Angry Planet - Ships: America Doesn't Build Them Like It Used To (Or at All)

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

A lot goes into keeping a navy afloat. There’s ship husbanding, maintenance, and buckets of haze gray. The U.S. used to be good at this, but it hasn’t been on an active war-footing for a long time and the manufacturing base that created its massive navy has seen better days. So what happens if there’s a war and America doesn’t have enough welders, let alone drydocks, to build out its fleets?Gil Barndollar is a senior analyst at Defense Priorities and the co-author of a recent piece in Foreign Policy about America’s inability to build new ships. Barndollar sounds the alarm on a number of different issues facing the U.S. military: the recruitment crisis, manufacturing issues, and sailors pushed to the limits of their physical abilities.We might even talk about arming container ships with missile batteries to augment existing forces.The U.S. Navy Can’t Build ShipsConverting Merchant Ships to Missile Ships for the WinSupport 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. Let's talk about ships. Let's talk about the fact that we can no longer build ships. There's a fantastic article in foreign policy in case you read foreign policy. I'm going to assume that most of our listeners, of course, do read foreign policy. It's that kind of educated crew. One of the authors of the article, Gil Barndollar, is joining us today and to tell us why it is that we just can't get it done anymore. So, Gil, would you just say hi and introduce yourself a little bit? Sure. I'm Gil Barndollar. I'm a senior fellow at Defense Priorities of Washington, D.C. think tank, a senior research fellow at a Catholic University of America. I came there, 50 from the Marine Corps where I served as in for the Air Force for seven years.

I never would have guessed you were a Marine other than the fact that you were sitting up so straight that it's almost embarrassing. You still have the affect for sure.

You totally do. Yeah, I guess that sticks with you. Can you describe, what is this poster that's behind you? I'm drawn to it somehow. That? Oh, sure. That's a,

sorry, the lighting is kind of catching it. That's a World War I propaganda poster. I think from 1917, German bloody boots. Oh, wow. Keep these off the USA. Yeah, I got online a couple of years ago for next to nothing, you know, considering it's 100 years old. But yeah, that's very cool.

So can you take us through the article a little bit? Just what did you find? And then we'll sort of get into how you found it and, you know, all the rest of it. Yeah, I think that's for people following the Navy. I think that's, you know, the basic situation I'm laying out is not a revelation. You know, the United States has struggled to build cost. And then you can take this beyond the Navy. I mean, I think the United States has struggled to build cost effective weapons for quite some time now.

And that's a result of a lot of things. You know, some of that is, you know, military industrial complex, kind of essentially corruption. But specific to the Navy, a lot of it is deindustrialization and the fact that we don't build commercial ships anymore. At least in the air realm for all of its troubles, and that's a, you know, a podcast or several books unto itself, we do have one of the major producers of civilian aircraft in this country in Boland, you know, despite his troubles. But we basically don't make commercial ships anymore.

As a result, you know, the vast majority of shipbuilding, the biggest producers are China, Japan and South Korea, Brazil and other countries. but as a result of not having a commercial shipbuilding industry, that leaves us with really limited industrial capacity. And as we say in the article, even more so, a lack of manpower, of industrial manpower knowledge. It's more an issue. I think we say something in the article, the detective,

it's more shortage of welders than widgets that is going to hamstring attempts to scale up a U.S. ship production. Are there enough facilities, even if we did have the hands? I mean, I'm just thinking about like the Brooklyn, Navy yard is not a Navy yard. You have here in Washington, D.C. The Navy Yard's been converted. It has a nice metro stop. Is that you? Sorry. That is my clock. Yeah. Sorry. Apologize. Okay. Tolting the hour a few minutes late. So I guess a lot of things, as you said, have been shut down, right? I mean, how would we even start up again at this point? Yeah, that's one of the things you try to highlight in the article is that that's a generational project. I mean, getting U.S. shipbuilding back to what I would argue should be for a great power and for a maritime nation.

That's going to take decades. I mean, even if we were to do it at a real pace and make that a priority, which no administration has done today. No, you're absolutely right. A lot of that defense industry, to say nothing of civilian shipbuilding. You know, the same thing. All of that has kind of gone away. We've outsourced productions we have in so many realms of American life, but other parts of the world, primarily Asia, and you can't rebuild that overnight.

No, that's absolutely right. And that goes for most of our allies, too, with maybe the partial, like, as I said, with the exception of Japan, South Korea and with the partial exception of Germany, but this is a broader kind of Western problem of de-industrialization and outsourcing, manufacturing. And, of course, we're always comparing ourselves with China as the great power conflict that we're, I don't know if we're most afraid of because you have Russia going on with Ukraine, but we're pretty afraid of. What kind of shape is China in and how does it compare to the United States at this point?

Oh, yeah, it's night and day. You know, I mean, China is producing, when we speak to this, the article, China is producing basically half the shipping in the world. There's a recent graphic and it's well illustrated kind of graphically that the words are striking enough. the Office of Naval Intelligence, there was an unclassified summary that came out a few weeks ago, saying that China now has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity in the United States. You know, as I said, they built about half of the world's new ships in 2022. U.S. yards produced 0.13 percent. So that that difference is staggering. And it's not even in the event of a major war, I think we would be. overwhelmed just on the on with our own yards on the on the maintenance front never mind building new ships or reconstitient fleet. I think we would be, you know, wholly unable to cope with the maintenance resulting from from ships damaged or, you know, recovered in the midst of shooting war.

And you also talking the article about how Chinese shipyards are dual use and that they made sure as they're building up capacity to make ships that, you know, if you can make a, you know, if you can make, you know, freighter you can make an aircraft carrier. I mean, it's not that simple, but I mean, there's some elements of that, right? Yeah, there's some overlap and especially in the workforce, right? I mean, welders are welders, pipe fitters or pipe fitters. A lot of the basic industrial processes that go into building a seaworthy ship transfer over. There's this, you know, a different level of, certainly of resilience and of damage control and things like that, that a warship brings to the fight. And we've seen that sometimes when the U.S. has struggled to adapt or been unwilling to adapt kind of commercial ships to to naval uses.

