Sea Control - Sea Control 152: Bryan McGrath and Mitch McGuffie on Surface Warfare Officer Training

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

“A Rude Awakening,” Mitch McGuffie’s 2009 article details his experiences as a junior exchange officer aboard a Royal Navy frigate.“What Happened to Our Surface Forces,” CAPT Kevin Eyer’s (ret.) 2018 article detailing Surface Navy decision-making since 1999 and its resultant effects.The collected USNI works of CAPT John Cordle (ret.), prodigious chronicler of the Surface Navy. 

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard another edition of the Sea Control Podcast. My guests today include Brian McGrath, former co-host of the War on the Rocks Net Assessment Podcast. Brian is a retired Navy commander who is the founding managing director of the Ferry Bridge Group, consultancy specializing in naval and national security issues including national and military strategy strategic planning executive communications strategic communications and emerging technologies he previously commanded uss bulkley an arlie burke class destroyer home ported in norfolk virginia my other guest is mitch mcguffey mitch is a navy reservist he

formerly commanded uss firebolt in bahrain as always the opinions here are our own and not reflective of the Department of Defense or the Navy. In advance of next week's Surface Navy Association gathering taking place just outside Washington, D.C., I thought this would be an appropriate time to revisit Mitch's 2009 article, A Rude Awakening, a seminal work that began to change surface warfare officer training for the better, as well as reviewing the current state of surface warfare officer training. So gentlemen, before we really get into the meat and potatoes of this, do you two know each other? Have you met before? I have not had the pleasure of meeting Mitch. Yeah, Jared, this is Mitch. I have not had the pleasure of meeting Brian, but I will say that

over the duration of my active duty naval career, I followed Brian's work closely. And I think, you know, his brilliant analysis and commentary have been a key part of the Navy dialogue. So it's a real honor to be on today's podcast with Brian. That's very kind of you. Thank you. Yeah, Brian, you're going to figure out pretty quickly why we in the PCU squadron referred to Mitch is the junior senator from Texas. Very, very well spoken, erudite, erudite individual. So and I do have to apologize to you both. This is not a visual medium. If I could allow America to experience Mitch's hair, I would do so. That was another hot topic when we were in command back together.

Thanks, Jared. I appreciate the compliments. But today's topic is a look back at one of the seminal documents that began to change our training. Mitch's 2009 work, A Rude Awakening. If you're looking to do some background reading here, one, I would recommend the article itself. Two, I would read all of Dr. John Cordell's work for U.S. Naval Institute Press. He has written extensively about U.S. Navy surface warfare officer training. Three is Captain Kevin Iyer's What Happened to Our Surface Forces, also published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press. And I'll include links to all these on the website as we go to post-production here.

So to set the scene, Mitch and I came into the Navy in 2003. And Mitch, I'm having trouble remembering which subpar academic institution did you attend? I think some of the listeners might have heard of this subpar institution, also the same subpar institution that Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, of which I'm joining the podcast today from Fredericksburg, Texas, which is where I live and the birthplace of Admiral Nimitz. But that is the U.S. Naval Academy, Jared. Thank you, Mitch. Brian, if you don't mind, the really pertinent part of your career here starts in about 2000 until your retirement. Could you tell us where you were career-wise from 2000 until you left the Navy? Okay.

In the year 2000 through 2001, I was XO of USS Princeton in San Diego. And then 01 to 04, I was Director of Interoperability at the Joint Theater Air and Missile Defense Organization of the J-8 of the Joint Staff. And I went from command to 04 to 06. How much further do you want me? And then I retired in 08. No, that's perfect. And I think that period 04 to 06 is going to be very interesting because you got to see the full range of the ensigns who received the original SWAS training and then Mitch,

me, and all of our compatriots there. But since 2003, there have really been three major moments in which the Surface Navy opted to make major changes to the way it trains its officers. The first occurred prior to my entry, prior to Mitch's entry into the Navy in 2003, when the Navy disestablished the Basic Division Officer Course, or BDOC. At that point, Mitch and I were senior midshipmen, by which I mean we were seniors in college, not midshipmen with any particular experience other than yelling at other 22-year-olds. We were about to be commissioned and head straight for our ships. Brian, you're the lone participant today who would have attended the, quote-unquote, old swaths. Could you describe a little bit what the course was like that you attended, the six-month variant?

