How to Get the Navy's Groove Back

Mike Gallagher has a few ideas

Sticking to this month’s theme, we have an opportunity to take action to get this country ready for the next Great Pacific War that most expect it to enter its greatest window of vulnerability in the next decade.

As a nation, we’ve procrastinated and appreciated the problem for too long without action. We will soon have a new President and a national security team looking to untangle past problems tied up with strategic inertia and instead look forward to the real threat in the Pacific. A decade after President Obama’s “Pacific Pivot,” what action items could we start to move on?

Our friend former Representative Mike Gallagher over at WSJ outlines some welcome and realistic action items. Read the whole thing, but here’s the important bits for me:

The only way to promote peace is to go to war on day one—not with China, Russia or Iran but with the Pentagon bureaucracy.

Bingo. As we cover here on a regular basis—the largest impediment to our national security posture is internal. A quarter century of failure tells you all you need to know.

The first task is to fix the U.S. Navy. America needs a maritime industrial base that can counter China’s. Pentagon requirements for building maritime assets involve too many uncoordinated stakeholders. The Pentagon establishes war-fighting requirements—such as the number of missiles on a ship—without regard to interdependent technical specifications such as that ship’s center of gravity. When those technical specifications aren’t tightly linked to war-fighting requirements, the mismatch can cause underperformance or unplanned costs and time. The Defense Department should return to the board model that served the Navy well until the 1960s.

The General Board is one of my hobby horses. I cannot love this comment more. We did a Midrats on the topic with John T. Kuehn, PhD 13 years ago. Give it a listen.

The Navy should also create an office focused on expediting the development and deployment of certain war-fighting technologies, similar to the Rapid Capabilities Office at the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force. The next secretary should insist on more flexible processes to deliver unmanned surface, aerial and underwater vehicles with speed and at scale.

“At scale” is the key to the above. When you go to war with a nation four times your population, close to your GDP and with a larger Navy using internal lines of communication instead of external lines of communication, you are not going to win that with a few bespoke Tiffany platforms.

He must also work with Congress to help shipyards attract and retain talent.

Rebuilding the maritime industrial base can also help save Aukus—the security partnership between Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.—which is in danger of stalling. Under the Aukus agreement, the U.S. Navy intends to sell Australia at least three Virginia-class attack submarines by the early 2030s. To realize this goal, the Navy needs to build more than today’s 1.2 hulls a year and shrink maintenance backlogs that have sidelined nearly 40% of the fleet. Addressing these challenges will demand consistent funding, which will come only if the defense secretary articulates the importance of sea power and presents a coherent shipbuilding plan. The secretary can get Aukus off life support by accelerating U.S. submarine deployments to western Australia, bringing more Australian sailors onto U.S. boats, and establishing a naval reactors organization in Canberra.

This should already be happening, but … it needs strong advocates in the Executive and Legislative branches.

The next secretary must rebuild America’s arsenal by moving to maximum production rates of the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (Extended Range), Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, Harpoon, Standard Missile 6 and other munitions. Wherever possible, these systems should be equipped with advanced energetic materials to extend their range and destructive power.

He has more updated knowledge of the absolute state of our magazine depth. This issue is more acute than most people know.

To free up more money, the secretary can reduce the civilian workforce, the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the general and flag officer corps, and the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy. He can sell non-war-fighting assets such as golf courses and resurrect a 2015 Pentagon study that outlined a path to save $125 billion over five years.

The amount of money—and more importantly time—wasted on non-value-added billets and programs is staggering. We need people with a charter, a cleaver, a stack of manning documents—and top-cover.

Assuming China sticks to its Taiwan timeline, the next secretary has two years to prevent World War III. To do so, he must put the Pentagon on a war footing, firing any bureaucrat unable or unwilling to work at a wartime pace. The lack of accountability at the Defense Department—after the shameful Afghanistan withdrawal, the failure to deter Russia from invading Ukraine, and the current secretary’s disappearance without informing the White House—has undermined confidence in military leadership. Armed with a bold agenda, the next secretary can regain the trust of the American people and the fear of America’s enemies.

If we do that, we make the Taiwan military option more difficult. By being more difficult, it may never get the greenlight.

I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have to explain to Congress how we are going to dispose of unused weapons systems in 2040, than have to explain to Congress in 2032 how it came to pass that the USA lost almost all influence from the International Date Line west to Suez, and as part of our agreement to end hostilities, is spending 30% of our defense budget recovering all the nuclear reactors sitting on the seafloor in the Western Pacific from all the CVN and SSN the Chinese sank in our arrogant and unsupportable sortie west of Guam.

I will note, Gallagher doesn’t mention replacing Goldwater-Nichols, COCOM reform, or an intellectual reset on the Cult of the Joint…but I am sure WSJ gave him a word limit. No one is perfect.