NAVAL SUBMARINE LEAGUE CORPORATE BENEFACTORS’ DAY February 27, 2014

Thanks, John, for that introduction. And thanks to the Naval Submarine League Corporate Benefactors for putting on such a great forum.

I thoroughly enjoy the chance to talk to you. I always learn from you every time I talk to you, our submarine base, and our industrial base experts. I’ll try not to duplicate, but instead add some flavor and detail behind what Joe Tofalo and Admiral Connor and Admiral Richardson said in their talks. But to start with, we’re in much better shape. I’m more optimistic than I was back in October when I addressed this Submarine League last.

First, we have a budget. That’s good. We’re not sequestered;also good. We received additional money to fully fund the second Virginia-class ship in ‘14. That’s pretty eye-watering on its own. Ohio Replacement is fully funded. And you just have to think about that; the program is growing in a time when everyone else is shrinking. And it’s in RDT&E, which is a usual hit point when others are looking for money, but not Ohio Replacement. And we have a 10, not nine, a 10-ship Block IV contract that’s ahead of us. We also have continued strong support looking forward to restart the Mk 48 heavyweight torpedo production line. This is all good, and it’s all credit to the joint hard work that this Navy industry team does.

All right. There’s also something I’d like to discuss that reflects on what Admiral Richardson said last night: that past returns are no guarantee of future performance. After thirty-two years in the submarine acquisition business—I was a direct access right out of the Naval Academy—I’ve gained a little bit of perspective. I’ve been fortunate to work extensively with the submarine platforms in today’s fleet. Sixteen years with the Virginia class, eight with the Ohio class, five with Seawolf and the Jimmy Carter, six with Ohio Replacement, and now I’m in my fortieth month as the Program Executive Officer for Submarines. And I’m going to say I am concerned. I’m concerned that we, our Navy Industry team, have become inured with our success. We have lost what I’ll call our Seawolf Edge, a term that Chris Deegan first used when I came into PMS 350 to describe life there.

In the Seawolf program office you were living a near-death experience every single day: cost caps, loss of political support and attacks, and an acidic industrial base environment. One only has to look back to a 1991 New London Day article, and I actually saved that paper, when cracks were found in SSN 21 Seawolf’s pressure hull, which eventually cost us about $50 million via an REA and about a year in schedule. Those were truly the bad days. I am not advocating returning to that. But I do think we need to reinvigorate that edge, challenge ourselves to outdo even our own record. Think about it. We have a young, and even mid-grade, workforce that has only known Virginia-like success. They never lived through a protest, nor a program killing material bust, nor faced a potential, complete shutdown of the industrial base. The edge is a different mindset, a keep on your A-game approach that got us to where we are today, a truly unmatched Navy/Industry team. We must collectively maintain a questioning attitude, anticipate problems, think ahead and think INDEPENDENTLY, and not fall victim to the biggest threat to our business, an attitude Al Ford drilled into our heads in SUBSAFE training, an attitude of ignorance, arrogance and complacency.

Now this team is certainly not ignorant. But, we can, and in some cases have, become over-confident and optimistic, which leads to complacency because of our success. So as leaders in this national crown jewel enterprise, we must lead our respective sectors to always keep the Seawolf Edge, keep giving Vice Admiral Connor the very best capability at the most affordable cost, and retain our position not only as the leaders in undersea dominance but also the leaders in defense acquisition. So with that view in mind, I’d like to cover where my PEO is heading this year and how we’re doing in a few key areas.

For the past several years, I’ve conducted a full day off-site with my leadership teams so that we can focus and align our efforts. I, along with Admiral Mike Jabaley, have posted our calendar year focus areas; this is the second year we’ve done this. Underlying all of our focus areas is delivering capability to the fleet on time and on budget. The community has truly fared well executing our plan over the past several years in these economic upheaval times. You’ve heard that. I think there’s a reason. The value of the fast attack and the ballistic missile submarine is recognized both in DOD and Congress. We are a sound investment. We deliver on time and on cost. Tools like our focus area chart help my team ensure we’re moving in the right direction and help us maintain that credibility we’ve built with our country’s leaders both on the Hill as well as in the Pentagon. I’ll just go through our objectives in our three Focus Areas:

Platforms:
– North Dakota: deliver it.
– Virginia Payload Module: submit the cost control report to Congress.
– Ohio Replacement: get our ship specs and our design work done.
– Ohio Replacement: work on reducing the non-recurring cost.

