Welcome to mid Rats with sal from Commander Salamander and the Eagle One from Eagles
Speak at Sea or Shore your home for a discussion of national security issues in
all things maritime. And welcome forward everybody. I am the aforementioned foul along
with my co host, the ever genial Eagle One from Eagles Speak. And
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And while the world fully and the last eleven months or so has been focused
on the war in Ukraine, the work both practical, legal and intellectual here
in the States and even with some of our close allies to try to shape
and build the navy more in line with the challenges we're facing. It didn't
stop in twenty two. There's been a lot of work going on, and
a few things happened that I think in twenty twenty three are going to start
to bear fruit or perhaps even get a little momentum. Not insignificant items as
well. And sometimes on mid Rats we talk about, you know, little
narrow niche targets, because we like to do that. But today we're going
to open up the aperture a bit, and we're going to look at some
larger macro issues involved with what came up during twenty twenty two, what interested
navalists should be looking forward to in twenty twenty three, keep in your scan
and how those are going to affect things good, bad or neutral going forward.
And we're real excited to have on today a returning guest, but not
just any returning guest. Is We kind of mentioned it for a second at
our thirteenth anniversary show last week, but almost thirteen years to the date from
his visit here to Midrats. Is our guest for the full hour, Brian
McGrath, Commander of the United States Navy, retired and managing director of the
Ferrybridge Group LLC. Brian, thank you very much for joining us this Sunday
for another Midrats sal It's very good to be here. One, good to
be with you two. I thank you so much for giving me this opportunity
thirteen years more into my adult dotage. I hope, I hope I am
worthy of your confidence. Well, if you've been going thirteen years, and
so have I, And I think I think my Illustric sco host has at
least a year or two on me, so he's setting the standard there for
us. But I think we'll will get there. Okay, you know that
thirteen years For you young folks out there, it does go in the blink
of an eye. And a lot of the issues that that we've talked about
during the years, and those that have come before us have talked about things
don't change overnight. It's it's kind of like the difference between growing annuals and
having an orchard. That you've got to have patients, You've got to pay
attention to the details. Every year. You have to go through a similar
process to get to what you desire at year one. And I want to
start today's show on a topic that we put in the pre show discussion that
I think it tells a larger story besides the little victory check in the block
that we have. It talks about persistence. Is you know we you know
we talk about you've been with us for about thirteen years, but you mentioned
in an article recently about some of the changes and titled ten that you first
saw this need almost fourteen years ago, or three or three to four years
before he joins us on Midraps. And you know, here we are at
the change of a new year in twenty twenty three, and we've seen that
change in section at eighty sixty two alpha, and I wanted it to talk
for a little bit about because words mean things, and especially where you are
in your line of work, words mean a lot. Talk a little bit
if you could about that. That's that's sixteen to seventeen year old journey,
and why people that really care about our Navy in the direction next going they
should be not just interested, but they should be encouraged and excited about something
that happened in Congress that affected Title ten. Sure, before I get to
that, I wanted to think about something I want to think about thirteen years
ago, two thousand and ten January twenty ten, and wonder allowed whether where
the Navy is today in the context of the threats it cases, versus where
the Navy was then in the context of the threats it pasted in two thousand
and ten. I would say, all in all, we've declined in them
that thirteen years and I'm just having a little bit of an anxiety attack here
on my couch thinking about that. Wait a second. We may we might
have been in better shape relative to the threat thirteen years ago than we are
today, which means we had If I'm right, it means we've treaded water
or paddled for thirteen years while our dversaries haven't. It's out off base,
do you think now, I think, you know, we we were swimming
in two knots against a ten knot current. I think that's that might be
a fair, if not um humbling observation. Mark. What do you have?
Yeah, I was gonna say, I think we're you know, we
had we had good at ages cruisers thirteen years ago. Uh that we're still
viable ships. We didn't have the We knew it LCS was a mess,
but we didn't know how much of a mess it was, and we still
don't know. I think fully how disaster set program is going to be if
we keep counting those real combatants, unless unless somebody changes my mind. Yeah,
I'm I'm really uh, I'm kind of with you that it is depressing
to think about that. The the you know, we haven't really put a
new aircraft out. The F thirty five was I guess was in in uh
the beginning stages back then, but they were still flying the NBA teams.
Yeah, I'm we don't have any long range carrier air really, it's yeah,
it's not a it's not a pretty picture. Yeah, I hadn't.
I hadn't thought about it in quite those terms before. And well, thanks,
thanks for driving me into a depressed state here in this Sunday evening.
