Source: United States Navy
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti delivers the keynote address and answers audience questions at WEST 2024 in San Diego, Feb. 13, 2024.
CNO: All right, well, thank you for that musical walk on. It’s an amazing way to come up on the stage. And good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for the warm welcome, Ray. Thank you for that kind introduction. And a little bit of a walk down memory lane to your time on Yorktown when we first met. Thank you and congratulations on becoming U.S. Naval Institute CEO and publisher. Pete Daly. I see you down there. I also want to thank you for your leadership and congratulations on a job well done over the last 12 and a half years as the Naval Institute’s leader and for your 34 years before that of uniform service.
I’d also like to thank the WEST 2024 team, April Parreco, and the entire staff for once again organizing this event and building an exceptional agenda. This forum will no doubt facilitate great conversations about warfighting and about what it is that we need to do to deliver decisive combat power in this maritime century. Please join me in giving Ray, Pete, and the WEST 2024 team a big round of applause…. And to our distinguished guests, industry members, flag and general officers, and all of our service members, the Sailors, Marines and Coast Guardsmen and our Department of the Navy civilians in the audience…thank you for making the time to be here today and this week, whether you’re wearing a uniform or a suit, I encourage you to use this venue to share your ideas, to collaborate to build your network, talk about our challenges and commit to working together to ensure that our Navy remains the most powerful navy in the world.
So let me start by just reaffirming that. The United States Navy is the world’s premier fighting force. I could not be more proud of our Navy team of our active and reserve Sailors and of our civilians who execute the Navy’s mission. Every single day. Our Navy team operates far forward to preserve the peace, respond in crisis and win decisively in war. Right now, our Sailors are standing the watch around the world and around the clock from the seabed to space, in cyberspace, and in the information environment, to deter aggression, promote our nation’s prosperity and security, and provide options to our nation’s decision makers.
Right now, from the Western Pacific to the Baltic and everything in between our Navy delivers power for peace. But we’re always postured and ready to fight and win as part of the joint force working alongside our allies and our partners. And right now, as you’ve seen on the news, our Navy is operating on the frontlines of freedom, and at the point of friction…. we’re performing with the skill and the professionalism that we expect of our United States Navy Sailors, in a complex, dynamic and kinetic environment, like we’re seeing today in the Middle East.
In support of the rules-based international order, the U.S. led operation prosperity guardian, a defensive coalition of more than 20 countries continues to provide international maritime security in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It’s our Navy team leading the way it includes destroyers Carney, Laboon, Mason, Gravely and Thomas Hudner and working with fighter squadrons from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
They are working tirelessly to preserve the free flow of commerce to date, shooting down over 70 UAVs, seven cruise missiles and for the first time in history, 14 anti-ship ballistic missiles. How about that? That’s combat power right there.
And it’s those same forces… working alongside our allies and partners… that are launching strikes, designed to degrade and diminish Houthi capability to continue these attacks. And that’s really just the start of what our Navy is doing around the world. As Secretary Austin said, “the United States is the most powerful country on Earth. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
In the eastern Mediterranean, the Bataan amphibious Readiness Group with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked, is providing options to the nation’s decision makers and sending a clear message of deterrence to any state or non-state actor seeking to escalate the conflict beyond Gaza.
And, in the Indo-Pacific, the USS Carl Vinson and USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Groups continue to underwrite the security and stability of the region, and enhance interoperability with our allies and partners, most recently through trilateral exercises with Japan and Australia. And through the third iteration of the maritime cooperative activity.
No other Navy operates at this scale. No other Navy in the world can build, train, deploy and sustain such a lethal globally deployed combat credible force. And all of this is a testament to the hard work and commitment to excellence over time over many years by the people in this room and the people that you represent. So I want to say thank you. Thank you for the exceptional partnership. And the teamwork that makes this all possible. You should take pride in seeing your Navy Marine Corps team in action.
But ladies and gentlemen as awesome as this story is, we cannot rest on our laurels. Our work is not done, and business as usual will not get us where we need to go. Our country stands at an inflection point in the history. We are in a decisive decade.
Increasingly, America, along with our allies and partners, finds itself beset on all sides by forces that desire to rewrite the global rules based order for their own political, military and economic interest. The challenges we face will only accelerate the threats to our nation and our interest will continue to grow. And the battlefield will become even more complex. For the first time since World War II, we no longer operate from a maritime sanctuary against competitors who cannot threaten us. Today, sea control is neither guaranteed nor freely given.