But at a certain point, building ships is building ships. So how bad do you think things get if we need to be on a wartime footing, like an actual wartime footing, not like a global war on terror, but like a real deal war in Europe, war in Southeast Asia footing? And you're speaking specifically to the navies or even more? more broadly. Well, let's start with the Navy and then go more broadly if you have opinions on that. Yeah, I think that the, well, yeah, starting with the Navy, I think that we don't have, as I said, we don't have the ability to really repair our ships. I mean, we have massive, and the article spoke

to that a little bit. We have massive kind of backlogs of maintenance just at peace time, you know, just to keep up with peacetime demand. And increasingly, I mean, one of the other things is the fleet is aging too, right? We have more and more older halls. And you get, you know, you get about 50 years out of a nuclear aircraft carrier, submarine, a bit less, or some other types of ships. But, you know, we're servicing certain ships, the war course, the fleet, the Arlie Burke class ships, which are still being produced. You know, those came online in, the first one was launched, I think, about a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And, you know, we're still making those ships, but the older ones are getting pretty long in the tooth. And the cruisers, which are on their way out of service, with no real replacement coming coming online anytime soon. We can speak to that. That's the failure of the EDG 1000 class. But the old cruiser, some of which were nuclear powered back in the Cold War, those have longer and longer maintenance backlogs because they're getting older. We see the same thing with the U.S. aircraft fleet, but that's starting to change. But the aircraft, especially in certain airframes, is getting really old. Everybody kind of knows the joke that the B-52s or

majority of the B-52s are older than their pilots. So that that problem is not, is not solely a Navy problem, but it certainly is a problem the Navy deals with. So, yeah, we just, we don't have the industrial capacity to cope with a major war. We would have to. And it's not, again, because the workforce is gone, we don't really, we can't reconstitute these things overnight. There's a lot of, never mind the just the pure industrial capacity and the physical, physical plant to generate ships, we don't have the corporate knowledge and the workforce

to do that. So it really is a generational project. We built U.S. shipbuilding. We're a war to take break out, you know, over by one is the likely scenario that everybody points to. But where that to happen tomorrow, were that to happen three or four years from now, our resources would be grossly inadequate to deal with expected losses. And those numbers are out there in the public domain. War games can be kind of, can tell you what they want them to.

And there's always the old saw about figuring out who paid for it. and then that kind of leads you your conclusions. But I think almost any responsible estimate is going to tell you that the U.S. would lose, you know, at a minimum, tens of ships and thousands of sailors in any serious shooting war in the Pacific, you know, in the opening days. That's the thing. There are so many issues, actually. I mean, your article mostly deals with shipbuilding, but it glances on a bunch of other things, like the problem recruiting sailors and how, the means that the sailors that we do have are stretched thin and thinner and thinner.

Mission creep or trying to keep the same missions as we had during the Cold War of being everywhere all at once. How do you prioritize? I mean, and put that on, you know, you're saying with the workers that civilian workers, they're taking jobs at McDonald's, you said, rather than learning how to weld? you would think that learning out of wealth would pay better than McDonald's. Sure. Yeah, I know a couple different pieces there, but I guess let's talk the global presence piece first.

I think that speaks to a myopia about what the Navy's for when it brings the table. I think a lot of things in U.S. defense policy and the Navy is certainly not the only offender. We picked up a lot of bad habits and a lot of kind of woolly thinking from 20, 20, 30 years at peace essentially. I mean, that post-Cold War peace dividend is a good thing. And we should welcome the fact that we were the world's sole superpower and even hyperpower. Some people had it for a decade or so. But what crept in there in addition to a certain amount of entirely rational and welcome disarmament was a lot of strange thinking about what the military does.

Again, this is not specific to us. Europeans are even worse in this regard in a lot of. ways. But certainly the Navy, the Navy was casting about for what to do with itself, you know, in a world in which it had no real competitor, no real enemy. And then this, you know, the Soviet Navy had had aspirations to be a serious warfighting, you know, Blue Water Navy. I think most people would say with the signal exception of its submarine force, it didn't really get there. And then there was a long period of time for the Chinese Navy was much of anything beyond a coastal defense force. And there were, you know, there were warning signs.

there were some moments where you could see where maybe things were going. We should have been more far-sighted. You know, that Taiwan, the last kind of, that Taiwan Straits crisis during the Clinton administration, when we, back then, we could sail aircraft carriers through the Taiwan straight with punity. And that was something the Chinese were determined to change, right? And they've spent a couple of decades changing that. But anyway, long and short, as a result, we had that much. moment of unipolarity and hyperpower, then the global war on terror starts, right?

9-11 happens and all of a sudden we choose, and let's make no bones about it, we chose to fight two long-running kind of wars of occupation in the Middle East and Central Asia. And as a result, and I think the article didn't really have the space to get into this, but what that did to the Navy in a host of ways, I think was really, really deleterious. And on the shipbuilding side, the Navy experimented with things. The LCS, you know, the littoral combat ship is one of the bigger disasters in naval procurement. And that wasn't, you know, that predates 9-11 as a concept, but it certainly gets some juice from the idea of having this close-in kind of street fighter was the term of art, able to operate in littoral waters, able to combat kind of lesser threats and to contribute to kind of operations ashore. potentially. The LCS, so the LCS is some ways a GWAT platform and ends up being a disaster.

And we can go into that if desired. But the Navy on a manpower side as well also starts having to justify itself in two ways. One, it sends a lot of sailors to the GWAT theaters to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to the owner of Africa, at other places, as generally as IAs as individual augmentees. So they're chopped over more senior officers or kind of mid-career in senior officers, staffs, more junior sailors, kind of helping out at a deck plate level, sometimes in the Marine Corps, but sometimes in a host of other ways. So a lot of sailors spent a lot of time getting kind of Middle East sand on their boots, not getting the boots wet, as it were.