Relative to title ten, uh, I was involved in the drafting of the
two thousand and seven Maritime Strategy. UM there was a lot of work that
went into that. It's bottom line assertion was that there was that sea power
played a disproportionate role in the maintenance, sustainment, advancement of American security and
prosperity. Um it. I thought it was. I thought then it was
a good message. I think today it remains a good message. I remember,
and this is a two thousand and six time frame. I remember walking
around the Pentagon at my boss by SA Admiral John Morgan's urging to interact with
the you know, with the intellectual shops of each of the services and the
OSD staff, and I'll never forget getting together with a group of folks in
the Air Force. I think they called themselves checkmate. I don't remember.
Again, I'm an adult, fifty seven year old man. I think they
called themselves checkmate. And I just remember sitting there with one of these really
bright lieutenant colonels who said to me when I was talking about this maintenance,
sustainment and advancement of American security and prosperity, and he looked at me,
he said, that's you're not your mission, um, And I said,
excuse me. He said, that's not your mission, your title time mission.
And I don't remember the exact words, but it, you know,
it's operations incident to combat at sea. And I'll never forget that because I
think it was the same mission when I was commissioned. I think in in
Rotc at some point one of my instructors would have said something about that what
the mission of the United States Navy was, and it's very much focused on
kinetic battle war conflict, um. And what this person was saying was these
aspirations that you have, or these this thought that you have that the Navy
plays this role. It's just nice to have. It's just it is a
lesser included offense under the um marquee mission of war fight and that don't don't
think that you can sort of raise that to some level of importance, because
you can't. That's not your mission, um. That's not the first time
or the only time I had someone in the Pentagon give me that approach.
It's not your mission. It's not your mission. Tend to your knitting.
What are you guys supposed to do? Warret se warat see operations, incident
combat at seat. And so I think what that has done over time was
to give people on the third deck, which is a colloquialism for OSD staff
and for people in the other services, when they when it was convenient for
them and when it served their ends, to bring that up to bring Hey,
Navy, all of this extra force structure that you need, or you
say you need because you need, because you say you need to be forward
advancing, sustaining and protecting American security and prosperity to saw your job. Why
are we paying for that? Why am I getting fewer tanks or fighter wings
or infantry brigades in order to pay for something that you're not it's not your
mission. I think, over time, through worth of a lot of people.
U. Bj Armstrong over at the Naval Academies has has a has a
cottage industry in this in his ability to make sure everybody recognizes that the Navy
does a lot of things when it's not shooting at people that are really important
to the health and welfare of this republic, and it always has UM.
So you know, I've wrote, I've written and spoken about this blind spot
in our national strategic makeup for a long time. And when Representative Gallagher just
really in a in an explication of what we pay legislators to do, UM
decided that he was going to mess with the source code of the Navy and
proposed language that change changes Title ten, changes that mission, that makes sure
that mission statement reflects what presidents have ordered the Navy to do for two hundred
and forty years. UM that that the mission statement had to reflect realities.
So I equival with you at at my Peril Salve. But when I saw
the tagline for the show and it said a new mission, I thought to
myself, this isn't a new mission, it's a new mission statement. But
the mission of peacetime prosperity and security advancement is something we've done for our entire
history, and it's high time that we're back, that we have that mission
statement, the legal justification to sit there in endgame when the budget crunches on
and say, no, you're wrong, we do need more capacity in order
to pursue this mission. It's not just the amalgamated addition of war plans.
That's not what makes NABE for structure. It is war plans, it is
exercises, it is forward presence to enable other missions and to enable the terrence
and the persuasion of folks who might wish to do violence. It's it is
when you have a navy like we have, it has to be forward if
it's going to be of any use to you. Um And I think there
is a there is an intellectual strategic tie between this mission statement and the concept
of a forward deployed Navy. I'll stop there for for your comments. Well,
I personally find it ironic. I mean, grown up as a as
a stack Bret and their motto was strangier er command motto was um pieces our
profession that somebody in the earth for us, would question that the Navy didn't
have the same uh deterrent mission that the that the that Sack claimed for itself.
I mean, that's that's very odd. But in the real world,
is this a change that that matters most to the great minds in the inside
the belt line area? Or is it is this is this something that when
we go out in public and we can say, look, you know,
the region support the Navy is because our our mission now fully clearly states that
it's it's to encourage peace in the world. I think, um, I
would be I would be less than truthful if I didn't say this wasn't very
much inside baseball. Um, that kind of a thing, and I would
be definitely overstating it's impact if I were to, let's face it, I
think three hundred and fifty five ships is the law. Also, the law
gets ignored these especially some you know, things such as this sometimes a little
more aspirational in nature. I don't expect that in the fiscal year twenty four
budget drop in the spring, that we're going to see great reams of money
raining down on the Navy because Congressman Gallagher was able to change the Title ten
law. What I see are fewer lieutenant commanders and commanders and captains and rear
admiral's having to go into the kind of bare knuckle brawling that is the process
that creates a defense budget and ever have to put up with that crap again
that it's not your mission, it is our mission. We need for structure
that enables us to be forward. To be forward, you need to have
a training base, you need to have a maintenance base. You now to
need to have upkeep, and you need to have our sustainment base. All
of that goes into a three or four ships to get one. That's sort
of a that sort of ratio that we've all been familiar with for our whole
lives. We now have a mission that makes it crystal clear that that's not
just a bunch of admirals who want ships for their own sake. And if
I can have a pushback on your pushback, though, I think I think
we're having applied agreement on the same premise. But um, is it a
new mission or is it not? I guess it depends. And this is
a subject you and I have talked about for at least a decade, maybe
not thirteen years, but at least a decade. To you and me.