Our adversaries are adapting new technology. They’re working to undermine our critical strengths… to expose any weaknesses they can… and are racing to develop their own warfighting advantage. In this rapidly changing security environment. America’s warfighting Navy, our Sailors alongside our Marines and Coast Guardsmen must be the very best warfighters in the world.
And we must design, develop and deliver to those warfighters the best systems, weapons and platforms that will deter or defeat any adversary anytime, anywhere. There’s no time to waste.
I intend to build on and accelerate the work done by my predecessor by focusing on three key priorities. The first is warfighting…. by delivering decisive combat power. The second is warfighters… by strengthening our Navy team, the third is the foundation. It’s the foundation that supports them by investing in our infrastructure, building trust, aligning resources, and quite simply by always being ready.
Our United States Navy plays an outsized and dominant role in achieving America’s national security objectives and ensuring our economic prosperity. The decisions we make and the actions we take today will determine the global maritime balance of power for decades to come. The Navy will continue to partner with all of you here in driving towards one objective: to deliver the Navy the nation needs to deter and if necessary, fight and win our nation’s wars. And that’s why this year’s theme, ‘Are acquisition, and readiness on pace to meet global security demands,’ is so important. Because they need to be.
How do we accelerate acquisition, and how do we increase readiness to put more players on the field? How do we drive innovation within our acquisition system… to get the right systems and capabilities into the hands of our warfighters at speed and scale? How do we think, act and operate differently with the technology and the systems we currently have to tackle the challenges we face today and tomorrow?
These are really important questions. The stakes are too high and the time is too short to act otherwise, we must act with urgency.
From cyber weapons to unmanned platforms, directed energy, artificial intelligence and hypersonic missiles and much more, we’re seeing technological breakthroughs that are redefining conflict. The Navy recognizes that speed matters… that the pace at which we procure modernize maintain, and sustain our platforms matters… as does the pace at which we rapidly integrate and adopt new technologies.
As students of history, I think it’s really important to look backwards sometimes to help us move forward, gleaning insights from similar past decisive decades on how we, as the Navy in a nation, navigated similar challenges.
Two of these decades were in the 1930s and the 1970s…decades when our leaders faced challenging security environments, and a changing character of war.
In the 1930s, in the interwar period, our leaders developed a series of operational concepts and war plans through wargaming at the Naval War College and fleet battle problems, that would shift our Navy from a platform-centric strategy, centered on battleships, to one that saw the future as an integrated naval force… on, under, and above the seas, and side by side with the Marines.
To procure and deliver this fleet. Our Navy leaders, alongside the White House and Congress, provided a joint demand signal and a blueprint to the shipbuilding industry to ramp up production on these new platforms and technologies. And that’s just what industry did. Private shipyards and manufacturing facilities expanded their infrastructure. They increased their manpower and they ramped up production, setting the stage for Allied victory in World War II.
If you fast forward to the 1970s when Navy leaders like CNO Zumwalt and CNO Holloway, recognized that our nation’s maritime force cannot maintain its maritime supremacy and compete with the Soviet Union with its current force structure. Zumwalt and his successors Holloway and Hayward, convened the Navy’s foremost thinkers and planners to develop a fleet capable of contesting sea control globally and directed the development of new capabilities by leveraging the technology of the era.
And they would resuscitate, develop or procure aircraft ships, submarines, and weapons systems, things like that F-18 Hornet, the Los Angeles and Ohio-class submarines, the Spruance and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, the Aegis, Harpoon and Tomahawk weapon systems to meet the designs of their strategy… a strategy that would position us for success against the Soviet Union.
Navy leaders in both those periods questioned existing assumptions and embraced the need for experimentation and innovation to ensure warfighting advantage into the future. They realized that we must be forward thinking in prioritizing our warfighting capabilities and we must increase our capability and capacity in peacetime to be able to surge effectively in war.
Today, your Navy is taking a similar approach by viewing everything through a warfighting lens. We’ve energized our wargaming enterprise at the Naval War College and at our warfighting development centers, to empower leaders at all levels to think differently about how we need to operate in uncertain, complex and rapidly changing environments. Leaders who are ready to take the initiative and to be bold.