And so you have a generation plus of sailors who orient increasingly around CENTCOM, like U.S. Central Command, like the rest of the U.S. military. That's a problem. They lose time at sea and lose that kind of culture. of being a Navy at sea. The flip side of that is the Navy without a great power opponent and without the kind of vision to see where China was going, the Navy increasingly orientes itself around presence, around, as you said, all of these kind of lesser contingencies or just showing global presence. And that's a military loves metrics, right?

That's an easy metric. You can say we had, you know, X ships in African waters or Middle Eastern waters or in the Eastern Mediterranean. or what have you. The Navy essentially is doing the same number of global presence missions it was doing as the fleet was starting to shrink post-Cold War with a fleet that's, you know, a battle fleet that's kind of less than half the size. So as you said, as the article speaks to, that grinds down ships and it grinds down people. One of the reasons we have maintenance backlogs is a lot of these deployments, especially these longer deployments. And the carrier fleet is probably the most kind of guilty or big. biggest example of that. You extend a deployment, the longer ship is out to sea, the lot more time it needs when it gets back into port or maintenance.

Nuclear overhauls, and I've done security for one of those towards the end of my time of the Marines. Those are the thing up to themselves, but just basic maintenance for both conventional nuclear platforms. So ship, you work it harder. You're going to need to put it up to rest and refit longer. And the same goes in spades for crewmen. And the Navy has, I think, increasingly, I would argue the Navy in some ways has a bigger manpower problem. them than any of the services. We're going to talk about recruiting crisis now. But the Army, the Army always deals with this episodically, right? Whenever there's a manpower crunch, the Army's going to be the ones to feel it. The Marine Corps is still making mission barely and has its kind of, both its spree and its image in the mind of the, you know, you hate to say the consumer,

but that's kind of what it is, and the mind of the American people. And the Marine Corps prioritizes recruiting, and so they're barely making missions. Space Force is tiny as a would count. And the Air Force missed mission last year, but I think we'll pull out of that. I think they were just kind of shocked that's just not a thing that happens to the Air Force. It hadn't happened since the 90s. But the Army is doing some more creative things, is spending real time on marketing. I think realizes the depth of the problem it's in. The Navy, which is going to miss mission, they think by about 9,000 sailors this year, 9,000 of routes. I think the Navy doesn't necessarily know what to do.

And what they're really doing is allowing, kind of opening the gates to what they call cat fours, is like the lowest quality of recruits. At least the Army is trying to do a prep program and kind of, you know, upskill or test up. It's really, folks that are really willing, but may not meet the standards. The Navy right now is, it's just kind of opening the floodgates

and I think the struggles to cope with this manpower problem, which there's bigger issues at play, but I think the Navy operational tempo in the way it's grinding through sailors is part of this equation, as you said. Right. Can you get into this a little bit? I think it is very interesting,

And I'm kind of, say that the recruiting crisis in America is an area of concern for me. Navy especially, right? Because it is long hours on a ship, lack of sleep. You get ground through, I think is a really good way to put it, right? Yeah. No, I think that's right. And I think that culture, too, you know, your shipboard, you're physically out of touch. you know, that we're all kind of connected now and even on a Navy ship in the middle of

whether it's the Red Sea or wherever you are, you can reach back and connect. And that's welcome. And that's a big boost in morale and all that. But you are still physically out of pocket. You still work for long hours. And the Navy has kind of a ship and shore culture. You're on shore duty, you know, kind of chairs should be spinning by two, three o'clock in a lot of cases.

And that's a time to rest. But when you're at sea, you're at sea. And I think that the maybe too much is made of this sometimes, but I think that the generational schisms or even collisions here, I think that's a big piece of this equation. I'm in the middle of actually reviewing a couple of books on generational theory in Gen Z. And the impact of that on military recruiting. And I think we're still very much coping with that. And American society, if you buy a lot of sociologists will tell you, and I think maybe, you know, trust your eyes.

American society has become more and more individualist for decades now, certainly since the end of the Second World War. So each succeeding generation by most, in as much as we have metrics, it can kind of try to have an objective measure of this, each succeeding generation is becoming more and more individualist in its preoccupations and its outlook. And I think, you know, military service can be justified on grounds of individualism and self-actualization, you know, kind of be all you can be and all that kind of thing. but I think it has to be undergirded by a certain amount of a collective ethos and service. And I think once you have, as that atrophies or even dies, for a lot of reasons, and some of them are good. There's a reason Americans are less inclined to trust their government. That starts really with Vietnam and Watergate and it's gotten much, much worse.

Some of that is sort of a healthy skepticism in a republic that would argue. But I think we're way past that point. So, no, to be sure, as you said, that the recruiting crisis is affecting all the services. I think the headwinds are really strong and growing. I don't think it's going to get any better. I think, you know, we might see a better year here and there, but I think the long-term trajectory is really, really troubling. And it calls into question the sustainability of the All-Voneteer Force model that we've now lived with for 50 years. But I think the Navy is probably more accurate to say the Army is ground zero for that,

but the Navy is not far behind and may struggle more in a lot of ways than the Army. Army does. How much of the generational stuff do you buy? Doesn't every new generation, doesn't every older generation look at the new generation, say they're more individualistic, say they're shittier? Isn't that kind of the way things always do? Every generation is shittier than the one before. I don't buy it.

I don't buy it. I think old men are always looking at younger men and saying that they're worse. And in some ways, they're exactly the same. Yeah. I mean, I'm inclined to be, to be skeptical of these narratives and to kind of agree with you because this is sort of the, this is kind of the story. And look, I mean, you know, for what it's worth,

I did two Afghan deployments and guys there. And I was on the older end of, even junior officers. And the guys there who were 18, 19, 20 years old, the vast majority of, you know, a Marine platoon is amazingly kind of baby-faced, especially if you're not in it every day and you step outside and look at it.

