Good morning, everyone. President Rondeau, distinguished faculty, staff, especially CAPT Eric Skalski, Dean of Students and my former shipmate, families and friends, and most importantly—graduates—it’s an absolute honor to stand here with you today.

Your 2025 Summer quarter graduating class includes 233 graduates, earning a total of 235 degrees ‐ 4 doctoral degrees, 229 master’s degrees, with 121 distance learning students, and 40 who also completed Joint Professional Military Education (JPME).

Congratulations on this impressive accomplishment for this class. My name is Rear Admiral Mike Mattis, Commander of Task Force 166 at Naval Forces Europe and Africa and Commander of Task Force 66 at U.S. SIXTH Fleet. Before I tell you about these Commands and what we do, let me first acknowledge the importance of relationships in your careers and give you an example of how tightknit our Navy, Joint and coalition military experiences and relationships really are across the course of our careers.

I first met Admiral Rondeau when she was a Commander serving as a Battalion Officer at the US Naval Academy and I was a young Midshipman. Then, as now, I can assure you she was driven, committed to upholding the highest standards, and deeply invested in the growth of the people in her charge.

Some 30+ years later in the late summer of 2023, I was working to stand up CTF-66 in Naples, Italy, to help the US Navy better support Ukraine in the maritime fight against Russia in the Black Sea. CAPT Skalski was running what was then called Task Force Poseidon working this problem set for the SIXTH Fleet Commander and he was going to be my Deputy Commander when we got CTF-66 up and running. The whole point of standing up CTF-66 was that the Navy recognized that we were under‐responding to the challenge of supporting Ukraine in the maritime environment, failing to innovate fast enough to keep up with the rapidly changing character of war and missing opportunities to learn some important lessons from what we would eventually call the “Black Sea Battle Lab.”

CAPT Skalski and I recognized that we needed to refocus the team’s efforts and despite having to stand up the commands with few initial resources, we had to find a better way to maintain our extraordinary operations tempo, develop and provide Security Assistance in the form of maritime armaments and equipment, as well as training and intelligence to our Ukrainian partners. Given our constrained resources in terms of people and money and recognizing that we needed to be more innovative in our approach to providing Ukrainian maritime security assistance, we reached out to the Naval Postgraduate School for help, finding willing support from Admiral Rondeau and the institution.

This help took many forms, but it included imbedding liaisons within our team in Naples, linking our capabilities development process with the newly emerging Naval Innovation Center to ensure we had innovation at the heart of our efforts to build and deliver kit to our Ukrainian partners, forming technical support teams that included faculty and students who would help us focus on key operational problems, and ensuring that lessons of the changing character of war observed in the “Black Sea Battle Lab” were documented and shared across the Navy, connecting the Fleets, and in particular NAVEUR and PACFLT, so that the lessons from a conflict in Europe might inform our readiness for a fight in the Pacific.

It is no coincidence that CAPT Skalski is now here at NPS as through these interactions he formed a bond with this institution. And neither is it a coincidence that I am here as your graduation on speaker, as I will spend much time later today reviewing the outstanding work NPS has produced to support my commands at CTF-166 and CTF-66. This goes to my points about relationships and the very small military community that we all participate in across the span of our long careers.

On this, your graduation day, it is the perfect opportunity for you to reflect on the deep relationships developed during your studies here at NPS. You have interacted with people from other services and nations across the Joint Force and our Allies and partners. In fact, 67 of you are U.S. Navy, 34 U.S. Marine Corps; 6 U.S. Army; 12 U.S. Air Force; 95 are civilians; and 19 are international graduates representing countries. Don’t be surprised when, in the future, you run into each other in the Fleet, the Joint Force, or one of our many Allied and coalition partner organizations. You will be called upon by a fellow NPS classmate or graduate to help on problem, dig in to find a novel solution, or enable the Joint Force, or our Allies and partners to deliver capabilities when and where needed for a future fight. This is perhaps the greatest legacy of your NPS experience – these deep and enduring relationships and networks formed here in Monterey that will continue to serve you throughout the rest of your careers.

