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We want to welcome back to VeteransRadio today Vice Admiral Kevin Green, United States Navy, retired.
We're going to talk about the fleet structure and issues related to that.
And then we're also going to get into talking about the Navy's recruiting issue
and how that impacts all these other decisions.
But let me set this up a little bit.
Kevin Green went to Annapolis in 1971 and about 30 years later,
30-plus years of military service, retired as a Vice Admiral, has been very active in all things defense
and Navy since then, both in the private government, private corporation world,
as well as government affairs and stays very attuned to things.
He commanded the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Group when he was active duty.
And I think his last assignment was Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Plans and Policy before his retirement.
Admiral, welcome back to VeteransRadio.
Thank you, Jim. I'm happy to be with you.
Well, we spoke before about something that's going on, which is NATO's 75th anniversary,
and we got done. And I said, hey, Admiral, I got some more questions for you,
and you were gracious enough to say, yeah, we should talk about that.
So really what we want to talk about, it starts with acknowledging some of the challenges
that the United States has in its national security around the world on the high seas.
And that leads you into thinking about, well, what's the right Navy force structure?
What are the plans that we have to have in place?
So why don't you recap a little bit about what the Navy looks at in terms of strategic concerns
on the oceans around the world?
Certainly. And the foundation of all of that is a description of the missions of the Navy.
Why do we have the Navy in the first place? And what does the Navy do for the country?
More than 50 years ago, the Chief of Naval Operations, the senior Admiral of the Navy,
laid out four basic missions for the Navy, one of them strategic deterrents principally
through our strategic submarine force. The next was sea control, maintaining control
of the seas, projection of power ashore with our partners, the United States Marine Corps,
and the Army to be complete, and naval presence around the world.
And by missions, what we're talking about are the outputs of the objectives of having a Navy
in the first place. Recently, the current Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Franchetti,
answered the question publicly when asked, what does the Navy do?
And the Navy is here to preserve the peace, to respond in a crisis, and to win decisively
in wars. The Navy operates far forward around the world and around the clock, from the seabed
to space and cyberspace and in the information environment, promoting our nation's prosperity
and security, deterring aggression, and providing options to our nation's leaders. We deliver
power for peace and are always postured and ready to fight and win as part of the joint
force that is with the other U.S. military services, and alongside our allies and partners.
The headquarters of the Navy is focused on organizing, training, and equipping the Navy
in order to carry out the missions that are assigned by the combatant commanders, the
geographic combatant commanders run various sections of the globe, and we, along with
the other services, provide the forces that allow them to carry out their peacetime and
their wartime missions. So what we do is a really important part of that. And when we
start thinking hard about the force structure, the size of the fleet, one measure is the
total number of battle force ships. Today, there are 293 battle force ships, meaning
what you would think of as warships, aircraft carriers, amphibious assault ships, destroyers,
cruisers, frigates, and so forth, 293 of them altogether. When we also count the military
seal of command ships, the ships that provide the logistic support for that battle force.
When you put that in context, give us some indication of the, I don't know, I think most
people don't understand how old the fleet is, maybe how long a ship is good for until
it has to be replaced. Help the uninformed get a better idea of is 293 all you need,
or how does replacement and those sorts of things come into play?
Sure. Well, it is a fact that things that humans build don't generally last forever,
and that is certainly true of ships and aircraft that operate in the complex, demanding, and
very, very difficult environment of the sea, of the oceans of the world, and the literal
areas, that is, the parts of the ocean that are close to land. Typically, we like to keep
a ship for 30 to 40 years. We have an average age on our fleet today of about 24 years,
and that includes submarines, the aircraft carriers, and the destroyers, cruisers, and
literal combat ships, some of them quite new, but you can tell from that average age of
in the mid-20s or so that it is a big challenge. We are constantly building new ships, bringing
them out, putting them into commission, and operating them in order to carry out these
missions that are assigned to us. You mentioned, or you asked if 293 was the right number.
Well, the day I entered the Naval Academy in the 1960s, we had almost a thousand ships
in the Navy in the fleet. Now, a lot of them were, frankly speaking, relics from World
War II. Others were relatively new ships. They had different kinds of missions, and
they were nowhere near as capable as the ships we have today. So when we talk about the right
size of the ship and how one would compare that with any other ship around the world,
it is by consensus in the people who analyze naval forces that the number one, the top,
the most powerful fleet in the world today is the United States Navy. There's a little
question about that. The Chinese fleet has more holes in the water, but in terms of capability,
in terms of missions, in terms of modernization, in terms of the things that really matter
in the measure of a ship, we are at the top of the heap. That doesn't give us a heck of
a lot of margin, however. And when we talk about potential operations that the Navy might
be involved with in the future, we only have to consider the kinds of operations the Navy
is involved in today around the world. We look at, in the Red Sea, for example, USS Eisenhower,
an aircraft carrier strike group is every day taking out anti-ship missiles that are
endangering the sea lanes, endangering merchant ships, plying their normal peacetime innocent
travel around the world to provide products and services to the world, the countries of
the world. We look at threats to Taiwan and the South China Sea. We look at issues having
to do with the Korean Peninsula and concerns there. We look at areas of the globe. Believe
it or not, there is still a piracy issue around the world, whether it's in the South Asia
area or in the Western Pacific or it's off the coast of Africa or either in the South
Atlantic or in the Indian Ocean. It's a genuine mission that continues. And one of the challenges,
one of the concerns we have is even with the exquisitely equipped, crewed, trained and ready
ships that we have in that battle force, a ship can only be in one place at one time.