There are big items in our platforms area.

Weapons & Sensors

– Capt. Moises Deltoro and PMS 415, deliver surface ship torpedo defense. I’ll talk about that later.
– Achieve, or work on, the submarine large ocean interface. You heard some of that from Admiral Tofalo, and get our ULRM to sea.
– Define a modernization plan that I’ll call the tailored 2/4 SWFTS model. We’ll discuss that.
– Meet the PACFLT requirements for a deployable low-profile photonics mast to my friend, Rear Adm. Phil Saw-yer, out in the Pacific Fleet.
– Deliver the heavy weight torpedo, and work on the heavy weight torpedo in the modular heavy weight vehicle readiness review panel to help set us on the right course as we do restart.
– Objective six is Cyber. Update our cyber vulnerability risk assessment.

I talked to the Naval Studies Board on the 22nd of January, and I told them I think we’re in a tail chase. All you have to do is look at what we’re adding, as we go through TI-10, 12, 14 and on to deal with cyber defense on our Submarine Force. I told them that cyber is just as important to us as processing a sound pulse. We have a lot more work to do there to make ourselves better in the cyber defense business.

Technology :

– Large flank arrays. Get that integrated with TI-14.
– Support Special Operations Force’s dry combat submersibles. We have Capt. Keith Lenhardt down in SOCOM working for us.
– Conduct an at-sea demo of the belt tensioning mechanism which goes on our towed array handlers and get the AWESUM JCTD done which uses this Switchblade UAV.
– Formally integrate our submarine tactical requirements group with the IUSS requirements group process to try to get those better aligned.

So these are big rocks, not all inclusive, but it gives you a view into what we collectively think is important, going ahead.

Okay, that’s what I’m going to talk about, starting with Vice Admiral Connor’s and Rear Admiral Tofalo’s priorities; platforms; and then on to the payloads.

Alright, first the Virginia Block IV contract. The bottom line is once we sign this contract in the coming weeks, we’ll officially continue our two-ship build rate into FY18; eight straight years of two Virginias per year. We have not seen a build rate like this since the end of the Los Angeles class and the beginning of Seawolf, between 1982 and 1989. So from 2011 to 2018, we’re building 16 SSNs, which is more than half of the Program of Record for Virginia. Now, you probably realize, it will go beyond 30, likely to about 48 to 50.

If you remember back to 2005, and I certainly do, our goal was to increase production to two-per-year in ’12. We achieved that one year early, due in a large part to our combined effort. The Virginia-class Navy/Industry relationship is the most successful, and I’ll say tight knit, in the Department of the Navy and DoD. We would not see this build profile without that tight knit effort, but one thing that this two-per-year build rate also means is that our tuned industrial base has little margin for error, late or defective equipment, poor quality, or material problems. We will be much more severely impacted. In short, we have truly pulled out some of the resilience that a one-per-year build rate has.

The history of Virginia-class deliveries is a very familiar story to us right now. Our challenge is to continue this tradition of early deliveries with the delivery of the NORTH DAKOTA in spring.As with any first of class, and NORTH DAKOTA is almost its own class within the Virginia Class, we’re working through some unanticipated issues. These will be resolved, and we will (per our standard) deliver a ship that’s ready for tasking.

At the October symposium, I said, “We’re tracking towards a January delivery.” Now, I think it will be May, which might make it a little tight because there’s one date that I know is not changing. On 31 May, we’re commissioning that ship. So that keeps us going. Even though my prediction from October did not come true, the delivery in May will still be three months early to contract. When you place that on the delivery history chart, “Oh, big deal…three months. Well, when you start laying it in the context of construction span…pretty good. Despite being only three months early, NORTH DAKOTA will come close to matching the 62-month shortest construction span for the Virginia Class, and that’s with, as Joe Tofalo pointed out, “20 percent of the ship being redesigned.” Conventional wisdom is that extensive redesign means reverse learning, taking longer, costing more, and on the first ship that’s usually true. NORTH DAKOTA…nope. First of the block, and we’re going to deliver early. That is truly a significant feat. We should not forget that.

I’ll also note what Kate Kaufer said. For those of you who may not know her, she’s a professional staff member on the Senate Appropriations Committee (Defense). During a visit to Electric Boat she gave her insight into our business. Pretty good. Simply put, she told EB that the onus is on EB to perform on the work they have. Why? To maintain their credibility. That goes for Newport News and that goes for every one of us in this room. It’s a universal view. Credibility is so important.

