Good morning, team.It’s great to be with you all this morning, Admiral Mies, Admiral Mulloy, Admiral Donald fellow submariners and captains of submarine industry.Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today.
Before I get into my prepared remarks which are really about the Commander’s Intent, my fundamental message to everybody, given that you just heard the CFO of the Navy brief the budget situation, is that to some extent the dog has caught the car. The good news is the President’s Budget ‘17 has some great thing in it for the Submarine Force, and that’s fantastic. The confidence that people have in the Submarine Force on high, our credibility is at the top, so given that, my message to you is now we’ve got to deliver. I need everyone in the room doing just that.
As I look across the room at friends old and new—I can’t think of a better group of people to ensure that we do that. So I thank you for that.I thank you for your service, whether formerly in uniform now or as a captain of corporate industry. I thank you for your service, your leadership, because it’s our time. We’ve got a lot of great challenges and it’s our time to move out on them
Let me transition now to what I had prepared, and it is the Commander’s Intent document that Admiral Padgett referred to. I hope everyone has had a chance to read it.
It was definitely a team effort: myself, Admiral Fritz Roegge, Admiral Chas Richard, all three of our names are on it.As Admiral Padgett referred to, you should find confidence in the fact that we are on the right course, and it’s essentially the same course.There has been some small rudder to account for changes in set and drift.I’ll talk about some of those over the course of my remarks.
My vision was to create this one stop shop of where anybody can go, whether you’re a Seaman Deuce busting rust in engine-room lower level, to a submarine CO, to someone in Office of the Secretary of Defense, OPNAV staff, on the Hill, press, whatever, the full gamut. I wanteda document that anybody could go to, to really understand what the Force is working on and where we’re going.We got a lot of good reviews on it and I think it really does answer the mail.But consequently, there’s a lot going on here; at a lot of levels.Fundamentally, it was combining these four things into this one stop shop.
There’s this first document called The Design for Undersea Warfare. It talked about what the Submarine Force should be working on, the Submarine Force itself, lines of effort. It hadn’t been updated since November ‘12, so it was coming up on four years old.So that had to be updated and that was accomplished.
Admiral Connor and Admiral Sawyer wrote this second document on Guidance to the Force. It was a set of five letters, guidance for what commanders should be attentive to.
Then we had this third thing called The Integrated Undersea Future Investment Strategy Executive Summary.That’s a thing that I created when I had Admiral Richard’s job.I felt it very, very important to communicate to industry where we want to go, and then it’s a win-win for everybody. The American taxpayer wins. Industry wins. The service wins. It’s more efficient. You spend your IRAD (Internal Research and Development) in smart spots.Everybody wins by that.And those of you who are DOD cleared contractors are able to read it, it’s only about four pages long, but very cogently laying that out.From the Force Commander perspective, we never had anything that pointed to it.The Commander’s Intent document now does that, but does not get into it in detail.That’s the purpose of the Integrated Undersea Future Investment Strategy (IUFIS) itself.But I thought it was important to point to that IUFIS from the Commander’s Intent. So whoever wants to understand what the Force is doing and where the Force is going, you could pick this up and understand.That was my goal.
In addition we had this fourth thing called The Undersea Dominance Campaign Plan.You’ll hear me refer to it as Vision 2025. There are some minor tweaks to Vision 2025.I’ll talk about those in a minute.But again, we’re on the right course. You should feel very confident in that.These are literally minor course corrections.
But prior to now, Vision 2025 wasn’t written down, it was just a PowerPoint presentation. And so we took the time to do that in a cogent manner, and I think there’s tremendous value in that. Again, we’ve gotten very, very good reviews across the board from that.
So, at a high level, that is what we were trying to accomplish, and I think we did that.
So who’s the target audience? Clearly submarine leaders, their crews, i.e. the Force, all the organizations that build, support and enable the Force, NAVSEA folks, Team Submarine, corporate, industry, those in the R&D world, the UARCS (University Affiliated Research Centers), government civilians, anybody who has anything to do with advancing the Force, there’s a little bit of something for you in here.Granted if you’re a submarine skipper you probably care a little bit more about the lines of effort.
If you’re a person at a UARC or in industry, you probably care a little bit more about Vision 2025.But it’s all in there and anyone who has ever worn dolphins probably cares about the whole thing.So again, I thought that really came together nicely.
