Sea Control - Sea Control 228 - To Provide & Maintain a Navy with Dr. Jerry Hendrix

Episode Date: February 21, 2021

Links:1. To Provide & Maintain a Navy by Henry J. Hendrix, Dec. 19, 2020.2. Buy Fords Not Ferraris, by Commander Jerry Hendrix, Proceedings, April 2009. 3. Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World, by Prof. Andrew Lambert, Nov 27, 2018.4. At What Cost a Carrier, by Jerry Hendrix, CNAS, March 11, 2013.5. Retreat From Range - The Rise and Fall of Carrier Aviation, by Jerry Hendrix, CNAS, October 19, 2015.6. Aircraft Carriers & Maritime History, Jerry Hendrix & Bryan McGrath, C-SPAN3, January 9, 2015.rof. Andrew Lambert, Nov 27, 2018.

Hey folks, Jared here. This week I am joined by author Dr. Jerry Hendricks to discuss his book To Provide and Maintain the Navy and his recommendations for the U.S. Navy as it moves forward. You may have noticed we've just completed our site migration. This was necessary to improve our service, which is providing a reliable, stable site where you can find everything you ever want to know about maritime security, sea power, and all manner of content of and related to the sea. On behalf of myself and the Sea Control Team, I want to thank you, the listeners, for hanging with us through that process. And I want to thank our internal team here at SimSec that battled through a number of unforeseen roadblocks. If you experience site disturbances in the future,

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Aloha shipmates and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today my guest is Dr. Jerry Hendricks and we're going to be discussing his new book, To Provide and Maintain the Navy. So Jerry, welcome and thank you for joining us. Would you mind telling the listeners a little bit about your background? So I'm a retired Navy captain, served for 26 years, three months, 19 days, all of them glorious. Came in through ROTC out of Purdue University, became a P3 Naval Flight Officer, spent the first half of my career sort of in the ASW environment with a disassociated C-Tour as a TAO on board USS Theodore Roosevelt. At the half point of my career, I served on a staff tour on the CNO executive panel staff, redirected my efforts then towards strategy,

had a special mission command as the commanding officer of TACRON 11, did a Northern Arabian Gulf deployment. And while I was on that deployment, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Theodore Roosevelt's use of the Navy as an instrument, of course, of diplomacy, which became my first book, and then rolled back out of command into OSD policy, where I worked for 18 months, and then went to work for Andy Marshall in the Office of Net Assessment for two years and served as the Director of the Secretary of the Navy's Advisory Panel and then culminated my career as the Director of Naval History and Heritage Command. And then I retired out of that, worked in a think tank for three years,

and I've been consulting now with defense industry as well as the government for the last three years. Thanks. And that background gives me a pretty good idea of what the answer to my first question is going to be. How long have you been working on these ideas, and why did you decide to publish this now? So I've been working on this since 2009, and you're right, that does give you a good idea. When I went to work in OSD policy, I worked for the DASD for strategy and force development. One of the questions we had to look at was, what size of the Navy should we have? And I did a review of COCOM requests for services and generated a list of 353 ships. So I actually published my first article on force structure in 2009 in the proceedings. It was entitled By Fords, Not Ferraris, and it was an argument for a high-low mix as a means of trying to get our ship numbers up.

and I've been writing about force structure in terms of the size of the fleet and then about the internal architecture, what would be the allotment within that larger number for most of the last 10 years. And that really is what drove me to write this book because I'd come to the awareness that all these arguments about numbers were going nowhere. We have been talking about this for the better part of my professional life, and yet we're not getting any traction. And what I had become aware of is that really the nation writ large and its representatives in Washington had become blind to the sea. They would give lip service to the idea of a larger Navy, but because they didn't understand what Navy's provided and why the United States Navy

in particular was critical to the nation's national security, they sort of glossed over and it was like, yeah, we'll get to a larger Navy later, but it's not a big priority now. You know, I had seen because of the drop off in the size of the fleet across my professional life, when I was commissioned in 88, you know, we were at 590 ships and then we crashed down through 500 and then 400 and suddenly we're at 350 in 1997 during the peace dividend years. And then we passed through 300. And what had happened was when we were large and complex and highly capable, no one wanted to compete with us at sea. But when we got down into the sub 300 and then literally down to 271 ships in 2015, we created a vacuum. We were no longer all the places that we wanted to be

or had to be. And in that vacuum, we invited a competition and China and Russia both have jumped in to varying degrees and using different strategies. But the sea is now a competitive environment. And that's really the argument behind this book is to understand how the sea is crucial to the United States as a nation, but also the fact that if we do not rebuild, we are inviting not only competition, we're inviting a war at sea, which we have not experienced in some 70 years. Thanks. Now, I interpreted this book as really having two parts. And you tell me if there's more to it than that, but I really broke it down into two is the way I understood it. So the first 70 pages or so are part history, part economics lesson and how trade evolved and functions as well

as it spells out what it means to be a sea power state versus a continental power. And then the last 30 to 40 pages are really focused on your recommendations. But I do want to discuss that history economics lesson first. So how did you define a sea power and is the U.S. a sea power state today? Well, so a sea power, I went back actually to the definition that's used by my mentor, the man who directed my dissertation, which is Professor Andrew Lambert. And Andrew wrote a book just a couple of years ago called Sea Power States, in which he made an argument that there is a difference between a nation being a sea power, which is one word altogether, And then a nation utilizing sea power, two words, in order to carry out its national interests. And Andrew identified that in reality, in history, that there had only been very few sea powers. He starts with Tyre. He moves into Carthage. He, of course, talks about Greece. He then talks about Venice. And then he talks about Great Britain.