Yeah, some context. I was an ROTC graduate from the University of Virginia, and so I went straight to my ship for three months after graduating. And by straight, I mean I graduated on Sunday, and I showed up on the quarterback on, I guess, Wednesday morning, sometime late in May of 1987. I got to SWAS Divot School with three months of underway time and import time on a ship, which gave me a little bit of a perspective. The Naval Academy folks that were there, I think they were on basket leave, most of them. And there were a few others who had gone to ships. But you're thrown together with a bunch of other ensigns. I have friends from that class to this day. The artist known as Vice Admiral Lisa Franchetti was my class leader. She was a Lieutenant JG who had come over from another community, and she was our boss in our class.

And it was essentially 8 to 3.30 of classroom training and some sort of static display stuff. But it was considered – it was a drinking from the fire hose, and there were some trainers, some very rudimentary late 80s kinds of trainers, nothing like we have today. I would say it was, I think it was a 12-week course. I might be wrong. It was probably nine weeks of material packed into 12 weeks. But it was, I thought, a very good introduction to the surface force. And between that and the three months that I had before I showed up, I thought it was a good way to get me started. Okay, so you would have, I don't know, your session then was actually probably closer to what we do today than the traditional, okay, I've graduated and now I go to SWAS for six months. I assume you knew that you were going to command when the decision to disestablish SWAS was made, or at least the BDOT course. Where were you when that decision was made? And I can't ask you to speak for the fleet, but what was your mood response to that decision?

I was on the joint staff, and I believed it was one of the dumbest things I'd ever heard, and I continue to believe that today. It was an incredibly short-sighted, it was just a terrible, terrible decision. Mitch, let me ask you, because we were both seniors at the time, what was your response as this was going on? I was focused in May of 2003 upon, first of all, graduating from the Naval Academy, and second, marrying my wife. So I graduated in May, I got married in early June to my wife, and then we made our way to San Diego. When I arrived, you know, I was handed, I think, 20 or 25 learning CDs that were had been burned onto to other CDs that you could copy. I showed up. I think there were 12 to 14 ensigns who were in the same position. And we had two laptops among, you know, 12 of us.

And we're really left with figuring out what we needed to know and and how this new process was going to work. You know, I'll just say one thing that I was fortunate when I showed up to the USS Benfold in San Diego, I was greeted on the quarterdeck by then Commander Mike Gilday, who's now the CNO. And we had a pretty good training program. But what I quickly started to understand through my classmates and peers who were on other ships is that, in effect, we had hundreds of different types of training going on. And I did have some concerns of the lack of standardization, but that realization did not come to fruition completely until, you know, I left to join the Royal Navy. And then, you know, based on perspective, I realized that, you know, I thought we were heading in the wrong direction for sure. So let me ask you, because I wanted to actually go back just a little bit further than that to the time was you're a senior midshipman, and you're told six months prior to graduation, hey, you're not doing this division officer course, you're going to the ship. Do you remember how you felt about that? You know, I don't remember it. I don't think that it was again, I was trying to figure out how this whole surface warfare qualification process worked. At the time, I don't recall it being, you know, feeling one way or the other. I think there was some assumption that that leaders who had made this decision were going to have it was going to ultimately lead to the same results.

And so I really can't comment on on my mood at the time or how I felt because I really don't recall that decision prior to graduation. Yeah, I've been thinking some about this over the last week. And, you know, in my heart of hearts, I want to say like, oh, I thought this was done from the start in the way that Brian is. Brian had a lot more perspective at that point. But I believe Midshipman Samuelson was actually pro if for the sole reason that I was kind of tired of being in an academic environment. I just wanted to get to a ship and do cool Navy stuff. So while I'd like to say that I had the foresight that Brian clearly had, it's like that was a failure on my part. And I think a lot of our group, in the way you just said, just kind of trusted that, well, somebody who knows significantly more than us has made this decision.

