Good morning, everyone and welcome!

I’m absolutely thrilled to be here with you.

Let me start by saying thank you to Dave Hart for putting together another exciting breakfast.

My thanks to all of you as well, for making the time to be here and thanks for your flexibility.

You know, it’s been almost a year since I last saw this group. A lot has changed in that time. New Administration, new Navy Leadership, new geopolitical environment, and new threats.

Let me be clear in the six months I’ve been CNO, I can say with absolute confidence that our Navy continues to remain the most formidable fighting force in the world.

Dave and I had initially planned this breakfast earlier in the new year, but to facilitate a more productive dialogue, I decided to push our breakfast to align with the release of the Navy’s newest strategic guidance the U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions.

The Fighting Instructions are a conceptual framework for modern warfare focused on delivering homeland defense, sustaining our global network of deterrence, and preserving our national prosperity.

They outline which investments matter most, the asymmetric capabilities we need to forge, and the requisite levels of mastery that will enable our Sailors to win across the spectrum.

So, this morning, I wanted to share with you more about my vision and get you up to speed on the Fighting Instructions.

But, most importantly, I want to hear from you.

In my experience, it’s important that our active and retired Flag wardroom remains lockstep and aligned with the direction of the Navy.

Many of these challenges have likely manifested themselves in one way or another throughout your time in service.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts at the end.

With that, let’s get into it.

In September, I released my priorities of Foundry, Fleet, and Fight.

At the center of these priorities are our people, the total force – our enduring competitive advantage and heartbeat of our world-class Navy.

Every policy we produce, every change we implement, and every strategy our Navy employs revolves around our people.

They are the ultimate link within every kill-chain, which guides everything we do and serve as the bedrock of my guidance.

Underpinned by the Foundry, the Fleet, and the way we Fight the United States Navy Fighting Instructions are broken down into three critical pieces:

Defining our Navy’s differentiated value the answer to why our Navy matters.

The implementation of a full-spectrum Hedge Strategy to ensure our differentiated value is sustained and operationalized.

An Enhanced Mission Command Framework defining how we command forward.

And the delivery of two service concepts: the Navy Warfighting Concept and new Navy Deterrence Concept.

As I was thinking about the message that I wanted to convey through the Fighting Instructions, it was important for me to take a step back and understand what services and capabilities our Navy uniquely provides and to which stakeholders.

As CNO, I have a lot of jobs, but perhaps at the top of the list is the need to communicate the value proposition of why our Navy matters to the Joint Force and to the Nation.

I believe that idea shapes the core of any organizational strategy, which comes down to defining, highlighting, and conveying our differentiated value.

Strategy documents can take many forms from traditional ends, ways, and means constructs to vision roadmaps, but they can also highlight the core attributes of an organization’s differentiated value those values, capabilities, skills, and deliverables that no one else can provide and then accelerating, amplifying, and leveraging them to uniquely create world-class outcomes.

So, what is our differentiated value?

From the perspective of the American people:

We assure homeland defense.

We keep sea lines of communication open, delivering global stability and deterrence around the globe.

And we enable the free flow of commerce that serves as the lifeblood of our nation.

While we’ve garnered a reputation as America’s Away Team, we are unequivocally America’s Home Team too.

If you look at the geographic size of the United States, it simply dwarfs most of our other allied nations.

We have 7,500 miles of interior borders that the U.S. shares and almost double that in shoreline, 13,000 miles to be precise.

And, if you factor in our economic exclusive zones, that figure grows to a whopping 4.5 million square miles to patrol, protect, and defend.

So, our Navy plays a lot bigger role in the everyday lives of the American people, our most important constituents than the average American would think.

Our Navy has some work to do in communicating that understanding and how we integrate into and deliver the outcomes of the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy.

This is something that each of you are well equipped to do within your own spheres of influence.

We need to advocate and share our Navy message with the Nation.

From the Joint Force’s perspective, we provide seven indispensably unique missions.

We deliver sea control and sea denial. When the Joint Force needs to fight, we pave the way.