We are experimenting with new concepts and tactics in a series of battle problems to develop and refine the operational concepts that will best leverage today’s fleet capabilities and capacity to yield warfighting advantage and help define the requirements for our future fleet. This work also includes thinking differently about how to best leverage and integrate disruptive and emerging technologies as we work to adapt to the changing character of war.
So let me briefly highlight four key ways that we’re doing just that. First, we’re using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and new technologies, to maintain, repair and deliver our platforms on contract and in the shipyards more quickly, cheaply, and effectively. We’re doing this in many ways… through enabling tools like shipboard additive manufacturing, 3D printing aboard our carriers and our big deck Amphibs. We’re doing this through machine learning and new artificial intelligence tools to help support conditions-based maintenance to free up our sailors for other, more important, tasking. And we’re doing this by using robotics, to quickly, accurately, and more cost-effectively assess the material condition of our seagoing platforms. These technologies help put and keep more players on the field. And this really only scratches the surface on how we’re using technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning to better support the fleet in lifecycle maintenance.
The second area we’re focusing on is expanding, extending, and bolstering the reach, the depth, and the lethality of our conventionally-manned fleet by exploring and integrating new, disruptive and emerging technologies… to include unmanned systems. I think unmanned systems have an enormous potential to multiply our combat power by complementing our existing fleet of ships, submarines and aircraft, through manned-unmanned teaming, especially in areas like maritime surveillance and reconnaissance, mine countermeasures operations, seabed exploration and carrier airwing support.
We’re building on the many successes that you’ve read about in 4th Fleet, 5th Fleet, and 7th Fleet. There are real world laboratories of learning to develop tactics, techniques and procedures and help us refine manned and unmanned command and control infrastructure. We’re also working actively to identify and get new technology into the hands of our warfighters quickly through our new Disruptive Capabilities Office, which reports directly to me and the Secretary of the Navy through our Vice Chief of Naval Operations, and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisitions.
And while there’s probably a lot of things that we can’t talk about here, make no mistake, the Navy is making its investments in these disruptive systems that will revolutionize our warfighting and provide us unmatched advantage in any future fight.
Third, we’re pursuing fleet-wide connectivity through Project Overmatch in a scalable, netted combat system, through the Integrated Combat System to effectively support Distributed Maritime Operations, and to achieve decision superiority and lethality at machine speed. Through Project Overmatch, we’re building a software defined network solution and modern software pipelines to provide as many pathways as possible to connect and share information.
This initiative is an effort to transmit any data over any network and is the connective tissue between today’s fleet and tomorrow’s emerging hybrid fleet. And using that connectivity, we’re working to evolve Aegis and the Ship Self Defense System into a single hardware-agnostic self-software suite… like the Integrated Combat System… that all ships can pull from to conduct missions alone or in a group. This system will enable a surface action group, a strike group and a fleet, or any combination of Integrated Combat System equipped ships to operate as a single, seamless system and become a true system of systems.
And finally, it’s important to remember that technology alone will not get us where we need to go. To quote Admiral Arleigh Burke, “the strength of any military organization lies in its combat power, which is in turn is the sum of two basic elements; its equipment, and its people. And so it goes for the Navy.”
In the end, it is all about our people, our warfighters our Navy’s true strategic advantage. We will build strong warfighting teams, recruiting and retaining talent from across the rich fabric of America, and providing them with world-class education and training.
We need warfighters who ruthlessly pursue warfighting excellence… who can deliver the advantage of autonomous and unmanned systems… who can operate and innovate alongside their systems… and who have the knowledge to deal with mission and navigation autonomy and can work across many domains.
So, lockstep with the experimentation and scaling of emerging and disruptive technologies, the Navy is ensuring our Sailors have the knowledge and skills to operate them through Live Virtual Constructive training, Ready Relevant Learning and the Fleet Learning Continuum. And lockstep with the increased demands for Sailors with expertise in autonomous and unmanned systems, the Navy is expanding its human force structure to adapt the prolific increase of these disruptive and emerging technologies.
