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We're going to hear from two extraordinary Americans talking about, is the United States
ready on a national security stance to deal with what's coming?
And we're going to look at it both from the Air Force standpoint and from the Navy Fleet
standpoint.
Our first guest has the handle Lucky.
Her name is Heather Penny, she'll tell her story about flying.
And then we're going to talk to Admiral Green about the Navy Fleet.
So I think you'll get really informed about what we need to be doing as a country to make
sure that our freedoms remain protected both here and around the world as we're in July
of 2024 in the shadow of Independence Day.
We want to welcome to Veterans Radio today Heather Penny.
She is a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies.
We have her on because of her extensive pilot and deep thinking about the Air Force.
We've got an interesting topic to talk about.
But Heather, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Thank you so much.
I'm so pleased to be here.
Well, let's start at the beginning because your whole life really has been centered around
flying and things related to flying.
But how did a nice girl from Reno, Nevada end up with such a passion over aviation?
I'm afraid I came by it honestly.
My daddy is a fighter pilot in Vietnam.
He flew A7s as a Sandy.
So we did the combat search and rescue mission picking up down pilots and air crews.
And then when he got out, he continued to serve by flying for the Reno Air National
Guard doing the rec emission in our Air Force.
So I grew up around military aviation and I just loved the fighters.
They were fast.
They were mean looking.
And they just felt so strong and purposeful.
But I also fell in love with the community.
The pilots in my dad's squadron, they were full of purpose, the brotherhood, the connection
and community they had.
And they were focused on excellence and doing their mission well.
And plus, when they would tell their stories, it sounded like the greatest adventure story
that you could go on.
So I was hooked on aviation from a very young age.
And of course, being in Reno and my dad racing, I grew up around all kinds of aviation.
So it's just something I couldn't get out of my blood.
Well, I've read a lot about you online, but that part of the backstory isn't generally
told.
So I figured there was a family connection to military aviation.
So thanks for telling it.
But here's a better story that you're not going to find anywhere else listeners.
And we're talking to Heather Penny.
I asked Heather earlier, hey, how did a nice girl like you end up at Purdue University
where you picked up both your bachelor's and your master's degree?
And there's always a story too, how that happens.
How did that happen here?
I can't believe you're making me fess up.
I am.
They won't take back your degrees at this point.
Oh, thank goodness.
It was the school with the latest application date.
I was terrified about the process.
I didn't really understand how to navigate college applications.
And it was the school with the latest application date.
So I am so fortunate they took me in.
But I am very much a proud Boiler Maker.
And I'm happy to say that my youngest daughter is following in my footsteps, not in the
aviation realm.
But she has been accepted into Purdue.
She accepted her admission.
And she'll be attending Purdue as a rising freshman this next year.
Oh, that's great.
We in the Midwest think highly of Purdue University.
It has a great engineering school.
And we know a lot of proud alumni from there.
But from there you went on and said, OK, I've got my degrees.
Let's get into aviation.
Tell us about your time in the service.
Well, actually, part of the reason why Purdue was on my list was because they had the ROTC
department.
And I wanted to be a fighter pilot.
And when I arrived on campus and I contacted the artist, they were like, no, no, no, girls
can't be fighter pilots.
Because at the time, in 1992, they couldn't.
The combat exclusion for aviation had not been lifted by Congress until later.
So that's when I ended up going into the humanities into the College of Liberal Arts
where I got my bachelor's and my master's.
So I was in the middle of my master's degree studying American studies, which is an interdisciplinary
field, when I learned that Congress had indeed removed that exclusion.
And I could apply to become a fighter pilot.
And so there I went to the Air National Guard Route, not the active duty.
And the reason why is in the mid 1990s, the Soviet Union had fallen.
It was the end of history.
The Berlin Wall had crumbled years earlier.
And so our nation was trying to reap this peace dividend.
They didn't think we were the only superpower on the globe.
So why do we need to have a military anymore?
And they literally cut our air force in half.
And so the active duty, their planes cut in half.
They were doing a reduction in force.
So they were actually forcibly exiting pilots from the service saying, thank you very much,
but next year you're not going to be in the air force anymore.
