Source: United States Navy
Buenos días. Good morning. Hello, heads of Navy. It is so wonderful to be here and an honor to be back here in beautiful Rio de Janeiro.
Obrigada, Admiral Olsen and his team – your entire team – for hosting this extraordinary gathering, the 31st Inter-American Naval Conference. This has been so crucial to strengthening our bonds of friendship, collaboration, and partnership for more than half a century.
You know, it is really great to be here among friends who are all united by our shared values, our shared geography, and our shared stake in the continued stability, security, and prosperity of the Western Hemisphere and our world.
This year’s theme could not be more relevant or more important to the United States, this hemisphere, and the global community. I know that all of the navies represented here understand well that these are very turbulent times, and we’ve been talking about that through your presentations today. We understand that the international system that has provided security and stability for over three-quarters of a century is under threat in every ocean.
We’ve all scanned the horizon, and we see the forces that are making our world and our hemisphere more unstable and more dangerous. We’ve all experienced the devastation of natural disasters, which have been intensified by a changing climate: flooding, fires, droughts, cyclones, landslides, and rising seas. And we’ve all witnessed the impact of illegal, unregulated, unreported fishing, and transnational crime – drugs, weapons, human trafficking – and the impact this has on our societies and on our populations.
And as I take in this changing environment, I know that my Navy must take action to get ahead of the changing character of the work and the additional challenges we are all facing in ship construction, maintenance, challenges we’re facing in recruiting and maintaining our infrastructure, all while acknowledging – in my case – the industrial and budgetary constraints that complicate my Navy’s ability to get after these challenges.
We see advancements in battlefield innovation; like we were just talking about, the profound implications for the changing character of war. We see cheaper, more accessible technology is pushing asymmetric capabilities at a lower cost to state and nonstate actors alike.
Over the past two years, as we’ve all seen, the Ukrainian navy has used a combination of missiles, robotic service vessels, and agile digital capabilities to deny the Russian navy the use of the western Black Sea and to threaten Russia’s supply lines to its occupying forces in Crimea. And Houthi forces, equipped by Iran and emboldened by Hamas’ horrific attack on Israel nearly a year ago, have repeatedly targeted innocent merchant shipping along a key maritime chokepoint and created (vast/mass effects ?) through a mix of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones against the United States Navy and all of the partner navies that are serving in that part of the world today.
We’ve all learned a lot about the future of war at sea, including the role – as we were just talking about – of robotic platforms, of proliferated weapons, and disaggregated forces in gaining and exploiting the sea.
In this increasingly turbulent and unpredictable world, security through partnership is critical because no one navy, no single nation can handle all of these challenges alone, and because all of our safety, security, and prosperity are tied to the seas. And as I’ve seen in the briefings we’ve had here already this week, all of our navies are right there on the front lines – right there on the maritime front lines every single day with more tasks than resources that we often have available.
So I think it’s really important that we, the global maritime community, work together to align our efforts in a way that can benefit us all. And we need to do this thoughtfully, deliberately, and collectively.
So whether you are charged by your nation with countering drug trafficking, human smuggling, illicit weapons transfers, IUU fishing, piracy, policing your territorial waters, delivering humanitarian aid and assistance to people in need, assisting mariners at sea, escorting cargo transports/tankers, or you’re deploying your forces all around the world, I believe that each nation here is the vital link in the chain of our maritime security network.
You will have no stronger partner in this endeavor than the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps team, who will work with you tirelessly to find common ground and common cause to address our common challenges. And you will have no more committed teammate than me, because I strongly believe that friendship is strength; and that allies and partners collectively, we are each other’s true strategic weapon. Together, we can collaborate and build a unifying framework where there is no south, no north, no east, no west, but really just a coalition of countries who participate in and engage on matters of common interest to promote continued stability in this hemisphere and beyond.
As I look ahead, I really see us doing this as part of what I call a warfighting ecosystem. It’s a concept that I introduced last week when I talked about my Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy. It’s my overarching strategic guidance that will make my Navy more ready for potential conflict across all time horizons, across the spectrum of operations both today and in the future.