And then he sort of deals with lesser included cases, which is nations who attempted to become sea powers like the Dutch Republic and also Russia. He also gives a passing glance at the United States by saying power. And we had at one point in time aspired to be one that we had never really become one. And he breaks that down because he looks at sea powers as nations that, one, are intrinsically tied to the sea, then understand that their economic life and, in fact, their cultural life is tied to the sea. And so in Andrew's sort of litmus test, if you look at the art and the history of a nation, if you find their museums devoted to pictures and portraits of sailing ships and admirals and merchant marine successful barons, then you're probably a sea power. if that's what dominates your cultural life, but if that's not present, then even though you may have a large navy, you are probably a nation that uses sea power to carry out your aims. I would disagree with Andrew, and as I often did, in that I believe that at the nation's founding,

we were in fact a sea power. Both our southern states as well as our northern states understood the importance of sea and maritime trade. It is one of the reasons why in our founding document in the Constitution, you know, that's where I get the title of my book, To Provide and Maintain a Navy, Article 1, Section 8, Clause Number 12, which requires that a navy be maintained. The army, which comes in Clause 13, is only a temporary state. Armies may be raised in the event of an emergency. But the Navy is the only requirement by the Constitution for a standing military force because the founders understood that the Navy and the oceans were critical to the nation's survival, its economic survival, its cultural survival, as well as then its military survival. And so

they provided that the Navy should always be maintained. So that's our challenge today. So that's the history of that. I wanted to also, in that section of the book, get into the concept of the free sea, which emerged from Hugo Grotius's legal argument in 1609 in a case between the Dutch and the Portuguese over the capturing of a Portuguese ship by a Dutch ship. And in the end, And Grotius loses the case in the sense that the Dutch have to reimburse the Portuguese. But what he does as a means of doing that is he establishes the concept of the free sea. And that the Portuguese were wrong legally to claim a vast portion of the world. I mean, if you remember, at one point in time, Spain and Portugal divided the world's oceans between the two of them.

And this Dutch legal jurist essentially says you can't do that. And under laws as they exist in nature, which is the sort of the definition of natural law, there is nothing that stops a ship from being able to blow from one portion of the ocean to another portion of the ocean. At sea, unlike even the land where mountains and rivers form natural boundaries and borders between nations, at sea there is nothing that stops man from trading from one portion of the sea to the other. And so he establishes this concept of the free sea. that concept of the free sea becomes foundational in the western enlightenment to providing an example of freedom so free sea becomes free trade becomes individual liberty and individual freedom

and so i wanted to lay that out because if we look at sort of the challenges that we're facing today it is the concept of the free sea that is being threatened by these rising great powers and specifically China and Russia. So we need to understand that what is under threat is in fact foundational to our very essence of our culture and our governing philosophy. And so I wanted to lay that precedent early in the book. Thank you. So you hit all the actors mentioned in the National Defense Strategy in the book, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. You focus primarily on China and then to a lesser extent on Russia. You assess them both as continental powers. And I don't think that designation for Russia is any surprise given the state and the size

of their Navy. But why do you believe China is a continental power? Well, it's the same reason, in fact, Russia is a continental power. If you look at the cultural development in the history of those two nations, what you find is China's history stretches back nearly three millennium. But if you look at the beginning of their history, when the Warring States period, when five great internal states of Asia come into conflict with each other, and then the king of Han essentially is able to establish supremacy over the four other Warring States, what he does is he brings them together into the original Qin area of China. But then as external threats, smaller states that lay on the border of that proto-state, as those smaller states become a challenge, he goes and he conquers them, not necessarily originally to incorporate them into his nation, but to establish a buffer state or a barrier. And they also, the Chinese in particular, begin to build walls along those lines, increasingly long walls, increasing walls that are farther and farther away from their central capital, their core, the strategic core of the nation.

But China is essentially built as a series of sequential acquisitions of territory around their central core, constantly growing outward, absorbing the threatening states, and then, of course, to be confronted by yet more threats that lay even beyond those. And so if you look at the acquisition of Mongolia and Manchuria, sort of the last two major additions to what we now recognize as China today, those were always about the threat, the barbarian Mongol horde or the Manchurians that came in and actually were the last ruling dynasty. But it was always about acquisition of additional buffer lands. Same thing happens with the Russians. You know, it starts in Moscow and the Muscovy states, and then they slowly add over time as they face the conquering the Golden Horde and so on. It's all about acquisition of these buffer territories. And so it's interesting because as they look at the sea today, I mean, the Chinese came to understand that the last two invasions by, quote unquote, the barbarians had come from their east, from the sea. It was the Japanese during the 1930s and in the 1940s. And then prior to that, it was the Western Europeans who had come during the Opium Wars in the 1830s, 1840s. And so they recognized that the sea is now a threat. And so when the Chinese began to look and develop a strategy to address the sea, at first, when it was Mao, it was sort of near-sea defense. Then they shifted to near-sea active defense. Then they started talking about first island chain as a barrier. Then the second island chain as a barrier. And they began to talk about building a great wall at sea.