Know, when we talk to our fellow people in the maritime and the naval
sphere, in some ways I think we are fish trying to talk about water.
I understand certain fundamentals. You understand certain fundamentals, and we don't feel
the need to talk about them too much to each other. However, let's
go back to your Air Force Lieutenant colonel's comments. He doesn't live in water,
he lives in air, so you know he doesn't know what we're talking
about. And so to him, in one of the efforts you made,
and I don't know if you wrote about it or you tweet about it again,
you pointed everybody to the series of speeches you made a few years ago
at the Rotary Club. Your road show is it is new to some people,
and especially people who have access to levers of power, whose expertise might
be in economics, or trial law or just politics. They don't appreciate what
we assume to be an old mission, and a lot of it has to
be. It goes back to the world we live in right now, just
in the last few years, it's slipping out of living memory. But when
you consider the almost everybody are a post World War two generation. Is the
globe in the world that the US Navy built after World War Two is assumed
to be the normal, and the whole global system of trade and economics and
access to resources was built upon that new reality that now is, if not
under threat, it has a different dynamic. So you know, when we
make a change to title ten that just looks like stating the obvious. Is
that a byproduct of I don't want to use the phrase arrogance, but just
maybe benign entitlement and assumptions of a reality? And there are there other things
about maritime power that may need to be coified in other ways to force the
issue. I like what you said. So now we have Lieugenet, commanders,
commanders, captains, admiral's own up. Don't have to run around explaining
to people what was what we always assumed to be in a natural state.
Is this kind of a process that we're looking at that maybe we just need
to codify, like we did here, things that we assume everybody who knows,
but they don't because they're not fish. Well. When I think about
this situation through that context and through that lens that you discussed, than I
would say to you then I would agree it is new. It is new
on a lot of people. Um. The codification of what that means um,
I think I would have to, I think without knowing the specifics,
like what other things would become because now we have a mission, Now we
have career interpret clive ships. I think we had you know, we have
a number of aircraft carriers. Um. The Marine Corps has in its mission.
UM, I guess three infantry infantry divisions. You know they've got their
size is set in law. UM. Maybe maybe more codification is required in
order to um, to remind people or to jar people into a better sense
of acquire m. You know you mentioned that that little speaking tour I did,
and I traveled around in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen to every county in
the state of Maryland, and I spoke in the county seat at the at
the Rotary Club there, and it was just all about trying to explain what
the Navy was doing for their country. And it really was quite i opening.
The degree to which what I said opened eyes. People just didn't know.
They didn't realize, they didn't get it. They didn't they did not
realize the degree to which our Navy had slipped, the degree to which its
readiness had slipped, the degree how small it had gotten. Um. You
know I would I talked to people way out in western Maryland one night in
January. It was three degrees below zero out there about the Navy, and
it was such a good group of people, great Americans, business people in
their in their county. It was Garrett County, I think it was,
and I was in and they were just so taken aback at the paint the
picture I painted. And I don't think I painted an unrealistic paint picture.
I didn't, you know. I wasn't gloom and doom. I was mostly
we need to do better because we have serious threats. UM. So maybe
additional codification, maybe additional as certainly, additional storytelling, additional narrative development,
additional UM, additional people out there talking about sea power and it's and it's
impact UM on our steering prosperity. Yeah, it's required. Yeah. I
always cautioned against more codification because it ties your hands in a lot of ways.
And although every now and then Congress says something right, so like I
think it's codified that we're supposed to have eleven carriers, and that makes some
sense to me that somebody the Navy said, look, we just can't fall
below this or we're going to get in trouble. But that also reminds me
that the Marine Corps is making an active push to get a whole bunch of
new little ships to not even that little, but new ships to move Marine
Corps people around, manned by Navy people. And I'm looking at this their
numbers thirty eight, Navy numbers eighteen and thinking is that going to count against?
