Speech to the Sarasota Navy League

Midday Thursday 3 October, I delivered these remarks (or something very close to it) at the Sarasota/Bradenton Navy League Celebration of the Navy’s 249th Birthday.

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery to the Sarasota-Manatee Council of the Navy League of the United States Celebrating the U.S. Navy’s 249^th Birthday

“The Nation Must Get Serious About Its Navy” 3 October 2024

Thank you, Gene, for the kind introduction and for your friendship and mentoring throughout the years.

It is good to be with you here today to celebrate the Navy’s Birthday. We have a lot to be proud of when it comes to our Navy, and every day, Sailors are out there across the world standing the watch, just as they did during the time Gene and I and some of you served, and just as they have done throughout the history of this great republic.

As a former Surface Warfare Officer and destroyer skipper, I can’t begin to describe the pride I’ve felt over this past year as destroyers in the Red Sea and Eastern Mediterranean  did their jobs and did them well, destroying cruise missiles, unmanned surface vessels, unmanned aircraft, and for the first time—anti-ship ballistic missiles traveling at hypervelocity speeds. The maritime industrial base—shipbuilders, weapons and sensor manufacturers, propulsion and electrical system providers—can be justifiably proud of what they’ve built over the past few decades, as those destroyers are the envy of the world. When I commanded one, I remember being VERY confident in my crew and the systems they operated, but there’s nothing better than performance in battle to validate the great American industrial base—something I’ll return to later.

While it is the Navy’s Birthday and we rightly celebrate its rich history, my business here today is not to talk about history. Or at least not to focus on it. My business with you is the Navy of today and tomorrow. I will primarily be talking about the Navy, and while there may be times that I cite or allude to the Marine Corps, they have their own birthday and there are far better people to speak to you about them than me.

The meat of my presentation comes in four parts. I’ll start by talking about the Navy’s mission. Then I’ll move on to a discussion of why the Navy has to be postured around the world to do its mission. Then I’ll talk a bit about WHERE around the world the nation needs its Navy, then we’ll get into a bit on how it does its business forward and what it needs to do the things that we ask of it.

I’ll end the presentation by getting into some of the challenges the Navy faces in carrying out what the nation asks of it.

Navy Mission

Let’s start with the mission. This is going to be a pretty deep treatment, so buckle up.

As of December 23, 2022, the Title 10 Mission of the Navy STRAIGHT from the U.S. Code is this:

The Navy shall be organized, trained, and equipped for the peacetime promotion of the national security interests and prosperity of the United States, and for prompt and sustained combat incident to operations at sea.

Two things—peacetime national security and prosperity, and combat operations at sea. Pretty straightforward, and to most of you, probably very sensible.

But what if I told you that on December 22, 2022—the day before the date I just mentioned, the Title 10 Mission of the Navy read differently. Here’s what it was:

The Navy shall be organized, trained, and equipped for prompt and sustained combat operations at sea.

Some of you in the room are nodding in acknowledgement. That was the mission I remember being aware of when I was commissioned in 1987. Boiled down to its essentials, what that mission meant was that the Navy needed really only to worry about war. All that stuff the Navy did in peacetime—and had done in peacetime since the earliest days of the Republic—was just gravy.

When budgets got tight—which for Navy shipbuilding means pretty much every year since the Cold War ended—and the Navy pleaded for more resources because of the important peacetime functions it served, White House, Defense Department, and even other Services simply pointed out that those other things aren’t in the mission.

Seven months before the mission changed, I was killing weeds in the driveway when I got a call from a friend of mine working on Capitol Hill. He said they were about to get really busy writing the defense authorization bill, and he asked if there was anything they should really be focusing on. I said one thing: Change the mission of the Navy to include the peacetime functions it has ALWAYS done and which have been valued by every single President in our nation’s history, but which are the first things that got cut when dollars are short. I was a little saltier than that, but you get the picture. He asked what I had in mind, I gave him a few sentences, and he got to work with his friends changing the law.