We’re mapping individual talent, our best and brightest to the task. For example, it’s two junior officers, two lieutenants, that are now commanding two groups. Task Group 59.1, and Task Force Hopper, that conceptualize, test, and operationalize our newest and most consequential technologies. And we’re exploring the establishment of a new rating, a robotics rating, to build and develop a team for the next generation, a team who has the reps and sets in sensors, platform autonomy, and mission autonomy programs, and can provide input in machine learning feedback processes.
As we look to the future, it’s clear that our decisive decade demands the same unity of effort, the same sense of urgency and the same resolve shown by our leaders in the 1930s and the 1970s. So I’ll conclude this morning by leaving you all with six words… Warfighting, Warfighters, Foundation, All Ahead Flank.
To continue to be the Navy the nation needs, we’ve got to think, act, and operate differently. We need to use data to assess and measure our progress. We must integrate disruptive and emerging technologies, and we must unleash the creative power of the American sailor and of American industry.
The Navy is committed to working alongside industry, academia and our allies and partners to urgently resolve operationally relevant capability gaps and get more players on the field. So I ask that you bring your best every day. We need your ideas, your partnership, your investment, and most of all, your commitment to ensuring that our Navy remains the world’s preeminent fighting force.
As part of that commitment, I’d ask that you work to embody the Navy’s core value of courage. The courage to recognize the many challenges we face, the courage to lead differently, the courage to be transparent and collaborative, and the courage to take the time to solve issues the right way, the first time, in order to make the changes needed to enable our every success.
Engage every day, with renewed courage, energy and vigor. We must accelerate change now. To rise to the challenge of this increasingly competitive environment. The American people are counting on us to protect and defend our security and our way of life. The American people are counting on us to move with purpose and urgency. And the American people are counting on us to preserve the peace, respond in crisis, and win decisively in war. And with this amazing team that I see right here in front of me, I am confident that that is exactly what we will do. We are America’s warfighting navy. Thank you very much.
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Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti answers questions from the audience following her keynote address at WEST 2024 in San Diego, Feb. 13, 2024.
RADM Spicer: I want to hear about quality of life. We keep making promises to the sailors but what are the tangible things that CNO intends to implement to help sailors quality of life?
CNO: Well, thank you and as you know, I just talked about my warfighting priorities its warfighting, warfighters and foundation. You know, we can’t do what we need to do every day, without our Sailors without our DON civilians, and you know, of course, with their families…. they support everything we do. So we are really looking at this in terms of quality of service, which is a combination of the quality of work and the quality of life. And as we’ve heard from Sailors, and we’ve learned through some investigations of tragic situations that have occurred throughout our fleet, we’re taking a learning approach to put together a cross functional team that really looks across the whole spectrum of the Sailors life, work life, everything they need to do. And using the really challenging industrial area around Newport News shipbuilding as our first place where we’re looking hard at solving some of these challenges. It’s a little bit of a laboratory.
So some things that we’ve done there are to first get after the barracks, making sure that people can get off the ship, especially in an industrial environment, have a place to live, to recharge their batteries. So looking at the barracks… getting new furnishings, developing opportunities for them to have free Wi-Fi in their barracks, so they can use that and stay connected to their friends and family. That is one of our first initiatives that we’ve taken there. But it’s also other things… like we realized that they didn’t have access to high quality food, so finding opportunities for them to get that 24/7 in the shipyard… have a place to cook their own food within their barracks… some new initiatives of what they can have in their barracks rooms to be able to cook their own food safely. That’s just another one.
Parking is always a challenge. And it is one of those things that is just a detractor from being able to do your job effectively and efficiently. So getting more parking, getting more shuttles. Getting safety and security in the parking lot, so they feel safe in the parking lots. Those are some of the things we’re doing.
Another thing we learned there is that some of the challenges with access to medical care or mental health care, was it’s too far for the Sailors and we needed to bring it to them. So setting up opportunities that they could walk to within that industrial environment is really important. More broadly for the Navy now as we look to scale those things, we’ve hired additional mental health providers, we’re setting up Armed Forces Wellness Centers, so people can actually take care of body mind spirit all the time and help stay left of some of the challenges that they face.
The other part is always about leadership. Really encouraging our Chief Petty Officers, our First Class Petty Officers, leaders at all levels, division officers, to get out, connect with their people, and build those connections, and understand how we can better help them and serve them so they can then in turn serve the Navy.