Are those real worships? And the answer is apparently not. But let's
talk about that a little bit about these laws. No, No, those
worships, those lawyer amphibious warships will count. They will count in the ship
count. There is no there is no reason that they would not count.
I think the nature of their mission this to the light amphibious warfare ship he's
talking about. And I wrote about this last week in Defense One about my
misgivings with this ship. It all boils down to this sense that I have
that what the Marines want to do with expeditionary advanced based operations is something I
really, really really want them to be able to do, and that is
kill ships from the shore and kill airplanes from the shore durned combat. I
really would love for them to be able to do those things. In order
for them to do those things, those those kinetic outposts need to have missiles
and parts and food and water and grease and all of the things that go
into providing that sort of power, and they have. The Marines have come
up with this this light amphibious worship as a means for the logistics support of
those ea bos among other things, but that logistics support for e abos is
chief among them. And I keep coming back to the sense that if this
machine is to do its job how they have spect it is insufficient to the
task. It is too slow, and it is it has no no armament,
no weaponry. And I know everybody who's who looks at these things today,
that's just McGrath trying to create, you know, pocket battleships. Again.
Now, I don't like the idea of seventy five marines and forty sailors
on a ship that has essentially a surface search raider, a twenty five millimeter
gun and a fifty caliber machine gun. That's not oh excuse me, and
that and that ship providing logistics support to important Marine Corps missions while the shooting
is happening. Um And and that article I wrote raised some some comments that
Marine Corps Combat Development Center Commanding General Lieutenant General Heckel brought up where he basically
was indicating that he that the ships weren't going to be They're going to go
bed down when the shooting starts. They're going to go go hide when the
shooting starts, and um, it struck me as a real disconnect and that
and that there was a a real storytelling problem here that the Marine Corps has
with this with the ship and the fact that the latest budget of twenty three
budget put the ship off for two years to create some decision space with something
I was writing about as a positive thing. Not everything has to be,
not everything has to be tricked out. Not everything has to be, you
know, a proper warship. If your job is to keep combat readiness at
a high level on a distributed Marine Corps basis all around East Jesus in the
south west Pacific, I personally would like that ship to be more capable,
specifically faster and have somewhat more of a C five eye suite than it has
today. Faster than fourteen to sixteen knots I don't think is an unreasonable goal.
Faster or at more C five bias R and T than a surfer search
radar, twenty five millimeter chain gun and a fifty colt machine gun. I
don't think that's a you know, a heavy lift over I'm glad you brought
that up, because when I was reading that article, I had stopped.
I had to go back. It's like, what did I just read?
Go back, and maybe you can help us because because you work in these
environs. Thankfully, probably more than ninety eight point seven percent of people in
this area is and I'll quote that from the deputy commander for the Combat Development
Integration. He said, this is from the article as war nears, the
new amphibious ship goes into hiding, it goes into bed downstone. Where nowhere
do we envision the light amphibious the law out transiting the sea lanes in the
middle of a kinetic fight. Unquote. I'm sorry, um, I don't
think you're able to have a training time out in the middle of war if
you have marines on islands that are relying on something in peace at war.
I don't see a combatant commander going I'm sorry, shipmate, we we can't
we got to hide this thing. We can't send It's just not going to
happen that way. And we've seen this before when there's maybe eight or nine
years ago when some of the realities of LCS came through. I believe it
was the cno at the Times has said, well, you know, lcs
can can run away real fast, and we'll pull it out because we're not
going to have it as a high fights something of that manner. And it
turns back to a mindset where we both like to use the term the green
eye shade considerations, because in peacetime, when you're looking at budgets, you
can understand why you would want to, you know, save ten cents so
you can have ten units as opposed to eight units. Is it really just
the green eye shade getting the majority vote in these decisions, or is there
a real intellectual disconnect which I would find shocking about what the realities of a
large Western Pacific war at sea would actually look like. I don't think there's
going to be any hiding west of Wake. So I have been dubious about
law for a while now. I first ran into it, I think when
the en General Burger put his his commanders in tent out when he took a
process in the summer of twenty nineteen. I was intrigued. Like most of
America who was paying attention, I was intrigued because there I thought there was
some interesting thinking going on I found myself thinking where are they going to get
the money. Then then I read on in general Burger's commanders intent and I
talked and I saw him talking about retiring legacy platforms, and that got my
spider senses tingling a little bit, um because what we have seen, and
obviously there isn't a one to one relationship here, but we have lost the
Marine Corps has has come down from its theological u connection with thirty eight amphibs
to thirty one amphibs, which by that I mean the LHD lh LSD LPG
seventeen versions. Um, they've come down to that almost magically, as they
have come up with this thirty you know this three dozen laws. So it
seems to me like they are trying to mum cannibalize uh proper amphibious force structure
for this um this capability. And I thought to myself, well, if
this capability has an impact on the war fight and does in fact do what
it sounds like it'll do, maybe it's worthwhile. But what As I keep
pulling on this string, I found myself thinking, no, it doesn't look
like this ship is going to be a ship that can uh can properly operate
in a contested environment. UM. And two things really surprised me and and
and rolled And when they rolled out, they made me realize, Okay,
I think I think I am onto something here. UM. One was this
set of remarks that General Hecke made last fall that I um that I glommed
onto and I thought, oh my goodness, this is this is all about,
how do we keep this at one hundred and fifty million dollars or less
per copy? It's a it was a desire to UH to make this risk
worthy platform into something that they could afford to buy in significant enough numbers that
they could use it with their marine electoral regiments. UM. The problem still
comes back to the use case. It still comes back to UM. What
they wish to do with the ea BOS requires a logistic ship that is more
capable than this. And when General Heckel said, UM, uh that that
you know this is UH it's going to bed that down. It's not going
to Yes, I get it. This isn't going to this. This ship
isn't gonna puts around at fourteen knots in the middle of a in the middle
of a wide open c for the Chinese surveillance environment to find and kill.
