What a wonderful turn out and good morning to everybody!  Thank you General Lawrence for the introduction and whenever it takes that long it’s a function of how old you are and how long you’ve been here. Thank you very much for that. Pleasure to see Admiral Harris here. I saw Admiral Foggo and Admiral Gortney and I know there’s a large array of distinguished visitors and former flag officers and mentors of mine. And so welcome to everybody to WEST. I’m fired up to be here as you can imagine at AFCEA and USNI’s signature event on the West Coast. It’s just one of many highlights of our Navy’s 250th birthday this year which we’re celebrating across the entire domain and what a great event. We all have a common goal here at AFCEA —to advance operational capabilities that outpace evolving threats.  
If you are here, you are part of that goal, and I look forward to succeeding with all of you, and that means three things:  

First; success means we continue to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific that allows all nations, large and small, to connect to the global economy and to prosper.  
Second; success means we continue to deter our adversaries and preserve peace.  
And third; success means that should deterrence fail, our military remains able to prevail over any adversary.  

I hope one of the things you take away from AFCEA West with USNI and your engagements here with senior military leaders is this:  When we all work together for results, nothing—and nobody—can stop us.  And we are here to win—I’m here to win with you, and we’re here to win together.

Today, we must maintain our dominant posture in a battlespace that is evolving faster than ever.  Trends in conflicts around the globe continue to highlight the importance of multidomain operations.  But more importantly, they highlight the need for rapid innovation, and lightning quick adaptation from the design room to the battlefield.
 
They highlight the need to integrate and adapt all domains of power:  land, sea, air, space, cyber, information—all to achieve and mass effects.  And, the ability to integrate and adapt commercial and military uncrewed platforms with legacy sensors and weapons to hold critical platforms and infrastructure at risk is an imperative. 

In our rapidly evolving battlespace, speed is a defining characteristic.  And I’m not talking about the physical speed of ships, submarines, aircraft, and weapons—I’m also talking about the speed of decision, the speed of information, and the speed of adaptation. 
This concept is certainly not new – being able to operate inside the enemy’s decision cycle, or the OODA Loop as Boyd would say, is fundamental to military success.  The U.S. Navy’s ability to quickly analyze intelligence, reposition assets, and launch decisive strikes at the Battle of Midway led to a pivotal victory that changed the course of World War II in the Pacific.  Today, I believe we’re at a tipping point where we can harness technology in a powerful way to further our advantage.

So, just as speed is a defining characteristic in our modern battlespace—we also need persistence.  
And what I’m talking about here is persistent power projection and persistent domination of the battlespace leading to a denial of adversary’s objectives.  It means forces are able to execute prolonged operations against evolving threats, and our forces able to operate within our adversary’s weapon engagement zone, or WEZ.  I think it’s important to note that operating within the WEZ is not new. We’ve done so throughout our entire history.  While weapon‘s range can provide sanctuary for a time—adversary technology and maneuver constantly evolves, and so we have to evolve with it and we have to be able to operate soundly within that weapons engagement zone. 

You know from the battles of the Revolutionary War, when the WEZ was defined by the range of a lead ball fired from muskets by a linear row of soldiers, to the Cold War, when our ships and aircraft operated in range of Soviet weapons, to today‘s operations in contested environments with high-end threats, our forces have navigated and fought within WEZs with precision and confidence.  Operating forces within the range of enemy weapons with the needed persistence to have an effect takes ingenuity and creativity in both tactics and equipment. That’s how we’re going to manage the inherent risks of those operations. 

The Continental Army adjusted their tactics by flanking those rigid British formations, shoot—we built the F-14 to specifically carry the Pheonix missile to counter the WEZ of the Russian Airborne Maritime Strike.  We have always generated capability to operate inside the weapons engagement zone—and we always will—we will not cede that battlespace.  So, to recap—I need speed, I need persistence, I need the ability to operate within the weapons engagement zone. 

You know I’m frequently asked:  Well what do you want—you want the most advanced ships, aircraft, submarines, air wings?  Or do you want the most powerful uncrewed platforms in every domain—that dominate the skies, the seas, and the seabed?  
Well I say YES—both, and all of it.  

