Sea Control - Sea Control 254 - Defining Readiness with Admiral Scott Swift (ret.)

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

Links"Redefine Readiness or Lose," by Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr. and Gen. David H. Berger, War on the Rocks, March 15, 2021.

Hey folks, Jared here. I've talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about it. There are two existing Sea Control feeds out there. The current feed, that's the one you want to be listening to, is labeled simply Sea Control and it includes the phrase Simsex Flagship Podcast in its description. That's Sea Control, Simsex Flagship Podcast. That's where you want to be. Please subscribe, rate, and review the new feed. Today we have Admiral Retired Scott Swift dropping by to discuss readiness. The Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Brown, Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Berger,

published an article in War on the Rocks entitled Redefine Readiness or Lose back in March, and Admiral's here today to provide some perspective on the topic. Please check out everything else going on over at the main website, simsec.org. We've partnered with Transcom for a call for articles related to strategic sea lift. If you want to get your ID in front of some flag officers, this is your chance. For more information, check out our website, simsec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts.

On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today we're going to be discussing readiness, how the Navy defines it, and perhaps how the Navy should redefine it based on a recent War on the Rocks article by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Brown, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Berger, entitled, Redefine Readiness or Lose. My guest is Admiral Retired Scott Swift, former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. So, Admiral, thank you for joining us today,

and would you mind telling us a little bit more about your background, sir? Hey, thanks, Jared. I'm going to pass on my Navy background. I would assume for the audience that is listening in is aware of that. But since I've retired, I'm coming up on three years. I did a year at MIT, which was a great experience at the Center for International Studies, which got some good advice from a retired four-star on the value of doing that. And that opened up the whole world of academia to me. So I spent a lot of time in that space really talking about national security. I shy away from the term national defense because I think it's too narrow a perspective. I'm an adjunct professor at the War College, a term of convenience more

than anything else. It's a payback. War College did a lot for me. I'm a senior fellow at CNA as well. They did a lot for me. So payback there, wanting to give back. And then I'm just involved in a lot of different things such as this, focused on sharpening the discussion and the thinking with respect to national security broadly, not just with the United States, but with others as well, with a specialization in the Indo-Asia Pacific. I will say that I'm getting pulled into Africa, Europe, and beyond that, just because the national security issues, I think, are coming together, but in a global kind of way. So I'll stop at that point. I'm doing a lot of things, staying busy. Well, thank you for joining us, Admiral. As a reminder to the listeners,

all opinions are around and not reflective of any institution with which we might otherwise be associated. For the listeners, if you haven't read the article, go do so. It's linked in the show notes. The central conceit, as I understood it, is this though, the generals are making the argument based on the amount of time that leaders spend discussing and measuring readiness, the joint force needs to better define what that term means, as readiness has largely come to mean availability. So Admiral, I'd like to start there with you. Do you agree with that assessment from Generals Brown and Berger on what readiness has come to mean? Well, let me caveat my thinking with respect to the article itself to say, you know, not only do I not speak for organizations

that I'm associated with and organizations I'm not associated with, nor could I speak for General Brown or General Berger. I know General Berger well from having served together extensively with him. I do not know General Brown that well, but I would care. I would agree. I would foot stop to the audience here that they really need to take the time to read the article, print it out with a pen in hand and take notes on the margin and highlight. I've got the article open in front of me here. There's scribble all over it. So I look at it as an opportunity to sharpen the the conversation on readiness, there's one that's always going in context. So I absolutely agree with the context that they're shaping the article, that readiness can't be viewed in isolation,

and it's not just one thing. You know, they talk about readiness in the context of how people traditionally think of readiness, but then they roll into it what I refer to as modernization. You know, they're talking about divesting themselves of older platforms, using that money to reinvest in more modern platforms or modernizing the platforms that they have. So I'll stop at that point. There's other thoughts to tease out, but I think it'll come out in the conversation. Absolutely. You've been able to observe this throughout a very long Naval career and now the last three years, a little bit on the outside looking in. How would you say that we got here? We've been here. In many ways, nothing has changed.