Go find a job.
And so because I wanted to fly fighters, it was really high risk to go into the active
duty.
So because my dad had been in the Guard, I knew that if I was hired by the Guard, if
they had fighters on their ramp, and if I was good enough, if I was qualified and I passed
all the check rise, if I was good enough, I could control my destiny and go fly fighters.
So I was hired.
It's important.
I want to point out, Heather.
It's important to this 1990 experience that you went through about that reduction, because
it's going to come back when we talk about the issue on which you're quoted in the Defense
News article that caught my attention.
But that's why you got yourself into the Guard and tell us about your time in the Guard,
your overseas deployments.
Yes.
I was fortunate to be hired by the DC Air National Guard, the 121st Fighter Squadron
in Washington, DC, and they fly F-16s.
So I went through NJET, which is the Euro NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training in Texas.
My qualifications got me above the threshold to attend this undergraduate pilot training,
which is pretty exclusive.
If you graduate from there, you're going to get a fighter.
It's kind of an all or nothing gamble.
And then I went through my F-16 training and showed up to my fighter unit and became combat
mission ready in early 2001.
Well, guess what happens next?
Exactly.
So on 9-11, Mark Sassabill and I were sent in unarmed F-16s on a suicide mission to Flight
93.
As you can imagine, this was unprecedented times for our nation.
And we are very fortunate that the passengers on Flight 93 are true heroes.
I mean, they took their fate into their own hands to protect our nation.
But this led to the last several decades, couple decades of the long wars in the Middle
East.
And I've got two combat deployments underneath my belt.
One was initial combat operations to Iraqi Freedom, where my unit, our wing, we were
tasked with hunting scuds.
So I was primarily a nighttime scout hunter.
And we went back and then did more F-16s.
And then I transitioned from the fighter, I had to leave it as a single mom with two
little girls that couldn't sustain the deployments.
And so I was fortunate to be able to fly the DV airlift mission.
And then I retired out of the Pentagon, out of the National Military Command Center.
But during that time, I also, as a guard man and then as a reservist, worked within the
defense industry.
So I understood the defense industry.
And I'm now a senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, which is
a think tank that focuses on air power and air force issues.
And that's really what got us to this article on MeTrack.
And you down to talk about, you mentioned the defense industry and you had various positions
with Lockheed Martin as the director of different air force programs.
So you had both the military service, the contractor, defense contractor information
experience and now this think tank experience.
And that kind of gets us to this article that I guess I hadn't thought about and probably
many veteran radio listeners have not thought about.
And that is the stress both on the fleet and the force that the air force has experienced
because of these long wars that you mentioned.
Set this up for us.
Tell us what the looming problem is as you see it.
The looming problem is that our air force is, I'm just going to say, it's in a death
spiral.
So in the 1990s, we cut the force in half and like for example, the fighter force literally
cut in half just divided by two.
So you've got 50% of what you had and then we go into operations in the Middle East.
Well now you have fewer aircraft but the demand signal has gone up dramatically.
Now even though we had been doing operation Northern Watch and Southern Watch, so everyone
else got to come home after a desert storm, the air force did not get to.
We conducted airspace control operations over Iraq, both the southern side and the northern
side to protect the Kurds and also to prevent further aggression from Saddam Hussein.
So the air force never came home.
But now suddenly they're doing more with less.
And so not only do you measure the age of aircraft in terms of chronological years,
but you measure it in terms of flight hours.
So we are just flying the hell out of these airplanes and they are dying sooner than they
had been planned.
Most of the aircraft that were built in the 1980s, now you remember the Reagan era build-up,
he didn't actually grow the air force tremendously.
What he did was he did a complete turnover of the air force.
So all of the Century Series fighters and Vietnam type fighters that we had, he recapitalized
with the modern 4th generation fighters that we're familiar with, the F-15, the A-10, the
F-16.
During the 1980s, we were buying these aircraft at 200 to 300 a year.
So now they're 20 years old as we go into operation in Iraqi freedom and during freedom.