And so as we look at the artificial islands, those islands are really all about building these walls and these barriers, but it really is about the acquisition of buffer state territories to protect the vital core. And so they are land powers who look outward upon the sea, but they're land-centric in the way that they formulate their strategy, and that's why I classify them as continental powers. Thank you. So you also have a really nice, concise summary of China's shifting vision for its Navy. And you hinted at it in your last answer there. Could you explain for the audience how China viewed its Navy initially under Mao and then how that evolved through Desert Storm and then the Taiwan Strait episode in 1996? So it's important to understand, if you look at the structure of the Chinese Navy over time, especially in the modern era, a lot of those early ships, if you look at the Mao era Navy, and then even into the 1980s, it is a Navy that is meant to, it's tied to the land. First of all, let's just talk about the fact that the People's Liberation

Army Navy is not a Navy. It is a maritime adjunct to the Army. So even in the structure of their military, their naval arm is a portion of the Army. And so if you start thinking just bureaucratically, as we always know, talking about the United States Navy, it's always sort of which community within the Navy is in ascendancy from a sense of political power, whether it's the aviators, the submariners, or the SWOs. The fact of the matter is, is the People's Liberation Army Navy is always subordinate in their strategic and as well as fiscal planning to the Army. And not to mention, when you think about the People's Liberation Army is not the Chinese Army, it's the Chinese Communist Party's army, which they maintain security of the state. So the Navy

becomes an extension of that political goal and philosophy. So Mao's whole idea about the Navy was, I need a small Navy that is going to protect my maritime border. And so that Navy was comprised of small ships, things that we would think of as patrol boats and or corvettes that could only go out essentially during the day, and then they would be in at night, maybe go out for two or three days. And then they were back in port. They did not have long legs. They didn't have a great deal of food. They did not have comfortable berthing spaces. It was not what we would call a blue water Navy. In many ways, really, it was a brown water Navy or a green water Navy. But over time, specifically after the 1990s, they began to, first they went out and bought

some Russian ships, the Sovremnys. They got those ships and they reverse engineered them so you can understand how to build a larger navy or a larger ship allowed them to have legs to go out also gave them a chance to reverse engineer those air search radars as well as the missiles that came with them and so they took all that russian material and they turned around began to create chinese variants of it with uh you know lu yang's and and some of their other more modern uh frigates destroyers and ultimately now their new type 55 cruisers but it's all been sequential evolution moving outward from essentially an internal water sort of first island chain ship structure and mind you ships that would be supported by shore-based weapon systems and sensors and aircraft so those

ships were never meant to operate those early ships were never meant to operate independently they essentially worked in coordination with a the joint force as it were but beginning after the 19, you know, the Taiwan Straits incident, where we sent an aircraft carrier and a light amphibious carrier through the Taiwan Strait against the government on Taiwan, then the Chinese began to turn. So they began to talk about an assassin's mace strategy at about that time. And then they began to outwardly build a Navy that could go to sea and stay at sea. And And so they took about 10 years between the 1995-96 crises. And then in 2008, China actually made its sort of first long-range patrol when three

Chinese ships went out to join the counter-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. And this really begins sort of their emergence as a modern force because they used that participation in an international force to learn things like how to be a blue water Navy, how to do underway replenishment and under which of establishing overseas resupply and refueling ports. And over essentially from 2008, that really is their emergence, their coming out party. And they've continued to just progress so quickly and build their Navy so quickly since then to become truly a Blue Water Navy. Sorry, this wasn't on the menu, but you just brought up, what is the Assassin's Mace strategy? I only know it is the title of a war game that is developed

for the Marines. But what does that strategy actually entail? Well, we tend to classify anti-access area denial, which is not a term I use in the book, actually. I make reference to it, but I talk about buffer state or a buffer state strategy. The Assassin's Mace was really a strategic decision made by the Chinese. The Russians also made a similar strategic decision as well, that after watching what happened in Desert Storm, where we were given six months essentially to flow into Saudi Arabia and build up 540,000 ground troops before executing the big left hook to take Saddam Hussein's troops out of Kuwait, the Chinese said, well, look, you know, we are never going to give the Americans that amount of time, the Americans and their