And I will say I like to make polarizing comments and then drive the conversation out from there. Because if you start at the margins and get to the middle, the critical middle, you never get to the critical middle. You know, the issues that we are rightfully engaged on are so complex that it's very difficult to peel that complexity onion back to get at the core. But, you know, I go back to when I was a lieutenant way back in the early 80s. And we were having a discussion about readiness then. I was a training officer and I was asked by the functional wing commander, who at that time was a, they were admirals, to come up with a new readiness metric that was more reflective of how do we optimize training across the A7 fleet at the time in ways that balanced the warfighting requirement with the funding reality. And at that time, I think the minimum flight hours for currency was 12 hours. And for proficiency, I think we were looking at, I think it was upward of 26 hours. And I think through that process, we came up with a 23 hours.

Well, funding was at 16 hours, which I think is reflective of what we're talking about now about readiness. That's why I said I don't think that much has changed. So I think you need to know what the requirement is. Let's have a discussion on what the requirement is. Let's have a discussion on what has been funded. What's in between is risk. It's warfighting risk. It's risk of mishaps. It's risk of not being able to sustain the velocity of warfight that is required by competing with a peer competitor or near peer competitor. So I don't think it's really changed over time. We go in cycles as to how focused the discussion is. I think we're at the peak of one of those cycles now. But, you know, my opinion is this interest will drop off at some point as well. And we'll go back to admiring the problem. I hate to say it, but that's what my thinking is. How would you describe the process by which the Navy measures readiness? Well, I think it, I wouldn't criticize the Navy. I would, my critique would be of all the services that I think more precision is required. And there needs to be as much as possible alignment between how the services measure readiness. And I say as much as possible because it's going to be different between the services, that there are different mission functions tasks that the services do. They have different challenges with the infrastructure that they have to support getting after those mission functions and tasks.

But I think this is a task that should be laid at the foot of the service chiefs and the joint staff. And I think the right place to have that is in the tank. I don't think the COCOMs are pulled into it directly, but it's focused on what's required to meet OPLAN mission function tasks requirements at an acceptable level of risk. That's what sets the budget requirement. And then now you can measure what the risk to mission is based on how far below that funding level you are. And then captured within that are the functions and tasks that each one of the services have to do, and then have a decision on what are the metrics for measuring those functions and tasks. If that process has happened in the past, I'm not aware of it. So this isn't something that's going to happen overnight.

What's most important is not the product of how we measure readiness, it's the process of determining what those metrics are. And then you apply it. That's the science of what we do, the art of what we do, that the science is measuring it. The art of what we do is how do we accommodate and address the delta between what Congress funds and what the warfighting requirement is of the COCOPS. Yes, sir. Now, as a Pacific Fleet commander, you're sort of uniquely positioned to see both the push and pull sides of this discussion about readiness, capability, availability, administratively or answerable to the Chief of Naval Operations alongside the command formerly known as Fleet Forces, now U.S. Atlantic Fleet, for manning, training, and equipping Pacific Fleet Forces. Operationally, you worked for the combatant commander, then PACOM, now Indo-PACOM.

Do those two chains share a common understanding of what readiness entailed? So the good news is there's a ton of maneuver space in that decision space of what readiness entails. I think there are too many, there's a lot of deltas, differences in there. And I think that's because the definition of readiness is too squishy. I mean, even in reading the article, the War on the Rocks article, the reason I have so many notes and highlights in the paper is I had to pause and consider points that General Berger was making, points that General Brown was making, and then the two of them were making together when they're using terms like readiness, capacity, capability. There may be specific definitions of those terms. If there are, if it's written down someplace, I haven't seen it. But certainly in the context that they're used up and down seniority and across units, there's too much variance in there to understand what the difference is. I was always a strong proponent. There is a cycle of centralizing readiness responsibility within CFFC, what Fleet Forces Command and the Pacific Fleet. I think that difference is important, not from a power distribution perspective, but if you centralize it too much, you lose the detail that's important in the aggregate. And I think the primacy for readiness, rightfully so, is that fleet forces command, but there's a responsibility that resides within Pacific Fleet Commander as well, just from a span of control, a span of authority perspective. But it does create challenges. I think if you centralized it, you would solve some of those challenges, but I think you would create more challenges in that process.

