Angry Planet - Patrolling the Seven Seas Isn't Cheap

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

Sea power was the secret of the Phoenicians, the Greeks - even the landlubber Romans when they took the upper hand against Carthage. More recently - which isn’t hard - the British Empire was won on the seas and an empire with tall ships.But how much navy is enough navy? And can a smaller, lighter, more advanced fleet do the job?Joining us today to talk about the future of the US Navy is Dr. Jerry Hendrix. Hendrix serviced 26 years in the Navy and retired a captain. He is now a vice president at Telemus Group, a strategic consultancy.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.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. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Gould. Sea power was the secret of the Phoenicians, the Greeks, even the landlover Romans, when they took the upper hand against Carthage. More recently, which isn't hard, the British Empire was won on the seas with tall ships. But how much Navy is enough Navy? And can a smaller, lighter, more advanced fleet do the job? Joining us today to talk about the future of the U.S. Navy is Dr. Jerry Hendricks.

Hendricks served 26 years in the Navy and retired a captain. He is now a vice president at Telemus Group, a strategic consultancy. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, it's my pleasure to be here, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. I'm going to start with the most basic question you can imagine, but I don't think it's something people think about very much, which is what's a Navy traditionally been for? So that's a great question because, you know, navies were born very basically to protect the trade of their mother nation. So navies come into being the idea of converting a ship, which probably previously have been carrying trade or cargo or something, putting guns onboard it and then putting it to sea, was essentially to thwart piracy on the high seas and protect that trade because seaborne trade was found to be not a decor. And, you know, a decremental increase in a nation's power and wealth, it was actually an exponential

growth as people began to realize that if you could go to the Indies and bring back spices and rare different products, you know, you could buy them for a dime there and sell them for a dollar back in the mother country. So it really was just this tremendous leveraging of wealth. And so the idea of being able to protect that became necessary because it was also an easy way to pick up wealth if you were out there as a pirate. And so Navy, Navy's began through that, and then we began to sort of specialize. So you went from just taking a merchant ship and putting some guns on it to making specific types of ships, whether they were frigates or cruisers or line of battleships. And then with those evolution of the types of ships, the reason and purpose of navies sort of changed because then became instruments of national power where you wanted to control key sections of the world's oceans, because those oceans became a source of wealth in and of them. It wasn't just the trade. It was fish. It was control of key choke points. And so when you, your example that you use there about the British Empire, upon which the sun never set for several decades, that, that was important because Britain identified, you know, the concept of choke points. So places like Gibraltar or the El Bob Mandeb in the Red Sea or going around the horn of Africa, these became critical. And whoever controlled that controlled trade. And so, the sea became a path to power. And so nations and navies evolved from that to what they are today,

which are really just extensions of some of those very early concepts. We've had enormous changes in technology. We've had enormous changes in technology since line of battleships in the 18th century. So how has the idea of a Navy changed? So naval power hasn't changed dramatically. What it's done is you've seen an increase in the distances involved. So the line of battleship, and probably with the one exception of aircraft carriers. And the reason why I say aircraft carriers are really distinct and different is because aircraft carriers gave us this capability of conducting naval battles without the ships actually ever seeing each other, which is something that was just beyond the imagination of someone like. Lord Nelson or St. Vincent from the British times. But the idea of the line of battleship became the battleship and the cruising sailing ships became cruisers. And frigates, I've essentially created, you know, frigates are there to escort merchant fleets or to escort military forces and do sort of local control, local policing. Well, that's what we use frigates for today. And so there's a lot of things that have changed in terms of technology. Clearly our ships can now

sail against the wind because we got steam and then we got propellers and then we've got, you know, gas turbines now and nuclear power to drive them. So we can go anywhere we want and we can go at much higher speeds and certainly going from wooden walls to steel sides and armor has changed things and the length of gunnery. But the basic roles and missions largely did not. I mean, even today, submarines are commerce raiders. So if you look at how submarines were used in World War II, it was to sink the Japanese or the German shipping, and that's how the Germans actually use their submarines against us as well. And today our submarines hunt other people's surface ships, but they also hunt other people's submarines. That's been sort of a natural evolution of that platform.