We deliver maritime security. When national sovereignty and prosperity are threatened, we respond.

We deliver tailored and combat-credible deterrence. Our global force laydown provides the ideal mix of lethality, mobility, and independence.

We deliver global replenishment across contested environments. No matter the scenario, we can resupply, rearm, refuel, repair, and revive the joint fight.

We deliver freedom of maneuver, providing extraordinary agility to confound detection and targeting.

And we deliver power projection over the horizon with precision and mass undersea, on the surface, and from the air.

This past year alone, the differentiated value of our Navy has been on full display.

Operation Absolute Resolve. While this was executed primarily by the Army Special Forces, the Navy had an outsized role to play allowing SOF teams to insert swiftly, seize decisively, and recover expeditiously from our platforms postured out at sea under the umbrella of our defensive air combat patrols.

Operation Midnight Hammer. Participating alongside more than 125 aircraft and a full array of intelligence assets across the Joint Force just one Navy SSGN launched more than two dozen TLAMs, aiding in the destruction of three Iranian nuclear facilities.

Operation Rough Rider. The Harry S. Truman and Carl Vinson CSGs expended millions of pounds of ordnance against Houthi strongholds in Yemen.

And Operation Southern Spear. In the Gulf of America and Caribbean, naval forces have surged to the NORTH and SOUTHCOM AORs alongside our Coast Guard teammates disrupting illicit drug trafficking while preserving the integrity of our Southern Border.

No other Navy, no other joint or combined force in the world could offer the same level of mobility and expeditionary capabilities that made those missions a success.

And no matter the scenario, our Navy’s differentiated value the unique set of skills we provide to our Nation and Joint Force allows us to be in any hemisphere, full-up round and ready to go, in a matter of days.

It ensures that our resources are prioritized and executed to never lose the “special sauce” that our differentiated value provides.

Once you understand why our Navy matters and to who only then can you define what our Navy must deliver.

That’s where the Fighting Instructions take shape by and through a full-spectrum Hedge Strategy.

In its most rudimentary form, the Hedge Strategy accepts fiscal, industrial, and operational realities as planning assumptions.

It balances cost-effective, scalable, risk-worthy mass with the most advanced multi-mission platforms we can build and sustain while taking stock in the likelihood of pacing scenarios and the severity of risk that’s attached.

When you consider the unique capabilities our Navy already provides, you’ll notice hedges are prevalent in almost everything we do.

Our Special Forces and Special Operators are our Nation’s hedge against low intensity and irregular warfare threats.

Our Ballistic Missile Submarines and E-6B Mercuries are our hedge against nuclear conflict and strategic attack.

And when crisis erupts or conflict breaks out, the Navy is the Joint Force’s ultimate hedge able to move fast, stay forward, and deliver sovereign options from the sea.

So, Hedge Strategy is a means of thoughtfully bringing the full weight of our maritime and joint forces to bear, optimally providing relevant capabilities for every situation, while ensuring the credibility and efficacy of our differentiated value persists.

What Hedge Strategy avoids is a brittle, single-purpose force that is either over-built for the high-end fight and under-used day-to-day or optimized for low end crisis and overmatched when it counts.

This isn’t a one size fits all approach.

By design, the Hedge Strategy is intended to be a force multiplier to our general-purpose forces working in concert with the Sailors and platforms of our traditionally manned fleet.

But the challenge becomes determining where to snap the chalk line, how much of each force element is truly enough.

That is what Hedge Strategy aims to do. It helps me design the force. It buys down risk in some areas, shifts risk to others but in the end it unabashedly embraces risk to tip the scales in our advantage.

To achieve this end, we must field ready capabilities Tailored Forces and Tailored Offsets to address specific situations that are too consequential to ignore, but too unlikely to drive overall fleet design.

Tailored Forces are the composite packaging of Tailored Offsets certified to address specific missions in particular regions.

They include general purpose units from the main battle force submarines, combatants, and aircraft for deployment and C2.