allies. We need to make sure that under no circumstances are they allowed to get close to our shores. We will not allow the Americans to execute a regime change campaign against us if they suddenly wake up one morning and say that we're bad people. So they began to invest in long range sensors and then long range missiles, long range aircraft, the whole, and then even fast attack nuclear submarines and diesel submarines in order to go from that first island chain of barrier out to a second island chain of barrier, all about creating that buffer space at sea. But the Assassin's Mace, I think in my mind, the ultimate expression of that was the creation of the anti-ship ballistic missile with the Marv warhead, which was specifically targeted the

idea of taking out American aircraft carriers, which they viewed as the biggest threat to them, the power projection device that could reach into their country from the sea. And so they came up the DF-21s and then ultimately the DF-26 with the idea as part of the Assassin Mace project in order to push Americans farther back from their shores and outside the weapons range of the American ship and the American air wing, carrier air wing. And so that's the term that they use within their own strategic community. Thanks. So I want to transition now to the second part of the book, and that's that last 30 to 40 pages that really focus a lot on your recommendations. What are some of the stressors for the U.S. Navy that are driving discussion

about ship numbers? Well, I mean, the stress that we're facing right now is after 1989, 1991, and the end of the Cold War, in the 1990s, we made a series of decisions, both as a nation was something that was called the Last Supper that happened in the early 1990s where defense industry said, well, we're not all going to be able to survive on our own given the cutbacks in the defense budget. And so there was a series of consolidations that occurred in rather rapid sequential order. There was at one point in time a company called Lockheed and there was a company that was called Glenn L. Martin Aircraft. Well, now we have Lockheed Martin. One point in time, there was actually a company called Northrop, and there was a company called Grumman. Well,

now we have Northrop Grumman. And you see that same thing occurring in shipbuilding, where General Dynamics now has acquired Electric Boat, as well as NASCO, and also had BIW. All, you know, three separate independent companies are now consolidated. And this was driven by essentially narrowing bottom lines and profit margins and the need to sort of consolidate and get to scale. What that's done is that at one point in time, we had over 50 shipyards in the United States that could build ships 400 feet or greater. Today, there are essentially 12 graving docks in active use that can produce those ships. And so this is create a fragility within our industrial base. And so even today, you know, and this is one of the comments you often hear,

that if the Congress doubled the Navy's shipbuilding budget tomorrow and said, you know, go thou and build ships, the fact is, is there's no capacity. There's no room in our ship production line or facilities right now to double that production. In fact, and I used two ships, Fitzgerald and McCain are damaged in 2017 and with the tragic loss of 17 American sailor lives. When those ships then go into the shipyard to be repaired, it actually took us longer to repair those ships than what it took to originally build and commission them, place them in commission. And why was that? Well, it was because there was no excess capacity.

We have yards that are building ships, but we don't have much room for repairing ships. And that raised a serious question with me that because if I can notice that, then China can notice that and Russia can notice that. So if they take out a ship on day one, if there's a Pearl Harbor tomorrow, how much ability will we have to refloat, repair those ships and get them back into action during the war? A lot of people don't remember, but aside from Arizona and Oklahoma, every other ship that was damaged at Pearl Harbor was refloated, repaired, and was placed back into the line of battle. I mean, Pearl Harbor battleship shelled the beaches of Normandy in 1944 in June.

So the fact is, is we don't have that additional capacity. We don't have a robustness and resiliency in our industrial base. So that's one of the key challenges that we have. The other point is just quite frankly, our ships have nearly doubled in their cost. If you look at the average cost to buy and operate a ship in 1989 at the height of the 600 ship Navy, that overall cost is one half. It's almost exactly one half the amount it costs to build and run a ship today. So it was good that we went to Aegis. I mean, I think the Arleigh Burks are some of the finest warships in the world, and we should be justifiably proud of them. But the fact is, is that is extremely expensive and complex piece of machinery budget.

And you never grow that shipbuilding budget, and your ship becomes individually more expensive to produce, you are going to get a smaller Navy. And I will tell you one other thing, and this is really coming due to us today, is that when you build a lot of ships all at once, as we did during the Reagan administration, where we built some 86 ships, you know, over that period of time, added 86 ships to the fleet, 30 years later, they're all going to decommission at exact same rates. And so if you're building 18 ships a year in the 1980s, but you're only building six ships a year, I'm sorry, 12 ships a year in the 2020s, you're losing ships every year as those decomm and leave the fleet and you're not building to

keep up. This is sort of a long-term question and conversation that I don't think that the Congress, most certainly the American people don't, which is again, one of the reasons why I structured to provide and maintain the Navy, my book to be read, you know, in a fairly short period of time, the book is over just over a hundred pages long. It's something you can sit down and read in a weekend. And I think it's something that's readable and accessible to a broader audience than just us, you know, in the church. You know, the last thing I think we should be doing right now is preaching to the choir. You know, the first church of the Navy, we got to get outside of church to find additional followers for this kind of cause that we're facing right now.