You hunt best where you live, and so submarines can hear other submarines and pursue them better than surface ships can. But by and large, submarines are still commerce raiders and interdiction forces. It really is that aircraft carrier as a power projection. force that was the major significant change in naval warfare in the last century. And mind you, that's a concept that was created in 1912. So we're at 108, 109 years into the evolution of that particular capability and platform. And if you think about history, that's actually a very long life for a new weapon system to have been in existence for a century and still to be relevant. So anyways, that's sort of an encapsulation of how things have changed, but how they've remained remarkably the same.

One thing that I've read in multiple places is actually a question about the current efficacy of aircraft carriers, which is, let's say, missiles launched from the Chinese mainland, just to take an example of possible antagonists, are supposedly very effective against ships and very effective in particular against aircraft carriers. I mean, how does that change the role of the aircraft carrier now, or does it? Well, Jason, I mean, actually, this is something I've been writing about. Oh, I think 2013 was when I published my first paper about the efficacy of aircraft carriers, which got me on a load of trouble. I was still on active duty in the Navy wearing the uniform of a Navy captain, and my golden wings at that time when I wrote, at what cost a carrier, which was a paper that I published through the Center for New American Security.

But what I've tried to get at this is it's not necessarily the carrier that has failed to keep up with the advent of new technology, specifically Chinese and Russian investments in long-range missiles or what we broadly call anti-access air denial capabilities, which are meant to push aircraft carriers and other power projection forces back from Chinese and Russian shores. These investments were really created because of Desert Storm. They looked at what we did in Desert Storm and said, geez, if you allow the Americans to get close enough to you, they can do regime change. And we're not that much interested in regime change on being done to us.

And so they wanted to push us back. And what we did almost simultaneously was we began to divest of the very assets and capabilities that would allow us to bridge that gap. So let's just say that you have a DF21. it can hit an aircraft carrier a thousand miles at sea. Well, if you look at our air wing, we've gone from having an air wing that could fly greater than a thousand miles in 1990 to an air wing today that has an unrefueled average range of about 500 miles.

So we divested of the long range A3 Sky Warrior and the A6 intruder, and we settled on the light attack, medium and short range, F&A, 18 Hornet, and then Super Hornet. So we've allowed the range of our air wing of the aircraft carrier to come down. I wrote a paper on this in 2015 that was called Retreat from Range, which is that we really, the world zigged and we zagged. And so we are now off cycle with the investments. We could get back and make the aircraft carriers relevant again, which if you're going to spend $13 to $15 billion on each Ford class, you need to have an air wing that's relevant. but that would mean creating new platforms, specifically, I think, unmanned combat aerial vehicles that can bridge that gap, fly 1,500 nautical miles, get targets ashore and then return to the carrier and then cycle back to do it again.

So I think that we've essentially, we're out of step with other people's investments in terms of capability. That to me begs a couple of different questions. I'll try to keep it down to a single question at a time. One is 35. He won't actually. he's just going to ask 10 questions. Yeah, I'll try to stick to one. The F-35 is now being deployed.

Does the F-35 in any way help with this asymmetry? So the F-35 is an improvement in the terms of stealth, but with the F-35 C, which is the longest range of the three F-35 variants, the A for the Air Force, the B for the Marine Corps, and the C for the Navy. The C actually has the longest range, and near as I can calculate, it's about 625 miles unrefueled. So it does not have the ability to bridge that gap. Now, if you created unmanned or a refueling capability that could refuel a division or a squadron of F-35 Charlie's so that you could extend them to a thousand miles, and then you gave the F-35 a new.

missile, let's just say that has a 200 to 400 mile striking range, then you could see that. I mean, and that's not outside the realm of possibility to kind of bring those things together. However, we haven't made those investments. So the organic tanker that we're building for the carrier now, the MQ25, it's actually, its requirements were to fully refuel two F&A 18 super hornets at their maximum range, which is about 100 miles less than an F-35, and to extend their range. You know, if we written the requirements differently for MQ25 for the stingray so that it would be required to fully refuel two F-35 Charlie's, then that would have made more sense. And we also don't have that missile. The problem with the missile as well is for the F-35

to maintain its stealthiness, which is really what we invested. That's why we paid the the big bucks for that airplane. Whatever missile it's going to be equipped with has to be carried internally. It needs to fit inside the Bomb Bay. And something that fits in that Bombay and can go 200 to 400 miles, that's a tough engineering problem to fit that much chemical potential energy inside a missile so that you can extend the range. If I mount a larger missile on the wing or on the center line of an F-35 Charlie, it immediately loses those stealth characteristics because that external load just becomes a big, you know, a radar bloom that I can pick up. And so, you know, we, again, we've got to think about these things in a sequential and strategic way.

