Welcome to mid Rats with Sal from Commander Salamander and Eagle One from Eagle Speak
at Seer Shore your home for a discussion of national security issues and all things
maritime and welcome aboard everybody. I am the aforementioned Sal. We have my
co host Eagle one from Eagle Spake on board today. This is usually what
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grab your ideas and throw it in there. But besides that, with the
intro, let's hop in directly to today's show and back on the twelfth of
February, our guest today had a guest post on my substack and do a
little quote for it. Quote. The combat performance of US Navy's destroyers and
the Red Sea against a variety of weapons employed by the Houthis and Yemen stands
as a monument to decades of brilliance, hard work, and dedication across generations
and naval officers and government civilians, industry executive, talented engine years and technologists,
assembly line workers and shipbuilders. This is the military industrial complex and it
works. Unquote. That, of course, is from the great Brian McGrath,
Commander US Navy retired, the managing director of the Ferrybridge Group, a
defense consultancy. As always Brian's opinions when he comes along with us, which
I mentioned in the pre show, it's been over a decade he's been blessing
us with his presence here on mid Rats are his owns, not necessarily affiliated
with any organizations our companies. He may spend some time with. Brian,
Welcome back to mid Rats. It's great to have you board. Thank you
for having me, Thank you for having me. The blessing is mine to
have this opportunity to talk with you guys. Oh you're too kind and kind
of like we do with authors of books, and I don't work scare any
about the way your post you put out on the twelfth of February is not
a book, but you can see the framework of somebody who wanted to write
a book along these lines, but just as a scenes that are for the
listeners who are now scrambling over to my substack to grab it and read it.
Give us a brief outline about what your article has to say and what
boosted you along to be able to go to the typewriter and pump it out.
Yeah, thank you. What I was responding to was a very positive
thing, and that was this outpouring of praise and adulation for what the ships
were doing in the Northern Red Sea and the performance of those ships and crews
and combat systems under real world combat conditions against targets ranging from easy targets to
shoot down to ballistic missiles anti ship ballistic missiles, which is something no navy
on Earth has ever had to shoot down in combat before. I was watching
and with with great interest and great pride the praise that was coming the way
of the Surface Force. I'm I am in the tank for the Surface Force.
I'm a former destroyer captain. I consult to both the Surface Force Commander
on the West Coast and to the Director of Service War Programs at kind of
gone. I do those things because that's where my interest is, and it's
to an extent that I have anything I'm good at, that's that's what I'm
good at. So I'm watching this force that I am, that I love
and that I have spent so much time trying to help out, really getting
a lot of praise and adulation. And then I saw an article in uh
in National Review about the military industrial complex and about the delivery of the speech
and Eisenhower's delivery of it. I think it's by guy named Pino, who's
a smart cookie, and I seized on one paragraph in Eisenhower's speech. It
was his farewell to the Nation, which had so much more than just a
discussion of the military industrial complex. But he warned, He warned the country,
and it had special meaning coming from a retired five star general and the
leader of America's war effort in Europe. He warned against unwarranted influence by the
military industrial complex. And that phrase has come to be mangled and shorthanded into
another one that you hear all the time, which is beware the military industrial
complex. And I was thinking to myself, don't people understand that the things
that they are praising and lauding today in the Red Sea are the result of
that military industrial complex. And I began to think about, not only how
over the course of one man's career, which was my own, which is
the only one I'm really familiar with the ships that I served on, when
I went from one to the next, to the next to the next,
five times, they all got better. Each ship was more capable than the
previous one. And I thought about how this was obviously not accidental, This
was purposeful. This was the work of talented people achieving goals, setting goals,
and achieving goals over time. So I wanted to talk about what we
see in the gulf in the Red Sea today and how it is the result
of the proper functioning of the military industrial complex. Made a huge mistake in
titling that article. I forget what I called it, something like in praise
of the military and industrial complex. I should have said something like in praise
of one small portion of a large, unwieldy, out of control, corrupt
and and bloated military industrial complex that just happened to get it right in this
one tiny little thing that is shooting things down in the air, because of
course everything else is screwed up, corrupt, over budget, bloated and terrible.
And I am obviously a hack for the defense industry. And so here's
my story. That's what I should have called it. But you have rules
for how long your articles can be. So I called it what I called
it, but it was a it was a Oh. The other thing.
