be through the questions that we cultivate over the course of the discussion itself.

But the first is really going to start with the front matter, which is why we're all here to really start where the earth cools. Then the international rules based order, as the absolute key to our nations’ security, freedom and well-being…and the Pacific as a locus for that international rules based order.

All of us are aware at this time of the acute threat of Russia, as we've seen over this last two months, as a wanton and bald attempt to upwind the international rules based order. And all are aware that the long-term threat to the international rules based order is in fact the People's Republic of China. Here in the Pacific, it’s incredibly here apparent and real to us every single day.

The international rules based order begins with the principle of sovereignty. You know, sovereignty is the inviolability of borders, and the fact that the international community and International law demands that a nation's borders should not be changed by the use of force.

A stark example in the last few months is that the potential for this is all too real. Dislike our illusions of the end of history over the last couple of decades. It's real to us in ways that are stark and visceral and we see every single day in the news.

Other elements of the international rules based order is the freedom of the seas…the concepts of exclusive economic zones… territorial water…freedom of navigation. This body of rules in the international rules based order doesn't favor one nation or another, but is in fact the environment that's led to 60% of the world population being lifted out of poverty since the end of the Second World War.

Indeed, I've seen statistics that say 160,000 human beings per day are lifted out of poverty every single day, as a result of the international rules based order. And these are the ways that it directly affects our nation's security, our freedom and our well-being every single day.

We recognize in the PRC, an actor that would upend that order for the direct pursuit of its own interests in a top down system based government that would compel human behavior in a way that is enabled in information technology. That is a tremendous threat to the international rules based order and to the security of our nation every single day.

Within that mandate to upend the order comes our principle of integrated deterrence. You may have seen this recently in the news and in the national security conversation.

Integrated deterrence is that outcome of a real and genuine capability to impose costs - that is the will, the capability, and the demonstration of that - with the military instrument, in a joint, all domain, allied partner manner that also comports with the other instruments of national power. That is the diplomatic, the informational and the economic instruments of national power, in order to tell those that would upend the order for our nation…for our allies…for our partners every single day that today is not the day.

That you'll suffer unacceptable costs as a result of what you can gain with aggression every single day, and every single day that must be supported by a real and profound combat capability.

It's just not the demonstration of combat capability but it's the capability that we build…where we build on our training ranges…and in how we knit together all of the joint capabilities that give us the ability to impose those costs every single day.

Within INDOPACOM, all of the components of INDOPACOM integrate in order to provide that combat power by building and demonstrating combat power…by partnering with our allies and our partners in order to deliver that capability…by affecting the posture.

Posture is that combination of our forced posture..our bases…the places…the ways that we operate every single day, and our ability to communicate among ourselves, communicate to our would be adversaries, and communicate with our allied partners our capability to do so.

Here's what is so critical to this association. Is that you've heard a lot of talk over the years about a Third Offset Strategy. The First Offset Strategy being the advent of nuclear weapons. The Second Offset Strategy having been precision strike technology. And we've seen [inaudible] about all different technologies that we hope will deliver that third piece of overmatch that enables us the ability to prevail against our would be adversaries.

You’ve seen us talk about hypersonics…about unmanned…about nanotechnology…about directed energy…about autonomous systems, and the continued pursuit of all of these capabilities is indeed, absolutely critical technologies in order to assure the future… in order to assure our ability to dynamically maneuver the force and to deliver fires and effects to win.

But in fact, the most important capability that we are pursuing is decision superiority.

Decision superiority is our ability to maximize what we know - that is our adversary’s position, their disposition. To maximize our own ability to communicate with our own forces. To be able to deliver long range, medium range, fires and effects, both kinetically and non-kinetically to impose costs on our enemy. And our ability to degrade our would-be enemy's ability to see, understand, and decide what happens within the battlespace itself.

And in fact, this is the founding charter of AFCEA…to be able to maximize our own ability to understand the battlespace and to pass effective communications to units in order to see, understand and act within the battlespace against our ability to degrade our enemy's ability to understand what's happening in the battlespace.

And this is coming in a time that is a decade of incredible consequence here in our nation and here in the Pacific.

In the Pacific, where 50% of the world's population 60% of the world's economy, and 7 out of 10 of the world's largest militaries reside here on the leading edge in the middle Pacific [inaudible].

And so it is a critical time of consequence and the portfolio that we work on it in AFCEA and within the services is the pillar…the community of consequence that assures our own ability to fight and win in the battle space. And it's that ability to fight and win in the battlespace that is the underpinning of credible, integrated deterrence.

All of us here in this room that operate in this enterprise understand that there are profound risks to our ability. And in some ways we are our own risks. You know our own high bound sequential acquisition systems that get in the way of our ability to acquire the capabilities that are going to ensure that we have decision superiority at all time. But within that avenue of risks, we're also seeing recently opportunities as well.

Opportunities in the form of the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve that seeks to bypass around our ponderous acquisition systems so that we can get key technology and key capabilities out to the leading edge. We are challenged in our resiliency, in our space, and our command and control systems. Yet, we see in the commercial proliferation in Low Earth Orbit and Mid Earth Orbit, opportunities to make ourselves more resilient, more capable, and with a greater ability to assure how we see, understand, decide and act within the battlespace itself.

And so having framed the initial thinking that this is a decade of consequence. That we see in the People's Republic of China a long-range threat to the security and to the well-being of the nation. That we see this manifests itself in the acute problem of Russia and their real intention to upend the international rules based order. It is imaginable and here in the second we face a decade of consequences in the key geography where we meet right now at this time.

With that, I'll open up the floor to any question on any topic that anyone would like to ask.