We'll just go execute. Now, Brian, you had mentioned you were serving as captain aboard the Bulkley from 2004 to 2006. This, to me, is a really interesting time period because at its outset, your wardroom is mostly SWAS graduates or BDOC graduates. and then you would have progressed to at the end you would have had a ton of ensigns on board with functionally no training before they showed up can you compare and contrast your experience working with the officers who were there when you arrived versus the officers who were there as you got ready to depart the ship can i can i give a little more background to the um to my experiences when things were were first when the news was first breaking absolutely please the

mythology out there is that there was a four-star child who had was going through swaths and who who just found it just a terrible experience and that that you know filtered back up we were also in the heady days of the peace dividend and we uh you know peace had broken out worldwide and we were at the ascendant navy everywhere and always um and so we were shifting from a period of what i refer to as effectiveness to a period of efficiency and everything was about finding efficiencies and doing things more efficiently we had an mba as a cno admiral uh admiral clark yep so there was a lot of bringing business practices to uh the fleet there were all of these things were in the air at the time and so there was a sense that oh and there was also this

this narrative out there that was that we called them kids but these you know young men and women hated going to swaths they just didn't like it maybe they were like you know midshipman you who thought you wanted to go straight to the fleet you're tired of the academics or whatever all i know is six months in newport rhode island with a bunch of you know mostly dudes my own age it was a great time i absolutely loved it i i learned quite a bit i made friends for life it was a great experience so this maybe over time it became more or less interesting or whatever but the the mythology out there was that like this everybody wanted this to go away and i just remember myself and my fellow ceos right this is just a terrible idea this is a terrible idea

so i get to command obviously the overwhelming majority of the people uh on the ship were you were SWAS graduates like me, I don't believe I got my first batch of ensigns. And more context here. I took over the ship about a week after it returned from a deployment. And it was in right around June or July of 2004. My adult mind is failing me right now. They'd just gotten home from a deployment. There were only a couple of brand new ensigns there. I don't remember if they were swast graduates or not but the overwhelming majority of of ensigns that i worked with on that ship were swast in a box guys like you guys the uh i i just i don't have any any strong memories of a contrast between you know ensigns that were uh were swast and ensigns that were not swast

My memory of the ensigns that were SWATs was from my XO tour in Princeton from 99 to 01. My memories in command are all SWATs in a box. So let me ask you, what was your experience as the commanding officer with SWATs in a box? Because as I look back on my time going through, it's like I cannot imagine the implementation challenge with everything else that you're asked to do. It struck me as, as I said earlier, a ridiculous idea that, you know, that the again, the powers that be at the time would say stuff like it's always been the commanding officer's job to train division officers is like, yeah, but I got other things to do, too. That said, like all other processes in life, implementing swaths in the box was governed by Gaussian distribution and the bell curve. And you had some ships and captains on the right side of the bell curve who embraced it and ran with it. I count myself among that few on the right.

And there was the big fat middle of those who just sort of went along with it. and then there was the ones on the left uh who feared it and and and fought there was no option it's not like i could i didn't have you know so the the way that we dealt with it was to was to really place it centrally in focus i had you know we we i think that's about the time the training officer came into business in the in the surface force yes um uh i had trino acting as trino and The senior watch officer both would were acting as the implementers of this program. But essentially, every single Friday afternoon in port for two years, I had a SWO board and it was me, the XO, the training officer, the senior watch officer and all unqualified ensigns sitting around the table in the ward room. And I would just ask them questions and I would say and I would I would look at you and say, what did you do this week?

and and since suck knuckle would say i did weather and i would start i'd ask i'd ask questions about what's the difference between a cumulus crowd cloud and a serious cloud what are some of those signs of an incoming low pressure for you know i would ask i would just have little swoboards and ask them questions and i just did that over and over and over and over and over again so that by the time we actually got to a no joke ood board or us nobody came to one of those boards not knowing how I was in a board, what I was going to ask. And no one came unprepared because, quite frankly, I had been involved in preparing them all along the way. I understand from my friends in the fleet that that was not necessarily the way everyone did it. No, I would say that is an

extreme anomaly and a positive one, and to your credit. Mitch, you said you reported USS Higgins out in San Diego. What was your qualification process like? Yeah, so I reported, this was during also another effort around C-swap and swapping hulls. And so I received orders to USS Higgins and then ended up getting sent to USS Spenfold, which along with John Paul Jones was part of the rotational crews. You know, I think overall, like I mentioned earlier, that we were lucky.