Next for discussion is the Virginia Payload Module. I said we fared well in the submarine community. We received a billion dollars to fully fund the second submarine, but we also recovered our FY13 sequestration cuts. That’s pretty good. We have an unmatched track record in DOD acquisition, and we are truly a model for Secretary Kendall’s better buying power initiatives. Time and time again, investing in our Submarine Force has proven to be a good investment. We live up to our Team Submarine standard. We deliver what we say we’re going to deliver, when we say we’re going to deliver it, and for what we say it’s going to cost. That’s our standard. I believe that’s one reason why Congress gave use the money. They gave us the $59 million to begin work on the Virginia Payload Module, and this is also during a time of shrinking budgets.

We’ve done some preliminary work to narrow down the different options to building this module. It will be a 70-foot hull section with a slight hump. This is the most cost-effective means, we think, of incorporating a VPM into the Virginia Class and one we’re going to keep working on with our money. The $59 million in 2014 comes with one caveat, $20 million of that is being withheld until the Navy submits a report to Congress on what we’re doing to control costs on the VPM design and construction. I happen to agree with Congress here. We owe them our plan to stay within cost thresholds, which we frankly have a track record of doing for only the last nine years, and I intend for us to keep doing so.

So that’s Virginia, and it’s good news. Next for discussion is the Ohio Replacement.

I remind people we are delivering a capability. Admiral Benedict will get up here and will talk about what we’re delivering with the Ohio Replacement that is critically important to the Navy, the country and our allies who depend on us to provide a nuclear umbrella.

I mentioned in October that Ohio Replacement is a different type of program. We do have three distinct parts that all have to come together seamlessly: propulsion, missile compartment and the rest of the ship.

Cost is important. We saw Secretary Hagel’s announcement this week. Make no mistake, budgets are being cut, and we are not immune in the Submarine Force. We have to keep this program on schedule. We have to keep these funding lines aligned so that we deliver, affordably, these twelve ships.

I’ll call the Ohio Replacement Schedule our “Collective Message” Chart. This is the detail behind what Admiral Richardson said when he articulated the importance of the 2021-back-to- today time span, and how that’s a bit of a fuzzy spot in many people’s minds. It represents the design and R&D progress and plan. It is anchored in the future on the first deployment in 2031. Lead ship test and evaluation and post shake-down availability come at the end of that period. We have three years staked for that. There is a seven-year build span. Design and construction support activity will bring us to where we are today, almost into year four of the technology-development phase. This phase is so important because it lays the foundation for SCN funding designs starting in 2017 and ship construction starting in 2021. Critical to our success is the Capability Approved Document. It is a Navy-approved document, and it gives us the requirements to focus the design on the right work and control costs. We are taking that guidance, and it is going today into our ship specs and into every facet of the design.

We’re going to complete, this year, our 161 ship specification sections. Capt. Bill Brougham and Admiral Fuller will sign out those sections on the 31st of March with only a few outliers. They will define the hull, mechanical and electrical systems. We’re now into the next phase: diagrams, descriptions, arrangements. Now, the one key element: our ship length. It’s taken about six months longer than I told you it would, but it’s done. Now we are in detail design in the missile compartment, and you’ll see some of that.

So why dwell on this? Simply because this early stage work is critical to achieving a design that’s 83 percent complete at construction start; is producible, with few design errors; and above all else, is affordable in design, in construction and in life cycle; a non-trivial task given that we are delivering an SSBN that’s frankly quieter than Virginia at SSBN speeds.

Restarting a dormant missile tube and launch tube industrial base, constructing three major test facilities, and achieving a ship that will meet a 124-patrol per ship op cycle; the most demanding of any platform anywhere, all done with an affordability target and on a schedule which has to be met. Otherwise we just aren’t delivering and giving STRATCOM what he needs for the mission.

So a few key points that will help us keep on message here:

Construction. Lead ship construction is seven years. FY21 to FY27. It’s aggressive, given the Ohio Replacement will be the largest submarine ever built by the U.S. with a lead ship construction span shorter than the previous three lead ships, Ohio, Seawolf and Virginia.