And not only are they at least 20 years old, but now suddenly we're flying them much harder
than they were planned to be.
So instead of 4,000 hours, we're now flying these aircraft to 8,000 hours.
So you can imagine how sort of long in the tooth and tired they are.
As a matter of fact, in I think it was 2015, and you could probably double check the actual
year, but an F-15 is flying over St. Louis, it's doing a normal training sortie and it
just breaks in half because it was the metal was the biggest.
Metal stress, yeah.
Fatigue.
Yeah, yeah.
It was so fatigued.
So even though we can modernize these aircraft with new widgets and new radars and new data
links and all that good stuff, the airframes are still old.
And while numbers don't tell you the whole story, the numbers here kind of do give you
a little shocking view of this is it's predicted that the fleet is going to drop, the Air Force's
fleet is going to drop below 5,000 fighters, bombers, tankers, the whole thing in 2025,
and it's never been that low if I understand it.
It's never been as low as it is today and it's getting even smaller.
The Navy has actually bought more fighters than the Air Force has in the last 20 years.
And even since we started Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and we've been
continuing this combat operations, the Air Force has continued to get smaller even though
the demand signal is going up.
Somebody in Congress must be looking at this and saying, hey, we're paying attention to
how many ships we have in the Navy because of the China situation.
Are we paying, is Congress paying any attention, is the public paying any attention to what's
happening to the Air Force?
I don't think there's as much attention being paid to this as it should be because now fortunately
we do have some members in Congress that are blocking the Air Force from divesting more
aircraft without a plan.
But if you think about it, the United States military has operated under a veil of air
supremacy since 1954.
They haven't had to worry about enemy bombers, enemy fighters, enemy missiles, or things
like that since 1954.
And so I think they take air power for granted.
They just assume that the Air Force is going to continue to be able to completely control
the skies.
And I wish there had been more of a wake-up call when our base in Iraq was attacked this
past year by Iranian ballistic missiles because that should have had people go, whoa, whoa,
wait a second, maybe we need to pay more attention to air control.
Because if you think about what's going on in Ukraine, which feels a lot like World
War I, with the way that the lines are, it's just a battle of attrition and atrocity.
Yeah, ground pounding.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, and that is primarily because neither side has real air power in the way
that we have shaped our joint force to employ.
And so it is at the end going to be just a matter of who has bigger numbers of bodies
and bullets the way they're fighting Ukraine.
And what a horrific way to fight war.
Well, sometimes when we have these discussions, people say, well, we don't need to be as big
as we have been or are to maintain, for example, air supremacy because we have allies, we
have friends, that's part of the argument about the Navy and Australia is going to be
there for us and Japan is going to be there for us.
We'll see.
But is that the argument that the U.S. Air Force doesn't need to be of its size because
you've got NATO or something?
What's the explanation for letting the Air Force fleet wither on the vine?
I would say there's three factors and one is just simply budgets.
The Air Force has not been provided the necessary resources to recapitalize the way that it
needs to.
And some of this is if you look at the last 20 years, the Army has been the preponderance
of forces in the Middle East.
And so the Air Force has been funded, as a comparison, $1.3 trillion less than the Army
over the last 20 years.
At the same time, that has forced them to cut their recapitalization plans.
So where the Air Force is right now is they basically have to recapitalize every single
major weapon system they have now because they have been limping everything along as
long as they possibly can.
So they have to recapitalize helicopters, strategic deterrents.
So this is they have to recapitalize and replace the Minuteman 3, which has been our ground-based
nuclear deterrent for the last 70 years.
They've got to recapitalize bombers.
They've got to recapitalize fighters.
They've got to recapitalize their specialized, what we call them, HAVAs, the high-value assets,
everything from AWACS to JSTARS to Rivet Joint to all of these other aircraft, all at the
same time.
So that's a huge bill because they've been deferring this for so long because of budget
pressures, right?
Yeah, that catches up to you and that's what's happening, right?
Well, yeah, and there's two more pieces.
So that's a main causal root cause.
But there's also this belief in third offset technologies, that's the buzzword for your
listeners.
