Angry Planet - Getting the Navy Back to Ready Will Cost Tens of Billions

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

With just over 270 ships doing the work intended to be done by more than 350, the U.S. Navy is stretched thin enough for the seams to show. In order to keep enough ships at sea, training is getting short shrift, and so is sleep. And that means accidents, some of which have been deadly.What’s to be done about it? Dave Majumdar of National Interest shares a few suggestions, but none of them come cheap.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollege.co. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Frankly, we're just overusing these people. I mean, there's only so much you can push people before they break, and essentially we've done that throughout the entire force. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines.

Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Recent reports have shown there's a problem with the U.S. Navy. Too many missions, not enough ships and sailors. Raidiness has suffered, and it cost 17 lives last year because of accidents. In separate incidents, two destroyers, the John McCain and the Fitzgerald crashed with other ships. Dave Majemdar is the defense editor for the national interest,

and he's here to help us understand the state of the Navy. Thanks for joining us. Nice to be here. Can we start off by just asking, how dire is the situation for the Navy? And can you talk us through the accidents? It is a pretty bad situation. There's no disguising this, I mean,

but it's a problem that's been in the making for a long time. And essentially, it comes down to we have a Navy, that has shrunk over the past 25 years down to like 276 ships down from like more than 300 and uh you know you're still we're still pretending like it you know it's the same fleet size i mean it's still a hundred ships deployed that hasn't changed but the number of ships and the fleet has changed i mean you know it's gone down significantly and this is basically people are being uh forced to do more work with less resources and they're tired they're not getting the training they need you know for example, in case of both the Fitzgerald and the McCain, the problem is that these guys are

really good at their jobs in terms of like, you know, the war fighting type requirements, right? Essentially, Fitzgerald, if I recall, was a ship that's actually pretty much like renowned for its sub-hunting capabilities. I mean, it was kind of like your go-to ship, but, I mean, technically it wasn't certified to do that job. I mean, because they just didn't have the time to do it, because they're out getting deployed, especially those forward-deployed, double forces out in Japan. they pretty much get the call right now. They go out there. They do their thing, and they're getting a lot of on-the-job training with, like, you know, right there on the fleet,

you know, doing real-world missions, but they're not necessarily – they're tasks so heavily. They're not getting the training that they need to get their certifications done, and especially stuff for this, routine stuff, like things that you just don't even think about housekeeping, stuff like navigation and just seekeeping, they're not doing. And they're not doing it because they just don't have enough time. There's 24 hours a day. You have so many people. You have so many resources to do it and just not.

And that's what happened. I mean, these are both accidents, but, you know, accidents that could have been prevented with proper training and had these crews known how to, you know, do the job, right? But the problem is also, and this is just even more recently, they've been finding that these new officers don't have the, like they're not being properly trained to begin with. Like the Surface Warfare School is not producing officers. who are necessarily that well trained to do this job. The first place is basic skills of navigation and seamanship.

They're not like there's a study that did. And out of like 164 officers, like 27 only passed with no concerns, like 108 pass some concerns. And those are like 30% like 29 people who have significant issues, like in just doing basic things like navigating a ship and avoiding collisions. And especially, like, they do well on simulators a lot of times, but then if they're pushed to, you know, like when they're pushed to, like, with the taxing scenario, they just don't know how to respond properly because they're not being trained. And a lot of this is because in order to do the insane redness temple, the Navy's been going with for, like, the past 25 years, I mean, remember, like, for a while, I mean, we were unchallenged at sea, and then Russia and China started coming back, and, you know, now we have to go to sea a lot more often. And the Navy is taking sort of shortcuts in order to try to keep people out at sea a lot longer.

And that's had a major impact, which is how you get these collisions. I mean, you know, because, I mean, these are things that people don't know the right in the rules of the road for, like, how to operate at sea and whatnot. I mean, those days used to be a school that, you know, you get like, okay, like compared to like naval aviation, the submarines, right? Navy, like, surface ships don't get, their crews don't get the same extensive level of training before you go to sea, right? for the first time. Like, for example, a naval evader will go, you know, like you go through your flight training and when you fight your advanced flight training, you get to like a replacement, you know, like a rag or, I guess, a complete replenishment squadron. You learn how to fly a FAA18 or whatever.