You know, those guys in literally walk through areas that could have been minefields. And in some marine deployments, we didn't have it too bad, but some marine deployments guys were walking and fighting every day through minefields. I think when they enter the system and the U.S. military, we're spending most of the time talking about what it does wrong and it does plenty of things wrong, but the U.S. military does some things well for sure. And I think generally, for all of its faults, training and acculturation are in pretty good shape still.

So I think the kids are all right in that sense. But I think that the numbers are what they are. I don't think, and some of those are more hard and fast statistics than just kind of a generational, sort of a vibes-based approach to American generations, right? And I think that the physical and mental decline is very real. I mean, that that is not an issue of, you know, kind of narratives of the kids are worse. And we had it harder and all that. I mean, it really is an effort, both the decline in physical standards is people just spend

more time indoors and COVID distributed that on the margins for sure, but people spend more time indoors. They're less physically active. Some of that has, you know, real kind of permanent impact. If you are couch potato essentially for most of your life and then you try to get in shape because you are motivated to join the U.S. military or induced to or whatever, you try to do that, your bone development, your muscular structure, all of that. It's hard to overcome 16 or 18 years of that in a hurry and you can hurt yourself doing that. Mental health stuff is even more real and I think more crippling. You know, we, there's no question.

I think that whatever else we want to say about Generation Z and a lot of it's pretty positive, maybe or at least a mixed picture, but the mental health issues are off the charts. Whether that's because of smartphones and social media, I mean, I don't, I don't think even sort of prove that yet, but that's kind of a going, that's the going discussion. It's launched a lot of books and launched many more, I'm sure. But for whatever basket of reasons and technology, I suspect, is going to be high among them. We do have really serious, much more widespread mental health issues among Generation C. And under current standards, we can talk about adjusting that and that conversation is certainly going on at D&D right now.

But under current standards, that is a really hamstrings military recruitment. Specifically because if you've been on certain, like mine-altering chemicals, meaning like an SSRI, right? It precludes you from joining. Yeah, absolutely. And so SSRIs are part of it. Self-medication is part of it too, right? On the one hand, yeah, I'm aware that Generation Z in some ways is kind of a much more risk of

first generation, you know, that much they're less likely to have sex, they're less likely to engage in interpersonal violence, they're less likely to drink heavily. All that is true. But we also were faced at the same time with really widespread. acceptance, you know, legal acceptance of marijuana. Now DOD hasn't done that. I'm not, I'm kind of agnosticating on that. I have no real brief one way of the other as far as American society goes and probably in a lot of ways the broader war on drugs was self-defeating doesn't make a lot of sense. But I think a lot of people will tell you that marijuana does have below a certain age. And I think they

positive roughly at 25. Marijuana, especially really strong marijuana can have serious effects on brain chemistry. And so that, I think, would be foolish to ignore that, to ignore the fact that that's going to impact the, you know, the mental health of recruiting demos as well. So, yeah, it's, the mental health issue is really is a huge one going forward. And that, and we've got another generation coming down the pike, you know, they're now, the oldest ones are 10, 12 years old. I don't know if society, we decided to call them, uh, Jen, I've heard generation alpha is being positive, you know, you get to Z and you've got to turn back around or the Polars is one sociologist is tossing that name out. It's kind of acute play on both American polarization and the polar ice

caps melting. She wanted I-Gen for the last one, and Gen Z is now pretty common, except so she might not win with Polars. But whatever we end up calling them, all of these issues, I think, are going to be equal or more pronounced in this next generation to come, who are already six years from now. These are going to be the folks that are going to be in the young and the prime military recruiting demo. So that's going to be upon us very, very quickly. All right. You're depressing the hell out of me on this end.

Let's get depressed about the go back to talk a little bit more about the Navy. All right, angry planet listeners. Want to pause there for a break? We'll be right back after this. All right. Welcome back, Angry Planet listeners. One thing you were talking about is maintenance and huge backlogs. I don't know if people understand the carriers, for example,

carries in the most glamorous, I guess, in some ways, right? They go out on a deployment, and then they're out of service for a while, right? I mean, so how does that cycle work, and what does that mean in terms of these backlogs? Well, I mean, as I said earlier, part of it is there's routine maintenance, and then there's the nuclear overhaul takes carries out for years at a time. I mean, I think the Lincoln was out for four years for her nuclear midlife, nuclear refueling. But in the nuclear Navy, I'll say this, in the Navy's phrase, the nuclear Navy has a great safety record. I mean, we have never had a serious nuclear incident with a ship or with a submarine or carrier, as I said earlier, when we had nuclear cruisers.

That's something that we obviously don't want to compromise, but that takes certain kind of stringent procedures. And unlike the Russians who have sunk, I don't know how many, but they've had several serious kind of losses of ships and who knows how many minor incidents over the years of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. And the Chinese are kind of on the doorstep of this stuff and are dealing with some of these issues more forward. But the more routine maintenance, yeah, as I said, it's hamstrung by a limited defense industrial base. It's by a lack of enough workers and by, you know, essentially four big military. shipyards. We choose one piece that thing we hit in the piece. We choose to do all this at home. There is now finally belatedly some recognition about how bad things are going. The current Navy Secretary Carlos Deltoro has been making overtures and kind of signing agreements for

potential maintenance in foreign yards. That would really be South Korea and Japan. I think that's entirely good. I mean, I think that we can't do it all ourselves. I think that we have to start leaning on allies, especially in a world where we are. are carrying most of the defense burden in terms of ships, in terms of weapons, in terms of size of force. And we are committing to defend treaty allies in the Pacific in the event of a shooting war in their neighborhood. I think the, I think leaning on them for maintenance is highly to the good. So in the short term, I don't think we solve these problems in U.S. yards. I don't think we solve these problems in backlogs. I think that, again,

reconstituting the U.S. shipbuilding base, or really the defense ship, building based on what it was is going to take decades. So I think we have to lean on foreign resources and start getting creative. But there's a danger there, right? Like we're seeing the fallout right now. I mean, it have been for years of graft and corruption around foreign support structures in the U.S. Navy, right? I'm Fat Leonard.