The other thing that I wanted to do is I have worked in the Pentagon
and around the Pentagon since nineteen ninety seven, and I've watched requirements officers in
n ninety six come and go, and I've watched them work their butts off,
you know, the over you know, just just trying to find money
for their programs, trying to advocate for the things that they need to advocate
for. They're trying to kill the things that they think are worth killing,
working really hard, and I've watched them over the years, and I see
it all the time. The guys they come in and they're full of pisson
vinegar, and by the time they leave, they're beaten down because because things
don't move all that quickly in the Pentagon, and you don't measure progress in
milestones you mentioned it, you measure it in inch stones. It's not like
going to see it's not like taking command of a mediocreship and making it a
great ship which you can see every day. The evolution of that kind of
thing happening. Change happened slowly, and over the course of a two or
three year tour. Some of these guys get ground down and they start and
they get a little dejected. And what I've tried to do was to show
how over thirty five years, a series of ground down action officers and the
actions that they took over that period of time mattered. It mattered in a
very demonstrable way. It mattered in the lives that are being saved routinely in
the Red Sea by weapon systems operated by well trained sailors that are built to
spec and built by a military industrial complex that has its problems, but is
the envy of the world. That's an overblown, way too wordy description of
what I was writing about, but that's what I hope to accomplish with that
piece. Over Yeah, I think one of the interesting aspects of that article
from National Review by you know, which is called what People's miss in Eisenhower's
Farrewell address is that since his time, the percentage of the GDP which has
been being spent by a defense has dropped a way down. I mean,
it's it's it's a it's not minuscule, but it's not. It's not what
people think that we're spending, you know, seventy percent of our our of
our federal budget on defense. It's it's fifteen percent. It's not anywhere close
to what it was during Eisenhower's time. And I think that a lot of
people who complain about the military industrial complex don't grasp that it's not the uh,
the octopus they seem to think of it. It is an octopus,
but it's not. There's not the octopus they think it there are. There
are two broad categories of critics of the military industrial complex. One is is
the is the the critic who would rather see that money being put to other
uses. Generally speaking, those are uh social programs, their domestic programs.
Uh and and and that's an honorable position. That's what we do in a
democracy, is we decide how to divide the pie and what are the most
important places to put our money. The other group of people who criticize the
military industrial complex are a group of people who, for for want of a
better term, think they know better who because they had a job you know,
as a you know, director of business operations for twenty five million dollar
defense contractor for fifteen years in uh, you know, in in Arlington,
Virginia, have solved forever, in all times the mysteries of the military industrial
complex, and everybody else is screwed up, everybody else is corrupt. If
only people listened to me, if only people did what I said. That's
the other brand of critics that we see quite a bit. And you know,
I hear I hear from those those people all the time over I think
what's interesting about and you know, goodness knows, I think both of us
have had, you know, like anything anything else you love or anyone else
you love, you praise the good. But if you really love somebody,
you have to point out where they don't meet their their potential. They make
a mistake. You know, you don't we have affection for something. You
aren't silent when they are hurting themselves and those they love, so to speak,
So It's not perfect, but there is no human institution that is perfect.
But when I first saw the draft of your post, I just kept
going yes, and we and others had started to point out just this great
level of success. Yes, you know, the Huthis are a non state
actor at the best of fourth rate power, but as you mentioned, they
are throwing stuff at our fleet and our destroyers with their plus or minus a
few years forty year old skippers in their twenty something crew. Then nobody else
has seen the anti ship ballistic missile and also a very complicated environment with the
everything from the flying lawnlower UAVs to some no kidding, at least second generation
anti ship cruise missiles that have made trouble for our navies and others a lot
in the last few decades. And there is something that people should take a
deep breath and go, yeah, this this has worked because it contrasts with
you look at what the Russian Navy and the Black Sea has been able to
face. And you know you talked about an evolution. I do want to
dive into it a little bit because I think that story is fascinating. But
you know, you and I both have young midshipman in jail experiences with the
Knox class frigates. And you know, your first ship was the Candleist FF
ten eighty four, which was commissioned in nineteen seventy two, and you have
the Moskva, which was actually whole one of the Soviet Slava class. It
was commissioned ten years later in nineteen eighty two, roughly the same generation of
ship, and we saw what happened to the Slava and a lot of the
other Russian black sea fleet that there is another one of the better funded,
even though they had a little bit of a spot of bother after the Soviet
Union, but in a global sense, an organization that had on paper a
very impressive navy. But when the ultimate test came, which is your lack
of a better phrase, your non permissive, non scheduled range time when stuff
is coming at you, they have not been able to perform. So,
looking at specifically the IgA system if you want to tie that into the early
Burks and how that has developed, one of the early performed real well was
the USS Laboon DDG fifty eight, which is a sister of the ship you
turned over command to back in two thousand. Ship two thousand and six,
which was a flight one early Burke. But they're out there performing as the
American taxpayer would want. You know, what is it about that that program
that allowed them to be put in a situation where you know, whether you're
looking at what happened to the Fitzgerald and they came that was other issues.