Bigger is not necessarily better all the time. And in this case, bigger is good at the Echelon 2 level, centralizing it, you know, spread it in two places on the Echelon 2 level, as opposed to centralizing it in one. Now, do you think capability is factored into discussions of readiness? As I read through the War on the Rocks article, it didn't seem like the generals think that it is, and they cited a number of examples of why they believe that. Yeah, yeah. So I do. So I agree with that premise. I'm going to stay away from either endorsing or refuting points that either one of the two service chiefs made. That's not a world that I live in. So, and thankfully, so they've got some big challenges in front of them. hey there's three priorities in my mind when it comes to readiness one is readiness itself what's what is the readiness down to the unit level and then scale that up what's it what's it look like so a unit may not be ready but it may be okay because there may be 12 units that

are that are working together you know i look at in a nine squadrons and an air wing and if one squadron's readiness is down a little bit depending on what the mission functions task of that squadron is, that may be okay. The air wing readiness may still be very high. So I view readiness as from an equipment that you have perspective and a people that you have perspective. That's what readiness is in my mind. So you can be 100% ready, but not be relevant. And that takes you to the second point, which is capability. So I think with capability, capability comes from having the right number of people. This really wasn't in the article, but as I say, I know General Berger well, and I know this is in the forefront of his thinking as well. And he's made some

trades in forest structure within the Marine Corps to shift funding to areas that he thinks is critically important, which I think is a great example of trades that you need to make. There's not purity where we need to be 100% ready in the context of readiness that I just described. We need 100% of the capability that the service chiefs say that they need using OPLANS as the metric of measure. And then we need 100% of the capacity. So capability is the numbers of people as part of it in order to have a capable force. They have to have the right numbers of weapons, you know, the right ordinance. You know, ordinance certainly goes into the readiness side of it as well.

So it's like a Venn diagram. These aren't a prioritization of three things. These are three pillars that overlap. So capability is the weapons that you have. I'd like to have hypersonics coming out of a rifle, but that's not affordable right now. But certainly we need some hypersonics. I use that as the high-end piece. And then when you get the capacity, this is the discussion of the numbers of ships that I find extremely frustrated. As if we had 600 ships, we'd be all good. How are we going to build them? We don't have the shipyard capacity to sustain the fleet that we have today. So please explain to me how we're going to maintain a 350-ship Navy when we're challenged with sustaining the ships that we have now just from a capacity perspective, shipyards to put them into, much less the shipyard workers, much less the money that's required for the upgrades, much less the deferred maintenance that extends these shipyard periods because we start to crack these things open. And all of a sudden we figured out, geez, we've got to start replacing all these I-beams and structural members that was not part of the original plan. So I think it's those three things are the priorities. I think it's readiness the way I described it. It's capability the way I described it. And it's capacity the way that I described it.

And all three of them overlap. So, yeah, you can modernize by modernizing stuff that you have now. That's about increasing the capability of the fleet, but you also modernize by getting rid of old stuff, which is part of the article, and using that money to buy new stuff. I think it was Bella Gulf that had a challenge getting underway recently out of Norfolk, a prime example. She was the most ready that she should have been. She was certified. Her strike group went on cruise, and she had to come back. I should have done a little more research to refresh my memory, but I think she came back twice.

that doesn't instill a sense of confidence first in the fleet that owns it to the Navy that owns it and to the joint force that depends on that capability and it diminishes deterrence it gives hope to competitors out there that gee maybe the U.S. Navy isn't as strong as it needs to be and yet we have voices out there

that are criticizing the CNO for his view that he's trying to find trade space within the budget that he has to get after the challenge of readiness, capability, capacity. And he's not able to do it because people are focused on, some people are focused on capacity and want to protect it. That was my takeaway from the article and the comments of General Brown and General Berger that they were saying, readiness is more complicated than how we look at it right now. And I think those three areas, readiness, capability, and capacity resonate with me to get after the problem set that they highlighted in that article. Now, you and I were having a