We’re the finest military in the world not because we have the most ships, subs and aircraft, but because we have the best and they are crewed by the best.  To continue to develop the best platforms, we must integrate the capabilities of all our manned and unmanned systems and link their development to the joint warfighting functions (Command and Control, Movement and Maneuver, Fires, Intelligence, Sustainment, Protection and Information) – For it’s the power, capability and capacity of the Joint Force that makes us number one.  

While responsible for all of those functions, I want to focus today on accelerating the cycle of action between maneuver and fires.  
Why concentrate on that?  Because it gets to dominating Boyd’s OODA loop that I mentioned earlier.   Maneuver is the deliberate movement of forces to gain a positional advantage over the enemy.  It’s not just about moving from point A to point B; it’s about controlling the tempo, exploiting weakness, and dictating the terms of engagement.  Fires enable maneuver by neutralizing threats that would otherwise hinder movement.  Maneuver, in turn, enables fires. 
 
When our forces maneuver to a position of advantage, they provide new targeting opportunities for fires.  The coordination between maneuver and fires creates a cycle of pressure the adversary will struggle to counter.  Fires shape the battlefield, maneuver exploits it, and together they overwhelm the enemy.  

So—we want emerging capabilities that increase the rate of fires in our maneuver cycle, because the speed of that cycle is key to massing effects and persistently dominating the battlespace, and ultimately winning faster.

As we continue to apply the joint warfighting function needs to an evolving battlespace, we will work with industry to improve the integration, resilience, security and capacity of our command and control systems.  We will further build and enable expeditionary mobile logistics.  We will synchronize joint fires, and align those fires in an operational protection scheme that brings together fires, intelligence, deception, movement, maneuver.
I can hear some of you saying right now:  Yeah okay, Admiral, how do we do all that?  And I can tell you, our Navy-Marine Corps team is pursuing a variety of compelling initiatives to do those things.  
The CNO’s Navigation Plan 2024, in particular, gets after many of these challenges, and has two strategic ends:  To improve our combat readiness in the near term, and to build the enduring advantages we need from now into the future. 

To implement the Navigation Plan, the CNO has unveiled Project 33 that sets targets for strategically meaningful gains, in the fastest possible time, with the resources we already have.  
One of the seven targets is scaling and integrating robotic and autonomous systems across the fleet by 2027.  

We’re already doing this in several areas, but the CNO’s vision is that we scale and integrate autonomous systems into every domain and every type of warfighting.  This vision will not replace our legacy capabilities.  It will enhance them.

Our Navy is laying the keel for the hybrid fleet through various efforts to build and integrate uncrewed systems, and to invest in artificial intelligence applications.  Just last month, for example, in a project with DARPA, the Navy Unmanned Surface Vessels MARINER and RANGER, completed an unmanned refuel at sea —for the first time ever.  That is a revolutionary advancement for the fleet.  We’ve also established a new enlisted rating – robotics warfare specialists across the Navy.  And in the Pacific Fleet, we’ve created unmanned surface vessel squadrons and unmanned undersea vehicles squadron to complement our existing unmanned air squadrons.

We have ramped up our experimentation efforts to get more robotic systems into operational settings in the next few years.  As many of you know, the DIU Replicator initiative is driving the fielding of many of these uncrewed platforms.  

Replicator One is already fielding all-domain, attritable, cost-effective, autonomous systems.  These include unmanned surface vessels, unmanned aerial systems, and counter-unmanned aerial systems of various sizes and payloads, as well as loitering munitions.  And now, Replicator Two is addressing the autonomous system threat to our installations and force concentrations.  Overall, the Replicator event has accelerated the acquisition of thousands of systems.