Now it’s not intended to address all of the undersea force issues.It’s not meant to address CRUDES, MPA, etc. But it’s really about, in the end, the primary focus being submarines and their crews and maintaining undersea superiority, that asymmetric advantage that Joe Mulloy talked about in his breakfast remarks.
If you’re a joint doctrine person, you’ll recognize the Commander’s Intent layout from situation, purpose, CONOPS, desired end-state, etcetera.We simplified these a little bit so they may not be doctrinally perfect, but I think everybody in this room gets this first bullet, the fact that we are a maritime nation. That’s kind of foundational to why we are all pretty much in this room if you really boil it down.
Seventy percent of the planet is covered in water. Eighty percent of the world’s population lives within just a couple hundred miles of a coastline.Ninety percent of how anything gets anywhere is by a ship.
We don’t FedEx Ford F-150 trucks in a plane around the planet. They get there by ships. IPads, trucks, cars, parts, stuff that you guys make, it’s all about those sea lines of communication.
Ninety-five percent of what’s in cyberspace is not bouncing off a satellite in space but it is in a cable under the water. That’s our domain. We’ve got to protect that.
Even our founding fathers saw the importance of that. From what’s written in the Constitution to raise and support armies, but provide and maintain a navy. George Washington, the father of our country, an army general, an army guy to the core, personally said “you can’t do anything definitive without a navy,” but “everything honorable and glorious” with one. Pretty strong words from a pretty hard core army guy.
People understand that. We’re a maritime nation.Now add on that how things are changing in the world today. Admiral Mulloy touched on some of this already.
Russia, totally on the resurge, illegally invading Crimea, clearly not afraid to use force in doing so, in violation of the INF Treaty.In fact, if you lay out countries, Russia being one of them, that have a new SSBN in the water and are flight-testing a new submarine-launched ballistic missile, it’s: China; Russia; North Korea, granted not a nuclear submarine but an SSB no less; and although not in that same club but from a proliferation standpoint, India.So there’s four countries on the planet with a new ballistic missile submarine in the water and are flight-testing a new submarine-launched ballistic missile, and none of them are the United States. That is a different world. That’s a changing place.
China, illegally building territory in the South China Sea that wouldn’t otherwise exist.In the past two years, China has increased from five acres of land that was above the waterline 23 months ago, to over 3,200.That’s over 3,200 acres that they have claimed in that same period.That’s a totally different approach for the Pacific and some of Admiral Roegge’s challenges. In the next 12 months, sometime in the next year, China will operationally deploy their new SSBN with a submarine-launched ballistic missile. Think about that.For the first time in your lifetime, your family will be held at risk by a submarine-launched ballistic missile from some country other than Russia.And there’s no START Treaty with China.Again, it’s a different, different world.
Throughout Russia’s tough economic times, they never stopped spending money on what they consider their capital force, their Submarine Force.I’ll quote Vice Admiral John stone, the maritime commander of NATO who recently said, “It is the level of activity from Russia, from a Submarine Force perspective, that has been significantly higher than it has been in the past.”
So the emphasis has changed.If you’ve read “The Design for Maritime Superiority,” signed out by our CNO, you get that loud and clear.The last 10 to 15 years have been primarily characterized by power projection ashore, launching Tomahawks from uncontested littoral waters. It’s a totally different ballgame when you wrap in what we just got done talking about.
The next 10 to 15 years are going to be characterized by a high-end fight in contested blue waters. It’s a return to the maritime, a return to the high-end fight.
Continuing on, you have to totally appreciate the fact that given all this, there is an expanding undersea role. It’s very, very evident. Take the SSBN force alone.Right now we operate a little over 50 percent of our nation’s strategic assets from the U.S. Submarine Force.So the other two legs of the triad combined are less than the Submarine Force’s contribution. That’s today. It’s about 54 percent, somewhere along those lines.
That’s absolutely amazing when you consider we’re only eight percent of the Navy officer corps. United States submariners, only eight percent of the Navy officer corps.There are more doctors and dentists in the Navy than there are submarine officers. Twenty-five percent of the warships, 10 percent of the budget, that’s a tremendous return on investment, when you consider that for the past seven decades this Force has prevented major power war.