conversation, quote unquote, off air to like just before we record this, sir. And you mentioned that the Navy does tiered readiness. Can you explain a little bit what you mean by tiered readiness? So it works best if you talk about it, I think, in a naval context. So anytime you say that you're trying to make a point, it's often useful to flip the coin over and look at the other side and show the negatives that you're trying to overcome. And this isn't really a negative, but the other side of the tiered readiness coin, I think, is the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps have always been reluctant to even accept much less leveraged tiered readiness. Although I think they've done that to some extent recently, I think for good reason. But let's say that the Marines' whole

piece is we don't do tiered readiness. We're a force that is ready to go at a moment's notice. you know, the 911 force. I strongly support that. I think they've got a good case for that in the past. I think they've got a good case for it going forward. When you certainly look at the commandant's intent and his planning guidance and being that inside force, they've got to be ready all the time. So that's an ideal model to pursue. But man, that is expensive. A little bit easier to do because their force structure is a little bit smaller. The force itself is a little bit smaller. So the national bill is a little bit more palatable, but that's where we should be going from all the services, not to the point of not accepting tiered readiness, but have clearly

defined and specific measures of readiness based on what the COCOM mission is for that force, disaggregated as you move from mission to function to task. You get to task, you get down to the unit level. That's what the Marine approach has been. Now, to your question on tiered readiness, you have a ship that's going into the yards. Hey, I get it that you can come down to Manning. You know, I get it that you can come down in readiness as well. You may have to take weapon systems offline. Well, there's an awful lot of effort that needs to go into sustaining a weapon system that may no longer be relevant for a six-month period. You may be able to take savings and invest those someplace else. My concern is what happens is we just, we don't fund

it. Hey, if the ship's going to be in the yards during this, what ships are going to be in the yard in this pump period, we're going to reduce the Navy budget as a result. That is a dangerous path to take. That's not my view of what tiered readiness is because when you look at the total force, my experience has been in the past, I don't know what the numbers are now, but we funded readiness at 70%. And then we measure readiness in green, yellow stoplight charts. And if you're at 70% readiness, you're green because that's all you were funded to. Well, what's your readiness according to the O plan? It depends. What part of your fleet, well, if you're a TICOM, what part of the, let's say the surface force, for instance, is in some kind of sustainment period,

the maintenance sustainment period well those those 70 may be good enough it's ridiculous to fund it at 100 because it's going to take you know three months to put the ship back together and get it underway even if you stopped all all maintenance in it so i'll pause at that point i recognize that we don't have the whole day to talk here but that's an example that i used of tiered readiness so tiered readiness needs to be applied against that that template of mission function task for that unit. Its mission is diminished. It doesn't have a warfighting mission. Its mission is to get through its maintenance period. And so the funding should be based on what that mission set is. The one point I will make that if you reduce the mission

readiness of a unit because it's in maintenance, there is an increased bill. You've got to fund it at more than a hundred percent to get back up on the step. So in aviation, we always use the term about proficiency and currency. Currency is, you don't need much funding. If you can aviate, navigate, communicate, you're good to go. But that's like on a cross-country flight. If you're going to fly into an IAS and deliver weapons with pinpoint accuracy, that is much, much more difficult. That's when you get to proficiency. And to go from currency in a maintenance period to proficiency, I don't know what the number is, but it's more than 100%. So you're not getting that savings reduction to put in your pocket for the whole year. Because when that unit comes out,

you're going to have to send surge money into it to get it back up to that readiness level that's needed to support the war fight. And I just haven't seen that happen in the 40 years that I was in the Navy. So how much of the difficulty in this discussion for the Navy is rooted in the fact that the Navy hasn't really had a fight up here at sea since 1945? Do we have difficulty measuring because of that? I don't think so, but I'd welcome an argument on that. I think that one of the benefits, I don't know if it's a benefit, but one of the benefits the Navy has is our operating environment, the sea, is a constant threat. I go back to the collisions of Fitzgerald and McCain, and the common denominator there was the maritime environment that they were operating