I get it. Um, I want to under I want to give general
Call the benefit of the doubt on this and not make it sound like McGrath
knows everything and Heckle knows not. That's not it. Heckle is a smart
guy. Heckle has good ideas. But I think when you think about how
the ship is going to do what it's supposed to do, which is to
provide logistics under fire too incredibly important capabilities, it has to be more than
it is. Um. I just don't I don't understand. I don't understand
why he said, why he said what he did, But perhaps they'll respond,
Yeah, I don't think I would count on that. The uh.
I mean, I'm said, they're looking to go, well, what about
the EPFs. They they're they're everything you're looking for, and they go fast
when you need them to. And uh and they get you know, they
get everything you want for legs and all the rest of it. And they
pulled more and they've got more space. I mean, I started doing all
kinds of calculations and I can't figure out other than the fact that they occasionally
crack and may just fall apart. But I don't understand why the EPF isn't
sufficient, and I also don't I really hate the idea if we can again
we can, we'll cut down to thirty one big am FIBs and we want
thirty eight little ones. And all of a sudden, you've got a seventy
four part part of your navy, that is that is am FIBs. Not
so bad if you have if you have the other numbers in combatants that actually
do blue water or inshore fighting. But my goodness is uh, I mean
the other option as far as I was concerned, as the Marines that want
to play Hasbella and there and there see eight o ones shooting up the Israeli
navy. Uh, you know that's then let's you know, I'm not sure
they need anything more complicated than truck floated with the right gear and uh maybe
and little tiny detachments everywhere, so you diversified your and spread your force round.
But year as you point out there they've got this combat regiment thing going.
I'm not quite clear on all the concepts. Well, they they m
one of the things they in their in their defense they've talked about one of
the ways that this vessel. The light into this warship will be survivable is
that it will have a low signature um Um. I think you can probably
design in signature control again, every dollar, every every you know, decibel
of signature control, whether it's acoustic or radar return or whatever. Um.
It's expensive. Signature control is an expensive proposition, so you immediately then begin
to to eat away at your desire of a cheap, expendable risk worth of
these ships. Um. If this ship were being built for peacetime operations,
uh, I'd say it's a it's a reason, it's a reasonable desire,
and or why couldn't we use army lcms that do pretty much the same thing.
The Army's got a ton of lcms, I think, But at the
end of the day, I just think there's a mismatch. I want.
I want the Marines to do shore based anti ship cruise missile firing, and
integrated air and missile defense. I think that would add a lot to the
war fighting posture in the Western Pacific. I want them to be able to
do that with confidence and to be able to move around quickly. Both the
war fighting capability itself and the logistics associated with that undertaking. I want all
of those things to happen. I just don't think that the logistic side of
this has been thought through as well as it should, and that this particular
ship is under spectful the role they wanted to have number one and it and
because eight up seven big antibs. It bothers me because the things that antibs
were doing and can do remain really important to this Navy, to the Marine
Corps, and to the nation. One of the things I mentioned in this
article is that the fact that we have these especially the LPG seventeens, floating
around without any offensive missiles on them, without SM six, without t lamp
block five, without any ability to really kill other ships or perform land attack
missions. That's a sin. That's a sin we can solve. We could
go we could put box launchers on, we could in their u cno availabilities,
we could put the LS launchers in them. We could solve that problem.