Granted, tragedies like the World Trade Center attack, 9/11, 3,000 plus people died senselessly. But 50 million to 70 million people died in World War II by most estimates, now that’s major power war. That’s what strategic deterrence has prevented. That’s why in this document the absolute first thing mentioned in the blue line of effort is how strategic deterrence is “foundational to our survival as a nation. ”That’s a quote, “foundational to our survival as a nation.”
So if that doesn’t blow you away right there, that 54 percent number, put your seat belt on because in less than two years when the New START Treaty enters into force, February of 2018, the United States Submarine Force will be responsible for 70 percent of our accountable nuclear warheads. I lose sleep on that.We’ve got a lot at stake here and we’ve got some heavy peddling to do between now and 2031 for the Ohio Replacement Program, as Admiral Caldwell told us last night, to make sure that we can get there from here.We can’t just pull an all-nighter the night before. The dog has caught the car.We’ve got to execute.
Let’s talk about the SSN and SSGN forces as well. It is very clear, if you’ve read any newspaper here in the past two weeks, the statements most notably by General Breed love, an Air Force General and European commander, and Admiral Harris,the Pacific Fleet commander, say they are only receiving about 62 percent of the subs they need to meet growing threats in Asia and Europe. People recognize the demand, the talk about adding another submarine in FY ‘21.People are starting to get it.
The Submarine Force is the anti-A2AD force, anti-access area denial.Anti-access, preventing the ability to get in; area denial, preventing your ability to move around once you are in.The Submarine Force is, the anti-A2AD force.We are the key that unlocks that A2AD lock that thereby enables a greater naval and joint force.
People recognize that. We can get in under that A2AD envelope. But we’ve got to work on some of the tools that we need once we’re in there, and we’re going to talk about that some more.I know Admiral Richard is going to talk about that as well.
So rolling it all up here.You have this backdrop of what’s going on.More is going to be expected of the Navy. You add in the A2AD piece and here’s my simple little equation at the bottom of the previous slide.More is going to be expected of the Submarine Force.
So now I’m going to talk a little bit about LOEs (Lines of Effort) I and II. I’m going to leave LOE III for Admiral Richard to get to because that’s pretty much his lane. I may talk a little bit about LOEIV, the people piece.Obviously, we’re nothing without the people.The only thing that a submarine can do by itself sitting next to the pier is rust.It takes the people to bring it to life and we do not forget that.But I thought you might want just a little bit of understanding here.
From a provider of ready forces standpoint, absolute number one in our minds is operational safety.In October ‘12, USS MONTPELIER hit USS SAN JACINTO.I was the investigating officer for that, over three years ago now,at this point. So that means to me that every single submariner who was in a submarine Wardroom or part of a Piloting party that was on a submarine on that day has probably rotated off.
The good news is that we have had no Class A ship handling type events in two years, all of ‘14 and all of ‘15.But from a statistical standpoint, and just a historical standpoint if you go back and look at some graphs, I regret to say that there’s an element of “we’re due.” Now we certainly don’t approach it with that fatal list type of approach.On the contrary, we want to be very proactive about this and not rest on our laurels and make sure that we are taking a very, very hard look at this.
There is a lot at stake for the people in this room who just got a talk about how the dog caught the car.We have got to continue that good reputation we talked about earlier, you have one little crimp in the armor from some untoward event from an operational safety standpoint, and that brings into question all that confidence we discussed.
So we’re very, very conscious of that. As we go down to 41 submarines, we can’t afford for a single one to have any kind of a problem, let alone the loss of life aspect for something, God-forbid, very terrible. So we’re very, very conscious of this.
It’s absolutely the first thing in the first LOE. We’re working hard on the resiliency of our teams.Both Admiral Roegge and I have established some new safety offices within our TYCOM staffs that we’ve carved out, taken out of hide. The Force Improvement Operational Safety, the FIOS office, for example.We’ve hired a civilian occupational safety engineer Dr. Kim Culley to help us take a different look at things, not just look at it from the traditional tactical binning of what problems were, or operational binning, but let’s look at the human factor aspect of what happened.
We developed a new attribute sheet as part of how we do examinations and self-assessment. The point is it’s about resiliency.We’re giving a tool to the CO on what the standard is for how teams should operate and how they should operate in a resilient manner. We’ve put a lot on this. We’re working on getting our lessons learned out in a smarter fashion, creating a continuum of products that the Force can use so it’s not just the same old push cookie-cutter things are only available from a pull stand point.