in. Transits in the first case of Fitzgerald to a perceived function, task and function that they needed to execute the next morning. And the threat was that they had to transit an extremely busy sea lane, and they just executed it very, very poorly. I'm not blaming the crew for it. There were specific individuals that I think Admiral Alcorn did a great job with his investigation and how he addressed those failures. So there were failures within the ship. There were also systemic failures. I mean, the ship was undermanned significantly. Again, this tiered readiness piece. so there's a there's a service element in that as well but the sea that the sea is always out there if you're not paying attention then you're going to get into trouble same thing happened in with

mccain i mean there were some errors made about the helmsman that was on watch at the time not not having a full understanding being new to the ship not although experienced he was not experienced on that helm so we've got these deltas between these same type model series ships contributes to the problem. That's a capability piece that needs to play. I would say that's different than readiness, but that's capability. So I think the C is always the driver there. I'm less concerned about pure combat being a driver. I think the biggest driver, to be honest with you, the service chiefs don't have much maneuver space to get readiness right. That's why I think the definition of it is critically important. Common definition is possible. Describe it as risk to

mission, the COCOM missions that they're assigned to, and then recognize their funding comes from Congress. Congress has a role to play in this. Don't talk to me about a 600-ship Navy until you fund the readiness necessary for the fleet that I have now. Otherwise, we're going to continue to have collisions going forward. So I don't see that not having an anvil of recent pure naval warfare to hammer against this issue of readiness as being all that relevant. There's too many other examples to use that I think are more relevant. So the Air Force and Marine Corps arguments around capability are that the cost of maintaining obsolete equipment is a drain on a budget that would better be directed towards developing new capabilities. Marine Corps

examples that come immediately to mind are giving up their tanks as well as surrendering some of their heavy vertical lift helicopters based out in Hawaii. I think you've given one example of this from the Navy perspective already, but are there analogous Navy systems that you see is ripe for recapitalization here? I think this is the message that CNO is talking about when it comes to cruisers. They're critically important. I get it. You make that argument in front of me, I'm not one to say, hey, that integrated air missile defense mission set that cruisers cover down on with their Aegis weapon system, that's tough to argue that we should divest ourselves of that kind of weapon system capability. But look at the structure

that weapon system is riding in. You know, you get to a point, Vela Gulf is an example. You get to an age perspective and it's not just years you know we say boy these these ships aren't making their service life expectations their their design service life well it depends on how hard you use them that service life is based on x number of underway days x number of maintenance days x number of revisit to the structural integrity of the c-frame if you're not doing those things the service life is moving to the left. You're going to come to a P-8s. We're flying the wings off of P-8s based on this demand signal for ISR. Carrier utilization. We're driving the keels off of carriers that this demand signal from COCOMS. I don't know what the number is now,

but I did a calculus back when I was PAC Fleet. And if you looked at just the demand signal from the COCOMS unfiltered, we need 15 carriers to meet that demand signal. It's okay that we don't have 15, but we need to characterize that as risk to national mission. If the COCOMs say they need that capability, but we don't have enough to give it to them, the nation doesn't have enough to give it to them, then the Delta's risk. And that's what we need to be clear with the American public. That's risk that is essentially going on their backs. So you've got to look at it from a service perspective and saying, I am spending an incredibly large amount of money to sustain these old platforms, I would be better off taking that money, just getting rid of the whole system

from stem to stern, including the Aegis system, and taking that money and reinvesting it into either modernizing a C-frame that has longer legs on it or buying another C-frame. That's the message that CNO is trying to put out. But there are people in power, certainly in Congress, that are focused on sea frames and saying, whoa, no, we can't do that. You know, that's when you get into this presence discussion. Isn't presence important? Presence is important, but is it affordable? You know, we have way too many ships going through maintenance in the SRA and Yokosuka. There's only so much capacity there. That limits the number of ships that you can put forward. That's a hard line. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to do maintenance.

We did modernization in Yokosuka because we didn't have enough shipyards to do modernization in CONUS. As soon as you said we're going to do modernization of ships in Yokosuka, that meant you weren't going to do sustainment maintenance on the ships that were home ported there. And now you get this cascading effect that is detrimental to readiness broadly. So it's complicated. But I think that the point that General Brown and General Berger made is exactly right. You have to look at this triad of capacity collectively. Now, how does this discussion fit with the ongoing arguments about fleet size? For example, the OSD study done by the Hudson Institute called for a 581 ship fleet with a mix of unmanned and unmanned platforms.