Whether it’s conducting anti-submarine warfare in the North Atlantic, clandestine mine warfare across critical chokepoints, or supporting fires off the coasts of foreign shores Tailored Forces with tailored certifications will allow our Navy to hedge against the likelihood of any threat without constraining our force design around a single pressing scenario.

Tailored Offsets are systems and platforms that are easiest to adapt and combine.

They’re capabilities like:

Attritable and easily replenishable USVs.

MUSVs for scouting, screening, striking.

UUVs for water space denial, survey, and mine warfare.

And low-cost, high-volume interceptors for counter drone defense.

Together, these tailored capabilities will amplify and complement the main battle force through lethal outputs that are scalable, deployable, adaptable, and cost-effective.

It’s in this effort where I see this Wardroom, alongside our industry partners, having an outsized role to play moving fast, iterating aggressively, and helping us scale these packages at speed.

In the same vein, large surface combatants and main battle forces aren’t going away.

Working together in concert, every tailored capability and every Navy platform will be enabled by and enablers to each other.

Once again, Hedge Strategy is where you come into play advocating for, encouraging, and spurring conversations amongst your own networks so our Navy can most fast, iterate aggressively, and scale and certify these packages at flank speed.

Now let me shift to the question that ties all of this together: How do we command and control the fight?

In the next conflict, our warfighting ecosystem will be tested under pressure, at speed, and under fire.

Communications will be disrupted. Space and cyber will be under attack. The enemy will try to fracture our kill chains, slow our decisions, and isolate our forces.

We can’t afford a Navy that waits for permission.

The only way to fight effectively is to ensure that every force element at every level can sense, synthesize, decide, and act fast enough with confidence to achieve Commander’s Intent.

That’s why, to fight at the timing, tempo, and synchronization demanded by the Hedge Strategy, the Navy will implement an Enhanced Mission Command Framework.

Each of you intimately understand the value of mission command. It can’t be something we fall back on when networks fail.

Inspired by the holacracy concept, we will build a Fleet that operates through empowered, self-organizing teams commanders who understand the mission, own the intent, and act with disciplined initiative.

Enhanced Mission Command gives us a clear way to delegate decision authority across the force matching autonomy to capability, and authority to the demands of the tactical situation.

In order to hedge appropriately, this strategy must be guided by authoritative naval concepts.

I recently signed into action a Navy Warfighting Concept. It tells commanders how we intend to fight, where we will accept risk, and where we will not.

But if you look at the global disposition of our forces, although warfighting is what we are designed to do, it accounts for only a fraction of our day-to-day operations.

We have the Navy Warfighting Concept, which defines what and how we fight but importantly, we need a Navy Deterrence Concept that defines who and how we deter.

The Navy Deterrence Concept will explicitly define who we’re deterring and from what specifically we’re preventing them from doing.

It will help us decide where to posture forces, what they should do to shape behavior, and how we need to tune the intelligence community for the feedback necessary to assess our activities.

The bottom line is this, the Navy Deterrence Concept is my way of formalizing a deterrence kill chain, defining an operational approach to escalation dominance, and codifying it into doctrine.

So that’s where our Navy is heading and while it may seem far removed to your day-to-day activities each of you fits squarely into this vision.

The Fighting Instructions lay out the track for us to ruthlessly deliver for our Nation, the Joint Force, and most importantly, for our Sailors.

Because that’s what this is all about providing our Sailors – our greatest competitive advantage – with new ways to think about our challenges, leverage asymmetric advantages, and sharpen their cognitive expertise so they can fight and win into an uncertain future.

But our Navy can’t accomplish this alone. Whether it’s our global network of allies and partners, joint force teammates, or industrial base vendors many of which you are representing today everyone of us has a critical part to play.

The Fighting Instructions aren’t just guidance for the Fleet and a roadmap for our Sailors they’re my way of providing clear headlights to our industrial partners about the capabilities we must forge, scale, and sustain and to the Fleet Commanders, who must develop and adapt the doctrine and process changes necessary to deliver our Navy most effectively to achieve our desired objectives.

Again, thank you for inviting me to engage this critical group of leaders. I look forward to hearing your questions.

Thank you.