Yeah, I mean, you're speaking to Fat Leonard, sure. And I think there's a new book out that's going to say making way It's a horrible one. But, yeah, there's attention on that. And in some ways, kind of being both ways, on the one hand, the Navy kind of wrapped up everybody that was within spinning distance to the Pacific. You know, if you supposedly went west of Pearl Harbor Wake, you're under suspicion. On the other hand, there are guys that, I got to name any necessarily, but there are guys running around D.C. and elsewhere who were essentially guilty of damn near treason, who got, you know, got out of the Navy and got retired at whatever rank they were at. probably should be spending time in prison.

So, yeah, there's, there's some pieces there, but I think, hopefully the Navy's learned its lesson. And I think that the, I wouldn't take Fat Leonard as, and that, which is a ship resupply issue and kind of, you know, restocking ships and port and his corruption there. As bad as that is, I would absolutely take that as an indictment of naval culture and something that needs a serious thing. But I think that the industrial issues of using, major four yards and kind of shipbuilding maintenance, especially in Japan and South Korea.

And look, I'm not, I've spent, I think in each country once, I'm by no means an expert. But, and they have their own, I'm sure, kind of Byzantine, you know, in some cases, family, structured corporations and whatever. But those are generally, most people would have phrased those as very, very honest, you know, black and better world of Western countries with it with a strong rule of law. So that concern, in the face of the crisis we're dealing with, that would be low down my list of issues. Yeah, I mentioned it as just a warning, I guess, not as a, not as a reason not to do it at all. Yeah, but you also like saying Fat Leonard.

I do. I mean, it's a great, like, the story is just so wild. I'm sorry. Yeah. No, if I had the time, I would love to dive into the Whitlock book. I'm sure there's tons of, I'm sure the anecdotes, the stories he's come up with. in digging into that at length. They're pretty unreal.

I guess I just wanted to say, you know, just one last thing about the maintenance thing. You're going to think I'm just like single minded. And I am. But, you know, I think people when you say maintenance, you're thinking about getting your oil changed, right? I mean, it takes 10 minutes and you're out. You know, that's not what happens with a ship.

I mean, anyone who's ever owned a boat knows that, I mean, it actually, I mean, this is, This is a lot of work. It's a thorough thing. And so if just routine maintenance, you have any idea, like how long a ship is out of service? Well, I don't know the average numbers. And part of that is because of these backlogs, you know, some of these averages are moving targets. I mean, I can tell you that, you know, let's take attack submarines, which are the, I think most, most people tell you that's the most important piece of the warfighting Navy.

I mean, there's another whole discussion to be had about the value of the aircraft carrier going. board and how much that platform is maybe a white elephant. And there's certainly a growing broader recognition of that nationally. But I think most people tell you that U.S. dominance at sea increasingly rests on the submarine fleet. I mean, I think it was one of the CNO's kind of late Cold War had a hearing on the hill, you know, said that he was asked by the Senate in an open session, you know, how long aircraft carriers. with last and a shooting war with the USSR. And this is, this is in the early 80s, I think, around the time of the Balkans war. And he said, oh, they'd all be sunk in 72 hours. I think there were supposedly audible gasps in the Senate at that conclusion. And that was 40

years ago when the, certainly the service to service missile threat was much less than it is. So, you know, be that as it may, I think it was actually Rickover that said that, not so moll, but be that as it may, the vulnerability of the aircraft carrier, even though it's a crown jeweled the fleet. I think some attack submarines are really where U.S. still has a huge edge, where we would fight and win a war to see should it come to that. And I can tell you that the idle time for SSNs, for nuclear-powered, not nuclear missiles, but nuclear power and attack submarines, their pre-maintenance idle time was 100 days in fiscal year 2015, and it was 1,019 days in fiscal year 2019, excuse me, 2015 to 2019. So since,

a 10x increase, just waiting around to get into depot maintenance. That's before, you know, anyone starts turning a wrench. You know, that's, I haven't seen numbers since then. I highly doubt they've gotten appreciably better. And so that's, you know, the most important ships we have, you know, about a third of which are at any given time or now either in maintenance or idle waiting to go into maintenance. That's where we sit with the submarine fleet. And so maybe that's a reasonably helpful in telling statistics about what what maintenance backlogs are doing to, you know, availability of the most important fighting ships in the Navy. Okay.

So that deserves an audible gasp. I could see that. So I guess you bring up missiles, Matthew, unless you want to go in a different direction. But I just, another thing that really was striking in your piece is how important missiles are, how fast you get, you run out of them, and the important role that they could play sort of saving our butts going forward. So can you talk a little bit about how missiles play into the Navy right now and what's changed over the last years? Yeah, I think we're firmly in the missile age and that missile age in some ways begins. You can go back.

You know, Nazi Germany was doing some even kind of at sea. experiments with stuff. And obviously we had both cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, you know, the V1 and V2 in that order in World War II. So the missile age is not new. But the missile age is kind of the B all and end all of award C is it took a little longer to get going. But that's, that's very much where we are. You know, it's it's, it's, it's, the naval folks will talk about salvo mat. How many missiles you get in the air, you know, how many it's going to take to kill a ship. And all that gets, gets complicated and gets conjectural, right? I mean, We haven't fought a major missile war scene.

You know, this is new for everybody. And just like, you know, lack of better analogy, World War I is interesting in that way where a lot of technologies that have been, folks had used on the margins and used in smaller wars, finally got thrown against each other by great powers. And it took years to kind of work out what that kind of combined arms, what that symphony looks like and how to fight through that and how to make gains on the battlefield. But as best we can tell, again, through kind of the scientific evidence, war games, it will be, naval warfare will be every bit as fast and bloody as it's ever been. Sometimes, you know, wartsy often is very decisive. There are periods of time where that was less true, you know, in the old kind of age of sail that was the birth of the U.S. Navy. A lot of people underappreciate how much pounding wooden warships could take from cannonballs and that mostly ships weren't sunk, right?