But you know this, this discussion of how that that the big antibs
are so are so vulnerable that we need to have these small antibs, we
need to build them in numbers. But then I read mac Fitic saying we're
not going to use them when they're vulnerable, and none of this story,
it doesn't add up for me. And I I wrote this articles hoping that
I can put some pressure on decision makers to ask inconvenient questions of the Navy
and of the Marine corps um to determine, you know, what exactly do
they want to do with this thing, and what exactly our EABO is going
to do? Um Because I thought I knew what they were going to do,
and I thought I thought, and I thought I was very much in
favor of that. I'm not so sure anymore. Yeah, asking questions,
I mean, just like you did the questions and concerns that you outlined about
the law. That comes from a perspective of somebody who is a not just
a career naval officer but since then has been soaking in these issues for a
long time. And to ask informed questions requires knowledge. And this sounds like
a political question, but it's really not. But I want to circle back.
You know, we talked about the changes to Title ten. That's the
law. Things like that have got to go through. Congress has to have
good staff and you know, many kudos in the world to Representative Mike Gallagher,
Republican and Wisconsin COMMA. However, he was part of a bipartisan dynamic
duo with Representative Elaine Lauria, Democrat of Virginia, and whether you're put politics
to the side if you're concerned with navalist issues. Representative Lauria she was.
She lost her election in the fall, so she won't be coming back.
And for those that have watched her or have had an opportunity to talk to
her, preferably both very knowledgeable and also has the right attitude willing to sharp
informed questions that you can't wiggle out, and you try to wiggle out,
you're going to squish you back. Representative gallaghries get it that. So regardless
of what political party they may be associated with, there's been a change in
power the leading party in the House of Representative, which is going to have
some changes in that landscape. But there also have been the land Lauria will
not be in Congress, but there have been some people with military backgrounds who
are coming into Congress, and I think that's that that type of knowledge base
and that type of personality is what a lot of us are looking at to
ask the questions like you asked but to do that with somebody who has congressional
power and influence. For the listeners here, just just real fast with the
new Congress, or there's some new names out there that if you don't have
knowledge of, at least pique your interest, that people can track on to
might be able to help us shape the navy we need by doing what Gallagher
and Lauria had done over the last few years. I don't know, I
honestly don't know. I do know that sea power is in a lesser position
than it was in the last Congress. Elaine Lauria was in fact a national
asset. She she grabbed a row, grabbed an oar and road when it
came to sea power, and she she's sometimes asked in convenient questions and caused
senior people some embarrassment. Um, but she was always growing in the right
direction. She's almost irreplaceable. I don't know who in her caucus will step
up and we'll sell that hole, or even if they consider it a hole.
Representative Gallagher did not get the chairmanship of the Seapower Committee, but he
did get a chairmanship of a special Select committee on China, which is going
to be a huge, huge, undertaking and a real feather in his cap.
I just hope that he is able to stay on the sea power beat
in the face of what that new responsibility will bring to him in terms of
workload, because he's going to be a busy, busy fellow one. I
don't think that Lane Lurry is gone. I think she'll I think she'll be
in and around town for a while, and I think she ad back someday.
UM. I think the two thousand twenty three NBAA created a commission on
the Future of the US Navy in which the there's eight people can be eight
members can be appointed to the committee. Um, it's by the leadership of
the House and Senate. I would be shocked. I would be absolutely shocked
if you're laying Luria isn't the number one draft pick of the Democrats in the
House and the Senate to be on that committee. So I think she'll have
a voice and she'll be she'll be influential for the term of that commission,
which I think is two years. One of the other things that we've talked
about here a lot in the Luria and others have talked about is the is
the inability of our shipyards seemed to keep up with the demand that we're even
the limited demand we've been putting on them. In the speech that Second n
have delivered to Surface Navy Association, he had an interesting comment, he said,
and all the other stuff was pretty interesting too, But he said,
we are looking to create significant shipyard capacity in the Pacific. Do you have
any idea where that came from? Is he talking about on our Pacific coast?
One of the mean, Guam's already got some shipyard capability. But and
let's talk about this shipyard capability. But I was struck by that particular comment.