The training process was we had a very proactive, enthusiastic training officer. And, you know, we had to navigate some challenges. And, you know, one of those challenges was, you know, most of the work had to be done on a computer and that was a limited asset. We had a pretty busy operational schedule, which allowed for us to to really get some experience at sea. And, you know, with 10 or 11 people all trying to get through a program and competing for watchkeeping time for, you know, various evolutions. I think we managed it pretty well. I will say one thing, just I wanted to follow up with Brian's comment. I think, you know, all three of us have had the perspective of command at sea.

My perspective as a midshipman, you know, getting commissioned and showing up to my first ship, fairly indifferent to the swaths in a box approach. But I think to Brian's comment of, you know, from his perspective as a commanding officer at the time and now having had that perspective, I mean, ultimately what it was was a transfer of risk and basically putting that risk and additional responsibility on the back of commanding officers across the fleet to figure this out. You know, I think some some commanding officers and some ships did it much better than others. But I feel as a Navy trying to drive standardized processes and and the real risk, I think, is you go through that training process and then you get handed off to another ship. And there's no way to know the quality or the minimum standards to which that officer that you are inheriting has been held to. So it's kind of having to re-baseline every time that they move to another ship. But I think, again, overall, I was lucky to have to have an enthusiastic training officer. And I think we made the best of of a kind of a challenging situation.

So, Mitch, after your time aboard, we'll just say the rotational halls there, you moved over the personnel exchange program in England. What was your opinion of yourself as a mariner when you showed up to HMS Cornwall? I felt pretty confident in my abilities, having been, you know, the specialist officer of the watch for officer of the deck for special evolutions, having driven the ship in and out of port, having deployed to the Far East and South America. I felt that I really had a lot of experience under my belt. And then I showed up to the Royal Navy and, you know, quickly, as the article that I wrote, you know, was in for a rude awakening of really I was not prepared. And and part of that is the difference in how our navies operate. But quickly, I was forced into a situation where I was the only officer on the bridge of a ship required to do my own chart work, fixing radar. with two other people to support you on you know a uk capital ship and um and i wasn't quite ready

for that um i think as i talked about in the article the rigor of rules of the road and no multiple choice but having to write out especially rule 1 through 19 knowing all of them verbatim and being able to talk through scenarios continually weekly um was was a real challenge So I think, you know, I wasn't for a rude awakening. I quickly was knocked down a couple of notches in my confidence level and really had to rebuild the foundation where I could call myself, you know, a competent mariner, at least in the UK's terms. So what point in that experience did you decide, I need to tell the Navy about this? I need to write something. I need to publish. After my navigator course in the UK, which was one of the most challenging, probably the most challenging course I've gone through to include department head school, commanding, you know, the commanding officer pipeline. But after coming back to the U.S., I really had some strong convictions and really wondered what was I going to give back to the Navy for giving me this opportunity to go and experience another Navy for two years. So, you know, to kind of put this in context, I had spent my first two and a half years on a U.S. ship and then I spent my second two years on a British ship.