How did we end up not thinking about it that way? I mean, what you just described is the reality. So everything that we have today from the Ford class aircraft carrier to the F-35 are products of the thinking of the 1990s. And in the 1990s, we were in this end of history, you know, euphoria. And we thought that we were going to be able to operate in close proximity. You know, think about Yugoslavia. So I was flying, you know, surveillance missions over Yugoslavia in the 1990s, doing Kosovo and in the whole bit. We thought that that was the world that we lived in and that we were going to live in. We had not conceived of anti-axis area denial. Now, there were some people, like my old boss, Andrew W. Marshall and the Office of Net Assessment, who were

thinking about this ahead of time. It could see sort of where these Chinese investments were going and was trying to ring the alarm bell. But the Navy leaders at the time, you know, believe that we were going to be able to operate in these permissive environments in close proximity to our targets. And so the things that they designed from the Ford class, which is designed around sortie generation. You know, the USS Ford can generate more aircraft shorties per day than any other aircraft carrier in our history. But that only makes sense if you think that I'm launching short-range fighters that are going to go off, come back, go off, come back, go off, come back four times

in a day. Well, that means that they're only flying short distances, hitting targets and coming back. That's when shorty generation becomes possible. But if I was doing a long-range flight where I'm going to fly a thousand miles, Well, that airplane's going to take off in the morning, and it's not coming back until the afternoon. So sortie generation is not the requirement for my aircraft carrier. It's the ability to host large enough airplanes to do that flight profile. But we designed for permissive environments and short range, sorty generating environments like Kosovo, sitting in the Adriatic Sea, or Iraq, sitting in the middle of the Arabian Sea.

That's where we thought we were going to be, not sitting a thousand miles off the coast of China trying to figure out how to hit their targets. Is anybody looking to fix this problem right now? And financially speaking, can this problem be fixed? I mean, if you talk about the expense of the Ford, which my understanding is, is still not fully operational? Yeah. What's the solution? Well, I think everything can be fixed. The problem is we don't have the time. And right now, we don't appear to have the will to spend the money that we're going to need. So to be able to fix the Navy, you know, we need to go back to the 2018 National Defense Commission, which said that you need to increase defense spending three to five percent

year over year from here until, you know, the next 10, 20 years. And we haven't generated sort of that level of support. Now, I was surprised the Congress did plus up defense authorization. I'm not sure the appropriations bill has been done yet of additional $25 billion. So we need to put the money behind it, but we also need to have sort of the, you know, when when Reagan came in, you know, his team or that team that was around the defense side had been working on the defense program for Ronald Reagan since 1977. And when they walked in and did the Republican platform about what defense should look like, they had already thought ahead about this. There was a vision. It was there. It was just something that need to be executed.

And so we were able to grow the Navy by some 85 ships across the Reagan administration and grow towards the 600 ship Navy. Today, we don't seem to have the clarity of thought. We don't understand the environment that we're in. We seem to be having difficulty coming to grips with the fact that we are in a great power competition with China, that it requires a strategy that confronts Chinese aggression or Russian aggression, and then to put the money, the time, the resources, and the designs against what it's going to take. to address that. We don't seem to have kind of brought all that together. There are people who are thinking, obviously, you know, you've come to me, you've asked me, I've been thinking about writing about

this for the better part of a decade. And there are others out there as well who are thinking about alternative fleet designs and how many ships we need and what types of missiles. The problem is, is none of us are in any positions of authority right now. And in fact, I think a lot of people would be uncomfortable with the idea of having someone who has as strenuous thoughts about this as what I and others do. But that being said, yeah, we're in a real pinch right now. How many ships does the U.S. Navy have now? And then your article in foreign policy, which was just published, you talk about what kind of force the U.S. needs. Can you talk about where we are and where we need to get to?