But it’s not just about building platforms, sensors and weapons.  We are also upgrading our command and control systems and processes for the high-end fight in a highly contested environment.  In short, we will train and fight in an integrated warfighting ecosystem.  Within this warfighting ecosystem, the Pacific Fleet Headquarters will fight from our Maritime Operations Center, or MOC.  The MOC concept is key to our fleet-level command and control and distributed maritime operations.  It empowers our Headquarters to stand up as a Joint Task Force, when directed, and command joint forces in a highly contested combat environment.  
At the operational JTF level, we will work with service component partners and INDOPACOM to integrate a joint command and control system that includes a collaborative joint fires and effects system.  That environment supports a tight synchronization of fires, maneuver, EMCON and deception across all domains that we’re going to need in this fight. 
Project 33 will make MOCs the fleet standard by 2027.  At Pac Fleet, we’re there.  The Pac Fleet MOC integrates every day with the joint force, allies, and partners to link fleet commanders to the full range of sensors, shooters, and effectors across the battlespace.  
Our industry partners are key to all these critical efforts.  So, if you are not already involved, how do you get involved?  The Pacific Fleet conducts a recurring cycle of studies, exercises, experiments, and war games—all supported by intellectually honest assessments.  That includes our Integrated Battle Problems, which are essentially large-scale experiments.  They integrate high technical readiness systems with innovative tactical employment to close warfighting gaps.  For example, last year during Integrated Battle Problem 23.2, we successfully deployed four medium unmanned surface vessels across the entire Pacific.  

Our constant drumbeat of experimentation and innovation will continue with more Integrated Battle Problems throughout this year.  Our common practice in these battle problems and experiments is to pair experiments with exercises and to work in parallel to develop new capabilities and to build concepts of operation.  

It might sound like to you like we’re building the plane while we fly it.  That is no accident— it is by design.  We have to work that fast to take advantage of today’s rapid pace of technological innovation.

We have to get that capability into the hands of our Sailors quickly to enable them to innovate and force change if needed. Fortunately, we are not building that plane alone.  We are building it in lockstep with our asymmetric advantage—which is the numerous allies and partners we’re blessed to have.  When we innovate with them, and field interoperable systems that all of us can use, the possibilities are endless.  We are achieving historic integration with our growing number of allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific, and around the globe.  That includes development of shared capabilities, defense industrial base integration, dynamic force posture initiatives, and the exponential growth of our combined exercises and cooperative deployments.

Our progress in these efforts, and many other efforts, is happening because the U.S. has some inherent advantages in the development of new technology and innovation that builds warfighting advantage—it’s a part of our DNA.  America innovates better and greater than any other country.  And you can see this practically in so many areas of our economy today.  We lead the globe in AI, regardless of the news of this weekend. I think it’s tactical if you’re going to give me that question, I still think we lead it. We have surpassed every other nation in both space launch and satellite construction capability.  

We dominate in undersea warfare technology and in submarine operations—and we have unmatched capabilities in cyberspace. That just names a few. 

So, to further our military capabilities and technological edge, we will continue to leverage our nation’s largest strategic advantage—a free enterprise system that adapts quickly and relentlessly innovates.  Our imperative as a military is to partner with industry—to work together—to foster innovation and integrate emerging capabilities as fast as humanly possible.  

But to do that, we need partners that rise to meet the challenges and opportunities of our time.  We need ships, submarines, aircraft, autonomous capabilities, command and control, all of those things to be delivered on time, and on budget.  Make no mistake, the team here has to deliver what we bought, what we paid for, on time – no excuses. And on a larger level, we need our industry partners to move beyond supply chain disruptions and workforce shortages, and make the visionary investments and process changes to further enhance our defense industrial base.

So, my closing message to West is this:  I want to leverage America’s innovation advantages to an even greater extent—and as a demanding operator—I want it all.  I want speed.  I want persistence.  I want capability designed and built to enable operations inside weapons engagement zones. And in 2025, I want to take our partnership with industry—with you—to even greater heights.  Let’s continue to strengthen our rapid acquisition strategy, put the best technology in the hands of our service members as soon as we possibly can, and continue to outpace the competition.  Let’s take a holistic, innovative approach that brings transformative strategic gains to our force.  

That includes considering things we’re not doing, that we should be doing.  It includes embracing the red—which is Navy-speak for embracing problems and adjusting quickly and holistically to fix them.  

So, West, let’s get to work.  Together, we can—and will—innovate to strengthen America’s military dominance, to grow our warfighting advantage, and to guarantee our ability to win at any time. I want to thank you for listening to me today and I look forward to any questions you all have.