You will need these relationships to help navigate the complex world and demanding service that you are returning to as you leave NPS. I had the privilege last month to be called on by ADM Caudle, our Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), to work as part of his transition team as he prepared to take over as CNO. You have already heard some things from him in the past few weeks in his “C‐notes” and there will be a lot more coming. But let me preview a few things I expect he will unveil as his tenure as CNO unfolds that speak to the increasing complexity of our future warfighting environment and the challenges you will face as leaders.

ADM Caudle thinks about the U.S. Navy in terms of what he calls the Foundry, Fleet and its ability to Fight. He is also closely aligned with Secretary Hegseth on restoring deterrence. ADM Caudle doesn’t believe the U.S. Navy with our “General‐Purpose Force,” our Fleet, or more specifically, our conventional capabilities (Carrier Strike Groups and Amphibious Ready Groups) have effectively deterred our peer and near peer adversaries over the last 15 years in the maritime.

If you look at the Chinese encroachment into other nations’ territorial rights in the Pacific or Russia’s illicit seizure of Crimea in the Black Sea or shadow fleet operations globally, U.S. and Allied Naval deployments have done little to dissuade the adversary of their malicious behaviors. You will likely see CNO direct the development a Naval Deterrence Concept or Strategy on his watch. What it will likely show is that, while our Naval Nuclear Forces do provide Nuclear Deterrence, the difficulty of maintaining readiness and the challenges of growing the General‐Purpose Force limit our ability to deter in the maritime.

You will see in this emerging Naval Deterrence Strategy the concepts of “Hedge Capabilities” and “Hedge Forces” that are needed to restore maritime deterrence. “Hedge capabilities” are things that make us more efficient and effective in generating lethality and survivability of the General‐Purpose Force in a future conflict like Long Range Fires, “Fight from the MOC,” and Counter‐C5ISRT capabilities.

“Hedge Forces” are platforms that are low in cost for affordability, high in numbers to be able to generate mass; they must be quickly developed and iterated to meet dynamic objectives; they must be forward deployed and be able to be quickly reconstituted. And finally, they are needed in key regions of the world where the restoral of deterrence is required – think of areas across the globe where we have difficulty generating mass capabilities far forward into areas where our adversaries are trying to make it difficult for us to operate – say the Baltic Sea or inside the First Island Chain in the Pacific.

These “Hedge Forces” will likely be composed of new and emerging “Robotic and Autonomous Systems” or “RAS” platforms linked with other “Hedge capabilities” that can augment the General‐Purpose Force to provide additional lethality, survivability and magazine depth. What is so fascinating about this approach to restoring deterrence is that it is almost entirely depended upon innovation, adaptation and adoption of new technology. Because of the need for “Hedge Forces” to be low cost and high in numbers that can be quickly developed and iterated, it means we have to be able to rapidly sense the changing character of war and be able to adjust to it in terms of “ac on‐reaction‐counter‐action” adaptation cycles similar to what we saw with “Improvised Explosive Devices” (IEDs) through 20 years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There will be no perfect capability or tactic, technique or procedure (TTP), only innovation of capabilities and iteration of novel TTPs developed to create dilemmas in all‐domain operations to create gaps and seams that can be exploited for warfighting advantage. In the land and air campaigns in Ukraine, we have seen the evolution from the use of mass artillery and rockets to the use of mass drones strikes, that are changing their capabilities and TTPs daily. The staggering numbers and results tell the story best.

Today Ukraine produces three million drones annually and 70% of battlefield casualties in the war are from drones, not artillery. Let me recount what my CTF 166 and CTF-66 teams have observed in what we call the “Black Sea Battle Lab” over the last few years in terms of capabilities and TTPs to better understand this changing character of war in the maritime environment.