There hasn't been the gold star, happy face news coming across. But even
I think the most cynical critic of what the US military does in a procurement
point of view, I think has to step back and look, Okay,
something is working here. What is it now? What's what's working there?
There's a couple things. What the foundational thing that worked? There was a
relationship between the government and industry. That was again another instance of the military
industrial complex firing on a cylinders. You had, you had a Navy customer
with sufficient technical capability in the oversight organs assigned to it overseeing the design,
testing, and production of two classes of ships versus the Ticondo Rugg class cruiser
and then the Arley Burtschlawyer, both of which were you know, one was
a late seventies project, the other was a mid eighties project, and we
built those ships for a long time, and we built did They were designed
and supported by an organization and a navy that concentrated on effectiveness and efficiency rather
than efficiency over effectiveness. We win the Cold War and we we we lose
our minds. This is I mean, we we we eviscerate NVC and the
technical oversight. We decide that we want to build ships. Uh build to
spec uh uh uh performance specs rather than design specs, which gives us.
One of the things that gives us is the LCS class. We we just
we we threw out tried and tested approaches to fielding, advanced capability, chasing
the go go world of efficiency that was the military industrial complex not working on
eight cylinders. We got some, we got some turns in there. We
uh and you know, nobody, nobody knows what they are better than than
the two of you. L c S was a problem. Uh, the
d d g X was a problem. The flight the Arlely Birth destroyers have
continued to plug along, and they plugged along because they retained much of the
support mechanisms that it was born with, not all of it. Don't get
me wrong. We've took we've taken away some of that support that they're trying
to build slowly back to now. But it didn't just shed at all.
And so we have and we had the LPG seventeen class, which uh was
you know, envisioned late, you know, at the at the U,
you know, right around the time the Cold War was over. We started
to build, but we had a design. We got a mature design for
it. We got a mature design for the flight, for the for the
flight one two and to alt the DDGs, and we built them in numbers,
and we learned and whatever we learned from the last ship we rolled into
the next ship. We we held requirements generally set until we had a new
tranch or a new flight, at which point we would implement those requirements.
We we lost our minds when we when we left the Cold War, and
we and we decided we were going to be efficient, and we and and
part of the problem was that we we cut a workforce in the government whose
job it was to oversee what industry does. And and I'm not I don't
want to blame industry. I don't want to blame the government. But we
used to have a plus B and it gave us c Now we have A
minus and B minus, giving us C minus. And that's the way it's
been for decades. The whole team, government and industry is less than it
used to be. And I think, until we turn the corner on this,
until we recognize, you know, as I say, all the time,
until we become serious again about building things, about designing, things about
risk taking and risk management. We hear about risk taking all the time.
Uh. And and this, you know, our Silicon Valley friends love to
make us we all you know, the height of business performance is to take
risks. No, the height of business performance is to manage risk. And
and and we quite frankly haven't managed risk all that well. It's interesting to
me that that the discussion evolves, I mean, is is evolution evolutionary?
I mean, your discussion is evolutionary. Uh. You know, every iteration
of the d DG is an improvement on the one that came before. Uh.
And I go back to gearing class destroyers. I mean, the gearing
class destroyer was an improvement on the on the last that came before before it.
And you know, then all the destroyers that have come along since,
all the improvement cinerator, all those iterations, you know, they they add
up so that you know, if you're used to an SPS twenty six uh
surface surgerator and all of a sudden you're looking at me. Just it is.
It is similar, but vastly improved over what we used to have.
I was reading Admiral Sandy Woodward's book on one hundred Days and thinking about the
technology that he was trying to fight the Argentinians with and trying to see how
that, how would how that would have changed Daddy had the technology we have
today and and the iterations that are that are provided by somebody in the I
think you're somewhere in your article you point out that somebody in the Pentagon says,
you know, I would really like to have this that your your demand
signal, and the the industry guys go, oh yeah, we could do
that. But somebody asked todents say okay, well how much you know,
how are we going to fund this kind of uh? Instead of as you
said with the LCS, well here's our concept. Make us like this and
and we'll pull it happily with it, which I think is completely different than
the iterations we've done with almost every other weapons. The F eighteen Alfon bravo.