And I guess it wasn't really clear to me, you know, you talked about, so all those ships that we built in the Reagan era Navy are now decommissioning. I guess I hadn't really thought about generations of warships until I interviewed a Canadian researcher about what the Canadians are doing. They're on track to basically replace their entire Navy because all their ships were built in the 80s or 90s. Now the bills do. Now you got to replace all those ships. They're 30 to 40 years old at this point. So having kind of that steady drumbeat of shipbuilding versus replacing them and generate an entire navy basically in a generation is an interesting discussion uh you did spend quite a bit of time discussing the navy's new frigates

the constellation class why do you think that's an important platform and what capability is it going to add to the force i spent a lot of time talking about constellation because quite frankly going back since 2009 and my first articles on this, I've been advocating for that class of ship for the better part of the last 10, 12 years. And so to actually have an FFG back into production is really, it's been core of my strategic argument all along. One of the problems we have is that by being entirely focused on that as sort of the essential day-to-day backbone of the fleet, we've lost access to certain areas of the world one we lost that access because the fleet came down in size and so we couldn't afford to be everywhere we wanted to be but the other point

too is i mean just from the sheer draft issues there were some ports that we were no longer going into and so there were sort of these out of the way areas of the world where we had been traditionally you know part of the neighborhood and we we sort of stopped going to that that in those portions of the world. And so I wanted to get frigates back in there so that we could become neighbors again, and that we could really more thoroughly patrol and defend our interests. And so I've been arguing for frigates because I wanted them to essentially be smaller in crew size. I wanted them to have shower draft. I wanted them to be more maneuverable. Another thing that struck me was, and I'll use this example, in 2017, if you look at the news, the day before

or within two days of the John McCain accident, McCain was doing a FONOPS in the South China Sea and then comes out of that FONOPS and then has this accident a few days later. Freedom of navigation operations are important. They're critical. They have to be done. They have to be done often in order to defend our interests.

But they are really a mowing the lawn job of the Navy to go out and show the flag and demonstrate our interest in our presence. and the john s mccain mccain is a ballistic missile defense capable ship that's assigned to deseron 15 out of japan because of the importance of doing ballistic missile defense against the north korean threat that's why deseron 15 is the largest deseron in the navy and why it's located in japan so i i'll come back to analogy of my my rural upbringing in indiana where my father still sits on the dairy farm and crop farm that I grew up on.

You know, when dad gets up in the morning, as he still does, and he has to go out and mow the lawn, he does not get the International Harvester 804 out of the barn, which can drag an eight-bottom plow, to go mow the lawn. You know, he gets the riding mower out. And up to a few years ago, he push-mowed that thing because, you know, he thinks that riders were lazy people. But the fact of the matter is, as we got John McCain out and we mowed the lawn to do a FANA, we should have had an asset in the Navy that's right-sized to do the day-to-day low-end engagement missions like freedom navigation or PASXs or doing exercise with allies and neighbors. And by the way, there's another thing. We used to have meetings with some of our allies, and I would ask them about interactions with the U.S. Navy. And some of the allies remarked to me when they found out I was a naval officer is that they disliked being looked down upon by the U.S. Navy.

And I said, well, what do you mean? And they said, well, you know, you sit up in your big stacks, you're 10, 15 feet above us, bridge wing to bridge wing. You're more highly technical, more highly complex. And so not only do you look down upon us from a technological standpoint, you literally look down upon us. And the beauty about going with FFG and the decision we made to buy Frem as the design is we, because Frem is an international design, we will literally be looking our allies and our partners day to day in the eye, bridge wing to bridge wing. Even though I think we will be more highly complex than they are, they will at least have the idea that meeting my frigate and we can work together. And I think it'll help build stronger partnerships and trust amongst us. Thanks. Now, you brought Moneyball and baseball into the discussion about the Navy's mission. Can you explain why you think Billy Beane's approach and Moneyball is analogous to what the Navy needs to do today? so you know i i always love to read books and i love baseball i grew up uh loving baseball

and so when when that book came out i got it and read it because i was interested in the topic of from baseball perspective but as i read it and really absorbed the argument of moneyball that this idea that on base percentage really is the critical uh statistical important measurement of how a baseball team is going to be. If you've got eight guys on that team, and by the way, I'm a National League guy. I believe the designated hitter is a communist threat against the American way of life. Same, Jerry. Same. Yeah. So if I got eight guys on the team that know how to get on base, if they can get there with a single, a double, if they can get hit by a pitch as Pete Rose was famous, you know, Pete Rose would turn that big thigh of his into a

close pitch and he'd take that because it was going to get him to first. It's all about getting to first. And if the next guy that comes up in the batting order behind you can also get to first and you've viewed a second or third, you're going to score a run eventually and you're going to get home and ultimately that's going to win. Now, I think that the American people went the way of the steroid era in the late 1990s, early 2000s, and they juiced themselves up by swinging for home run hitters, trying to add Arlie Burke, Klass, Ticonderogas. We were going to go with the heavy hitter, the home run guy. But the fact of the matter is, is home run guys tend to strike out more than your base hitter type of guy. And so I was making an argument that it's okay to

have a couple home run hitters. I always need a strong number three, number four hitter in the lineup. But the fact of the matter is, is I need a good leadoff hitter. And this gets me the idea of Naval Press or some offshore patrol vessels to maintain our presence on a day-to-day basis, and I can grow my lineup, I will be more present. And by being more present, I will deter the enemy from making, you know, trying to jump ugly with me today. And in fact, that ship then would be present in order to provide combat power in the event that the enemy does choose. But it's really all about presence. We needed to understand that preventing war is at least as important as our ability to win a war. And so, again, right-sizing the fleet, high-low mix, making sure I have sufficient low-end capacity to prevent war and deter it, and then I need high-end capacity to win the war decisively if the other guy jumps ugly with me. And that's where Moneyball and Billy Bean led me.