And when there are lots of different challenges around the world, whether it has to do with
Eastern Europe, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, you name it, it is a real challenge
satisfying those operational demands of our combatant commanders to provide the fleet forces
that are necessary for them to carry out their missions. And I am very sure that if you were
to talk with any of those combatant commanders, they would tell you, yes, we can do our mission
today, but it's a narrow margin. And I wish I had more forces at hand, ships, aircraft,
and this pertains to the other military services as well.
Yeah, what's unique though on the Navy mission though is you mentioned it, you can only have
that ship in one spot, and it takes a long time to transit somewhere else. It's not a
matter about jumping on a plane and moving folks by air travel. It's a much slower process,
and it's not just the number of ships you have, but the types and the locations where
they can be deployed, because you just ran us around the whole world from the Mideast
to the South China Sea and everywhere in between. How do you then, you know, how is the country
now planning because a ship has such a long life and a long time to be, you know, takes
to build? How do you plan for the future like that? The ship you launched today is going
to be around for 35 years. How do you think about what it's actually going to be used
for over that 35-year period? Well, that's a great question, Jim, and
it's the center of why the National Defense Strategy is so important. The National Defense
Strategy anticipates developments around the world that would make a big difference in
the planning for structure, meaning how many people do we need to have on active duty,
how many aircraft, how many ships, how much ammunition, how many systems? How do we tie
all of those things together electronically in the sense of sharing information and intelligence
and all of that? Keeping in mind that while we're doing our planning, our potential adversaries
are doing the same, they are designing and building their forces, naval forces, military,
air forces, space, and certainly cyber forces to overcome the strengths that we have today.
And our National Military Strategy leans forward on that. What do we have to be able to do
to maintain our current advantages and avoid a situation where we're outgunned, we're outnumbered,
and we've run out of ideas? We have got to create the warfighting advantages, and that
will dictate what we need to build and what we need to invest in. And while we're doing
that, one of the issues that is a controlling factor is the defense industrial sector. What
can our private sector companies, our industry partners, and academia do to help us move forward?
And I have to tell you that when we look at a battle force of 293 ships, not all of those
ships are available all the time. They're going through maintenance. Nuclear propelled
ships go through periodic nuclear refueling, which takes a long time to get completed.
It's expensive as well. The capacity of shipyards, both federal shipyards, and there are a few
of those left, but commercial shipyards where the ships are built, where the ships are maintained,
and the other industrial firms that provide maintenance and provide the systems, the armaments,
the munitions, and the other systems, it's a big challenge. So the question at this point
comes, well, what are we going to do about all this? Looking at what the military leadership
and what the senior folks in Congress and what the administration are dealing with,
number one thing for them to keep in mind, and they do, is that the threats to our nation
and our interests around the world are real in their growing. It's a changing strategic
environment. We've got to be able to defend the homeland. We've got to be able to deter
strategic attack, and we've got to be able to deter potential adversaries from moving
against us and be prepared to prevail in the event of a strategic attack or in the event
of any conflict with any of the host of potential adversaries that are out there.
Well, you said one of the four pillars here of the mission is strategic deterrence, and
you can't have strategic deterrence if your adversaries say, well, their fleet continues
to erode and get older and they're not replacing it fast enough. We just have to wait them
out 10 years and we'll have the advantage because there isn't strategic deterrence.
So I recently was reading in preparation to talking to you the Congressional Research
Services White Paper on March 1st of 2024 on the Navy 4th Structure and Shipbuilding
Plants, and they say, well, we're going to build 11 ships per year for 35 years, and
that'll get us up to something like 355 ships. And my first reaction was, oh my God, 35
years to get up to that number? Again, I have just a general layman's view of this thing.
When you look at those kind of projections, and again, we're talking to retired Vice
Admiral Kevin Green, who is the Deputy Chief Naval Operations Plans and Policy Director
at one point, how do you look at those sort of plans and say, well, here's a 35-year plan.
We'll try to build 11 a year.
Well, I'll tell you, Jim, it worries me, and I'm not alone. And we have put ourselves
in a situation where in the short term, we have to focus on readiness, readiness of the
platforms that is the ship's aircraft and other systems that we use, but ensuring that
when they deploy, when they leave port to go over and carry out an operational mission,
they are ready. They are trained. They are well-armed. The systems work. They have the
spares and the materials and the ammo that they need to get the job done. That doesn't
solve the longer-term problem, but it solves the immediate problem when we're able to get
enough of them out there. There's been a lot of focus in the past several years on how
many of this battle force, how many of the battle force ships are fully ready for mission.