And that's one of the side-ders where the more exquisite and the more sophisticated the technology
is, the more effective we can be so we need less stuff.
But that only works to a point.
And that's, for example, one of the reasons why air power is able to be so dominant in
desert storm that the Army was just basically able to walk right up to Baghdad is because
of these advances in technology and how we employed that.
What the problem is is that twofold, one, technology is no longer the unique domain
of the free world and specifically of America.
There's a lot of really smart engineers and software coders and technologies out there,
right?
And two, one thing can only be in one place at one time.
It doesn't matter how effective it is.
So that's sort of like the Battlestar problem, right?
Is that you have one widget, it might be incredibly effective, but you cannot cover the entire
breadth of the Pacific with it.
You cannot cover, you know, you cannot feel the force of the small amount of things.
So scope and geography is now, and also now that we're facing more, I would actually call
them peer threats, right?
Where China, Russia, and other nations are becoming, they're getting better at what they
do.
And they might begin to account for attrition as well.
So that's really, and so Secretary Kendall right now is, he is embarking and has been
divesting older platforms so he can invest in research and development.
But the problem is it creates this bathtub where you're getting rid of the aircraft
that you have to a very, very small force in the hopes that future technologies will
arrive in the 2035 timeframe that will be relevant to that timeframe.
So Kendall is trying to transform the Air Force, and I don't disagree with his intent,
but what I'm deeply concerned about is this, the next decade of how the Air Force is becoming
so small that we will not be able to meet the demands of our national security interests.
We won't be there for our joint partners, and how do we grow when we've gotten too,
too small?
It's a death spiral.
Yeah, trying to ramp back up every business, every team, every whatever you've ever been
in understands the idea of how much more difficult it is to ramp back up after you've gotten
that small.
And we've moved cyber into a new segment, and we have things, you talk about technology
offsets, I think, do people think drones are, you don't need the Air Force of old because
you've got drone technology?
Unfortunately, people do.
People are of this belief that suddenly now quadcopters are around and there's drones,
there's artificial intelligence, we just put these little unmanned vehicles up there.
And we're seeing a lot of that in Ukraine, but people are not seeing how these drones
are falling out of the sky there.
And so when we look at Ukraine and what's going on in Ukraine and how they're using
drone technology there, there are uses for these kinds of drones, but then also the Air
Force is looking at what they call collaborative combat aircraft.
And they should be smaller, cheaper, autonomous aircraft that are probably modular.
They can have different capabilities like jamming or sensing or they can be missile trucks
or things like that.
But they should help address the capacity requirement that the Air Force will have in
future war.
And also they have the interesting opportunity to change the risk calculus.
So we did a war game last year at the Mitchell Institute to look at how you might use these
collaborative combat aircraft.
And what we found was that operators wanted to use them in disruptive and sort of chaotic
little ways.
They wanted to be able to use these drones to be able to detonate adversary tactics,
force the adversary to react, to deplete the adversary magazine, and to get them off
their game.
So that basically then would put our manned aircraft in a position of advantage.
And let me tell you why humans in the battle space, especially in aircraft, will continue
to be really important because we don't even have smart self-driving cars just yet.
And that's a two-dimensional problem set with well-known, well-accepted rules of the
road in an unchanging environment.
Fairly unchanging, right?
The roads generally stay where the roads are.
Going into a high-intensity conflict in three-dimensional airspace is not quite so easy of a problem
set.
And so having humans being able to make decisions through uncertainty, ambiguity, and improvise
within the battle space based off of the human mind and imagination and training will continue
to be a critical component of our combat edge.
As opposed to putting a drone out there that we'll call it smart, but still is only as
smart as it's trained and doesn't have the ability to adapt to deception, doesn't have
the ability to adapt to hacking, and could be, depending on what goes on with the adversary,
could be fairly predictable to the enemy.
And I guess we're going to run out of time, and boy, we could have gone a lot longer.
But as you cut airframes, you're cutting the workforce.
Yeah, you're cutting pilots.
And mechanics and everybody in between.
Yep, exactly.
And it's the people that are combat edge, our combat advantage.