RADM Spicer: Great. Wonderful. I’m going to change subjects on you here from warfighters to something you just talked about a little bit. The Navy is moving towards creating a hybrid manned-unmanned fleet. Last spring, Navy leaders told Defense News the service would spend the current five-year FYDP buying and testing prototypes, so the hybrid fleet could become a reality in 2029-2033. Do you think that’s a realistic timeline? And what steps will you take this year and in the coming years to close the gap between prototype operations and a truly operational hybrid fleet?
CNO: Yeah, thank you. And as I said, you know, the promise of unmanned is, is actually here, and you know, right at our doorstep, so I think this is a reasonable timeline. If you think about it in sort of a three, FYDP approach. The first FYDP we’re in right now, is this prototyping, experimenting, learning. I think the other part about unmanned, is that it’s not really unmanned. The actual platform may be unmanned, but we also need to set up all the infrastructure, all of the networks, everything that can enable the unmanned technology to actually work and the people that operate it. So in this first FYDP, those are some of the things that we’re learning and putting into place these enablers, then the next FYDP is the actual procurement of those unmanned platforms. And then I think by the third FYDP, there’ll be operating at speed and at scale, and I know we’re gonna see that.
Some of the things that we’re doing this year is really building on the work that’s already been done in Task Force 59, with our hybrid fleet out there. Then the work done in 4th Fleet, as they continue to operate unmanned technologies there and then the integrated battle problems that we’re seeing out in PACFLT, which has been very successful in teaching us all we can have a long transit and what is it that we need to do to be able to enable that to even be expanded in the next go round. So we have another battle problem coming up.
I think the other thing that’s really interesting is that every other head of Navy that I talk to, is also looking at unmanned technology. For many of them, its demographics, but other ones, they want to have better awareness of their situation around in their EEZs. And so there’s a lot of opportunity to partner with allies and partners in unmanned technology, whether it’s surface, undersea, or in the air. I think the other part about unmanned is we often focus on the surface side of it, but you know, we do have the Triton right now that’s already flying in Indo-Pacific. She’s going to be standing up her next detachment here in Sigonella pretty soon. And then the one after that will be in Bahrain. So a lot of good learning from that. And then in 2026 we will have the Stingray IOC, which is our airborne refueler off the aircraft carrier, which again is going to expand lethality and reach of our manned platform. So I think we’ve got a lot of really good work going on. I’m very excited about it.
RADM Spicer: So it’s great and you bring up a good point about yeah, there’s, you know, unmanned is not really unmanned. Right. But I think there’s a lot of work going on by a lot of folks out here in this audience today about the difference between unmanned and autonomous, right. So we’re trying to get into that autonomous region where it truly is unmanned. Great point.
CNO: Yeah, exactly. I’m looking forward to that as well.
RADM Spicer: Next question. Given your comments on more players on the field, and warfighters, how are you thinking about that in the context of recruiting and retention?
CNO: Okay, so I think, first of all, more players on the field, I could explain that just a little bit. Because sometimes I think folks just think about that in terms of numbers. So more players on the field is really the warfighting ecosystem that we’re looking at. Right? We need platforms to get, once we purchased, you know, on contract, get them out and get them delivered. We got to get the ones we have, you know, in and out of the shipyard on time, or the maintenance facility on time. We got to use what we have differently. We’ve got to be good stewards of what we already have. So it lasts a little bit longer. And of course, we need to integrate with allies and partners because that’s all more players.
That people side of the players is a people, the warfighters that we need to operate all of that stuff. You know, it’s interesting when I was talking with the strike group commander, Admiral Miguez out in fifth fleet right now, and there are a lot of reenlistment contracts, you know, coming across everybody’s desk out there because Sailors really like to do their job. And retention is, you know, actually very high right now. We recognize that we need to retain one Sailor at a time. So all of those quality of service initiatives I’m talking about, plus some other initiatives for billet-based advancement, a little bit more choice and what they get to do. Those are some things we’re looking at.
The hardest one of course, is the one that you mentioned, first, which is recruiting. And you know, I think recruiting sometimes the Navy has a challenge with recruiting because people don’t necessarily always see what we do. One of my Canadian counterparts calls it sea blindness. If you don’t live on a coast or you don’t live near a Navy base, you don’t know someone who’s in the Navy, you don’t know anything about the Navy and so you might be less propensed to just to sign up and go see the Navy, so part of it is getting our story out there. That’s really important.