It takes, like, it's a process that takes two years. And then, you know, once you get to the boat, like the carrier, I mean, you still, you're like the low man on the totem pole. You have to learn from your flight lead and whatnot to get qualified flight lead. and then as an instructor pilot eventually, you know, you go to the top gun and whatnot. That takes a long, long time. Even just to get to the boat for your first tour, you're looking at minimum two years. Navy, the Navy submarine guys have to go through the same sort of process. Like, there's a very extensive process.

You go to nuclear propulsion school and whatnot, and you learn everything about how to operate safely. Navy Surfously doesn't have anything like that. They used to, and I think it was 2003, they used to something called a surface warfare officer, division officer, course, right? That was like, roughly, if I recall correctly, 16 weeks to learn the basics how to operate your ship, they can discontinue that. And, you know, it was kind of a, frankly, I mean, dumb move. And then, you know, they try to try to make it so that they'll learn on the job, and that just wasn't happening. And then after that, they kind of, in 2012, they did a smaller course. It was like kind of a classroom-based thing to teach you the basics of seamanship. But

even then, I mean, it has obviously has not been particularly effective. So this is what kind of led to those collisions, because, I mean, they didn't know what to do, essentially. So it sounds like they're under-trained, understaffed, and there's a leadership problem that seems systemic. Yes. And they're massively, massively, massively have worked. I mean... This leads to one of my questions is, how much sleep are they getting? Not much.

I mean, in the Navy, they're actually almost... seem to take pride in like being tired all the time. What do you mean by that? Like I mean like there's a certain perverse pride and like, you know, working these, these like these sort of, they have these shifts on the ship, right? They're like kind of six, a six hour long watch. They stand watch like six hours and they get like another six hours to sleep and whatnot. And it has no real correlation to like, you know, the realities of like this, you know, like time of day and whatnot.

This is the ship kind of has own time. But it's like you're not getting. getting the kind of sleep that you need, you're being pushed the limit, you're continuously to work, right? So it's just, you know, people can't operate like that. Is that something that the Navy's taking seriously, something that they're actually going to do something about? Yeah, yeah, they're trying. I mean, so there's a lot of your, I guess, this November, December, yes, I think it was November. I think it was last year. There was a report that came out.

It's like a massive report that they kind of systemically went through both the collisions of, you know, like the Fitzgerald, the McCain, Porter, and there's been a couple other ones, right? And basically they went through this and they found that this has been a systemic problem of like just as a fleet's gotten smaller, standards of slip. They've tried to just push these guys a lot harder than they've ever had before. and it's just they're pushing people and you know they're not getting trained people not getting rest I mean a lot of times come you know like people come off of shore tours and go directly to the ship and they're not properly even trained I mean like you have an ex-o who might be on the shore for like four or five years then he's going directly to the boat not being recertified to do anything you know things like that so what kind of demands are actually being put on the Navy now you said that there were always a hundred or so ships at sea, and are there more missions now than there have been traditionally, or it's just the same, but there are fewer ships to do it? So, okay, it's an ideal world. The Navy to Forest Structure Study and other things, there's like four or five think tanks did a

study on this too, right? The fleet size should be around 355 ships for what they want, what all the COCOM demands are from around the globe. The fact is we simply don't have that many. Even in 1999, when we had 333 ships, you know, we were deploying 100 vessels, and even then it wasn't enough. But since then, the fleet has shrunk. There's like, I think, 55, if I had known the math, right, about 55 fewer ships today than there were back then in 2017, right? I'm going to use those numbers because I just don't know how many we have now.