As the Chief of Naval Operations, I’m compelled to do more and to do more faster to ensure that our Navy is more ready despite all these challenges, despite the changing security environment, the changing character of war, and our own industrial base challenges. I can’t stand still as we work to secure the long-term investments we need for our Navy to grow our work.
My Navigation Plan will raise America’s Navy’s baseline level of readiness and put more players on the field. Players are things like platforms that are ready with their requisite capabilities, weapons, and sustainment; and the people that are ready with the right mindset, the right tools, skills, training, and the relationships.
We will be doing that by, first, implementing Project 33, seven key areas that my Navy needs to accelerate. And they’re areas where I will put my personal time, my personal attention, and my resources, and really put my thumb on the scale to urgently move the needle. It is a reference to my place as the 33rd Chief of Naval Operations in a continuum of naval leaders past, present, and future.
Second, by expanding my Navy’s contribution to the warfighting ecosystem. Where every country has a seat at the table and a role to play no matter the size of their forces or the extent of their capabilities, we can come together to counter our share of the challenges.
So I’ll talk to you just a little bit about this ecosystem. I think it’s probably better explained as a global security ecosystem. We saw a little preview of this as we were just talking about – in the presentation on Orion (ph). It’s another version of an ecosystem. It’s where participants can plug in and contribute their capabilities, their information, their logistics, their people, their maritime domain awareness; and create compounding, outsized effects in service of an open, safe, and stable maritime domain. It is a system in which the layered capabilities of each of our navies, coast guards, marine corps, marine maritime police forces, and interagency partners enable and then are enabled by each other.
And in this area of operations, in the Western Hemisphere and its adjacent seas – an area that is critical to global security and stability – I believe there are some key opportunities where we can collaborate and cooperate to expand our collective contribution to this ecosystem. And this is a great place to have these conversations, at this kind of conference.
So let me just highlight a few of them today.
I think the first opportunity is about building interoperability and accelerating our naval integration to work more seamlessly together. In order to support our mutual requirements, we can work together coherently, effectively, and efficiently to achieve our tactical, then our operational, and then our strategic objectives. We can do this through education, exchanges, through our officers and our enlisted leaders, whether it’s in the United States – maybe at the Naval Academy, the War College, Navy Postgraduate School – or in the many programs that you offer to us and to each other across the hemisphere. Through these exchanges, we can plant the seeds to grow our long-term relationships, create long-term shared understanding, and develop approaches to address the common challenges we face.
And we can build that interoperability through exercises. We’re coming off a great year of many, many exercises. And earlier this year we conducted the 29th Rim of the Pacific exercise with 29 nations, 25,000 people from across the Pacific Ocean, Europe and all around.
In August, our Navy supported the 10th Southern Seas deployment, and the third with the Aircraft Carrier Strike Group George Washington, conducting at-sea operations and building our collective operational planning capability. One of the ways we did that this year was through the deployment’s first-ever embarked international staff made up of 29 maritime officers from your navies and your coast guards. And I want to thank you for that support. Together, our staffs briefed, planned, and executed 35 bilateral and multinational exercises, further strengthening our interoperability and our enduring partnerships.
In August, as well, our navies conducted the latest iteration of Continuing Promise, 2024, growing our collective capability to provide health and veterinary care, execute professional military exchanges, conduct construction projects, and enhance our collective disaster relief preparedness and ability to cooperate in the face of a crisis.
Two weeks ago, our navies wrapped up – and thank you to all of you for participating in a highly successful UNITAS, the most recent in the longest-running multinational maritime exercise in the entire world. It was at a meeting like this, at the first Inter-American Naval Conference in 1959, that UNITAS which conceptualized, agreed upon, and brought to life.
This year, for the first time ever, our navies conducted that exercise at the operational level, executing full maritime operation center processes to synchronize efforts across all domains, including cyber. And as you may have seen better resourced in my NAVPLAN, I talk a little bit about the importance of a maritime operation center. Resourcing our MOCs is a critical part of my plan and a critical part of integrating with each of you, linking our commanders to the wide range of sensors and platforms that are distributed across the seas.