In February of 2022, Russia took action to posture for an amphibious assault of Odessa, bringing more amphibious ships into the Black Sea ahead of the start of the conflict because they knew the declaration of war would trigger the Montreux Convention to kick in, limiting additional combatants gaining access into the Black Sea. Ukraine’s counteraction was the deployment of mines and costal defense cruse misses (CDCMs) to enable sea denial around Odessa and sink the Russian Black Sea Flag Ship, Moskva. The Russian counter‐action was to agree to the Black Sea Grain Initiative in July of 2022 to stabilize the Black Sea to allow for the flow of the grain to fuel their economy.

Ukraine then took action to use Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) to strike against static targets (ports and bridges) to isolate Crimea. Russia’s reaction was to increases port defenses, both kinetic and non‐kinetic, decided in June of 2023 to not only not‐renew the Black Sea Grain initiative, but instead, attempt to blockage the Odessa Grain Corridor in the Southwest Black Sea. A move to choke off the grain trade and significantly hurt a large portion of the Ukrainian economy. Ukraine’s counter-action was to move the grain corridor into territorial waters, aided by Romania and Bulgaria, and attack dynamic targets at sea – the Russian ships that were attempting to blockade the Grain Corridor. Our observatio at CTF 166 and CTF-66 was that Ukraine did not attack with enough mass to sink anything – only four to six USVs leaving Odessa with only two to three USVs surviving the transit (we saw roughly a 50% failure rate of USVs due to mechanical and autonomy problems) to attempt an attack on a ship with one hitting a ship approximately every other attack attempt. While the Ukrainians did not sink any Russian blockade ships, they did get four hits on these ships between July and September of 2023 that badly bruised the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

We then observed Russia taking action to withdraw its ships from the grain corridor blockade, retreating to the Eastern Black Sea, to prevent loss of ships and making it much for more difficult for Ukraine to hit these dynamic targets at sea. Ukraine’s counteraction to the withdrawal of ships was to initiate integrated all domain attacks (USVs, UAVs, Missiles, Deception capabilities, etc…) on the static targets in Ports (moored/drydocked ships and important facilities) during the Summer and Fall of 2023, including missile strikes hiring the Black Sea Fleet Headquarters, a KILO Submarine in dry‐dock and several other ships in port in Sevastopol. Russia, in a surprise counter‐action, abandoned Sevastopol, the key terrain and center of gravity of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and instead chose to bastion their ships in Novorossiysk to prevent further attrition of in‐port attacks over the winter of 2023‐2024.

Ukraine then took the bold action to press the attack in the Black Sea, pushing further East to hunt dynamic targets – ships at sea ‐ with mass this me (10‐12 USVs in each attack) which led to the sinking of three ships at sea between January and March of 2024. In all three sinkings, 10‐12 USVs got underway in Odessa and 4‐6 USVs hit the target with a second USV entering a hole that a first USV made in a Russian ship, leading to a catastrophic wound that overwhelmed ship damage control efforts. These successful attacks led to the firing of the Black Sea Fleet Commander and the Chief of the Russian Navy in February and March of 2024, respectively.

Russia’s reaction to these attacks was to flood the Black Sea with Rotary Wing and TACAIR to significantly limit survivability of USVs in Black Sea. Between January and July of 2024, it became approximately ten times more difficult for any Ukrainian USV to survive at sea as it transited to a static (port or bridge) or dynamic (a moving ship) targets in the Black Sea.

Ukraine’s counter-action was to field counter‐air capabilities launched from unmanned surface vessels (counter‐Rotary Wing at first and later counter‐TACAIR) which led to the shootdown of Russian Helicopters in December of 2024 and January of 2025 and the shootdown of a Russian SU‐30 Fighter in May of 2025. Russia then took action to uses small Unmanned Arial Systems to kill USVs at sea. Ukraine’s counteraction was to use longer ranged Neptune missiles to strike long range targets in the far Eastern ports of the Russian Black Sea as well as launching long range USV attacks (not many that were successful) and use long range Unmanned Airal Systems (UAS) to attacks ships in port and at sea (targetting as far as the Caspian Sea and getting a successful hit, earlier this month, on a moving ship in the Sea of Azov, just North of the Black Sea.