We want to be more agile. We want to push things to people.In fact, you can actually report things anonymously now, because the worst place to be is not knowing what you don’t know.We don’t want that.
So we’ve created a thing called a Significant Event Report.We took a page from the aviators and their anonymous reporting system.The truth is, I don’t think anyone uses it that way, I think we’ve had one anonymous report in over a year.I don’t know if it’s just nukes or just in their DNA, they come forward with what happened.But we have seen an increase in our overall reporting and consequently our ability to understand where the issues are, then get the lessons learned out in a more active fashion. We think this has had a positive effect.
Delivering combat ready forces, this is getting back to the blue line of effort from the Navy Design document, taking a fresh look at our FRTP or the process by which we generate readiness and produce forces ready to deploy. We’re taking a hard look at that and making sure, if there is any tuning of that that needs to be done as we look at the high-end fight where it’s not just about power projection ashore in uncontested littoral waters, but making sure that we are ready for the high-end contested fight.
LOE II; if LOE I was really focused on the submarine skipper and below, LOE II is for those major headquarters staffs, the TYCOM staffs, the large shipyard and maintenance organizations, people who schedule and plan. We’ve really got to work hard from an SSBN standpoint on getting this number back to 27 months for those refueling overhauls. I regret to say that USS MARYLAND just left Norfolk Naval Shipyard after 37 months on that availability. We can’t have that as we go forward, and are working on this transition leading up to Ohio Replacement.With 54 percent going to 70 percent of our accountable nuclear warheads; we’ve got to get those assets back at sea and not managing it on the margins that Admiral Roegge and I, as CTF-134 and CTF-144 respectively, have to deal with on a daily basis.
The good news is, when we get to the year ’19 or ‘20 the log jam is going to bust open because the EROs are going to be done on the Ohio class.Those EROs were never the plan, right? It was a 30 year ship. OHIO went on patrol in 1981. So five years ago OHIO was supposed to be beingde commissioned. We extended it to 42 years.
The longest we’ve ever done a single submarine, USS KAMEHAMEHA, is 36 years. We’re going to take an entire class to 42 years. That’s uncharted water.So we have got to get this right, it is a national imperative.
You’ve heard Admiral Mulloy talk about nuclear deterrent enterprise. We’ve added to the shipyard manning by 2,500 workers. We’ve added to Kings Bay by 250 workers.
Let me camp on this next one a little bit, the UWDC, Under-sea Warfighting Development Center.For those of you who don’t know, DEVRON 12 as you knew it growing up, for those of you who wear dolphins,is gone.It’s now SUBRON 12.The special sauce that made it a DEVRON, was this entity called the TAG, the Tactical Analysis Group, it has been pulled out from the DEVRON and is now underneath UWDC, the Undersea Warfighting Development Center.
We are very, very conscious of the fact that we cannot lose our connection with the waterfront.Admiral Trussler knows this very well. We talk about it all the time.He’s right there in Groton with the schoolhouse, so there’s a tremendous synergy that happens there from an experimental standpoint.We’re very, very conscious of how we’ve got to keep that very, very tight.
Admiral Mies has done a good job of challenging me with things that we’ve got to do from a TACDEV standpoint and we are on a jihad to improve our tactical development. Admiral Trussler is working on that very hard and we’re taking a close look at all the pieces that contribute to that. It’s very, very important to us.
Theater ASW, believe it or not, Admiral Trussler who works for me, I sign his FITREP, he bottom lines the strike group ASW certification for all carrier strike groups. All carrier strike groups that deploy, he bottom lines their ASW certification. And he bottom lines the certification for all theater ASW CTFs: CTF 69, CTF 54, CTF 74, he even bottom lines mine.
But the point is, we’re in that business, Navy-wide, ASW from the carrier strike group level up. That’s a big change from where it used to be.
But that transition is going very well, frankly better than I think some might have thought. It’s getting rave reviews.Everyone is in a pile together working on it and I’m very, very pleased with how that’s going.
This is the Navy’s campaign design on a single page.I’m just putting it up there for effect because I want to show you the next slide.