It always flexes a little bit, right? But we're still deploying about 100 ships, and they're always on average. You know, these are always, you know, the numbers are inflex. But there are a hundred ships deployed then, hundred ships deployed now, but 55 fewer ships. Same number of missions, because, I mean, there's like a physical limit, what you can do with 100 ships, right? Ideally, they'll want to do even more now because, I mean, 99, we were not seeing the kinds of threats we're saying, right? 999, we were still in a peacetime capacity, you know, 9-11 hadn't happened yet. Russia was, you know, basically, like, the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union was a complete dumpster fire.

and then China was still, you know, not anywhere near, you know, like ready to challenge us. So, I mean, yeah, it's gotten a lot more intense in terms of, like, the peer-level threats are out there. Then 2011, sorry, 9-11 happened. Now you're seeing, like, this, you know, like this demand signal for, like, not necessarily the traditional mission, but still, like, a lot of stuff is going on. You're just running these ships into the ground, the crews in the ground, while, you're shrinking the fleet. because, I mean, the resources are going towards, you know, the counter-insurgency fight. And then you also see the rise of the Russian, you know, the rise of the Chinese and the resurgence the Russians.

And, I mean, the Russians aren't anywhere near, you know, what they used to be. But, you know, it's still a problem. I mean, you're still dealing with the same hundred ships. I mean, you know, that you have, that you can deploy versus the need to have a lot more ships now. Because, I mean, essentially once Cold War ended, I mean, we kind of, you know, like, kind of thought, you know, hey, we're done. We don't need this many ships. So we started cutting and cutting and cutting. We had a very structured, very disciplined method, you know, back when the Soviets were still around.

Because, you know, it was predictable. I mean, now it's not. So now we have a new challenger, and two new challenges really come up. And we're now getting used to that. We have to basically go back to, like, proper discipline, getting people trained and arrested and able to, you know, do things. I mean, Congress is trying to do a couple things, which has kind of split the responsibilities up. There's a bill. It's basically going to the House and the Senate, right?

Basically, they want to split up some of the responsibilities of a surface warfare officer. Right now, we have very generalists to people, right? So compared to, like, you know, the British who have very specialized people, they go through and they have dedicated, you know, warfare systems officers and whatnot. We just have people who do everything, you know. They're not, they're like a Jackal Trade Master or none. And they're kind of trying to split them up in this bill into two components, like one's an engineering guy and one's like a, you know, like a weapon systems and, you know, just basically run the ship type guy.

So that could help, but, you know, it's hard to say. One thing I was wondering is when you talk about 1999 and the kind of threats that we were experiencing, you are not talking about al-Qaeda or ISIS, and now we're using aircraft carriers to constantly launch stories regardless of, well, I mean, I guess it's just, it's, every day. It's not like the bombing of Kosovo or Bosnia or any of those things that were one-offs, but now the aircraft carriers work every day. So what's the impact there? People get tired. You see this in the naval aviation community too, right? I mean, like, basically the Navy has been at war continuously now from 2001. And you're seeing this in surface fleet. You're certainly seeing this in the aviation side too, because, I mean,

If you look at the Hornet Fleet, there's like maybe one-third of those airplanes are flyable at any given time, right? And this is because not only are you flying them, I mean, a lot harder than they're ever designed to fly, right? I mean, you're flying a lot of sorters for long durations. And, you know, over places you don't necessarily need an FAA 18 even, right? But, you know, nonetheless we're doing it. The problem is that they're flying a lot of sorters. There's a little pool of pilots. They're going to keep getting deployed over and over again.

So, you know, like when you're flying like against, like over Afghanistan or like, you know, like where there's no real threat, this is kind of, you're just kind of patrolling and waiting to drop something, right? I mean, you know, that's not really useful training hours, right? You're burning a lot of airframe life just, you know, for, you know, for the sake of, you know, like burning airframe life. And then, you know, like then you also have to keep up with training for everything else. And then the airplanes have to go through, you know, as you wear them out, have to go through depot and whatnot, keep them maintained. and you'll see spare parts. And remember, how the sequestration thing hit, and that disrupted.