Russia’s counteraction was to start using USVs to attack static targets in Ukraine with several attempts to hit port infrastructure in Odessa this year and, just this month, they were able to get a USV up the Danube River, between Romanian and Ukraine, to sink a Ukrainian ship in port.

Over 3 years of conflict Russia has lost approximately 40% of the Black Sea Fleet. Their actions have routinely been countered by Ukraine or defensive in nature. Ukraine’s bold actions and reactions in the maritime domain, as a contrast, as well as their superior rate of innovation, adaptation and adoption, has enabled a nation with no Navy to inflict the greatest losses on any Fleet since World War II. We need to take note of this as unique to the maritime fight being able to deliver truly strategic asymmetric effects unlike in the land campaign due to a simple principal best articulated by a legend of this institution, CAPT Wayne Hughes, and his book Fleet Tactics.

Ships have nowhere to hide in the open ocean and no defensive boundary to protect them from asymmetric threats; unlike the trenches, barbed wire and mine fields of the Ukraine land‐war hellscape that limit the reach of effects in the land domain.

Now let me go back and explain a little bit more about my teams at CTF-166 and CTF-66. As I mentioned before, CTF-66 was stood up in support of SIXTH FLEET, taking over the mission of Task Force Poseidon in supporting Ukrainian partner force operational and tactical actions leveraging multiple Joint, Allied, Navy, United States Marine Corps, Special Operations Forces, and Other Government Agency organizations. But recognizing the need to better coordinate Security Assistance (SA) with the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) Combatant Commander (CCDR), to better enable capabilities development leveraging Navy Service Component organizations (including Naval Postgraduate School), and to better support integration of all‐domain effects, we also stood up CTF-166. So CTF-166 is where we advocate for resources and all‐domain effects for the Ukraine maritime fight, focus on capability Development for the partner, and support partners with intelligence sharing. CTF-66, on the other hand, focuses on training Ukrainian partner forces and the logistics of moving kit as we transition it the partner forces. Both teams need to focus on the changing charter of war and understand the evolution of this fight to ensure that the capabilities we were developing and the TTPs we were training are relevant for the moment in the action‐reaction‐counter‐action cycle.

These processes require novel innovation, iterative adaptation and rapid adoption on in order to generate warfighting advantage. Restoring deterrence with “Hedge Forces,” given the realities of the changing character of war, that my 166 and 66 teams have observed in the Black Sea, will require the U.S. Navy and our Allies and partners to accelerate these innovation, adaption and adoption processes. We call the Black Sea a “Battle Lab” because there it has a thinking adversary, real world electromagnetic spectrum interference and all the fog and friction of war. Partner forces, employing evolving kit and capabilities with novel TTPs provides a natural experiment where we can gain exceptional insights. In many ways this is our version of the Spanish Civil War where the Germans innovated with new capabilities and tac cs to blend dive bombers, tanks and the radios to create lightning war used in World War II. Only in this case, we are learning what Maritime Blitzkrieg looks like with Robotic and Autonomous Systems.

But we must move beyond the Black Sea and our Ukrainian partner forces if we are going to operationalize these capabilities in the U.S. Navy and across our Alliance and coalition partners to restore deterrence. In my first meeting with ADM Munsch, the Maritime Theater Commander for Naval Forces Europe and Africa in May of 2023, just as I was preparing to take on this assignment, my guidance from my Commander was clear (what I am stating here is slightly updated to include our latest thinking on deterrence and burden shifting with Allies). I was to do the following:

1) Assist Ukraine in the maritime, learning from our partners and the secret sauce that they have brewed in the Black Sea employing RAS and integrated all‐domain effects against Russia, but also build what he called a “conveyor‐belt” eco‐system that could innovate, adapt and adopt capabilities faster than the adversary.

2) Build U.S. RAS capabilities leveraging insights from Ukraine aimed at being able to generate asymmetric effects for warfighting advantage in key regions where Hedge forces are needed to deter the adversary, leveraging this same “conveyor‐belt” concept.

3) Accelerate RAS capabilities and the innovation, adaptation and adoption capabilities of our NATO Allies to ensure they can increase their ability to burden share and ultimately be able to shift the RAS burden to them across the NATO alliance.