It may have been a convoluted thought process, but when I read that book, I, of course, started thinking about the Navy. So then what was your opinion of the DoD force structure assessment that called for 581 ships? So I thought it was useful. And in the same way, first of all, you always want some analysis. You want some war gaming to back these things up. And the fact that they went out and talked with some think tanks, the fact that they did some war games, the fact that the capabilities or Cape Shop had gone ahead and sort of run the budget numbers on this. And there were some things that came out of that that I think are really, really are critical. One is beginning to look at the efficacy of aircraft carriers in the long term.

The Cape recommendation was the idea that we should drop carriers down to seven to nine. Do I think that that's the way you ought to be? not necessarily, but the fact is, is the limiting range of our air wings today limit the effectiveness of carriers. If the Navy's unwilling to address that, then perhaps we should look at downsizing the number of large deck carriers going forward. It's really up to the Navy in that case. The other thing was really heavily emphasizing the importance of frigates. Both this new naval force structure from OSD, as well as what the White House put out, really emphasizes growing the number of frigates. And then the last crucial thing that came out of that was the importance

of unmanned platforms, both unmanned surface vessels and unmanned underwater vessels. I wish they spent more time, quite frankly, talking about unmanned aerial vehicles as well. But the idea that there is going to be greater cost savings with going with unmanned and that we needed to rapidly evolve our defense industrial base to build these. We need to start working with our computer programs to create the type of automated intelligence to be able to run unmanned platforms for long periods at sea. And we need to start experimenting and doing con ops. So I thought it was a net net positive to have that process. Now, do I think that 580 ships is the right number? Obviously, I didn't. I wrote 456 ships in my book and tried to give justification

for every one of those ships, the number of carriers, the number of cruisers, destroyers, frigates, et cetera, give the justification within my strategic matrix. But I'm glad to have the discussion. What we seem to have happening with us right now is there is a growing consensus, both from the left and the right of the political spectrum, that the Navy's important and growing it will be crucial to us being able to compete in this great power competition. And I am happy that that consensus is coming. Yeah, we had an interview a couple weeks ago with Congresswoman Elaine Luria and Representative Mike Gallagher, echoing exactly what you just talked about. So excited about that it appears members of legislature are

looking at that in the way that you just described. Most interesting to me about the force structure assessment, you mentioned the frigates and the unmanned pieces. I found the Corvettes, because I thought, you know, a Corvette is a smaller vessel, and you talked about 12 graving docks that can build ships 400 feet or longer. If you start building Corvettes, that seems to me like it would open up a lot more capacity that some of these smaller yards could start doing work for the Navy, but I don't know what your thoughts are about that. No, I, you know, I absolutely agree, and in fact, you know, in my chart, I sort of believe that the littoral combat ship that we have today is a Corvette. You know, Corvette in the traditional sense of that

definition is a single mission ship. Now, there's a lot of people in the Navy today say, well, we can't afford because of the air threat. Every ship has to be at least dual mission to be able to do anti-submarine or anti-surface and provide its own aerial self-defense. And I'll buy into that. Self-defense is okay. Area defense, well, that's a destroyer or a cruiser that does area defense. But I think that there's a role for corvettes or offshore patrol vessels, but single mission platforms, specifically single mission platforms that could be forward-based in places like Singapore and the Philippines or in Japan or Palau or some of our other friends, allies, and partner nations out there. But I think that it is important to kind of look at that. And you're

right. The idea of building a smaller ship does open up significant other areas of the industrial base. I've been looking at shipyards that exist within the United States historically over time, so those World War II shipyards that we use versus the ones we have today. You start looking at building corvettes or even these smaller marine connecting vessels that they're talking about within the Marine Corps' new structure. Those things could be built in interesting places like on the Mississippi River or even as far north on some shipyards that exist along the Ohio, southern Ohio southern Indiana that could then add to that again adding resiliency and redundancy in our industrial base now a lot of people's like well you know that that type of shipyard doesn't

help me with some of my other things but I will tell you it does because it actually creates a trained workforce and in the United States we have today our workforce is a mobile workforce so if I train a welder or a pipe fitter in a shipyard along the southern on the Ohio River and there's a great job that pays more down in Mississippi, that guy's going to get up and move down to Mississippi on that. And I will add capacity to that thing because it's a competitive workplace market. We really, our main goal today, our main challenge is growing that trained workforce to give the electricians, pipe fitters, heating and air conditioning people that can actually grow our shipbuilding industrial base. We need the smaller yards to do that. And I also