I don't I don't know. I don't know. I heard the same
comment. I don't know what he has planned. I'm not read into it,
so I can't say. One of the one of the trends that I'm
identifying. And when I talked to my peep, to my clients, and
I talk to people who listen to me, one of the trends that I'm
detecting is a more aggressive prodding of the industrial base by Navy leadership. And
I saw this at the end of last year. I tracked you, I
see went, I see cno traveling. I said, see SECNAV traveling and
then it was it was, you know, pretty obvious at Search Navy Association,
Am McConnell called out the Defense Industrial Base. Checkn have had some questions
for this defense industrial base. UM. I'm writing about this, and I
have an article that'll come out sometime in the first week of February. But
the bottom line here is, um. There was there was a line that
the CEO of Lockheed Martin used at the Reagan Forum and the first week of
December out in Sine Valley, California, and I'm building this article around this
line he used, and the line went something like this, the United States
Defense Industrial Base is scoped for efficient peacetime production. That may not that may
not sound like insightful insight to anybody else, but to me, those fourteen
words perfectly encapsulated the problem we have right now, and that is we are
not at war with Russia, but we are sure as hell in war with
Russia. We are not at war with China, but we are preparing for
war with China, and we are doing so with an industrial base that is
chugging along like it's two thousand and eight. And so when admir Coudell goes
after the Defense Industrial Base, and when others go after the Defense Industrial base,
I think we have to realize that they have for years been acclimatized to
efficiently providing exactly what the federal government was asking for, and then came COVID
I, and I don't think we can. I don't think we can just
sort of dismiss out of hand the workforce issues they had, the supply chain
issues they had. Hell, I couldn't get toilet paper. You think there
would be plenty of that available to Americans let alone, Let alone sophisticated parts
and raw materials to make radar screens and all of the things that we really
need to make our defense industrial base go. We couldn't. The whole system
slowed down. So anybody that goes around, you know, yelling at the
Defense Industrial Base to do more, do more, do more, I'm not
gonna. I don't accept your excuses. They're not excuses. It's just the
way it is right now. And it's partially because there was never any margin
in this system to begin with. They were they were building every day to
efficient peacetime requirements. That doesn't cut it anymore. I was kind of laughing
as you're saying at because we can both trace back to where this came from.
You know, people say, why do you have an NBA. It's
like I got it in the nineteen nineties when the CNO said that we needed
to have a business mindset. So I was a good I was a good
little lieutenant and did what I was told. Um So, I mean that's
it's been with us for a long time. And not to wax your apple
or anything, but there are a few people, one of which is Jerry
in the chat room. He might he would, he might be in the
same coalhord as you are. But there a few people that could hold a
candle to the argument and the drum. You've been beaten for so long about
numbers, but not just numbers, but numbers combined with capability. I know
you and I have had this back and forth. Well I'll make some low
te comment about you budget restrictions and you're like, I don't care. We
need what we need and we're gonna ask for it and you find the money
if he has a fair argument. And another former mid Rats gets Sam Tim
mccretty over in the latest issues of Proceedings. There's interesting quote of his I
just wanted to get your take at kind of throwing some raw meat in the
lions den here, but doing what folks do in his position. He looked
at twenty eight naval wars going back to five hundred BC, and of those
twenty eight naval wars, he saw only three instances where superior technology defeats bigger
numbers. And that feeds into it's not an excuse. Perhaps it's maybe a
talking point, but where two Ocean Navy, the peoples are republic, it
is not. And while we've been in this post World War two entitlement,
they've been building up one hell of a fleet and that they just need to
focus on locally. And here's a quote from ten Grady quote. All of
the wars were won by superior numbers or when equal forces, superior strategy,
or admiralship. Often all three qualities act together because operating a large fleet generally
facilitates more extensive training and as often an indicator that leaders are concerned with strategic
requirements. That is just kind of a polite way of saying that we're in
a bit more of a pickle than we think we are. For those that
are are poo pooing the quality inherent in the quantity of the Chinese fleet.
You know, where do you think that balance is and should be part of
our argument? I think first of all that Sam ten Grady's article is one
of the most important things I've read in ten years because it it with scholarship
and and unemotionally goes directly at the capability versus capacity argument, especially the absolute
intellectual intellectually stultifying sense that it has to be one or the other. It's
not, it is, it has to be a blend. And sometimes,
like the Soviet admiral says, quantity has a quality of all of its own.
Um I when I think about our fleet, and I think about the
Chinese fleet, and I think about the way they operate their fleet currently,
the fact that they don't have an overseas basing structure, they don't have an
overseas uh distribution network, They don't have these things yet, they don't have
the they don't have the capacity yet to be able to operate as a global
fleet. They can go make thing, go make some um uh. They
can make some overseas deployments. They can get partshipped to places they need and
food and all the stuff they need for a peacetime employment. They don't have
the infrastructure for wartime force employment. UM. What that what that means to
me is that if if there were a conflict of so much, more of
their fleet would be available for them in that conflict, but a good portion
of that fleet would be vulnerable. Whereas UM and in my view of the
world, our balance and like you refer to as a two ocean navy.