You know, goes to the to the UH to the current model of
super Hornets. They're completely different aircraft and much improved. But that is the
that is the process, the way it's supposed to work. Talk about that
a little bit and and some of the changes that that. I'm just like,
if you're looking at Amroal Woodward's situation in UH in the in that war,
or what we were doing in Desert Storm, that the differences in the
in the UH in that time period of what we've got today. I mean
that was we were wonder kids of those days. Everybody thought, well,
yeah, all the high tech stuff we were doing, and that that seems
to me to have been uh in retrospect to looking back all those years,
I mean, that was that was ancient technology. It was and and you
know, let's face it, I uh, I have ideas about where the
fleet are to go, and where the surface force ought to go, and
how to properly architect a combat system. I believe that what we have today
may in fact be the class of the world, but it is a shadow
of what I know we can do. Not you know, some aspirational UH
buzz light year kind of thing, but no, what we can what we
can do with the technology that the that the uh that the financial industry is
moving billions of dollars in microseconds without a penny being lost and no no data
loss. We can import some of that, the technology that is out there
today into our ships in a way that's meaningful and gives us an incredible advantage.
So I look at the sipulary the red seat right now, and there
are a number of different combat system basedlines. There are very modern ones,
there are some less modern ones. They are doing a wonderful job. I
do. I do want to caution everybody that it's dangerous and that while I
am proud of everything they're doing, someone may get hit and people may get
hurt, and we have to keep that in mind. But so far,
what I'm seeing is that is exactly what I expected. And I think I
put this in my in my article that you know, when I looked at
my ship and I trained my ship, and I looked at my combat system,
I believed that if we went out and took on a proper opponent,
my technology would be better than theirs, and that we would win that fight.
We may not win the industrial fight. We may not win the rock
fight, but we're gonna win that technology fight, and we're seeing that right
now. We're seeing it in a big way. Now. A lot of
critics are saying, yeah, we're shooting down, you know, flying lawnmowers
with two million dollar interceptors. Yes, yes we are, Yes we are.
That's what you do when you're not in a great power war with an
industrial power. That's what you do when you're margin for error is zero.
That's what it is. The margin for error for those ships in the Red
Sea right now is zero. If you take it in the snot locker with
a with a telephone pole sized surface to surface missile, your name is mud
and you're gonna have to answer to a lot of justifiably angry parents and a
chain of command. We don't have the luxury that we would have in a
South China Sea scenario when you're getting literally scores of supersonic missiles being shot at
you at one time. So yes, we are targeting in some cases modestly
capable targets with increased with more capable interceptors. But that's what we have,
that's what we've invested in, and that's what the margin of error gives us.
Ultimately, what I hope is that we recognize that what we see in
this petri dish of modern naval warfare is it wakes people up. It wakes
people up. I was really happy to see the Surface Force Commander at SNA
in January say he was unsatisfied with the pace of development of directed energy weapons,
lasers and high powered microwave. Good on him, because you know,
directed energy has been just around the corner for forty years and I'm tired of
it. I'm tired of hearing about it. I want I want us to
field proper directed energy systems, which we can. I mean, the Army's
got a three hundred kilowatt laser on a truck in the desert. We can
do this. We need we need people. We need someone like the Surface
Force commander who has has taken this on to stand up and say I got
this, and put a shoulder down and and make it happen over and let's
talk about that in the in the finest traditions of the Naval Service. Because
I've always thought that one of the reasons why we're having the success we have
today is the way that AEGIS was developed and standard missiles were developed. There's
almost a little I passively aggressively subtweeted a few people today. There there is
a certain industry, especially in the in the water. The U S wimmen
much more than I do of people who they they want to sell the above
the fold, and they want to overpromise and under deliver the sexy, the
sparky, the transformation, all the Aren't I smart? You know? Directive
energy is kind of like railguns. There, they're going to be here the
next palm cycle. We've heard that in the last twelve palm cycles it hadn't
really happened. But with the development of aegis, we had a rear admiral
who was in a job for a long time that put his shoulder into that.
And I may be guilty of this that I've I've put Admiral Meyra up
on a little bit of a pedestal there. But in many times, with
the failures we speak we've seen, especially in the last few decades, I
don't think enough people have looked back and said, look at how we did
that, Why don't we do that until we do it better, then we
can do something new. What characterized the position he has and is there have
we just create a system where nobody can do that again, to have that
one person who, as you said, is putting his shoulder into it and
is longer than a twenty four to thirty six month PMS cycle. Well,
what's interesting is you lay out the case of amal Meyer, But then there's
also Rickover and there was another admiral who was in the ballistic missile program for
a long time. I don't remember his name, but we see the Navy
seems to have this desire for messiahs to come along and lead us out of
the desert, and we found those messiahs when we needed them. I'd like
to think that there is a system that will support us making incremental gains gains
over time in the absence of a messiah, that the process just works because
smart people are in it. But I do recognize the value of long term
leadership at the top, stable leadership at the top. That's one thing that
he just had was that there was Abramire pulling the strings. What Abermyer also
had, though, was something that doesn't exist today, which was somebody writing
the checks. Who who controlled the checks for manpower, maintenance, shipbuilding.