need those smaller yards to build these smaller ships. Thanks. So you ultimately wind up calling for 456 ships. How did you reach that number? Well, I mean, it starts at the top. So statutorily right now, we're required to have 11 aircraft carriers. They're sort of quintessential American assets, you know, huge prestige assets for us. Where a carrier goes, there goes the United States with all of the sovereignty that goes along with it. So we're required to have 11. Now, do I think that we need 11 Ford class? No, I don't. Obviously, we're going to move on beyond Ford to something, whether it's smaller, cheaper, more efficient. Yeah, I think we ought to be looking at that. But we're going to have 11 carriers, quote unquote, in the force. Well,

if you put a carrier to sea and you traditionally do that, then that carrier should be escorted by a shotgun. In fact, historically, we've always put two cruisers with our high-end capital vessels to provide air defense. Well, now it's air and ballistic missile defense. So those high-end, high-capacity cruisers are crucial as we look at things like ballistic missiles that are now set to target our aircraft carriers. So two cruisers for 11, well, that's 22 cruisers at a minimum. And then you start looking at destroyers. Well, during the Cold War, the standard structure for a carrier strike group was four destroyers for every carrier. So there were destroyers that were there to do anti-submarine warfare, but there was also destroyers there to do anti-surface

warfare. So you start looking at aircraft carriers of 11 and then four destroyers. Well, that's 44 destroyers. Plus we've picked up additional missions like ballistic missile defense for allies, partners, and geographic regions. So I then generated my destroyer number. And then I came up with the frigate number based upon the presence requirements that are put out by our regional combatant commanders, to constantly have some ship maintaining presence in certain regions. So I came up with 60 plus frigates within that. And then it descends down beyond that. I got into the reasoning for corvettes, forward deployed corvettes. You can actually get by with fewer corvettes because you have to assume they would be forward deployed and hence have a presence

factor all the time, almost like our forces in Japan are always counted as being deployed or present in the region. And then I got into things like large unmanned surface vessels and large unmanned underwater vessels, factored those into my submarine numbers, which by the way, we need a lot more fast attack submarines. And I think probably the most controversial thing that I called for in my force structure planning document was the creation and construction of eight new ssgns the idea that we ought to take the columbia class design that's that's in play right now and we need to build eight additional of those for a total of 20 columbia class 12 of them to ballistic missile submarines but eight of them to serve as replacements for the four

ohio class ssgns we're losing because when you look at the vertical launch tube inventory across the fleet, and you count in the fact when those four Ohio's decomm in this next decade, that's 600 VLS tubes that we're losing. We really need to make that back up. And I will tell you, competitor nations pay attention to those four Ohio's. When one surfaces south of Korea, everyone in the region knows it. When one surfaced near Guam just a couple of weeks ago, everyone paid attention in the news that, oh my gosh, the USS Ohio is at Guam. Well, Why is it here? So we need that capacity, that submerged ability to project power, specifically as we look at new weapons, such as the conventional prompt strike hypersonic weapon, which really goes nicely with our submarines. And so when I got done adding it all up, it was 456 ships. And by the way, I found it interesting that when I looked at other things like Congressman Jim Banks, who is in the House Armed Services Committee, did a piece of legislation a few years ago called the Five Oceans Navy Act.

And he called for 436 ships, I believe. And then in 2014, in a really interesting conversation, then CNO John Greenert was kind of put on the spot in front of the House Armed Services Committee about ship numbers. And they got on him and said, you know, how many ships do we really need, Admiral? And he said, well, if we really met all of the basic requirements of the COCOMs, we'd have a Navy of around 450 ships. Now, I don't know where Admiral Greener got that. I think that was an informed answer. I think that they had looked at those numbers internally, and he had that sitting in the back of his head. But that's what he said in open testimony. And so when I got done with my plan and came up with 456, it's like, you know what?

I'm probably in the ballpark here. So that's the plan that I put out, and I hope the readers get the book. And for the listeners and the readers, I will tell you, I will confirm Jerry's statement. It's a quick read. you can get through that thing in a day. It's great. It flies along. As you were going through and apportioning your fleet, how did you prioritize the different missions the Navy does? Or did you look at that? And I'm talking about anti-submarine warfare versus anti-air warfare, ballistic missile defense, all the other things that we do. So I think that the idea of power projection

is still the most critical mission that the Navy has. And it's the one we don't talk much about. In fact, after the Cold War, we sort of walked away from the power projection mission. But the ability to hold the enemy's capital at risk is really, that was the lesson learned of World War II. So we ended up fighting a three and a half year campaign in the Pacific Ocean because we couldn't get to Tokyo fast enough. We had to roll them up slowly but surely until we could finally get within range to hit the enemy capital. And so it was a long and expensive war. And we took that as a lesson learned, which is why after the war, we built the supercarriers. We built the forestal class with airplanes that had long enough range to reach deep into

the heart of the Soviet Union, because the whole idea was, how do I end the war quickly? Well, you end the war quickly by being able to reach your enemy's vital centers. But after Desert Storm or after the end of the Cold War, we sort of slowly divested of our long range power projection capabilities and our ability to reach deep inland. We had the Tomahawk, but the Tomahawk, which was very exquisite when it first came out, is now increasingly antiquated. I mean, it's a, it's a sub mock capable thing that has a radar cross sections with not necessarily called stealthy. And it's, although it's very effective with a warhead, the fact of the matter is, is, you know, enemy shielding and defenses could mitigate Tomahawk.