This is my Commander’s Intent overlaid on top.I’m just making the point to you that these two things are right in line. You hold these two things up to the light and they are tight, and that was no accident, I can assure you. We’ll talk about Vision 2025, but I think those of you who are familiar with it know that, get on the same page, is a big part of how we do business. It’s why we’re all in this room right here right now, to be honest with you, and this kind of makes that point in spades.
Let me transition to a little bit about the strategy orabout the Vision 2025 itself. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this.You people, I think, are very, very familiar with it. Obviously we’ve talked about ORP. We’ve talked about getting a second VPM (Virginia Payload Module) in FY ‘19. We’ve talked about restarting the heavyweight torpedo line.
You know, we’re going to be building torpedoes again in this country for the first time in 20 years. All of this is in the own the best category: Large Vertical Array; Virginia-class two per year; every single piece of it.
Growing Longer Arms. This is kind of the platform-centric view that has characterized the last 10 to 15 years, this 10 mile or so torpedo and this 1,000 mile or so land attack weapon, an acoustic envelope that’s kind of just drawn there from a reference standpoint.
This is what we’re working on changing, from a growing longer arms standpoint. It’s not just about torpedoes that can go 100 miles.That’s certainly part of it, but there’s all kinds of ways in which our arms need to grow.This shows it very well, the large vertical array and the acoustic superiority initiatives are helping make that yellow bubble bigger than that reference line, via the TLAM research, the references Admiral Mulloy made to the $439 million that is in the President’s Budget of ‘17 for advanced capability Tomahawk, putting a seeker on the weapon, that’s all part of that right there.
UUVs are a huge part. Admiral Mulloy referred to that as well.He mentioned NORTH DAKOTA, but I want to hit you over the head with what he was saying.For the first time an operational submarine did a real world mission in support of a combatant commander using a UUV. That’s what happened there,huge.It’s a new world.
That opens up all kinds of things. Your little EM spectrum is no longer just at the top of an antenna coming out of your submarine, but your ability to grow longer arms and have that come from UUVs, large or small, UAVs, that’s taking it to another level.
Torpedoes, this is very much in the Grow Longer Arms piece.We talked about some of this here already as well.
This is just a snapshot showing you all the things from the President’s Budget ‘17. I’m not going to spend any time on this.Admiral Richard is going to walk you through that, but for effect I wanted you to get that this is where the dog has caught the car.This is a pretty impressive array of enhancements that are helping us achieve this vision. It’s real, it’s time to execute. Now we have to deliver.
We’ve got a bunch of things going on with decoys, some of which, most of which, I really can’t talk about here.This is part of the vision.
Protecting our Strategic Assets. Again, probably the easiest thing to talk about in this forum is the Theater ASW offset strategy. It’s a great example of a scalable re-deployable system, a system of systems, that you can use to protect a carrier strike group, for example, and establish a haven somewhere.
We’re getting ready to do an experiment. We just did one in the PAC last week that was very successful. We’re going to be doing more of a demonstration here in June and we expect to have some things actually in the water from an operational standpoint here by the end of the year. Very, very exciting stuff, definitely leaning forward on that.
This is one area where if you’re a real student of the UDCP and Vision 2025 you might recognize a little bit of a difference. I helped write the original plan so this is not pejorative in any way.But I felt like it was a little bit passive. We were owning stuff and protecting stuff and getting stuff. I wanted to threaten some stuff. Hence the dot, dot, dotand Threaten Theirs that if you hadn’t picked up on is part of this.
I already mentioned this. From a tactical level, obviously very important, probably our next big thing that we’ve got to get after is from a communications standpoint, LPI, LPD communications. I started working on that a little bit but Admiral Richard is going to take it to another level on his watch.Given that we are inside the A2AD bubble we want to make sure that we can communicate, we can get the target, or we can provide the targeting data, whatever the case may be. That’s a big part of some of the stuff that we’ve got to do so that we can take advantage of those longer arms.
Admiral Roegge and I have worked very, very hard on being extremely tight as a Force. And as I mentioned earlier, this is a very big part of our success.It’s part of why we’re here today.
The URCIs (Undersea Rapid Capability Initiatives) continue at full speed and you see evidence of them in everything, from the Fleet Modular AUV (Autonomous Undersea Vehicle), which really fueled the use of the Remus 600 vehicles and fully was part of how we did project 1319 on the USS NORTH DAKOTA.We’re going to do more of those kind of missions. That’s URCI number one.