I should add here that they're also talking about a number of smaller ships. So when we talk about shipyard capacity, going smaller could actually open up some capacity. Yes. So why are we going smaller? What kind of sailors do we need? You know, we're having a hard time recruiting straight sailors from the population base because the technical demographics are so critical in the Navy as we become more and more technical. And oh, by the way, we're competing with industry, Silicon Valley, Amazon. I mean, look at look at the number of veterans that are working at Amazon. You know, a lot of those aren't pulling military retirement. They've left the military in order to go invest their intellectual interests that are, you know, not in their mind, not available to them within the military.

So this is another challenge the service chiefs are heavily engaged in and understanding. So the 581 number, I shrug my shoulders. I'm almost just about tapped out of that conversation when somebody throws numbers at me because it just generates so many questions. And you can come at me with a spreadsheet and say, well, here's this is what the shipyard capacity is. We think we can do it with smaller ships. Maybe a good point. I don't defend carriers as an aviator. I just ask questions. We need fewer carriers. So my question is, what are you going to replace that capacity and capability of the carrier brings? The carrier generates four two hundred thousand gallons of fresh water a day.

Critically important in an HADR event. So carriers' relevance, they're paying back today based on their ability to respond to a thing like the tsunami in Aceh every year. People may roll their eyes on it, but deterrence is about relevancy in allies, partners, and friends, and those that sit on the fence as well. And your ability to respond on a regular basis to issues that are critical to them as citizens of other countries is important. So what are you going to replace carriers with? well, we're going to replace it with smaller carriers. You just made DF-21 and DF-26 more effective. Because the blast effect of a DF-21-26 is significant with respect to a carrier, but my opinion, looking at those carriers, you can make it mission ineffective, which is what it's designed

for based on the pattern that impacts the flight deck. But if you make it smaller, that blast effect is increased. The number of warheads, you may not hit a flight deck that's smaller, but smaller is smaller in capacity and capability so are we doing it because it's it's cheaper that's not a path forward it's it's got to be based on what is the mission i get more complicates the problem for a pure competitor but we're just not looking at this holistically enough i'm a big believer in unmanned but let's just make everything unmanned if unmanned is better than man let's just make everything unmanned and the world would be perfect. So it's, what's the right balance? What does technology support? We need to be moving towards unmanned. We need to be moved towards

unmanned aircraft. Just the systems to support a living human being in the cockpit is a huge expense from both design acquisition to sustaining it. Look at what we went through with hypoxic events in Hornets and transitioning from an oxygen-based system to an oxygen generator system. So I'm all about unmanned. Don't get me wrong. But man, my foot is on the brake when people start saying it needs to be this percentage. It's fine. So, you know, just put some goals out. I think those goals are great. I thought it was pretty courageous of him to set those goals out there. But I haven't talked to him about it, but I would imagine in his mind, those are the culture going in that direction that unmanned needs to be embraced just as much as man does. But the percentage in that transition is something that we need to be thoughtful and informed about. Yes, sir. And then one final question. We'll keep it super current. Based on the discussion that we've just had and all your thoughts on this, what are your impressions of the decision to move the Reagan from Westpac over to the CENTCOM AOR to cover the drawdown in Afghanistan? Yeah, so I'd be fascinated about that decision. So I think it's great on its face. I may not feel that way if I knew what the debate was. I may have some arguments about that debate. But we're running the fleet into the ground. The operational demand signal. We keep coming up with mechanisms. The certification process that we had in 7th Fleet, I think, was largely misunderstood after the collisions. But that was a mechanism by which we didn't have the funding or the people funding or the people in order to cover down on all the mission sets that are resident within a ship.