The old OPPO three owned training he was. They so heard of these guys
as the warfare barons. I think warfare barons undersooes them. They were warfare
dukes or warfair princes. These guys were incredibly powerful there, and there were
these partnerships between NAVC broadly understood and OPO three broadly understood that went on for
years where the guy writing the check could move could could within his own program
reallocate money and move it around in inventive ways and grab money to go over
to capitalize interesting developments in aegist that doesn't exist anymore. Surface the Director of
Surface Warfare does not have anywhere near the in ninety six, does not have
anywhere near the budget authority that OPPO three had in nineteen eighty three. Admiral
Doyle, Admiral Rodents Senior, those guys, they had immense amounts of money
and the ability to and it was semi fungible within their within their purview.
Rickover had Rickover had a ton of money. And I'm not just arguing for
money here, I'm arguing over control of money. We have. We have
so thoroughly parsed every part pot of money to affare thee will Uh and the
and Congress and congressional staffers exercise eagle eyed authority over every line item because there
is some buddy in Congress or someone on Capitol Hill or even within the Defense
Department who is who wants that money to be managed so closely. We've changed
the way that we financed this whole, this whole enterprise, so that it
is harder even if the Messiah came along. I think it would be harder
for the Messiah to do his job or her job because they don't have they
can't pull the strings like they used to. This the surface Warfare the SWOW
boss at at in San Diego, Admiral McClain, he runs the Surface Warfare
Enterprise. But what he really does is he exercises convening authority and influence over
the Naval Supply System Commander, the Naval Key Systems Commander, the p E
O I W S. He he cannot order them to do anything, and
so we we work together the best we can. We move the system along
as best we can. But there are no messiahs, there are no people
who can pull the strings. It is a harder environment to make change in.
And we've done it to ourselves over. Yeah, if I were a
Swow admiral, which sud of course never happened. But if I were one,
I would be complaining about the way the uh the drones, the UAVs
and u s v's and all the other v's and unmanned stuff that would be
beneficial to my section of the of the Navy is being handled. I would
want, like the Marines, I would like every ship to have some some
say in what they want to carry as far as that kind of equipment,
And I want them to use it and go out and play with it and
and experiment with it, and then come back and say, well, you
know, this works, just doesn't work. I don't want it to be
driven by some air boss somewhere in the world who doesn't know what destroyers do
and what they need or or what cruisers need. And I think when we
don't, we don't. I don't think too many surface guys tell the the
f A teen drivers, I know this is what you really need. Guys.
I think that that stove piping is some of these things is a major
problem. And when you talk about the funding, I think that's a huge
part of the issue. Well, I need to whine a little bit here,
so Sally, you can offer me some cheese. It has ever been.
Thus, surface warfare is a bill pair, right, It's a bill
pair for the submarine community, broadly understood because submarines submerge and surface with nuclear
power plants, and this country cannot afford and talk about zero margin of risk,
we cannot afford a reactor accident, We cannot afford to unsafely operate nuclear
reactors. And so quite rightly, the submarine force is the lead pig on
the teats. They get what they need right. The next is the aviation
community. Why, because we can't have airplanes falling out of the sky.
That's just that's just what we can't have it. And so we come down
to the surface force, who gets plenty of money. Don't get me wrong.
Surf force gets a billion dollars every year to do what it needs to
do. But it's not enough, and it always comes behind the requirements for
aviation, for specifically carrier aviation and for submarines. Nobody going to be n
ninety six. Nobody in Admiral Pyle's job. That's not a surprise to any
of them. They understand that everybody in surface warfare understands that you've got to
make your case. You've got to come forward with facts, you've got to
have data, you've got to make you've got to make the case. And
so that's what surface warfare winds up doing is trying to do, you know,
a very evidence based, analytically based approach to this is what we bring
to the table, Here's what it's worth, here's what it costs. At
the end of the day at n A and nine and the Vice Chief's office,
those things have to get muscled in with all of the other needs.
Right, we want, we need to, we need to build things,
we need to have military construction, we need to we need to pay for
all sorts of things. Military personnel costs are amazing. So I wish it
were different. I wish surface warfare got more money and was considered more important.
I'm hoping that what people are seeing in the Red Sea wakes some up
to the fact that hey, this isn't this is a really important part of
our peacetime global navy because what they're doing there, there's no declared war,
there's no there we are this is what a peacetime navy is doing in a
time of rested peace. That's the surface warfare. That's what surface warfare does.