Design. We have design activities sequenced to support construction. The scope of our design is unparalleled. The Ohio Replacement is the largest design effort in the Navy’s shipbuilding history, and about 50 percent greater than what we did on Virginia. We have to have a high design maturity at construction start. It is crucial to meeting this aggressive construction cost and schedule challenge. The scope of our technology development effort for Ohio Replacement is bigger than what we did on Virginia, and the design plan has to include these very important prototyping efforts. Implementation of a new integrated design tool adds some additional challenges; just like CATIA did for Virginia. The design plan needs to account for the relative immaturity of the Ohio Replacement design and construction workforce compared to Virginia. We aren’t rolling off Seawolf hot into Virginia. We are rolling off a gap. We haven’t designed a complete submarine for twenty years.

Funding challenges and schedule slips. This is different than Virginia. They’re going to introduce churn within the design plan, and we have to manage that. So, in summary, if you look at the design, there really is no elasticity, or margin, in our design. Based on known best practices in the Navy shipbuilding programs, technology development assessments, expected performance based on major design challenges, and the relative inexperience of our design team, the Ohio Replacement program has been aggressively planned to meet these lead ship deployment plans with no further room for delay. As Joe said, we have taken out all the efficiencies. We are there and we have to execute.

So that gives you a little insight into where this design is relative to what we’ve done in the past.

If you look at our ramp-up to start of construction it has a flat spot, two-year delay, but we’re now on a ramp going up. Our curve from now to 2021 represents the design yard’s hours. We have done a good job of continuing to drive down the overall hours. We’re on an up ramp all the way to 2019, but what’s important is the progress through requirements, arrangements and detail design.

Our effort in 2013 was mostly concept requirements. This year, most of it is arrangements, detailed design, deliverables, analysis and calculations. It’s a fundamental shift in what we’re doing in 2014. We are in the business now of getting the design done on a very, very aggressive pace to meet our requirement of 83 percent done by construction start.

It’s a challenge, but it’s entirely achievable if we stay on plan. In the middle of our ramp-up to construction start we have deliverables we have to meet, and guess what? We’re starting to put deliverables out the door now, this year. We’ve got to get the design work done on time, put the products out, which are keyed for 52 weeks in advance of construction need schedule, which is what we learned in Virginia is the right way to do this.

Very, very important work, and one other thing that’s hidden in this, you may not know, is that the CMC (Common Missile Compartment) design is driving the current phase of what we’re doing. We’re a little bit out of sequence because of this shift, because the UK did not move when we moved.

We’ve had some great successes this last year. We’ve done things which are very innovative. Show me another X-plane ship since probably the Albacore. We have our joint U.S./UK schedule approved, so we’ve got an alignment between us and the UK which is very important because we’re feeding design products right to their design agent. The team has been very successful at getting missile compartment fixtures bought, collaboratively, between the two countries, to save cost and also keep these things as common as possible between the two build sites, Barrow-in-Furness and Electric Boat.

We’ve set the ship length, it’s within inches of the size of Ohio. We should not be apologetic for that. It is that size because of the stealth requirements and because of the maintainability requirements on that ship and the cost. It’s exactly the right ship for the mission set that’s put on it. It’s going to deliver 124 patrols, which by the way, is two more than Ohio does in her op cycle.

Ongoing and upcoming, we have a full slate of work this year, a lot of HM&E testing, propulsors, runs of the Large Scale Vehicle at Lake Pend Oreille. We’re doing COOPEXs, we’re doing missile tube manufacturing. We’re about to let the next contract for buys. We already have one out the door in November. We’re doing one in February and one in May, so we’re moving, and we’re also doing physical scale model testing. It’s that prototyping work so that the design is done once, it’s built once,and right the first time.

So the ramp-up and design yard personnel is key to improving our design execution, but it’s still an area where we have to focus that 83 percent.

Ohio Replacement is, without a doubt, the country’s number one new acquisition program. More important than Joint Strike Fighter; this is it. To keep our leaders’ faith, we have to continue to show we’re achieving our cost reduction objectives; very important.

Last but not least, we moved ship construction from 2019 to 2021, so we need to stay in sync with the UK. We need to stay on track with them. We have to support the UK.

So that’s the platform piece, and I have five minutes to cover the rest. First to be talked about is SWFTS (Submarine Warfare Federated Tactical Systems). One of the ways we’re looking at cutting our budget is to retool the Submarine Force’s SWFTSmodel, which is our combat systems modernization.