The reason we had boarding parties and these kind of heroic, you know, bloodwaters, And all was because the ships just didn't sink. That is not going to be the case. I think going forward, those people will tell you, and we're seeing bits of evidence of this from some interesting things the Ukrainians have done to sink Russian ships. This is going to be much more like a, you know,

shift forward a century or two from there. You know, the Battle of Jutland, the big kind of cataclysmic but indecisive battle between the Kriegsmarine, the German Imperial Navy and the Royal Navy in 1916. When Jutland happened, And, you know, these ships were hit and split in half and sank to the bottom with, you know, battlecruisers and battleships with the loss of almost everybody aboard. I think we're much more likely to see that kind of scenario in the Pacific, despite the effectiveness of Navy damage control and those kinds of things. So I think it becomes a missile game.

It also becomes like anything now, it becomes, you know, ISR is the acronym, and an intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. it becomes an ISR and a computer game in the sense of finding the ships. But I think we are both at sea and certainly on land. We're seeing that in Ukraine as well. If you can find it, you can kill it. I mean, that's the thing, right? The kind of Precision Weapons Revolution, it's now a couple of decades on as well. That's pretty clear.

If you can find things, you can kill them. And that is going to, even in the vastness of the Pacific, there are only so many warships. So I think that that question is one of the unknown ones. To what extent when you get into the realm of satellites and radars, to what extent do we still have a substantive lead over the Chinese? How is that going to play out? For all the size of the Chinese missile arsenal, they can't find us, it can't hit us. That being said, they certainly know where all the major U.S. infrastructure is in the Pacific,

whether it's Sasebo or Yakuzka in Japan, whether it's a Sasebo or Yukuska in Japan, whether it, is, you know, Qaam is a bit further out. One of the assets of Guam is that we are, you know, outside that first island chain. And it's easier to defend the Chinese simply have fewer missiles that can reach that far. They certainly do have some. But that math, the closer you get, I guess I would say just the closer you get to China, the worse the math gets, right? I mean, if we fight a war on or around Taiwan or in the, you know, in the Taiwan Strait,

that China has a tremendous amount of kind of short and medium-range missiles that they can throw at any any targets they could find. Whereas as we get further out, you know, that math gets worse for them. And I think they're smart people, and I'm inclined to agree with them, they would say, look, if the United States goes to find itself in a situation of standoff or an actual shooting war with the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy, we should be very smart and deliberate about this and not throw the Navy. into some, again, cataclysmic battle in the neighborhood of Taiwan, we should be thinking in terms of interdiction of blockade. I mean, China is not self-sufficient in fuel. It's not even self-sufficient food. And they know that. And China's vulnerabilities are in a long war, never mind, kind of great unknown of societal cohesion. So we should think in those terms, instead of

thinking we're going to fight and win a battle right off China's coast. And I think the missile math, again, with a lot of conjecture involved, probably suggests that. Can you talk a little bit more about the lessons of Ukraine, you've begun to flag in there, because it's an interesting case study, because it's a country that doesn't really have a Navy absolutely dominating a country that has one, right? At least on the, at least it's sea. Yeah, I think, I mean, I'm not following that maybe, certainly as closely as a lot of people that are

legitimate kind of Ukraine or Black Sea Naval experts or whatever else or study the Russian fleet with any real fidelity. But I think there are a couple of interesting conclusions there. I mean, we are seeing drones at war, you know, unmanned, usually subsurface, but sometimes

surface vessels going to war. And that's interesting unto itself. And they've been very effective at some of these attacks on Russian Navy vessels in the Black Sea You know, the Moskva is the one that the flagship of that police, the one that draws the most attention justifiably. But there certainly been others.

And it certainly tritted the Russian fleet to a great degree, and I think kept it from being a bigger participant in the Navy. We don't hear, certainly don't hear any talk about an amphibious assault on Odessa, which was certainly part of poor planning or at least, you know, thinking early in the war. So they've kind of kept that Navy in port, I think, largely in limited Russia's options there and taking something off the table. But yeah, I think it's a realm for experimentation. I think where I'm sure we are watching closely kind of at their elbow,

how much we've dissipated and aided some of these strikes is unknown, but I'd be surprised if we're not, given what we know of the land war and kind of the surface-to-surface virus piece on the ground in Ukraine, I think I'm sure we're part of this equation, maybe in a really big way. But it also speaks, too, to the reconstitution piece. I mean, Russia has some of the same. problems that we have in terms of lack of, I mean, even more pronounced, you know, real lack of

naval infrastructure. That's one of the reasons they want in Crimea. But lack of naval infrastructure or lack of welders, people that study the Russian defense industrial base beyond just the issue of ships will tell you that the Russians have serious workforce shortages throughout their defense industrial base. And that may be masked by the current state of affairs in terms of the amount of munitions they're able to produce and the amount of weapons they're pulling out of stockpiles. But that's telling in and of itself.

They're producing pretty minimal numbers of their most advanced land weapon designs. And pulling out, you know, older, essentially archaic land combat vehicles, you know, infantry fighting vehicles and armed personnel carriers and reconnaissance vehicles, all those are being pulled out of stockpile thrown into the fights. So we're seeing that kind of reversion to more and more primitive. weapons and a more primitive way of fighting. I mean, there's attrition of both manpower and material. And that happens on the naval front, too.

I mean, the one I would point to, you could check, but I don't think I'm based on this. The Admiral Kuznetsov, you know, Russia's one kind of limited smoke spewing ski junk carrier there. The Kuznetsov, you know, got some press a few years ago for supporting limited strike operations, you know, sea to shore in Syria during the Russian intervention there. that being said, it was a, you know, there was a lot of effort for a very limited numbers of sorties. They lost at least one ship that kind of missed, or excuse me, one airplane that missed a ship and came in and crashed into the sea. And the Kuznetsov was kind of notorious for, as I said, just belching, you know, black smoke.