We're at about 295 ships right now, and that number is going to trend lower if the Navy's plans that they've given us follow through. I mean, we're looking to decommission seven of our Ticonderoga class cruisers because of their advanced age. And we're also decommissioning some of our littoral combat ships, which are less than 20 years old right now because of maintenance issues associated with them. So we'll actually see the fleet get down to around 291, 290, maybe in 280s again, when in fact we need more than 400 ships. I think that we actually need a around 456 ships in order to meet all of the requirements that have been enunciated by our regional combatant commanders. And by that I mean like the India Pacific Command Commander or the European Command Commander or the Southern Command.

They all have laid out these requirements. Say, I need these many ships flowing through. So that's our number that we're going after. But in fact, we're going the opposite direction. I think that there is a way of getting there. Of course, it starts with we need increased amounts of funding. And that funding is important because we need to do two things to grow the fleet. We need to both build more ships.

And right now, a lot of our shipyards that are doing new construction are maxed out based upon how many people they have and the amount of space they have in their shipyards. They're building as many ships as they possibly can right now. But if you want them to build more, you've got to give them a stronger signal so they'll hire more people and expand their yard capacity. That's expensive. The other thing is we need to take the ships that we have today and make them last longer, which means we need an investment in repair yards. You know, one of the things that we found after the 2017 collisions, when the USS McCain and the USS Fitzgerald had their collisions at sea, we brought those ships back home to the United

States to repair them. And what we found was due to a lack of capacity, in our repair yards at home, it actually took us longer to repair those ships than it did to build them and crew them originally. So we need to make investments in the repair yards. There's plenty of work like the Taekondoroga class cruisers. Each one of those to repair would cost about $500 million to repair and modernize. It will cost $3.5 billion to replace them. So, you know, I think there's an economic argument to be made here. But we will also need those repair yards, by the way, that if we get into a war, and remember that Admiral Davidson, who was the retiring Indo-Pacific commander, he said that he thought

there was a chance that we would go to war with China within the next six years. So in event of a war with China, well, where will the ships that will be damaged in war? Where do they come to to be repaired in wartime? There's virtually no repair capacity on the American West Coast. And that's something that we need. We also need repair capacity in places like Australia or in American holdings like Guam or in Pearl Harbor. We need to expand our repair capacity there. Or even sort of those American confederated states or islands that are out there in the Pacific,

those would be great logistics and repair hubs for us. So these are places we can make investments right now to be able to grow that fleet by retaining the ships that we have as we add additional ships. And to come back to the foreign policy essay, you know, the argument I was making there is that, you know, the size of your fleet is actually an indicator of your national power and prestige. And that's something that we've undervalued in recent decades. We sort of lost touch with where that factors into the calculus and equation. And I'd like to talk a little bit more about that later. Yeah, actually, I think that we're at a pretty good point for that, because when you talk about power and prestige, the U.S. Navy, at least in terms of certain things, is unrivaled.

I mean, not just unmat. I mean, unrivaled. Aircraft carriers would be one example. China, I believe, at this point, has two. Depending on how you count our carrier fleet, we have as many as 20, if you can include the ones that actually launched short-range fighter. I mean, really, I think the marine fighters and also helicopter sorties. how does that force, what is it, does it matter? I mean, is that something that, you know, we can say, well, that's not actually all that important. We need to actually change everything and build greater numbers when it sounds like we have such a huge numerical advantage to begin with. So the Chinese actually have a larger fleet in terms of sheer numbers right now. So we have the most recent data shows the Chinese fleet being north of 350 ships. There is a difference. So if we want to just look at, in raw tonnage that we float.