There was a very well-old machine of getting these aircraft at the depot and repaired and fixed, and they didn't do that. So with sequestration and all these various fits and starts for the defense budget, I mean, there's been a lot of work stoppers and whatnot,

so people got laid off at these factories and depots where you have to build these airplanes and fix these airplanes, and you've got to hire them back, and people get very tired of that because you keep getting laid off. I mean, as a journalist, you know, and I'm a journalist too,

and we've had this situation, too. We get laid off, and then we have fun to the job, and then you don't want to come back necessarily. You're the job that you just lost if they call you back. I mean, or you get out. I mean, the same thing happens to these guys, right? You're like, you know, they have families to feed and whatnot, and they're like, you know, we're out, you know,

if they get laid off, right? So you lose that guy, and you have to try a new guy to replace that. And so you see this disruption all over because of inconsistent budgeting and this is just a freaking tempo that people are operating at, right? So, you know, basically, a lot of this is like stuff the Congress has to fix, like, a consistent budgeting and just, you know, say, a stream of money. And also just like, frankly, we're just overusing these people. I mean, there's only so much you can push people before they break,

and essentially we've done that throughout the entire force. Corruption is a problem, too, right? I mean, I was thinking specifically of the Seventh Fleet. Oh, Fat Leonard? Yeah, absolutely Fat Leonard. Yeah, that is an issue. I mean, but I mean, that will, you know, not has been found, it's going to be fixed, right? I mean, like, this isn't some of the Navy condones or anything.

It's just people are, you know, greedy and they do dumb things. And a lot of people will go to jail. And once that dead wood has been cleared out, I mean, you get better people in there, hopefully. But, yeah, you have to be on their lookout for it. I mean, we're certainly better in the United States. here than a lot of the countries, but corruption happens. I mean, how much that corruption is eaten into breadness? I don't know. I mean, like, obviously, they're giving sweetheart deals in certain cases to certain people because of the benefits they're getting in return. But, I mean, I have to have to think this, like, compared to the overarching, like, the entirety of naval operations, I mean, this is, like, kind of a blip, you know what I mean? Overall, I mean, yeah, you're overcharging people, whatnot. I mean, that does, obviously cut into it, but, I mean, it's not, in the grand scheme, things that much damage. comparatively. I mean, it's not good, but it's not, you know, it doesn't really necessarily impact the overarching readiness of the fleet. So it's not the same phenomenon as, you know,

the world famous $1,000 toilet seats and things like that. You're talking about something, it's not systemic. No, no. This is like just outright, like, just outright criminal, you know, criminal behavior on the part of those officers are involved. Yeah, they absolutely need to go to prison and be court-martialed and whatnot. But, yeah, this. thousand-dollar toilet system is just really a byproduct of this some this very um difficult and arcane uh... procurement system that you know and this is not a navy problem this is a entire do d wide problem

that needs to be solved like this is requirements process and and acquisitions process that is just incredibly difficult and slow to work with and you know like anything that does get through the process is inevitably a massive over budget or late, or, you know, and actually usually both. And so, you know, like, a lot of stuff you end up getting is like out of date and late to need. And going forward, I mean, frankly, I mean, the way technology is advancing in the civilian sector and, you know, and, you know, other forces, I mean, you can't do that anymore. So, you know, like you see a lot of people try, you know, like the Air Force, for example, is building the B-20-O and bomber and, you know, like outside even the regular acquisitions process, it's done, they basically bypassed it. And you can do that because, they put under a special project rapid capabilities office type thing and uh... you know i think people are in more of the services looking at doing things of that just because the process is completely broken at this point there's if you do get something to

the requirements process it takes for freaking ever and then you know about time you build it uh... with all these like uh... technologies uh... that you're developing it's late to need and then it's not adaptable necessarily so you know like we need to buy stuff faster and get out to feel fast so it was going to be obsolete and this is no one's really figured out a good way of fixing it. What about bringing back some of the old ships out of retirement to bulk up the fleet?

It's an idea. It could work, but remember those ships are put out to pasture for a reason. I mean, old ships are hard to maintain, and this is going to be a problem for us going forward to keep the ships we have out of the fleet longer too, because an older ship is much, much, much more maintenance intensive. So, you know, like the same thing with airplanes, the longer you keep them in service, the harder it is to fix them, you know, stuff breaks, stuff gets corroded. I mean, it's just, they need more work.