It's out there deterring, assuring, responding to crisis, and carrying out
national policy every single day. Over one thing that that watching some of our
allies try to do the same thing kind of creeped into my mind and is
informed by your article. Is wanted to know who successfully made the argument because
the green ice shre always coming after you when you have a ship. We
need to save some money, so why don't we get rid of this system
or that system? And as we talked about earlier on in the show,
some of our arly burks who we will build to the crack of doom.
We have ninety some odd either afloat or on order. Well we'll get over
one hundred of visually, I'm quite sure. But some of these ships,
in the course of a day they saw an anti ship cruise missile, they
saw an anti ship ballistic missile, They had UAV attacks, even had some
had surface attacks. And all these arly burks, depending upon the burkey hath
you have SM two s M three, SM six EESSM missiles, You've got
t LAM for your land attack, You've got that multi use five inch gun
forward that everybody loves. And then you look at the Royal Navy, which
is from an intestinal fortitude point of view, they always come out they they
want to play. But there some pictures came out over the weekend of their
HMS Diamond. I think it is one of their dairying class. They only
have a half dozen comparable too in Arley Burke common However, they have significant
budgetary problems that have for a long time, so their version of the Arly
Burke does not have land attack cruise missiles. Their main gun does not have
an anti air capability anymore because they decided to save money to no longer give
it that ability. And as everybody does, they've got they in their case
have to go all the way back to Gibraltar to reload. So what in
the Arley Burke program do you think what it was that we were able to
convince the builders and the people who are writing the checks excuse me, that
yes, we're going to have a wide variety of missiles on this because we
really don't know who we're going to fight, so we want to have enough
tools in the box to be able to deal with it. I think that
also is an important lesson when you look at a closest peer like the Royal
Navy, how those decisions can really make a difference. Yeah, you know,
we have we have these debates in uh in in fleet architecture, and
one of the debates people love single purpose ships, right, people love mind
sweepers, people like phms. They want us to they want us to build
these ships that do one thing exquisitely. Well, because we used to do
that. We used to have as part of our fleet a number of ships
that were sort of single purpose ships. Well, there is a there's an
incompressible and irreducible amount of give a dand that a navy has to do for
every ship. You have to have people, you have to have grease,
you have to have fuel, ammunition, food, All of that has to
be carried on other ships. There have to be supply eyelines, there have
to be depots, There have to be all of these things. There has
to be a certain superstructure to support any class of ship. Therefore, it
is almost always more efficient to have a ship that does multiple things rather than
have multiple classes of ships to singular things. It catch me so far.
So this is you know, one of the reasons why we have arly bird
destroyers and just cruisers that have anti ship cruise missiles, anti land attack cruise
missiles, surface to air missiles, hypersonic missiles. The I think technically the
SM six is hypersonic harpoon missiles. They have over the side torpedoes, they
have anti submarine rockets, they have Tota race ownars, a bow mounted sonar.
What we did was we said, if we're going to create naval power,
it's more efficient that those ships have multiple purposes and then we can have
more efficient supply and support mechanisms. Then to create singular ships that have or
ships that have singular emissions break. That explains why we have DDGs and cruisers
like we have today. That explains why the FFG when it comes out at
least Hall two will have most of those weapons, including a land attack variant.
Is because if we're going to spend you know, a billion dollars a
copy, we might as well get all of the things out of it.
The Royal Navy has a much different problem to deal with, and that is
they simply don't have the money or in my view, the will to do
much different from what they are capable of doing now, and what they're capable
of doing now is to put out a modest number of well of capable,
well equipped chips that can do some things. But a ship that does what
a modern E just cruiser or a modern AGES destroyer or a future DDG X
does it's just beyond them right now because it would suck up far too much
of their military budgets. So they have It's not that they couldn't do it,
it's that they can't do it because they have other places their money needs
to go over. Yeah, one of the concerns has been expressed, specially
by by Wayne Hughes in the past. By building these ships that are so
capable, the the loss of any one of those ships means that if you
if you have to send your your d DP back to Guam to rearm,
assuming WALM is still there, you've then taken you know, anti air,
anti submarine, a tremendous asset that does all those things offline. And you
know, that was one of the arguments that he was making in favor of
of Yes, the d d g's great, the cruisers great, but also
uh some single purpose uh smaller ships, the more expendable ships that would that
would keep keep you uh you know if you lost when you didn't lose all
the capabilities of a of a Burke class destroyer. So you know, the
question then is I think one of the things that that I at the point
I really liked your article where that you know, when you first got to
the to your f f uh not. None of the components that the anti
submarine, that missiles, the uh, the regular C I C stuff do
not all communicate electronically. I mean he had an one to swear I was
on we had this sonar guys yelling over to the radar guys, uh something.