I walk you through all of this to reinforce with you that the Navy is different. Different than the Air Force, the Space Force, and the Army. The very nature of operating at and from the sea—where no one can claim sovereignty—and our nation’s particular geography that places great distances between us and things we value—demands a Navy that is large and capable enough to tend to our peacetime knitting AND act as the maritime component of Joint Warfighting. We must have both. Only thinking about a Navy that acts AFTER the shooting starts does a disservice to critical missions like deterrence, assurance, crisis response, and naval diplomacy. These are the things the Navy does 99% of the time and the nation is better for them.

Why Forward?

Ok—let’s all slap the table and say that the change to the Navy’s mission was important and required.

Does that mean then, that the Navy MUST be globally deployed? Couldn’t we do the job differently, leave things to friends and allies and pretty much just maintain the ships and planes and subs we need for wartime and operate mostly off our own coasts until the force is really needed somewhere?

I mean, the way we do things now, if we want to maintain a ship forward, we have to have a ship training to replace it, a ship in maintenance getting ready to start training, and because of the great distances involved in sailing from US bases to overseas operating areas, a ship that represents the transit time there and back again. Essentially, four ships to maintain one forward.

If we stopped operating so much of our force forward, it could be smaller, and less expensive, and our industrial base wouldn’t be stressed to support it.

What I’m getting at here is something people talk about as “Forward Presence”, but I purposely avoid talking about forward presence, because it has the effect of handing critics of naval power a rhetorical weapon, where they say, “you Navy guys ask for all these ships just so they can be in these cool places around the world cutting holes in the water.”  No. Our Navy is not forward in order to be forward. It is forward because being forward is the most effective way to achieve the mission assigned it.

If the Navy could sustain our national security and prosperity and be ready for war at half its size and mostly operating off Mayport, Norfolk, and San Diego, I’d be all for it. But it cannot. So we shouldn’t.

We cannot deter aggression from Norfolk. We cannot assure allies from Mayport. We cannot respond to crises –manmade or otherwise—from San Diego. We are not forward because we want to be forward. We are forward because THAT’s the best place to accomplish the mission.

Where Forward?

Ok, you say. You’ve convinced me. We need a Navy for both peace and war, and to do its job, it must be out and about.

Ok then, but where should it be out and about to? And my answer to that, is that it should be where our interests are most densely located, and where they are most threatened. That means three general places: the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and Europe.

When we won the Cold War and peace broke out throughout the land, we decided that we’d be influential with Navy power in TWO areas—the Western Pacific and the Arabian Gulf/Indian Ocean region. Carrier strike groups would deploy from the U.S. and have a couple of port visits in Europe and maybe a NATO Exercise or two, but their destination was the Persian Gulf and Middle East Instability. West Coast Strike groups plied their trade in the Western Pacific and the Middle East, while Europe became an “economy of force” theater for naval power.

That “Two-Hub” strategy SEEMED right for the post-Cold War world, but as time progresses, it is obvious that we need powerful naval forces in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo Pacific. We have the Russian invasion of Ukraine—or really the second invasion of Ukraine—we have Iranians sending their proxies to slaughter Israelis, and of course we have China intimidating treaty allies of ours with illegal maritime claims and thuggish behavior at sea.

The problem is that the Navy we have was sized for two-hubs, and it is trying to cover down on three.

It is not as simple as saying we’re half again too small for what is being asked of us, but it isn’t a whole lot more complicated than that. Before the latest Ukraine invasion, our Two-Hub Navy was already straining to carry out its missions in its assigned hubs. That we now are in a de facto three hub scheme with less than a two-hub Navy is the essence of my message—and that message is that the nation must get serious about its Navy.

With What Forward?

Okay—so you’re all still with me. We agree that what the Navy does is important. We agree that it is important that it be done forward. And we agree that it be done forward in three major hubs—Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Pacific.

Now we get to the tough part.