So the experience was almost equally divided between two navies. And I had some strong convictions. I had socialized this with some mentors and the responses were mixed. Hey, Mitch, you shouldn't put yourself out there. This is risky. You're going to make a lot of people mad at the higher levels. But then I had some others that said, listen, this is an opportunity for you to help change the direction that our Navy's going, and you shouldn't worry about the consequences. So I started jotting down some thoughts, and over six months to a year, I started to really bring something together and then decided to publish. And I was working in a pretty high-visibility job at the time and was interfacing with a lot of admirals, so I was wondering, you know, how is this going to impact my career? But I decided to publish, and it was released in the January 2009 edition of Proceedings as one of the headline articles. And interesting how timing works, but that's also the month of the Surface Navy Symposium. And during the Surface Navy Symposium, where they hand out copies of proceedings, we received news that the Port Royal had run aground off the coast of Hawaii in our home waters, which was a significant event as a strategic ship that's coming out of the yards. And so it really brought a lot of light into, you know, what I had written, and it kind of foreshadowed, you know, some of the challenges that we had, which really became the catalyst for the Navy to start looking at how we were going about training our junior officers.

So can I ask, what was the response like after publishing? I know your mentors had expressed some concern about risk here for you, but how did that manifest? It was mixed. And to be candid, I had a few awkward conversations with some very senior Navy leaders at the time in some elevators while I was escorting admirals saying that my ideas or my proposed solution was completely – there's no way it would ever happen, right? It was too expensive. It didn't make any sense. And then there were some that were more receptive and, you know, had some very good engagement from some of the surface leaders after the Port Royal grounding and the dialogue started going. So there was some negative feedback. But overall, I think, you know, for for other junior officers, and I mean, Brian is a is a prolific writer. But it is when you go to write something, I felt confident because it wasn't me just giving my opinion. It was me sharing my experience, which is hard to dispute and a unique experience. And then on top of that, it wasn't just a complaint. I knew that my solution was not, you know, completely thought out. It had not factored into cost, et cetera. But I felt like I needed to provide some recommendation to get the debate going. So, you know, using experience and then trying to provide some solution is the way I approached it. And I think that allowed it to land a little easier than just someone writing

about a topic, not having a lot of experience. Thank you. Brian, do you remember Mitch's article and any of your reactions to it? So we come now a little bit to what did the Navy do at that point? And the first major changes I remember were establishment of the surface navigator course, reintroduction of the basic division officer course, which continues to this day in Norfolk and San Diego. So Mitch, I think you and I both worked with officers during our department head tours who had the benefit of the BDoc education. What was your impression then? Because you got to see, I mean, that should have been for you like seeing some of the fruits of your labor, I would imagine. I mean, I think it was a step in the right direction. And I'll say that one of the

privileges that I had in the commanding officer pipeline was I found time to attend the four or five week navigator course that had really started from the discussions that came out of the article that I wrote. And again, I think it was a step in the right direction. I can't, you know, when you talk about the success or the results of BDOC and a move back to brick and mortar training, my feeling is it was the right direction. But as you look through the comprehensive review of 2017, which is, you know, seven or eight years after we started pivoting back, it's hard to ignore some of the comments that specifically, and these are not my opinions, but these are the 34, 40 different people saying that individuals are still not arriving to the ship with the

foundational knowledge and skills to perform in the duty of conning officer. There's no comprehensive assessment of an officer's navigation and seamanship proficiency. So although I think it was a step in the right direction based upon 2017 and really some of the incidents that we've had in the past decade, I can't help but question where did we miss the mark? Yeah. Just a year after your article, I believe the Navy released the Belisle Report. So the Belisle Report was a zero baseline assessment of the surface fleet conducted by Vice Admiral Retired Phil Belisle that went sort of in depth into a lot of the, we'll call them insufficiencies here. Maintenance, both preventative and depot level, a lot of the training things. Brian, do you remember reading the Belisle Report? At this point, you would have been out of the Navy. Yeah, I was out of the Navy by then. I was then, and to this day, a consultant to, it was then N-86, the director of surface warfare. I was at home and I got a leaked copy of the actual report. And I read it, and I mean, if you had been anywhere near my office at the time, you would have heard the cheering coming from the office, because I believed that someone had finally recognized that during the previous essentially 10 years, the surface force had been perturbed by a number of really good ideas, None of which was implemented independently so that its results could be evaluated on its merits because there were so many other variables in play at the same time. And in my view, over that 10 years, none of those initiatives served to increase the professionalism of surface warfare.