We have a superiority in tonnage right now, mostly because our aircraft carriers displace 100,000 tons. So because of that sort of disparity between the Chinese two carriers, and they've got a third one that's going to be fitting out here shortly. And then the 11 super carriers that we have, and you are correct, we have the 10 light amphibious assault ships, which would be an aircraft carrier in every other Navy of the world, you know, we do have sort of that superiority. But in terms of relevance, so again, we come back to my

conversation about the air wing. If that aircraft carrier and its air wing has not a role in the fight, but in fact, in fact, it's a big target to Chinese or Russian missiles and it cannot hit their targets ashore, then what is the relevancy of that part of your fleet? More and more, if we fail to upgrade the air wing, you're going to put those airmen. aircraft carriers to the side, they'll be left standing off waiting for us to knock down the defenses and the anti-axis air denial capabilities of the enemy. And then with the thought that they would roll in with their fourth generation capabilities later in the combat campaign. So what matters today? Well, what matters today really is, I always say the Navy has two

roles in missions. One is a day-to-day cop on the beat preserve the peace force. That's out and about demonstrating presence and showing American interest and resolve. That is best filled by ships like frigates, which by the way, we don't have any. We had 150 frigates during the Cold War, and then we went down to zero. And so we're just starting to build frigates now with the new constellation class. And we need to make significant investments because those ships are large enough that they can carry 32 missiles, but they're small enough that they can actually go into some of the smaller ports where our partners and allies where we can show the flag and we can partner and work with them. So those are an important investment. The other part is the,

what I call the win the war force. And if the carrier does not have an adequate air wing to fight, what do you depend on? Well, you depend on submarines. You depend on submarines that can both launch power projection missiles like Tomahawks or later. We're looking at new hypersonic missiles like the conventional prompt strike missile. And also that submarine is there to sink the enemy ships. Their submarines, their carriers, their surface combatants, their troop carriers, specifically in the case of a Taiwan situation, if they put ferries at sea or troop carriers at sea to begin on assault on Taiwan, you know, I expect U.S. fast attack submarines to flood the Taiwan straight and sink them. That would be the role of those boats. So those are the two areas of investment that I think

that we need to spend a lot of time and money. Frigots and fast attack, land attack submarines. And I think that that's where our focus should be right now. You bring up what seems to be all over the news right now, which is Taiwan. How do you think our Navy would be able to perform if called upon in a confrontation between China and Taiwan? on. And we can talk separately about whether we would actually go. That's a whole policy issue, right? Well, I will, just to speak to that, I'm assuming we all saw the town hall with Biden the other night, correct? Or he said we are committed to doing that. I just want to throw that out there for the listeners. Yeah, no, good point. Good point. Well, but the White House has put a walkback statement that just came out this morning, where they clarified and said that no, you know, our policy is

strategic ambiguity, which is that we will not come out and say whether we will defend Taiwan or not, we will leave it there to interpretation, which seems to be something that the State Department's been interested. By the way, that's a bipartisan approach. We've been operating under strategic ambiguity since the 1970s when Nixon went to China. I think, quite frankly, that's a mistake. I think that, you know, clarity at this point in time is important, specifically given Xi Jinping's aggressive actions in the South China Sea, as well as. against the Uyghurs and Tibet and so on. I think it's, you know, clarity is what would help preserve our ally and partner now. But with regard to Taiwan, quite frankly, the Taiwan's a toss-up. It's jump-ball.

And it depends on whether it comes as a total shock, Pearl Harbor type shock, or whether we have a rolling start where we've had indications and warning sufficient that I begin staging things. You know, I won't get into deployment plans, but we don't always have the same number of ships operating in the same areas at all time. There are cycles to these things. And if the Taiwan invasion happens at a time when we're at a low ebb of what we have forward, be it submarines or aircraft carriers or otherwise, then we could be in a real pickle at that point in time where we have to fight our way back in to an environment with the Chinese already have space control, air control, and sea dominance. That's a hard challenge for us to do. You know, I firmly believe that we need to be,

encouraging the Taiwanese right now to make significant investments in the types of weapon systems that allow them to defend themselves long enough for us to get there. And those investments, by the way, are not, you know, Gucci things like, you know, F-16s or F-35s, which a lot of people talk about, or additional ships. These are things like missiles, mines, torpedoes, things that they can control from their own shores, that they can launch out into that straight and sink. anything that comes across that straight. That, you know, stopping those ships from making it Taiwan is, is our best plan. You know, Taiwan is 110 miles from the Chinese shore. That's not a minute, that's not a short distance. That's actually a long distance in terms. I mean, Normandy was 20 miles,