So the idea that we need to reinvest back into power projection is sort of at the core of a lot of my thought. Then the idea of sea control, you know, the idea that I need to be able to clear the seas both for my ships, my naval ships, but also my merchant fleet to make sure that everything that needs to get to my country gets there and everything I want to send overseas can go wherever it wants. So sea control is critical. But I will tell you that one of the key areas where I'm most concerned right now is anti-submarine warfare. You know, when I was young and out of the Cold War, you know, my first missions as a P-3 TACO were on top of Soviet Union ships, and we were really good at ASW back then. Our surface ships, our submarines, and our airplanes, we all knew how to track submarines and, if needed, how to attack submarines. I think we've gotten away from a lot of those basic skill sets they've atrophied over the last 30 to 40 years, and we need to make some significant investments back in that. But the fact is, to me, it's all about being able to hold the enemy's core interests at risk, whether that's his fleet in being or whether it's his at-home infrastructure. And I want to make sure that the U.S. Navy has a role to play in those missions. so i've got one more question for you and it's not one that's on the list but it came up as you were saying answering some of the other questions uh how does air wing evolution factor into this

for the carriers have you thought about that oh well i mean that i wrote my my breakout article the thing that got me i was still on active duty and i wrote an article called uh at what cost a carrier which raised questions about the both the cost of the ford class as well as the effectiveness of its air wing. And when I realized after I put that out that I'd been kind of too cute by half in not correctly identifying that the real problem was the air wing, that, you know, I realized that actually did a debate with a friend of mine at the Naval Academy on the future efficacy of aircraft carriers. And out of that debate, I realized I need to go back and revisit. And so I wrote a report when I was working at the think tank called Retreat from Range, which really told the story

of how the range of the carrier air wing had dropped precipitously since the end of the Cold War. So in 1989, the average range of our air wing was about 980 miles. That was how far we could project power. And then today, that average range is down lower than 500 nautical miles. So we nearly have the effective range of our air wing at the time that the enemy invested in assassins mace anti-access air denial capabilities like ballistic missiles that can target us thus pushing us farther back outside of the range of that air wing and so that report came out with a strong recommendation that we invest in ucavs unmanned combat aerial vehicles that would have the ability to fly at a minimum distance of 1500 nautical miles with a minimum internal carriage

of 4 000 pounds of ordnance and that the aircraft be all aspect broadband stealth and uh and that to be automated. And so the idea of adding range back into that carrier air wing so that the air wing itself could maintain the efficacy of the carrier concept itself. But I have not seen that the Navy has actually begun to really move out on doing that and aircraft that we have, both the F-18 Super Hornets, as well as the Joint Strike Fighters, lack the range. And I will tell you that in the modern weaponized environment, men are not going to be able to make decisions quick enough in the face of some of these very sophisticated S-400 type missiles to be able to save their airplanes. And so I think we have to go to an automated capability that can respond

much more quickly. And by the way, men are also not able to pull the Gs. The airplane today is limited by the man, the mush that sits in the seat. If an airplane can pull 18 Gs, but it never gets there because the guy sitting there can't take it, then we've inherently limited the design of our aircraft. So I think we have to sort of unleash the full potential of airplanes by unmanning them. Thanks, Sherry. And yeah, it's funny you bring up at what cost a carrier. That used to be one of the first readings I assigned in the class I taught over in Germany. So we We had a lot of great debates, and then I thought later about assigning, I think it's called the Battle of Preble Hall or something, with you and Brian McGrath debating the aircraft carrier. I think I've seen it online, but yeah, it's a great debate.

Everybody should go watch it, and then if I can find those, I will drop them in as links for the podcast and on the website. But that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Jerry Hendricks. The book is To Provide and Maintain the Navy. you can find a link to purchase in our show notes. Jerry, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Well, I'm on Twitter at Jerry Hendricks II. I'm my Jerry Hendricks II. And that's about it. I now work as a private consultant. So a lot of my work is for the government or for, you know, people in industry. And so I don't have a webpage and I'm

not at a think tank, but I can always be reaching. Find me on Twitter. Please reach out to me if you got questions, engage me in the conversation. I love to talk about the Navy and debate it. And the one thing I will say is, you know, I do not claim a monopoly of the right answer. So if someone else has got another way of doing this, I'm most interested in hearing that. And if I adopt your idea, I will attempt to give you full credit. Thanks so much, Sherry. And this is a good time to remind our listeners as well that all the opinions expressed here are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated but jerry thank you for joining us and to the listeners thanks

for tuning in and we'll see you next time c control is edited and produced by ed salo william and jonathan Help me for one Put it in the alley Put it on the shimbo now A porter of And a porter till Way, hey

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