In the aviation world, they refer to that measure as full mission capable, and the FMC
rates, full mission capability rates of the naval air force has gone up significantly
in the last several years due to investments and better means of managing that force. They've
done a great job, and they have to stay on it. One of the things that occurs to me is
this relationship with the defense industrial base and expanding the defense industrial
base and finding things like disruptive capabilities, the things that we haven't had in the past,
things that make a difference. The Secretary of the Navy has put together a new disruptive
capabilities office that is looking at just that, and they're principally looking at things
like cyber warfare and use of drones and all that. I have observed, I have seen and been
present at demonstrations from a lot of different companies, companies that are not traditional
defense firms that are applying new technologies to things that sound awfully mundane, things
like propulsion systems. I saw a demo recently of a new kind of propulsion system for assault
craft, amphibious craft, and so forth that is so different from what's been used before.
Finding a way of connecting the government, the Department of Defense, and the folks who
do the acquisition of new systems to connect them with the companies. This is good old
American know-how and inventiveness and energy, brilliant new thoughts and being able to connect
all of this together.
You really have to count on some of that to stay up with folks, countries who may be
spending more money and attempting to leapfrog you in just numbers of ships at sea. You have
to try to move forward with some technologies, this disruptive capabilities you mentioned.
That's one of the ones I wanted you to expand on a little bit because the Navy is planning
on actually quite a number of larger unmanned underwater vehicles for a variety of work
and missions over the next couple of decades and maybe moving that number up to like, I
think I read 150. Again, help us who aren't in this regularly to think about what does
that do? How does that help your capabilities?
Well, first of all, back to that earlier point that one ship can only be in one place at
a time. The fifth fleet in the Persian Gulf and the northern Indian Ocean and the Red
Sea has for years now been engaged in a brilliantly successful and extremely innovative program
to use unmanned systems, platforms, principally surface-based boats, if you will, aircraft
also to be able to expand their ability to conduct surveillance and intelligence gathering.
That's been true in the fourth fleet area of responsibility as well in the Caribbean
and around South America and Central America. They're able to use these systems in a theater
where it's hard to get a large number of ships and aircraft because it's a very large area
and there's lots of work to be done, but being able to use those kinds of systems is extraordinarily
powerful. Evel Poparo, who's the commander of the US Pacific Fleet now and has been confirmed
by the Senate to be the next commander of the Indo-Pacific Command later this year,
has made a number of public statements concerning the use of thousands of such unmanned systems,
subsurface, surface, and aerial, to be able to again expand his ability to gain intelligence,
surveillance, and in some cases, they can have other kinetic missions as well. It's
a very exciting change and it requires fewer people to be placed at the scene of action,
if you will, and some of these platforms have extraordinary endurance. We've done a number
of lead exercises in the last year and a half or so that have demonstrated the value to
the fighting force of what these platforms can do.
Well, it's really interesting and I think in a very positive way for national security,
Admiral. And while I also am very worried that we don't either have the Congressional
Budget for or the Defense and Duffer drill base to build more ships that are more rapid
paced than we need, I don't want to end this on a downer. I really want to come back and
say one of the things that I think is also going on in recognition of what some of our
adversaries are doing is a greater effort to have naval partners and I'm thinking of
Australia in particular, but I suspect this goes on worldwide that the US Navy is working
hard to have naval partners in other countries sort of as a force multiplier and strategic
deterrent. Can you advise us a little bit about that?
Absolutely. And you and I were speaking last week about things. I mentioned that I served
on a German ship back in my midship and days. Ships that I served on as a commission officer
had exchange officers and others and we operated with NATO ships and with Japanese ships and
with Korean ships and others as well. Today, the British, the French, the Germans, members
of NATO, you know, countries in Europe are already engaged in planning and continuing
a series of operations of their ships in the western Pacific because of their understanding
that if there's a serious problem somewhere in the globe, it's going to affect the entire
globe and that's a very, very encouraging and positive development. And I have to say
that once again, the strength of our national abilities is not dependent on us alone. We
have great partners who have been proven in combat who have made it very clear where their
loyalties lie and we couldn't be more fortunate than to have the friends that we do. And typically
the adversaries that we consider for potential concern in the future don't have that luxury
of having strong, capable friends to be able to help them out. You mentioned one last thing
on the defense industrial base. The shipyards that they operate are so important to us.
Their workforces are important as well. And I'll tell you what, that's tough work. Work
in a shipyard, it's extraordinarily rewarding. The skills and talents take years to develop
and there can't be a more satisfying career for someone with an industrial bent than to
work in one of our commercial shipyards in the United States.
Such important work, you're right. We're talking with Vice Admiral Kevin P. Green, retired
United States Navy. And we've been talking about fleet structure and some of the challenges
the Navy faces on a national security front around the world. And we really appreciate
his time on this subject.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today. I am Jim Fausone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host. I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help
for Veterans and you can reach us at 800-6934800 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web. You
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