It's its whole way through that deployment. The Kuznetsov limped into shore, you know, went back, went back in for refit. And the Russians had essentially a crane break. I mean, these are massive. If you've ever been to a Navy shipyard, the size and that infrastructure. I mean, I know if you spent time at Newport News, there's a crane at Newport News, which is the second biggest crane in the Western Hemisphere. I mean, these are huge, not easily replaced pieces of machinery.

Because that's what I think has been in port ever since that intervention because of a lack of physical infrastructure and a lack of the workforce to fix her. So I imagine she'll look back out to sea at some point, probably not in this war. but that was kind of a one and done. So Russia, in some ways, we have both allies and adversaries that show us how bad things can get. And I think sort of Russia's naval travails, we're not anywhere near that shape. You know, we are still the really arguably, the only real Blue Power Navy in the world, you know, Blue Water Navy for all of our faults.

But there's kind of a lesson in the decline of the Russian fleet over several decades. And we can look at a lot of NATO armies to see the kind of manpower piece and see what happens when you struggle with manpower when you just, you lose force structure. And it becomes, as we said, in terms of readiness and deployments, it becomes a kind of self-reaborse excitement. So we can look to both partners and adversaries to see some worst-case scenarios. And we're not there yet, but the trajectory in a lot of ways is really troubling. This conversation has gone in so many ways that it's just terrific. I just, I guess, for me, there are two other things stuck out. Matthew, I think you wanted to ask something. But one, and I think they're related. Do we still need a Navy if everyone's going to just missile us to death? And, I mean, other than the subs, which I understand are much harder to get at and have a super important role. And then, you know, You also had mentioned the idea of taking container ships and putting a bunch of missiles on them as a possible, not solution, but, you know, help to in our current situation.

Sorry, I know it's two questions. I'm bad about that. I ask, you know, multiple questions. Sure, sure. Yeah, what do you think? Yeah, yeah, well, I'll take those in sequence. No, I think we absolutely need a Navy. I mean, I think we need probably a bigger Navy.

I mean, this is a maritime, and that's just kind of an interesting cultural argument there. But I think the United States is by geography and by, you know, grand strategy and naval power, even if maybe culturally we're not. You know, there's a continental versus maritime power discussion. The United States is absolutely a continental power. But we closed that frontier over a century ago. We haven't had a meaningful land threat to this country. I would argue since the 1850s. After the Mexican-American War, there was no meaningful threat on Americans' borders.

We got a little war scares with Canada writing right up to right up to World War I, certainly. And that was once a real war path up from New England to New York into Canada, but those days ended a long time ago. And we absolutely have border security issues, and those may become militarized issues, That's not contrary to some really nasty rhetoric. That's not an invasion. So we are strategically, incredibly secure at our own hemisphere. As much as we have threats, they're all going to be overseas. They're all going to be out of area.

And you need a Navy both to kind of impact issues there and potentially to project power. So I think, and then there's a broader conversation about guarding, you know, global shipping trade and kind of the global commons and all that. And I think we're reaching, in some ways, we're reaching the limits of that. And the Houthi was something we haven't really spoken to, the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea. And what they're able to do to affect global shipping with missiles is, I think, very interesting. And there's probably more to follow on that. And I don't think the United States probably should or can carry the load of ensuring global commerce by sea single-handedly. And also, how long does the Eisenhower remain in port after it's done?

Sure. Yeah, yeah, the eyes and the eye, you know, the eyes and our got extended in its deployment and it's going to have a lengthy, as we said, kind of refit for both the ships and then and then for the crew. So yeah, I think we need a Navy for sure. I think there is there's a question about letality and survivability of surface warships, as you said. But again, that's that's kind of an unproven proposition to date. I would probably bet the under on the lifespan of an Arly Burke destroyer, let alone an airspace. craft carrier that's fighting anywhere close to enemy shores of a major, let's just call it China. But we don't we don't totally know that yet. But I think there's, I think we need a Navy. I think we need a much more capable and probably a larger Navy. So put, I'll put a pin in that one. Remind me your second piece of that, totally, totally different second question. Container ships.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, container ships and the kind of unconventional sort of merchant missilemen idea. Yeah, that's entirely credit. That's just something I came across years ago and the author's a friend. TX. Hamas, who was a retired Marine colonel, and now has been at NDU for a while. I would recommend his article. We link to it in piece. It's in U.S. Naval Institute proceedings.

I'm a member, but I think they've been, I think they gave you free, you know, I'm sure they give you, I think five free articles a month in proceeding. So I recommend folks read that piece, which came out a few years ago. But TX has banged on that drum for a while now. It just says that the issue is missiles of firepower, not halves, and that we're way behind, as we've kind of spoken to, in terms of fleet size. You know, the U.S. Navy still outweighs the People's Liberation Army Navy,

but we have fewer warships, and that trajectory is pretty clear. That's only going to get worse. So he argues for taking merchant ships, container ships, and possibly even tankers as well, and just putting containerized, you know, vertical launch missile cells essentially on these ships. And then we could do what he proposes, especially when you bring in the reserve, you know, and the U.S. Naval Reserve is, I think, struggling like all reserve components, is probably struggling manpower-wise far more than the active components are.

We talk about the recruiting crisis and retention issues. So there's a tremendous amount of scope there for Naval Reserve crews who combined with a merchant marine and with civilian mariners to just, you know, you take these ships out to sea. These guys can train essentially on their, on their drill weekends with simulators. It's not that, it's not that tricky a process in terms of learning how to launch, launch missiles, launch VLS missiles. So that is a way to kind of even the score, to both have a lot more holes at sea, a lot more exponentially more firepower. and present a much trickier kind of strategic and targeting picture to the people's liberation Army, Navy, and the rest of the Chinese military. So I recommend TX's piece.

He, you know, he kind of wrote the book on that, and he has been pushing that. You know, the Navy to date has not been tremendously sympathetic to that argument and wants to build more warships, despite the inability to do so. at any kind of scale or pace. I think the one piece we hit on in our piece that's particularly troubling that came out just a few weeks ago, even the simple stuff we've gotten tremendously bad at doing. You know, the constellation was this frigate design that was supposed to be a very simple, cheap, almost off the shelf. We bought a European kind of conglomerates design, the Finn Mechanica's design.