What should the Navy do its job with? How much is enough? What kinds of ships/aircraft/submarines/weapons/sensors/networks should it be provided with, and how many?

Answering these questions is pretty much what I do for a living, not that anyone ACTS on the suggestions, mind you.

But I think that it is important for me to share with you my thoughts on force structure for you to decide.

Naval force structure is built around two primary modalities—the Carrier Strike Group and the Expeditionary Strike Group.

As its name implies, the Carrier Strike Group is built around a large, nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and it has a handful of destroyers assigned to it and maybe a growing long-in-the-tooth cruiser.

The other major mode of employing naval power brings our friends in the Marine Corps into the mix, and that is the Expeditionary Strike Group built around a big deck amphibious ship, 2200 Marines and their gear, and two additional amphibious ships.

These two modalities of employing naval power—the CSG and the ESG—are ably supported by land-based aircraft like the P-8 and other various unmanned platforms, and they operate with and around our arsenal’s most effective killing machines, our attack submarines.

This basic force structure has existed for decades, and it is generally appropriate to what we ask of our Navy.

What those formations are capable of DOING has changed dramatically in those decades, with the up-to-date iterations of those formations capable of inflicting considerably more—and more precise—damage than their Cold War ancestors could.

We tend to roll all that force structure up into a single number, a number that we throw around as if it is useful for revealing all of the various contributors to our Navy’s power. We call that number the “ship count”, and as of September 23rd, that number was 297.

Many of you have heard ship count used historically in connection with Ronald Reagan’s “600 ship Navy”. Those were heady days, and we nearly got there—I think we hit 594 before the Soviet Union collapsed and peace broke out all over the land. We have steadily declined using this measure to half the number.

But don’t lose heart. Today’s Navy of half the size is more powerful and capable than the 1988 version with twice the number of ships. I’d bet on today’s Navy in a fight with that Navy six days a week and twice on Sundays. The sensors and weapons and networks our Sailors operate with today are considerably better, faster, and more lethal than what I started out with in the 1980’s.  This is kind of why a lot of people don’t like using ship count as a standard.

The problem though, is that no one has come up with a better measure, a better way to quantify naval power. Lord knows, I’ve tried. But when it comes down to a single descriptor that conveys an adequate sense of a nation’s commitment to naval power, ship count remains the most useful way.

Put another way, when I think about the 297 ship Navy of today and all we ask it to do and where we ask it to do it, I think we are about 150 ships short. Not JUST because we are not standing up to the strategically wise requirement to man three forward hubs continuously and indefinitely, but because our pacing threat—the Chinese Navy—has surpassed us in this measurement, with the Congressional Research Service telling us that China’s Navy now consists of 370 ships. Again—because ship count isn’t a perfect measurement, I’d bet my next paycheck we’d win a naval war against the Chinese Navy.

But I don’t think the Chinese aren’t interested in a naval war with us, at least not yet. Their Navy is mostly concerned with intimidating their neighbors—including Taiwan—a nation they believe is part of their own, and at whom most of its military planning is aimed.

Also, our Navy isn’t built just to fight other navies. Our Navy is built to defend our nation’s security and prosperity, in addition to fighting and defeating other navies AND acting as part of our Joint Warfighting construct. Our Navy is arrayed against entire nations, not just their navies.

Before I close on a series of challenges, I want to introduce the elephant in the room, and that is the perception that ships at sea are vulnerable, and that spending billions of dollars to build them is a waste of money in the modern world.

The biggest culprit here is of course, the aircraft carrier, which at $15B a pop is the most expensive weapon system in the arsenal. Critics of surface ships and aircraft carriers have watched the Russian fleet in the Black Sea get mauled by unmanned surface vessels and land-based missiles, and they have decided that aircraft carriers must be obsolete and we need to replace them with thousands of tiny drones operating on, under, and above the sea.