But uh, you know, the integration of all this stuff into a
into a modern system, I think is one of the most important things that's
been accomplished over the years. Talk a little bit about that and why why
that is both a blessing and a curse if we lose one of these d
d g s. We don't get me wrong, Like everyone else in this
field, I have a great deal of respect for Wayne Meyer. I mean
for you, just Wayne you sorry. When I've looked at you know,
I've looked deeply at some of his fleet design ideas, and they have merit.
One problem I've always had with Wayne uses fleet designs is that I think
he is guilty of underestimating how much those ships cost. Number one, So
the total cost of his fleet and total ownership costs are higher than he tends
to give them, or have been higher than he tends to suggest. The
problem, though, comes in the fact that we haven't been, for a
long time, a war fighting navy. We've been a war deterring navy.
We've been a put a bit of stick about navy. We've been a navy
that protects and sustains global order and and our economy and security. And so
when your navy is doing those things over time, and you and you have
a certain amount of money available to spend on land based maritime patrol through through
a vertical lift, new class of submarine, another new class of submarine,
aircraft, carriers, surface ships. When you have all of these places to
put your money, and when you look at your surface fleet, you then
come back to it is it makes more economic sense for a fleet that is
built both to fight and to influence. It makes more sense to build multi
mission ships. Now that's not an argument for death stars, it's not an
argument for you know, you could you could take this to the to its
ridiculous extreme and think about, you know, some sort of a twenty five
billion dollar death Star kind of ship, but having a certain number. I
personally would like to see fewer large surface combatants and more numerous smaller surface combatants.
That would I say more numerous. I think about the the f fg
X class. I'd like to see, you know, I'd like to see
US building four or five of those a year as soon as possible. I
think building one and a half large surface combatants, but very very capable surface
combatants, surface combatants with a SPY six radar to see with Block three,
with with a integrated power system, with a with a series of directed energy
weapons on them. I would like to see US rebalanced so that we have
fewer large surface combatants and more numerous smaller surface combatants for essentially the same amount
of ship building money a year. That's going to take an intellectual argument I
make. I make that argument all the time to really influential people. I
have not carried the day I want to build one and a half big ships
and four smaller ships a year, rather than building two big ships and two
smaller ships. A year, which means that I want to build five and
a half ships for the same money it costs to build four ships, but
that you would change the character of the surface force over time. I've made
this argument, I haven't won it yet, and maybe before I hang it
up, someday I can convince people. But for now we're kind of we're
sort of stuck with building those big, the big multi mission ships. The
thing and I think offers the most hope alter this is unmanned surface vessels.
If we're going to build modestly capable surface vessels, we might as well not
put people on them or have them mostly unmanned. And that to me makes
a lot of sense. And I think we are starting to see some really
good ideas in unmanned, medium, small, and and even a large surface
A large unmanned surface vessel, which is essentially a quoting VLS magazine, we
can take. We can we can offload those Wayne Hughes inspired wartime kinds of
single mission platforms into the unmanned fleet, and I think we can do so
within a more achievable total labigational authority over it. I would feel feel bad
if I didn't, you know, quote your article one more time. For
those that read the comments and some of the other commentary about what you wrote,
it's been kind of funny how you've triggered people on a few topics that
see the navalist sympathy for the devil type of speech, and one thing that
nobody likes to throw a little love at that you do actually throw a little
love at. I'll do a little quote here, and then I'd like to
get expound on a little bit. It has to do with the defense budget.
And this was towards the end of your article. It says, quote,
it never ceases to amaze me want to hear people talk about the defense
budget and this as if it were a certain number of dollars that would provide
an optimal level of national offense. And this fantasy world, incredibly spart list
crunch number. The Department of Defense creates a bill for the officer management and
budget, and this bill is presented to the Congress, who pays it unflinchingly
because of the obvious wisdom of the thinking that went into it. Not to
mention the unquestioned non parochialism of the legislators involved. This is not how things
are done. The inefficiency, the pork, the parochialism, the horse trading,
the compromise, those are not bugs. This is a system. Tell
everybody why they got it wrong? Do you do? You have that at
hand so you can read the very next sentence. Oh sure, thing,
it says right after. This is a system, and it's a system that
drives defense spending. Because there are no point solutions, there will always be
inefficiency. That inefficiency, inefficiency gets papered over by additional resources. Lather,
rent, and repeat. You need to finish the rest of the paragram's I'm
trying to. I have come to conclude that the closer we come to a
perfect system of resource allocation, the farther away from representative democracy we will be.