UM, it leads me to believe that in such a conflict, after the
initial rounds of of violence and when some sort of a stasis is reached,
the fact that we still have two thirds of our navy or fifty to two
percent to two thirds of our navy available to pursue what comes next is definitely
an advantage we have. If that's not an advantage in every scenario, it's
not an advantage. If China decides to create a mirror image of our navy
or some version of a global navy, those those things will change. But
for now, I like the way we have our insufficient, insufficiently maintained,
and insufficiently sized fleet. I like the way we have it postured. We
just need more of it. That's kind of where I am right now,
and the other thing five mores. Jerry, Jerry, who you mentioned in
the chat room. Jerry and I have been like this, have been like
freaking frack for you know, a long time. If you want people to
come to you and tell you how you can spend the same amount of money
more efficiently, you probably don't want to talk to Jerry or me. If
you want to talk about what kind of maybe we actually need, how expensive
it's going to be, and why that expense is warranted, talk to Jerry,
talk to Brian. This ties into that that article you commented on by
Megan Exta and at about the Fleet Forces Command suggesting decouplings. You want you
want to take a few minutes to talk about that, because that's a pretty
yeah, yeah, interesting talk. I mean, let's let's face it,
right. What is OFRP? The Operational Fleet Response Plan is a way to
manage forces in peacetime to produce predictable readiness for use by the combatant commanders.
It is I've referred to it, it's a pie factory. O FRP makes
pies, and you get pies. You get pies, you get pies.
I don't know that OFRP is the kind of thing we need. We might
need a high end restaurant approach where someone out there is ordering a ridiculous salad,
someone's ordering oysters on the half shell, someone's ordering a seventeen ounce Delmonico
M. There has to be more of a sense of a blend of those
two things. And what Caudal I think have a Caudles thinking about, is
that we don't necessarily have to tie all of our or so much of our
force structure to this traditional pattern of carrier strike group employment, which is tied
at its heart to the carrier's maintenance cycle. We can and should be thinking
about other ways to employ destroyers and frigates and UH and UH and even amphibia
ships. We do this to an extent. There are independent deployers all the
time. Not a lot, but some um I have ped up. I
just did it in in Twitter last week. This idea that I have that
this the DDGX class that the Navy wants to build and should build and needs
to build, that perhaps it should be built from the ground up as a
ship that is not a carrier strike group asset, that it is a geographic
asset that we build for a constant level of employment in certain places rather than
to serve, rather than tying the numbers of the thing to the numbers of
carrier strike groups that we that we wish to employ. I think what one
advantage to that is that you could take an equal amount of money that you
now spend to get too large surface combatants and too small surface combatants every year,
and you could you could you could instead acquire one and a half large
surface combatants a year and four small surface combatants a year. You would you
would, you could, so that every year you'd be buying five, you'd
be buying five and a half ships instead of four. Number one, you
would change change the makeup of the surface force where you would have over time
you'd have fewer large surface combatants and more numerous small surface combatants, and some
percentage of those new large surface combatants would would then come out of the rotation
and not be carrier strike group deployers. I think you discussed some of your
experience with this, and some of were our experience as a country with this
in the on the gun line in Vietnam. Um. I think one of
the advantages we had then was like an eleven hundred ship navy, and we
had lots of ships with less things, fewer things to do, and I
think that added to that when you got as small as we got over time,
UH Fleet Forces Command under Admiral Davidson when he was there, came up
with OFRP, which was all about efficiency, all about level loading shipyards,
all about a peacetime mindset to how a navy should be employed. That is
insufficient to the moment. We need to start to think about how do we
generate, generate and maintain forward based combat power. Well, as you like
to end a lot of your your writing, winter is coming, so to
speak, but it's it's time to get religion. I'll tell you what,
Brian, it's been. It's been a great hour. I really appreciate you
investing some time with us today. You have been on a quasi prolific writing
run. If the listeners wanted to keep track of you, where's a good
place for him to keep an eyeball? And are you working on something right
now that we should definitely look for in the near future. Yeah, the
best place best thing to do is follow me on Twitter. It's at khans
Wahu c O n s Wahoo. Because every time I write something, I
link to it. Um, I am in fact writing something right now that
I previewed a little bit here earlier today, or I think the title of
it, the working title of is it We're just not serious about war.
And it takes that, it takes that statement from the Lockheed Martin CEO and
builds on that that that we are in order for us to get different results,
we have to do different things. And we're not going to get more
ships. We're not going to get more precision missiles, We're not going to
get more artillery shells or stinger missiles. By continuing to shape our defense industrial
base for peacetime efficient peacetime production. Well perfect, Why I look forward to
reading that, And Thanksgan, Brian really appreciate your time with us today.
Yeah, it's been great. Thank you a pleasure. Thank you guys,
thank you, and thank you everybody for joining us for another the Midrats.
Until next time, we hope you have a great Navy day. Cheers by
all kings like my lonely want to marry me and please fan that be.
Can't believe all your being to blame for love fabily to me, silly faulting
your the same. It's a long way to differ. It's a long way
to go. It's a long way to differ between. I don't bye pcdealing,
Well, let's talk to it. It's a long long way to dipper
Ram, but my life by the ve move