In this case, we're talking mainly about DDGs, but same with cruisers. And so if you didn't have the fire control techs that were necessary to cover down on the BMD mission, then you'd tag out the BMD mission and saying, hey, the ship is not certified for BMD, but it's certified in these other six missions. So is it worthwhile taking that ship offline? That's a slippery slope because pretty soon you get down to where ships only certified to do two missions, but we're still because the presence perspective is what the COCOM may be driving at. So I do think that we need to balance. There's been lots of COCOMs I'm most familiar with, with PACOM. And not just one, you can single out a comment made by one COCOM, and that's unfair to that individual, because collectively they continue to say, they would say, they have said, I

am unapologetic about the operations advance signal that I place on the joint force. Wait a minute, that's only funded to a certain level, but the funding requirement only goes to a certain level. And then Congress funds it to a lesser level. And then trades need to be made throughout the year because of that operational domain signal. So it's not just underway time. You know, we have a limit of how fast a ship can go to make sure we have enough fuel for everybody. You know, that that's tiered readiness right there. Hey,

you've got enough fuel to steam around on an average of, of, you know, 25 knots. That's the ideal. And then if they don't, if they don't burn all that for other ships as well, not as simple as that. But I think the decision that, hey, so force allocation is risk allocation. We don't say that often enough. We weren't willing to accept the risk. So we pull a carrier out of the closet and shove two of them into CENTCOM. The number of surges, I think we're using surge in the wrong way. We surge for crisis. We're not in crisis. We're in competition. You know, I'm not feeling the crisis. I didn't feel it as Pack Fleet with respect to China as a peer

competitor. So we have strength. I think the message is wrong that I'm reading in the press about, oh my God, we've got this huge gap in the Pacific. When I was a J3 at PACOM, you know, we had a 1.0 carrier presence requirement and Admiral Willard, God bless him, made the requirement based on maintenance that was required on the carrier fleet. We're going to take a gap. We're going to take a four month gap in the requirement. So he backed off on the requirement in order to get at the maintenance, and then threw it at his COCOM to say, hey, joint not having a carrier for four months. So the COCOM commander is going to say that they're at extreme risk because they don't have a carrier. So we need to push back on COCOMs and have this insatiable appetite for ops

and saying, explain to me what the national risk is that we're going to take if we don't give you this asset that you need. You know, I think this is the struggle that CENTCOM is going through right now with the drawdown in afghanistan you gotta think we don't think in a innovatively naturally we think innovatively when we're in crisis we have this big take a little bit this is a good point i think jared um at least in my mind i just i'll share it i know we're getting long on time here but pearl harbor there was a big debate between battleships or carriers remember what happened the air force started that debate when they sunk a battleship that was anchored in a mobile by the way demonstrating air power and so the battleship navy the only navy that we had at

the time all led by battleship commanders and admirals they said holy cow we need to protect air and so we need carriers to protect battleships that was the metric and so then once carriers the viability of carriers started to grow the fleet problem series and the big exercise that we did off of panama a rehearsal uh part of rehearsing parts of oakland uh orange war gaming that was being done up at the war college you know they realized that wow good carrier down there langley i think it was did some overland stuff did some strikes now it's got some punch capability and now it starts to compete ability of carriers and uh and now there's this argument in the navy between our carriers better or battleships better oh man it was all personal it was hammer and tong

out. He couldn't get an edge, and everybody had to absolutely polarize. Well, who solved that argument for us? Japan. Why did it get solved? By accident. If the carriers had been in port instead of the battleships, I'd be a battleship commander. I wouldn't be an aviator. That's the path we would have gone down. So I think we need to think more holistically about that operationally required and think more broadly. What can we provide as a joint force? Not for the purpose of this podcast, the other thing I would say, if you're talking about peer competition, you need a whole of government competition. And we lead too much with a military counter to the issues that we have with peer competitors. We need a whole of government counter. That's one reason that we're

driving DOD so hard. So I'll stop at that point, Jared, and throw it back to you. No, thank you very much, sir. That is all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank My guest, Emeril Retired, Scott Swift. Emeril, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? So I'm not, you know, I'm working on a ton of things, as I said in the opening. The only place you can really find me online is LinkedIn. But if someone tries to connect with me there, have patience because I don't check LinkedIn all that often. So I'm busy.

I'm doing a lot of panels and, you know, about things like this. So, you know, pay attention to the discussions that are going on with different think tanks and you'll find me participating on panels there from time to time. Absolutely. Thanks again for joining us, sir. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. ¶¶