We’re trying to be smart about this. I want to get to a predict-able eight- to nine-a-year installs instead of two, five, fourteen, ten, which is very disruptive to our industrial base. If we can get to a straight eight, or a straight nine, we’ll be achieving better, frankly, than we do today.

We will align this plan in 2016. We will alternate between Virginias, then go to Los Angeles and Seawolf in 2018 and then back to Virginias in 2020. It’s going to take a little more management but it saves research and development, and it also saves in procurement. Over $200 million dollars out of the FYDP and I think this is a smart adjustment to this industrial base. We’re going to have to manage obsolescence a little more carefully, but if you just continue the model and don’t disrupt us, we’ll actually be a little better than we are today on average of the age of our systems across the fleet.

Payload is the next topic. There’s a lot going on. As I told you in October, we’re going to start rebuilding the Mk 48 torpedo, and we are well on our way. The goal is to award two contracts; one for guidance and control, and the other for the after body and tail-cone efforts in the fiscal year 2016 with a technical data package completed a year later. In 2018, we’ll reach our production readiness review and, if it all goes well, which I anticipate it will, we will start producing weapons, at a rate of two per month, starting the same year.

In October, I said we’d broken the weapon apart, and we planned to have industry deliver the components to the Navy which will then integrate, test and ultimately deliver the weapons to the fleet. Under our current timeline, we expect to deliver between two and four Mk 48s a month between FY18 and FY22. That adds up to 152. So if you do the math, that’s only about a third, so there’s more ahead.

I think it’s important for you to know where we’re going. We do have, as a precursor to this though, the review panel, to make sure that A) this is a solid plan, and B) how can we be smart about leveraging this investment to work our way towards the modular vehicle that Admiral Connor talked about, which is very important and, frankly, part of our future.

USS GEORGE H.W. BUSH (CVN 77) departed on February 15th with the first hard-kill Surface Ship Torpedo Defense on board, tested, used by the crew and ready for tasking. Unbeliev-able.

The countermeasure anti-torpedo (CAT) sits in a nice little home. We call it an all up round enclosure. Very simple, you just load the weapon in there. The CAT sits in its own enclosure and when it’s told to go, it impulses out much like an air bag to shoot the CAT. A very, very capable new torpedo that Dr. Ed Liszka and his team at ARL Penn State have designed.

We took this and made this a little bit of a different program. We pretty much chucked DOD 5000.2. Paul Schneider and his review team helped us to give top cover on that, but we took a CNO priority system, worked the team, 3 Phoenix, Pacific Engineering, Penn State and our government team, and in sixteen months got it to sea and tested. And overall in 25 months it’s underway on the Bush, right now, heading to theater.

It’s the kind of responsiveness and ingenuity we need to weather this budget environment. It’s not a submarine system, but it’s an example of what we can do when we put our mind to it.

Next let’s talk about towed arrays. I didn’t talk much about this in October, but it’s important because it’s an ongoing concern with the fleet. We have to make our arrays and their handlers more reliable. So we’re looking at a way to make the telemetry simple, the array simple and the handlers less disruptive on the array itself.

We have two arrays at sea today on two ships, a compact towed array from L-3 Chesapeake, on USS COLUMBIA (SSN 771) and the IPEN (inverse passive electrical network) telemetry from 3 Phoenix aboard USS PASADENA (SSN 752). We’re running these arrays through their paces with the goal of collecting data that allows us to refine the design so we can be confident of providing the fleet with a reliable and capable towed array.

We also are working on the handler. We have a MacTaggart Scott belt mechanism. We’ve done land-based testing, and we’re getting this to sea on a 688 in the spring, maybe this summer, so we can see what it does. If it actually works out, I want to roll it out as fast as we can get it out the door to get rid of the darn pinch rollers, so that they quit damaging our arrays.

We are trending in the right directions. This is a great acquisi-tion model. Get good mature prototypes out in the hands of the war fighter, understand them, do it competitively and then drive affordability with the competition. Then, if you’re crafty enough about it, you can cobble enough money together to make it work. That’s exactly what we’ve done here.

For the low-profile photonics mast (LPPM), we’re meeting Admiral Sawyer’s and Admiral Connor’s demand signal.

