Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Louie DiPalma from William Blair.
Louie DiPalma: Howard, thank you for your deep aerospace-defense expertise in your current position and your former position on the sell side, your high standards raised the level of those around you. For Jason, for the Army’s CHS-6 $8 billion recompete that should be announced, I think, very soon. GD Mission Solutions is teaming with GDIT. Do you feel these synergistic joint bids between IT and Mission will become more common and a significant strategic advantage for you? And could it help return the overall Technologies segment to mid-single-digit growth over the long term?
Jason Aiken: Yes. And bottom line answer, you kind of hit the nail on the head there. We absolutely expect the synergistic benefits of these two businesses working together to be to our benefit over the long run. It’s — the predicate for all that is that what we’ve seen both in the customer demand environment, what they’re requiring in terms of end-to-end solutions, including both software, services and the hardware elements of what we provide. We’re seeing the peer group migrate that way with some of their M&A activities that you’ve seen in the market. And so, we believe that is the thesis that we’ll see play out. You noted CHS-6, we’re obviously participating in and anticipating that — resolution to that competition.
We’ve seen that program migrate over time from one that was traditionally very much focused on high-end, customized, ruggedized hardened-type defense hardware to one that is a combination of that type of capability as well as a more traditional, sort of off-the-shelf catalog-type product. And so, we believe that having the attributes of both GDIT and Mission Systems involved in that program would be the best suited to serve our customer there. So, that’s just one good example of it. But absolutely, we see that over time. And as far as long-term growth rates, we’ll have to see where this leads. Right now, we continue to track low- to mid-single digit, but we’ll see if we can’t get some juice out of that over time.
Operator: And your next question comes from the line of Sheila Kahyaoglu from Jefferies.
Sheila Kahyaoglu: Howard, exactly what Louie said, and then, thank you for being such a great colleague and a teacher to me and all those around you, so thank you. Phebe or Jason, whoever, on the Defense business, when you look at your 2023 guidance, Defense growth is up solidly up 5% for the year versus the 9% growth you did in the first half. But this is not necessarily leading to operating leverage with margin contraction of 40 bps and flat operating profit. So, how do you think about the return to operating margin expansion either on a total company level or a segment basis? It seems like Technologies is more temporary, Combat mix maybe continues for some time.
Phebe Novakovic: So, Technologies and Combat are simply a question of mix. And I suspect Combat will quickly return to its normal operating leverage. The Marine Group has significant supply chain challenges that have impacted for the Virginia-class in particular. That’s going to take some time to resolve. We’ll talk about that in a little bit more detail. So, as I noted, we expect slow quarter-over-quarter margin growth in the Marine Group, perhaps an occasional perturbation by quarter, but slow and steady improvement over time.
Operator: And your next question comes from the line of Ken Herbert from RBC Capital Markets.
Ken Herbert: Congratulations, Howard. Phebe, I just wanted to dig into Marine again a little deeper. The full year guide implies a pretty significant deceleration in growth into the back half of the year. Two questions, really. First, as we go back six months, you were talking about a much more conservative outlook for the top line in Marine. And clearly, maybe any comments on really what’s changed because the first half has really been much stronger than expected. But then also, as you think about the remainder of the year, what will drive the significant step down and how much conservatism does the Marine outlook reflect in terms of the growth?