23 miles to go from, from England to the Normandy coast. And, and so, you know, I've read the Normandy operational plan. It's a six-inch three-ring binder. And it's a six-inch three-ring binder. And it's, huge and it's very complex. And the one thing I discovered in that is if the Germans sank a troop transport on day one, they weren't just taking out those troops from day one. They were taking out troops that that transport was scheduled to deliver on day three, day five, day seven. It was in every other day cycle for 28 days to make that invasion complete. So if the Chinese want to invade Taiwan, they're not bringing it all at once. This will be a multi-day invasion cycle where they have to have control of that straight for perhaps a week or two. And if the Taiwanese

can sink ships on day one, those ships aren't coming back to pick up the troops on day three, five, seven, whatever that follows. So this is kind of a complex way, but we need to encourage the Taiwanese to invest in theirs. And we need to invest in the things that will work, like submarines and longer range aircraft. So the question is, is whether this happens sooner or later, sooner, which is inside what I call this Davidson window, six years or less, sooner is a real challenge for us because there's very little that we can change in the here and now. We can extend the lives of some of our ships.

We can try to build more. But even if I tell Bath Ironworks in Maine to build me another destroyer tomorrow, I'm not going to see that destroyer for three to five years. That's how long it takes to do this. So, you know, we're sort of stuck with where we're at and trying to figure out how to make the most of it. I think my Navy questions are more fat Leonard related, but I can set that aside for right now.

Ooh, that's pretty fantastic. You will, I mean, just how do we, how do you manage the relationships with, with other countries in Southeast Asia when corruption is such a problem, which I also think speaks to, it feel like the Navy is not just ships, right? Ships are incredibly important, but it's also the personnel. And in the last 10 years, while kind of the American public hasn't been paying attention, you've had a widespread corruption scandal breakout that's enormous and is encompassing much of the seventh fleet. And you've got more and more reports about personnel stretched thin. Basically not enough sailors not getting enough sleep, right?

And how do you think we resolve these questions swiftly so that we can get the fighting force ready? So, you know, great, great question. You know, having watched the fallout for both the Fat Leonard scandal and then the collisions of 2017, and even now with the report that's just come out about the Bonham, Richard, burning at the pier in San Diego, you know, what you see is, is a Navy that's been stretched in. And, in fact, a Navy that has been asked to do more with less and has consistently attempted to do so rather than to come back to see. senior uniform leaders as well as senior civilian leaders and just saying, no, we cannot do more with less and then show, you know, essentially from a strategic sense that the emperor has no clothes,

that, you know, this continual underinvestment in the Navy has a real impact. Now, you know, the fat, Lentner scandal is sort of a separate, that is dealing with an individual that was out, you know, about, it was everywhere in the Western Pacific, you know, making these agreements for us to pull into ports and the unfortunate fallout from that, that if you were at a dinner that Fat Leonard was at, you know, you got tainted by this. And we lost, we lost people who should be punished. We also lost people that, quite frankly, were just caught up in the tangential, you know, overspray from, from this situation.

And we lost essentially a generation of leaders who had deep understanding of the Western Pacific environment. And then, of course, after the 2017 accidents where we fired a fleet, commander and then, you know, a bunch of three, two, and one stars, you know, you know, afterwards there was actually someone said, you know, if the Chinese had wanted to design a way to cripple the U.S. Navy vis-a-vis its ability to fight in the Western Pacific, they couldn't have designed it better than to have Fat Leonard be followed by the 2017 collisions. So we're in a real, and we just don't have a deep bench of experience right now in dealing with the Chinese Western Pacific. Now, I think that this is a time where we need to look, again, deeper,

deeper selection, looking for real leaders who, you know, one, demonstrated moral, ethical leaders, two, that they're war fighters, that they understand the environment which they fight. They're not selected simply because they were great program managers or that they've done a superior job in working the D.C. Circuit or that they're best, you know, inside managing a spreadsheet. But in fact, people who know their craft, whether they're ship drivers, aviators, or submariners, and that they have excelled in those areas, because we're going to be coming to war. In World War II, you know, Bull Halsey was scheduled to be retired. He was older. He was right up for the retirement. But after the war started, he was a right man in the right place. He made a lot of mistakes, by the way.