I thought it was it was 10 really bad years for surface warfare. And I was so happy that, you know, this report had come out that said all this stuff and had Phil Belisle stink all over it. And so I called I called in to 96 and wanted to and asked to talk to Admiral Pandoff, who was the 86 at the time. And I told him, I said, Admiral, I just I'm just reading through this thing. It is white hot. I'll send it over to you. You got to read it. I mean, because I know that he had been briefed and he had known what sort of what was going on. But this was this was before it got out. And I said, when this gets out, it's going to be dynamite. Now, that document came out and its first opportunity to implement or impact SWO training was in POM 12. And so there was a period of, you know, there's been a period of, I guess, seven fiscal years between then and right now where something on the order of, I think it's three and a half to four billion dollars in additional training money went into trying to make things better. I suppose we can talk about whether whether that has helped or not.

Yeah, I mean, certainly in light of the collisions in 2017, then we get into the comprehensive review and more changes to the surface warfare officer curriculum. And I think kind of the two most consequential for the individual surface warfare officer, in my opinion, were the introduction of the logbooks and the junior officer of the deck course. Brian, question for you is like, what were your opinions of those additions? I went back and read the article under consideration earlier today, and I believe that the increases in professionalism, increases in courses, when those courses are taken, go-no-go points, actual attrition, and assessment, I see those things in the plan. I see the potential for goodness. I see the potential for things to get better. But before we go on, I want to be, you know, put the put the bad thing in the punch bowl right here. go i'm the guy who has all all along said that the collisions in the summer of 2017 were the fault of the crews on those ships at that time not doing what they knew to be the

right thing i am not the guy to come to to look for systemic causes for those casualties i am I am fully aware of systemic contributions to them. But I believe when you when you suggest a systemic cause, you then have to be able to account for 280 some odd other ships that didn't collide. And I know Admiral Davidson said that in a Senate hearing in a very impolitic way. But there is some truth to that way to look at things analytically. I think surface Navy training from the time I left the Navy to the time of those accidents can, without a question, be said to have gotten better. It's much better than it was in 2004 when I got last year's college graduate walking down the brow with 10 CD-ROMs in his hand. Yeah, without question. I thought that a lot of things had gotten better. The problem, I think, comes from a generation of people who are very comfortable with technology and very comfortable with what's out there and what the art of the possible is, fully comprehending that what we had in place was not up to snuff in the civilian world. And I think some of the stuff that's come out of the 2017 comprehensive review helps us get more toward the, you know, Mitch's article and what the kinds of things that he wanted to see implemented into surface training.

Mitch, as you looked at the comprehensive review, did you feel validation as you've seen some of these changes coming to the curriculum? Yeah, I think validation is not the right word. I think, you know, it's not about me. Right. It's it's just I felt that based on some limited experience, I saw this coming. And it's a bit of there's there's a bit of kind of remorse and sadness that I feel like we weren't able to correct this to prevent it. And I think anyone who reads the the reports that came out of those collisions, the most disturbing word that just pops out on the page for all of these. Right. And I think it goes back to even the Porter in 2012. The word that is common throughout all of these documents is avoidable. Right. These were avoidable situations. I'm encouraged by again, I must make a concession that I'm no longer the man in the arena. Right. I've been out of left active duty in 2015. So the knowledge that I'm basing somebody's opinions on is just from what I've it's been publicly available. But I do believe that as a result of the comprehensive review that came out in 2017, that I'm seeing some some good movement of the junior officer of the deck course, expanding that to, I believe, four weeks, really focusing on training people to use the equipment. Right. ARPA course, the radar course.

I understand there's some maritime skills training centers that are coming online. It's good. And we must continue to move forward. It's just I feel like some of this came, you know, a little bit too late. And I must say, kind of just to kind of go to the macro level here, one of my favorite books of all time. And I think this really comes down to this is a complex problem. And to Brian's point that it's really hard to to point to one thing. And I don't think it's one thing.

