Introduction

Thank you, everyone for joining us today for this truly seminal moment in the history of our Navy. Rearm at sea is one of my top priorities that I’ve been urgently pursuing over the past two years to make our current fleet more formidable.

Without the ability to rearm at sea, our surface combatants must return to port—sometimes thousands of miles away—to replenish their magazines.

 The ability to rearm at sea will be critical to any future conflict in the Pacific or elsewhere.  Our surface combatants’ exemplary performance in the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean over the past year only further reinforces the tremendous value TRAM will bring the Fleet.

 But since the advent of the vertical launch system for our guided missile surface combatants, a true at-sea rearming capability for the main batteries of our cruisers and destroyers has eluded us.

Until now.

Today, I was proud to bear witness to the first at-sea use of the Transportable Re-Arming Mechanism (TRAM), which leverages our Navy’s time-proven Connected Underway Replenishment system to provide our surface combatants with a game-changing capability to reload their Vertical Launch Systems while underway in open ocean.

Testing this week at sea aboard USS CHOSIN and USNS WASHINGTON CHAMBERS was a complete success, including successful TRAM Connected Underway Replenishment operations in Sea State 4.

I am incredibly proud of the team for their efforts to meet the aggressive timeline that I set to field TRAM across the fleet—beginning with the shore based demonstration earlier this year, and continuing with the at-sea test this week.

Once TRAM is fully fielded, our surface combatants will be able to keep the sea continuously while pounding any adversary with an overwhelming tempo and volume of long range strikes.

By enabling our combatants to refill their magazines underway, TRAM offers us a powerful near-term deterrent that will disrupt the strategic calculus of those who would do us harm.

By investing in innovations like TRAM, we are ensuring that the United States remains the world's preeminent maritime power.

The challenges we face in the world today are significant, but so too are our capabilities and our resolve.

Thank you to the engineers at NAVSEA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab who made today happen, the crews of CHOSIN and WASHINGTON CHAMBERS who just conducted the first at-sea test of a truly game-changing capability, and to everyone else who had a part in the test today.

 And thanks to all of you, again, for joining us today.

Now, we’ll open it up for questions. What questions do you have for me?