But at the same time, he was a warfighter. It was willing to take the hurt to the enemy. And other men emerged that quite frankly were not people that we thought that we're going to be leaders, like Dwight Eisenhower was ready to retire as a lieutenant colonel at the beginning of the war when suddenly he becomes a four-star within a year and a half. So that's probably what we need to be looking at is sort of the deep look, deep read as to who would be the time that in time of war break glass. And these guys are going to become our numbered fleet commanders and our carrier strike group commanders and the other groups, submarine group commanders and so on that we're going a need. But that actually takes someone who actually knows what they're looking for. I read a book a few

years ago called the Road to Pearl Harbor in which an admiral whose name was Richardson, you know, spoke with the president and said, you know, Mr. President in time of war, you know, we're going to have to send Charles Nimitz out. Nimitz will be the guy that we send. And there was an understanding prior to Pearl Harbor who the wartime team was going to be. We need to have sort of that internal dialogue now. One more question. Actually, I have a million, but one more question for you today, which is, is the Navy underfunded in comparison to the other branches? And who would you take the money away from?

I know I'm asking a Navy man, but I'm curious how you see our balance. So there's two things I'm going to say here. One is that the Navy is underfunded, and it's underfunded to the tune of about $40 billion for what it actually needs. Now, if you gave me $40 billion tomorrow, I can't spend it. You've got to incrementally grow in order for the system to be absorb it. The shipyards couldn't take it. I've got to grow.

For every new ship, I need new crew. I need new training. All of this is a continuous cycle. So we have to come up with a plan that over the next five years that we could grow an additional $40 billion. There are two ways to look at this. One is, if you're telling me that you're just giving me a flat budget, forever, then yeah, I got to take it from somebody else. But I kind of reject that point. Right now, we're spending 3.5% of GDP in the last great power competition we were in with the Soviet

Union. Our average was 5.5% of GDP was devoted to defense across time span. If we did 5.5%, that would be a $1.1 trillion defense budget year over. And so that's probably the right size defense budget. Now, could we do that smarter? Yes, we could. but that is the right number in this time. So that's the one thing I would say. Now, I would also tell you that in other times of great power competition, like during the Eisenhower administration, now, the one thing about Eisenhower was he was a five-star general sitting in the White House. So the Pentagon really couldn't argue and push back and say, you don't really know what you're talking about. He knew exactly what he was talking about. He was a former Army Chief of Staff, former NATO commander, former Supreme Allied commander in Europe. He knew exactly what he was talking about. And Eisenhower repurposed and reprioritized within the Pentagon. During Eisenhower's administration, because he felt that air power and missiles were going to be the pro bonnet thing that we needed to deter the Soviet Union, he shifted the budget to where the Air Force was 47 percent of the defense budget, and that then the Navy was second and then the army

was third. He cut the army by 500,000 troops from 1.4 million down to 900,000 during his time to in order to pay for the things that he wanted to do. If you had somebody today and said, okay, we are now in a great power competition. It's in the Western Pacific. It's a maritime and air and space competitive area, and you need to repurpose your dollars accordingly, then I think that you would see a different balance within defense budget, even as that budget grew that you would see a different balance within it with proportions of to the Air Force and to the Navy growing and the space force, and perhaps the proportion of the Army shrinking at that point in time. Nothing, no love taken away from my Army brethren,

they've been bearing the burden for 20 years in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but we're not in Iraq, Afghanistan anymore. We're in the Western Pacific, and that's the dominant domain. Dr. Jerry Hendricks, thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, it's been my pleasure, and this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate environments like this where you can take very complex issues, and you can unpack them. It's really great questions from you guys today.

Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. That's all for this episode, Angry Planet listeners. We will be back two more times this week. We've got some interesting bonus content coming up. If you want to get access to that, go to Angry Planetpod.com or substack.angangriplanet.com,

where for mere $9 a month you get access to commercial-free versions of all of the Baseline episodes, as well as two bonus episodes every, month. It will be coming at you a little bit later this week. Again, that's at angryplanetpod.com or at substack.ang.angriplanet.com. We will be back next week with more conversations about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.