I think it's hard to point causality to one individual thing or problem, but in C.S. Forrester's book, which every commanding officer should read, called The Good Shepherd, it talks about the variables being the ship's equipment, the valves, the compass, all of that. But but he goes and says that above and beyond all of these variables is the human variable. Right. The greatest variable of all. And and I think this quote is so important that comes out of the first few pages of of the book. And he refers to it as men. I know in today's world, we're both men and women. But he writes that men's hands turn the wheels. Men's eyes watch the gauges. men men's skill kept the compass needle steady on the cards all kinds of men of slow reactions and a fast cautious men and reckless men men of vast experience and men of almost none and the differences between the men were of more importance than the differences between the ships

the latter differences might bring about disaster in 20 minutes but the human variable a careless order or a misheard order, a wheel turned the wrong way, or a calculation brought to a wrong conclusion could bring disaster in 20 seconds. So I think it all goes back to how can we enable those that are leading, those who are standing officer of the deck with that great responsibility to provide some consistency, maybe is the right way to put it, of the human variable. and I think the human variable is a difficult thing to quantify, to really describe, but some of that comes from experience, right? Some of it comes from technical prowess and other things, but I think all this comes down to, in many cases, the human variable.

We're running low on time here, so I'm just going to ask one more question of you both, and Brian, I'd like to hear from you first. If you were in charge for the day making one change to the SWO curriculum, what would that change be? I would get the high fidelity ship handling trainer that brings both CIC and the bridge to all the fleet concentration areas with all due speed. The volume of maritime traffic that has accompanied globalization has made driving ships harder. And until we do a better job providing bridge watch standards with systems they need to better sort through the traffic. We need to expose them to that traffic all the time in a safe environment of the trainer. And we have to do that quickly.

Mitch, over to you. Same question. I mean, I think Brian's point is spot on. I think that is definitely a step in the right direction. I mean, again, I'm a little bit old school. I really believe that I would like to see a move back toward some form of training ships, whether it's based in Newport, I understand it's cost prohibitive. But I think when we look at, you know, all a lot of this stuff, we've aviators have learned these lessons through loss of life over over many years, and have continued to refine that community. I think there's a lot we can learn from aviators. And a simulator is good. I mean, And let's face it, some of the simulators that we have today are very realistic.

We can run all kinds of scenarios. But I don't think that the smart use of simulators and as they get smarter, I don't think that that is a replacement for on the water experience. And I think it goes back to that human variable of like learning those mistakes when the costs aren't nearly as high. And I think if we could move to doing more practical at sea training, you know, I'll use the example of a T-38, right? Flying a T-38, then you go into the simulator, you work through things that you maybe couldn't have done on the T-38 or whatever the training aircraft is. But it's a combination of both. So I think that's just, I think there's numerous things, but that's one that comes to mind that I would like to see if money were not an issue. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. I want to thank my two guests today. Brian McGrath. Brian, where can we find you online now and what can we expect from you next?

You can follow me on Twitter at conswahoo, C-O-N-S-W-A-H-O-O. And I don't know. I'm trying to figure out how to help get 350 to 55 ships into the Navy that are well-supported and well-resourced. I guess if you see any progress on that, maybe I can be part of that. Yeah, just absolute piles of money. Piles of money, I think, is what we're talking about. Mitch, what's next for you? Yeah, Jared.

Well, first, just let me say thank you for hosting this important dialogue. I do care greatly about where our Navy continues to go. And, you know, it's the greatest achievement of my life to have served in the Navy. I continue to work my way up through corporate America and enjoying a change of pace, but still think a lot about the Navy. but would be happy to take any comments to the podcast. You can find me at mitch.mcguffey at gmail.com or if anyone is ever in Fredericksburg, Texas, taking a tour of the National Museum of the Pacific War,

would love to please reach out. Would love to provide a tour there. But again, I really appreciate this, Jared. Brian and I both care greatly about where our Navy is going and I think this is an important discussion that we just had. Well, thank you both again for participating, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in. As always, you can contact me via Twitter. I'm at JWSC03, and we'll see you next week.

¶¶ We'll be right back.