If we had an authoritarian government, if we had a king, we
would be much It would be much easier to achieve the kind of defense budget
that a number of critics of my article seem to think is possible. It's
not possible. We can't allocate resources that way. We have five hundred and
thirty five members of Congress, each of whom believes that they are, you
know, venture capitalists. That's the way the system was created, and there
will and there will always be inefficiency because of that compromise. There's never going
to be perfect allocation of resources to strategy. And it just bothers me that
I hear really smart people sometimes falling victim to the sense that that that not
only not only is there a more perfect way to do it, which probably
is, but that there is a perfect way to do this, which certainly
isn't. We have to recognize that this is my favorite example. For the
Navy to grow, more money is going to have to be spent on the
Navy period, end of story. The only way the Navy is going to
get more money is if the Army gets more money, and the Air Force
gets more money, and the Marine Corps gets more money, and the Space
Force gets more money. Not because that's the strategically smart thing to do,
but because that's how our system works. We're not good at making that kind
of point solution, that kind of hard strategic choice. We have people in
congressional districts who build tanks who will say that's not a good idea. I
need more money in order for me to vote for Europe. This that kind
of log rolling, that kind of compromise, that's part of that is our
system. Uh, And you know, I think, uh, I don't
know. I think people low themselves into a into a sense of security thinking
that if only we had more patriotic people or I'm sorry, I might I
might embarrass some of our some of my hosts right now. If only we
had term limits, it could throw the bums out every you know, every
six years or whatever. It would almost never work that way. As long
as we continue to have geographically distributed representation in the lower body of lower Chamber
of Congress, and as long as states continue to send an equal number of
representatives into the center Senate, which is going to stay until this country is
conquered or ceases to exist, We're going to have this kind of inefficiency and
we need to just recognize it. Yeah. During the during some research for
this show, and I got a chance to look at the the Eisenhower School.
I don't know if you're familiar with this, but they used to be
the Army Industrial College I became the Armed Condustrial College. The Armed Forces now
is known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy,
and it's it's its mission is to prepare select military officers and civilians for
strategic strategic leadership and success in developing national security strategy and evaluating marshaling and managing
resources and the execution of that strategy. And I said, there go,
who who are these people? And do we ever see them? And that
you look at your article, I think, and I don't. There's a
disconnect between what these people think they're doing at the Eisenhower School and the name
of a man who had that military industrial uh complex uh speech and and and
what you just said about how the real world works. So talk about that
a little bit. I am amazed. I talked. I talked to flag
officers all the time. These are some of the These are brave men and
women. These are people, and and they I wish they had a more
sophisticated understanding of that system, because they would recognize that there is so there
are so many people over there on Capitol Hill who want to help them,
who want who want them to succeed. But I think sometimes because there are
others over there who who are clearly antithetical to the Navy's interests, so who
act antathetically to the Navy's interest they seem to think that all are but they're
not there. There's a good bunch of people over there, especially in the
in the committee and the committees that helped the Navy or that oversee the Navy.
This is why you know, this administration sent you know, its first
two budgets up to Capitol Hill and Congress added I think between forty and sixty
billion dollars to each of those because there are interests up there that are different
than the interest in the Pentagon. And that's the way the system works.
And if the Navy, if if flag officers understood that system and appreciated it
and exploited it, that's the word I'm going to use, is exploited it
in a little more ill and more sophisticated manner. I think we'd be in
a better place. Well, Brian, on that note, we've we've kept
you for the full hour. I really appreciate you taking time this Sunday to
chat with us. I would highly recommend everybody who's listening look at the show
page and if you're catching the podcast, you'll find a link there as well.
Link can go read Brian's article and some of the other stuff you're putting
out. You also have your own substack, so if people would like to
keep an eye on what you're working on. Where's a good place for them
to keep their eyeballs and their computers looking. Obviously, your substack is a
key place, because when I want to reach an influential audience quickly, I
call you and I say, hey, you've got room for me, And
I appreciate how often you say yes unflinchingly. Or you can go to my
own substack, the Conservative Wahoo, where you can see where I sometimes write
about the Navy and sometimes write about just life in these United States. Perfect
well, I really appreciate it, Brian, And we're coming up on spring,
so I hope the rest of twenty four works out well for you and
yours, and I'll look forward to next time having a conversation. Thank you
very much, Thank you very much, take care of Thank you, Brian,
thank you, and thank you everybody for joining us for another edition in
mid Rats. Until next time. I hope everybody has a great Navy day.
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