And so in the air force, the end strength or the manpower or the number of workers you
have is all based off of how many air planes and how many weapon systems you have.
So for example, in my fighter squadron, we had had a 2.5 to 1 crew ratio.
So we had 2.5 pilots for every single airplane that we had.
And that allowed us to fly full flying schedule, give people crew rest, train the appropriate
levels.
We weren't over manned.
We had the number of training flights and the sorties that they needed.
And that also drove the amount of intel officers that we had and how many mechanics we had
and how many weapons troops.
So the guys that build the bombs and the missiles, how many of those guys we had.
So when you cut platforms, when you cut aircraft, you cut the workforce.
And you're usually cutting your most experienced people.
And experience matters in combat.
And we know this from history, whether or not it's in Vietnam or you go back to World
War II.
For example, Germany had some of the most experienced fighter pilots at the beginning
of the war.
And just through statistics and nutrition, those guys died out.
So by the end of the war, Germany was building and producing more fighters than they did
at the beginning of the war.
But the kids they put in there were so inexperienced, they just got shot down.
The same reason why Japan had to come to kamikaze attacks in the end, because they lost their
experienced pilots.
Well, we've been talking to Heather Penny, called Sign Lucky, who has been helping us
understand the challenges that the United States Air Force is facing as its airframes
dip below 5,000 in fiscal year 2025, and the risk that that causes to the nation our national
security, being able to have the up tempo that we are often called to have in the Air
Force.
Heather, this has been a great conversation.
We appreciate your work here as senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace
Studies.
You've given us a great insight into this problem, which is something we all should
be watching.
Oh, thank you, Jim.
It really has been an honor to speak with you.
If you don't have an Air Force, you can't have a joint force.
I hope to, I'll be able to chat with you again.
I hope you found that informative.
Heather Penny is a real patriot.
You certainly got that from the interview.
But you should also know that on September 11, 2001, when she was just a first lieutenant
at the time, she was ordered to, along with another pilot, take her F-16 fighter and head
it to Pennsylvania.
They were ordered to down the United Flight 93, which was heading to Washington, D.C.
Now they were up doing training missions and there was no ammunition.
These two F-16s were flying, but they were not outfitted with live ammunition, other
than maybe 100 rounds of ball ammunition always carried to maintain trim.
So the mission was take down United 93.
And if the passengers on United 93 did not crash that into the fields in Pennsylvania,
it would have been the job of Heather Penny to do just that.
And she was lucky that didn't have to occur and she's still here to tell the stories.
But you can understand how that molded her to her core as a pilot, as a patriot.
So great story, a lot to learn.
Stick around, you're going to learn now what the concerns are with the naval fleet and
what our opposition is doing versus what we're doing here in building out the fleet.
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We want to welcome back to Veterans Radio 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 Veterans Radio.
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 or
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,
made out four basic commissions 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, literal combat ships 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's 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 is 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.
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,
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, to 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.
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.
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.
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.
I here wish I had more forces at hand, ships, aircraft, and this pertains to the other military
services as well.
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 mid-east to the South China Sea and everywhere in between.
How do you then, 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 of this?
Seeing 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 and they're 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 Force structure and shipbuilding
plans 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 was 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 force, the platforms, that is, the ships, 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.
And 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.
And 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.
I mean, 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.
And 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
at 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 U.S. 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,
conduct 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 got a number of fleet 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's 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.
The British, the French, the Germans, members of NATO, 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.
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.
When you get a chance and you bump into your local congressman or senator, you ought to
ask them what are they doing about, how much support are they given to the Air Force and
the Navy so that we have the machinery to defend the country when it comes time.
Well, you're not going to hear these stories anywhere but on Veterans Radio I hope you'll
stay in contact with us through our webpage at veteransradio.org or on Facebook.
I'm Jim Fossone, Dale Throneberry.
We'll be back next week to talk about some of these issues and we certainly appreciate
all of our partners like NVBDC and those Ann Arbor based Veterans Service Organizations
which have been helping us out for a long time and my fellow board members who are always
working to bring you the best we can in Veterans Radio and until next time on Veterans Radio
you are dismissed.