We just about by the end of this year, we’ll have finished filling out our recruiting stations, we had taken some risk in manning those, unfortunately, right around the same time as the pandemic. So even when that lifted up, we didn’t have time. We didn’t have a way to get people back out and talking about our Navy and our mission. I’ve charged our new class of one stars to get out and talk to three non-traditional audiences. And I would encourage everyone here to talk to some non-traditional audiences about what it is the Navy does, because again, I think it’s just connecting people to our Navy story. And they can understand – young people can understand how the Navy can accelerate their life, how it can give them a skill whether they stay for six years or 38 years like me.
I joined for free college, I planned on being here for four years. I’m still here 38 years later because of the mission, because of the great teams that I got to work with… and I got to see 43 countries so far, you know, and counting. In the recruiting, it’s also not only uniform recruiting, which I should probably just offer, that I think it’s a little bit broader of a call to service for our nation. So getting out and talking to influencers, coaches, teachers, you know, people who can talk about the value of serving something greater than yourself is really important, because I when I go out and talk to industry, there are many challenges out there with workforce, workforce development, workforce retention. Again, I think it’s a parallel to exactly what we’re seeing in the Navy and across the military services.
RADM Spicer: The next question here, how does NAVSEAs mission and ship maintenance at large support the foundation pillar in your America’s warfighting Navy priorities?
CNO: NAVSEA is an incredibly important organization and there’s 80,000 civilians that work at NAVSEA, and every single one of them contributes in some way to getting more players on the field. Specifically on the maintenance one. NAVSEA is playing a really critical role in establishing some very firm guidelines on how we’re going to plan and execute shipyard maintenance, and I think this is going to have a significant impact on us. You know, getting our platforms in and out of maintenance on time.
You may even remember from your day, you know in the Navy, where you had to lock in your work package, 120 days out, so you could plan all the work, you could get all the materials you could get everything purchased and then your platform could go through. We really are setting a firm foundation for that. And again, NAVSEA is working very hard in our public shipyards to make sure that we have all the tools, the resources, the processes in place to try to capture all that good learning and moving it on from one ship to the next because often times there’ll be growth work that we could have anticipated, things we know we needed to do. And then you get a delay in your shipyard period. That is not getting more players on the field. So we’ve got to be very proactive. And we’ve got to invest ahead of time to make sure that we have the parts and materials work package done. So we can get that done quickly. And NAVSEA is critical to everything we’re trying to do to getting more players on the field whether it’s getting the new ones or getting the old ones in and out of maintenance on time.
RADM Spicer: All right. This is the last question that we have time for another long one. China’s current shipbuilding capacity is 232 times that of the United States. And they’ll have some 475 battleships by 2035. I think maybe 475 combatants maybe not battleships compared to maybe 310 for the U.S. How do you respond to criticism that the U.S. Navy is doubling down on the strategy of pumping up ageing shipyards rather than fully embracing unmanned vessels? That can be produced in far greater, far greater numbers far faster? Want me to repeat the question now?
CNO: No, I got the question. You know, my first comment is that it’s clear that we do need a larger Navy. So you know, we and every study that has been done, and the sense of the Congress that we need 355 ships, you know, including 31 amphibious ships, and our battle force structure assessment reports, they all show that we do need to have a larger Navy. As you look at last year, with our mission, being updated by Congress to reflect the fact that we needed to provide for the prompt combat sustained operations incidents at sea, but we also need to provide for the nation’s peacetime security demands. So we need a bigger Navy to be able to do those things. But, the numbers, when you just talk about the numbers of China, China’s ships and the numbers that they’re producing, I look at our Navy as part of a broader warfighting ecosystem. It’s not about numbers. It’s about how you put it all together. It’s platforms on, under, and above the sea. It’s the networks that enable them. It’s cyber. It’s our work in space. It’s work with all the joint force. They are incredible force multipliers. If you look at some of the things, that all of our sister services are doing to get after this challenge of China, and you put all that pieces together, we are the dominant combat warfighting force.
RADM Spicer: allies and partners as well.
CNO: Allies and partners right in there.
RADM Spicer: Okay, CNO, we so appreciate you taking the time to be with us this morning to kick off WEST 2024.
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