Today, CTF-66 is currently capable of fielding 22 USVs with 14 more on the way over the next several months as we are developing and proving out CONOPS to deliver maritime domain awareness and generate asymmetric effects. I just came from Troia, Portugal where over 3000 people from over two dozen nations are working on exercises REPMUS and DYNAMIC MESSENGER to lean into the innovation, adaptation and adoption processes and challenge our individual nations and our NATO Alliance and partner forces to learn from the changing character of war “action-on‐reaction‐counter‐action” cycles that we see coming out of the Black Sea. Our ability to deter, as a Nation and as an Alliance are depended on getting this cycle right and moving quickly, together, to ensure interoperability and effectiveness in our rapid implementation of new and evolving capabilities and TTPs.

I would summarize the big picture items of what I have talked about this morning as follows:

1) Growing relationships over your career matters with Joint, Allied and partner relationships often being the most important as they bridge you to the critical “other” organizations you may be working with in an operation or to deliver an outcome. This is the foundation of trust, which you cannot surge in a time of need, and is critical to having to enable you to ask for or deliver assistance.

2) Restoring deterrence will depend on delivering “hedge capabilities” and “hedge forces” which in turn will rely on our ability to quickly innovate, adapt and adopt new capabilities and TTPs due to the changing character of war and the “action‐reaction‐counter‐action” cycle.

3) Integrated all domain effects are what make the difference. Robotic and Autonomous Systems alone cannot win the day, they must be integrated in with other effects in order to create dilemmas that cause gaps and seams in adversary defenses that can be exploited. This requires exceptional Operational Level of War and all‐domain warfighting expertise.

4) We do not want to fight alone, and we must be interoperable with our Allies and partners, as well as being able to share information at speed at scale. Winston Churchill famously stated, "There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them." This quote, spoken when Britain was fighting alongside various allies in World War II, underscores the vital importance of unity and collective effort in times of conflict that is just as true today as it was 80+ years ago.

Now here is the wonderful news about today, and your time here at NPS. You have established and grown relationships with Joint Force, Allies and partners at NPS, establishing the foundation of trust. Stay in touch and nurture these relationships as your careers move forward.

Someday they will be just as key to helping you as they were to helping me and CAPT Skalski as we developed CTF-66 and 166. You have gained all the skills and insight from your studies here at NPS to grow your skills and abilities needed to quickly innovate, adapt and adopt new capabilities and TTPs. You will inevitably face the changing character of war and the “action‐reaction‐counter‐action” cycle in your future assignments. Continue to grow and refine these skills as they will be needed as your rapidly field “hedge capabilities” and “hedge forces” to restore deterrence.

Those of you who completed Joint Professional Military Education have already taken the next step to become an “All‐Domain Integrator” needed to create dilemmas for our adversaries that we must be able to exploit. For the rest of you, get after JPME at the next opportunity in your career and continue to leverage the technical and policy expertise that you received while here at NPS to contribute to the all‐domain fight.

Our Allies and partners are one of the greatest strengths we have as a nation. We must continue to find ways to share information at speed at scale with them if we hope to compete in the fight due to the changing character of war and these rapid “action‐reaction‐counter‐action” cycles.

You have learned how to interact with Allies and partner here at NPS, so now your task is to grow your ability to operationalize these partnerships throughout the rest of your careers. It has truly been an honor to speak with you today, tell you a bit of the stories of my Commands and how I think it relates to your future service. Most importantly, I hope I have assured you that your degree and experiences from this institution have laid the groundwork for you to succeed in the very challenging operating environment that you find yourselves in given the trends of the changing character of war. You must build on this foundation, be bold in your actions, reactions and counter‐actions and enable our Joint Force, Allies and partners in all that you do moving forward. Victory will depend on it.

Congratulations once again on your degree and God Bless you, your families, and the United States of America.
 

• Watch Rear Adm. Michael Mattis deliver his speech
• Watch full Summer Quarter 2025 graduation ceremony