There’s URCI number two, that’s a decoy.There’s a number four, which is the Long Range Precision Strike, including use of a SCEPS (Stored Chemical Energy Propulsion System) engine.This is part of longer arms, from a torpedo standpoint.
There’s URCI number five, which has the TRAPs (Transformational Reliable Acoustic Path System) node in it. That’s part of the Theater ASW offset strategy which we’re operationalizing and taking to the fleet this year. And then you’ve got the UAVs, the signal injector launched one which is Blackwing, and the torpedo tube launched one which is XFC (eXperimental Fuel Cell).
We’ve got 118 of the Blackwings in the President’s Budget ‘17, and 13 of the XFCs in the President’s Budget‘17, for the first time ever. When I was at N97 I actually had an aviation slash chart in the POM submit for the Director of Undersea Warfare. So pretty cool stuff, and we consider them just part of the fire control system and the imaging system. That’s how we’re treating them.They’re an extension of what I showed in that previous slide.
This is part of us getting faster. We can’t rely on the 20 year flywheel for new platforms. It’s got to be about vehicles. It’s got to be about payload on those vehicles. It’s got to be about TTP,hence the emphasis on TACDEV. That’s all part of the get faster thing, and it’s very much in line with the green LOE out of the CNOs Design.
The people aspect, this was also an addition that Admiral Roegge, Admiral Richard and myself thought was important.And, of course, right as we were thinking about adding this, Sailor 2025 came out almost on cue.They even got the year right! Vision 2025, Sailor 2025, very much in keeping with where the Navy is going and obviously very, very important from a people standpoint.
Very quickly, just some accomplishments from SUBLANT’s standpoint. These are actually organized by LOE’s; this is LOE 1, this is LOE 2, this is LOE 3, LOE 4. I mentioned our safety record that we have, butwe cannot rest on our laurels.We’ve got to continue to push forward there.
We implemented the Crew Rest Initiative.I think it was last year when Admiral Mike Connor was standing on this stage he made the comment that he spent the first 15 years of his career tired.We’ve taken some steps to work on that.
In a satellite environment, which is what we’re getting at, we’ve got to be able to communicate in ways that aren’t dependent on that.We’ve worked hard for the past year or so at improving our ability to communicate from an HF standpoint, not reliant on satellites, so going back old school.And we had to sweep out some cobwebs, but we’ve made tremendous improvements. No surprise, if you practice you can get good at it, or get good at it again.
Partners are obviously key. These are just my partners. Admiral Roegge’s got as many if not more in the Pacific. This is pretty impressive.
I know I’ve been talking about our availability and maintainability, and we’ve got to work on that. But the fact that we are able to generate one SSBN (this is just LANT numbers, it’s even bigger if you view the whole Force), every three weeks and one SSN on deployment every month, that is hard work.That’s what it takes to have a Force that is forward and projecting power, taking it to the other guy. You can’t do it without that, and that really is tremendous.
Faslane, our first SSBN port visit in over a decade to Faslane, Scotland, huge. Talk about showing support with the allies, showing support with NATO, demonstrating to the world that we patrol everywhere in the Atlantic.You don’t need to come into our house to find us, because proving that we’re up there, that’s huge.It’s very, very important.We hit the long ball on this one, and we look forward to more.
Women in submarines, lots of first in 2015.We have about 20 percent of our crews are now integrated, over 115 female submariners in our Force. The first three SSNs were integrated in ’15: MINNESOTA, VIRGINIA and MISSISSIPPI.
We’re starting to work on SSBNs. We had the first application cycle for MICHIGAN. It’s complete. We’ve got the second one in progress now and we’ve actually added a 19th crew.
A additional SSN because we wanted to have one in Norfolk, if you look at all the other three concentration areas where the submarines are, where we’re integrating women, it was Kings Bay, Bangor, Groton places where there’s not necessarily a large non-submarine Navy population. A lot of the women who are married, their spouses are in the Navy too, but not necessarily submariners. So if they’re married to a Navy JAG, a Navy pilot, we wanted to have a sub that was in a place like Norfolk, where there is a large concentration of other than just Submarine Force assets. That’s actually a Sailor 2025 initiative.