I’d be happy to discuss aircraft carriers with you in the Q and A, but the bottom line for me is that the burden in this argument is with aircraft carrier critics. And that burden is for them to suggest how they will replace all of the things aircraft carriers do across the spectrum of conflict, but more importantly, they need to own up to the fact that the defeat of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea is as much a function of a spectacularly bad concept of fleet operations as it is any sense of the vulnerability of ships.

OF COURSE ships are vulnerable. EVERYTHING on the modern battlefield is vulnerable. The question then is whether the way you are employing those things makes them even MORE vulnerable—which the Russians have been doing—or less vulnerable, which is what our fleet concept of operation accomplishes.

Our fleet fights as a system, gaining sea control and air dominance to an acceptable level of risk in order to seize maritime terrain and project power therefrom.

In a modern war, will we lose ships? Almost certainly. Will the other side lose considerably more ships. Indeed.

This isn’t to say that we should ignore the benefits conferred by unmanned capability and advanced networking. We need lots of small, cheap, and expendable things to go along with our large, powerful, and exquisite capabilities. Notice that I said “go along with”, not instead of. This gets us back to the burden of replacing the aircraft carrier and its place among carrier critics. Until we figure out how to control the sea and project power more efficiently and effectively than from the Carrier Strike Group and its escorts, we need to keep buying and building these things. More of them. Faster. Which brings me to my closing and a few of the challenges the Navy faces.

Challenges

There are three challenges I’d like to leave you with today and how we might address them. Those challenges are the state of the maritime industrial base, Navy recruiting, and ignorance of the virtues of seapower in our political class.

First, the industrial base.

We have EXACTLY the industrial base that the Navy and the Department of Defense wanted, an industrial base that was optimized for efficient peacetime production. The post Cold War drawdown left us with excess capacity, and so that capacity disappeared. Now that we need an industrial base to expand, we are finding it not as easy as it was to contract. The Federal Government is highly active in spreading money around to the industrial base to help spur investment, but there’s nothing like steadily increasing demand to incentivize publicly held corporations to invest in capital improvements. We’re beginning to see some action here, but the hole we are in is deep, and it will take a long time to crawl out of it.

Certain parts of our shipbuilding industry HAVE additional capacity, but they don’t have the workforce. We in this country have spent four decades devaluing skilled labor, insisting that the only path to success and happiness was through college degrees. We as a society need to turn this around, to help raise the attractiveness of skilled trades to young men and women coming out of high school. Instead of pushing them into no-hope degrees and student debt up to their ears, maybe learning to be an electrician, a pipefitter, a welder, an air-conditioning and refrigeration tech, or a mechanic could be the road. We have to stop de-valuing blue collar labor. And then we need to pay for that labor. That’s right. The race to the bottom in which the Navy drives cost out of its programs is in no small measure impacting salaries in shipyards. We need to pay shipyard workers more in order to have more of them. This is Econ 101. This means ships will be more expensive. So be it.

The next challenge we face is Navy recruiting. We—you and me and everyone who wants a stronger Navy—has an obligation to talk to young men and women about serving. We should never miss an opportunity to talk with our grandchildren, their friends, and anyone who doesn’t seem to have their road picked out for them. Talk about the friends you make, the fact that you’ll grow and mature while doing something important, and you’ll put money away for later, while your friends are taking on $100K in loans for a BA in Social Justice. Talk about what it is like to wake up at anchor off the Greek Islands, dreaming about what you and your buddies would be doing later that day ashore. Talk about being in combat, about how it made you feel, about watching your team execute like a Swiss Watch, because they’d been over these things countless times before. Talk about the feeling of pride and accomplishment you gain when you wear the nation’s cloth.

The final challenge we face is ignorance, ignorance as to just how essential to our security and prosperity a powerful global Navy is. That’s where you come in. Stay engaged. Read about what is happening and send emails to your elected representatives. There are maybe fifty men and women out of 535 in the House and Senate who have a CLUE about the Navy. You may not be represented by any of them. Your voice—pointing them in the direction of what is important, is critical to gaining the traction we need in this country to finally get serious about our Navy.

Thank you very much.