You know, if you step back and you think about everything that has happened in our world since that Inter-American Naval Conference back in 1959, each of us here has remained committed to our UNITAS exercise, knowing well it is part of our maritime heritage. It is part of our critical, sharing partnership. And so, as the United States look forward to hosting UNITAS in 2025 in Mayport and participating in future exercises, I know we will continue to build our collective interoperability.
I think our second opportunity is continuing to deepen our cooperation with maritime law enforcement and by aligning our authorities to help counter transnational organized crime. Everyone today, as – (inaudible) – just talked about, is challenged. And I think by synchronizing our efforts with our authorities, we can accelerate our progress against the forces that are working hard to destabilize our region.
We’ve seen success in this with the Joint Interagency Task Force South, where the United States, alongside many allies and partners, as well as interagency partners, has been able to interdict vessels carrying drugs and other contraband. And right now, as part of Campaign Martillo, our navies are working together to deny transnational criminal organizations the ability to use regional sea lines of communication for the movement of these illicit goods.
And then, finally, I’ll pick up where I left off in our previous discussion. I think the third opportunity is to enhance our collaboration on robotic and autonomous systems to help especially improve our maritime domain awareness. As I said earlier, we can use these technologies to do things that are dirty. We can free up our sailors to do the things that only they can do.
So whether it’s tasks that are dirty – I think about, many of you who have been at sea, cleaning a bilge. That would be great to have technology to do that and not our sailors.
To do the things that are dangerous. Many of us have worked with technologies to defuse mines and destroy mines. Where else can we have autonomous robotic technology do the things that are dangerous?
And things that are dull. This is going on a patrol for weeks on end and maybe never even seeing one of the things that we’re looking for. But can we do that through a robotic and autonomous platform on the sea, above the sea, under the sea, and then free up our people to go and see what is that anomalous behavior that an autonomous platform has detected in a pattern of life?
Again, we can free up our people to use their talents and use their creativity for the things that only they can do. And I think that we could partner together to leverage our respective innovation bases and invest in some of those advanced technologies and prototypes to ensure that our – we have this advantage today and we have it in the future.
Integrating robotic autonomous systems into our daily business of operations is a key part of my Navigation Plan. I think it is an area of great opportunity. And I’m going to invest my time and resources to help, again, raise that baseline level of integration and the baseline level of readiness of our fleet by expanding, extending, and bolstering the reach and resilience, as well as potentially the lethality, of our conventionally manned fleet by integrating unmanned technologies.
We’re already seeing the positive effects of these systems across our force and with allies and partners through the Fleet Experimentation series – or called FLEX series – that’s been sponsored by NAVSOUTH for the last several years. In fact, today, in the Hybrid Fleet Campaign Event in Key West, Florida, there are sailors in companies from across our navies. They are working together to operationalize new capabilities, to enhance maritime domain awareness, and to detect and monitor illicit trafficking – again, working towards a more stable future for our hemisphere.
So, fellow leaders, this week we have an opportunity to discuss our shared challenges and chart our course to increase the resilience of our forces, to strengthen security, and promote prosperity as partners, building on our already very sound foundation. Each of you here has an important role and provides valued expertise in this ecosystem that I believe is critical to tackling our common values. Together, we can ensure the security and stability of our region while working to ensure that our shared values, our cultures, and our way of life can be shared by generations to come.
So I thank you all very much for the opportunity and the honor to be with you today, and I hope we can do this next year at Mayport for UNITAS. I also invite you to come to our International Seapower Symposium, which will be next October in Newport, Rhode Island, and then help me celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. I know that’s young for some of the other navies here, but 250 for us. We’ll be celebrating that birthday also in October, in Philadelphia. And I look forward to seeing you at those events if I don’t see you before. Thanks very much. Again, it’s an honor to be with all of you today.