It's like if you kept your car in service for years and years and years, you're going to have to keep putting more and more work at some point. It's not worth it. So if they want to expand the fleet, you're going to have to keep your existing ships in service longer, and they're going to have to do more work on it. And then you're going to probably buy new ships faster, but then bring back older ships. I mean, some of them are the newer ones that just got retired,

you may be able to bring them back fairly easily, but it's still going to cost you money, right? I mean, you still have to refurbish those ships and then get new electronics on board, new weapons. I mean, you know, like it may or may not be worth. It would have to do a cost analysis on that and see if it's actually worth, you know, if the juice is worth a squeeze, if you will, right? There's no reason you couldn't do it, but it's going to cost you money. It's just to figure out what that cost is worth the payoff you get because you may not be able to get that much of service life of these, you know,

like these old ships, right? It may not deliver a useful capability. And I think we have this picture in our heads of these ships that are ready to go that are just anchored off a coast somewhere. And what you're saying makes sense. That is, of course, not exactly what we're talking about. Okay, so I have a related question, though. So even if we did put more ships out to sea now, however we did it, are there enough sailors to go around? And are they having trouble getting bodies onto the ships?

well you have a lead-up time right right now we do not have no uh... you can need more people and uh... no exilers are not free you're going to have to pay them and you know i train them and everything else and house them and feed them and quote them so that's uh... you and i know also the retirement issues and health care and all that's our stuff right personnel is a single biggest cost for the doD right uh... and also then v.A don't forget about that because that's also the cost the national treasury is uh you got take care of these guys afterwards right because the also benefits for education and health care, even after they leave.

So it's not just simply a DOD expense, it's a VA expense and other things, too. So there's that. So there's going to be a bit of a ramp time because people, you can't just like grab some guy off the street, like you did in the old days and when he had press gangs

and say, guess what, you're now in the Navy. You've got to take that guy and then train him to actually do what his job is and some of the students, you know, like what this takes time and some of the training as it turns out might need to be revamped so that question what the hell they're doing when they're actually out there, right? So it's going to take some time to, you know, like, school it up.

It's not magic, I mean, but neither is building new ships or even bringing ships back from the bonyard, right? You know, all these things take time, and it will take many, many, many years. Even if you magically tripled the Navy budget or the, hell, the entire Defense Department budget, and you want, like, a field of fleet much larger, and, like, another two years, it is physically impossible to do that. I mean, it could take decades. I mean, I think the earliest they're looking at

forgetting at least part of the way there is that 2035, right? This is going to be well-path to Trump administration, you know, like even if he survives their two terms. I mean, this is like, you know, trajectory that is, this will be beyond his era and beyond the next president's era too. I mean, like it's this is like a long-term thing.

You can't, the none of this is, it happens on a dime. Speaking of dimes, how much do you think all this cost? to get the Navy somewhere near ready, quote unquote? Well, billions of dollars. I mean, it's hard to say how much money they need because, I mean, like, frankly, I don't know. I don't know how deep the problem is, right?

Because, I mean, you know, like, they're still reviewing. I mean, if the report from, like, the memo from like two days ago shows, I mean, there's a lot deeper problem out there in terms of training than we even realize. The shipbuilding stuff is more quantifiable, tens of billions of dollars easily, because frankly right now we don't have a shipbuilding count that can get you to 355 ships. Remember, also, there's Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, these submarines, which we must build, because part of our strategic nuclear deterrence, they're extremely expensive. I mean, like, extremely expensive. Like, I forget the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it's like something like $5 billion per boat, not kind of the first boat, which is much more expensive because it's a new ship, right?

But, you know, we absolutely must build 12 of them if we maintain their current nuclear posture, right? So that has to be built. That's the – you can't avoid that. That's going to come on somewhere. And, you know, like, that means if you build that, if you keep the same budget, you can't build same number of aircraft carriers, same number of surface ships and whatnot. So you have finite resources and finite, you know, number of ships you want to build. So that has to be spaced out and done.

So if you plus up that, and you also have to look at industrial capacity, how many can these shipyards actually physically build? A lot of that stuff is now gone from the 1980s. right? So you've got to figure out how much money can the industry absorb. So minimum tens of billions of dollars, I can't really put it, you know, like you'd have to get into like the nitty gritty if much more deeply than, and no one has crystal ball, frankly, but tens of billions of dollars, I think is the best answer. And it might take years, like decades. Wow. Well, thanks very much, Dave. Thanks for illuminating us on this. interesting to know just how few good answers there are. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it, leave us a review on iTunes.

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