And even that is delayed by three years, even though it was supposed to be 85% commonality. and we're buying something off the shelf and only making minor adjustments. We just couldn't do that. So long story short, I think TX's idea of merchant missile men or even beyond that kind of arsenal ships, it should be an even bigger piece, is deserves serious study and deserves to be engaged with. Even we spoke earlier about the lethality of Ward C. He makes the point, too, that these are enormous ships, right?

Anyone that's seen a container ship or a tanker, these are huge ships with limited crew. he says, look, one of the things you can do, one of the assets of these huge ships is they're actually, if you're smart about it, pretty hard to sink. You know, you can add all kinds of foam inside the hall. They don't take a hit below the water line. A lot of this stuff, you can seal up and you're basically just shooting into kind of buffered space. So these ships are actually potentially, despite not meaning anywhere near kind of naval construction or damage control standards, they're potentially surprisingly survivable in a shooting war. So there's some other assets to taking this unconventional. approach and essentially, you know, weaponizing civilian platforms. And I don't think T actually hits on this, but what it kind of suggests itself. The, this comes back to kind of the dawn of American sea power, right? We had a lot more privateers and weaponized civilian ships long before we had a meaningful maybe. So there's kind of interesting historical circularity to that, but I think it's an interesting idea and deserves to be taken on. Is issuing letters of mark to civilian container ships and sending them out there, letting them,

shoot and absorb missiles. Yeah. Matthew, do you have anything else? This is maybe, yeah, I'll ask it. What is nuclear modernization doing to America's defense budget? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's crushing it.

I mean, I think that the modernizing the triad, and I'm not a nuke's guy, but the top line math is pretty clear, right? I think that the, I think there are a lot, of people, a lot of very hawkish folks, especially in D.C., but sometimes outside it, who will just say, look, okay, we have a great power competitor. We have to just increase a defense budget dramatically. That's not happening. And by the time it happens, it's probably going

to be too late. And I think that there are a lot of reasons. There are a ton of, just as I said, with recruiting, there are a ton of societal headwinds that prevent that. And there's no enthusiasm among actual politicians or among the American people to spend more on defense, nor arguably should there be. I mean, our country is incredibly geographically secure, as I said, for all the problems we have, you'd probably make big picture kind of societally, economically, geopolitically, you'd much rather have the hand we have than that of any other country or any other major country. So I don't think there's a compelling case to increase the defense budget dramatically.

But that being said, the squeeze coming in from nuclear modernization is huge. And I think that it may still be time to kind of change that. but it seems pretty clear that what the decision making is. If we're going to modernize all three pieces, you know, we've got the B-21 bombers coming online providing that piece of the equation. You know, the second leg of the stool,

the SSBNs and the submarine launched, ballistic missiles. That I think everyone would tell you that's the most important piece to try, the most survivable and the most, I'm just so the most responsive for the most survivable second strike capability. So that's a given. There's a very real question. have you asked about the ground, you know, the ICBMs, the ground launch missile silos.

That gives you a slightly faster response time, I guess. I mean, but what it really, it soaks up adversary missiles for the most part. I think we probably should, again, not really my field, but I think we probably should get rid of that. If you're going to make, if you're going to make meaningful savings and reallocation of money in the defense budget in any kind of timeline, I can only think of two things that make any kind of sense that you could do. And one of those is to trim the triad down to a biad basically to otherwise change what the math is on modernization of the nuclear triad. I think it's pretty clear which way you go on that. Or you could, in this would be an even harder sell and would probably have far bigger strategic impacts.

You could cut the U.S. Army down dramatically and put most of it in the garden reserves. I mean, I would argue the case for a large active duty U.S. Army, and I say this is currently a serving guardsman. But so I guess I'm biased on both sides and as a former Marine. But you could cut the U.S. Army down dramatically and accept that, hey, we're going to fight a major war. And we're going to need it anyway. We're going to need time to mobilize the stand up and train reserve formations. And we have tremendous geographic security. And the extent to which I would just close by saying the extent to which we ignore our

our biggest advantage far away is the geographic security of the United States, that we have, you know, a couple thousand miles between us and any potential foe. And we have the time, A, to be kind of deliberate in our, in our decision making and not, you know, react hysterically to every little thing that happens overseas. And B, to kind of pick and choose when we intervene, how we intervene. And we squander that by dint of how we've structured our forces and how we react as a nation to all kinds of issues overseas. So, yeah, to come back to your question, question, I think, I think nuclear triad modernization is going to, is going to crush the defense budget and it's going to crush the individual services because it's basically structured that

that's coming out of high. You know, the Navy always makes the case that, hey, the SSBN force is a strategic asset. That's not really a naval asset. That's something almost should almost should be off our books. We're giving that to the nation as a hedge against nuclear war. That's what that's for. That's not how the map works, you know, that those ships come out of the Navy budget and they are going to crunch what is, as we've said, is already a super constrained shipbuilding budget that is not adequate to the potential threat. And if we wanted to borrow more money to spend more money on defense, where the hell would we get the money?

We're already borrowing as much as you can possibly imagine, right? We would just print more. Right. Machine go print more. Yeah, that does a whole thing. That doesn't work the way you think it would work. But anyway, yeah, it's playing with fire, right? I mean, we never, I think you could make a longer, again, very much.

not my field, but you could make a longer argument that maybe we'd be better off as a nation, not being the global reserve currency long term in terms of the dysfunction that's induced. Most people would say right now that is a key American strategic asset, right, as being everybody wanting dollars and trading in dollars. But playing with that, as you just said, is risking that is not a great idea by most people's lights. Gil Barndollar, thank you so much for coming on. You covered so much ground.

I can hardly believe it. no pleasure talking you guys I enjoyed it so much all right y'all that's it for this episode of Angry Planet as always Angry Planet is me Matthew Galt Jason Fields and Kevin O'Dell was created by myself and Jason Fields

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