We have three prototype LPPMs, two from L-3 KEO and one from Cassidian and 3 Phoenix. We’ll have to use these masts to support ops and cross-deck them from one boat to another. It’s not ideal, but it fulfills a requirement, and we’re going to go into production with a competitive contract, we think, in 2017. As Ken Swan, at L-3 Kollmorgen told me last night, I have to get up there to go see, on the stand, the first LPPM that he’s going to deliver soon to Jack Gellen, I think it’s March, and then six months later number two follows. So two LPPMs out, integrated with the Lockheed Martin ISIS, and off it goes to Phil Sawyer to use on the fleet. We’ll learn, and we’ll use this same model, get into production, competitively bid, and off we go. Truly an example of meeting the fleet’s need.

We’ve talked about payloads. Well, you need something to hold the payloads in, and we call it another awful acronym: the submarine large ocean interface, the SLOI. I’ll take any input on a better acronym.

What we have today in SLOI is represented by six dry deck shelters, four experimental tubes in the SSGNs and lastly the delivery of the soon-to-be North Dakota this spring. Twelve large diameter openings that allow people and payloads to deploy from submarines and into the water column. With each Block III Virginia we deliver, the number goes up by two. Now, we know the primary use is Tomahawks. When we do the Block IV and Block V ships, however, it’s an opportunity, and I think there’s a lot of room for growth and innovation here. We know how much life we have left in our dry deck shelters. Well, this is what we’re doing about it. They go to 2051, by the way, so getting a new design, a brand new build shelter is not likely. So let’s take what we’ve got and be innovative. We need to take the man out of the loop, in terms of their operation.

When deploying a SEAL delivery vehicle, we have to manu-ally open the door, winch out a track and cradle, launch the payload and then bring it all back in. This is a dicey evolution when you’ve got a 5,000-pound vehicle. When you have a 30,000-pound vehicle, you cannot do that. It has to be done differently.

So Capt. Mike Stevens and his program office are exploring automating the hangar door and cradle, the launch and recovery of payloads, as a technology demonstrator, and it’s eye-watering. We’ve got a co-sharing agreement about to be inked with our Special Operation Force’s friends in Hondo Geurtz. So a great sharing effort so that we can get a demonstrator out there to de-risk the shallow water combat submersible (SWCS) as well as the dry combat submersibles that are our future.

Now, I know Franz and Electric Boat sometimes would like to see a 100-inch extension, but I think 50 is about what we’re going to get right now, and we’ll use it to establish a pull from the fleet for more capacity.

It racks out between the legacy vehicle and the DDS today and potentially you can fit more in there. The shallow water combat submersible is bigger. It goes up to 10,000 pounds, almost twice as heavy. You put a little sea state on that, and you can get hurt, while you’re hauling that thing down on its cradle.

UOES1 is S301 in everyone else’s vernacular. It’s the sub-mergence group design vehicle; UOES-3 is being done by GSE and Electric Boat; these are big vehicles. If we’re going to host bigger vehicles with more capability we’ll probably have to go longer than 50, but you’ve got to start somewhere. It’s going to go on USS HAWAII (SSN 776). It will be tailor-made for our Virginia-class ship to save cost, and we’ll establish the demand signal. There will be more to follow.

So to conclude, one of the main reasons for the Submarine Force’s continued success is the people in this room, and I truly believe that. Our ability to form partnerships, and not just business relationships, is what sets us apart from everybody else. We have proven time and again that we deliver on what we promise. Congress and the Pentagon recognize the value of the fast attack and the fleet ballistic missile submarine, the Virginia-class program got more money even above the President’s budget requests. And we received the money for the Virginia Payload Module. Investing in the Submarine Force is a good investment because we deliver on our promises. They go together. By living up to our own high expectations we make it hard for people to cut us. There’s also room to grow; I just described to you the Submarine Large Ocean Interface where I think we’ll go for new payloads in an era of diminishing resources. The ability of our submarines to operate in the A2AD (Anti-Access/Area Denial)environments means we’re the right people to put payloads where they need to be. So Admiral Connor, IUFS—Integrated Undersea Future Strategy, if I have it right—we’re not just studying it or planning it, we are doing it. I’ve described some objective evidence.

And lastly, don’t forget the Seawolf Edge. That will resonate with folks like John Butler, Steve Johnson, Chris Deegan, Paul Sullivan, John Casey, and me, frankly, to name just a few. It is an energy, focus, intensity. We are the best. I, my team, and this industrial base are committed to staying there and delivering the undersea dominance our nation needs. As we were told by the CNO, be bold, be confident, be accountable. Pretty good sailing directions.

Thank you.